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+The Project Gutenberg EBook The Trespasser, by Gilbert Parker, v2
+#47 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
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+
+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+Title: The Trespasser, Volume 2.
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: August, 2004  [EBook #6220]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on September 27, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
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+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRESPASSER, BY PARKER, V2 ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TRESPASSER
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+Volume 2.
+
+
+VI.       WHICH TELLS OF STRANGE ENCOUNTERS
+VII.      WHEREIN THE SEAL OF HIS HERITAGE IS SET
+VIII.     HE ANSWERS AN AWKWARD QUESTION
+IX.       HE FINDS NEW SPONSORS
+X.        HE COMES TO "THE WAKING OF THE FIRE"
+XI.       HE MAKES A GALLANT CONQUEST
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+WHICH TELLS OF STRANGE ENCOUNTERS
+
+A few hours afterwards Gaston sat on his horse, in a quiet corner of the
+grounds, while his uncle sketched him.  After a time he said that Saracen
+would remain quiet no longer.  His uncle held up the sketch.  Gaston
+could scarcely believe that so strong and life-like a thing were possible
+in the time.  It had force and imagination.  He left his uncle with a
+nod, rode quietly through the park, into the village, and on to the moor.
+At the top he turned and looked down.  The perfectness of the landscape
+struck him; it was as if the picture had all grown there--not a suburban
+villa, not a modern cottage, not one tall chimney of a manufactory, but
+just the sweet common life.  The noises of the village were soothing, the
+soft smell of the woodland came over.  He watched a cart go by idly,
+heavily clacking.
+
+As he looked, it came to him: was his uncle right after all?  Was he out
+of place here?  He was not a part of this, though he had adapted himself
+and had learned many fine social ways.  He knew that he lived not exactly
+as though born here and grown up with it all.  But it was also true that
+he had a native sense of courtesy which people called distinguished.
+There was ever a kind of mannered deliberation in his bearing--a part of
+his dramatic temper, and because his father had taught him dignity where
+there were no social functions for its use.  His manner had, therefore,
+a carefulness which in him was elegant artifice.
+
+It could not be complained that he did not act after the fashion of
+gentle people when with them.  But it was equally true that he did many
+things which the friends of his family could not and would not have done.
+For instance, none would have pitched a tent in the grounds, slept in it,
+read in it, and lived in it--when it did not rain.  Probably no one of
+them would have, at individual expense, sent the wife of the village
+policeman to a hospital in London, to be cured--or to die--of cancer.
+None would have troubled to insist that a certain stagnant pool in the
+village be filled up.  Nor would one have suddenly risen in court and
+have acted as counsel for a gipsy!  At the same time, all were too well-
+bred to think that Gaston did this because the gipsy had a daughter with
+him, a girl of strong, wild beauty, with a look of superiority over her
+position.
+
+He thought of all the circumstances now.
+
+It was very many months ago.  The man had been accused of stealing and
+assault, but the evidence was unconvincing to Gaston.  The feeling in
+court was against the gipsy.  Fearing a verdict against him, Gaston rose
+and cross-examined the witnesses, and so adroitly bewildered both them
+and the justices who sat with his grandfather on the case, that, at last,
+he secured the man's freedom.  The girl was French, and knew English
+imperfectly.  Gaston had her sworn, and made the most of her evidence.
+Then, learning that an assault had been made on the gipsy's van by some
+lads who worked at mills in a neighbouring town, he pushed for their
+arrest, and himself made up the loss to the gipsy.
+
+It is possible that there was in the mind of the girl what some common
+people thought: that the thing was done for her favour; for she viewed it
+half-gratefully, half-frowningly, till, on the village green, Gaston
+asked her father what he wished to do--push on or remain to act against
+the lads.
+
+The gipsy, angry as he was, wished to move on.  Gaston lifted his hat to
+the girl and bade her good-bye.  Then she saw that his motives had been
+wholly unselfish--even quixotic, as it appeared to her--silly, she would
+have called it, if silliness had not seemed unlikely in him.  She had
+never met a man like him before.  She ran her fingers through her golden-
+brown hair nervously, caught at a flying bit of old ribbon at her waist,
+and said in French:
+
+"He is honest altogether, sir.  He did not steal, and he was not there
+when it happened."
+
+"I know that, my girl.  That is why I did it."
+
+She looked at him keenly.  Her eyes ran up and down his figure, then met
+his curiously.  Their looks swam for a moment.  Something thrilled in
+them both.  The girl took a step nearer.
+
+"You are as much a Romany here as I am," she said, touching her bosom
+with a quick gesture.  "You do not belong; you are too good for it.  How
+do I know?  I do not know; I feel.  I will tell your fortune," she
+suddenly added, reaching for his hand.  "I have only known three that I
+could do it with honestly and truly, and you are one.  It is no lie.
+There is something in it.  My mother had it; but it's all sham mostly."
+Then, under a tree on the green, he indifferent to village gossip, she
+took his hand and told him--not of his fortune alone.  In half-coherent
+fashion she told him of the past--of his life in the North.  She then
+spoke of his future.  She told him of a woman, of another, and another
+still; of an accident at sea, and of a quarrel; then, with a low, wild
+laugh, she stopped, let go his hand, and would say no more.  But her face
+was all flushed, and her eyes like burning beads.  Her father stood near,
+listening.  Now he took her by the arm.
+
+"Here, Andree, that's enough," he said, with rough kindness; "it's no
+good for you or him."
+
+He turned to Gaston, and said in English:
+
+"She's sing'lar, like her mother afore her.  But she's straight."
+
+Gaston lit a cigar.
+
+"Of course."  He looked kindly at the girl.  "You are a weird sort,
+Andree, and perhaps you are right that I'm a Romany too; but I don't know
+where it begins and where it ends.  You are not English gipsies?" he
+added, to the father.
+
+"I lived in England when I was young.  Her mother was a Breton--not a
+Romany.  We're on the way to France now.  She wants to see where her
+mother was born.  She's got the Breton lingo, and she knows some English;
+but she speaks French mostly."
+
+"Well, well," rejoined Gaston, "take care of yourself, and good luck to
+you.  Good-bye--good-bye, Andree."  He put his hand in his pocket to give
+her some money, but changed his mind.  Her eye stopped him.  He shook
+hands with the man, then turned to her again.  Her eyes were on him--hot,
+shining.  He felt his blood throb, but he returned the look with good-
+natured nonchalance, shook her hand, raised his hat, and walked away,
+thinking what a fine, handsome creature she was.  Presently he said:
+"Poor girl, she'll look at some fellow like that one day, with tragedy
+the end thereof!"
+
+He then fell to wondering about her almost uncanny divination.  He knew
+that all his life he himself had had strange memories, as well as certain
+peculiar powers which had put the honest phenomena and the trickery of
+the Medicine Men in the shade.  He had influenced people by the sheer
+force of presence.  As he walked on, he came to a group of trees in the
+middle of the common.  He paused for a moment, and looked back.  The
+gipsy's van was moving away, and in the doorway stood the girl, her hand
+over her eyes, looking towards him.  He could see the raw colour of her
+scarf.  "She'll make wild trouble," he said to himself.
+
+As Gaston thought of this event, he moved his horse slowly towards a
+combe, and looked out over a noble expanse--valley, field, stream, and
+church-spire.  As he gazed, he saw seated at some distance a girl
+reading.  Not far from her were two boys climbing up and down the combe.
+He watched them.  Presently he saw one boy creep along a shelf of rock
+where the combe broke into a quarry, let himself drop upon another shelf
+below, and then perch upon an overhanging ledge.  He presently saw that
+the lad was now afraid to return.  He heard the other lad cry out, saw
+the girl start up, and run forward, look over the edge of the combe, and
+then make as if to go down.  He set his horse to the gallop, and called
+out.  The girl saw him, and paused.  In two minutes he was off his horse
+and beside her.
+
+It was Alice Wingfield.  She had brought out three boys, who had come
+with her from London, where she had spent most of the year nursing their
+sick mother, her relative.
+
+"I'll have him up in a minute," he said, as he led Saracen to a sapling
+near.  "Don't go near the horse."
+
+He swung himself down from ledge to ledge, and soon was beside the boy.
+In another moment he had the youngster on his back, came slowly up, and
+the adventurer was safe.
+
+"Silly Walter," the girl said, "to frighten yourself and give Mr. Belward
+trouble."
+
+"I didn't think I'd be afraid," protested the lad; "but when I looked
+over the ledge my head went round, and I felt sick--like with the
+channel."
+
+Gaston had seen Alice Wingfield several times at church and in the
+village, and once when, with Lady Belward, he had returned the
+archdeacon's call; but she had been away most of the time since his
+arrival.  She had impressed him as a gentle, wise, elderly little
+creature, who appeared to live for others, and chiefly for her
+grandfather.  She was not unusually pretty, nor yet young,--quite
+as old as himself,--and yet he wondered what it was that made her so
+interesting.  He decided that it was the honesty of her nature, her
+beautiful thoroughness; and then he thought little more about her.  But
+now he dropped into quiet, natural talk with her, as if they had known
+each other for years.  But most women found that they dropped quickly
+into easy talk with him.  That was because he had not learned the small
+gossip which varies little with a thousand people in the same
+circumstances.  But he had a naive fresh sense, everything interested
+him, and he said what he thought with taste and tact, sometimes with wit,
+and always in that cheerful contemplative mood which influences women.
+Some of his sayings were so startling and heretical that they had gone
+the rounds, and certain crisp words out of the argot of the North were
+used by women who wished to be chic and amusing.
+
+Not quite certain why he stayed, but talking on reflectively, Gaston at
+last said:
+
+"You will be coming to us to-night, of course?  We are having a barbecue
+of some kind."
+
+"Yes, I hope so; though my grandfather does not much care to have me go."
+
+"I suppose it is dull for him."
+
+"I am not sure it is that."
+
+"No?  What then?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"The affair is in your honour, Mr. Belward, isn't it?
+
+"Does that answer my question?" he asked genially.
+
+She blushed.
+
+"No, no, no!  That is not what I meant."
+
+"I was unfair.  Yes, I believe the matter does take that colour;
+though why, I don't know."
+
+She looked at him with simple earnestness.
+
+"You ought to be proud of it; and you ought to be glad of such a high
+position where you can do so much good, if you will."
+
+He smiled, and ran his hand down his horse's leg musingly before he
+replied:
+
+"I've not thought much of doing good, I tell you frankly.  I wasn't
+brought up to think about it; I don't know that I ever did any good in my
+life.  I supposed it was only missionaries and women who did that sort of
+thing."
+
+"But you wrong yourself.  You have done good in this village.  Why, we
+all have talked of it; and though it wasn't done in the usual way--rather
+irregularly--still it was doing good."
+
+He looked down at her astonished.
+
+"Well, here's a pretty libel!  Doing good 'irregularly'?  Why, where have
+I done good at all?"
+
+She ran over the names of several sick people in the village whose bills
+he had paid, the personal help and interest he had given to many, and,
+last of all, she mentioned the case of the village postmaster.
+
+Since Gaston had come, postmasters had been changed.  The little pale-
+faced man who had first held the position disappeared one night, and in
+another twenty-four hours a new one was in his place.  Many stories had
+gone about.  It was rumoured that the little man was short in his
+accounts, and had been got out of the way by Gaston Belward.
+Archdeacon Varcoe knew the truth, and had said that Gaston's sin was not
+unpardonable, in spite of a few squires and their dames who declared it
+was shocking that a man should have such loose ideas, that no good could
+come to the county from it, and that he would put nonsense into the heads
+of the common people.  Alice Wingfield was now to hear Gaston's view of
+the matter.
+
+"So that's it, eh?  Live and let live is doing good?  In that case it
+is easy to be a saint.  What else could a man do?  You say that I am
+generous--How?  What have I spent out of my income on these little
+things?  My income--how did I get it?  I didn't earn it; neither did my
+father.  Not a stroke have I done for it.  I sit high and dry there in
+the Court, they sit low there in the village; and you know how they live.
+Well, I give away a little money which these people and their fathers
+earned for my father and me; and for that you say I am doing good, and
+some other people say I am doing harm--'dangerous charity,' and all that!
+I say that the little I have done is what is always done where man is
+most primitive, by people who never heard 'doing good' preached."
+
+"We must have names for things, you know," she said.
+
+"I suppose so, where morality and humanity have to be taught as Christian
+duty, and not as common manhood."
+
+"Tell me," she presently said, "about Sproule, the postmaster."
+
+"Oh, that?  Well, I will.  The first time I entered the post-office I saw
+there was something on the man's mind.  A youth of twenty-three oughtn't
+to look as he did--married only a year or two also, with a pretty wife
+and child.  I used to talk to them a good deal, and one day I said to
+him: 'You look seedy; what's the matter?' He flushed, and got nervous.
+I made up my mind it was money.  If I had been here longer, I should have
+taken him aside and talked to him like a father.  As it was, things slid
+along.  I was up in town, and here and there.  One evening as I came back
+from town I saw a nasty-looking Jew arrive.  The little postmaster met
+him, and they went away together.  He was in the scoundrel's hands;
+had been betting, and had borrowed first from the Jew, then from the
+Government.  The next evening I was just starting down to have a talk
+with him, when an official came to my grandfather to swear out a warrant.
+I lost no time; got my horse and trap, went down to the office, gave
+the boy three minutes to tell me the truth, and then I sent him away.
+I fixed it up with the authorities, and the wife and child follow the
+youth to America next week.  That's all."
+
+"He deserved to get free, then?"
+
+"He deserved to be punished, but not as he would have been.  There wasn't
+really a vicious spot in the man.  And the wife and child--what was a
+little justice to the possible happiness of those three?  Discretion is a
+part of justice, and I used it, as it is used every day in business and
+judicial life, only we don't see it.  When it gets public, why, some one
+gets blamed.  In this case I was the target; but I don't mind in the
+least--not in the least.  .  .  .  Do you think me very startling or
+lawless?"
+
+"Never lawless; but one could not be quite sure what you would do in any
+particular case."  She looked up at him admiringly.
+
+They had not noticed the approach of Archdeacon Varcoe till he was very
+near them.  His face was troubled.  He had seen how earnest was their
+conversation, and for some reason it made him uneasy.  The girl saw him
+first, and ran to meet him.  He saw her bright delighted look, and he
+sighed involuntarily.  "Something has worried you," she said caressingly.
+Then she told him of the accident, and they all turned and went back
+towards the Court, Gaston walking his horse.  Near the church they met
+Sir William and Lady Belward.  There were salutations, and presently
+Gaston slowly followed his grandfather and grandmother into the
+courtyard.
+
+Sir William, looking back, said to his wife: "Do you think that Gaston
+should be told?"
+
+"No, no, there is no danger.  Gaston, my dear, shall marry Delia
+Gasgoyne."
+
+"Shall marry?  wherefore 'shall'?  Really, I do not see."
+
+"She likes him, she is quite what we would have her, and he is interested
+in her.  My dear, I have seen--I have watched for a year."
+
+He put his hand on hers.
+
+"My wife, you are a goodly prophet."
+
+When Archdeacon Varcoe entered his study on returning, he sat down in a
+chair, and brooded long.  "She must be told," he said at last, aloud.
+"Yes, yes, at once.  God help us both!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+WHEREIN THE SEAL OF HIS HERITAGE IS SET
+
+"Sophie, when you talk with the man, remember that you are near fifty,
+and faded.  Don't be sentimental."  So said Mrs. Gasgoyne to Lady Dargan,
+as they saw Gaston coming down the ballroom with Captain Maudsley.
+
+"Reine, you try one's patience.  People would say you were not quite
+disinterested."
+
+"You mean Delia!  Now, listen.  I haven't any wish but that Gaston
+Belward shall see Delia very seldom indeed.  He will inherit the property
+no doubt, and Sir William told me that he had settled a decent fortune on
+him; but for Delia--no--no--no.  Strange, isn't it, when Lady Harriet
+over there aches for him, Indian blood and all?  And why?  Because this
+is a good property, and the fellow is distinguished and romantic-looking:
+but he is impossible--perfectly impossible.  Every line of his face says
+shipwreck."
+
+"You are not usually so prophetic."
+
+"Of course.  But I am prophetic now, for Delia is more than interested,
+silly chuck!  Did you ever read the story of the other Gaston--Sir
+Gaston--whom this one resembles?  No?  Well, you will find it thinly
+disguised in The Knight of Five Joys.  He was killed at Naseby, my dear;
+killed, not by the enemy, but by a page in Rupert's cavalry.  The page
+was a woman!  It's in this one too.  Indian and French blood is a sad
+tincture.  He is not wicked at heart, not at all; but he will do mad
+things yet, my dear.  For he'll tire of all this, and then--half-mourning
+for some one!"
+
+Gaston enjoyed talking with Mrs. Gasgoyne as to no one else.  Other women
+often flattered him, she never did.  Frankly, crisply, she told him
+strange truths, and, without mercy, crumbled his wrong opinions.  He had
+a sense of humour, and he enjoyed her keen chastening raillery.  Besides,
+her talk was always an education in the fine lights and shadows of this
+social life.  He came to her now with a smile, greeted her heartily, and
+then turned to Lady Dargan.  Captain Maudsley carried off Mrs. Gasgoyne,
+and the two were left together--the second time since the evening of
+Gaston's arrival, so many months before.  Lady Dargan had been abroad,
+and was just returned.
+
+They talked a little on unimportant things, and presently Lady Dargan
+said:
+
+"Pardon my asking, but will you tell me why you wore a red ribbon in your
+button-hole the first night you came?"
+
+He smiled, and then looked at her a little curiously.  "My luggage had
+not come, and I wore an old suit of my father's."
+
+Lady Dargan sighed deeply.
+
+"The last night he was in England he wore that coat at dinner," she
+murmured.
+
+"Pardon me, Lady Dargan--you put that ribbon there?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Her eyes were on him with a candid interest and regard.
+
+"I suppose," he went on, "that his going was abrupt to you?"
+
+"Very--very!" she answered.
+
+She longed to ask if his father ever mentioned her name, but she dared
+not.  Besides, as she said to herself, to what good now?  But she asked
+him to tell her something about his father.  He did so quietly, picking
+out main incidents, and setting them forth, as he had the ability, with
+quiet dramatic strength.  He had just finished when Delia Gasgoyne came
+up with Lord Dargan.
+
+Presently Lord Dargan asked Gaston if he would bring Lady Dargan to the
+other end of the room, where Miss Gasgoyne was to join her mother.  As
+they went, Lady Dargan said a little breathlessly:
+
+"Will you do something for me?"
+
+"I would do much for you," was his reply, for he understood!
+
+"If ever you need a friend, if ever you are in trouble, will you let me
+know?  I wish to take an interest in you.  Promise me."
+
+"I cannot promise, Lady Dargan," he answered, "for such trouble as I have
+had before I have had to bear alone, and the habit is fixed, I fear.
+Still, I am grateful to you just the same, and I shall never forget it.
+But will you tell me why people regard me from so tragical a stand-
+point?"
+
+"Do they?"
+
+"Well, there's yourself, and there's Mrs. Gasgoyne, and there's my uncle
+Ian."
+
+"Perhaps we think you may have trouble because of your uncle Ian."
+
+Gaston shook his head enigmatically, and then said ironically:
+
+"As they would put it in the North, Lady Dargan, he'll cut no figure in
+that matter.  I remember for two."
+
+"That is right--that is right.  Always think that Ian Belward is bad--bad
+at heart.  He is as fascinating as--"
+
+"As the Snake?"
+
+"--as the Snake, and as cruel!  It is the cruelty of wicked selfishness.
+Somehow, I forget that I am talking to his nephew.  But we all know Ian
+Belward--at least, all women do."
+
+"And at least one man does," he answered gravely.  The next minute Gaston
+walked down the room with Delia Gasgoyne on his arm.  The girl delicately
+showed her preference, and he was aware of it.  It pleased him--pleased
+his unconscious egoism.  The early part of his life had been spent among
+Indian women, half-breeds, and a few dull French or English folk, whose
+chief charm was their interest in that wild, free life, now so distant.
+He had met Delia many times since his coming; and there was that in her
+manner--a fine high-bred quality, a sweet speaking reserve--which
+interested him.  He saw her as the best product of this convention.
+
+She was no mere sentimental girl, for she had known at least six seasons,
+and had refused at least six lovers.  She had a proud mind, not wide,
+suited to her position.  Most men had flattered her, had yielded to her;
+this man, either with art or instinctively, mastered her, secured her
+interest by his personality.  Every woman worth the having, down in her
+heart, loves to be mastered: it gives her a sense of security, and she
+likes to lean; for, strong as she may be at times, she is often
+singularly weak.  She knew that her mother deprecated "that Belward
+enigma," but this only sent her on the dangerous way.
+
+To-night she questioned him about his life, and how he should spend the
+summer.  Idling in France, he said.  And she?  She was not sure; but she
+thought that she also would be idling about France in her father's yacht.
+So they might happen to meet.  Meanwhile?  Well, meanwhile, there were
+people coming to stay at Peppingham, their home.  August would see that
+over.  Then freedom.
+
+Was it freedom, to get away from all this--from England and rule and
+measure?  No, she did not mean quite that.  She loved the life with all
+its rules; she could not live without it.  She had been brought up to
+expect and to do certain things.  She liked her comforts, her luxuries,
+many pretty things about her, and days without friction.  To travel?
+Yes, with all modern comforts, no long stages, a really good maid, and
+some fresh interesting books.
+
+What kind of books?  Well, Walter Pater's essays; "The Light of Asia";
+a novel of that wicked man Thomas Hardy; and something light--"The
+Innocents Abroad"--with, possibly, a struggle through De Musset,
+to keep up her French.
+
+It did not seem exciting to Gaston, but it did sound honest, and it was
+in the picture.  He much preferred Meredith, and Swinburne, and Dumas,
+and Hugo; but with her he did also like the whimsical Mark Twain.
+
+He thought of suggestions that Lady Belward had often thrown out; of
+those many talks with Sir William, excellent friends as they were, in
+which the baronet hinted at the security he would feel if there was a
+second family of Belwards.  What if he--?  He smiled strangely, and
+shrank.
+
+Marriage?  There was the touchstone.
+
+After the dance, when he was taking her to her mother, he saw a pale
+intense face looking out to him from a row of others.  He smiled, and the
+smile that came in return was unlike any he had ever seen Alice Wingfield
+wear.  He was puzzled.  It flashed to him strange pathos, affection, and
+entreaty.  He took Delia Gasgoyne to her mother, talked to Lady Belward
+a little, and then went quietly back to where he had seen Alice.  She was
+gone.  Just then some people from town came to speak to him, and he was
+detained.  When he was free he searched, but she was nowhere to be found.
+He went to Lady Belward.  Yes, Miss Wingfield had gone.  Lady Belward
+looked at Gaston anxiously, and asked him why he was curious.  "Because
+she's a lonely-looking little maid," he said, "and I wanted to be kind to
+her.  She didn't seem happy a while ago."
+
+Lady Belward was reassured.
+
+"Yes, she is a sweet creature, Gaston," she said, and added: "You are a
+good boy to-night, a very good host indeed.  It is worth the doing," she
+went on, looking out on the guests proudly.  "I did not think I should
+ever come to it again with any heart, but I do it for you gladly.  Now,
+away to your duty," she added, tapping his breast affectionately with her
+fan, "and when everything is done, come and take me to my room."
+
+Ian Belward passed Gaston as he went.  He had seen the affectionate
+passages.
+
+"'For a good boy!' 'God bless our Home!"' he said, ironically.
+
+Gaston saw the mark of his hand on his uncle's chin, and he forbore
+ironical reply.
+
+"The home is worth the blessing," he rejoined quietly, and passed on.
+
+Three hours later the guests had all gone, and Lady Belward, leaning on
+her grandson's arm, went to her boudoir, while Ian and his father sought
+the library.  Ian was going next morning.  The conference was not likely
+to be cheerful.
+
+Inside her boudoir, Lady Belward sank into a large chair, and let her
+head fall back and her eyes close.  She motioned Gaston to a seat.
+Taking one near, he waited.  After a time she opened her eyes and drew
+herself up.
+
+"My dear," she said, "I wish to talk with you."
+
+"I shall be very glad; but isn't it late? and aren't you tired,
+grandmother?"
+
+"I shall sleep better after," she responded, gently.  She then began
+to review the past; her own long unhappiness, Robert's silence, her
+uncertainty as to his fate, and the after hopelessness, made greater
+by Ian's conduct.  In low, kind words she spoke of his coming and the
+renewal of her hopes, coupled with fear also that he might not fit in
+with his new life, and--she could say it now--do something unbearable.
+Well, he had done nothing unworthy of their name; had acted, on the
+whole, sensibly; and she had not been greatly surprised at certain little
+oddnesses, such as the tent in the grounds, an impossible deer-hunt, and
+some unusual village charities and innovations on the estate.  Nor did
+she object to Brillon, though he had sometimes thrown servants'-hall into
+disorder, and had caused the stablemen and the footmen to fight.  His
+ear-rings and hair were startling, but they were not important.  Gaston
+had been admired by the hunting-field--of which they were glad, for it
+was a test of popularity.  She saw that most people liked him.  Lord
+Dunfolly and Admiral Highburn were enthusiastic.  For her own part, she
+was proud and grateful.  She could enjoy every grain of comfort he gave
+them; and she was thankful to make up to Robert's son what Robert himself
+had lost--poor boy--poor boy!
+
+Her feelings were deep, strong, and sincere.  Her grandson had come,
+strong, individual, considerate, and had moved the tender courses of her
+nature.  At this moment Gaston had his first deep feeling of
+responsibility.
+
+"My dear," she said at last, "people in our position have important
+duties.  Here is a large estate.  Am I not clear?  You will never be
+quite part of this life till you bring a wife here.  That will give you a
+sense of responsibility.  You will wake up to many things then.  Will you
+not marry?  There is Delia Gasgoyne.  Your grandfather and I would be so
+glad.  She is worthy in every way, and she likes you.  She is a good
+girl.  She has never frittered her heart away; and she would make you
+proud of her."
+
+She reached out an anxious hand, and touched his shoulder.  His eyes were
+playing with the pattern of the carpet; but he slowly raised them to
+hers, and looked for a moment without speaking.  Suddenly, in spite of
+himself, he laughed--laughed outright, but not loudly.
+
+Marriage?  Yes, here was the touchstone.  Marry a girl whose family had
+been notable for hundreds of years?  For the moment he did not remember
+his own family.  This was one of the times when he was only conscious
+that he had savage blood, together with a strain of New World French,
+and that his life had mostly been a range of adventure and common toil.
+This new position was his right, but there were times when it seemed to
+him that he was an impostor; others, when he felt himself master of it
+all, when he even had a sense of superiority--why he could not tell;
+but life in this old land of tradition and history had not its due
+picturesqueness.  With his grandmother's proposal there shot up in him
+the thought that for him this was absurd.  He to pace the world beside
+this fine queenly creature--Delia Gasgoyne--carrying on the traditions
+of the Belwards!  Was it, was it possible?
+
+"Pardon me," he said at last gently, as he saw Lady Belward shrink and
+then look curiously at him, "something struck me, and I couldn't help
+it."
+
+"Was what I said at all ludicrous?"
+
+"Of course not; you said what was natural for you to say, and I thought
+what was natural for me to think, at first blush."
+
+"There is something wrong," she urged fearfully.  "Is there any reason
+why you cannot marry?  Gaston,"--she trembled towards him,--"you have not
+deceived us--you are not married?"
+
+"My wife is dead, as I told you," he answered gravely, musingly.
+
+"Tell me: there is no woman who has a claim on you?"
+
+"None that I know of--not one.  My follies have not run that way."
+
+"Thank God!  Then there is no reason why you should not marry.  Oh, when
+I look at you I am proud, I am glad that I live!  You bring my youth, my
+son back; and I long for a time when I may clasp your child in my arms,
+and know that Robert's heritage will go on and on, and that there will be
+made up to him, somehow, all that he lost.  Listen: I am an old,
+crippled, suffering woman; I shall soon have done with all this coming
+and going, and I speak to you out of the wisdom of sorrow.  Had Robert
+married, all would have gone well.  He did not: he got into trouble,
+then came Ian's hand in it all; and you know the end.  I fear for you,
+I do indeed.  You will have sore temptations.  Marry--marry soon,
+and make us happy."
+
+He was quiet enough now.  He had seen the grotesque image, now he was
+facing the thing behind it.  "Would it please you so very much?" he
+said, resting a hand gently on hers.
+
+"I wish to see a child of yours in my arms, dear."
+
+"And the woman you have chosen is Delia Gasgoyne?"
+
+"The choice is for you; but you seem to like each other, and we care for
+her."
+
+He sat thinking for a time, then he got up, and said slowly:
+
+"It shall be so, if Miss Gasgoyne will have me.  And I hope it may turn
+out as you wish."
+
+Then he stooped and kissed her on the cheek.  The proud woman, who had
+unbent little in her lifetime, whose eyes had looked out so coldly on the
+world, who felt for her son Ian an almost impossible aversion, drew down
+his head and kissed it.
+
+"Indian and all?" he asked, with a quaint bitterness.
+
+"Everything, my dear," she answered.  "God bless you! Good-night."
+
+A few moments after, Gaston went to the library.  He heard the voices
+of Sir William and his uncle.  He knocked and entered.  Ian, with
+exaggerated courtesy, rose.  Gaston, with easy coolness, begged him
+to sit, lit a cigar, and himself sat.
+
+"My father has been feeding me with raw truths, Cadet," said his uncle;
+"and I've been eating them unseasoned.  We have not been, nor are likely
+to be, a happy family, unless in your saturnian reign we learn to say,
+pax vobiscum--do you know Latin?  For I'm told the money-bags and the
+stately pile are for you.  You are to beget children before the Lord,
+and sit in the seat of Justice: 'tis for me to confer honour on you all
+by my genius!"
+
+Gaston sat very still, and, when the speech was ended, said tentatively:
+
+"Why rob yourself?"
+
+"In honouring you all?"
+
+"No, sir; in not yourself having 'a saturnian reign'."
+
+"You are generous."
+
+"No: I came here to ask for a home, for what was mine through my father.
+I ask, and want, nothing more--not even to beget children before the
+Lord!"
+
+"How mellow the tongue!  Well, Cadet, I am not going to quarrel.  Here
+we are with my father.  See, I am willing to be friends.  But you mustn't
+expect that I will not chasten your proud spirit now and then.  That you
+need it, this morning bears witness."
+
+Sir William glanced from one to the other curiously.  He was cold and
+calm, and looked worn.  He had had a trying half-hour with his son, and
+it had told on him.
+
+Gaston at once said to his grandfather: "Of this morning, sir, I will
+tell you.  I--"
+
+Ian interrupted him.
+
+"No, no; that is between us.  Let us not worry my father."
+
+Sir William smiled ironically.
+
+"Your solicitude is refreshing, Ian."
+
+"Late fruit is the sweetest, sir."
+
+Presently Sir William asked Gaston the result of the talk with Lady
+Belward.  Gaston frankly said that he was ready to do as they wished.
+Sir William then said they had chosen this time because Ian was there,
+and it was better to have all open and understood.
+
+Ian laughed.
+
+"Taming the barbarian!  How seriously you all take it.  I am the jester
+for the King.  In the days of the flood I'll bring the olive leaf.  You
+are all in the wash of sentiment: you'll come to the wicked uncle one day
+for common-sense.  But, never mind, Cadet; we are to be friends.  Yes,
+really.  I do not fear for my heritage, and you'll need a helping hand
+one of these days.  Besides, you are an interesting fellow.  So, if you
+will put up with my acid tongue, there's no reason why we shouldn't hit
+it off."
+
+To Sir William's great astonishment, Ian held out his hand with a
+genial smile, which was tolerably honest, for his indulgent nature was
+as capable of great geniality as incapable of high moral conceptions.
+Then, he had before his eye, "Monmouth" and "The King of Ys."
+
+Gaston took his hand, and said: "I have no wish to be an enemy."
+
+Sir William rose, looking at them both.  He could not understand Ian's
+attitude, and he distrusted.  Yet peace was better than war.  Ian's truce
+was also based on a belief that Gaston would make skittles of things.
+A little while afterwards Gaston sat in his room, turning over events
+in his mind.  Time and again his thoughts returned to the one thing--
+marriage.  That marriage with his Esquimaux wife had been in one sense
+none at all, for the end was sure from the beginning.  It was in keeping
+with his youth, the circumstances, the life, it had no responsibilities.
+But this?  To become an integral part of the life--the English country
+gentleman; to be reduced, diluted, to the needs of the convention, and no
+more?  Let him think of the details:--a justice of the peace: to sit on a
+board of directors; to be, perhaps, Master of the Hounds; to unite with
+the Bishop in restoring the cathedral; to make an address at the annual
+flower show.  His wife to open bazaars, give tennis-parties, and be
+patron to the clergy; himself at last, no doubt, to go into Parliament;
+to feel the petty, or serious, responsibilities of a husband and a
+landlord.  Monotony, extreme decorum, civility to the world; endless
+politeness to his wife; with boys at Eton and girls somewhere else; and
+the kind of man he must be to do his duty in all and to all!
+
+It seemed impossible.  He rose and paced the floor.  Never till this
+moment had the full picture of his new life come close.  He felt stifled.
+He put on a cap, and, descending the stairs, went out into the court-yard
+and walked about, the cool air refreshing him.  Gradually there settled
+upon him a stoic acceptance of the conditions.  But would it last?
+
+He stood still and looked at the pile of buildings before him; then he
+turned towards the little church close by, whose spire and roof could be
+seen above the wall.  He waved his hand, as when within it on the day of
+his coming, and said with irony:
+
+"Now for the marriage-linen, Sir Gaston!"
+
+He heard a low knocking at the gate.  He listened.  Yes, there was no
+mistake.  He went to it, and asked quietly:
+
+"Who is there?"
+
+There was no reply.  Still the knocking went on.  He quietly opened the
+gate, and threw it back.  A figure in white stepped through and slowly
+passed him.  It was Alice Wingfield.  He spoke to her.  She did not
+answer.  He went close to her and saw that she was asleep!
+
+She was making for the entrance door.  He took her hand gently, and led
+her into a side door, and on into the ballroom.  She moved towards a
+window through which the moonlight streamed, and sat on a cushioned bench
+beneath it.  It was the spot where he had seen her at the dance.  She
+leaned forward, looking into space, as she did at him then.  He moved
+and got in her line of vision.
+
+The picture was weird.  She wore a soft white chamber-gown, her hair
+hung loose on her shoulders, her pale face cowled it in.  The look was
+inexpressibly sad.  Over her fell dim, coloured lights from the stained-
+glass windows; and shadowy ancestors looked silently down from the
+armour-hung walls.
+
+To Gaston, collected as he was, it gave an ominous feeling.  Why did she
+come here even in her sleep?  What did that look mean?  He gazed intently
+into her eyes.
+
+All at once her voice came low and broken, and a sob followed the words:
+
+"Gaston, my brother, my brother!"
+
+He stood for a moment stunned, gazing helplessly at her passive figure.
+
+"Gaston, my brother!" he repeated to himself.  Then the painful matter
+dawned upon him.  This girl, the granddaughter of the rector of the
+parish, was his father's daughter--his own sister.  He had a sudden
+spring of new affection--unfelt for those other relations, his by the
+rights of the law and the gospel.  The pathos of the thing caught him in
+the throat--for her how pitiful, how unhappy!  He was sure that, somehow,
+she had only come to know of it since the afternoon.  Then there had been
+so different a look in her face!
+
+One thing was clear: he had no right to this secret, and it must be for
+now as if it had never been.  He came to her, and took her hand.  She
+rose.  He led her from the room, out into the court-yard, and from there
+through the gate into the road.
+
+All was still.  They passed over to the rectory.  Just inside the gate,
+Gaston saw a figure issue from the house, and come quickly towards them.
+It was the rector, excited, anxious.
+
+Gaston motioned silence, and pointed to her.  Then he briefly whispered
+how she had come.  The clergyman said that he had felt uneasy about her,
+had gone to her room, and was just issuing in search of her.  Gaston
+resigned her, softly advised not waking her, and bade the clergyman good-
+night.
+
+But presently he turned, touched the arm of the old man, and said
+meaningly:
+
+"I know."
+
+The rector's voice shook as he replied: "You have not spoken to her?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You will not speak of it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Unless I should die, and she should wish it?"
+
+"Always as she wishes."
+
+They parted, and Gaston returned to the Court.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+HE ANSWERS AN AWKWARD QUESTION
+
+The next morning Brillon brought a note from Ian Belward, which said that
+he was starting, and asked Gaston to be sure and come to Paris.  The note
+was carelessly friendly.  After reading it, he lay thinking.  Presently
+he chanced to see Jacques look intently at him.
+
+"Well, Brillon, what is it?" he asked genially.  Jacques had come on
+better than Gaston had hoped for, but the light play of his nature was
+gone--he was grave, almost melancholy; and, in his way, as notable as his
+master.  Their life in London had changed him much.  A valet in St.
+James's Street was not a hunting comrade on the Coppermine River.  Often
+when Jacques was left alone he stood at the window looking out on the gay
+traffic, scarcely stirring; his eyes slow, brooding.  Occasionally,
+standing so, he would make the sacred gesture.  One who heard him swear
+now and then, in a calm, deliberate way,--at the cook and the porter,--
+would have thought the matters in strange contrast.  But his religion
+was a central habit, followed as mechanically as his appetite or the
+folding of his master's clothes.  Besides, like most woodsmen, he was
+superstitious.  Gaston was kind with him, keeping, however, a firm hand
+till his manner had become informed by the new duties.  Jacques's
+greatest pleasure was his early morning visits to the stables.  Here were
+Saracen and Jim the broncho-sleek, savage, playful.  But he touched the
+highest point of his London experience when they rode in the Park.
+
+In this Gaston remained singular.  He rode always with Jacques.  Perhaps
+he wished to preserve one possible relic of the old life, perhaps he
+liked this touch of drama; or both.  It created notice, criticism, but he
+was superior to that.  Time and again people asked him to ride, but he
+always pleaded another engagement.  He would then be seen with Jacques
+plus Jacques's earrings and the wonderful hair, riding grandly in the
+Row.  Jacques's eyes sparkled and a snatch of song came to his lips at
+these times.
+
+No figures in the Park were so striking.  There was nothing bizarre, but
+Gaston had a distinguished look, and women who had felt his hand at their
+waists in the dance the night before, now knew him, somehow, at a grave
+distance.  Though Gaston did not say it to himself, these were the hours
+when he really was with the old life--lived it again--prairie, savannah,
+ice-plain, alkali desert.  When, dismounting, the horses were taken and
+they went up the stairs, Gaston would softly lay his whip across
+Jacques's shoulders without speaking.  This was their only ritual of
+camaraderie, and neglect of it would have fretted the half-breed.  Never
+had man such a servant.  No matter at what hour Gaston returned, he found
+Jacques waiting; and when he woke he found him ready, as now, on this
+morning, after a strange night.
+
+"What is it, Jacques?" he repeated.
+
+The old name!  Jacques shivered a little with pleasure.  Presently he
+broke out with:
+
+"Monsieur, when do we go back?"
+
+"Go back where?"
+
+"To the North, monsieur."
+
+"What's in your noddle now, Brillon?"
+
+The impatient return to "Brillon" cut Jacques like a whip.
+
+"Monsieur," he suddenly said, his face glowing, his hands opening
+nervously, "we have eat, we have drunk, we have had the dance and the
+great music here: is it enough?  Sometimes as you sleep you call out, and
+you toss to the strokes of the tower-clock.  When we lie on the Plains of
+Yath from sunset to sunrise, you never stir then.  You remember when we
+sleep on the ledge of the Voshti mountain--so narrow that we were tied
+together?  Well, we were as babes in blankets.  In the Prairie of the Ten
+Stars your fingers were on the trigger firm as a bolt; here I have watch
+them shake with the coffee-cup.  Monsieur, you have seen: is it enough?
+You have lived here: is it like the old lodge and the long trail?"
+
+Gaston sat up in bed, looked in the mirror opposite, ran his fingers
+through his hair, regarded his hands, turning them over, and then, with
+sharp impatience, said:
+
+"Go to hell!"
+
+The little man's face flushed to his hair; he sucked in the air with a
+gasp.  Without a word, he went to the dressing-table, poured out the
+shaving-water, threw a towel over his arm, and turned to come to the bed;
+but, all at once, he sidled back, put down the water, and furtively drew
+a sleeve across his eyes.
+
+Gaston saw, and something suddenly burned in him.  He dropped his eyes,
+slid out of bed, into his dressing-gown, and sat down.
+
+Jacques made ready.  He was not prepared to have Gaston catch him by the
+shoulders with a nervous grip, search his eyes, and say:
+
+"You damned little fool, I'm not worth it!"  Jacques's face shone.
+
+"Every great man has his fool--alors!" was the happy reply.
+
+"Jacques," Gaston presently said, "what's on your mind?"
+
+"I saw--last night, monsieur," he said.
+
+"You saw what?"
+
+"I saw you in the court-yard with the lady."  Gaston was now very grave.
+
+"Did you recognise her?"
+
+"No: she moved all as a spirit."
+
+"Jacques, that matter is between you and me.  I'm going to tell you,
+though, two things; and--where's your string of beads?"
+
+Jacques drew out his rosary.
+
+"That's all right.  Mum as Manitou!  She was asleep; she is my sister.
+And that is all, till there's need for you to know more."
+
+In this new confidence Jacques was content.  The life was a gilded mess,
+but he could endure it now.  Three days passed.  During that time Gaston
+was up to town twice; lunched at Lady Dargan's, and dined at Lord
+Dunfolly's.  For his grandfather, who was indisposed, he was induced to
+preside at a political meeting in the interest of a wealthy local brewer,
+who confidently expected the seat, and, through gifts to the party,
+a knighthood.  Before the meeting, in the gush of--as he put it "kindred
+aims," he laid a finger familiarly in Gaston's button-hole.  Jacques, who
+was present, smiled, for he knew every change in his master's face, and
+he saw a glitter in his eye.  He remembered when they two were in trouble
+with a gang of river-drivers, and one did this same thing rudely: how
+Gaston looked down, and said, with a devilish softness: "Take it away."
+And immediately after the man did so.
+
+Mr. Sylvester Gregory Babbs, in a similar position, heard a voice say
+down at him, with a curious obliqueness:
+
+"If you please!"
+
+The keenest edge of it was lost on the flaring brewer, but his fingers
+dropped, and he twisted his heavy watchchain uneasily.  The meeting
+began.  Gaston in a few formal words, unconventional in idea, introduced
+Mr. Babbs as "a gentleman whose name was a household word in the county,
+who would carry into Parliament the civic responsibility shown in his
+private life, who would render his party a support likely to fulfil its
+purpose."
+
+When he sat down, Captain Maudsley said: "That's a trifle vague,
+Belward."
+
+"How can one treat him with importance?"
+
+"He's the sort that makes a noise one way or another."
+
+"Yes.  Obituary: 'At his residence in Babbslow Square, yesterday, Sir S.
+G. Babbs, M. P., member of the London County Council.  Sir S. G. Babbs,
+it will be remembered, gave L100,000 to build a home for the propagation
+of Vice, and--'"
+
+"That's droll!"
+
+"Why not Vice?  'Twould be just the same in his mind.  He doesn't give
+from a sense of moral duty.  Not he; he's a bungowawen!"
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"That's Indian.  You buy a lot of Indian or halfbreed loafers with
+beaver-skins and rum, go to the Mount of the Burning Arrows, and these
+fellows dance round you and call you one of the lost race, the Mighty Men
+of the Kimash Hills.  And they'll do that while the rum lasts.  Meanwhile
+you get to think yourself a devil of a swell--you and the gods!  .  .  .
+And now we had better listen to this bungowawen, hadn't we?"
+
+The room was full, and on the platform were gentlemen come to support
+Sir William Belward.  They were interested to see how Gaston would
+carry it off.
+
+Mr. Babbs's speech was like a thousand others by the same kind of man.
+More speeches--some opposing--followed, and at last came the chairman to
+close the meeting.  He addressed himself chiefly to a bunch of farmers,
+artisans, and labouring-men near.  After some good-natured raillery at
+political meetings in general, the bigotry of party, the difficulty in
+getting the wheat from the chaff, and some incisive thrusts at those who
+promised the moon and gave a green cheese, who spent their time in
+berating their opponents, he said:
+
+"There's a game that sailors play on board ship--men-o'-war and sailing-
+ships mostly.  I never could quite understand it, nor could any officers
+ever tell me--the fo'castle for the men and the quarter-deck for the
+officers, and what's English to one is Greek to the other.  Well, this
+was all I could see in the game.  They sat about, sometimes talking,
+sometimes not.  All at once a chap would rise and say, 'Allow me to
+speak, me noble lord,' and follow this by hitting some one of the party
+wherever the blow got in easiest--on the head, anywhere!  [Laughter.]
+Then he would sit down seriously, and someone else spoke to his noble
+lordship.  Nobody got angry at the knocks, and Heaven only knows what it
+was all about.  That is much the way with politics, when it is played
+fair.  But here is what I want particularly to say: We are not all born
+the same, nor can we live the same.  One man is born a brute, and another
+a good sort; one a liar, and one an honest man; one has brains, and the
+other hasn't.  Now, I've lived where, as they say, one man is as good as
+another.  But he isn't, there or here.  A weak man can't run with a
+strong.  We have heard to-night a lot of talk for something and against
+something.  It is over.  Are you sure you have got what was meant clear
+in your mind?  [Laughter, and 'Blowed if we'ave!']  Very well; do not
+worry about that.  We have been playing a game of 'Allow me to speak, me
+noble lord!'  And who is going to help you to get the most out of your
+country and your life isn't easy to know.  But we can get hold of a few
+clear ideas, and measure things against them.  I know and have talked
+with a good many of you here ['That's so!  That's so!'], and you know my
+ideas pretty well--that they are honest at least, and that I have seen
+the countries where freedom is 'on the job,' as they say.  Now, don't put
+your faith in men and in a party that cry, 'We will make all things new,'
+to the tune of, 'We are a band of brothers.'  Trust in one that says,
+'You cannot undo the centuries.  Take off the roof, remove a wall, let in
+the air, throw out a wing, but leave the old foundations.'  And that is
+the real difference between the other party and mine; and these political
+games of ours come to that chiefly."
+
+Presently he called for the hands of the meeting.  They were given for
+Mr. Babbs.
+
+Suddenly a man's strong, arid voice came from the crowd:
+
+"'Allow me to speak, me noble lord!' [Great laughter.  Then a pause.]
+Where's my old chum, Jock Lawson?"
+
+The audience stilled.  Gaston's face went grave.  He replied, in a firm,
+clear voice.
+
+"In Heaven, my man.  You'll never see him more."  There was silence for a
+moment, a murmur, then a faint burst of applause.  Presently John Cawley,
+the landlord of "The Whisk o' Barley," made towards Gaston.  Gaston
+greeted him, and inquired after his wife.  He was told that she was very
+ill, and had sent her husband to beg Gaston to come.  Gaston had dreaded
+this hour, though he knew it would come one day.  A woman on a death-bed
+has a right to ask for and get the truth.  He had forborne telling her of
+her son; and she, whenever she had seen him, had contented herself with
+asking general questions, dreading in her heart that Jock had died a
+dreadful or shameful death, or else this gentleman would, voluntarily,
+say more.  But, herself on her way out of the world, as she feared,
+wished the truth, whatever it might be.
+
+Gaston told Cawley that he would drive over at once, and then asked who
+it was had called out at him.  A drunken, poaching fellow, he was told,
+who in all the years since Jock had gone, had never passed the inn
+without stopping to say: "Where's my old chum, Jock Lawson?"  In the past
+he and Jock had been in more than one scrape together.  He had learned
+from Mrs. Cawley that Gaston had known Jock in Canada.
+
+When Cawley had gone, Gaston turned to the other gentlemen present.
+
+"An original speech, upon my word, Belward," said Captain Maudsley.
+
+Mr. Warren Gasgoyne came.
+
+"You are expected to lunch or something to-morrow, Belward, you remember?
+Devil of a speech that!  But, if you will 'allow me to speak, me noble
+lord,' you are the rankest Conservative of us all."
+
+"Don't you know that the easiest constitutional step is from a republic
+to an autocracy, and vice versa?"
+
+"I don't know it, and I don't know how you do it."
+
+"Do what?"
+
+"Make them think as you do."
+
+He waved his hand to the departing crowd.
+
+"I don't.  I try to think as they do.  I am always in touch with the
+primitive mind."
+
+"You ought to do great things here, Belward," said the other seriously.
+"You have the trick; and we need wisdom at Westminster."
+
+"Don't be mistaken; I am only adaptable.  There's frank confession."
+
+At this point Mr. Babbs came up and said good-night in a large, self-
+conscious way.  Gaston hoped that his campaign would not be wasted, and
+the fluffy gentleman retired.  When he got out of earshot in the shadows,
+he turned and shook his fist towards Gaston, saying: "Half-breed
+upstart!"  Then he refreshed his spirits by swearing at his coachman.
+
+Gaston and Jacques drove quickly over to "The Whisk o' Barley."  Gaston
+was now intent to tell the whole truth.  He wished that he had done it
+before; but his motives had been good--it was not to save himself.  Yet
+he shrank.  Presently he thought:
+
+"What is the matter with me?  Before I came here, if I had an idea I
+stuck to it, and didn't have any nonsense when I knew I was right.  I am
+getting sensitive--the thing I find everywhere in this country: fear of
+feeling or giving pain; as though the bad tooth out isn't better than the
+bad tooth in.  When I really get sentimental I'll fold my Arab tent--so
+help me, ye seventy Gods of Yath!"
+
+A little while after he was at Mrs. Cawley's bed, the landlord handing
+him a glass of hot grog, Jock's mother eyeing him feverishly from the
+quilt.  Gaston quietly felt her wrist, counting the pulse-beats; then
+told Cawley to wet a cloth and hand it to him.  He put it gently on the
+woman's head.  The eyes of the woman followed him anxiously.  He sat down
+again, and in response to her questioning gaze, began the story of Jock's
+life as he knew it.
+
+Cawley stood leaning on the foot-board; the woman's face was cowled in
+the quilt with hungry eyes; and Gaston's voice went on in a low monotone,
+to the ticking of the great clock in the next room.  Gaston watched her
+face, and there came to him like an inspiration little things Jock did,
+which would mean more to his mother than large adventures.  Her lips
+moved now and again, even a smile flickered.  At last Gaston came to his
+father's own death and the years that followed; then the events in
+Labrador.
+
+He approached this with unusual delicacy: it needed bravery to look into
+the mother's eyes, and tell the story.  He did not know how dramatically
+he told it--how he etched it without a waste word.  When he came to that
+scene in the Fort, the three men sitting, targets for his bullets,--he
+softened the details greatly.  He did not tell it as he told it at the
+Court, but the simpler, sparser language made it tragically clear.  There
+was no sound from the bed, none from the foot-board, but he heard a door
+open and shut without, and footsteps somewhere near.
+
+How he put the body in the tree, and prayed over it and left it there,
+was all told; and then he paused.  He turned a little sick as he saw the
+white face before him.  She drew herself up, her fingers caught away the
+night-dress at her throat; she stared hard at him for a moment, and then,
+with a wild, moaning voice, cried out:
+
+"You killed my boy!  You killed my boy!  You killed my boy!"
+
+Gaston was about to take her hand, when he heard a shuffle and a rush
+behind him.  He rose, turned swiftly, saw a bottle swinging, threw up his
+hand .  .  .  and fell backwards against the bed.
+
+The woman caught his bleeding head to her breast and hugged it.
+
+"My Jock, my poor boy!" she cried in delirium now.  Cawley had thrown
+his arms about the struggling, drunken assailant--Jock's poaching friend.
+
+The mother now called out to the pinioned man, as she had done to Gaston:
+
+"You have killed my boy!"  She kissed Gaston's bloody face.
+
+A messenger was soon on the way to Ridley Court, and in a little upper
+room Jacques was caring for his master.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+HE FINDS NEW SPONSORS
+
+Gaston lay for many days at "The Whisk o' Barley."  During that time the
+inn was not open to customers.  The woman also for two days hung at the
+point of death, and then rallied.  She remembered the events of the
+painful night, and often asked after Gaston.  Somehow, her horror of her
+son's death at his hands was met by the injury done him now.  She vaguely
+felt that there had been justice and punishment.  She knew that in the
+room at Labrador Gaston Belward had been scarcely less mad than her son.
+
+Gaston, as soon as he became conscious, said that his assailant must be
+got out of the way of the police, and to that end bade Jacques send for
+Mr. Warren Gasgoyne.  Mr. Gasgoyne and Sir William arrived at the same
+time, but Gaston was unconscious again.  Jacques, however, told them what
+his master's wishes were, and they were carried out; Jock's friend
+secretly left England forever.  Sir William and Mr. Gasgoyne got the
+whole tale from the landlord, whom they asked to say nothing publicly.
+
+Lady Belward drove down each day, and sat beside him for a couple of
+hours-silent, solicitous, smoothing his pillow or his wasting hand.  The
+brain had been injured, and recovery could not be immediate.  Hovey the
+housekeeper had so begged to be installed as nurse, that her wish was
+granted, and she was with him night and day.  Now she shook her head at
+him sadly, now talked in broken sentences to herself, now bustled about
+silently, a tyrant to the other servants sent down from the Court.  Every
+day also the headgroom and the huntsman came, and in the village Gaston's
+humble friends discussed the mystery, stoutly defending him when some one
+said it was "more nor gabble, that theer saying o' the poacher at the
+meetin.'"
+
+But the landlord and his wife kept silence, the officers of the law took
+no action, and the town and country newspapers could do no more than
+speak of "A vicious assault upon the heir of Ridley Court."  It had
+become the custom now to leave Ian out of that question.  But the wonder
+died as all wonders do, and Gaston made his fight for health.
+
+The day before he was removed to the Court, Mrs. Cawley was helped up-
+stairs to see him.  She was gaunt and hollow-eyed.  Lady Belward and Mrs.
+Gasgoyne were present.  The woman made her respects, and then stood at
+Gaston's bedside.  He looked up with a painful smile.
+
+"Do you forgive me?" he asked.  "I've almost paid!"
+
+He touched his bandaged head.
+
+"It ain't for mothers to forgi'e the thing," she replied, in a steady
+voice, "but I can forgi'e the man.  'Twere done i' madness--there beant
+the will workin' i' such.  'Twere a comfort that he'd a prayin' over un."
+
+Gaston took the gnarled fingers in his.  It had never struck him how
+dreadful a thing it was--so used had he been to death in many forms--till
+he had told the story to this mother.
+
+"Mrs. Cawley," he said, "I can't make up to you what Jock would have
+been; but I can do for you in one way as much as Jock.  This house is
+yours from to-day."
+
+He drew a deed from the coverlet, and handed it to her.  He had got it
+from Sir William that morning.  The poor and the crude in mind can only
+understand an objective emotion, and the counters for these are this
+world's goods.  Here was a balm in Gilead.  The love of her child was
+real, but the consolation was so practical to Mrs. Cawley that the lips
+which might have cursed, said:
+
+"Ah, sir, the wind do be fittin' the shore lamb!  I' the last Judgen,
+I'll no speak agen 'ee.  I be sore fretted harm come to 'ee."
+
+At this Mrs. Gasgoyne rose, and in her bustling way dismissed the
+grateful peasant, who fondled the deed and called eagerly down the stairs
+to her husband as she went.
+
+Mrs. Gasgoyne then came back, sat down, and said: "Now you needn't fret
+about that any longer--barbarian!" she added, shaking a finger.  "Didn't
+I say that you would get into trouble?  that you would set the country
+talking?  Here you were, in the dead of night, telling ghost stories,
+and raking up your sins, with no cause whatever, instead of in your bed.
+You were to have lunched with us the next day--I had asked Lady Harriet
+to meet you, too!--and you didn't; and you have wretched patches where
+your hair ought to be.  How can you promise that you'll not make a madder
+sensation some day?"
+
+Gaston smiled up at her.  Her fresh honesty, under the guise of banter,
+was always grateful to him.  He shook his head, smiled, and said nothing.
+
+She went on.
+
+"I want a promise that you will do what your godfather and godmother
+will swear for you."
+
+She acted on him like wine.
+
+"Of course, anything.  Who are my godfather and godmother?"
+
+She looked him steadily, warmly in the eyes: "Warren and myself."
+
+Now he understood: his promise to his grandmother and grandfather.
+So, they had spoken!  He was sure that Mrs. Gasgoyne had objected.
+He knew that behind her playful treatment of the subject there was real
+scepticism of himself.  It put him on his mettle, and yet he knew she
+read him deeper than any one else, and flattered him least.
+
+He put out his hand, and took hers.
+
+"You take large responsibilities," he said, "but I will try and justify
+you--honestly, yes."
+
+In her hearty way, she kissed him on the cheek.  "There," she responded,
+"if you and Delia do make up your minds, see that you treat her well.
+And you are to come, just as soon as you are able, to stay at Peppingham.
+Delia, silly child, is anxious, and can't see why she mustn't call with
+me now."
+
+In his room at the Court that night, Gaston inquired of Jacques about
+Alice Wingfield, and was told that on the day of the accident she had
+left with her grandfather for the Continent.  He was not sorry.  For his
+own sake he could have wished an understanding between them.  But now he
+was on the way to marriage, and it was as well that there should be no
+new situations.  The girl could not wish the thing known.  There would be
+left him, in this case, to befriend her should it ever be needed.  He
+remembered the spring of pleasure he felt when he first saw other faces
+like his father's--his grandfather's, his grandmother's.  But this girl's
+was so different to him; having the tragedy of the lawless, that
+unconscious suffering stamped by the mother upon the child.  There was,
+however, nothing to be done.  He must wait.
+
+Two days later Lady Dargan called to inquire after him.  He was lying in
+his study with a book, and Lady Belward sent to ask him if he would care
+to see her and Lord Dargan's nephew, Cluny Vosse.  Lady Belward did not
+come; Sir William brought them.  Lady Dargan came softly to him, smiled
+more with her eyes than her lips, and told him how sorry she had been to
+hear of his illness.  Some months before Gaston had met Cluny Vosse, who
+at once was his admirer.  Gaston liked the youth.  He was fresh, high-
+minded, extravagant, idle; but he had no vices, and no particular vanity
+save for his personal appearance.  His face was ever radiant with health,
+shining with satisfaction.  People liked him, and did not discount it by
+saying that he had nothing in him.  Gaston liked him most because he was
+so wholly himself, without guile, beautifully honest.
+
+Now Cluny sat down, tapped the crown of his hat, looked at him cheerily,
+and said:
+
+"Got in a cracker, didn't he?"
+
+Gaston nodded, amused.
+
+"The fellows at Brooke's had a talkee-talkee, and they'd twenty different
+stories.  Of course it was rot.  We were all cut up though and hoped
+you'd pull through.  Of course there couldn't be any doubt of that--
+you've been through too many, eh?"
+
+Cluny always assumed that Gaston had had numberless tragical adventures
+which, if told, must make Dumas turn in his grave with envy.
+
+Gaston smiled, and laid a hand upon the other's knee.  "I'm not shell-
+proof, Vosse, and it was rather a narrow squeak, I'm told.  But I'm kept,
+you see, for a worse fate and a sadder."
+
+"I say, Belward, you don't mean that!  Your eyes go so queer sometimes,
+that a chap doesn't know what to think.  You ought to live to a hundred.
+You'll have to.  You've got it all--"
+
+"Oh no, my boy, I haven't got anything."  He waved his hand pleasantly
+towards his grandfather.  "I'm on the knees of the gods merely."
+
+Cluny turned on Sir William.
+
+"It isn't any secret, is it, sir?  He gets the lot, doesn't he?"
+
+Sir William's occasional smile came.
+
+"I fancy there's some condition about the plate, the pictures, and the
+title; but I do not suppose that matters meanwhile."
+
+He spoke half-musingly and with a little unconscious irony, and the boy,
+vaguely knowing that there was a cross-current somewhere, drifted.
+
+"No, of course not; he can have fun enough without them, can't he?"
+
+Lady Dargan here soothingly broke in, inquiring about Gaston's illness,
+and showing a tactful concern.  But the nephew persisted:
+
+"I say, Belward, Aunt Sophie was cut up no end when she heard of it.  She
+wouldn't go out to dinner that night at Lord Dunfolly's, and, of course,
+I didn't go.  And I wanted to; for Delia Gasgoyne was to be there, and
+she's ripping."
+
+Lady Dargan, in spite of herself, blushed, but without confusion, and
+Gaston adroitly led the conversation otherwhere.  Presently she said that
+they were to be at their villa in France during the late summer, and if
+he chanced to be abroad would he come?  He said that he intended to visit
+his uncle in Paris, but that afterwards he would be glad to visit them
+for a short time.
+
+She looked astonished.  "With your uncle Ian!"
+
+"Yes.  He is to show me art-life, and all that."
+
+She looked troubled.  He saw that she wished to say something.
+
+"Yes, Lady Dargan?" he asked.
+
+She spoke with fluttering seriousness.
+
+"I asked you once to come to me if you ever needed a friend.  I do not
+wait for that.  I ask you not to go to your uncle."
+
+"Why?"
+
+He was thinking that, despite social artifice and worldliness, she was
+sentimental.
+
+"Because there will be trouble.  I can see it.  You may trust a woman's
+instinct; and I know that man!"  He did not reply at once, but presently
+said:
+
+"I fancy I must keep my promise."
+
+"What is the book you are reading?" she said, changing the subject, for
+Sir William was listening.
+
+He opened it, and smiled musingly.
+
+"It is called Affairs of Some Consequence in the Reign of Charles I.
+In reading it I seemed to feel that it was incorrect, and my mind kept
+wandering away into patches of things--incidents, scenes, bits of talk
+--as I fancied they really were, not apocryphal or 'edited' as here."
+
+"I say," said Cluny, "that's rum, isn't it?"
+
+"For instance," Gaston continued, "this tale of King Charles and
+Buckingham."  He read it.  "Now here is the scene as I picture it."  In
+quick elliptical phrases he gave the tale from a different stand-point.
+
+Sir William stared curiously at Gaston, then felt for some keys in his
+pocket.  He got up and rang the bell.  Gaston was still talking.  He gave
+the keys to Falby with a whispered word.  In a few moments Falby placed a
+small leather box beside Sir William, and retired at a nod.  Sir William
+presently said: "Where did you read those things?"
+
+"I do not know that I ever read them."
+
+"Did your father tell you them?"
+
+"I do not remember so, though he may have."
+
+"Did you ever see this box?"
+
+"Never before."
+
+"You do not know what is in it?"
+
+"Not in the least."
+
+"And you have never seen this key?"
+
+"Not to my knowledge."
+
+"It is very strange."  He opened the box.  "Now, here are private papers
+of Sir Gaston Belward, more than two hundred years old, found almost
+fifty years ago by myself in the office of our family solicitor.
+Listen."
+
+He then began to read from the faded manuscript.  A mysterious feeling
+pervaded the room.  Once or twice Cluny gave a dry nervous kind of laugh.
+Much of what Gaston had said was here in stately old-fashioned language.
+At a certain point the MS. ran:
+
+"I drew back and said, 'As your grace will have it, then--"'
+
+Here Gaston came to a sitting posture, and interrupted.
+
+"Wait, wait!"
+
+He rose, caught one of two swords that were crossed on the wall, and
+stood out.
+
+"This is how it was.  'As your grace will have it, then, to no waste of
+time!'  We fell to.  First he came carefully and made strange feints,
+learned at King Louis's Court, to try my temper.  But I had had these
+tricks of my cousin Secord, and I returned his sport upon him.  Then he
+came swiftly, and forced me back upon the garden wall.  I gave to him
+foot by foot, for he was uncommon swift and dexterous.  He pinched me
+sorely once under the knee, and I returned him one upon the wrist, which
+sent a devilish fire into his eyes.  At that his play became so delicate
+and confusing that I felt I should go dizzy if it stayed; so I tried the
+one great trick cousin Secord taught me, making to run him through, as a
+last effort.  The thing went wrong, but checking off my blunder he
+blundered too,--out of sheer wonder, perhaps, at my bungling,--and I
+disarmed him.  So droll was it that I laughed outright, and he, as quick
+in humour as in temper, stood hand on hip, and presently came to a smile.
+With that my cousin Secord cried: 'The king!  the king!'  I got me up
+quickly--"
+
+Here Gaston, who had in a kind of dream acted the whole scene, swayed
+with faintness, and Cluny caught him, saving him from a fall.  Cluny's
+colour was all gone.  Lady Dargan had sat dazed, and Sir William's face
+was anxious, puzzled.
+
+A few hours later Sir William was alone with Gaston, who was recovered
+and cool.
+
+"Gaston," he said, "I really do not understand this faculty of memory, or
+whatever it is.  Have you any idea how you come by it?"
+
+"Have we any idea how life comes and goes, sir?"
+
+"I confess not.  I confess not, really."
+
+"Well, I'm in the dark about it too; but I sometimes fancy that I'm mixed
+up with that other Gaston."
+
+"It sounds fantastic."
+
+"It is fantastic.  Now, here is this manuscript, and here is a letter I
+wrote this morning.  Put them together."
+
+Sir William did so.
+
+"The handwriting is singularly like."
+
+"Well," continued Gaston, smiling whimsically, "suppose that I am Sir
+Gaston Belward, Baronet, who is thought to lie in the church yonder, the
+title is mine, isn't it?"
+
+Sir William smiled also.
+
+"The evidence is scarce enough to establish succession."
+
+"But there would be no succession.  A previous holder of the title isn't
+dead: ergo, the present holder, has no right."
+
+Gaston had shaded his eyes with his hand, and he was watching Sir
+William's face closely, out of curiosity chiefly.  Sir William regarded
+the thing with hesitating humour.
+
+"Well, well, suppose so.  The property was in the hands of a younger
+branch of the family then.  There was no entail, as now."
+
+"Wasn't there?" said Gaston enigmatically.
+
+He was thinking of some phrases in a manuscript which he had found in
+this box.
+
+"Perhaps where these papers came from there are others," he added.
+
+Sir William lifted his eyebrows ironically.  "I hardly think so."
+
+Gaston laughed, not wishing him to take the thing at all seriously.  He
+continued airily:
+
+"It would be amusing if the property went with the title after all,
+wouldn't it, sir?"
+
+Sir William got to his feet and said testily: "That should never be while
+I lived!"
+
+"Of course not, sir."
+
+Sir William saw the bull, and laughed, heartily for him.
+
+They bade each other good-night.
+
+"I'll have a look in the solicitor's office all the same," said Gaston to
+himself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+HE COMES TO "THE WAKING OF THE FIRE"
+
+A few days afterwards Gaston joined a small party at Peppingham.  Without
+any accent life was made easy for him.  He was alone much, and yet, to
+himself, he seemed to have enough of company.
+
+The situation did not impose itself conspicuously.  Delia gave him no
+especial reason to be vain.  She had not an exceeding wit, but she had
+charm, and her talk was interesting to Gaston, who had come, for the
+first time, into somewhat intimate relations with an English girl.  He
+was struck with her conventional delicacy and honour on one side, and
+the limitation of her ideas on the other.  But with it all she had some
+slight touch of temperament which lifted her from the usual level.  And
+just now her sprightliness was more marked than it had ever been.
+
+Her great hour seemed come to her.  She knew that there had been talk
+among the elders, and what was meant by Gaston's visit.  Still, they were
+not much alone together.  Gaston saw her mostly with others.  Even a
+woman with a tender strain for a man knows what will serve for her
+ascendancy: the graciousness of her disposition, the occasional flash of
+her mother's temper, and her sense of being superior to a situation--the
+gift of every well-bred English girl.
+
+Cluny Vosse was also at the house, and his devotion was divided between
+Delia and Gaston.  Cluny was a great favourite, and Agatha Gasgoyne, who
+had a wild sense of humour, egged him on with her sister, which gave
+Delia enough to do.  At last Cluny, in a burst of confidence, declared
+that he meant to propose to Delia.  Agatha then became serious, and said
+that Delia was at least four years older than himself, that he was just
+her--Agatha's--age, and that the other match would be very unsuitable.
+This put Cluny on Delia's defence, and he praised her youth, and hinted
+at his own elderliness.  He had lived, he had seen It (Cluny called the
+world and all therein "It"), he was aged; he was in the large eye of
+experience; he had outlived the vices and the virtues of his time, which,
+told in his own naive staccato phrases, made Agatha hug herself.  She
+advised him to go and ask Mr. Belward's advice; begged him not to act
+until he had done so.  And Cluny, who was blind as a bat when a woman
+mocked him, went to Gaston and said:
+
+"See, old chap,--I know you don't mind my calling you that--I've come for
+advice.  Agatha said I'd better.  A fellow comes to a time when he says,
+'Here, I want a shop of my own,' doesn't he?  He's seen It, he's had It
+all colours, he's ready for family duties, and the rest.  That's so,
+isn't it?"
+
+Gaston choked back a laugh, and, purposely putting himself on the wrong
+scent, said:
+
+"And does Agatha agree?"
+
+"Agatha?  Come, Belward, that youngster!  Agatha's only in on a sisterly-
+brotherly basis.  Now, see I've got a little load of L s. d., and I'm to
+get more, especially if Uncle Dick keeps on thinking I am artless.  Well,
+why shouldn't I marry?"
+
+"No reason against it, if husband and father in you yearn for bibs and
+petticoats."
+
+"I say, Belward, don't laugh!"
+
+"I never was more serious.  Who is the girl?"
+
+"She looks up to you as I do-of course that's natural; and if it comes
+off, no one'll have a jollier corner chez nous.  It's Delia."
+
+"Delia?  Delia who?"
+
+"Why, Delia Gasgoyne.  I haven't done the thing quite regular, I know.
+I ought to have gone to her people first; but they know all about me,
+and so does Delia, and I'm on the spot, and it wouldn't look well to be
+taking advantage of that with her father and mother-they'd feel bound to
+be hospitable.  So I've just gone on my own tack, and I've come to Agatha
+and you.  Agatha said to ask you if I'd better speak to Delia now."
+
+"My dear Cluny, are you very much in love?"
+
+"That sounds religious, doesn't it--a kind of Nonconformist business?
+I think she's the very finest.  A fellow'd hold himself up, 'd be a deuce
+of a swell--and, hang it all, I hate breakfasting alone!"
+
+"Yes, yes, Cluny; but what about a pew in church, with regular
+attendance, and a justice of the peace, and little Cluny Vosses on the
+carpet?"
+
+Cluny's face went crimson.
+
+"I say, Belward, I've seen It all, of course; I know It backwards, and
+I'm not squeamish, but that sounds--flippant-that, with her."
+
+Gaston reached out and caught the boy's shoulder.  "Don't do it, Cluny.
+Spare yourself.  It couldn't come off.  Agatha knows that, I fancy.  She
+is a little sportsman.  I might let you go and speak; but I think my
+chances are better than yours, Cluny.  Hadn't you better let me try
+first?  Then, if I fail, your chances are still the same, eh?"
+
+Cluny gasped.  His warm face went pale, then shot to purple, and finally
+settled into a grey ruddiness.  "Belward," he said at last, "I didn't
+know; upon my soul, I didn't know, or I'd have cut off my head first."
+
+"My dear Cluny, you shall have your chance; but let me go first, I'm
+older."
+
+"Belward, don't take me for a fool.  Why, my trying what you go to do is
+like--is like--"
+
+Cluny's similes failed to come.
+
+"Like a fox and a deer on the same trail?"
+
+"I don't understand that.  Like a yeomanry steeplechase to Sandown--is
+that it?  Belward, I'm sorry.  Playing it so low on a chap you like!"
+
+"Don't say a word, Cluny; and, believe me, you haven't yet seen all of
+It.  There's plenty of time.  When you really have had It, you will learn
+to say of a woman, not that she's the very finest, and that you hate
+breakfasting alone, but something that'll turn your hair white, or keep
+you looking forty when you're sixty."
+
+That evening Gaston dressed with unusual care.  When he entered the
+drawing-room, he looked as handsome as a man need in this world.
+His illness had refined his features and form, and touched off his
+cheerfulness with a fine melancholy.  Delia glowed as she saw the
+admiring glances sent his way, but burned with anger when she also saw
+that he was to take in Lady Gravesend to dinner; for Lady Gravesend had
+spoken slightingly of Gaston--had, indeed, referred to his "nigger
+blood!"  And now her mother had sent her in to dinner on his arm, she
+affable, too affable by a great deal.  Had she heard the dry and subtle
+suggestion of Gaston's talk, she would, however, have justified her
+mother.
+
+About half past nine Delia was in the doorway, talking to one of the
+guests, who, at the call of some one else, suddenly left her.  She heard
+a voice behind her.  "Will you not sing?"
+
+She thrilled, and turned to say: "What shall I sing, Mr. Belward?"
+
+"The song I taught you the other day--'The Waking of the Fire.'"
+
+"But I've never sung it before anybody."
+
+"Do I not count?--But, there, that's unfair!  Believe me, you sing it
+very well."
+
+She lifted her eyes to his:
+
+"You do not pay compliments, and I believe you.  Your 'very well' means
+much.  If you say so, I will do my best."
+
+"I say so.  You are amenable.  Is that your mood to-night?"  He smiled
+brightly.
+
+Her eyes flashed with a sweet malice.
+
+"I am not at all sure.  It depends on how your command to sing is
+justified."
+
+"You cannot help but sing well."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I will help you--make you."
+
+This startled her ever so little.  Was there some fibre of cruelty in
+him, some evil in this influence he had over her?  She shrank, and yet
+again she said that she would rather have his cruelty than another man's
+tenderness, so long as she knew that she had his--  She paused, and did
+not say the word.  She met his eyes steadily--their concentration dazed
+her--then she said almost coldly, her voice sounding far away:
+
+"How, make me?"
+
+"How fine, how proud!" he said to himself, then added:
+
+"I meant 'make' in the helpful sense.  I know the song: I've heard it
+sung, I've sung it; I've taught you; my mind will act on yours, and you
+will sing it well."
+
+"Won't you sing it yourself?  Do, please."
+
+"No; to-night I wish to hear you."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I will tell you later.  Can you play the accompaniment?  If not, I--"
+
+"Oh, will you?  I could sing it then, I think.  You played it so
+beautifully the other day--with all those strange chords."
+
+He smiled.
+
+"It is one of the few things that I can play.  I always had a taste for
+music; and up in one of the forts there was an old melodeon, so I
+hammered away for years.  I had to learn difficult things at the start,
+or none at all, or else those I improvised; and that's how I can play one
+or two of Beethoven's symphonies pretty well, and this song, and a few
+others, and go a cropper with a waltz.  Will you come?"
+
+They moved to the piano.  No one at first noticed them.  When he sat
+down, he said:
+
+"You remember the words?"
+
+"Yes, I learned them by heart."
+
+"Good!"
+
+He gently struck the chords.  His gentleness had, however, a firmness, a
+deep persuasiveness, which drew every face like a call.  A few chords
+waving, as it were, over the piano, and then he whispered:
+
+"Now."
+
+"Please go on for a minute longer," she begged.
+
+"My throat feels dry all at once."
+
+"Face away from the rest, towards me," he said gently.
+
+She did so.  His voice took a note softly, and held it.  Presently her
+voice as softly joined it, his stopped, and hers went on:
+
+                   "In the lodge of the Mother of Men,
+                    In the land of Desire,
+                    Are the embers of fire,
+                    Are the ashes of those who return,
+                    Who return to the world:
+                    Who flame at the breath
+                    Of the Mockers of Death.
+                    O Sweet, we will voyage again
+                    To the camp of Love's fire,
+                         Nevermore to return!"
+
+"How am I doing?" she said at the end of this verse.  She really did not
+know--her voice seemed an endless distance away.  But she felt the
+stillness in the drawing-room.
+
+"Well," he said.  "Now for the other.  Don't be afraid; let your voice,
+let yourself, go."
+
+"I can't let myself go."
+
+"Yes, you can: just swim with the music."
+
+She did swim with it.  Never before had Peppingham drawing-room heard a
+song like this; never before, never after, did any of Delia Gasgoyne's
+friends hear her sing as she did that night.  And Lady Gravesend
+whispered for a week afterwards that Delia Gasgoyne sang a wild love song
+in the most abandoned way with that colonial Belward.  Really a song of
+the most violent sentiment!
+
+There had been witchery in it all.  For Gaston lifted the girl on the
+waves of his music, and did what he pleased with her, as she sang:
+
+              "O love, by the light of thine eye
+               We will fare oversea,
+               We will be
+               As the silver-winged herons that rest
+               By the shallows,
+               The shallows of sapphire stone;
+               No more shall we wander alone.
+               As the foam to the shore
+               Is my spirit to thine;
+               And God's serfs as they fly,--
+               The Mockers of Death
+               They will breathe on the embers of fire:
+               We shall live by that breath,--
+               Sweet, thy heart to my heart,
+               As we journey afar,
+               No more, nevermore, to return!"
+
+When the song was ended there was silence, then an eager murmur, and
+requests for more; but Gaston, still lengthening the close of the
+accompaniment, said quietly:
+
+"No more.  I wanted to hear you sing that song only."
+
+He rose.
+
+"I am so very hot," she said.
+
+"Come into the hall."
+
+They passed into the long corridor, and walked up and down, for a time in
+silence.
+
+"You felt that music?" he asked at last.
+
+"As I never felt music before," she replied.
+
+"Do you know why I asked you to sing it?"
+
+"How should I know?"
+
+"To see how far you could go with it."
+
+"How far did I go?"
+
+"As far as I expected."
+
+"It was satisfactory?"
+
+"Perfectly."
+
+"But why--experiment--on me?"
+
+"That I might see if you were not, after all, as much a barbarian as I."
+
+"Am I?"
+
+"No.  That was myself singing as well as you.  You did not enjoy it
+altogether, did you?"
+
+"In a way, yes.  But--shall I be honest?  I felt, too, as if, somehow,
+it wasn't quite right; so much--what shall I call it?"
+
+"So much of old Adam and the Garden?  Sit down here for a moment, will
+you?"
+
+She trembled a little, and sat.
+
+"I want to speak plainly and honestly to you," he said, looking earnestly
+at her.  "You know my history--about my wife who died in Labrador, and
+all the rest?"
+
+"Yes, they have told me."
+
+"Well, I have nothing to hide, I think; nothing more that you ought to
+know: though I've been a scamp one way and another."
+
+"'That I ought to know'?" she repeated.
+
+"Yes: for when a man asks a woman to be his wife, he should be prepared
+to open the cupboard of skeletons."  She was silent; her heart was
+beating so hard that it hurt her.
+
+"I am going to ask you to be my wife, Delia."
+
+She was silent, and sat motionless, her hands clasped in her lap.
+
+He went on
+
+"I don't know that you will be wise to accept me, but if you will take
+the risk--"
+
+"Oh, Gaston, Gaston!" she said, and her hands fluttered towards his.
+
+An hour later, he said to her, as they parted for the night:
+
+"I hope, with all my heart, that you will never repent of it, Delia."
+
+"You can make me not repent of it.  It rests with you, Gaston; indeed,
+indeed, all with you."
+
+"Poor girl!" he said, unconsciously, as he entered his room.  He could
+not have told why he said it.  "Why will you always sit up for me,
+Brillon?" he asked a moment afterwards.
+
+Jacques saw that something had occurred.  "I have nothing else to do,
+sir," he replied.  "Brillon," Gaston added presently, "we're in a devil
+of a scrape now."
+
+"What shall we do, monsieur?"
+
+"Did we ever turn tail?"
+
+"Yes, from a prairie fire."
+
+"Not always.  I've ridden through."
+
+"Alors, it's one chance in ten thousand!"
+
+"There's a woman to be thought of--Jacques."
+
+"There was that other time."
+
+"Well, then?"
+
+Presently Jacques said: "Who is she, monsieur?"
+
+Gaston did not answer.  He was thinking hard.  Jacques said no more.  The
+next morning early the guests knew who the woman was, and by noon Jacques
+also.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+HE MAKES A GALLANT CONQUEST
+
+Gaston let himself drift.  The game of love and marriage is exciting, the
+girl was affectionate and admiring, the world was genial, and all things
+came his way.  Towards the end of the hunting season Captain Maudsley had
+an accident.  It would prevent him riding to hounds again, and at his
+suggestion, backed by Lord Dunfolly and Lord Dargan, Gaston became Master
+of the Hounds.  His grandfather and great-grandfather had been Master of
+the Hounds before him.  Hunting was a keen enjoyment--one outlet for wild
+life in him--and at the last meet of the year he rode in Captain
+Maudsley's place.  They had a good run, and the taste of it remained with
+Gaston for many a day; he thought of it sometimes as he rode in the Park
+now every morning--with Delia and her mother.
+
+Jacques and his broncho came no more, or if they did it was at
+unseasonable hours, and then to be often reprimanded (and twice arrested)
+for furious riding.  Gaston had a bad moment when he told Jacques that he
+need not come with him again.  He did it casually, but, cool as he was,
+a cold sweat came on his cheek.  He had to take a little brandy to steady
+himself--yet he had looked into menacing rifle-barrels more than once
+without a tremor.  It was clear, on the face of it, that Delia and her
+mother should be his companions in the Park, and not this grave little
+half-breed; but, somehow, it got on his nerves.  He hesitated for days
+before he could cast the die against Jacques.  It had been the one open
+bond of the old life; yet the man was but a servant, and to be treated as
+such, and was, indeed, except on rarest occasions.  If Delia had known
+that Gaston balanced the matter between her and Jacques, her indignation
+might perhaps have sent matters to a crisis.  But Gaston did the only
+possible thing; and the weeks drifted on.
+
+Happy?  It was inexplicable even to himself that at times, when he left
+Delia, he said unconsciously: "Well, it's a pity!"
+
+But she was happy in her way.  His dark, mysterious face with its
+background of abstraction, his unusual life, distinguished presence,
+and the fact that people of great note sought his conversation, all
+strengthened the bonds, and deepened her imagination; and imagination is
+at the root of much that passes for love.  Gaston was approached at Lord
+Dargan's house by the Premier himself.  It was suggested that he should
+stand for a constituency in the Conservative interest.  Lord Faramond,
+himself picturesque, acute, with a keen knowledge of character and a
+taste for originality, saw material for a useful supporter--fearless,
+independent, with a gift for saying ironical things, and some primitive
+and fundamental principles well digested.
+
+Gaston, smiling, said that he would only be a buffalo fretting on a
+chain.
+
+Lord Faramond replied:
+
+"And why the chain?"  He followed this up by saying: "It is but a case of
+playing lion-tamer down there.  Have one little gift all your own, know
+when to impose it, and you have the pleasure of feeling that your fingers
+move a great machine, the greatest in the world--yes the very greatest.
+There is Little Grapnel just vacant: the faithful Glynn is gone.  Come:
+if you will, I'll send my secretary to-morrow morning-eh?"
+
+"You are not afraid of the buffalo, sir?"
+
+Lord Faramond's fingers touched his arm, drummed it "My greatest need--
+one to roar as gently as the sucking-dove."
+
+"But what if I, not knowing the rules of the game, should think myself
+on the corner of the veldt or in an Indian's tepee, and hit out?"
+
+"You do not carry derringers?"
+
+He smiled.  "No; but--"
+
+He glanced down at his arms.
+
+"Well, well; that will come one day, perhaps!"  Lord Faramond paused,
+abstracted, then added: "But not through you.  Good-bye, then, good-bye.
+Little Grapnel in ten days!"
+
+And it was so.  Little Grapnel was Conservative.  It was mostly a matter
+of nomination, and in two weeks Gaston, in a kind of dream, went down to
+Westminster, lunched with Lord Faramond, and was introduced to the House.
+The Ladies Gallery was full, for the matter was in all the papers, and a
+pretty sensation had been worked up one way and another.
+
+That night, after dinner, Gaston rose to make his maiden speech on a bill
+dealing with an imminent social question.  He was not an amateur.  Time
+upon time he had addressed gatherings in the North, and had once stood at
+the bar of the Canadian Commons to plead the cause of the half-breeds.
+He was pale, but firm, and looked striking.  His eyes went slowly round
+the House, and he began in a low, clear, deliberate voice, which got
+attention at once.  The first sentence was, however, a surprise to every
+one, and not the least to his own party, excepting Lord Faramond.  He
+disclaimed detailed and accurate knowledge of the subject.  He said this
+with an honesty which took away the breath of the House.  In a quiet,
+easy tone he then referred to what had been previously said in the
+debate.
+
+The first thing he did was to crumble away with a regretful kind of
+superiority the arguments of two Conservative speakers, to the sudden
+amusement of the Opposition, who presently cheered him.  He looked up as
+though a little surprised, waited patiently, and went on.  The iconoclasm
+proceeded.  He had one or two fixed ideas in his mind, simple principles
+on social questions of which he had spoken to his leader, and he never
+wavered from the sight of them, though he had yet to state them.  The
+Premier sat, head cocked, with an ironical smile at the cheering, but he
+was wondering whether, after all, his man was sure; whether he could
+stand this fire, and reverse his engine quite as he intended.  One of the
+previous speakers was furious, came over and appealed to Lord Faramond,
+who merely said, "Wait."
+
+Gaston kept on.  The flippant amusement of the Opposition continued.
+Something, however, in his grim steadiness began to impress his own party
+as the other, while from more than one quarter of the House there came a
+murmur of sympathy.  His courage, his stone-cold strength, the disdain
+which was coming into his voice, impressed them, apart from his argument
+or its bearing on the previous debate.  Lord Faramond heard the
+occasional murmurs of approval and smiled.  Then there came a striking
+silence, for Gaston paused.  He looked towards the Ladies Gallery.  As if
+in a dream--for his brain was working with clear, painful power--he saw,
+not Delia nor her mother, nor Lady Dargan, but Alice Wingfield!  He had a
+sting, a rush in his blood.  He felt that none had an interest in him
+such as she: shamed, sorrowful, denied the compensating comfort which his
+brother's love might give her.  Her face, looking through the barriers,
+pale, glowing, anxious, almost weird, seemed set to the bars of a cage.
+
+Gaston turned upon the House, and flashed a glance towards Lord Faramond,
+who, turned round on the Treasury Bench, was looking up at him.  He began
+slowly to pit against his former startling admissions the testimony of
+his few principles, and to buttress them on every side with apposite
+observations, naive, pungent.  Presently there came a poignant edge to
+his trailing tones.  After giving the subject new points of view, showing
+him to have studied Whitechapel as well as Kicking Horse Pass, he
+contended that no social problem could be solved by a bill so crudely
+radical, so impractical.
+
+He was saying: "In the history of the British Parliament--" when some
+angry member cried out, "Who coached you?"
+
+Gaston's quick eye found the man.
+
+"Once," he answered instantly, "one honourable gentleman asked that of
+another in King Charles's Parliament, and the reply then is mine now--
+'You, sir!'"
+
+"How?" returned the puzzled member.
+
+Gaston smiled:
+
+"The nakedness of the honourable gentleman's mind!"
+
+The game was in his hands.  Lord Faramond twisted a shoulder with
+satisfaction, tossed a whimsical look down the line of the Treasury
+Bench, and from that Bench came unusual applause.
+
+"Where the devil did he get it?" queried a Minister.
+
+"Out on the buffalo-trail," replied Lord Faramond.  "Good fellow!"
+
+In the Ladies Gallery, Delia clasped her mother's hand with delight; in
+the Strangers Gallery, a man said softly, "Not so bad, Cadet."
+
+Alice Wingfield's face had a light of aching pleasure.  "Gaston, Gaston!"
+she said, in a whisper heard only by the woman sitting next to her, who
+though a stranger gave a murmur of sympathy.
+
+Gaston made his last effort in a comparison of the state of the English
+people now and before she became Cromwell's Commonwealth, and then
+incisively traced the social development onwards.  It was the work of a
+man with a dramatic nature and a mathematical turn.  He put the time,
+the manners, the movements, the men, as in a picture.
+
+Presently he grew scornful.  His words came hotly, like whip-lashes.
+He rose to force and power, though his voice was never loud, rather
+concentrated, resonant.  It dropped suddenly to a tone of persuasiveness
+and conciliation, and declaring that the bill would be merely vicious
+where it meant to be virtuous, ended with the question:
+
+"Shall we burn the house to roast the pig?"
+
+"That sounds American," said the member for Burton-Halsey, "but he hasn't
+an accent.  Pig is vulgar though--vulgar."
+
+"Make it Lamb--make it Lamb!" urged his neighbour.
+
+Meanwhile both sides applauded.  Maiden speeches like this were not
+common.  Lord Faramond turned round to him.  Another member made way
+and Gaston leaned towards the Premier, who nodded and smiled.  "Most
+excellent buffalo!" he said.
+
+"One day we will chain you--to the Treasury Bench."
+
+Gaston smiled.
+
+"You are thought prudent, sir!"
+
+"Ah!  an enemy hath said this."
+
+Gaston looked towards the Ladies Gallery.  Delia's eyes were on him;
+Alice was gone.
+
+A half-hour later he stood in the lobby, waiting for Mrs. Gasgoyne, Lady
+Dargan, and Delia to come.  He had had congratulations in the House; he
+was having them now.  Presently some one touched him on the arm.
+
+"Not so bad, Cadet."
+
+Gaston turned and saw his uncle.  They shook hands.  "You've a gift that
+way," Ian Belward continued, "but to what good?  Bless you, the pot on
+the crackling thorns!  Don't you find it all pretty hollow?"
+
+Gaston was feeling reaction from the nervous work.  "It is exciting."
+
+"Yes, but you'll never have it again as to-night.  The place reeks with
+smugness, vanity, and drudgery.  It's only the swells--Derby, Gladstone,
+and the few--who get any real sport out of it.  I can show you much more
+amusing things."
+
+"For instance?"
+
+"'Hast thou forgotten me?' You hungered for Paris and Art and the joyous
+life.  Well, I'm ready.  I want you.  Paris, too, is waiting, and a good
+cuisine in a cheery menage.  Sup with me at the Garrick, and I'll tell you.
+Come along.  Quis separabit?"
+
+"I have to wait for Mrs. Gasgoyne--and Delia."
+
+"Delia!  Delia!  Goddess of proprieties, has it come to that!"
+
+He saw a sudden glitter in Gaston's eyes, and changed his tone.
+
+"Well, an' a man will he will, and he must be wished good-luck.  So,
+good-luck to you!  I'm sorry, though, for that cuisine in Paris, and the
+grand picnic at Fontainebleau, and Moban and Cerise.  But it can't be
+helped."
+
+He eyed Gaston curiously.  Gaston was not in the least deceived.  His
+uncle added presently, "But you will have supper with me just the same?"
+
+Gaston consented, and at this point the ladies appeared.  He had a thrill
+of pleasure at hearing their praises, but, somehow, of all the fresh
+experiences he had had in England, this, the weightiest, left him least
+elated.  He had now had it all: the reaction was begun, and he knew it.
+
+"Well, Ian Belward, what mischief are you at now?" said Mrs. Gasgoyne.
+
+"A picture merely, and to offer homage.  How have you tamed our lion,
+and how sweetly does he roar!  I feed him at my Club to-night."
+
+"Ian Belward, you are never so wicked as when you ought most to be
+decent.--I wish I knew your place in this picture," she added brusquely.
+
+"Merely a little corner at their fireside."  He nodded towards Delia and
+Gaston.
+
+"The man has sense, and Delia is my daughter!"
+
+"Precisely why I wish a place in their affections."
+
+"Why don't you marry one of the women you have--spoiled, and spend the
+rest of your time in living yourself down?  You are getting old."
+
+"For their own sakes, I don't.  Put that to my credit.  I'll have but
+one mistress only as the sand gets low.  I've been true to her."
+
+"You, true to anything!"
+
+"The world has said so."
+
+"Nonsense!  You couldn't be."
+
+"Visit my new picture in three months--my biggest thing.  You will say
+my mistress fares well at my hands."
+
+"Mere talk.  I have seen your mistress, and before every picture I have
+thought of those women!  A thing cannot be good at your price: so don't
+talk that sentimental stuff to me."
+
+"Be original; you said that to me thirty years ago."
+
+"I remember perfectly: that did not require much sense."
+
+"No; you tossed it off, as it were.  Yet I'd have made you a good
+husband.  You are the most interesting woman I've ever met."
+
+"The compliment is not remarkable.  Now, Ian Belward, don't try to say
+clever things.  And remember that I will have no mischief-making."
+
+"At thy command--"
+
+"Oh, cease acting, and take Sophie to her carriage."  Two hours later,
+Delia Gasgoyne sat in her bedroom wondering at Gaston's abstraction
+during the drive home.  Yet she had a proud elation at his success,
+and a happy tear came to her eye.
+
+Meanwhile Gaston was supping with his uncle.  Ian was in excellent
+spirits: brilliant, caustic, genial, suggestive.  After a little while
+Gaston rose to the temper of his host.  Already the scene in the Commons
+was fading from him, and when Ian proposed Paris immediately, he did not
+demur.  The season was nearly over,
+
+Ian said; very well, why remain?  His attendance at the House?  Well, it
+would soon be up for the session.  Besides, the most effective thing he
+could do was to disappear for the time.  Be unexpected--that was the key
+to notoriety.  Delia Gasgoyne?  Well, as Gaston had said, they were to
+meet in the Mediterranean in September; meanwhile a brief separation
+would be good for both.  Last of all--he did not wish to press it--but
+there was a promise!
+
+Gaston answered quietly, at last: "I will redeem the promise."
+
+"When?"
+
+"Within thirty-six hours."
+
+"That is, you will be at my studio in Paris within thirty-six hours from
+now?"
+
+"That is it."
+
+"Good!  I shall start at eight to-morrow morning.  You will bring your
+horse, Cadet?"
+
+"Yes, and Brillon."
+
+"He isn't necessary."  Ian's brow clouded slightly.
+
+"Absolutely necessary."
+
+"A fantastic little beggar.  You can get a better valet in France.  Why
+have one at all?"
+
+"I shall not decline from Brillon on a Parisian valet.  Besides, he comes
+as my camarade."
+
+"Goth!  Goth!  My friend the valet!  Cadet, you're a wonderful fellow,
+but you'll never fit in quite."
+
+"I don't wish to fit in; things must fit me."  Ian smiled to himself.
+
+"He has tasted it all--it's not quite satisfying--revolution next!  What
+a smash-up there'll be!  The romantic, the barbaric overlaps.  Well, I
+shall get my picture out of it, and the estate too."
+
+Gaston toyed with his wine-glass, and was deep in thought.  Strange to
+say, he was seeing two pictures.  The tomb of Sir Gaston in the little
+church at Ridley: A gipsy's van on the crest of a common, and a girl
+standing in the doorway.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Down in her heart, loves to be mastered
+I don't wish to fit in; things must fit me
+Imagination is at the root of much that passes for love
+Live and let live is doing good
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRESPASSER, BY PARKER, V2 ***
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