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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Devotee, by Mary Cholmondeley
-
-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/license
-
-
-Title: A Devotee
-       An Episode in the Life of a Butterfly
-
-Author: Mary Cholmondeley
-
-Release Date: August 4, 2012 [EBook #40408]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A DEVOTEE ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Suzanne Shell, Linda Hamilton, and the Online
-Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
-file was produced from images generously made available
-by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-  A DEVOTEE
-
-  An Episode in the Life of a Butterfly
-
-  BY
-  MARY CHOLMONDELEY
-  AUTHOR OF
-  'DIANA TEMPEST,' 'SIR CHARLES DANVERS,' AND 'THE
-  DANVERS JEWELS'
-
-  _SECOND EDITION_
-
-  EDWARD ARNOLD
-
-  LONDON                 NEW YORK
-  37 BEDFORD STREET      70 FIFTH AVENUE
-
-  1897
-  _All rights reserved_
-
-
-
-
-  To
-  FLORIE,
-  UPON WHOSE KIND STRONG HAND
-  I HAVE SO OFTEN LEANT.
-
-
-
-
-                          'That day is sure,
-    Though not perhaps this week, nor month, nor year,
-    When your great love shall clean forgotten be,
-    And my poor tenderness shall yet endure.'
-
-    WILFRID S. BLUNT.
-
-
-
-
-A DEVOTEE.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER I.
-
-    'Yet to be loved makes not to love again;
-     Not at my years, however it hold in youth.'
-
-     TENNYSON.
-
-
-The cathedral was crammed. The tall slender arches seemed to spring out
-of a vast sea of human heads. The orchestra and chorus had gradually
-merged into one person: one shout of praise, one voice of prayer, one
-wail of terror. The _Elijah_ was in mid-career, sailing like a
-man-of-war upon the rushing waves of music.
-
-And presently there was a hush, and out of the hush a winged voice
-arose, as a lark rises out of a meadow, singing as it rises:
-
-'O rest in the Lord, wait patiently for Him, and He shall give thee thy
-heart's desire.'
-
-The lark dropped into its nest again. The music swept thundering upon
-its way, and a large tear fell unnoticed from a young girl's eyes on to
-the bare slim hand which held her score. The score quivered; the slender
-willowy figure quivered in its setting of palest violet and white
-draperies threaded with silver. Only a Frenchwoman could have dared to
-translate a child's posy of pale blue and white violets, tied with a
-silver string, into a gown; but Sibyl Carruthers' dressmaker was an
-artist in her way, and took an artist's license, and the half-mourning
-which she had designed for the great heiress was in colouring what a
-bereaved butterfly might have worn.
-
-Miss Carruthers was called beautiful. Perhaps she was beautiful for an
-heiress, but she was certainly not, in reality, any prettier than many
-hundreds of dowerless girls who had never been considered more than
-good-looking.
-
-Her delicate features were too irregular, in spite of their obvious high
-breeding; her figure was too slight; her complexion was too faintly
-tinted for regular beauty. But she had something of the evanescent charm
-of a four-petalled dog-rose newly blown--exquisite, ethereal, but as if
-it might fall in a moment. This aspect of fragility was heightened by
-what women noticed about her first, namely, her gossamer gown with its
-silver gleam, and by what men noticed about her first--her gray eyes,
-pathetic, eager, shy by turns, always lovely, but hinting of a sword too
-sharp for its slender sheath, of an ardent spirit whose grasp on this
-world was too slight.
-
-And as the music passed over her young untried soul, she sat motionless,
-her hands clasping the score. She heard nothing of it, but it
-accompanied the sudden tempest of passion which was shaking her, as wind
-accompanies storm.
-
-The voice of the song had stirred an avalanche of emotion.
-
-'And I will give thee thy heart's desire.'
-
-She knew nothing about waiting patiently, but her heart's desire--she
-must have it. She could not live without it. Her whole soul went out in
-an agony of prayer to the God who gives and who withholds to accord
-her this one petition--to _be his wife_. She repeated it over and over
-again. To be near him, to see him day by day--nothing else, nothing
-else! This one thing, without which, poor child! she thought she could
-not live. It seemed to Sibyl that she was falling at God's feet in the
-whirlwind, and refusing to let Him go until He granted her prayer. But
-would He grant it? Her heart sank. Despair rushed in upon her like a
-flood at the bare thought of its refusal, and she caught yet again at
-the only hope left to her--a desperate appeal to the God who gives and
-who withholds.
-
-Presently it was all over, and they were going out.
-
-'We were to wait for the others here,' said Peggy, the girl who had been
-sitting with Sibyl, as they emerged into the sunshine with the crowd.
-'Mother and Mr. Doll were just behind us.'
-
-Lady Pierpoint, Sibyl's aunt, presently joined them with Mr. Doll
-Loftus, an irreproachable-looking, unapproachable-looking fair young
-man, who, it was whispered, was almost too smart to live, but who
-nevertheless bore himself with severe simplicity.
-
-He went up to Sibyl with some diffidence.
-
-'You are tired,' he said anxiously.
-
-Doll's remarks were considered _banal_ in the extreme by some women, but
-others who admired fair hair and pathetic eyes found a thoughtful beauty
-in them.
-
-It would be difficult from her manner to infer which class of sentiments
-this particular remark awoke in Sibyl.
-
-'Music always tires me,' she replied, without looking at him, dropping
-her white eyelids.
-
-'Are we all here?' said Lady Pierpoint. 'Peggy, and Sibyl--my dear, how
-tired you look!--and myself, and you, Mr. Doll; that is only four, and
-"we are seven." Ah! here come Mr. and Mrs. Cathcart. Now we only want
-Mr. Loftus.'
-
-'The Dean caught him in the doorway,' said Doll. 'He is coming now.'
-
-The tall thin figure of an elder man was slowly crossing the angular
-patch of sunshine where the cathedral had not cast its great shadow. The
-nobility of his bearing seemed to appeal to the crowd. They made way for
-him instinctively, as if he were some distinguished personage. He was
-accompanied by a robust clerical figure with broad calves.
-
-'Mr. Loftus makes everyone else look common,' said Peggy plaintively.
-'It is the only unkind thing I know about him. I thought the Dean quite
-dignified-looking while we were at luncheon at the Deanery, but now he
-looks like a pork-butcher. I'm not going to walk within ten yards of Mr.
-Loftus, mummy, or I shall be taken for a parlourmaid having her day out.
-I think, Sibyl, you are the only one who can afford to go with him.'
-
-But Doll thought differently, and it was he and Sibyl who walked the
-short distance to the station together through the flag-decked streets
-in the brilliant September sunshine. People turned to glance at them as
-they passed. They made a striking-looking couple. Mr. Loftus, following
-slowly at a little distance with Lady Pierpoint, looked affectionately
-at the back of his young cousin, who was also his heir, and said to
-her, with a smile:
-
-'I wish it could be. Doll is a good fellow.'
-
-'I wish indeed it could,' said Lady Pierpoint earnestly, with the slight
-slackening of reserve which is often observable in the atmosphere on the
-last afternoon of a visit with a purpose.
-
-Lady Pierpoint had not come to spend a whole week with a Sunday in it
-with Mr. Loftus at Wilderleigh for nothing. And she was aware that
-neither had she and her niece and daughter been invited for that long
-period without a cause. But the week ended with the following morning,
-and she sighed. She had daughters of her own coming on, as well as her
-dear snub-nosed Peggy, who was already out, and it was natural to wish
-that the responsibility of this delicate, emotional creature, with her
-great wealth, might be taken from her and placed in safe hands. She
-thought Doll was safe. Perhaps the wish was father, or rather _aunt_, to
-the thought. But it was no doubt the truest epithet that could be
-applied to the young man. It was a matter of opinion whether he was
-exhaustingly dull in conversation or extraordinarily interesting, but he
-certainly was safe. He belonged to that class of our latter-day youth of
-whom it may be predicted, with some confidence, that they will never
-cause their belongings a moment's uneasiness; who may be trusted never
-to do anything very right or very wrong; who will get on tolerably well
-in any position, and with any woman, provided there are means to support
-it and--_her_; who have enough worldliness to marry money, and enough
-good feeling to make irreproachable husbands afterwards; in short, the
-kind of young men who are invented by Providence on purpose to marry
-heiresses, and who, if they fall below their vocation, dwindle, when
-their youth is over, into the padded impecunious bores of society.
-
-There was a short journey by rail through the hop country. Sibyl watched
-the rows of hops in silence. Cowardice has its sticking-point as well as
-courage, and she was undergoing the miserable preliminary tremors by
-which that point is reached. Mr. Loftus, sitting opposite her, and
-observing her fixity of gaze, glanced at her rather wistfully from time
-to time. He saw something was working in her mind. He looked tired, and
-in the strong afternoon light his grave, lined face seemed more worn
-and world-weary than ever. He had the look of a man who had long
-outlived all personal feeling, and who to-day had been remembering his
-youth.
-
-The Wilderleigh omnibus and Doll's spider-wheeled dogcart were waiting
-at the little roadside station, which was so small that the train very
-nearly overlooked it, and had to be backed. Doll was already holding the
-wheel to protect Sibyl's gown as she got up, and looking towards her,
-and Lady Pierpoint was hurrying Peggy, who had expressed a hankering
-after the dogcart, into the omnibus, when Mr. Loftus observed that he
-thought he would walk up.
-
-Sibyl's face changed.
-
-'May I walk up with you?' she asked instantly.
-
-Mr. Loftus looked disappointed; everybody looked disappointed. Lady
-Pierpoint put her head out, and said:
-
-'My dear child, the drive in the open air will refresh you; you are
-looking tired.'
-
-'May I go in the dogcart if Sibyl doesn't want to?' put in Peggy in an
-audible aside to her mother.
-
-'I think you are tired,' said Mr. Loftus, looking at Sibyl and shaking
-his head. 'And,' he added in a lower voice, 'Doll will be much
-disappointed.'
-
-A faint colour covered her face, which quivered as she turned it towards
-him.
-
-'Let me walk up with you,' she said again, with a tremor in her voice.
-
-He met her appealing eyes with gentle scrutiny.
-
-'It is not far,' he said aloud; 'not more than half a mile through the
-park. I will take care of her, Lady Pierpoint. We shall be at
-Wilderleigh almost as soon as you are.'
-
-'Oh, mummy, may I go in the dogcart _now_?' implored Peggy from the
-depths of the omnibus.
-
-And Mr. Loftus and Sibyl set out together.
-
-They were in the park in a few minutes, and were walking down towards
-Wilderleigh, on the opposite side of the river, an old house of
-weather-beaten gray stone, of twisted chimneys and uneven roofs and
-pointed gables, with quaint carved finials, standing above its terraces
-and its long stone balustrade. The sun was setting in a sky of daffodil
-behind the tall top-heavy elms of the rookery and the tower of the
-village church. Little fleets of clouds lay motionless in high heaven,
-looking towards the west. The land in its long shadows dreamed of
-peace. The old house beyond the river was in shadow already. So was the
-river.
-
-'Sometimes,' said Mr. Loftus to himself, 'a young girl feels more able
-to confide in an old friend than a relation. She has often talked to me
-before. Perhaps she is going to do so again.' And he felt comforted
-about Doll and the dogcart.
-
-Presently as he glanced at her, wondering at her continued silence, he
-saw that she was greatly agitated.
-
-'Something troubles you,' he said gently.
-
-She looked at him half in terror, as if deprecating his anger.
-
-They were walking down a narrow ride in the tall bracken. A trunk of a
-tree lay near the path among the yellowing fern.
-
-He led her to it and sat down by her, looking at her with painful
-anxiety and with a sense of growing fatigue. Emotion of any kind
-exhausted him. If it had not been for Doll, he would have dropped the
-subject, but for his sake he made an effort.
-
-'Tell me,' he said, and he took her thin young hand and held it in his
-thin older hand. It was the last afternoon; both were conscious of it.
-
-She trembled very much, but she did not speak. His heart sank.
-
-'You wish to tell me something about Doll, perhaps,' he said at last.
-'Do not be afraid of paining me by talking of it. You like him, perhaps,
-but not enough, and you are grieved because you see how much he loves
-you. Is that it?'
-
-'I don't like him,' gasped Sibyl. 'I have never thought about it. That
-is only Aunt Marion.'
-
-Mr. Loftus sighed, and his gray cheek blanched a little. He had built
-much on the hope of this marriage. He had a tender regard for Sibyl,
-whose emotional and impulsive nature appealed to him, and filled him
-with apprehension as for a butterfly in a manufactory, which may injure
-itself any moment. And he knew Doll was genuinely in love with her. It
-would be grievous if she were married for her money. And Wilderleigh was
-dying stone by stone and acre by acre for want of that money.
-
-As he looked mournfully at Sibyl, an expression came into her wide eyes
-like that which he had seen in the eyes of some timid wild animal
-brought to bay. He recognised that, like a shy bird near its nest, she
-was defending in impotent despair of broken white wings something which
-was part of her life, which was going from her, which _he_ was taking
-away.
-
-'It is you I love,' she said, and her small hand ceased trembling and
-became cold in his.
-
-For a moment both were stunned alike, and then some of the grayness of
-age and suffering crept suddenly from his face to hers as she felt his
-hand involuntarily slacken its clasp of hers.
-
-'My child,' he said at last, with great difficulty and with greater
-tenderness, 'it is very many years since I gave up all thought of
-marriage. I am old enough to be your----' He might have said
-'grandfather' with truth. He meant to say it, but as he approached the
-word he could not wound her with it.
-
-'I know,' she interrupted hurriedly. 'I don't mind. That is nothing to
-me.'
-
-'And my life,' he said, 'what little there is left of it, hangs by a
-thread.'
-
-'I know,' she said again--'I have thought of that. I have thought of
-nothing but you since I first met you a year ago. But if I might only
-love and serve you and be with you! And I am so rich, too. If I might
-only take away those money troubles which you once spoke of long ago! If
-I might only give you everything I have! The money is the smallest part
-of it--oh, such a little, little part compared to----' And she looked
-imploringly at him.
-
-He was deeply moved.
-
-'My child,' he said again, and the ominous repetition of the word shook
-her fragile edifice of hopes to its brittle foundation, 'you have
-always looked upon me as a friend, have you not?'
-
-She shook her head.
-
-'Well, then,' he added, correcting himself, 'as one who cared for and
-understood you, and whose earnest wish was to see you happy?'
-
-She did not answer.
-
-He had known difficult hours, but none more difficult than this. He felt
-as if he were trying with awkward hands to hold a butterfly without
-injuring it, in order to release it from the pane of glass against which
-it was beating its butterfly heart out.
-
-'To see you happy,' he went on, with authority as well as tenderness in
-his level voice. 'I should never see that; I should have no real'--he
-hesitated--'affection for you at all if I allowed you to make such a
-woeful mistake in your early youth before you know what love and life
-are. They are terrible things, Sibyl; I have known them. This beautiful
-generous feeling which you have for me is not love, and I should be base
-indeed to allow you to wreck your life upon it, your youth upon the rock
-of my age. You offer you know not what; you would sacrifice you know not
-what.' He smiled gravely at her, endeavouring to soothe her growing
-agitation. 'It would be like taking the Koh-i-Noor out of the hand of a
-child. I could not do it.'
-
-Her mind was in too great a tumult wholly to understand him, but one
-thing was clear to her, namely, that he was refusing to marry her. She
-snatched her hands out of his, and, starting wildly to her feet with an
-inarticulate cry, ran a short distance and flung herself down on her
-face among the bracken.
-
-He looked after her, but he did not follow her. He could do no more, and
-a sense of exhaustion and distress was upon him. He had been clumsy. He
-had hurt the poor butterfly, after all.
-
-He sat a long time on the tree-trunk, the low sunshine on his worn,
-patient face, on which the refinement of suffering and of thought had
-set their indelible stamp. And now the thin high features wore a new
-look of present distress over the old outlived troubles, a new look
-which anyone who really loved him would have been heart-stricken to have
-called into it. But when love ceases to wound its object, and bears its
-own cross, it has ceased to be young.
-
-As he sat motionless the sun sank. Far in the amber west the heavens
-had opened in an agony of glory. The knotted arms of the great oaks,
-upraised like those of Moses and his brethren, shone red as flame
-against the darkness of the forest. The first hint of chill after the
-great heat came into the still air.
-
-Mr. Loftus rose and went slowly towards the prostrate figure in its
-delicate gleaming gown.
-
-'Sibyl,' he said gently, but with authority, 'you must get up. I see
-Doll and your cousin coming up the glade to meet us.'
-
-Sibyl started violently and raised herself, turning a white, hopeless
-face towards him. Her entire self-abandonment, which would have brought
-acute humiliation to another woman, brought none to her. Her despair
-was too complete to admit of any other feeling.
-
-'Like a child's,' he thought, as he looked at her sorrowing.
-
-He helped her to smooth her gown, and he set her hat straight, and took
-some pieces of dried bracken out of her crumpled shining hair. She let
-him do it, neither helping nor hindering him. She evidently did not care
-what impression might be made on the minds of the two young people
-leisurely approaching them. She would have lain on the ground if it had
-been a bog instead of dry turf until the ice fit of despair had passed.
-His thoughtfulness for her, and the ashen tint of his face, were nothing
-to her, any more than the moonshine is to the child who has cried for
-the moon and has been denied it.
-
-At Mr. Loftus's bidding they went slowly to meet the others.
-
-'Doll,' said Mr. Loftus, lingering behind as Peggy and Sibyl walked on
-together, 'give me your arm. I feel ill.'
-
-'Won't she have me?' said Doll, biting his lip.
-
-'No, my poor boy, she won't.'
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER II.
-
-   'But we are tired. At Life's crude hands
-    We ask no gift she understands;
-    But kneel to him she hates to crave
-    The absolution of the grave.'
-
-    MATHILDE BLIND.
-
-
-The laws of attraction remain a mystery. Their results we see. Glimpses
-of their workings can occasionally be caught in their broken fragments.
-But the curve by which the circle may be drawn is nowhere to be found
-among those fragments. The first cause we cannot see. With sacrilegious
-hands we may rend the veil of its temple in the sacred name of truth,
-but we shall find nothing in its holy of holies save the bloodstains of
-generations of sacrifices on its empty altar, and the place where the
-ark has been.
-
-Youth, beauty, wit--all these attract; but they are only the momentary
-disciples of a great master, and their power is from him. In his name
-they perform a few works, and cast out a few small devils.
-
-But now and again a nature appears in our midst in the presence of which
-youth sinks its voice, and beauty pales and hangs its head, and wit
-bends its knee in reverence.
-
-What talisman had Mr. Loftus brought into the world with him that
-disinterested love and devotion should with one exception have followed
-him all the days of his life? But whether it had been given to him at
-his birth, or he had found it alone upon the hillside, or Sorrow, who
-has many treasures in her lap, but will never give them to those who
-turn from her, gave it to him when he kissed her hand--however this may
-have been, he had it.
-
-He had gone through his difficult life little realizing how much he owed
-to the impersonal love and respect which he inspired in men and women,
-as a beautiful woman seldom realizes how life has been coloured for her
-by the colour of her hair and eyes.
-
-His poetic exalted nature, with its tender affections, its deep
-passions, with its refinement and its delicacy of feeling, too sensitive
-to bear contact with this rough world, and yet not content to dwell
-apart from awkward fellow-creatures who wounded when they touched it,
-had leaned twice on the frail reed of personal love, and twice it had
-pierced his hand. After the second time he withdrew his scarred hand in
-silence, and journeyed on with it in his bosom.
-
-In the days of his youth he had been swept into the vortex of a deep
-passion which for the time engulfed his whole being. His early marriage
-and his romantic love, and his young wife's desertion of him, consumed
-like a rolling prairie-fire his early life. But he had emerged with the
-mark of fire upon him, and had taken up life again, and had made a
-career for himself in the world of politics.
-
-And he had reached middle age, he was a grave man with gray in his hair,
-before love came to him the second time. How he fared the second time no
-man knew; but afterwards the love of woman, deep-rooted though it was,
-died down in Mr. Loftus's heart. He went quietly on his way, but the way
-wearied him. He confided in no one, for he was burdened with many
-confidences, and those on whom others lean can seldom find a hand to
-lean on in their greater weakness and their deeper troubles.
-
-But his physical health wavered. At last his heart became affected, and
-after a few warnings he was obliged to give up public life. He ceased to
-be in authority, but he remained an authority, and so lived patiently on
-from year to year on the verge of the grave, aware that at any moment
-the next step might be across its brink.
-
-He had spoken the bare truth to Sibyl when he told her that his life
-hung by a thread. That this is so with all human life is a truism to
-which we all agree, but which none of us believe. But in his case the
-sword of Damocles was visible in the air above him. He never took for
-granted, if he went out for a walk, that he should return; and on this
-particular May afternoon, as he looked out from a friend's house in Park
-Lane across the street to the twinkle of green and the coloured bands of
-hyacinths beyond the railings, he locked his writing-table drawer from
-force of long habit, and burned the letters he had just read as
-carefully as if he were going on a long journey, instead of a short
-stroll across the park to Lady Pierpoint's house in Kensington.
-
-It was a heavy trouble that he had just locked into the writing-table
-drawer--nothing less than the sale of Wilderleigh, which he and Doll,
-after much laying together of the gray head and the brown one, had both
-come to the conclusion could not be staved off any longer. For the
-newly-imposed death-duties and the increasing pressure of taxation on
-land, in the teeth of increasing agricultural depression, had been the
-death-blow of Wilderleigh, as of so many other quiet country homes and
-their owners. The new aristocracy of the ironmaster and the cheesemonger
-and the brewer had come to the birth, and the old must give way before
-the power of their money. Mr. Loftus accepted the inevitable, and
-Wilderleigh was to be sold.
-
-He did not know for certain where Lady Pierpoint was to be found, but he
-would try the little house in Kensington. He had seen her driving alone
-the previous day, and he knew that she had quite recently returned with
-her daughter and niece from Egypt, where they had spent the winter
-months. Something in the glimpse of her passing face yesterday had
-awakened in him a vague suspicion that she was in trouble. She looked
-older and grayer, and why was she alone?
-
-He took up his hat and, entering the Park, struck across the grass in
-the direction of the Albert Memorial, blinking in all its gilt in the
-afternoon sun. The blent green and gray of a May day in London had
-translated the prose of the Park into poetry. Here in the very heart of
-the vast machine, Spring had ventured to alight for a moment,
-undisturbed by the distant roar of dusty struggling life all round her.
-The new leaves on the smoke-black branches of the trees were for a
-moment green as those unfolding in country lanes. Smoke-black among the
-silvery grass men lay strewn in the sunshine, looking like cast-off rags
-flung down, outworn by humanity, whose great pulse was throbbing so near
-at hand. Across the tender beauty of the young year fell the shadow of
-crime and exhaustion, and 'the every-day tragedy of the cheapness of
-man.'
-
-The shadow fell on Mr. Loftus's mind, and he had well-nigh reached Lady
-Pierpoint's door before his thoughts returned to her and to her niece,
-Sibyl Carruthers.
-
-'Pretty, delicate, impulsive creature, so generous, so ignorant, so full
-of the ephemeral enthusiasms of youth which have no staying power. The
-real enthusiasms of life are made of sterner stuff than she, poor child!
-guesses. What will become of her? What man in the future will take her
-ardent, fragile devotion, and hold it without breaking it, and bask in
-the green springtide of her love without desecrating it, like those poor
-outcasts in the Park?'
-
-Lady Pierpoint was at home, and he was presently ushered into the
-drawing-room, where she was sitting in her walking things. The room was
-without flowers, without books, without any of the small landmarks of
-occupation. It had evidently been arranged only for the briefest stay,
-and had as little welcome in it as a narrow mind.
-
-Lady Pierpoint, pouring tea out of a metal teapot into an enormous
-teacup, looked also as if she were on the point of departure.
-
-She greeted him cordially, and sent for another cup. A further glance
-showed him that she looked worn and harassed. Her cheerful motherly
-face was beginning to droop like a mastiff's at the corners of the
-mouth, in the manner in which anxiety cruelly writes itself on plump
-middle-aged faces.
-
-'I am not really visible,' she said, smiling, as she handed him the
-large cup which matched her own. 'I cannot bring forth butter in a
-lordly dish, as you perceive, for everything is locked up. I am here
-only for two days, cook-hunting.'
-
-Mr. Loftus had intended to ask after Sibyl, but he asked after Peggy
-instead.
-
-'She is quite well,' said Lady Pierpoint. 'She is always well, I am
-thankful to say. I have another Peggy coming out this year--Molly--perhaps
-you remember her; but how to bring her to London this season I don't know.
-I have hardly seen anything of her all last winter, poor child! as I was
-in Egypt with Sibyl. I have only just returned to England.'
-
-'And Miss Carruthers?' he said, examining his metal teaspoon; 'will not
-she be in London with you this season, with your own daughters?'
-
-'No,' said Lady Pierpoint, looking narrowly at him; 'Sibyl is ill. I
-have been very anxious about her all the winter. I greatly fear that she
-will sink into a decline. You know, her sister died of consumption a
-year or two ago.'
-
-Mr. Loftus looked blankly at Lady Pierpoint.
-
-'Sibyl!' he said--'ill? Oh, surely there is some mistake? What do the
-doctors say?'
-
-'They all say the same thing,' said Lady Pierpoint, her lips quivering.
-'She had a cough last winter, and she is naturally delicate, but there
-is no actual disease as yet. But if she continues in this morbid state
-of health--if she goes on as she is at present--they say it will end in
-that.'
-
-Mr. Loftus was silent.
-
-Lady Pierpoint looked at his unconscious, saddened, world-weary face,
-and clasped her hands tightly together.
-
-'Mr. Loftus,' she said, 'I am going to put a great strain on our
-friendship, and if I lose it, I must lose it. I have been thinking of
-writing to you, but I could not. I had thought of asking you to come and
-see me while I was alone here, but my courage failed me. But now that
-you have come by what is called chance, I dare not be a coward any
-longer. Sibyl has told me of what passed last summer between you and
-her.'
-
-A faint colour came into Mr. Loftus's pale face. He kept his eyes on the
-floor.
-
-'I think,' he said gently, but with a touch of reserve in his voice
-which did not escape his companion, 'we must both forget that as
-completely as she herself has probably already forgotten it.'
-
-'She has not forgotten it,' said Lady Pierpoint, ignoring, though with a
-pang, his evident wish to dismiss the subject. 'It is that which is
-causing her ill-health. She can think of nothing else. Some of us,' she
-said sadly, 'are so constituted that we can bear trouble and
-disappointment--others can't. This poor child, who has cried for the
-moon, is not mentally and physically strong enough to bear the
-disappointment of being denied it. And the doctors say that her life is
-dependent on her happiness.'
-
-Mr. Loftus rose, and paced up and down the room. She dared not look at
-him.
-
-Presently he stopped, and, with his face turned away, said with emotion:
-
-'But the moon is a dreary place if it is seen as it is, with its extinct
-volcanoes and its ice-fields. Nothing lives there. The fire in it is
-burnt out, and there is snow over the ashes. It is only in the eyes of a
-child that the moon is bright. We elders know that it is dark and
-desolate.'
-
-Lady Pierpoint was awed. She had known Mr. Loftus for twenty years. He
-had been kind to her in the early years of her widowhood, and in the
-later ones had helped on her boys by his influence in high quarters. She
-had often told him of her difficulties, but she had never till now heard
-him speak of himself.
-
-Her great admiration for him, which was of a humbler kind than Sibyl's,
-led her to say: 'It is not only in the child's eyes that the moon is
-bright.'
-
-She might have added with truth that in her own middle-aged eyes it was
-bright, too.
-
-'I greatly honoured you when Sibyl told me about it,' she continued,
-after a long pause. 'It is because I have entire trust in you that I
-have told you the truth about this poor child, who is as dear to me as
-my own, though I hope my own will face life more bravely. Should you,
-after reflection, feel able to do her this--this--great kindness, I hope
-you will come and stay with us at Abergower for Whitsuntide. But--I
-shall not expect you, and I shall not mention to anyone that I have
-asked you.'
-
-She rose and held out her hand. She looked tired.
-
-He held it a moment, and she endeavoured to read the grave, inscrutable
-glance that met hers, but she could not.
-
-'Thank you,' he said, and went away.
-
-'How dare she think of him?' said Lady Pierpoint to herself.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER III.
-
-   'L'amour est une source naïve, partie de son lit de cresson, de
-    fleurs, de gravier, qui, rivière, qui, fleuve, change de nature
-    et d'aspect à chaque flot.'--DE BALZAC.
-
-
-In England Spring is a poem. In the Highlands of Scotland she has the
-intensity of a passion. The crags and steeps are possessed by her; they
-stand transfigured like a stern man in the eyes of his bride. And here
-in these solemn depths and lonely heights, as nowhere else, shy Spring
-abandons herself, secure in the fastnesses where her every freak is
-loved. She sets the broom ablaze among the gray rocks, yellow along the
-river's edge, yet hardly yellower than the leaves on the young oak just
-above. The larches hear her voice, and hundred by hundred peep over each
-other's heads upon the hillside, all a-tremble with fairy green. The
-shoots of the dwarf cherry, scattered wide upon the uplands, are pink
-among the grass. The primroses are everywhere, though it is
-Whitsuntide--behind the stones, among the broom, beside the little
-tumbling streams, in every crevice, and on every foothold. The
-mountain-ash holds its white blossoms aloft in its careful spreading
-fingers. Even the silver birch forgets its sadness while spring reigns
-in Scotland.
-
-There are those to whom she speaks of love, but there are many more to
-whom she whispers, 'Be comforted.' When hope leaves us, it is well to
-go out into the woods and listen to what Spring has to say. Though life
-is gray, the primroses are coming up all the same, and the young shafts
-of the bluebell pierce the soft earth in spite of our heartache. A
-hedge-sparrow has built him a house in the nearest tangle of white
-hawthorn. There will be children's voices in it presently. Be comforted.
-Hope is gone, but not lost. You shall meet her again in the faces of the
-children, God's other primroses. She is not lost. She has only taken her
-hand out of yours. Be comforted.
-
-But Sibyl refused to be comforted. Her love for Mr. Loftus, if small
-things may be called by large names, was the first violent emotion of a
-feeble and impulsive mind in a feeble body, both swayed by veering
-influences, both shaken by the changing currents of early womanhood, as
-a silver birch is shaken with its leaves.
-
-A woman with a deeper heart, and with a slight perception of Mr.
-Loftus's character, would have reverently folded her devotion in her
-heart and have gone on her way ennobled by it. But with Sibyl, to admire
-anything was to wish to possess it; to tire of anything was to cast it
-away.
-
-Mr. Loftus was in her eyes without an equal in the world. Therefore--the
-reasoning from her point of view was conclusive--she must marry him. She
-had no knowledge, she had not even a glimpse, of the gulf of feeling,
-far wider than the gulf of years, which separated him from her. She
-imagined no one appreciated him, or entered into the dark places of his
-mind, as she did. She mistook his patient comprehension of her trivial
-aspirations, and his unfailing kindness to all young and crude ideas,
-for the perfect sympathy of two kindred souls, and was wont to speak
-mysteriously to Peggy of how minds that were really related drew each
-other out and enriched each other.
-
-It is always a dangerous experiment to awaken a sleeping soul to the
-pageant of life. Mr. Loftus had endeavoured to do this for Sibyl,
-consciously, gently, with great care, out of the mixed admiration and
-pity with which she inspired him, in the hope that, in later years, when
-her feet would be swept from under her, she might find something to
-cling to, amid the wreck of happiness which his dispassionate gaze
-foresaw that she would one day achieve out of her life.
-
-He had run the risk which all who would fain help others must be content
-to run--the risk that their work will be thrown away. He saw that the
-little rock-pool which reflected his own face was shallow, but he had
-not gauged the measure of its shallowness. His deep enthusiasms, tried
-and tempered before she was born, weary now with his own weariness,
-aroused hers as the Atlantic wave, sweeping up the rocks, just reaches
-and arouses the rock-pool, and sends a flight of ripples over it, which,
-if you look very close, break in mimic waves against the further edge.
-And before the thunder of the wave is silent the pool is glass once
-more.
-
-On natures like these the only influence which can make any impression
-is a personal one. It is overwhelming while it lasts; but it is the
-teacher who is everything--the teaching is nothing. And when he is
-removed, they passively drift under another personal influence, as under
-another wave, and the work of the first, the foundation patiently and
-lovingly built in its pretty yellow sand, is swept away, or remains in
-futile fragments, as a mark of the folly of one who built on sand.
-
-Certain strong, abiding principles Mr. Loftus had sought to instil into
-Sibyl's mind. She had perceived their truth and beauty; but she cared
-nothing for them in reality, and had fallen at the feet of the man who
-had awakened those exquisite feelings in her.
-
-And now either she would not, or could not, get up. She clung to her
-imaginary passion with all the obstinacy which is inherent in weak
-natures. The disappointment had undermined her delicately-poised
-health. As she walked down towards the Spey alone on this particular
-June afternoon, she looked more fragile and ethereal than ever. The
-faint colour had gone from her cheek, and with it half her evanescent
-prettiness had departed. Her slight, willowy figure seemed to have no
-substance beneath the many folds of white material in which her
-despairing dressmaker had draped her. With the suicidal recklessness of
-youth, she made no attempt to turn her mind to other thoughts, but
-pondered instead upon her trouble, with the unreasoning rebellion
-against it with which, in early life, we all meet these friends in
-disguise.
-
-She picked her way down the steep hillside, through the wakened broom
-and sleeping heather, and along the edge of the little oasis of
-oatfield, where so many thousands of round, river-worn stones had been
-gleaned into heaps, and where so many thousands still remained among the
-springing corn. The long labour and the patience and the partial failure
-which that little field meant, reclaimed from the heather, but not
-wholly reclaimed from the stones, had often touched Lady Pierpoint, who
-knew what labour was; but it did not appeal to Sibyl.
-
-She sat down with a sigh on the river-bank, a forlorn white blot against
-the crowded world of green, with Crack, her little Scotch terrier,
-beside her, and looked listlessly across the sliding water, which ran
-deep and brown as Crack's brown eyes, and loitered shallow and yellow as
-a yellow sapphire among its clean gray stones and gleaming rocks. A pair
-of oyster-catchers sped upstream, low over the water, swift as eye
-could follow, with glad cries, like disembodied spirits that have found
-wings at last and feel the first rapture of proving them.
-
-'Happy birds!' said Sibyl to herself. 'They do not know what trouble
-means.'
-
-Crack, who had heard this sentiment, or something very like it, before,
-stretched himself methodically, both front-legs together first, and then
-the hind-legs one by one, and walked slowly down to the edge of the
-water and sniffed sadly, as one who knows that search is vain among the
-stones for a rat which is not there. Crack had a fixed melancholy which
-nothing could dispel. His early life had been passed in the activity of
-a camp, and his spirit seemed to have been permanently embittered by the
-close contemplation of military character. He had been round the world.
-He knew the principal smells of our Eastern empire, but no reminiscences
-of his many travels served to brighten the gloomy tenor of his thoughts.
-He was sad, disillusioned, still apt to hurry and shorten himself
-through doors, and to retreat under sofas to brood over imaginary
-wrongs. All games distressed him. He went indoors at once when the red
-ball was produced which transformed Peter from an elegant poodle into a
-bounding demon. But in spite of his melancholy he was liked. He went out
-but little, but where he went he was welcomed. He was a gentleman and a
-man of the world. No dog ever quarrelled with him. He met bristling
-overtures with a mournful tact which turned growls into waggings of
-tails. He himself was seldom seen to wag his tail, except in his sleep.
-
-He returned from the water's edge and sat down on an outlying fold of
-Sibyl's gown.
-
-In the sunny stillness a wild-duck, with cautious, advanced neck, and a
-little fleet of water-babies, paddled past, bobbing on the amber
-shallows. Crack raised his ears and watched them. His feelings were so
-entirely under control that he could scratch himself while observing an
-object of interest; and he did so now. But he did not move from his seat
-on Sibyl's gown. He was disillusioned about wild-ducks, who did not play
-fair and stick to one element, but would take to their wings when hard
-pressed in the water, like a woman who changes her ground when cornered
-in argument.
-
-Presently the afternoon sun shifted, and all the larches on the steep
-hillside opposite and all the broom along the bank stooped to gaze at a
-flickering fairyland of broom and larches in the wide water. The deep
-valley of the river was drowned in light. Only the bank on which Sibyl
-was sitting under the mountain-ash had fallen suddenly into shadow.
-
-'Like my life,' she thought, and rose to go.
-
-Who was this coming slowly towards her along the little path by the
-water's edge?
-
-She stood still, trembling, her hands pressed against her breast.
-
-It was he. It was Mr. Loftus. He was looking for her. He was coming to
-her. Joy and terror seized her.
-
-He saw her standing motionless in her white gown under the white
-blossom-laden tree. And as he drew near and took her nerveless hands in
-silence, and looked into her face, he saw again in her deep eyes the
-shy, imploring glance which had met him once before--the mute entreaty
-of love to be suffered to live.
-
-'Sibyl,' he said, and in his voice there was reverence as well as
-tenderness--reverence for her untarnished youth, and tenderness for the
-white flower of love which it had put forth, 'will you be my wife?'
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IV.
-
-   'J'ai vu sous le soleil tomber bien d'autres choses
-    Que les feuilles des bois et l'écume des eaux,
-    Bien d'autres s'en aller que le parfum des roses
-        Et le chant des oiseaux.'
-
-    ALFRED DE MUSSET.
-
-
-'Mummy,' said Peggy, a few days later, coming into her mother's
-sitting-room and pressing her round, cool cheek against Lady
-Pierpoint's, 'why does Sibyl want to marry Mr. Loftus?'
-
-'Because she thinks she loves him, Peggy, as many other women have done
-before her.'
-
-'I think I love him, too, in a way,' said Peggy. 'He is better than
-anybody. When I am with him, I feel--I don't know what I feel, only I
-know it's good, and I want to do something for him, or make him
-something really pretty for his handkerchiefs; but--I don't want to
-marry him.'
-
-'That is as well, my treasure, as he is going to marry Sibyl.'
-
-'I never thought he would marry anybody. I can't believe it. It seems as
-if it could not happen.'
-
-'It will happen,' said Lady Pierpoint, 'if he lives.'
-
-'Sibyl says,' continued Peggy, 'that he enters into her feelings as no
-one else does, and that she understands him, and that hardly anyone else
-does except her, because he is so superior.'
-
-'Indeed!'
-
-'And she says she can speak to him of aspirations and things that she
-can't even mention to Molly and me. She says it isn't our fault--it is
-only because we are different to her.'
-
-'You are certainly very different,' said Lady Pierpoint, compressing her
-lips.
-
-'And to think that she might have married Mr. Doll,' continued Peggy, as
-if Sibyl's actions were indeed inscrutable. 'Mr. Doll will be
-twenty-eight next August. He was twenty-seven when we were at
-Wilderleigh last year. If I had been Sibyl, I would have married him,
-and then I'll tell you, mummy, what I would have done. I would have
-asked Mr. Loftus to let us live with him at Wilderleigh, and I would
-have taken such care of him--oh! such care--and I would have spent whole
-bags of money on the farms and fences and things, and he would have
-been happy, and Mr. Doll would have been happy, too.'
-
-'Peggy,' said Lady Pierpoint, 'shall I tell you a secret? I think that
-is exactly what Mr. Loftus hoped Sibyl would do.'
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Mr. Loftus returned to London a day or two later, and had an interview
-with Doll the day before the announcement of the engagement appeared in
-the _Morning Post_.
-
-Mr. Loftus was attached to his nephew--people always looked upon Doll as
-his nephew, though he was in reality his first cousin--and to him and to
-him alone he told the circumstances which had led to his engagement.
-
-What passed between the elder man and the young one during that
-interview will never be known. But when at last Mr. Loftus left him,
-Doll sat for a long time looking over the geraniums into the park. The
-somewhat dull, unimaginative soul that dwelt behind his handsome
-expressionless face was vaguely stirred.
-
-'It's a mistake,' he said at last, half aloud. 'But Uncle George is on
-the square; he always is.'
-
-And when he was ruthlessly twitted next day by his brother officers on
-being cut out by his uncle, he replied simply enough:
-
-'He is a better man than me, as all you fellows know. She would not have
-looked at one of you any more than she would at me. I suppose she had a
-fancy for marrying a man who could spell, which none of us can.'
-
-'Spelling or none,' said the youngest sub--'which is an indecent
-subject which should never be mentioned between gentlemen--anyhow, I
-mean to borrow a thousand or a fiver off him. Mr. Loftus always tipped
-me at school.'
-
-One of Mr. Loftus's first actions was to stop the preliminary
-proceedings regarding the sale of Wilderleigh, which he had been
-arranging a month ago, on the afternoon when he had called on Lady
-Pierpoint. It was like awakening from a nightmare to realize that
-Wilderleigh would not be sold, after all. He almost wished that he might
-live long enough to set the place in order for Doll.
-
-The engagement was a nine days' wonder, and those nine days were
-purposely spent by Mr. Loftus in London. He was aware that many cruel
-things would be said at his expense, and that the bare fact that a man
-of his years and in his state of health should marry a young heiress,
-and so great an heiress as Sibyl Carruthers, must call forth
-unfavourable comments. People who did not know him said it was perfectly
-shameful, and that it was just the sort of thing which those people who
-posed as being so extra good always did. How shocked Mr. Loftus had
-pretended to be when old Lord Bugbear, after his infamous life, married
-a girl of seventeen! And now he, Mr. Loftus, was doing exactly the same
-himself. Of course he had a very fascinating manner--just the kind of
-manner to impose on a young girl who, like Miss Carruthers, knew nothing
-of the world, and had been nowhere. And everyone knew he was desperately
-poor. Wilderleigh could hardly pay its way. A rumour had long been
-afloat that it would shortly be for sale. If he had not been so hard up
-for money it would have been different; but it was a most disgraceful
-thing, and Lady Pierpoint ought to be ashamed of having exposed the poor
-motherless girl left in her charge to his designs upon her. They
-wondered how much Lady Pierpoint, whose means were narrow, had been
-bought over for. The sums varied according to the sordidness of the
-different speculators, who of course named their own price.
-
-Others who knew Mr. Loftus were puzzled and were silent. To know him at
-all was to believe him to be incapable of an ignoble action; yet this
-marriage had the appearance of being ignoble--not, perhaps, for another
-man, but certainly for him. His intimate friends were distressed, and
-greeted him with grave cordiality and affection, and hoped for an
-explanation. He gave none. And they remembered that never in his public
-or in his private life had he been known to give an explanation of his
-conduct, and came to the conclusion that they must trust him.
-
-Mr. Loftus had recognised early in life that explanations explain
-nothing. If those who had had opportunities of knowing him well
-misjudged him after those opportunities, they were at liberty to do so
-as far as he was concerned. The weight of an enormous acquaintance
-oppressed him, and, though he had never been known to wound anyone by
-withdrawing from an unequal friendship, which he had not been the one to
-begin, and which was an effort to him to continue, still, he took
-advantage of being misunderstood to lay aside many such friendships. It
-was not pride which prompted this line of action on Mr. Loftus's part,
-though many put it down to pride, especially those who had held aloof
-from him at a certain doubtful moment, and in whose regard subsequent
-events had entirely reinstated him, and who complained that he expected
-to be considered infallible. It was, in reality, the natural inclination
-of a world-weary man of the world to lay aside, as far as he could
-courteously do so, the claims of the artificial side of life, its vain
-forms, its empty hospitalities.
-
-He realized that for the purpose of winnowing its friendships the
-various events of life may be relied on to furnish the fitting
-occasions. Those who do not wish to offend others by leaving them need
-make no effort, for they will certainly be presently deserted by those
-who have never grasped the meaning of the character which has been the
-object of their transient admiration. 'If he is unequal he will
-presently pass away.' Mr. Loftus neither hurried the unequal,
-self-constituted friend, nor sought to detain him. But when he departed,
-shaking the dust from off his feet, the door was noiselessly closed
-behind him, and his knock, however loud, was not heard when he returned
-again.
-
-A small batch of uneasy admirers left him on the occasion of his
-engagement. They said openly that they were much disappointed in him,
-and that he had shaken their belief in human nature.
-
-'Will Sibyl also pass away?' Mr. Loftus wondered, as he sat on the
-terrace at Wilderleigh on his return from London. 'Yes, she, too, will
-presently pass away; but I shall not give her time to do so. She will be
-absorbed by her first love for a few years, and I shall only remain a
-few years at longest. By the time it wanes I shall be gone, and my
-departure will pain her but very slightly.'
-
-His face softened as he thought of Sibyl. His nature, which, in its
-far-away youth, had been imaginative and romantic, had remained
-sympathetic. He gauged, as few others could have done had they been the
-object of it, the measure of her romantic attachment to himself. It was
-perhaps safer in his hands than in those of a younger man. For youth
-perpetrates many murders and mutilations in the name of love, as the
-schoolboy's love of a butterfly finds expression in a pin and a cork.
-But it would have cut Sibyl to the heart if she had even guessed that
-his tranquil mind took for granted that her adoration would not last
-until the stars fell from heaven and the earth fell into the sun. For
-'Les esprits faibles ne sont jamais sincères.' That is a hard saying,
-but alas! and alas! that it is only the weak who believe that it is not
-true. The strong know better, but if they are merciful they are silent.
-
-'And so my second wife is also to be an _esprit faible_,' said Mr.
-Loftus to himself, looking at the past through half-closed eyes. 'But in
-the meanwhile I have learnt a lesson in natural history. I shall not
-expect my butterfly to hew wood and draw water. And this time I shall
-not break my heart because pretty wings are made to flutter with.'
-
-And the remembrance slid through his mind of Millais's picture of the
-dying cavalier, and the butterfly perched upon the drawn sword in the
-ardent sunshine. And he thought of the drawn sword of Damocles hanging
-over his own life, and Sibyl's love preening itself for one brief second
-upon it. And at the thought he smiled.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER V.
-
-   'Je suis l'amante, dit-elle.
-    Cueillez la branche de houx.'
-
-    VICTOR HUGO.
-
-   'When all the world like some vast tidal wave withdraws.'--BUCHANAN.
-
-
-Many persons prophesied that the marriage between Mr. Loftus and Sibyl
-would not take place, but it did.
-
-On a burning day late in July they were married in London, for Sibyl's
-country place, where Mr. Loftus had hoped the wedding might have taken
-place, was shut up.
-
-Lady Pierpoint did all in her power to make the wedding a quiet one,
-for his sake. Very few invitations were sent out, and there was no
-reception afterwards. But, nevertheless, though the season was at its
-last gasp, when the day came the unfashionable London church was crammed
-with that 'smart' world, half of which had condemned Mr. Loftus, while
-it showered invitations upon him.
-
-Many hundreds of eyes were fixed upon his stately feeble figure as he
-moved slowly forward to place himself beside the young girl, whose
-emotion was plainly visible, and whose bouquet shook in her hand. The
-contrast between the two, as they stood together, was of that glaring
-description which appeals to the vulgar and conventional mind, on which
-shades of difference are lost.
-
-Mr. Loftus went through the ceremony with equanimity. His grave face
-betrayed nothing except fatigue and the fact that he was suffering from
-a severe headache. Lady Pierpoint and Doll watched him with anxiety,
-while Peggy, standing close behind the bride, wept silently, she knew
-not why.
-
-'Oh, mummy,' she said afterwards when it was all over, and Sibyl,
-anxious, preoccupied, had left Lady Pierpoint and Peggy and Molly, who
-had been mother and sisters to her, without a tear, without a regret,
-without a backward look, absorbed in the one fact that Mr. Loftus was
-ill--'oh, mummy, you say Sibyl loves him so much. Is that why she did
-not mind going away from all of us a bit? I know he had a headache, but
-she never used to mind when you had a headache, and when she was ill, do
-you remember how she always sent for you, even when I told her you were
-resting? And yet she used to be a little fond of us. But since he came
-she does not seem to care for us any more. If one loves anybody, does
-one forget the others?'
-
-'Some women do,' said Lady Pierpoint, taking Peggy's red, tear-stained
-face in her hands and kissing it. She could not bear to own, even to
-Peggy, how wounded her warm maternal heart had been because Sibyl, whose
-delicacy had given her so many anxious hours, had shown no feeling at
-parting with her. Mr. Loftus had shown much more, when he had come to
-speak to her alone for a few minutes in her sitting-room, when the
-carriage was at the door.
-
-'Some women,' said Lady Pierpoint, looking wistfully at her daughter,
-'forget everyone else when they marry, and are very proud of it. They
-think it shows how devoted they are. A little cup is soon full, Peggy,
-and a shallow heart, if it takes in a new love, has no room left for the
-old ones. The new love is like the cuckoo in the nest--it elbows out
-everything else.'
-
-'I will not be like that,' said Peggy, crushing her mother and her
-mother's bonnet in an impulsive embrace. 'I will have a deep, deep
-heart, mummy, and no one shall ever go out that once comes in--and--oh,
-mummy, you shall have the best bedroom in my heart always!'
-
-'I have a very foolish girl for a daughter,' said Lady Pierpoint,
-somewhat comforted, smiling through her tears, 'and one who has no
-respect for my best bonnet.'
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-At Sibyl's wish she and Mr. Loftus went straight to Wilderleigh. They
-reached it after several hours' journey on the evening of their
-wedding-day. And gradually the nervous exhaustion and acute headache
-from which he had been suffering, and which had become almost unbearable
-in the train, relaxed their hold upon him. They were sitting in the
-cool, scented twilight on the terrace. Through the half-darkness came
-the low voice of the river talking to itself. Noise and light and other
-voices, and this dreadful day, were gone at last.
-
-He gave a sigh of relief and smiled deprecatingly at her. They had
-hardly spoken since they were married. She was sitting near him, a
-slender figure in her pale gown, that shimmered in the feeble light. But
-there was light enough for her to see him smile, and she smiled back at
-him with her whole heart in her lovely eyes. No thought of self lurked
-in those clear depths, and Mr. Loftus, looking into them, and
-remembering how, on this her wedding day, her whole mind had been
-absorbed, to the entire oblivion of a bride's divided feelings, in the
-one fact that he was suffering, was touched, but not with elation.
-
-The long listless hand lying palm upwards on his knee made a slight
-movement, and in instant response to it her hand was placed in his. His
-closed over it. Perhaps nothing could have endeared her more to him than
-the mute response that had waited on his mute appeal, and had not
-forestalled it.
-
-His hand clasping hers, he drew her slightly, and, obeying its pressure,
-she leaned towards him.
-
-'My Sibyl!' he said, and she involuntarily drew closer to him, for
-something in his voice and manner, in spite of their exceeding
-gentleness and tenderness, seemed to remove him from her. 'Fate has been
-hard upon you that I should have been ill on your wedding-day.'
-
-'No,' she said, timidly pushing off from shore into the new world upon
-her little raft. 'Fate was kind, because to-day has been the first day
-when I could be with you and take care of you.'
-
-'You take too much care of me.'
-
-'I care for nothing else,' she said, her voice faltering, adoration in
-her eyes.
-
-One white star peered low in the western heaven through the violet dusk.
-
-'Once long ago, before you were born,' said Mr. Loftus, 'I loved
-someone, and she said she loved me, and we were married. But after a
-time she brought trouble upon me, Sibyl.'
-
-The great current had caught the little raft, and was hurrying it out to
-sea.
-
-'I will never bring trouble upon you,' said the young girl, her lips
-trembling as she stooped to kiss his hand. 'When you are tired you shall
-lean on my arm. When your eyes are tired I will read to you. I will take
-care of you, and keep all trouble from you.'
-
-'Till I die,' he said below his breath, more to himself than to her.
-
-'Till you die,' she answered.
-
-And so, but this time very lightly, Mr. Loftus leaned once again, or
-made as if he leaned, on the fragile reed of human love.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VI.
-
-   'He has nae mair sense o' humour than an owl, and a' aye haud
-    that a man withoot humour sudna be allowed intae a poopit.'
-    --IAN MACLAREN.
-
-
-The arrival of Sibyl at Wilderleigh was the occasion of many anxious
-surmises at the little Vicarage on the part of the young Vicar and his
-young and adoring wife.
-
-It had long been a great grief to them that Mr. Loftus only came to
-church once on Sunday. It was vaguely understood that he had yielded
-himself to doubts on religious subjects, which alone could account for
-this 'laxity'--doubts which the young Vicar felt could not have shaken
-himself or Mrs. Gresley, and which he was convinced he could dispel. But
-he could never obtain an opportunity to wage war against these ghostly
-enemies, for though he had preached during Lent a course of sermons
-calculated to pulverize the infidel tendencies of the age, which his
-wife had pronounced to be all-conclusive and to place the whole affair
-in a nutshell--it certainly did that--unfortunately the person for whose
-spiritual needs they were concocted did not hear them.
-
-Mr. Gresley had several times called upon Mr. Loftus with a view to
-giving the conversation a deeper turn, but when he was actually in his
-presence, and Mr. Loftus's steel-gray attentive eye was upon him, the
-younger man found it difficult, not to say impossible, to force
-conversation on subjects which Mr. Loftus had no intention to discuss.
-
-'If he would only meet me in fair argument!' Mr. Gresley said on his
-return from a futile attempt to approach Mr. Loftus on the subject of
-public worship; 'but when I had thoroughly explained my own views on the
-importance of regular attendance at both services on Sunday, he only
-said that those being my opinions, he considered that I was fully
-justified in having daily services as well. If he would only meet me
-fairly and hear reason,' said the young clergyman; 'but he won't. The
-other day when I pressed him on the subject of the devil--I know he is
-lax on the devil--I said: "But, Mr. Loftus, do you not believe in him?"
-If he had only owned what I am sure was the case--namely, that he did
-not believe in him--I could have confuted him in a moment. I was quite
-ready. But he slipped out of it by saying, "Believe in him! I would not
-trust him for a moment." There is no arguing with a man who scoffs or is
-silent.'
-
-'My dear,' said Mrs. Gresley, 'infidels are all like that, and their
-only refuge is to be silent or profane. Don't you remember when that
-professor from Oxford, whom we met at Dr. Pearson's, said something
-about history and the Bible--I forget what, but it was perfectly
-unorthodox--and Dr. Pearson was so interested, and you spoke up at once,
-and he made no reply whatever, and then asked me the name of our
-Virginia creeper, and talked about flowers. I often think of that, and
-how he had to turn the subject.'
-
-'But he was not convinced,' said Mr. Gresley, frowning; 'that is the odd
-part of it. He brought out a book on the Bible with things in it much
-worse than what he said in my presence, and which I positively refuted.
-And it went through six editions, and the Bishop actually read it.'
-
-'You see,' said Mrs. Gresley, with the acumen which pervades the
-atmosphere of so many country vicarages, 'a man like the professor does
-not _want_ to be convinced, or his books would not be read, any more
-than Mr. Loftus wants to be convinced he ought to come to church
-regularly, because then he would have no excuse for staying away. But
-perhaps his wife may be a Christian, James. They say she is quite a
-young girl, and that her aunt has brought her up well.'
-
-And when Sibyl's sweet face and black velvet hat, and a wonderful
-flowing gown of white and lilac, appeared in the carved Wilderleigh
-pew beside Mr. Loftus's familiar profile, the Gresleys hoped many
-things; though Mrs. Gresley expressed herself, after service, as much
-shocked at the bride's style of dress, which she pronounced to be too
-showy. Mrs. Gresley's views on dress were exclusively formed at the two
-garden-parties and the one private ball to which she went in the course
-of the year. The Gresleys thought it wrong to go to public balls,
-and--which was quite another matter--they thought it wrong for other
-clergymen and their wives to go also.
-
-It was fortunate that Mr. Loftus admired his wife's style of dress, as
-he had always admired Sibyl herself, from her graceful, fringeless head
-to her slender, low-heeled shoes. She pleased his fastidious taste as
-perhaps no other woman could have done. She was one of the few
-Englishwomen who can wear French gowns as if they are part of them, and
-not put on for the occasion.
-
-After a becoming interval Mr. and Mrs. Gresley called, and this time
-Mrs. Gresley was somewhat mollified by what she called the very
-'suitable' costume of brown holland in which Sibyl received them. Mr.
-Loftus did not appear, and in the course of conversation the young
-couple were further pleasantly impressed with the perfect orthodoxy and
-sound Church teaching of the bride, whose natural gift of platitude was
-enhanced by the subject under discussion.
-
-They also made the discovery that Mr. Loftus was, in his wife's opinion,
-infallible. And Mrs. Gresley looked with some astonishment at a bride
-who actually entertained towards a 'layman' the unique sentiments
-which she did for her apostolic James.
-
-'She is a nice young creature,' said Mrs. Gresley, half an hour later,
-as, with her hands full of orchids, she accompanied her lord back to the
-Vicarage, 'and her views, James, are beautiful--just what I think
-myself. She agreed with everything we said. She must have been very well
-brought up. But I can't understand her infatuation for Mr. Loftus.
-Really, from the way she spoke of him, and how he knew best, one might
-have supposed he was priest as well as squire here. It almost made one
-smile.'
-
-Mr. Loftus and Crack had, in the meanwhile, remained in the gardens, he
-leaning back in a long deck-chair, looking dreamily up into the
-perspective of moving green above him, while Crack, who had only just
-arrived from Scotland, snapped mournfully at the English flies, which
-tasted very much the same as those of Strathspey, so few new things are
-there under the sun.
-
-Sibyl had wished to bring Peter, the poodle, also to Wilderleigh, but
-nothing would induce Mr. Loftus to invite him. He told Sibyl that he
-himself hoped to replace Peter in her affections, and he had certainly
-succeeded.
-
-She returned to him now, and sat down on a low stool at his feet. In
-these early days she was much addicted to footstools and the lowest of
-seats, provided they were properly placed. They were in harmony with her
-sentiments, and facilitated an upward gaze.
-
-'They were so pleasant. I wish you had come in,' she said.
-
-'I find the clergy as fatiguing as Anderson's beetle found cleanliness,'
-said Mr. Loftus, his eyes dwelling on her. 'But that is not their fault.
-It is because I happen to be a beetle.'
-
-'I was a little tired, too,' said Sibyl hastily. 'They stayed rather
-long.'
-
-'And did you like them?'
-
-'Yes; I thought them very nice. And I am glad they are High Church. I
-think it is so much nicer, don't you?'
-
-'Do you mean to tell me, now that we are married and it is too late to
-go back, that you are High Church?'
-
-'Oh, not very high!' said Sibyl anxiously, yet reassured by his look of
-amusement. 'Which are you?'
-
-'I am the same as Mr. Gresley,' said Mr. Loftus slowly, 'with a
-difference.'
-
-'I thought you were different,' said Sibyl, gratified at her own
-powers of observation.
-
-'I know,' continued Mr. Loftus, 'that he thinks I have no principles at
-all, because he believes they are not the same as his; but in reality
-they are very much the same as his, only they are carried further
-afield, and he loses sight of them, while he has a neat little
-ring-fence round his own. I like Mr. Gresley very much. He is an
-exemplary young man. But some people become very narrow by walking in
-the narrow path, and I fear he is one of them. Remember this, my Sibyl,
-that there is no barrier in your own character against which someone,
-sooner or later, will not stumble to his hurt. No boundary in ourselves
-will serve to shut God in, as this good young man thinks, but every
-boundary will at last shut out some fellow-creature from us, and be to
-one, whom perhaps we might have helped, an occasion of stumbling. And
-now let us show Crack the brook. I am afraid he will think but little of
-it after the Spey, but he will be too polite to say so. As he only
-arrived yesterday, it is premature to put it into words, but I have an
-intuition that Crack and I shall become friends. If I had any influence
-over him, I would encourage him to bathe in the brook, for he brought
-into the house with him this morning an odour that convinced me that we
-were on the eve of some great chemical discovery.'
-
-So they wandered down by the brook, across the lengthening shadows. A
-cock pheasant was clearing his throat in the wood near the gardens. The
-low sun had become entangled in the rookery. A pair of sandpipers were
-balancing their slender selves on a tiny beach of sand. A little black
-and white water-ousel darted upstream with rapid, bee-like flight. Crack
-followed, gravely investigating the bank point by point, as if on the
-look-out for some fallacy in it.
-
-And Sibyl registered the conclusion in her own mind that one must be
-'wide,' like Mr. Loftus, not narrow, like Mr. Gresley. After this
-conversation she always spoke of her religious convictions as 'wide.'
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VII.
-
-   'We form not our affections. It is they
-      That do form us; and form us in despite
-    Of our poor protests.'
-
-    LYTTON.
-
-
-Summer slid into autumn, and autumn into winter. The first few months of
-married life had been difficult to Mr. Loftus, but he had brought his
-whole attention and an infinite patience to bear on them, and gradually
-his reward came to him. Sibyl could learn because she loved. She learned
-slowly, but still she did learn, to read, not her husband's
-thoughts--those were far from her--but his wishes. She discovered, with
-a pang which cost her many secret tears--but still she did
-discover--that he often wished to be alone, and that she must not go
-into his study unless she were asked to do so. She learned gradually
-when to join him when he paced in the rose-garden, and when it vexed and
-wearied him to have her by him. And she learned, too, after the first
-horrible experience, which neither could remember without anguish, when,
-with blue lips, he had begged her not to touch him; that when he had an
-attack of the heart she must not betray her agony of mind, if she was to
-be allowed to remain in the room, and she must not ignorantly try to
-apply the remedies, but must leave it to Mr. Loftus's valet, whose
-imperturbable calm and promptitude had often ministered to his master
-before. Sibyl's terror of death and violent emotion at its approach
-were peculiarly trying to Mr. Loftus, who had long since ceased to
-regard death with horror, and only wished to be allowed to meet it
-quietly, without a scene.
-
-All intimacy was difficult to his solitary nature. It was alien while it
-was courteously welcomed. It was the natural instinct of hers. She had
-to learn to suppress her tenderness--or, at any rate, its expression--a
-hard lesson for an over-demonstrative nature, not long out of its teens.
-But Sibyl learned even that for his sake. And there her knowledge
-stopped. It never reached beyond his wishes to his mind. She was merged
-entirely in her love of her husband, but if he had been unworthy of the
-exalted pedestal on which she had placed him, she would not have
-discovered it.
-
-'It might just as well have been Doll.' Mr. Loftus thought occasionally,
-half amused, when he had the barbarity to try a platitude of the first
-water upon her--one of Doll's best, such as the young man, after diving
-into the recesses of his being, could produce, and found she received it
-with as much interest as the thoughts for which he had dug deep. For
-hero-worship was necessary to Sibyl, but not a hero--only that she
-should consider him one. The sham was to her the same as the real. She
-saw no difference. Like many another woman, she would have adored an
-ass's ears, wondering at the blindness of the rest of mankind. But if
-the truth about those ears had been forced upon her, rubbed into her,
-tattooed upon her, her entire belief in human nature would have fallen
-with the fall of one fellow-creature. The heights and depths of human
-nature had never awed her, nor its great forces moved her to reverence
-or compassion. She was of the stuff out of which the female cynic, as
-well as the female devotee, is made.
-
-Mr. Loftus did not marvel at an adoration which has been the birthright
-of his fortunate sex since the world began, but his perennial wonder at
-the enigma of feminine human nature had a new element added to it--that
-of amusement. She played with his tools, as a robin perches on a spade,
-thinking it is stuck in the earth for that purpose, and for the turning
-up of worms.
-
-The struggles, the despair, the hope and the aspiration, through which
-his youth had climbed, and out of which it had forged its tools, were
-not a part of Sibyl's youth. She liked the tools now that they were
-made, and desired them for her own small uses. She was naturally drawn
-to those of deeper convictions and larger faiths. She liked the luxury
-of being moved by them, stirred by them, lifted beyond herself by a
-power outside of herself. She loved to nibble the edge of their
-hard-earned bread and feel that she, too, was of them, and make believe
-that she had helped to grind the flour; and to make believe with Sibyl
-was the same thing as to believe. Her insolvent nature clung to the rich
-one, ostensibly because it was sympathetic, but really because it was
-rich.
-
-This unconscious audacity was a novel source of entertainment to Mr.
-Loftus, a bubbling wayside spring which he had hardly hoped to meet with
-on the dry highroad of married life. It is greatly to be feared that his
-conscience, usually a tender one, was hardly as watchful as it should
-have been on this subject. It certainly had lapses when Sibyl conversed
-with him seriously, especially when she coupled his feelings with her
-own on the greatest subjects, never doubting that they were identical.
-But after a short time he dared not speak to her of anything really dear
-to him. She had a gift for making sacred things common by touching them,
-and age had not tarnished reverence in Mr. Loftus's soul, though it had
-tarnished many things which youth holds in reverence. He talked to her,
-instead, on subjects which he had not much at heart, and that did quite
-as well.
-
-And she, on her side, would bring to him the inferior religious books,
-and superficial unorthodox works which she believed to be deep because
-they were unorthodox, which were the natural food of her little soul,
-and he received them and her remarks upon them, as he received a flower
-when she gave him one, with courtesy and gratitude.
-
-So absorbed was she in her devotion to her husband, and in the
-interchange of beautiful sentiments, that her other duties, increased by
-her position at Wilderleigh, were not even perceived. Unobservant
-persons are sometimes surprised at the real devotion--and Sibyl's was
-real--of which a shallow and cold-hearted nature shows itself capable.
-But those who look closer perceive at what heavy expense to others that
-one link is held, which is in reality only a new and more subtle form of
-selfishness.
-
-She dropped the other links without even knowing that she had dropped
-them. She had no tender, watchful gratitude for Lady Pierpoint, no
-interest in Peggy's new gowns and lovers, or as to whether Molly had
-enjoyed her first season. If this had been pointed out to her, she would
-have glibly ascribed the result to marriage, which, according to some
-women, is the death-bed of all sympathy and impersonal love. It is like
-ascribing sin to temptation.
-
-The Gresleys were much disappointed in her, and they had reason to be
-so, for Sibyl had changed over after her discovery of Mr. Loftus's
-convictions, or, rather, her interpretation of them, and, instead of
-being rather High Church, had now decided to be 'wide,' which state, it
-soon appeared, was not compatible with being an efficient helper to the
-earnest hard-working young couple at her gate. Mr. Loftus, who now had
-command of money, was far more considerate than his wife.
-
-'She,' Mrs. Gresley complained, 'did not seem to care to do anything
-with her life, for she would neither sing in the choir nor teach in the
-Sunday-school.'
-
-She did consent to give prizes for needlework in the schools, but when
-the day came it was discovered that she had forgotten all about it, and,
-as she had a cold, Mr. Loftus drove into the nearest town and brought a
-mind weighted with political matter to bear upon the requisite number of
-prizes suited to girls of from seven to fourteen years, and hurried back
-just in time to prevent disappointment by distributing them himself.
-
-'Have you written lately to Lady Pierpoint?' he sometimes asked, and
-Sibyl generally had to confess, 'Not lately,' and then she would write
-and then forget again.
-
-'I suppose Lady Pierpoint is less well off now that you are married?' he
-asked one day tentatively. 'No doubt your guardians made her an
-allowance while you lived with her.'
-
-'Yes,' said Sibyl, who was sitting on the hearthrug, trying to make
-Crack do his trick of sitting up. It was his only trick, and he could
-not do that unless he happened to be sitting down when called upon to
-perform it. If he were on all fours at the moment, he could not remember
-how it began. 'Aunt Marion often said it was a very handsome allowance.'
-
-'And have you continued it, or part of it?' asked Mr. Loftus gravely.
-
-Sibyl owned that she had never thought of doing so.
-
-'Everything I have is yours now,' she said, looking up at him.
-
-'And I am spending it,' he said, 'freely. Thousands of yours are being
-put into the estate, in repairs, and new farms and buildings. I am like
-the man in Scripture who pulled down his barns to build greater--at
-least, who intended to do so if he had had time.'
-
-Mr. Loftus stopped. For the first time for many years a faint wish
-crossed his mind that his soul might not be required of him till all
-those expensive improvements were paid for, which would make Doll's
-position as landlord easier than his own had been.
-
-'Even in these bad times,' he went on, 'Wilderleigh will come round. You
-have taken a great weight off my mind, Sibyl.'
-
-'That is what I wish,' she said, turning her face, as he put back a
-little ring of hair behind her ear, so that her lips met his hand.
-
-'But Lady Pierpoint? I am afraid, Sibyl, her husband left her very badly
-off.'
-
-'I will write now,' said Sibyl, springing to her feet.
-
-Crack rose too, and jumped on Mr. Loftus's knees, quietly pushing his
-hands off them with his strong nose, and accommodating his long, thin
-body by a few jerks into the groove which a masculine lap presents. Mr.
-Loftus did not want him, and it tired him to keep his knees together;
-but he knew there was a draught on the floor, and he allowed him to
-remain.
-
-'How much shall I say? A thousand a year or fifteen hundred for her
-life?' asked Sibyl, dipping her pen in the ink. It was all one to her.
-She always gave freely of what cost her nothing--namely, money.
-
-'It must not be too much, or she won't feel able to take it,' said Mr.
-Loftus, considering. 'And if it is an annuity, it does not help the
-children.' And he wondered how far he dared go.
-
-And when, a few days later, Lady Pierpoint received a note from Sibyl,
-very delicately and affectionately expressed, and offering, in such a
-manner as to make refusal almost impossible, a sum of money more than
-sufficient to provide for both her daughters, she guessed immediately
-whose tact had dictated the letter.
-
-'Sibyl would never have thought of it,' she said to herself, as she
-wrote a note of acceptance. 'It never crossed her mind when she left us,
-or even to offer to pay for Peggy's and Molly's bridesmaids' gowns,
-although she chose such expensive ones. And if it had occurred to her
-since, she would not have put it like that.'
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VIII.
-
-   'Le monde est plein de gens qui ne sont pas plus
-    sages.'--LA FONTAINE.
-
-
-With the winter came many invitations, but they were nearly all refused,
-for Mr. Loftus had long since dispensed himself from attending county
-festivities, and Sibyl, though she had recovered her health, was always
-delicate. Lady Pierpoint had had doubts as to whether she ought to
-winter in England, but not only was Sibyl herself determined so to do,
-but when Lady Pierpoint saw her in London before Christmas with a
-vivid colour and an elasticity of bearing which made a marked contrast
-to the drooping, listless demeanour of the previous winter, her doubts
-were at once set at rest.
-
-Presently, however, an invitation came for a masked ball in the
-immediate neighbourhood, which Mr. Loftus decided could not be refused.
-
-'But why should we go?' said Sibyl, 'if we don't care about it. And I
-hate balls, and I hate society. I was saying so to the Gresleys only
-yesterday. I love my own fireside and a book.'
-
-Sibyl had no idea how much these occasional mild flourishes, which found
-great favour at the Vicarage, annoyed Mr. Loftus. She put them forth,
-poor thing! with a view to showing him how much she had in common with
-him.
-
-'It is a mistake to say you hate society,' said Mr. Loftus, 'because
-you are not in a position to hate what you have never seen. Personally,
-I can see nothing peculiarly obnoxious in my fellow-creatures when they
-have their diamonds and white ties on. I do not even discover that they
-are more worldly in ball-gowns than on other occasions.'
-
-'But it is all so empty and vain,' said Sibyl; 'and though I dare say I
-have not seen much, still, the small-talk is so wearying, and I suppose
-that is the same everywhere. I should not mind society if there was any
-real conversation, anything _deep_.'
-
-Sibyl loved the word 'deep.' She used it on the occasions when others
-use the word 'trite,' she meaning the same as they did, but looking at
-the trite from a different angle. From her point of vantage,
-eccentricity was originality, and a wholesale contradiction of
-established facts a new view.
-
-Mr. Loftus was so close on the verge of annoyance that he was obliged to
-be amused instead.
-
-'I have heard many people say they hated society,' he said, smiling, and
-Sibyl smiled back at him, delighted at having won his approbation by the
-nobility and originality of her sentiments.
-
-'I have generally found that they are persons to whom, probably for some
-excellent reason, society has shown the cold shoulder, or those, like
-the Gresleys, who have never seen anything of it, and who call
-garden-parties, and flower-shows, and bazaars, and all those dismal
-local functions, society.'
-
-'She is not going to this masked ball,' said Sibyl. 'I asked her, and
-she said, "Of course not. Her husband being a clergyman made it quite
-impossible." I wonder why she always says things are quite impossible
-for the clergy that most of the other clergy do. She said the same about
-the Hunt Ball.'
-
-'That was because of the pink coats of the men and the new gowns of the
-women, and also partly because they were not asked. It happened to be a
-good ball, consequently it was dangerous. Dowdiness has from a very
-early date of this world's history been regarded as a sacrifice
-acceptable to the Deity, so naturally pretty gowns and electric light
-are considered to be the perquisites of the Evil One.'
-
-'But are we really going to this ball?'
-
-'We are. It would be unneighbourly not to do so. I met Lady Pontesbury
-yesterday in D----, and she begged us to support her, and to bring even
-numbers. People cannot give balls in the country, Sibyl, if none of the
-neighbours will take the trouble to fill their houses. I have seen very
-cruel things of that kind done. Ours is the largest house in the
-neighbourhood, and, as it now has a mistress, we must fill it.'
-
-The idea of society having any claim on her was a new light to Sibyl.
-She had always considered herself superior to its blandishments. But now
-that she discovered that Mr. Loftus actually regarded certain social
-acts as a duty, and this masked ball as one in particular, she
-immediately changed her opinion, and forthwith looked upon it as a duty
-also. It was a duty which, as its fulfilment drew near, became less and
-less unpleasant to anticipate.
-
-She had until now lent a sympathetic ear to the Gresleys when they
-talked of society as a snare, and had echoed Mr. Gresley's remarks on
-the same.
-
-'Balls are not wrong in themselves,' Mr. Gresley would say in his chest
-voice, keeping his hand in before Sibyl and his admiring wife. 'It is
-only the abuse of them that is blameworthy. Use the world as not abusing
-it. A carpet dance among young people I should be the last to blame. We
-cannot keep the bow always at full stretch. But when it comes to ball
-after ball, party after party, and pleasure is made a business, instead
-of a recreation, by which I mean that which restores elasticity to the
-exhausted faculties, recreates us in fact, and renews our energy for
-our work, then indeed----' And Mr. Gresley would express himself at that
-length which is apparently the one great compensation of the teacher who
-has no pupils.
-
-Sibyl enjoyed his conversation very much. She thought Mr. Gresley a very
-sensible person, and his opinions were in harmony with her own.
-
-Mrs. Gresley had also declared, after a brief visit to Kensington in
-July during the 'sales,' that she had neither the means nor the
-inclination to throw herself into the social whirlpool which she and Mr.
-Gresley had dispassionately viewed from two green chairs in the Row, and
-which Mr. Gresley had estimated 'at its true worth.' If she had
-possessed both the means and the inclination, she would perhaps have
-discovered that she was no nearer to that vortex than the many
-thousands who annually make a pilgrimage to London only to be tossed on
-the outermost ripple of the whirlpool, and who revolve for ever on the
-rim of society like Saturn's rings, without approaching the central
-luminary. But that it is difficult to be loved of Society and ensnared
-by her the Gresleys and Sibyl did not know, any more than that certain
-crimes require great qualities in order to commit them.
-
-Mr. Loftus might have been able to relieve their ignorance, but, as
-Sibyl told the Gresleys, he did not care much for conversation.
-
-A habit of silence was certainly growing upon him since his marriage.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IX.
-
-   'Et chacun croit fort aisément,
-    Ce qu'il craint.'
-
-    LA FONTAINE.
-
-
-The night of the masked ball had arrived. A large party had assembled at
-Wilderleigh, including Lady Pierpoint and her daughters, and Doll. It
-was Doll's first visit to Wilderleigh since Mr. Loftus's marriage, and
-as he looked down the dinner-table at Sibyl he wondered at his own folly
-in coming. He thought he had 'got over it,' but to-night he found that
-he had made a sufficiently grave mistake in supposing so. Unimaginative
-persons never know when they have got over anything, because they have
-no fore-knowledge in absence of the stab which a certain presence can
-inflict. So Doll walked stolidly in--where Mr. Loftus in a remote but
-not forgotten passage of his own life had feared to tread--and then
-writhed and bit his lip at the hurt he had inflicted upon himself.
-
-In the days when he had hoped to marry Sibyl, he had often pictured her
-to himself--his imagination could reach as far as tangible objects, such
-as furniture and food and raiment--sitting at the head of his table,
-talking to his guests, wearing the Wilderleigh diamonds, and looking as
-she looked now; for to-night Sibyl was beautiful. And it had all come
-about, except one thing--that she was married to Mr. Loftus instead of
-to him. He turned to look fixedly at Mr. Loftus talking to Lady
-Pierpoint, and saw as in some new and arid light his thin stooping
-figure in the carved high-backed chair, the refined profile with the
-high thin nose and scant brushed-back gray hair, and the bloodless
-Vandyke hand holding his wine-glass. Mr. Loftus had a very beautiful
-hand. Doll had not seen Mr. Loftus and Sibyl together except at the
-altar-rails. And as he looked rage took him. It was a monstrous
-marriage. The blood rushed to his face, and beat in his temples. And a
-sudden bitter hatred surged up within him against Mr. Loftus as man
-against man. He looked at him again in his gray hair and his feebleness,
-and loathed him.
-
-And Mr. Loftus's indifferent kindly glance met his, and he smiled
-quietly at him. And the cold fit came after the hot one, and poor Doll
-cursed himself, and told himself for the first time of many times--of
-how many times!--that the greatest evil that could befall him in life
-would be to become estranged from 'Uncle George.'
-
-'What are you thinking of?' said Peggy's voice at his elbow. Peggy was
-often at Doll's elbow at other times besides dinner, a fact which did
-not escape Lady Pierpoint's maternal eye, but for which she did not
-reprimand Peggy, any more than for her slightly upturned nose and little
-upper lip, which turned up in sympathy too. But Peggy vaguely felt that
-on this occasion her dear 'mummy' was rather in the way, especially when
-the whole party assembled in the hall in their masks and dominoes, and
-Peggy could not sufficiently admire Doll's flame-coloured garment with a
-black devil outlined on the back and a hood with pointed ears. She had
-no eyes for Captain Charrington, the tallest man in the Guards,
-magnificent in crimson silk from head to foot, with crimson mask as
-well, or for another of Doll's companions in arms in a chessboard domino
-of black and white with an appalling white mask.
-
-'Look, Peggy,' said Lady Pierpoint, 'at Mrs. Devereux. I think I have
-never seen any domino as pretty as her white one with little silver bees
-all over it.'
-
-Mrs. Devereux protested, in a muffled manner, through the lace edge of
-her mask that Miss Pierpoint's and Mrs. Loftus's duplicate primrose ones
-edged with gold quite put her bees into the shade.
-
-'Into a hive you mean,' said her husband, a dull young man in dove
-colour. 'But how are we to know Mrs. Loftus and Miss Pierpoint apart?'
-
-'You won't know us,' said Sibyl; 'that is just the point.'
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-'There is one thing I ought to have asked you before,' said Sibyl
-solemnly in her married-woman voice, as the brougham in which she and
-Mr. Loftus had driven together drew up in the _queue_. 'Would you like
-me to dance or not?'
-
-'Are you fond of dancing?'
-
-'Very--at least, I mean I don't mind.'
-
-'Then, dance by all means.'
-
-'You are quite sure it is what you wish. I thought perhaps as a married
-woman----'
-
-'Married goose,' said Mr. Loftus, laughing, perfectly aware that she
-would have liked him to be jealous.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-'I'm going to dance,' whispered Sibyl to Peggy, as they followed Mr.
-Loftus and Lady Pierpoint, the only unmasked ones of the party, towards
-the ballroom. 'He says he wishes me to. He is always so unselfish.'
-
-But Peggy's open eyes and mouth and whole attention were turned to the
-ballroom which they were entering.
-
-Lord and Lady Pontesbury were standing near the entrance solemnly
-shaking hands with the masked hooded figures who came silently towards
-them. No introductions were possible. Lord Pontesbury almost embraced
-Mr. Loftus, so relieved was he to see a human face. Lady Pontesbury
-beamed on Lady Pierpoint.
-
-'Your girls here?' she whispered. No one seemed able to speak above a
-whisper.
-
-'Yes,' said Lady Pierpoint below her breath, looking helplessly round
-at the twenty muffled figures in her wake. And Captain Charrington came
-forward at once, and said he was the eldest, and produced Doll as his
-youngest sister, while Peggy and Molly wondered how anyone could be so
-funny and live.
-
-The long ballroom, with its cedar-panelled walls outlined in gilding,
-was brilliantly lighted. The floor of pale polished oak shone like the
-pale walls. Banks of orchids rose in the bay-windows. In the brilliant
-light a vast crowd of spectral figures stalked about in silence, clad in
-every variety and incongruous mixture of colour.
-
-'Like devils out on a holiday,' said a voice from the depths of a fool's
-cap and bells.
-
-Mr. Loftus was at once surrounded by masked figures who shook hands
-with him warmly. A Bishop was the centre of another group, ruefully
-responding to he knew not whom, half the young men in the room telling
-him that they had met him last at the Palace when they were ordained.
-
-One mischievous couple were making the circuit of the room, conversing
-with the chaperons one after the other, who smiled helplessly at them
-and answered but little, for middle-aged ladies with daughters out have
-other things to think of besides repartee. Captain Charrington sustained
-his character of a wit by walking about growling at intervals in a
-mysterious and interesting manner.
-
-The band took its courage in both hands, and broke the silence. A tremor
-passed through the crowd. There was a momentary pause, a momentary
-uncertainty as to the sex of the hooded figures, and then forty, fifty,
-seventy couples of demons were solemnly polkaing.
-
-Mr. Loftus smiled. Sibyl, standing by him, laughed till he gently urged
-her to take it more quietly. Lord and Lady Pontesbury turned for a
-moment from the fresh arrivals, and their mournful faces relaxed. The
-Bishop, who seldom saw anything more enlivening than a confirmation or a
-diocesan gathering, shed tears. The trombone collapsed, the wind
-instruments wavered, and left the violins for a moment to make desperate
-music by themselves. Then the band pulled itself together, and the music
-and the flying feet rushed headlong on.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Doll, who had hardly spoken to Sibyl that day, came up to claim his
-dance.
-
-'I can't dance any more,' she said plaintively. 'My domino weighs me
-down. Let us sit out.'
-
-'Shall we go into the gallery,' said Doll, 'and watch the unmasking from
-there? It is a quarter to twelve now, and every one unmasks at twelve.'
-
-He did not know whether to be glad or sorry that she would not dance
-with him. 'Better not,' he said to himself. But he had thought of the
-possibility of that dance many times before he reached the ballroom, and
-had decided that it was his duty to ask her.
-
-They left the ballroom, and, passing numerous ghostly figures sitting in
-nooks and on the wide staircase, they made their way to the arched
-gallery which overhung the ballroom. Every white arch had been lit by
-a pendent pink-shaded lamp, and the arches and Sibyl's primrose domino
-all took the same rosy hue. In nearly every arch a couple were already
-sitting, watching the crowd below. Doll secured one of the few vacant
-places, and Sibyl drew her chair forward and leaned her slender bare
-arms on the white stone balustrade. The couple in the adjoining archway
-were chattering volubly, but Doll and Sibyl did not talk. She did not
-notice the omission, for her eyes were following the quaint pageant with
-the delight of a child. Doll racked his brains for something to say, and
-found nothing.
-
-Why had she married Uncle George? Why had she married Uncle George? So,
-as he could not ask her that, and tell her that he cared for her a
-hundred times more than her husband did, he said nothing.
-
-The _pas de quatre_ was in full swing. The men, annoyed by their long
-dominoes, and having one hand disengaged, raised their voluminous skirts
-and danced with long black legs, regardless of propriety. Captain
-Charrington's endless crimson domino had come open in front and
-displayed his high action to great advantage. A very elegant pink
-domino, which had been introduced by the eldest son of the house as an
-heiress to all the men whom he did not recognise, and which had danced
-only with masculine dominoes, was now seen to emulate its partner, and
-to have black trousers rolled up above its white-stockinged ankles, and
-rather large white satin shoes.
-
-'Look!' said the girl in the next archway; 'that pink domino must be
-Mr. Lumley. He often acts as a woman.'
-
-'Hang him for an impostor! I've danced with him as such,' said the man,
-with ill-concealed vexation. 'He knew me, and called me by name. I took
-him for----' He did not finish his sentence. 'By Jove! that black domino
-with a death's-head and cross-bones is a good idea,' he went on. 'Is it
-half-mourning, do you suppose?'
-
-'How foolish you are! That is Lord Lutwyche. I have just been dancing
-with him.'
-
-'Lord Lutwyche is not here. He sprained his ankle at hockey yesterday.'
-
-The female domino appeared to be a prey to uneasy reflections.
-
-'The primrose domino is the prettiest in the room,' she said presently.
-'And how well she dances! I wonder who she is.'
-
-'I happen to know that is Mrs. Loftus.'
-
-Sibyl, with her back to the arch, could hear every word on the other
-side of it. Doll was not near enough. This was indeed delightful! How
-lucky that she and Peggy had come dressed alike!
-
-'Which is Mr. Loftus?' said the woman's voice eagerly. 'I have heard so
-much about him.'
-
-'That tall, thin, fine-looking old chap with his hands behind his back,
-standing by the Bishop. The Union Jack domino is speaking to him.'
-
-'So that is he. I have always wished to see him. He looks tired to
-death.'
-
-'He always looks like that. Quite a character, though, isn't he?'
-
-'He has an interesting face. But it was a disgraceful thing, his
-marrying a pretty young girl, and an heiress, at his age.'
-
-Sibyl made a sudden movement, and the other couple glanced round. They
-saw her, but her primrose domino had taken the pink of her surroundings,
-and they suspected nothing.
-
-'I'm not so sure. His nephew stands up for him, though his uncle cut him
-out, and his nephew ought to know. I fancy there was more in that
-marriage than outsiders suspect. I've heard it said more than once that
-she fell head-over-ears in love with him, and he married her out of
-pity.'
-
-The last words fell distinctly on Sibyl's ears, and at that second the
-music ceased with a crash, and a gong boomed out, engulfing all other
-sounds. It was twelve o'clock. A bell somewhere just above them was
-counting out twelve slow strokes, just too late--just ten seconds too
-late.
-
-She leaned back sick and shivering.
-
-She did not realize that the crash and the tolling bell were part of the
-evening's programme. They seemed to her the natural result of the words
-she had just heard. If she had been crossed in love at Lisbon before the
-earthquake, she would have regarded that upheaval as the immediate
-consequence of her lacerated feelings.
-
-'Look, look!' said the woman; 'they are unmasking.'
-
-A confused sound of laughter and surprise and recognition, and a
-widespread hum of conversation, came up to them.
-
-Everyone was streaming out of the gallery, and in the ballroom there
-was a vast turmoil, as of hiving bees, and a throng at every door.
-
-'Shall I take you to the cloak-room to leave your mask and domino?' said
-Doll, turning to her at last, from watching without seeing it what was
-passing below. He took off his velvet mask as he spoke. The sullen
-wretchedness of his face fitted ill with the pointed rakish ears which
-still surmounted it.
-
-She did not answer. He saw that the outstretched hand still on the
-balustrade was tightly clenched.
-
-'Mrs. Loftus,' he said. 'Sibyl! what is it? Are you ill?'
-
-She tore off her mask, and, as if she were suffocating, plucked with
-trembling hands at the gold ribbon that fastened her hood and domino.
-
-He was alarmed, and clumsily helped her to loosen them. Her small face,
-released from the mask, looked shrunk and pinched like a squirrel's in
-its thrown-back hood. The pink glow upon it from the lamp was in
-horrible contrast with its agonized expression.
-
-'What is it? what is it?' said Doll, in distress nearly as great as her
-own, taking her little clenched hand, and holding it, still clenched, in
-his large grasp. 'Are you ill?'
-
-She shook her head impatiently.
-
-'Would you like--shall I--fetch Mr. Loftus?'
-
-She winced as if she had been struck.
-
-'No,' she gasped; 'I will not see him--I will not see him!'
-
-A change came over Doll's face. Involuntarily, his hand tightened its
-clasp on hers.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-'These entertainments,' said the Bishop to Mr. Loftus, as they paused
-for a moment in the gallery, and looked down into the ballroom, which
-was now rapidly refilling with gaily-dressed women and pink and black
-coats, 'are, I believe, typical of English country life. They
-are--ahem!--the gallery seems conducive to conversation; it is, in fact,
-a--er--whispering-gallery.' Here he turned, smiling, to Mr. Loftus.
-'Perhaps Mr. Doll has hardly reached the stage at which he will call
-upon me to officiate--just so; we will go down by the other
-staircase--but I trust, though I might be in the way at present, that my
-services may be required a little later on.'
-
-'I should like to see Doll married,' said Mr. Loftus, who had been not a
-little surprised at the eager manner in which the young man was bending
-towards the figure with her back towards them, whose fallen-back hood
-intercepted her features. He recognised the domino.
-
-'I had no idea Peggy had made such an impression,' he said to himself.
-
-As he re-entered the ballroom, he met Lady Pierpoint, also returning to
-it with her two plump little girls in tow, whom she had been tidying in
-the cloak-room. Captain Charrington and some of the other men from
-Wilderleigh were waiting near the doorway, claiming first dances as
-their party came in. The orchestra, who had been refreshing themselves,
-were remounting to their places.
-
-'Then, where is Sibyl?' said Mr. Loftus, looking at Peggy.
-
-'She went to the gallery a long time ago,' replied Peggy promptly, 'with
-Mr. Doll, to see the people unmask at twelve o'clock.'
-
-Mr. Loftus smiled. 'It was a horrible sight as seen from below,' he
-said; 'half the men's faces were black, and the hair of every one of
-them stood up at the back.'
-
-The band struck up a swaying, languorous valse such as tears the hearts
-out of young persons in their teens.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-'I must go home,' Sibyl kept repeating feverishly. 'Doll, you must get
-the carriage. I must go home.'
-
-Doll was engaged to Peggy for this valse, but he had forgotten it. Sibyl
-was engaged to Captain Charrington, but she had forgotten it.
-
-He was terrified, as only reticent persons can be, lest her loss of
-self-control should be observed. He helped her to her feet, and took
-her to the cloak-room, she clinging convulsively to him. Her entire
-disregard of appearances filled him with apprehension. The cloak-room
-was empty, even of attendants, for it had been thronged till within the
-last ten minutes, and now the wave had surged back to the ballroom, and
-the maids, their duties finished, had slipped away to see the spectacle.
-
-Sibyl cast herself down on a chair, shivering. Her little Grecian crown
-of diamonds fell crooked.
-
-'Let me fetch Lady Pierpoint,' said Doll urgently.
-
-'No, no,' she said imploringly; 'I want to go home. Oh, Doll, get the
-carriage, and take me home. Is it so much to ask?'
-
-He looked at her in doubt. She was not fit to return to the ballroom.
-Evidently she would make no attempt to conceal her despair, whatever its
-cause might be, from the first chance comer.
-
-'I will take you,' he said; and he rushed out to the stables, found the
-Wilderleigh coachman, and himself helped to put the horses into the
-brougham.
-
-'It was ordered for one o'clock especially for Mr. Loftus,' said the
-coachman, hesitating, 'and the landau, and the fly, and the homnibus for
-half-past three.'
-
-'You will be back in time for Mr. Loftus,' said Doll. 'Mrs. Loftus is
-ill, and must go home immediately.'
-
-He had the brougham at the door in ten minutes, and returned to the
-cloak-room to find a maid standing by Sibyl with a glass of water. Sibyl
-was still shivering, holding on to the chair with both hands, her eyes
-half closed, her face ghastly.
-
-'I am afraid the lady is ill,' said the servant.
-
-It was very evident that she was ill.
-
-'The carriage is here,' said Doll. 'Can you manage to walk to it?'
-
-She rose unsteadily, and the maid wrapped her in her white cloak. It
-annoyed Doll that the maid evidently looked upon them as an interesting
-young married couple.
-
-He gave Sibyl his arm, and she staggered against him. He hesitated, and
-then compressed his lips, put his arm round her, and, half carrying,
-half leading her, helped her to the carriage.
-
-It was a white night with snow upon the ground. The band was playing
-one of Chevalier's songs. Out into the solemn night came the urgent
-appeal of ''Enery 'Awkins' to his Eliza not to die an old maid,
-accompanied by the dull, threshing sound of many feet.
-
-As the carriage began to move, Sibyl seemed to revive, and a moan broke
-from her.
-
-'Oh, Doll,' she said suddenly, turning towards him and catching his hand
-and wringing it. 'It isn't true, is it? It is only a horrible lie.'
-
-'What isn't true?' he said fiercely, almost hating her for the pain she
-was causing him, not his hand.
-
-'It isn't true what that man said in the next arch, that--that Mr.
-Loftus married me out of pity?' And she swayed herself to and fro.
-
-She had asked the only person to whom Mr. Loftus had confided his real
-reasons for his marriage.
-
-It had been on the tip of Doll's tongue all the evening to say: 'Why did
-you marry him? _I_ would have married you for love.' But he mastered
-himself.
-
-'It isn't true, is it?' gasped Sibyl.
-
-Doll set his teeth.
-
-'No,' he said. 'It's a lie. He married you for love. He--_told me so_!'
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER X.
-
-   'Pour connaître il faut savoir ignorer.'--AMIEL.
-
-
-'Doll,' said Mr. Loftus, the morning after the ball, when all the guests
-had departed, except the Pierpoints, 'I do not expect absolute
-perfection in my fellow-creatures, but it appeared to me that you fell
-rather below your usual near approach to it last night. What do _you_
-think?'
-
-Doll answered nothing.
-
-'You see,' went on Mr. Loftus, 'after twelve o'clock, when everyone
-unmasked, was the time when I should naturally have introduced Sibyl to
-many of our friends and neighbours, as this was her first public
-appearance since her marriage, and I could not do so on our arrival. The
-fact that she had left the house without me, and--without my
-knowledge--was unfortunate.'
-
-It had been more than unfortunate in reality. Mr. Loftus, whose marriage
-had made a great sensation in his own county, had been begged on all
-sides, as soon as the masks were off, to introduce his wife, and, though
-he had not shown any surprise at her non-appearance and Doll's, he had
-at last been obliged to retire to the men's cloak-room and wait there
-till his carriage came, so as to obscure the fact that she had departed
-without him. He had been annoyed at what he took to be Doll's
-heedlessness of appearances.
-
-'She felt ill, and wished to go home,' said Doll, reddening, and not
-perceiving that he was offering an explanation which did not cover the
-ground. He would have been perfectly satisfied with it himself.
-
-'I greatly fear that she _is_ ill,' said Mr. Loftus; 'but she was quite
-well when she went to the ball last night. She is very delicate and
-excitable. Is it possible that anything occurred to upset her?'
-
-Mr. Loftus fixed his keen steel-gray eyes on Doll. He had seen, as he
-saw everything, Doll's momentary jealousy of him the evening before.
-
-For the life of him Doll could not think what to say. It seemed
-impossible to tell Mr. Loftus the truth, and he had but little of that
-inventive talent which envious persons with a small vocabulary call
-lying. That little had been used up the night before. Yet, perhaps, if
-he had been aware that Mr. Loftus had seen him with Sibyl in the gallery
-in an attitude which allowed of but few interpretations, his slow mind
-might have grasped the nettly fact that he must explain.
-
-Mr. Loftus waited.
-
-'My boy,' he said at last, 'I am not only Sibyl's husband'--he saw Doll
-wince--'but I am also, I verily believe, her best friend.'
-
-There was no answer.
-
-A slight, almost imperceptible, change came over Mr. Loftus's face. He
-paused a moment, and then went on quietly:
-
-'Sibyl is most generous about money--too generous. I am almost afraid of
-taking an unfair advantage of it, though she presses me to do so. But I
-am pushing on the repairs everywhere; and I am rebuilding Greenfields
-and Springlands from the ground. They will get to work again directly
-the frost is over. I have the plans here, if you would like to look at
-them.'
-
-He drew a roll out of the writing-table drawer, and spread it on the
-table. Doll perceived with intense relief that the subject was dropped,
-and he knew Mr. Loftus well enough to be certain that it would never
-under any circumstances be reopened. But as he looked at the plans, and
-Mr. Loftus pointed out the new well and the various advantages of the
-designs, it dawned upon Doll's consciousness that he was losing
-something which he had always regarded as a secure possession, and which
-nothing could replace--Mr. Loftus's confidence.
-
-He had seen it withdrawn in this gentle fashion from other people, who
-did not find out for years afterwards that it was irrevocably gone. And
-he became aware that he could not bear to lose it.
-
-'Here,' said Mr. Loftus, putting on his silver-rimmed pince-nez, 'is, or
-ought to be, the new private road leading out on to the H---- highroad.
-I decided to make it, Doll, not only for the convenience of the farm,
-but also because I cannot let that row of cottages with any certainty
-until there is an easier means of access to them. My father always
-intended to make a road there. I only hope,' he said at last, letting
-the map fly back into a roll, 'that I shall live to pay for all I am
-doing, but I can't pay for unfinished contracts. If I don't, Doll, you
-will have to raise a mortgage on the property to pay for the actual
-improvements on it. Sibyl has left all her fortune to me, I believe;
-but as I am certain to go first, Wilderleigh will not be the gainer.'
-
-And it passed through Mr. Loftus's mind for the first time that perhaps,
-after all, Sibyl might still marry Doll some day. How he had once wished
-for that marriage he remembered with a sigh.
-
-'It may be. Youth turns to youth,' said Mr. Loftus to himself, as he
-went up to his wife's room after Doll had left.
-
-Sibyl was ill. A chill, or a shock, or excitement--who shall say
-which?--had just touched the delicate balance of her health and overset
-it. It toppled over suddenly without warning, without any of the
-preliminary struggles by which a strong constitution or a strong will
-staves off the advance of illness. She gave way entirely and at once,
-and the night after the night of the ball it would have been difficult
-to recognise, in the sunk, colourless face and motionless figure, the
-brilliant, lovely young girl in her little diamond crown.
-
-Sibyl's illness did not prove dangerous, but it was long. Lady
-Pierpoint, who had nursed her before, sent her daughters home, and took
-her place again by the bedside, with the infinite patience which she had
-learned in helping her husband down the valley towards the death which
-at last became the one goal of all their longing, and which had receded
-before them with every toiling step towards it, till they had both wept
-together because he could not, could not die. Perhaps it was because her
-husband had gone through the slow mill of consumption that Lady
-Pierpoint's heart had so much tenderness for Sibyl, for whom only a
-year ago she had dreaded the same fate.
-
-Mr. Loftus had the nervous horror of, and repugnance to, every form of
-illness which as often accompanies a refined and sympathetic nature as
-it does an obtuse and selfish one. And his lonely existence had not
-brought him into contact with that inevitable side of domestic life. He
-was extraordinarily ignorant about it, and his natural impulse was to
-avoid it.
-
-But he stood by his wife's bedside, adjusted his pince-nez, and accepted
-the situation. For many days Sibyl would take nothing unless given it by
-himself, would rouse herself for no voice but his. Lady Pierpoint
-marvelled to see him come into Sibyl's room at night in his long gray
-dressing-gown, to administer the food or medicine which the nurse put
-into his hand. His patience and his kindness did not flag, but it
-seemed to Lady Pierpoint as if at this eleventh hour they should not
-have been demanded of him; and it wounded her--why, it would be hard to
-say--to watch him do for Sibyl with painstaking care the little things
-which in her own youth her young husband had done for her, the little
-things which in wedded life are the great things.
-
-Mr. Loftus sometimes made a mistake, and once he forgot that he was
-married, and was found pacing in the rose-garden oblivious of everything
-except a political crisis--but only once. He was faithful in that which
-is least.
-
-Lady Pierpoint felt with a twinge of conscience that when she had
-endeavoured to bring about this marriage she had been selfishly
-engrossed in Sibyl's welfare. She had not thought enough of his.
-
-And gradually Sibyl recovered, and went about the house again, wan and
-feeble, and Lady Pierpoint left Wilderleigh.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XI.
-
-   'Dark is the world to thee? Thyself art the reason why.'
-
-    TENNYSON.
-
-
-Convalescence is often accompanied by a depression of spirits rarely
-experienced during the illness itself. A weak nature seeks for a cause
-for this depression in its surroundings, and when it finds one, as it
-invariably does, it hugs it. These causes, thanks to the assiduity of
-one whom we are given to understand has seen better days, are seldom far
-to seek; and it requires a very strong will to hold fast the conviction
-that these paroxysms of depression arise from physical weakness, and
-not from some secret woe. Sibyl had not a very strong will. After the
-first novelty of convalescence was past, and she had been installed in
-her sitting-room in a cascade of lace and ribbons, which her dressmaker
-called a _saut du lit_, and after Mr. Loftus had gravitated back towards
-the library on the ground-floor and his article for the _Millennium_,
-Sibyl began to experience that vague weariness and distaste of life
-which all know who know ill health.
-
-It is at this stage that the unprincipled invalid becomes 'the terror of
-the household and its shame.' It is at this stage that lengths of felt
-are laid down in passages by tender and injudicious parents, because no
-sound can be borne by sensitive ears, that the children are 'hushed,'
-the blinds are drawn down, and doctors who encourage exercise and light
-are speedily discovered to have misunderstood the delicate constitution
-with which they have to deal.
-
-If Sibyl had not had a cause for depression, she would most certainly
-have manufactured one. But unfortunately she had a real one. The
-incident of the masked ball rankled. Doll had lied. He had done his poor
-best, but he had not lied well. His eyes had not quite looked her in the
-face when he told her that Mr. Loftus had married her for love. His
-voice had not that emphatic ring which the crude mind ever recognises as
-the ring of truth, and which in consequence the progressive one applies
-itself to acquire.
-
-Her mind, dulled by illness and narcotics, had half forgotten that she
-had been momentarily distressed. But now the remembrance came back like
-a nightmare. The grain of sand, blown by chance into her eye, pricked,
-and she sedulously rubbed it into an inflammation.
-
-She remembered now that there had been an earlier incident in his
-courtship which had not been satisfactorily explained, _when he proposed
-to her the second time_. Sibyl always regarded his offer under the
-mountain-ash as _the second time_. She had a vague feeling that he had
-proposed before. She had said as much to one or two friends in
-confidence. But now that she came to think of it, she remembered that it
-was she who had proposed _the first time_, and had been refused. This
-minor detail of an uncomfortable incident had until now almost slipped
-out of her memory, which, like that of many women whose buoyancy
-depends on the conviction of the admiration of others, seldom harboured
-anything likely to prove a worm in that bud.
-
-But now she applied to the whole subject that mental friction which
-morbid minds believe to be reflection, until it became, so to speak,
-inflamed.
-
-Why had he sworn before the altar and the Bishop to love her, if he did
-not love her? She became tearful, listless, apathetic. She sat for hours
-looking into the fire, unemployed, uninterested. The evil spirit which
-ever lurks in sofas and couches whispered in her ear, when it pressed
-the cushions, that she was indeed miserable, that her husband avoided
-her, that she was an unloved martyr, that no one felt for her or
-sympathized with her. It did not tell her that she had been married for
-her money, simply because no sane person could look at Mr. Loftus and
-believe that. But she changed in manner towards him. She was cold,
-formal. She turned away her head when he came into the room, and then
-when he had left it wept in secret because she had been married out of
-pity.
-
-And yet in her heart of hearts, if she had such a thing, had she not
-partly guessed that fact long ago, and wilfully shut her eyes to it? The
-chance words she had overheard were only the confirmation of a latent
-misgiving. Does any woman ever really remain in ignorance if she is not
-loved, or if she has been married for other reasons than love? What
-constant props and supports she had given to Mr. Loftus's love for her!
-It had never been allowed to stand alone. Why had she from the first
-always bolstered it up by continually saying to herself and others,
-until she almost believed it: 'My husband is so devoted to me. My love
-is such a little thing beside his. What have I done to deserve such a
-great devotion?' How often she had said all these things that
-tepidly-loved women say!
-
-Seeming to observe nothing, Mr. Loftus saw all, and pondered over the
-reason of her altered appearance, and her visibly changed feeling
-towards himself since the night of the masked ball. If it were that her
-health was threatened as it had been before her marriage, why should her
-affection towards himself have undergone this change? Could it be
-anything to do with Doll? And in these days Sibyl was more frequently in
-his thoughts than in the early days of his marriage with her. The
-thought of her came between him and the political article which the
-editor of the _Millennium_ had asked for.
-
-'Time will show,' he would say to himself, with a sigh, taking up his
-pen again.
-
-One afternoon soon afterwards he came into her sitting-room, and found
-her in tears.
-
-'Has Crack said anything unkind?' he asked gently, while Crack beat his
-tail in the depths of the fur rug in courteous recognition of his own
-name.
-
-'No,' she said, turning her head away.
-
-'Have I, then?' sitting down by her.
-
-'No.'
-
-'Then, my child, what is it?'
-
-'Nothing,' she said faintly.
-
-There was a pause.
-
-'Is it the same nothing that troubled you the night of the ball?'
-
-He saw her start and shrink away from him.
-
-'Oh! did Doll tell you?' she gasped, turning crimson.
-
-'My dear, he told me nothing,' said Mr. Loftus gently, moving slightly
-away from her, and looking at her with grave attention. He greatly
-feared that unhappiness was before her in some form or other. He waited
-in the hope that she would speak to him of her own accord. But she only
-began to cry again. She was still weak. Was it possible that she was
-afraid of him? What could be troubling her that she, who did not know
-what reticence meant, could fear to tell him, which yet Doll knew? Doll
-was in love with her. Had he lost his head on the night of the ball?
-Had she discovered that she and Doll were young?
-
-'Crack,' said Mr. Loftus, 'I have a very neglectful wife. I come to ask
-for something for my headache, and she pays no attention to me at all.'
-
-In earlier days Sibyl would have been on the alert in a moment if Mr.
-Loftus's sacred head confessed an ache. Now she moved slowly to the
-writing-table and produced certain innocuous remedies which he had
-brought to her and asked her to apply for him after that terrible time
-when he had had an attack of the heart and had repulsed her.
-
-Presently the headache was better, and Mr. Loftus went back to the
-library and lit his pipe, which was remarkable, because he was as a rule
-unable to smoke after a headache.
-
-He sat motionless a long time, his eyes fixed.
-
-'I hope,' he said at last, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, 'that I
-shall not live to become Sibyl's natural enemy, for I think I am about
-the only real friend she has in the world.'
-
-And the small seed that would have quickened in another man's heart into
-a deep-rooted jealousy remained upon the surface of his mind as a
-misgiving, which took the form of anxiety for her.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XII.
-
-   'Oui, sans doute, tout meurt; ce monde est un grand rêve,
-    Et le peu de bonheur qui nous vient en chemin,
-    Nous n'avons pas plus tôt ce roseau dans la main,
-      Que le vent nous l'enlève.'
-
-    ALFRED DE MUSSET.
-
-
-Sibyl continued pale and listless, and presently Mr. Loftus found fault
-with her gowns. They were not new enough. The colours of her tea-gowns
-did not suit her. He suggested that she should go to London to Lady
-Pierpoint's house for a few days to see her dressmaker, and added, as an
-afterthought, that he should like her to consult the specialist to whom
-she had gone on former occasions, and whose name he had reason to
-remember.
-
-Sibyl received the suggestion of this visit in silence. She did not
-oppose herself to it, but left the room to shed a torrent of angry tears
-in private. The truth, which seldom visited her feeble judgment, did not
-tell her that Mr. Loftus was anxious about her health. Hysteria took up
-the tale instead, and officiously informed her that he was tired of her.
-He wanted to get rid of her. Men were always like that after they had
-been married a little time. What was a woman's love and devotion to them
-when the first novelty had worn off? She would go. She would certainly
-go; and when she was gone she would write to him, telling him that she
-saw only too plainly that his love for her was dead, and that she had
-decided never to return, and at the same time making over to him her
-entire fortune, reserving only for herself a pittance, on which she
-would live in seclusion in a cottage in some remote locality.
-
-She was somewhat consoled as she thought over the dignified, the
-harrowing letter which she would compose in London. Parts of it, as she
-repeated them to herself, moved her to tears. A new sullenness was added
-to the previous listlessness of her demeanour. She parted from Mr.
-Loftus with studied indifference.
-
-Mr. Loftus missed her, not altogether unpleasantly, when she left him.
-It was the first time that she had been a day away from him since their
-marriage. Life was certainly very tranquil without her. He wrote her a
-charming little letter every day of the three days she was away.
-
-Doll was with him on business. Now that Sibyl was absent, something of
-the old affection and confidence returned between them, which shrank
-away in her presence; but not quite all. At times, as they were talking,
-the younger man longed to break down the slight, almost imperceptible
-barrier that his stupid untimely silence had raised. But he could not do
-it. He could not take the plunge. Mr. Loftus, however, who would not
-have done such a thing for worlds, unwittingly gave him a push.
-
-'The spring coppice wants thinning,' he said to Doll the third morning.
-'We will go up and mark the trees this afternoon.'
-
-'I am going away to-day,' said Doll sullenly.
-
-'Stay another day,' said Mr. Loftus. 'Mrs. Gresley tells me that the
-sight of her happy home, and Mr. Gresley, and the church-tower as viewed
-from the spare bedroom of the Vicarage, have proved a turning-point in
-the lives of many wild young men. Stay another day, Doll, and I will
-emulate Mrs. Gresley. It will do you good.'
-
-'Uncle George,' stammered the young man with sudden anger, 'will you
-never, never understand? Have you forgotten that it is not a year ago
-since I told you--in this very room--and you said you would help me. I
-can't meet Sibyl; and--and she is coming back to-day. I tried in the
-winter, and--it was a failure.'
-
-Mr. Loftus had momentarily forgotten Sibyl, as he had done once before
-when she was ill.
-
-'I beg your pardon, Doll,' he said, his pale face reddening. 'I ought to
-have remembered.'
-
-There was a constrained silence.
-
-'It need not come between us,' said Mr. Loftus at last. 'You must not
-let it do that.'
-
-'I can't help it,' said Doll. 'It does. It must.'
-
-'Sibyl's happiness,' said Mr. Loftus sadly, 'seems to be a costly
-article. A great deal has been spent upon it, apparently without making
-it secure. If we have any real regard for her, we must manage to save
-that between us, Doll, whatever else goes by the board.'
-
-'What do you take me for?' said Doll fiercely.
-
-'A good man,' said Mr. Loftus, 'and the person I care for most in the
-world.'
-
-Sibyl's letter to Mr. Loftus was never written. At least it was written,
-as, indeed, were several, and read over and retouched at night in her
-own room; but even the best of the assortment remained unposted. Sibyl
-brought back her wan face and limp figure to Wilderleigh a few hours
-after Doll had left it, and heard with bitterness that he had been
-staying there. She had pictured to herself Mr. Loftus alone, missing her
-at every moment of the day, realizing the withdrawal of the sunshine of
-her presence. This was a 'high jump,' on the bar of which, it must be
-owned, even her practised imagination caught its toe. And now she found
-that Doll had been with him all the time--Doll, whom he cared for more
-than for his wife. He had not missed her, after all. Probably he and
-Doll had been discussing her. She had been jealous of Doll ever since
-she had seen Mr. Loftus take his arm during her first visit to
-Wilderleigh before she was married.
-
-Her jealousy revived now. For the remainder of the day Sibyl met Mr.
-Loftus with averted eyes and monosyllabic answers, rehearsing in her
-mind parting scenes with him which were to prove more poignantly
-distressing to him than the best of the letters, and in which he was to
-appeal in vain (imagination caught its toe once more) against her
-irrevocable determination to leave for ever one who had married her for
-other motives than love.
-
-She could see herself in evening dress, pale as the jasmine flower in
-her breast, mournful but unflinching, withdrawing her hand, and saying,
-in reply to the moving representation which he would of course make of
-his loneliness:
-
-'You have Doll!'
-
-She decided that she would not say more than that. No reproach should
-pass her lips.
-
-'You have Doll!'
-
-What words for a young wife to be forced to use to her husband! Her
-hands clenched in an agony of self-pity. What a cruel situation was
-hers!
-
-So Sibyl walked in her waking dream, and her husband watched her.
-
-'Is it the body that is ill, or is it the mind?' he asked himself.
-
-Later in the day the doctor's letter to himself--Mr. Loftus had written
-to him asking for a frank statement of Sibyl's condition--confirmed his
-worst fears for her.
-
-'Mrs. Loftus's health is endangered, not by her recent illness, of which
-no trace appears, but by some anxiety. She does not deny that she is
-suffering from great depression. Unless that anxiety, whatever it may
-be, can be removed, her morbid condition, if prolonged, will give rise
-to grave apprehension as to her future.'
-
-Mr. Loftus had heard something very like this before--about nine months
-ago. He had removed a mountain in order to remove with it the first
-cause of her unhappiness, and now unhappiness had reappeared. No one had
-guessed--no one had been allowed to guess--what an effort his marriage
-had been to him. And it had availed nothing. He dropped the letter into
-the fire, and, as he did so, exhaustion and an intense weariness of
-life laid hold upon him. He knew well the touch of those stern hands,
-but this evening, as he sat alone in the library, it seemed to him as if
-he had never endured their full pressure until now.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIII.
-
-   'O World, O Life, O Time.
-    O these last steps on which I climb.'
-
-    SHELLEY.
-
-
-For those who do not sleep, life has two sides--the side of night as
-well as day--and the heaviest hour of the day or night is the hour
-before the dawn, when the night-lamp totters and dies, and the ashen
-light of another day falls like despair on the familiar articles of
-furniture, the chairs, the table, the wardrobe, which have been up all
-night like ourselves, taking the imprint of our exhaustion through the
-interminable hours, and which look older and more haggard than ever in
-the changed light which brings nor change nor rest.
-
-Those who sleep at night, for whom each day is not divided by a gulf of
-pain, who look upon the darkness as a time of rest, and the morning as a
-time of waking, know one side of life, perhaps, as the passers-by in the
-street know one side of the hospital as they skirt it--the outside wall.
-
-Mr. Loftus slept ill, and the night after Sibyl's return he woke early.
-The gray light was just showing above the white blinds as he had seen it
-so many, many times. Would the morning ever come, he wondered, when he
-should no longer open his eyes upon the dawn, when 'these last steps'
-should be climbed, and effort would cease, and weariness might lie down
-and cease also?
-
-The premonitory tremor, the shudder of coming illness, laid its hand
-upon him, and with it came that physical recoil of the flesh from
-solitude before which the strongest will goes down.
-
-Involuntarily he got up and went to Sibyl's room. He opened the door
-noiselessly and looked in.
-
-The room felt deserted. He went up to the bed; it was empty. A great
-fear fell upon him. Had she left him? Poor, poor child! had she left
-him, as that other wife had left him in the half-forgotten past, buried
-beneath so many years? Can any man whose wife has forsaken him ever
-quite forget that he has once been deserted, that the road which leads
-away from him has known a woman's footsteps, and another may walk in it?
-He stood still and listened. The spirit had over-mastered the flesh.
-All suffering had vanished.
-
-From the next room, Sibyl's sitting-room, which opened out of her
-bedroom, a faint sound came. He noiselessly crossed, and looked through
-the half-open door, and thanked God.
-
-Sibyl was lying on her face on the polished floor in her night-gown,
-moaning and sobbing, a white blot upon the dark boards.
-
-He had seen her lie like that once before, among the bracken in the
-park, in the entire abandonment of young despair. The vague suspicion of
-many weeks dropped its disguise, and stood revealed, an awful figure
-between them, between the old man in his gray hair and the young, young
-wife.
-
-He withdrew stealthily, regained his own room, and sat down in the
-armchair.
-
-That passion of tears could flow from one source only. He knew Sibyl
-well enough to know that she had no tears, no strong emotion, for
-anything except that which affected her own personal happiness. Her
-slight nature could not reach to impersonal love, any more than it could
-reach to righteous anger. All this apparent failure of health and
-listlessness had a mental cause, as he had always feared, as he now knew
-for certain. She was unhappy.
-
-'She has ceased to love me,' said Mr. Loftus to himself, 'and she is in
-despair. Doll loves her, and she has found it out. Those tears are for
-Doll.'
-
-There was a long pause of thought.
-
-He started at the remembrance that she was probably still lying on the
-floor in her thin night-gown.
-
-He got up, and tapped distinctly at the door of her bedroom. At first
-there was no reply, but after the second time there was a slight hurried
-movement and a faint 'Come in.' He went in. She had crept back into bed,
-as he had hoped she would at the sound of his tap.
-
-'May I have your salts?' he said, taking them from the dressing-table.
-'I have waked with a headache.'
-
-'Can I do anything for it?' she asked, but without moving, her miserable
-eyes following his thin, gaunt figure in its gray dressing-gown.
-
-'Nothing, my dear, except forgive me for disturbing you.'
-
-'I was not asleep,' said Sibyl, yielding to the impulse, irresistible to
-some women, to approach the subject which they are trying to conceal.
-
-He took the salts, and went back to his own room, closing the door
-carefully. But he did not use them. He sighed heavily as he sat down
-again in the old armchair in which he had so often watched the light
-grow behind the Welsh hills.
-
-There was another pause of thought, and he remembered again Doll's
-confession of the day before.
-
-'Poor children!' he said--'poor children!'
-
-And he remembered his own youth and its devastating passions, and the
-woman whom he had loved in middle life, and how nearly once--how
-nearly---- And he and she had been stronger than Doll and Sibyl.
-
-'God forgive me!' he said; 'I meant well.'
-
-There was another pause.
-
-'I knew her love could not last,' his mind went on. 'It was too
-extravagant, and it had no foundation. But I thought it would last my
-time, and it has not. I have outlived it; I am in the way.'
-
-Mr. Loftus had never willingly been in the way of anyone before. His
-tact had so far saved him. But a kind intention had betrayed him at
-last.
-
-'I am in the way,' he repeated, 'and I am fond of them both, and I think
-they are both fond of me. But they will come to hate me.'
-
-The light was strong and white now, and a butterfly on the window-sill,
-that had mistaken spring for summer, waked, and began to beat its wings
-against the pane.
-
-He rose wearily, and opened the old-fashioned window wide upon its
-hinges. The butterfly flew away into the spring morning.
-
-'My other butterfly,' he said--'my pretty butterfly, who mistook the
-spring for summer, breaking your heart against the prison windows of my
-worn-out life--I will release you, too!'
-
-He took up the little silver flask that always stood on his
-dressing-table at night and lived in his pocket by day, and which
-contained the only remedy which a great doctor could find for his
-attacks of the heart, by means of which he had been till now kept in
-life.
-
-'I have a right to do it,' he said. 'I can only help them by going away.
-And if I am in the wrong, upon my head be it.'
-
-He checked himself in the act of emptying the contents of the flask
-into the dead fire.
-
-'A right?' he said. 'What right have I to shirk the consequences of my
-own actions? what right to be a coward? No; I will not go away until I
-receive permission to do so. I will stay while it is required of me.'
-
-He sighed heavily, and replaced the flask upon the dressing-table.
-
-'Patience,' he said. 'I thought I had seen the last of you. I am tired
-of you. But, nevertheless, I must put up with you a little longer.'
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER XIV.
-
-   'As the water is dried upon sands, so a life flieth
-    back to the dust.'--SIR ALFRED LYALL.
-
-
-How Sibyl spent the morning that followed she never knew. She dared not
-go out of doors. The world of spring, with the new breath of life in it,
-mocked her. The song of the birds hurt her. She felt as if she should
-scream outright if she saw the may-blossom against the sky. She wandered
-aimlessly about the house, and at last crept back to her own room and
-lay down on her bed, and turned her face to the wall.
-
-The day went on. Her maid brought her soup, and drew down the blinds,
-and was pettishly dismissed.
-
-The afternoon came. They were mowing the grass on the terrace on the
-south front. The faint scent of newly-cut grass came in through the open
-window, and seemed, through the senses, to reach some acute nerve of the
-brain. She moaned, and buried her face in the pillows. Presently the
-mowing ceased, and everything became very silent. A bluebottle fly,
-pressed for time, rushed in, made the circuit of the room, and rushed
-out again.
-
-Far away in the other wing, on the ground-floor, she heard the library
-door open. She knew Mr. Loftus's slow, even step. It crossed the hall;
-it entered the orangery; it came out through the orangery door, down the
-stone steps to the terrace below her window. She could hear his step on
-the gravel outside in the crisp air. Crack gave a short bark in
-recognition of the spring, and satisfaction that the long morning of
-arranging papers and the afternoon of letter-writing were at last over.
-
-The steps dwindled and died away into the sunny silence. It seemed to
-Sibyl's overwrought mind that he was walking slowly out of her life, and
-that unless she made haste to follow him she would lose him altogether.
-With a sudden revulsion of feeling, she sprang to her feet, and put on
-her hat and shoes. Then she braved the spring, and went swiftly out.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-A great tranquillity had fallen upon Mr. Loftus. He had made up his
-mind. After a turn along the terrace, he and Crack went into the little
-wood near the gardens, and sat down under the pink horse-chestnut-tree,
-just blushing into flower. It would have been difficult to put the
-arrangement into words, but there was a tacit understanding between the
-husband and wife that when Mr. Loftus sat under that particular tree he
-did not mind being interrupted. Sibyl generally fluttered out to him
-after he had been there a few minutes, though the wood was out of sight
-of the windows. And he waited for her to come to him now.
-
-Spring had returned at last. But you might have walked through the wood
-and not known she was there: have seen only the naked trees, and the
-gray twigs of the alder, bleached white where the rabbits had bitten
-them in the frost. But if you had stopped to listen and look as Mr.
-Loftus did, you would have seen and heard her; seen her in the blue
-haze, and the mystery of change that lurked among the gray twigs, and in
-the rare primroses among the brown leaves; heard her in the persistent
-double-tongue of the chiff-chaff, and, not near at hand, but two trees
-away, in the ripple of the goldfinch, with a little question at the end
-of it. Is it a hint of immortality, that haunting desire and expectation
-of happiness which comes with the primroses, that longing for some
-future year when the spring shall bring with it no heartache, the autumn
-no contrition; of another year, somewhere in the future, when the ills
-of life will be done away? Mr. Loftus looked straight in front of him,
-and his face took an expression as of one whose eyes are on a goal where
-even patience itself, so visible in every line of his quiet face, will
-at last with other burdens be laid aside.
-
-She saw him before he saw her, as she came towards him. Her heart went
-out to him wistfully and passionately by turns. She longed to turn to
-him as a young wife turns to a young husband, and cry her heart out on
-his breast, and be petted, and caressed, and comforted. But she dared
-not. Whatever besides she was ignorant of, she had learnt certain things
-about her husband, and one of them was that she must never show her
-devotion unasked. And she was seldom asked. Her life was a constant
-repression of its greatest, its only real affection.
-
-As she came towards him he roused himself and smiled at her. She sat
-down by him in silence. He had a single primrose in the buttonhole of
-his coat, and he took it out and drew it very gently through the
-Russian embroidery on her bodice.
-
-'When I was young, Sibyl,' he said, 'I was convinced, and the conviction
-has never wholly left me, that flowers are God's thoughts which He sows
-broadcast in the hearts of all alike. But we will have none of them, and
-they drop unheeded to the ground. But the faithful earth receives
-them--thoughts despised and rejected of us--and nurses them in her
-bosom, and they come forth transfigured. And that is why, when we see
-them again, we love them so much, and feel akin to them.'
-
-Her locked hands trembled on her knee.
-
-'It must have been a beautiful thought that could turn into a lily,' he
-went on, noting, but ignoring, her emotion. 'I wonder, if it had fallen
-into a poet's heart, what it would have grown into. Nothing more
-beautiful, I think. And I know the primroses are first love. I have felt
-sure of that always. I wonder, my Sibyl, when there is so much in your
-heart for me, that there are any left to come out in the woods; but
-there are a few, you see, among the brown leaves.'
-
-'They will soon be over,' said Sibyl, turning her head away.
-
-'Yes,' said Mr. Loftus, with a gentleness which was new to Sibyl, and he
-was always gentle. 'They will die presently, as first love dies. But
-nevertheless it is a beautiful gift while it lasts, and we must not
-grieve because, like the primroses, it cannot last in flower _for ever_.
-I have lived through so many feelings, Sibyl, I have seen so many die
-which seemed immortal, that I have long since ceased to count on the
-permanence of any.'
-
-He leant towards her, and for the first time he took her slender hands
-and kissed them. It was as if he were readjusting his position towards
-her, reassuring her of his trust and confidence and sympathy, supporting
-her in some great trouble. She leaned her forehead against his shoulder,
-and a sense of comfort came across her desolation, as if she were
-leaning her faint soul against his soul. He put his arm round her, and
-drew her closer to him.
-
-'My darling!' he said, and there was an emotion in his voice which she
-had never heard in it before. Her hat had slipped off, and he passed his
-hand very tenderly over her hair.
-
-Sibyl's over-strained nerves relaxed. Some of the craving of her heart
-and its long yearning was stilled by the touch of his hand. Ah! he
-loved her, after all--certainly he loved her. Doll was right, after all.
-How foolish she had been to cry all night! Certainly he loved her.
-
-She could not speak. She could not weep. She could only lean against
-him. She had never known him like this before. It was this that she had
-always wanted, all her life, long before she had ever met him.
-
-'You have been so good to me,' he went on, 'from the first day of our
-married life when I was ill. Do you remember? And I know that your dear
-love and kindness will not fail me while I live. I thank and bless you
-for all you have given me, your whole spring of primroses; and now that
-spring is passing, as it must, Sibyl, as it must, not by your fault,
-take comfort, and when other feelings come into your heart, as they
-have come in, do not reproach yourself, do not cut me to the heart by
-grieving, but remember that I understand, and that my love and honour
-and gratitude can never change towards you, and that I too was young
-once: as young as--Doll, and there is no need for you and him to be so
-miserable. It will only be--like a--long engagement.'
-
-As the drift of his words gradually became clear to her, Sibyl
-insensibly shrank back as from an abyss before her feet. But in another
-moment she took in their whole meaning. She pushed him from her with
-sudden violence, and stood before him, her hands clenched, her eyes
-blazing, her slender figure shaking with passion.
-
-'How dare you!' she stammered. 'How dare you insult me?'
-
-He put out his hand feebly, and she struck it down.
-
-'What is Doll to me?' she went on, 'to me, _your wife_! Oh, will you
-never, never understand that I love you, that I worship you, that I care
-for nothing in the whole world but you, and that I cried all night
-because you married me out of pity?' Sibyl wrung her hands. 'Oh! how
-dared you do it, how dared you swear to love me before God, if you did
-not, if you could not? I am too miserable. I cannot bear it--I cannot
-bear it!'
-
-He sat like one stunned. His hand went to his heart.
-
-In a moment her arms were round him, and his head was on her shoulder.
-
-'Forgive,' he repeated over and over again, between the long-drawn
-gasps which shook him from head to foot.
-
-And then the battle for life began.
-
-She found his little flask in his pocket, and managed to make him
-swallow the contents.
-
-He struggled, but she upheld him. Her strength was as the strength of
-ten.
-
-At last, all in a moment, the struggle ceased, and a light came into his
-fixed eyes of awe and thankfulness, and--was it joy?
-
-He did not move. He did not speak. His whole being seemed absorbed in
-that of some vast enfolding presence.
-
-She called him wildly by name.
-
-He trembled, and his troubled eyes, with all the light blown out of
-them, wandered back to seek hers. Death looked at her through them. He
-saw her as across a gulf. He recognised her. He remembered. He had
-hoped that when he came to die it might be quietly, without a scene, but
-it was not to be. He made a last effort.
-
-'Not for pity--for----' he gasped, his ebbing breath winnowing the air.
-But Death cut short the lie faltering on his lips, and his head fell
-suddenly forward on her breast. She held him closely to her, murmuring
-incoherent words of love and tenderness, such as she had never dared to
-speak while he had ears to hear.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-How long she had knelt beside him, holding him in her arms, the
-frightened servants, who at last found them after sunset, never knew.
-And when they came to lay him in his coffin, they saw on one of the thin
-folded hands a faint blue mark, as from a blow.
-
-
-
-
-POSTSCRIPT.
-
-
-Sibyl was an inconsolable widow. Her grief reached a depth which placed
-her beyond the succour of human sympathy, and Lady Pierpoint, who had
-lost her young husband in her youth, was felt to take a superficial view
-of Sibyl's bereavement.
-
-She shut herself up at Wilderleigh for a year and refused comfort, and
-then suddenly married Doll, the only man except Mr. Gresley whom she had
-allowed to see her during her widowhood.
-
-In rather less than a month after her marriage with him she made the
-interesting discovery that he was the only man in the world who really
-understood her. His gift of platitude, harmonizing as it did with hers,
-was an inexhaustible source of admiration to her. She was wont to say in
-confidence to her woman friends, that, devotedly as she had loved her
-first husband, she had found her ideal in her second one; and that it
-was to Doll she owed the real development of her character, a subject in
-which she took great interest.
-
-For some years, while her daughter remained an only child, she was
-passionately devoted to her. But when her son was born she ceased to
-take much interest in the little girl, who was by this, time rather
-spoilt, and consequently tiresome. Doll, who proved exemplary in
-domestic life, took to her when Sibyl forgot her, and became deeply
-attached to her. Later in life Sibyl became inconsolably jealous of her
-daughter.
-
-
-THE END.
-
-
-BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
-
-
-
-
-NOVELS FROM
-_MR. EDWARD ARNOLD'S LIST_.
-
-
-
-
-  By the Author of 'The Red Badge of Courage.'
-  GEORGE'S MOTHER.
-  BY STEPHEN CRANE.
-
-Cloth, 2s.
-
-
-_Saturday Review._
-
-'From first to last it goes with immense vigour and sympathy. But the
-story must be read for its power to be understood; quotation fails, for
-the simple reason that it is a bare story and nothing beyond. Apart from
-its distinctive qualities, English readers will welcome this book as an
-indication of the growth of a real and independent critical method
-across the Atlantic, side by side and directing really original work.'
-
-
-_Athenæum._
-
-'A striking scene of the relations, in a rough world, between a boy and
-his mother.'
-
-
-_Speaker._
-
-'Stephen Crane proved conclusively in "The Red Badge of Courage" his
-possession of an extraordinary power of vivid and accurate vision
-expressed with startling poignancy of phrase; and in his later
-production, "George's Mother," we find the same rugged directness and
-almost savage intensity, the same contempt for conventional graces of
-style, and the love for violent colouring, which marked his previous
-work.'
-
-
-_Daily Chronicle._
-
-'The gradual progress of deterioration in George Kelcey is very briefly
-but very cleverly and convincingly set out.'
-
-
-_St. James's Gazette._
-
-'It is a _tour de force_ of description and analysis, this terrible
-scene of George's debauch--not in the least laboured, or Zolaistic, or
-photographic, but amazingly actual, and lightened with a grim sense of
-humour.'
-
-By the Author of 'Into the Highways and Hedges.'
-
-
-
-
-  WORTH WHILE.
-  BY F. F. MONTRÉSOR,
-  Author of 'Into the Highways and Hedges,' 'The One Who Looked on.'
-
-Crown 8vo., cloth, 2s. 6d.
-
-
-_Academy._
-
-'The quiet excellence of Miss Montrésor's little book may likely enough
-cause it to lie unnoticed among its thrilling companions. There is, none
-the less, more of art and literature in two short sketches than one is
-likely to meet with again in a hurry. If inferior work, gaudily
-bedraped, gets all the encores, in the shape of many editions, I cannot
-think she will greatly care. Such work as hers only comes, as the
-proverb has it, by prayer and fasting. And she will receive ungrudging
-praise from those who revere sterling merit, and respect labour at once
-unobtrusive, competent, sincere.'
-
-
-_Guardian._
-
-'"Worth While" is a real idyll of a life's sacrifice, most sweetly and
-touchingly told.'
-
-
-_Glasgow Herald._
-
-'Both the stories in this volume are of very superior quality. The
-characters are distinctly original, and the workmanship is admirable.'
-
-
-_Manchester Mercury._
-
-'Although the two stories contained in the present volume are
-comparatively short, they serve to display the author's peculiar gifts
-in a striking manner.'
-
-
-_Liverpool Courier._
-
-'Two most pathetic and beautiful stories make up this little volume. The
-writer is to be congratulated on the delicate beauty of her stories.'
-
-
-
-
-  By the Author of 'The Apotheosis of Mr. Tyrawley.'
-  A MASK AND A MARTYR.
-  BY E. LIVINGSTON PRESCOTT.
-
-One vol., crown 8vo., cloth, 6s.
-
-
-_Westminster Gazette._
-
-'This is an undeniably clever book. A picture of self-sacrifice so
-complete and so enduring is a rare picture in fiction, and has rarely
-been more ably or more finely drawn. This singular and pathetic story is
-told all through with remarkable restraint, and shows a strength and
-skill of execution which place its author high among the novel-writers
-of the day.'
-
-
-_Daily Telegraph._
-
-'There is no doubt that this is a striking book. The story it has to
-tell is thoroughly original and unconventional, while the manner of
-telling shows much restrained power.'
-
-
-_Spectator._
-
-'Mr. Prescott has evidently a future before him.'
-
-
-_Pall Mall Gazette._
-
-'Mr. Prescott has given us a clever and an interesting book. We have
-seldom read of such superhuman courage, such transcendent love, as Mr.
-Prescott has shown us in his masterly picture of Captain Cosmo
-Harradyne, of the Fighting Hussars. A story which we confidently, nay,
-earnestly, recommend to our readers; they will thank us for doing so.'
-
-
-_National Observer._
-
-'A book which has much cleverness of treatment, an excellent style, a
-great deal of interest, a high ideal, and a real pathos. Perhaps it is
-not necessary to add that a novel of which so much can be said is one
-greatly above the common run of fiction. The book should be, and we have
-no doubt will be, read with real interest by many people.'
-
-
-
-
-  'One of the best stories of the season.'--_Daily Chronicle._
-  HADJIRA,
-  _A TURKISH LOVE STORY_.
-  BY ADALET.
-
-One volume, crown 8vo., cloth, 6s.
-
-
-_Speaker._
-
-'Certainly one of the most interesting and valuable works of fiction
-issued from the press for a long time past. Even if we were to regard
-the book as an ordinary novel, we could commend it heartily; but its
-great value lies in the fact that it reveals to us a hidden world, and
-does so with manifest fidelity. But the reader must learn for himself
-the lesson which this remarkable and fascinating book teaches.'
-
-
-_Daily Chronicle._
-
-'A Turkish love story written in excellent English by a young Ottoman
-lady, would be a book worth reading, if only as a curiosity; but when,
-as in this instance, it is of uncommon merit and originality, it is
-particularly welcome. It is deeply interesting, fascinatingly so. It is
-as a picture of family life in Turkey that this book is so interesting,
-possibly because the picture it provides is unexpectedly agreeable. As a
-study of Turkish life in our times, when Western civilization is
-beginning to penetrate into the seclusion of the harem, this book is a
-valuable contribution to contemporary literature. It is a well-merited
-compliment to its author to say of "Hadjira" that it is one of the best
-stories of the season.'
-
-
-_Pall Mall Gazette._
-
-'An interesting and readable book.'
-
-
-_St. James's Gazette._
-
-'The book is excellently written. As a clearly truthful account of
-modern Turkish life, from the woman's point of view, it is as valuable
-as it is interesting. We shall hope to have more from the same pen.'
-
-
-_Guardian._
-
-'A curiously interesting bit of work.'
-
-
-
-
-  A RELUCTANT EVANGELIST.
-  BY ALICE SPINNER,
-  Author of 'Lucilla,' 'A Study in Colour,' etc.
-
-Crown 8vo., 1 vol., 6s.
-
-
-_Saturday Review._
-
-'"A Reluctant Evangelist" is as good as its predecessor "Lucilla," which
-we were glad to be able to praise last year. The West Indies, with their
-"colour problem," their weird romance and undercurrent of horror, will
-last a long time as background for new stories.'
-
-
-_Glasgow Herald._
-
-'It is into the wonderland of the West Indies that Miss Spinner takes
-us: into a region of hot sunshine, of blue sky, of sparkling sea. All
-the stories are excellent, and will repay perusal.'
-
-
-_Pall Mall Gazette._
-
-'Good, too, is Miss Spinner's budget of short stories. "Buckra Tommie"
-is an exquisitely pathetic story. The writer is evidently at home in the
-South Seas, and with the out-of-the-way humanity she meets there.'
-
-
-_Irish Times._
-
-'A charming little series of stories. They are very daintily written,
-and although the incidents upon which they turn are not always very
-striking, they are at all events novel, and they have been conceived
-with much dramatic power.'
-
-
-_Cape Times._
-
-'These short stories are all distinctly good.'
-
-
-_Englishman._
-
-'We can strongly recommend these stories. They are varied and
-interesting, and have a distinct literary merit.'
-
-
-
-
-  INTERLUDES.
-  BY MAUD OXENDEN.
-
-One volume, crown 8vo., 6s.
-
-
-_Scotsman._
-
-'The writer is to be congratulated on the strength with which she
-portrays men and women, and describes the passions of love or of grief
-that sometimes fill the mind. There are other personages in these pages,
-whose experiences of love and joy and grief are under other
-circumstances than those indicated; but if the writer had depicted none
-other than the three personages that appear in the tragic scene in
-London she would have scored a distinct success. An admirably-written
-book.'
-
-
-_Sheffield Telegraph._
-
-'We have not read anything so tenderly touched with pathos, and at the
-same time so delicately told, for a very long time. Indeed, "Interludes"
-is about as good a piece of literary work of its class as we could wish
-to read, and is worth a high place in the works which appeal to the
-emotional in our nature.'
-
-
-_Bradford Observer._
-
-'The stories evince a considerable and disciplined faculty of invention
-which, though it produces situations of intense interest, never becomes
-riotous or extravagant. We will close our too brief note with an
-expression of the pleasure we have felt in reading these chaste and
-beautiful fancies.'
-
-
-_Guardian._
-
-'There is much that is both clever and original in Miss Oxenden's
-"Interludes." There is often very genuine pathos, and nearly all the
-volume is interesting.'
-
-
-
-
-  TWENTY-SECOND THOUSAND.
-  STEPHEN REMARX.
-  _THE STORY OF A VENTURE IN ETHICS._
-  BY THE HON. AND REV. JAMES ADDERLEY.
-
-Small 8vo., elegantly bound, 3s. 6d.; paper, 1s.
-
-
-_Daily Telegraph._
-
-'Written with a vigour, warmth, and sincerity which cannot fail to
-captivate the reader's attention and command his respect.'
-
-
-_Saturday Review._
-
-'Let us express our thankfulness at encountering, for once in a way, an
-author who can amuse us.'
-
-
-_Star._
-
-'The book is charmingly written.'
-
-
-_Guardian._
-
-'Not only do we agree with Mr. Adderley in his general objects, and in
-many of his fundamental principles, but we believe that the path of
-reform lies very much in the direction to which he has pointed.'
-
-
-_Daily Chronicle._
-
-'The story is one of a novel kind, and many people will find it
-interesting and very suggestive.'
-
-
-_Rock._
-
-'A little but very notable volume.'
-
-
-_Record._
-
-'A little book, but one of which much will be heard.'
-
-
-
-
-  DAVE'S SWEETHEART.
-  BY MARY GAUNT.
-
-One vol., 8vo., cloth, 3s. 6d.
-
-
-_Spectator._
-
-'It is interesting to watch the literature which is coming over to us
-from Australia, a portion of which is full of promise, but we may safely
-say that of all the novels that have been laid before readers in this
-country, "Dave's Sweetheart," in a literary point of view and as a
-finished production, takes a higher place than any that has yet
-appeared. From the opening scene to the closing page we have no
-hesitation in predicting that not a word will be skipped even by the
-most _blasé_ of novel readers.'
-
-
-_Daily Telegraph._
-
-'In every respect one of the most powerful and impressive novels of the
-year.'
-
-
-_Tablet._
-
-'Essentially a strong book. The writer has a wonderfully clean way of
-describing the elemental facts of life, and lets her plummet-line go
-down deep into the depths of human tears. The book is of interest down
-to the last line.'
-
-
-_Weekly Sun._
-
-'The narrative is throughout animated, and rises occasionally to heights
-of great dramatic power, whilst the picture of life in the diggings is
-delineated in a way that compels admiration.'
-
-
-_Morning Post._
-
-'The action is rapid and well-developed, the incidents exciting, as
-becomes the nature of the subject, and the human interest unusually
-deep.'
-
-
-_Times._
-
-'A vigorous and dramatic story of the early gold-digging days in
-Victoria. "Dave's Sweetheart" is a good story.'
-
-
-_Guardian._
-
-'Many books of Australian life have come before us lately, and to none
-of them are we inclined to give more honest praise than to "Dave's
-Sweetheart."'
-
-
-_Speaker._
-
-'Alike from a dramatic and a literary point of view, "Dave's Sweetheart"
-is admirably told, with restraint and with distinction.'
-
-
-
-
-  TOMMY ATKINS.
-  A Tale of the Ranks.
-  BY ROBERT BLATCHFORD,
-  Author of 'A Son of the Forge,' 'Merrie England,' etc.
-
-Second Edition. Crown 8vo., cloth, 6s.
-
-
-_Bradford Observer._
-
-'A splendid narrative of the barrack life of the rank and file.'
-
-
-_Eastern Morning News._
-
-'There is not a dull page in the book.'
-
-
-_Glasgow Herald._
-
-'Most vigorous and picturesque sketches of barrack life.'
-
-
-_Scotsman._
-
-'Entertaining throughout, and reveals high literary ability.'
-
-
-_Dundee Advertiser._
-
-'A really vivacious book; the incidents are so well selected that the
-reader never wearies from start to finish.'
-
-
-_Liverpool Post._
-
-'The book is both clever and amusing.'
-
-
-_Broad Arrow._
-
-'For this well-conceived, well-written, and well-informed little story
-we have little but commendation to offer.'
-
-
-
-
-  THE BAYONET THAT CAME HOME.
-  BY N. WYNN WILLIAMS,
-  Author of 'Tales of Modern Greece.'
-
-Crown 8vo., 3s. 6d.
-
-
-_Dundee Advertiser._
-
-'Well worth perusing.'
-
-
-_National Observer._
-
-'Mr. Williams's story of modern Greece throws a curious light on her
-corrupt politics, on petty oppression, and on the conscription, with its
-attendant hardships to the peasant population.'
-
-
-_Glasgow Herald._
-
-'A powerfully-written and vivid little story.'
-
-
-
-
-  By the Author of 'Aunt Anne.'
-  LOVE-LETTERS OF A WORLDLY WOMAN.
-  BY MRS. W. K. CLIFFORD,
-  Author of 'Aunt Anne,' 'Mrs. Keith's Crime,' etc.
-
-Cloth, 2s. 6d.
-
-
-_Queen._
-
-'One of the cleverest books that ever a woman wrote.'
-
-
-_Morning Post._
-
-'It is that _rara avis_--a volume characterized by knowledge of human
-nature and brightened by refined wit.'
-
-
-_World._
-
-'A book that will gladden the hearts of those who love literature for
-its own sake.'
-
-
-_Review of Reviews._
-
-'Many writers have pictured to us a woman, but none more successfully
-than Mrs. Clifford, whose Madge Brooke stands forth distinct and almost
-flesh and blood--a human document.'
-
-
-
-
-  ON THE THRESHOLD.
-  BY ISABELLA O. FORD,
-  Author of 'Miss Blake, of Monkshalton.'
-
-Cloth, 3s. 6d.
-
-
-_Guardian._
-
-'It is a relief to turn from many of the novels that come before us to
-Miss Ford's true, penetrating, and sympathetic description of the lives
-of some of the women of our day.'
-
-
-_Bradford Observer._
-
-'Those who have followed and admired Miss Ford's active social and
-political work will be interested in this latest work of hers, and will
-understand its special characteristics. It only remains to be added that
-the literary workmanship of the book is excellent.'
-
-
-_Hearth and Home._
-
-'A decidedly clever book.'
-
-
-
-
-  MISTHER O'RYAN.
-  An Incident in the History of a Nation.
-  BY EDWARD MCNULTY.
-
-Small 8vo., elegantly bound, 3s. 6d.
-
-
-_National Observer._
-
-'"Ould Paddy" and the "poor dark cratur" are as pathetic figures as any
-we have met with in recent romance, and would alone stamp their creator
-as a writer of real force and originality.'
-
-
-_Pall Mall Gazette._
-
-'An extremely well-written satire of the possibilities of blarney and
-brag.'
-
-
-_Bookman._
-
-'An Irish story of far more than ordinary ability.'
-
-
-_Church Times._
-
-'A sad story, but full of racy Irish wit.'
-
-
-_Yorkshire Post._
-
-'It is a book to circulate everywhere, a book which, by its pathos and
-its power, its simplicity and its vivid truth, will impress the mind as
-the logic and the reasoning of the statesman too rarely do.'
-
-
-
-
-  ORMISDAL.
-  BY THE EARL OF DUNMORE, F.R.G.S.,
-  Author of 'The Pamirs.'
-
-One vol., cloth, 6s.
-
-
-_Glasgow Herald._
-
-'In this breezy and entertaining novel Lord Dunmore has given us a very
-readable and racy story of the life that centres in a Highland shooting,
-about the end of August.'
-
-
-_St. James's Gazette._
-
-'The impression left on the mind after laying down "Ormisdal" is that
-Lord Dunmore is a remarkably lucky man to lead such a pleasant life
-among such charming people and in such charming places, and that
-everybody will be delighted to hear from him again, when he has more of
-the same sort to tell us, whether he wraps it up in a book of personal
-anecdote or a novel.'
-
-
-
-
-  THAT FIDDLER FELLOW.
-  _A TALE OF ST. ANDREWS._
-  BY HORACE G. HUTCHINSON,
-  Author of 'My Wife's Politics,' 'Golf,' 'Creatures of Circumstance,'
-  etc.
-
-Popular edition, crown 8vo., cloth, 2s. 6d.
-
-
-_Spectator._
-
-'A singularly ingenious and interesting tale.'
-
-
-_The World._
-
-'What Mr. Hutchinson writes is always pleasant to read.'
-
-
-_The Guardian._
-
-'A strange history of hypnotism and crime, which will delight any lover
-of the grim and terrible.'
-
-
-_National Observer._
-
-'An excellent story.'
-
-
-
-
-  THE BONDWOMAN.
-  _A STORY OF THE NORTHMEN IN LAKELAND._
-  BY W. G. COLLINGWOOD,
-  Author of 'Thorstein of the Mere,' 'The Life and Work of John Ruskin,'
-  etc.
-
-Cloth, 16mo., 3s. 6d.
-
-
-_Leeds Mercury._
-
-'As for the thrilling details of the plot, and the other sterling charms
-of the little work, we must refer our readers to its pages, especially
-those of them who may be touring, or contemplating a tour, in
-Westmorland and Cumberland.'
-
-
-_Manchester Guardian._
-
-'Mr. Collingwood has attempted the almost impossible task of
-constructing the social life of a remote period, of evolving from dry
-and doubtful specimens the pulse and colour of a bygone age, and his
-success has been remarkable.'
-
-
-_Glasgow Herald._
-
-'His story is a stirring and vigorous one, which can hardly fail to take
-hold of the imagination and leave a vivid impression on it.'
-
-
-
-
-TWO FAMOUS FRENCH NOVELS.
-
-
-
-
-  THE TUTOR'S SECRET.
-  (_LE SECRET DU PRÉCEPTEUR._)
-  Translated from the French of VICTOR CHERBULIEZ.
-
-One volume, crown 8vo., cloth, 6s.
-
-
-_Daily Chronicle._
-
-'M. Cherbuliez is to be congratulated on having found a translator who
-has done justice to him, and to do justice to M. Cherbuliez is no mean
-achievement, for he is one of the most artistic and delightful of modern
-French novelists. He is also one of the few whose works may be safely
-left lying about where the young person is prone to penetrate. In "The
-Tutor's Secret" all his finest qualities are to be found.'
-
-
-_Manchester Guardian._
-
-'An admirable translation of a delightful novel. Those who have not read
-it in French must hasten to read it in English.'
-
-
-_Westminster Gazette_.
-
-'If Victor Cherbuliez did not already possess a great reputation his
-latest production would have been quite sufficient to secure him renown
-as a novelist. From the first line to the last we recognise a master
-hand at work, and there is not a page that even the veriest skimmer will
-care to pass over.'
-
-
-
-
-  THE MYSTERY OF THE RUE SOLY.
-  From the French of H. DE BALZAC, by LADY KNUTSFORD.
-  One volume, 8vo., cloth, 3s. 6d.
-
-
-_Spectator._
-
-'To place a first-rate foreign novel in reach of those whose education
-does not enable them to enjoy it in the original is to confer a real
-boon upon them; and everyone who is not a French scholar has much cause
-to be grateful to Lady Knutsford for the capital translation of Balzac's
-renowned Ferragus.'
-
-
-_Scotsman._
-
-'Lady Knutsford's translation is excellent.'
-
-
-_Speaker._
-
-'Admirably translated.'
-
-
-
-
-Transcriber's Note
-
-
-Inconsistencies have been retained in spelling, hyphenation,
-punctuation, and grammar, except where indicated in the list
-below:
-
-  - Single quote added after "death." on Page 139
-  - "his" added after "on" on Page 157
-  - "s" changed to "is" on Page 214
-  - Single quote added before "Mr." on Page 214
-  - Period changed to comma after "SPINNER" on Page 216
-  - Single quote changed to double after "Ormisdal" on page 222
-  - Period changed to comma after "HUTCHINSON" on Page 223
-  - Period changed to comma after "COLLINGWOOD" on Page 223
-  - Single quote added after "over." on Page 224
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Devotee, by Mary Cholmondeley
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