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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 73273 ***







  THE
  FRANTIC MASTER


  BY

  DOUGLAS PULLEYNE

  AUTHOR OF "SPRING SORREL"



"And in particular I may mention Sophocles the poet, who was once
asked in my presence, 'How do you feel about love, Sophocles?  Are
you still capable of it?'  To which he replied, 'Hush, if you please;
to my great delight I have escaped from it, and feel as if I had
escaped from a frantic and savage master.'"

_The Republic of Plato._



  CHAPMAN
  AND HALL LD.

  LONDON : MCMXXVII




_AUTHOR'S NOTE_

_The incident, in essentials true, of the soldiers in the railway
carriage, overheard by "Cyprian," is the seed from which this book
grew.  To explain his attitude, it is, therefore, included with
acknowledgments to that Editor of the_ "PIONEER" _who first recorded
it for me.  "Shoan and the Mermaid" is also true, as an example of a
tale told to the Nicobarese by a traveller, and retold by them, and
may be found in Sir Richard Temple's Census Report, preserved to the
best of my belief in the Offices of the Chief Commissioner in the
Andamans._

_I make no apologies to my old friends, Scarecrow, Friend-of-England
and others for describing them under their own names, feeling sure
that they would expect no evil magic to come of it.  To the workers
of the Mission at Car Nicobar, one of whom it is well-known spent
twelve years in the islands translating the Prayer Book into
Nicobarese, I would say that little Jellybrand is only the portrait
of a type I have met--of which is the Kingdom of Heaven, and which
neither looks for nor will find recognition on earth for much simple
heroism._

_A somewhat delightful brother of mine may be inclined to suspect a
portrait in "Peter."  Let me assure him that I have known many
Peters._



  _Printed in Great Britain
  by Burleigh Ltd., at_ THE BURLEIGH PRESS, _Bristol_




WRITTEN FOR

A SOLDIER, A DOCTOR

AND

A SCIENTIST




YOU THREE,

This fulfilled promise, possibly, by now, nearly forgotten by you,
will find the four of us in different countries, or even different
continents; but find you it will, to recall to your minds a memory of
five long weeks, during which we formed a perfect square; when, alike
under the Colombo palms or the hot rocks of Aden, among the lights of
Port Said or in the shadow of Gibraltar, the discussion, ever and
again, would veer round to that which the fool hath said in his heart.

People on this earth evolve and alter; it is to you, as I knew you
then, that this is addressed.  Try to put back the clock and think as
you thought then.

I have still in your neat hand-writing, "C"--I wonder whether your
prescriptions are as clear to read?--the account of your conversion
to that Spiritualistic Theosophy which used to make "L.B." impatient.
I inserted the page in the first book I wrote for you all, but which,
to the agent's surprise, I suddenly withdrew, doubting lest I was
still too near the Three of you and those endless conversations to
have made my characters impersonal enough and, also, doubting the
fairness of putting into cold print anything which had been given me
in the special circumstances of our friendship.

So Cyprian and Ferlie come late on the scene to show you by their
problem much that I have left unsaid (even to you, "L.B.") during the
star-spangled nights in tropical waters and, afterwards, in the grey
streets of Westminster and those greyer and darker streets elsewhere,
down which the Other Half live and the Men in Black go to and fro.

Let me say now, since it was hardly permitted for me to tell you
then, that what you did was one of the bravest things I have ever
known a man do.  This, in case you have, in retrospection, doubted
and regretted the impulse as abnormal or unbalanced.

Some travellers across my horizon last winter recognized your
photograph, and I gathered from them that you are now on the way to
be reckoned among the Senior and the Great.

To you, "C," I have always wished to confess, in acknowledgment of
your wisdom as physician and psychologist, that your warning nearly
came true and, two years ago, I thought a great deal about it, and
you, in hospital.

And of you, "L.L.": I have often wondered whether you found your
Golden Girl according to Le Gallienne?  Well, I owe much to the
passing of our ships: hence this dedication.

I have only the one wish for you all Three, but particularly will
"L.B." understand it: it is, that to the end of the voyage you may be
able to trust the Pilot you have chosen.

Under a signature only part familiar to you,

  Yours,
      H. E. DOUGLAS-PULLEYNE




THE FRANTIC MASTER



CHAPTER I

When a man has been turned down by the Only Girl (although she isn't,
and never was) and, subsequently, finds her present in the same batch
of dinner-guests as himself, it is hardly to be expected that he will
prove the life and soul of the party.

But, thought Mrs. Carmichael, vexed with herself for a blundering
hostess who ought to have known, and still more vexed with Cyprian
Sterne for not having waited until after the 17th to try his luck
with Muriel, there was no need for him to gloom at his soup as if he
were gauging its depths for a suicidal dive and there was no need for
him to have waved aside the champagne.  Champagne was clearly
indicated on the occasion, medicinally, if not (as she felt inclined
to insist, herself, despite appearances) in felicitation.

Cyprian always showed himself so ridiculously sensitive.  And Muriel
looked so ... adamant.  Yes, that was the word; hard and bright like
a crystal prism you could not see through clearly, however often the
attractive suggestion of buried rainbows within might tempt you to
hold it close to your eyes.  With the closeness even the rainbows
became blurred.

"An incarnation of the three B's which constitute the Perfect Woman,"
said her men-admirers.

Brain, Beauty and Breeding.  All by heredity.  No wonder she behaved
as if she had the right to wealth also, of a standard not to be
extracted from the scholarly pockets of Cyprian and his like.

Had he a like?  Mrs. Carmichael doubted.  She wondered what mislaid
edition of Persian verse or Grecian ethics was, even now, spoiling
the symmetry of his evening coat.  A little bowed, the shoulders,
even when he stood upright.  The scrutiny of the very blue eyes a
little fixed when he addressed you with that air of seeing behind
things which betrays the short-sighted.  Interesting, the long dreamy
face, but hardly handsome.  And his acknowledged cleverness did not
flash in your face like Muriel's, so that, waiving her awareness of
his Double Firsts at Oxford and all that, she had been heard to tick
him off as "a dry old stick."  Encouraging his transparent admiration
the while.  Minx!

One had wished he would hurry up and propose and get the inevitable
yearnings for a premature grave over and then forget.  And now he had
completed the first item on that programme--most inconsiderately
before the 17th--and the yearnings were upon him and he was ruining
his end of the dinner-party.

Muriel sat opposite him and it was comprehensible that he should not
want to look at her and, therefore, incomprehensible why he insisted
on trying to.

As usual, she was worth looking at.  Those very fair women,
particularly when dressed in soft watery greens, recalled old legends
of sirens who floated gold hair about their insinuating bodies,
luring mankind by music and provocative laughter to its destruction
despite the warning, eternally present, of white bones on the sand.

A pity that Cyprian's mental vision was as myopic as his physical
when it came to those bones.

Mrs. Carmichael could see them quite clearly herself: here, the skull
of Major Ames (a nice little man, and of course, that hunting tragedy
_had_ proved an accident, although at the time They said...) there,
the femur, rather nobbly, of Maurice Waring who had parted, not
exactly with his life, to be sure, but certainly with his wife since
sighting the siren's shining head.  But those two had never got on
anyhow, and if, eventually, he managed the divorce ... how much more
nearly would he and Muriel prove birds of a feather than she and poor
Cyprian with his good old-fashioned conviction that this modern
laxity in matrimonial matters was a national menace.  Refreshing, to
find a man like Cyprian, even though as he was not safely religious
one was inclined to wonder, when it came to personal influence, would
Muriel...?  Mrs. Carmichael's subconscious musings (for consciously
she was smiling eager attention to ex-Colonel Maddock's--he was now,
by virtue of a dead American wife, by way of being a millionaire,
which is far better--account of his last yachting cruise, and praying
Providence for the strength and the strategy to resist suggestions
that she and Robin should join him next time) were shattered by the
despairing howl of what sounded like a soul in torment.  Only, it
emanated from regions too nearly at the top of the house to be
described as "nether."

"It's that child again," remarked Robin accusingly down the long
table, interrupted in an intense discussion with Miss Mabel Clement,
the playwright: "I have always said we would suffer for it if you
were so weak with her in the beginning."

"To any child born in the East, English nursery-life is impossibly
terrifying," and Mrs. Carmichael apologetically sought the support of
her guests.  "Since Peter went to school she has had to sleep alone.
It's all very well for Robin to call me weak but I can't believe it
is good for a child's nerves to..."

Another wail crescendoed to the uttermost heights of horror and died
away.

"That noise does not improve mine," Robin Carmichael answered dryly:
"What is the nurse thinking of?"

"It's her evening out."

And, inwardly, his wife sighed for their return to Burma where
servants did not have evenings out, and ... and people were too
enslaved to official etiquette to show their feelings at
dinner-parties.

A chair grated harshly back, rumpling the rug on the polished parquet
floor.

"Let me go up to her for a moment," said Cyprian, "I undertook to
visit the nursery when I arrived but was told she had gone to sleep."

Well, if it would take his mind off himself and his stricken face
from the vicinity of the Hon. Mrs. Porter, who was beginning to wear
a worried look.  Mrs. Carmichael knew that Robin would say that it
was all wrong, of course, in the morning, but she could hardly let
Ferlie howl throughout dinner and, if the parlour-maid went up, Rose
would have to hand round the fish single-handed and she was under
notice to go, and therefore, under no obligation to behave.  In Burma
there had always been someone to sit with Ferlie if she woke.

"Tell her to go to sleep at once then," and Ferlie's mother favoured
Cyprian with an indulgent smile.  His fondness for the child was
really too quaint.  In the circumstances, pathetic.

The incident might well arouse Muriel's better nature ... but no, not
quite.

It would, in all likelihood, encourage her worse one, since she was
no character in a book written with a mission behind it.  Already her
clear eyes were glinting humorously and something she remarked to
Captain Wright, in an undertone, had just made that young gentleman,
who never at any time required much encouragement to giggle, choke
violently into his napkin.  Why couldn't Cyprian realize that he
didn't in the least want Muriel, but a Womanly Woman of Yesterday?

* * * * * *

Meanwhile, Cyprian, incapable of perceiving his desire for any woman,
save one who was the figment of his own imagination, clothed in a
blurred semblance to Muriel Vane, mounted the stairs to an airy room
with a sloping roof which lent queer profundities to the dancing
shadows born of Ferlie's night-light.  Found Ferlie sitting up among
the pillows with the sheet over her head and the fear of the devil in
her soul.  Ferlie, at seven, was afraid of darkness, being
accidentally buried alive, and wolves.  Not lions and tigers: only
wolves.  This, since she had never seen a wolf; though tigers,
looking loose and heavy, had been marched across her horizon more
than once by excitedly shouting coolies, when everyone was in holiday
camp and Mr. Carmichael had been out shooting.  They inspired
sympathy rather than respect in that condition, and lions, naturally,
slipped into the same category of beasts one's father could, if he so
desired, bring home on poles and transform into carpets for the
bungalow.  Wolves were different.  She had a book concerning their
activities in a land called Siberia.  They chased people there for
miles and miles over stuff like ground-rice pudding, commonly known
as "snow," and even ate the sleigh.  England, in which she now found
herself, might very easily resemble Siberia in this particular: it
was cold also, and snow came with cold.  The birth of the
being-buried-alive fear dated from a conversation overheard between
her parents anent the accuracy of the Bible with regard to the
reappearance from the grave of one, Lazarus.

Her father was a thoughtful sceptic, but Ferlie did not find him out
for many years.  Her mother's views were founded on the Book of
Common Prayer and the story, "There, but for the Grace of God ..."
though she was divided in her mind whether Bunyan had invented the
one and Gladstone said the other, or vice versa.  Her own father, a
bishop, and a busy one, had rather taken her catechism for granted
when he confirmed her, on the assumption that a daughter educated in
a godly ecclesiastical household and never exposed to the youthful
heresies of a boarding-school must necessarily be in a perpetual
state of knowledgeable grace.  And he had passed on his gaiters as a
matter of course before retiring to her elder brother.

Her husband explained away miracles by Euclidean methods which struck
terror to her orthodox heart.

"A possible and recorded case of suspended animation," had been his
verdict on Lazarus.  "Occurs every day.  Read _Hudson's Psychic
Phenomena_."  Mrs. Carmichael had no intention of doing any such
thing.

"There are countless instances of people being buried alive,"
continued Mr. Carmichael.  And, after racking his brains for two,
cited them in clear convincing tones.  Ferlie had scooped the last
grains of melting sugar out of an empty cocoa-cup and thoughtfully
left the room.  Mrs. Carmichael vaguely hoped that God was not
listening to the conversation and then forgot all about it.  So did
Robin.  Ferlie remembered.  Always at night in this England, deprived
of her patiently crooning Burmese nurse, she remembered.  The wigwam
of sheets and blankets was to shut out Fear.

She knew the footsteps on the stairs which were coming to the rescue
now; though he was not, in his customary accomplished fashion, taking
two steps at a time.

"Is that you, Cyprian?"

"Yes, old lady."

"I thought it might be Satan."

"Why Satan?"

She came out of her fastness with a shudder.

"They call him the Prince of Darkness, you know.  This is the
witching hour when I think he probberly might..."

"Might what?"  Vainly he tried to sort the tumbled bed-clothes.  Her
Viyella night-dress was dripping wet.

"Might take an' bury me in the Tomb," said Ferlie in a hoarse
whisper.  Cyprian tried to make his laugh aggressively reassuring.

"Who on earth suggested such nonsense to you?"

"It can't be nonsense if it's in the Bible.  An' in a book by a man
named Hudson.  He makes the kitchen soap 'cos Cook told me so when I
asked.  He must be clever for every person to buy his soap.  An' he
buried Lazarus."

It was beyond Cyprian's power to disentangle her from this web.  The
servants must have been frightening the child.  It was common
knowledge that the best of nurses were often grossly imaginative.

He stroked the russet mop of fluff resting against his shoulder and
resorted to practical conversation.  Except that it concerned her own
private affairs and was therefore connected with Teddy-bears, the
duck-pond in the park, the little-girl-next-door, and other important
personages of summers six to ten, it was conducted as gravely as
though they were of an age.

Cyprian did not really understand anything about talking down to a
child's level and that was why Ferlie loved him.  She detected the
simple sincerity behind his sometimes complicated language and when
he used words beyond her ken it was seldom she failed to grasp the
drift.

Neither the child nor the man realized that each being sensitive to a
fault, they affected one another atmospherically and their true
conversation existed in emotions experienced side by side rather than
in sentences interchanged.  Thus, to-night, her quick intuition
arrived at the cause of that veiled look in his eyes.

"Are you going to be married to that Vane girl?" she enquired,
betraying instantaneously to Cyprian that there were those who
disapproved of his matrimonial projects.

He answered, "No," quietly, after an instant's pause.

"Why not?" asked Ferlie suspiciously.  "Nurse says she's a hussy."

"No one should have said such a thing to you."

"It wasn't to me: it was to Rose.  Rose used to live in her house,
an'..."

"It doesn't matter what either Rose or Nurse says," said Cyprian.
"But who told you about my marrying anyone, Ferlie?"

"I think that was just in my head," struggling to remember where the
impression had first indented itself upon her responsive brain.  "Why
aren't you...?"

He saw there was no help for it and replied patiently, "She does not
want to marry me; that's all."

"Then she's a dam fool," said Ferlie with complete conviction.  He
was genuinely shocked.

"You must never say that of anyone, dear, even if you don't like
them."

"Dad says it of mostly all peoples, whether he likes them or not."

"That's different."

"How?"

"He's grown-up."

"How can grown-ups...?"

"And he's a man," Cyprian went on, desperately aware that he was not
doing very well.  "Ladies don't use such words."

Then Ferlie played her trump card.  "Miss Vane does," she said coldly.

Cyprian preserved a masterly silence.  Good gracious! she was modern
enough, of course.  Muriel!  There was music in her name ... and in
her throat when she sang ... and in the delicate hands moving over
the keys of the grand piano downstairs; for she always played to them
after dinner in the evenings.  She had the whitest throat he had ever
seen and the most beautiful hands.

"_Why_ do people always want to marry other people?" insisted his
companion, alive to mysteries unsolved and femininely peevish in
consequence.  Cyprian considered this himself before attempting to
clear it up.

"I suppose they grow lonely living just for themselves," he said at
last.

"I don't believe that there girl would make loneliness feel better,"
declared Ferlie.

"You don't understand, dear."  She cuddled his sleeve, ecstatically
sympathetic with that which she _did_ understand, his tone of voice.

"Are you so sorry you can't get married, Cyprian?  Why not make Miss
Cartwright marry you astead?  She'd do it, I daresay, 'f I begged her
for _my_ sake.  She says she'd do most things for me, only not run
upstairs backwards at her timerlife.  An' she cooks lovely choclick
fudge.  Miss Vane can't, I'm sure.  You ask her."

"I think you are probably right about that."

"Then we've settled it," much relieved.  "I wouldn't go marrying
anyone myself 'less they had a hand for fudge.  I'll tell Miss
Cartwright to-morrow that you want to get married to her this
directly immejantly, an' I was to ask her not to say 'No' like Miss
Vane."

"Good God!" exclaimed Cyprian rousing himself.  "I beg your pardon--I
mean--you must never say that, Ferlie.  But neither must you say
anything to Miss Cartwright.  Promise!  It's just--you see, this must
be a dead secret between you and me, about Miss Vane and all."  Happy
thought!  He might trust Ferlie to the stake with their numerous
unique secrets.

"But, Cyprian, why..."

"Dear, my dear," said the man, speaking more to the beauty of her
upturned face than to the child, "when you want to marry it is only
the one person who counts.  The one person with all her faults and
weaknesses--because those, too, are part of her.  Chocolate fudge
(and there are more kinds of that than you know) doesn't come into it
with the averagely decent man.  You just love the person or you
don't.  You will understand all about it some day, when you are
older."

The comforting arms which stole round his neck might have understood
all about it now.

"Do you really love that Miss Vane?"

"Heaven help me, I do!"

"Can't you stop if you want to?"

"Apparently not; but one doesn't want to.  That's the ridiculous part
... the thing grips you, like invisible iron hands, to drag you along
a road of withered flowers, forcing you to breathe the rot of that
Dead Sea fruit which fills the air with the bitter fumes of jealousy
and passion....  Fruit?"

"Cyprian, didn't you not bring me up a cryssalized apricot?"

He nearly chuckled as he stumbled back along his "withered paths" to
Reality.

"Sorry, Little Thing.  I forgot.  You shall have a whole box
to-morrow."

"I shan't get a moment's peace to eat them unless we have it as a
secret," she suggested wheedlingly.

"Oh!" he cried, delightedly hugging her, "You'll be a woman so much
too soon."

"Mother says..." she began dreamily, and that reminded him.

"She said I was to tell you to go to sleep at once."

"Such a silly sort of thing to say to a child!" said Ferlie, palpably
quoting, "Sleep is like that marrying feeling of yours: it can't be
made to go or stop ... Cyprian..."

"Well!"

"You did a wriggle.  You aren't goin' away."

"Not if you'll shut your eyes," he undertook feebly.  "But, you know,
there is really nothing to be afraid of, Ferlie, whether I am here or
not."

She knew better.  "And that's another thing you can't let go nor
stop, neither," she told him.

Considering it, with her head growing heavier every moment against
his shoulder, Cyprian came to the conclusion that she was right.  The
darkness deepened about them as someone shut the door between hall
and stairs.

"Cyprian."

"Dear."

"Whoever you get married to, you will always like me best, won't you?"

"Why, of course," said Cyprian.  "Of course..."

Her breathing became contentedly regular.

* * * * * *

Downstairs, Muriel Vane had been very clever at his expense.

More like a siren than ever, perched behind the looming rock of the
grand piano, a few gleaming threads of escaping hair picked out
against the background of polished wood, while, every now and again,
her fingers rippled the accompanying chords of some haunting French
song.

She usually sang in French.

"To shock folk in legitimate ignorance," she informed Captain Wright,
leaning over her with every symptom of shortly shedding his bones in
the vicinity.

"Dear Muriel!" placidly reproved Mrs. Carmichael.  She did not
understand sung French, or for that matter, any but the brand which,
by dint of firm repetition, brings you your hot water and "Du
thé--pas chocolat.  Pas!" in Parisian hotels at eight a.m.

Muriel's sort of French was of little use to anyone but foreigners,
and there were so seldom foreigners present.

"Sing 'Sanson et Dalila'," begged the Hon. Mrs. Porter, feeling surer
of her ground when dealing with passion in opera, where, however
unbridled, it remained respectably unconvincing to the mind of the
British matron.

"I was saving that till Cyprian Sterne had finished rocking the
cradle upstairs," said Muriel.  "It happens, quite unsuitably, to be
his favourite song, and the hand that rocks the cradle rules the
girls--in that its action suggests a future peacefully free from that
domestic duty for them."

"I have sent up two messages," Mrs. Carmichael anticipated her
husband plaintively, "but he replied that he was not feeling very
well to-night and would join us after dinner."

"I have repeatedly said----" began Mr. Carmichael, but was firmly
interrupted: "I know you have, dear, but if half an hour with Ferlie
amuses him, I think it would be better to leave him alone to-night."
She looked across, meaningly, at Muriel and closed her lips.  Tact
was a thing nobody seemed able to acquire who had not been born with
it.

Muriel made a little grimace and burst suddenly into a very simple
melody:

  "J'ai pris un bluet Fluet
  Enclos parmi l'herbe
  Et quelqu'un m'a dit; Mon Dieu!
  Il n'est pas de bleu plus bleu
  Que ce bleu superbe.
  Moi, qui sais ce que je sais--
  J'ai souri sans lui rien dire
  Car à tes yeux je pensais--
  Sans rien dire, sans rien dire."


The notes quickened with heartless mirth, and the pure voice rang out
again:

  "Au rosiers fleuris j'ai pris."


Mrs. Carmichael, ruminating that the piano, at any rate, kept Muriel
out of mischief, here clutched thankfully, decided that the song
concerned roses, and framed an intelligent appreciation, on that
hypothesis, against its finish.

Cyprian walked into the room as the last verse, reckless with desire,
was sweetening the air:

  "J'ai pris un pavé, trouvé
  Au fond de cratère
  Et quelqu'un m'a dit, Mon Dieu!
  Plus dur pavé ne se peut
  Trouver dans la terre.
  Moi, qui sais ce que je sais--
  J'ai pleuré sans lui rien dire,
  Car à ton c[oe]ur je pensais--
  Sans rien dire...  Sans rien dire...."


"I always like songs about flowers, don't you?" queried their hostess
of the world.

And "Here you are at last," her husband remarked to Cyprian before
Muriel's curving lips could make the most of that joke; "you really
should not spoil Ferlie."

"She is such a highly-strung child," the Hon. Mrs. Porter volunteered
languidly, waving a gold-tipped ostrich feather, though, had she
stopped to consider the matter, she would have discovered that she
was cold in her chair near the door.

"Never yet," said Colonel Maddock, who adopted the criticizing
privileges of an unofficial uncle in the house, "have I met the
fortunate mother whose children were not exceptionally highly-strung.
What does the term mean exactly?"

"That they need a disciplined existence," said Mr. Carmichael.  "All
these modern methods of making things easy for children are wrong.
Life is not easy.  They must be fitted to overcome difficulties."

"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control!" mocked Muriel, with
accusing eyes on Captain Wright who was trying to press her hand
behind the music-stand.  "I cannot bear a man, particularly, without
self-control; and the child is father to the man--in Ferlie's case."

Cyprian dejectedly decided that he had let himself go, rather, at the
scene of the proposal.  She had looked so infinitely desirable.

"Ferlie was frightened," he said, rather lamely.  "I think, perhaps,
the servants----"

"There!" cried Mrs. Carmichael.  "What did you tell Robin about
English servants?"

"You should discipline her out of being frightened," declared Muriel.
"Why make it easy for a child to go to sleep with night-lights and
such nonsense?  Think of all the insomnia she will have to battle
against in future years.  Let her learn to overcome----"

Mr. Carmichael was looking so stiff that his wife intervened.

"Dear Muriel!  You do talk such nonsense.  Robin did not mean that."

"No?"  Muriel turned limpid eyes on Cyprian.  "And what line did you
take with her?"

"We talked a little," he said, blinking quickly at the carpet, "and
presently she fell asleep.  I must thank her for affording me the
excuse to get rid of a slight headache."

"I thought you were not yourself at dinner," said Mrs. Porter
forgivingly.  "You are fond of children?"

"No," said Cyprian, somewhat bluntly.  He was not fond of children.

"Really!  Ferlie is so devoted to you."

"She is about the first child I have ever addressed, and will
probably be the last."

"If she were a normal specimen, the first time you addressed her
_would_ have been the last," said Muriel, "I have heard you doing it.
I am glad when you are with me you talk down to my level, Cyprian.  I
have not Ferlie's pristine trust in dictionarial expressions.  I
should imagine that you were swearing at me half the time."

"I think he talks very good English," said Mrs. Carmichael kindly.
"We none of us speak enough like books these days."

Mabel Clement who, during the greater part of the evening had been
scrutinizing Muriel and Captain Wright with a view to working them
into her new satire, "The Man-Eater," came out of a frowning
wilderness of thought, wherein the others had completely forgotten
her, to say that the ideal language, as yet unborn, should consist
merely of a riot of sound, expressing the emotion it was required to
convey.

"Our spelling is execrable, our grammar clumsy, and the elegant
diction of the one-time popular novelist of the Jane Austen calibre
was affected in the extreme.  Life is too short for these chains of
superfluous sentences, and far too short for us to master all the
tongues of Babel before we can test the mentality of other nations.
It should be possible to invent a tongue, common to all, conveying to
the brain, by sound, what it is desired to express."

"Let's begin to invent it now," Muriel suggested rapturously:
"Colonel Maddock!  Whu-u!  Why!  Whu-u-u!  Isn't my meaning perfectly
clear?"  She tilted her flower-face up to his, drawing in her breath
in a series of staccato jerks.

The Colonel grinned down amiably as he inhaled the fragrance of a
delicate hair-wash.

"I know!" Captain Wright bawled triumphantly from his corner: "she
wants a drink!"

In the storm of merriment which followed, Mabel Clement smiling
resignedly, retired again into the fastness of her soul, while
Cyprian crossed the room to a tray containing, Eastern fashion,
several long bottles and a syphon.

While the party were breaking up in a fizzling glitter of glasses,
Mrs. Carmichael drew close and gently touched his sleeve.  Then and
there the memories were blotted out of occasions when he had wondered
how a clever man like Carmichael stood her!  Madonna-sweet, her smile
at that moment.

"Wait a bit after the others leave," she said in an undertone; "Robin
and I have been wondering about your plans.  And I want to consult
you over Ferlie's school."

The note on which the last word was spoken broke in two.  When she
and her husband returned to Burma they would be minus encumbrances.
Subtly conveying her own need of a little sympathy in the only idiom
she knew, Mrs. Carmichael remained unaware that in so doing she
represented to Cyprian the beauty of the Essentially Feminine.

She kissed Muriel "Good night," reflecting cattily how boring women's
kisses must seem to her after ... and staved off the Colonel's last
broad approach to the forthcoming pleasure-cruise in the yacht.

"Good night, Mrs. Porter."

"Good night, dear.  Such a pleasant...  Yes, thank you, that is my
vanity bag, though at my time of life you may well be wondering ...
and Muriel with a Vinolia complexion has no business to own such a
thing."

"Robin, will you...  Ah!  Here is the parlour-maid...."

A low-murmured plea from Captain Wright, whose arms encircled
Muriel's cloak....  The diamond glitter of answering eyes....

Good night....  Good-night.




CHAPTER II

"Seems almost a pity," said Mr. Carmichael.

His wife looked her grey-eyed agreement.

"The one post promises security for life, a fixed salary...."

"And is so eminently your line, Cyprian."

"At the moment," said Cyprian, "a secure haven and a tranquil time to
brood upon my good fortune in it are the last attractions the world
can offer me.  I feel restless.  I know I am probably being a fool
but, since my mother died, there is nothing that need prevent me from
being a fool if I so desire."

Mrs. Carmichael had a feeling that any young man who rounded off his
sentence with, "if I so desire" at this stage of his career, was
intended by Heaven for a University donship and not the vicissitudes
of a miner's existence.  She was quite right.

"The Company which has offered you the post of Secretarial Manager
and What-Not of its--er--machinations," went on Mr. Carmichael,
"will, in all likelihood, burst before the year's end and leave you
stranded.  The Burmese mines are overdone and I hardly believe in
this new discovery and your avaricious expectations.  What is
promised?  Rubies?"

"I got such a pretty aquamarine straight from the Mogok mines once,"
murmured his wife, "through a friend who ..."

"You won't find any rubies, ten to one," warned Robin.

"But I may find something else again which is of even more importance
to me," said Cyprian.

Neither of his companions asked what that was.  He went on slowly:
"Some force outside myself seems to be urging me away from England
for the present.  I fear the facetious would describe me as a
quitter, but, for certain natures, it is always safest to quit ...
temptations.  I have never dared to do anything else myself, and a
superficial peace at Oxford just now would multiply mine
unbelievably, though I am sensible of the honour done me by their
offer of the appointment."

"You are only twenty-eight, are you not?"

"Yes.  For a humble tutor and lecturer to get such a chance..."

"Free house and garden," chirped Mrs. Carmichael, seeing womanly
visions and dreaming womanly dreams, "and with prospects of becoming
a master in time.  What a pity..."

She knew, alas, that Muriel would refuse to be dazzled.

"Well, since you seem to have made up your mind to throw up a good
thing for a doubtful one"--Mr. Carmichael never wasted time on vain
regrets--"I agree that your science and geological knowledge will be
invaluable to your employers and I had better tell you what I have
seen of the district."

The talk drifted into generalities, and Mrs. Carmichael began to
price Ferlie's winter coat and remind herself to impress it upon the
matron at Peter's school that Peter was really an Exceptional Boy.
She believed in a private appeal to the only woman in an
establishment full of unimaginative men.  Pictured the red-roofed
bungalow in Rangoon without the children's toys annoying her husband
in the verandah.  Remembered all the other Colonial mothers and
wondered why that made the pain worse instead of better.  Rejoiced
that she had, at least, got the better of Robin in the matter of
Ferlie's education.  None of your hard modern schools,
over-developing brain and body at the expense of femininity.
Reaction must set in soon on this count, and Muriel Vane was nothing
if not a warning.  There could come a revival of the old-fashioned
home-school, where it was so fortunate that the kind Miss Maynes had
welcomed the thought of having Peter for the holidays.

They could not have agreed to take just any boy, they had told
her--in fact none had, up to date, been offered them--but, in the
circumstances, "Why, it is really our _duty_, dear Mrs. Carmichael."

Yes, Lady Vigor's daughter had always remained with them and,
naturally, they had taken her to the seaside.  How impossible,
thought Ferlie's mother, to have entrusted Ferlie or Peter to Aunt
Brillianna.

Brillianna Trefusis, a maternal aunt of Robin's, who was,
nevertheless, not more than five years his senior, was an eccentric
lady who travelled a great deal, spoke boldly and wore a
disconcerting air suggesting that life amused her.  And she did not
go to church!

Mused Ferlie's mother, it was all very well for the men-folk to
content themselves with prayer by proxy, reaping where their loyal
wives had sown, but if the women were also to desert the old and
tried paths to that Better Land, Far, Far Away, the chances were that
the Judgment would fall due before anyone had reached those Eternal
Bowers, and the travellers find themselves shooed into Outer Darkness
to the tune of "Depart, ye Cursed!"  And Ferlie was so responsive to
her surroundings: Aunt B. could easily have raised doubts in her mind
as to the authenticity of Lazarus and Jonah, and when once you began
to pick and choose...

"No, I am afraid she is still out in the park, Cyprian.  What's that?
Crystallized apricots?  Oh, but you really shouldn't.  I could give
them to her when she comes in....  Well, if you will ... she's sure
to be near the pond.  Thank you, Peter is quite well.  So odd!  He
says his form master asked him where he had learnt the secret of
perpetual motion.  Such a silly sort of thing to say to a child."

Cyprian had never met the exiled Peter, on the occasion of whose
swift banishment he had first recognized a kindred spirit in the
Ferlie, white-faced and dumb, presented to him in the Carmichaels'
drawing-room with the motherly rebuke, "And, Cyprian, this is the one
I intended to ask you to be godfather to, only Robin put me off,
insisting that you would not know what the term meant."

He visualized Peter, after winning his sister's confidence, as a wiry
mortal of nine summers, permanently unlaced boots and an enquiring
expression; this last suggesting a soul too perfectly in tune, if not
with the Infinite, at least with the Infinitely Annoying, as
connected with problems of Eternal Research, for the peace of mind of
those in charge of him.

"Isn't it funny, when you come to think of it"--thus Mrs. Carmichael
when Cyprian had gone--"that a woman's 'No' can alter the whole
course of a man's life?"

"Not nearly so thoroughly as can a woman's 'Yes,' believe me.  He is
jolly well out of that one."

"The trouble is that you can't persuade him of it.  Such an ideal
situation for him, Robin.  A free house and garden..."

"Nice Society," went on Robin, a little grimly, "church bells within
ear-shot, so that one can imbibe atmospheric religion from an
arm-chair, and the golf-links closed on Sunday.  But you're right: it
would have suited him--in the end.  If ever I saw an Oxford don in
embryo, it is Cyprian."

"He's so Nice," his wife lingered over the word.  "One realizes at
once how high-principled..."

"Oh, he's all that ... and he listens to the Abbey organ regularly."

"Simple and obtuse," Linda Carmichael continued.  "And _she's_ quite
heartless.  Do you know, Robin, sometimes she behaves almost as if
she were not a lady."

Mrs. Carmichael couldn't understand why Robin sniggered at this
superlative condemnation.

"She wants the Man-with-the-Stick," he briefly summed up Muriel.

Mrs. Carmichael did not pursue that idea.  It was so bluntly lowering
to the dignity of Womanhood as to make her feel mildly uncomfortable.
There were wife-beaters in the slums--very sad--but she always closed
fastidious eyes to the thought that among Us, also, the thing called
Human Nature could betray itself in crude unmentionable ways.

Exploited as it might be in these days, Human Nature always seemed to
her to have an undressed sound.

Her own marriage had been a reticent affair: separate dressing-rooms
and so on.

There was something about Muriel, though her father's first cousin
was an Earl, which reminded one of the pictures kept in the house
because they were classical but which one did not look at very
closely and hung in darkish corners of the landing.  Necessary to Art
but hardly to Life.

* * * * * *

While Cyprian was laying in stocks of quinine, dark glasses and thin
pyjamas, and the Carmichaels were busily embracing relations whom
they never set eyes on except at the "Ave atque Vale" occupying the
two separate ends of their four-yearly "leaves," and while Peter was
interesting himself in illicit Natural History during class hours,
and Ferlie in members of her own sex as a regiment, in class and out,
Muriel was brooding over her bones and finding them tasteless.

She came out of her bath one morning after washing her hair and,
having given the damp cloud a desultory rub with a large fluffy
towel, tossed that shield from her and paused before the long
pier-glass.

  "And God, who made that body for delight"--

She quoted under her breath--

  "Should there have stayed and left a perfect thing,
  Nor added to your loveliness a soul.
  So had He spared you sharpest suffering;
  Dark waves of night that o'er your spirit roll.
  And sobs which shake you through the lonely night...."

Where had she read the words?  Some literary magazine.  Author?
Hamilton Fyffe?  Was it?  Or Fyfe?  Remembered she had thought that
clever when, very young, she came across it.  Someone had scrawled
against the margin, "I fear me Fyffe is very inexperienced.  No woman
without a soul has held a man for long."

Did she want to hold any man for long?  Did she ever want to "fall in
love"?  What bosh it all was--this thirst of milk-blooded girls for
the soul-mate.

"It's positively terrifying to see Truth naked," remarked Muriel to
her own white reflection.  Or was it not better to be free from
mental corsets--as well as the ordinary sort?  She raised herself on
tiptoes, clasping her rounded arms above her head as the thought
rippled into merriment across her face: "If Cyprian were my husband
and came in now, accidentally, he would apologize and flee, and be
too much of a gentleman even to mention it again on our meeting
later.  He's the type of man who would never forget that though its
wife was its wife she was still a 'lady'."

Footsteps, and a knock at her door disturbed these cogitations.  A
known voice greeted her through it.

"May I come in, Muriel?"

"Oh, is that you, Twinkle?  Yes, so far as I'm concerned you can come
in.  Better leave your gentleman-friend outside on the mat
though--for his sake, not for mine."

A thickset, handsome girl entered languidly, took in the situation at
a glance and sat down upon the unmade bed.

"You are a One!"  Her voice drawled richly.  "I suppose I can smoke
while you dress?"

"Puff away!  I'll have one too while I finish my air-bath.  It fills
me with optimism to take it in front of the glass."

Twinkle ran critical eyes over this unbashful nymph.

"You're all right," she said candidly.  "A bit thin.  Thinking of
posing as an artist's model?"

"Glory!  It never occurred to me."

"It's a possible treatment for your complaint, my dear."

"What do you mean?"  A deepening of the carnation tint on Muriel's
soft cheek.

Twinkle did not appear to notice.

"Enough eyes on your _tout ensemble_ to satisfy even your thirst for
admiration.  The joy of seeing, say, thirty individuals all occupied
in reproducing your beauty for general display in some gallery.
After-results ... _qui sait_?  The artist's model...."

"Meets artists," finished Muriel, recovering herself: "I am out after
bigger game.  I had thought of going into training on your lines."

"The stage is over-stocked with people seeking auditions who have not
the slightest talent," warned Miss Ruth Levine, commonly known as
Twinkle, probably because it was the most unsuitable nickname that
could possibly be found for her.  "You _might_ prove a happy
exception."

"I'd get a walking-on chorus part, at any time," Muriel confidently
assured her, "with nothing to do but kick and use my eyes."

"M-m!  You've been reading some reliable literature, wherein the
pure-hearted Gladiola Trevelyan, who is only on this degrading beat
in order to supply calves' foot jelly for little cripple sister
Winnie at home, finds the young earl's card in her dressing-room.  In
real life you'll discover it is the son of the local butcher who
leaves his in a Rolls Royce and that the marquises' cheques are to be
mistrusted more often than honoured."

"Truly enough, gold paint can disguise a lead coronet.  We've one in
our family--my second cousin's.  Anyone is welcome to him for me.
Money I must have, Twinkle, or I may as well commit suicide."

"You are doing that by inches while you waste time emptying old
pocket-books."

"My little weakness," admitted Muriel frankly.  "I take what comes
while keeping my eyes on the final goal."

"What the devil is your goal?  One man or several?"

"You are an honest woman," laughed Muriel.  "I don't mind confessing
for your private ear, that I simply do not know."  She flung herself
face downwards on the tumbled satin quilt, cupping her face in her
pink palms.

"To look it in the face: I have seen marriage at close quarters and
found it distinctly uninspiring.  Father and Mother!  My God!  How
they bore one another!  They try to go their separate ways and yet
cling to a snarling respectability."

"Why don't they get a divorce?"

"Too expensive.  Besides, there is no just cause or impediment.  I
could forgive them if either had risen to a guilty passion.  But that
would have smirched the family escutcheon, you see; merely being rude
to one another doesn't.  Then they have not got me off their hands
yet.  Dad would sell me to the highest bidder to-morrow.  I am
marketable stock for some degenerate duke with no age-limit, provided
he is rich.  Not so easy to find, eh?  As for a love-match with an
impecunious captain, whose inspiriting moustache bristles to touch
one's holy hand before the ring adorns it and, a year later, remains
quiescent against one's immovable lip-salve--well, I ask you!  Every
Sweet Young Thing thinks her matrimonial drama will be acted to muted
violins in 'Just a little love, a little kiss,' and is perfectly
prepared to 'Give him all her life for this.'  Now, I'm not."

"The alternative is a profession.  Mannequin?"

"Golly!  Not enough men in it.  And your Model idea would have to be
carried out in dark secrecy.  Mother would poison me!"

"You carry out a number of things in secrecy with complete success."

"Pff!  Not what you think.  I know my market value."

Twinkle's dark gaze became fixed and speculative.  "Any of your folk
ever died in an asylum?" she enquired suddenly.

"I suppose you are being funny.  But, as a matter of fact, my
grandmother's sister did, and there was an uncle, who gore-ily cut
his throat, of unsound mind.  Why?  Do I look as if I meditated such
a drastic solution of my problems?"

Twinkle decisively knocked out her cigarette and stood up.

"Never mind....  Curiosity, I guess."

Muriel became dimly interested in this dispassionate friend's
disapproval of something.

"Do I fill you with disgust?"

"No--with pity," was the unexpected reply.  "You don't understand
what you are up against, Muriel.  But I've seen types like you
before; and they are born, not made."

They went out together, presently.

"I have only got till lunch-time," warned the actress.  "Matinee at
two.  Performance again at 8.30.  A dog's life!"

"You wouldn't change with me!"

"Holy snakes!  I would not!"  Her vehemence startled, for the moment,
in one so remotely calm.  She pulled herself together as quickly.
"No, I am fitted for my job.  Some day I shall be the Big Noise all
right."

Muriel glanced at the sure, emotionless face.  Not pretty; La
Gioconda, refined and Semiticized--if one might use the word.
Beautifully tinted eyes, heavy lidded and calculating, not for gain,
but as if their owner were perpetually weighing up the world and did
not, like Brillianna Trefusis, find it at all amusing.

That Twinkle's distrait attitude at Marshall's silk-stocking counter
was due to Muriel's own looming future the latter never guessed.

"I've seen 'em"--so ran the thoughts of the Jewess--"always devoid of
natural feeling at the start, but unable to live without a man's eye
upon them.  The market value of passion glibly at the tongue's end.
Never sentimentally eroto-maniacal; better if they were.  Then,
suddenly, the day when the craving for admiration merges into
sex-realization.  No actual desire perhaps, for the love of an
individual: no realization of Love in the abstract as a desirable
thing.  A sudden startled awakening and, with neither religion nor
moral sense behind....  If one could warn ... but there is always the
chance that I am misreading her and am utterly in the wrong.  She's
no 'modern' product anyhow."

"Musings without method," remarked Muriel, having lingered to reduce
the youth at the ribbon-counter to a state of drivelling imbecility
with her smile: "Are you meditating upon some subtle gesture for your
great act that will bring the curtain down in a storm of sobs more
soul-satisfying than applause?"

"I was simply letting my mind run wild on the subject of heredity as
a factor in folks' lives.  There are few things admitted heredity now
except those which are sexual, and I was wondering how far the
psycho-analysts had really got going on that subject, apart from the
sex-chart.  One has heard of hypnotism as a cure at early stages for
... some things."

"If I went to a hypnotist to be cured of anything," said Muriel,
"what's the betting the gentleman in the chair would find the
positions reversed and himself masquerading as victim?"

"I have no doubt you'd do your damnedest," said Ruth, dryly.

* * * * * *

It was not long before Cyprian sailed for the East.

Captain Wright, temporarily insane, though he was the only one who
did not know it, began to drink at unusual hours.  Muriel had taken
three months to sicken of him and considered him exceedingly
ungrateful.  Weak.

Cyprian had shown himself much stronger.  He went down to Ferlie's
school to say good-bye to her.

"Like an uncle to the child, you know," her mother had told the
Misses Mayne; who beamed over the avuncular visit, brooding on the
Degrees and reflecting what a good thing it might be should he
recommend the school while in the East.

"You will come back soon?"

"It will seem very soon, Ferlie."

"You promise, Cyprian?"

Nothing had ever succeeded in getting a respectful prefix out of
Ferlie, though Mrs. Carmichael was uneasy lest the Misses Mayne
should not feel quite happy over the familiar mode of address.

"Of course I promise.  And I'll write if you will."

"I'll write," said Ferlie, "when I have things to say."  A sensible
resolution which might be more widely adhered to.

Cyprian carried away with him the memory of delicate hands, laughing
eyes and a poignantly sweet voice ... a memory which left the same
ache as does a solitary aloof star on a summer evening.

But always it was followed by the haunting comfort of Ferlie's
clinging arms.




CHAPTER III

"French is to be talked from the time the rising-bell rings in the
morning to the time the dressing-bell rings for supper at night."

So ran Rule 9, at St. Dorothea's Home School for Girls.  It was
relaxed on Saturdays at twelve after the hour in the gymnasium.

At ten minutes to twelve the gloomy cavern, known as the Glory Hole,
rang with noise which, according to the ancient series of L. T.
Meade's school-stories, stocking the library, should have been
punctuated with "silvery ripples of girlish laughter."  It wasn't.
The parrot-house at the Zoo would have been nearer the mark.  A
harassed prefect presided, noting the names of people who insisted on
forestalling the cuckoo-clock.

"Parlez-vous Français, Margery, ou je dirai Mademoiselle."

"Ma foi!  N'est-ce pas que c'est douze heures?"

"Le cuckoo a cuckooé, je suis positive."

"Doris, vous sotte-ane, c'est ma place que vous prendre."

Moods and tenses were blandly ignored at St. Dorothea's outside the
actual French class.

"Naw," denied Doris, resolutely blocking the partition wherein she
had thrust her own gym shoes.  "Je partage cet morceau de le shelf
avec Ferlie."

"Mais, avant Ferlie, j'ai avez baggé!"

This last effort could not pass muster even on a Saturday.

"Margery, 'bag' n'est pas Français et c'est argot.  Prenez un point
de conversation."

"Mais si je fait cela je ne peut pas jouez hockey.  Soyez une sport,
Mary."

There was an understanding that whosoever lost six marks during the
week for failing to observe Rule 9 was relegated to the ranks of the
crocodile, with the junior class of all, after lunch, instead of
being permitted to join in the usual Saturday games.

Margery was a constant offender; and the Fourth Form A. were to play
the Fourth Form B.!

"Si vous ne jouerez pas, ce sera un tiroir," prophesied Ferlie
ingeniously, after pausing an instant to consider the French for a
"draw" at hockey.

The clock whirred.  "Cuckoo!  Cuckoo!"

"Thank God!" said Margery Craven, piously.

The prefect fled, pretending not to hear.

"I thought you weren't playing either, Ferlie?"

"I am not--that's why I said if you can't play centre-forward in my
place the A's will be about level with the B's.  You and I combined
give the A's the advantage."

"Why isn't Ferlie playing?" asked Doris Martell.

"Don't you know?" and Margery's air was fraught with mystery.  "The
co-_rr_espondent from Far Cathay has asked--and obtained--permission
to take the Favourite of the Upper Fourth to the Zoo."

"Lucky little beast!"

"How long is he going to stop in England, Ferlie?"

"Only six months this time.  Father and Mum never take such short
leave, but Cyprian has had malaria..."

"It's a beautiful name," mused Doris with upturned eyes.  "No wonder
she blushes!"

"Silly ass!"

"What beats me," said Margery, "is how Martha and Mary allow Ferlie
to gad about with a genuine trousered male in an expensive tailored
suit and all the appurtenances thereof.  Because even if he does look
forty he's not really your uncle, is he, Ferlie?"

"No, thank the Lord!  I shouldn't feel nearly so comfy with him if he
were."

"She confesses to feeling comfy with him," Margery informed the
others.  "Brazen hussy!  And she a 'Sunlight Fairy'!"

Ferlie forgot Cyprian in a sudden righteous indignation.  "You shut
it, Margery!  Lot of grinning shriekers!  Thought yourselves very
funny, didn't you?  You wouldn't laugh if it were your mess."

For Ferlie's instinctive courtesy, rooted in a horror of hurting
people's feelings and combined with a certain dreamy trustfulness in
human nature, characteristic of her, had landed her in a false
position which, during the past week, had been the joke of the school.

A dean's wife, far-famed for excellent work among the business girls
of the suburbs, and convinced that the road to salvation for all
budding womanhood lay via the fold of a Purity Society organized by
her, had now conceived the idea of interesting the girls' schools in
a campaign of mutual prayer and interchange of friendly letters with
these unknown female correspondents of the working-class, all virgin
pilgrims up the Hill of Difficulty, pledged not to permit male
travellers to carry their bundles nor waste their time in frivolous
communications.  The Misses Mayne, generally known to their pupils,
in terms of disrespectful affection, as "Martha" and "Mary," approved
of the plan and accorded the dean's wife half an hour one Sunday
afternoon, following Bible Class, to set forth her appeal for
supporters in the school.

At the close of an earnest address she had suggested that any of them
willing to join the League and correspond with another young woman,
forlornly in search of true friendship, would hold up a hand.

Ferlie, having arrived late from an imperfectly learnt collect,
happened to be sitting at a front desk, eschewed by early arrivals as
too nearly under the eye of Martha for perfect ease.  Not having paid
particular attention to the proceedings, but gleaning from the
speaker's tense expression that something was expected of the
school--possibly a penny a week to the Blind Babies' Fund--she
mechanically raised her hand, wondering the while whether there would
be time after the Zoo to take Cyprian to that new tea-shop where you
could always get hot dough-nuts, fresh and jammy.  Hers was the only
hand raised.  The role of "Sunlight Fairy," by letter, to a factory
girl did not appeal to the Margeries and Dorises of the Upper Fourth,
and the senior school members were struggling with finishing exams
and wanted no extra correspondence thrust upon them in their scant
leisure.  Had she only known it, the dean's wife was about the fourth
of a series of well-meaning women that term obsessed with schemes for
benefiting England's blossoming womanhood.  To put it coarsely, St.
Dorothea's had "had some."

Margery was the most interested in Ferlie's future radiance as a
"Fairy."  The dean's wife, impressed by such single-minded strength
of character, had invited her to tea and presented her with a blue
card depicting a rising sun shooting an inquisitive searchlight on
the face of a worried-looking young woman wending her way up a
crowded thoroughfare either in quest of true friendship or a factory.

"And it's quite time you began," said Margery severely, at the
termination of Ferlie's bitter harangue.

The bell for the reading of the week's marks interrupted them;
following which rite a strong smell of Irish stew combined with apple
pudding, in the hall, did duty for a lunch menu.

And, "I will not eat the bottom bit of my suet to-day," Margery
resolved in a fierce whisper as they filed to their seats.

The conversation over the gravied onions made about four times the
volume of sound as on a French day.

The Misses Mayne, one at each end of the long table, beamed
indulgently.  "Martha," the practical one, who was also the junior of
the two sisters, confined her remarks to the state of the hockey
field and reminders that stockings were to be changed immediately on
the team's return.

"Mary" brightened life at her post by little reminiscences of the
ways in which she had spent her Saturdays at school, "when hockey for
girls was quite out of the question, my dears," and the Magic
Lantern, with views of foreign countries in colours, existed still as
a delirious mid-term treat.

All went contentedly until the last helping of apple pudding had been
served out, and then Mary settled her glasses and allowed her kindly
faded eyes to rest on one particular plate.

"Now, Margery"--a sudden hush followed the raising of the gentle
tones--"are you going to conquer that pudding or are you going to let
that pudding conquer you?"

The luckless Margery, who had brought an empty paper bag to lunch
with felonious intent, started guiltily and reddened to the forehead.

"You know it is by overcoming--always by overcoming--the weaknesses
in ourselves that we develop into worth-while members of the world's
community," Mary continued.

"Or by coming it over other people," muttered Ferlie, sympathizing
with Margery's sensations towards the grey mound of suet pushed to
one side of her plate.

"It--it always makes me feel sick, Miss Mayne," faltered Margery
hysterically.

"Imagination!" came from Martha's end of the table.  "How can good
wholesome food make anyone feel sick?"

Margery's mouth took an obstinate curve.  She was not going to be
intimidated by Martha, anyhow.

That lady, with twenty years' experience of Margeries behind her,
probably sensed rebellion and decided the moment had arrived for
brisk disciplinary methods.

"Eat it up, Margery, and don't be foolish," she said.

Margery sat very still.

The rest of the table did not want to witness her downfall, nor seem,
by respectful silence, to approve the idiosyncrasies of Martha and
Mary.  Why should anyone eat the beastly pudding who did not want to?
The fees were paid just the same.

Strained low-toned comments on the progress of the new tennis court
began to be heard; but Mary was wiser than Martha, as of old.  Far
wiser.  Long and humble study of the New Testament had inclined her
heart to keep its Law.  She ruled, in fact, by love.

"I think we'll leave it to Margery's own Brave Self," she told her
sister.  "She understands that it is for her own good, mentally and
physically, that we desire her to eat it.  Do not distress yourself,
my child.  Just think the matter over carefully and then decide which
of your two natures is to Win the Fray.  If, to-day, you decide to
leave it..."

She smiled watery encouragement at Margery, by this time incapable of
eating anything.  Lunch finished a little hurriedly.

Said Martha that night in the private sitting-room, where she and
Mary were wont to dissect characters and debate the handling of them:

"A little giddy."

"But warm-hearted," defended Mary.

"Shallow," said Martha.

"It is a question of guidance, Sister," insisted Mary.

Martha remained unconverted.

"Obstinacy must be dealt with firmly," she said.  "You will be at a
loss next Saturday over the apple pudding."

Came a knock at the door, and Margery stood beside the tinted
reproduction of the Good Shepherd near it, looking at Mary over the
stand crammed with photos of dear departed pupils who, with Youth's
heartlessness, had supplied her, since, with no other memories of
their passing.

"I've decided to c-conquer the p-pudding," announced Margery.  And
felt almost rewarded by the spiritual ecstasy of affection in Mary's
little eyes.

* * * * * *

Cyprian did not recognize the sisters for the last of a long line of
sanctified Englishwomen who, in the past, have run Happy Home-Schools
for the daughters of unmodern mothers, many of whom lived abroad and
who cherished the suspicion that dear Daphne or Nora would not be
prevented from over-working to the detriment of her health at a
modern establishment which dealt in Oxford examiners rather than in
embroidery classes.

It was Ferlie who grew critical of the Miss Maynes's curriculum, with
the conclusion of her fourteenth birthday, and so of their blatant
efforts to coerce in the straight and narrow way.

To Cyprian, the sisterless bookworm, the ladies recalled his deceased
aunts, a couple who belonged, by rights, to a Victorian novel and at
whose separate funerals a special hearse had to be requisitioned for
the wreaths.

And all the flowers were symbolically white.

Ferlie, the out-reaching experimentalist, wondered whether such of
Cyprian's aunts as remained above ground were exactly the type of
people to direct the electrical currents in a houseful of twentieth
century youth.

"Mary could have whistled for my brave and better nature," she told
Cyprian this afternoon, in relating the incident of the pudding, with
a resentment he considered entirely out of proportion to the fact
that she had not minded the suet herself.  He admitted that, as a
sane man, he never ate things which he did not like, nor did he know
anybody who, having attained years of discretion, believed such a
course necessary to salvation.

"But, you see, it must be difficult, Ferlie, to legislate for so many
tastes and, despite certain things of which you may disapprove, the
Misses Mayne seem kind to you all."

"I think I could do with less kindness and more common sense," she
persisted, "and far less prayer!"

He looked at the eager profile, bordered by a riot of autumn-tinted
curls, and wondered, a little anxiously, whether Ferlie was growing
up a sceptic like her father.  And himself.  And most of his friends.

He would rather she took both Testaments at a gulp like a pill, in
the unquestioning faith that they would purge her as with hyssop
according to promise.

He recognized his attitude to be decidedly illogical.  Perhaps the
simplicity of Mrs. Carmichael was not quite such a matter for
humorous reflection, after all.  Supposing the Woman-of-the-Future,
no longer sheltered from the rough and tumble of things, began
universally to don the materialistic armour suited to her defence,
and ceased to set her marching song to the awe-inspiring chant:

  "We love Thine altar, Lord;
  Oh, what on earth so dear?
  For there in faith adored,
  We find Thy presence near!"

The singers might possess the undeveloped minds of little children.
They might.  Nevertheless...

"They are such good women, Ferlie."

"I don't consider them any better members of the world's community
than you," Ferlie informed him carelessly, adding, "and they have,
according to their ideas, much more to gain by being good."

Cyprian did not quite know what to answer.  A less humble man might
have suspected that he was fast becoming the child's ideal.  He only
knew that they cared a great deal for one another and that Life, for
him, seemed less meaningless, though more unreal, when they were
together.

He had chosen the Zoo because it was the nearest open-air
entertainment within reach, by tram, of the suburb which contained
St. Dorothea's, and Ferlie was not, under Rule 6, allowed to attend
indoor places of amusement in term-time.  And surely, at fourteen, it
was a reasonable spot to take Ferlie, the animal-lover, for
recreation.

"But the tea here is beastly," she stated candidly, and he undertook
to follow where she should lead when the hour for nourishment
approached.

There were long stretches of walking between the enclosures of the
Big and Bloodthirsty caged inhabitants which Ferlie favoured.  The
two strolled along contentedly, exchanging current news.

Presently: "You know she's abroad, Cyprian?"

"Really!"

"You didn't try to find out?"

"Not this time, Ferlie.  What's the use?"

Ferlie was frowning.

"Aunt Brillianna asked me for a visit at Christmas.  And I went.  I
like her.  She doesn't talk rot to me just because I am not grown up.
She goes on like you do.  And one wet afternoon another woman came in
and said that the Vane girl had gone abroad after a nervous
break-down, and Aunt B. said, 'Oh, that's what they've decided to
call it?  The uttermost ends of the earth would not effect a cure.'
And I am telling you, Cyprian, because I feel that if it means that
she has been ill, you would rather know."

"Thanks, old lady."

"But, Cyprian----"

"Dear!"

"I can't be a hypocrite about it.  I don't really hope it is as bad
as smallpox, but if anything does make me hope that Martha and Mary's
Day of Judgment is true in every detail, it's her."

"But why, Ferlie?"

"If she came back would you ask her again now?" she asked, ignoring
explanation.

He revolved the possibility in his mind, seeking, as ever with her,
the meticulously accurate answer her candid eyes deserved.

"I hardly know.  I have never met another woman whom I wanted--that
way.  But then, in my life out East, I see very few Englishwomen, and
they are generally married.  I have guarded the thought of her, as
the Perfect One for me, so long in my heart that, sometimes, I doubt
whether any woman could be all that one imagines her when one--cares.
It is not fair to endow your Ideal with the qualities which suit you
and then blame her for not acting always according to your
conceptions."

She walked on silently for some way with bent head and her cheeks
unusually flushed.  Then she spoke again, rapidly.

"I have got to tell you, Cyprian.  From what I have heard, now and
again, I think that if you did ask now, you--you'd get the answer you
wanted once.  There aren't a lot of men like there used to be,
and--and I don't understand what it is all about but there is
Something....  Well, anyway, you'd stand a good chance now.  So I've
got to tell you."

"You don't want me to take that chance, Ferlie?"

She turned her face from him, unanswering.  And Cyprian
incomprehensibly knew that he would never seek out Muriel Vane with
that question on his lips; that her image would slowly drift out of
his dreams and that before it receded for ever he could make no
effort to call it back.  Could not?  Then it was true that no man
worshipped only at one shrine in a lifetime?  It was the Ideal and
not the Individual to which he burnt his incense!  The most startling
part of this discovery was that nothing mattered at the moment save
that Ferlie would be glad of it.

"As the years go by, one must change," he said diffidently.

She drew a long breath and spoke nonchalantly lest it should be
interpreted as relief.

"She must be quite an old woman by now.  At least twenty-six or
twenty-seven."

Cyprian's laughter shattered the imperceptible barrier of restraint.

"How old do you think I am, Ferlie?"

She surveyed him critically.  "Well, you are never any particular age
to me because, underneath, I feel you are about mine; but the other
girls don't think you look more than forty."

"They are a little premature.  I am only thirty-five."

"It's a good age, you know," said Ferlie gravely.  "How terribly
short Life is; over before you have got anywhere."

"You think I have wasted mine, up to date?"

"It all depends on what you want in the end.  Do you know I have a
feeling sometimes that we are all just as much in cages as these
animals, and can't get out without breaking something.  The cages
Chance dropped us into when we were born.  Think how enormous and how
interesting the earth is!  And how much of it shall you and I ever
see unless we break away from the particular bits we are imprisoned
in?  Just look at that old lion.  He has settled down, quite pleased,
forgetting that there was a time when he, or his ancestors, walked
where they wished for miles in the jungle.  And a lot of us copy him.
Satisfied in captivity because it is comfortable.  We don't remember
what it was like in the days of our freedom but common-sense tells us
it was unsheltered and unsure.  My ancestors may have been gipsies
and, if I had the courage, I might be one again by breaking things.
Ordinarily, Martha and Mary have got me till I am seventeen; then it
will be some finishing place in France for a year, and then Mother
comes home and I shall be considered luckier than most girls in
squeezing a Season or so out of Burma before Dad retires."

"During which you will marry, Ferlie, and settle down like a
well-behaved little lioness and..."

"Live Mother's life all over again for her--ugh!"

She stared at the lion.

"No I shan't.  It can stay there if it likes, and all the other
fool-animals who don't know their own strength.  I've got some
inkling of mine.  I am going to get out of the cage."

A passing keeper warned her not to shake the bars and not to go so
near, Miss.

She ignored him, clinging fervently to her subject.

"That old elephant could turn the howdah off his back, kill at least
twenty people and overset the monkey-house inside quarter of an hour.
And, instead, he just walks stupidly up and down, up and down."

"Please don't put ideas into his head in passing," begged Cyprian.

"Well, he's only an animal and so would misuse his regained power.
But a man needn't," said Ferlie, hot-footed on the trail of great
discoveries, "a man needn't...  Are you happy, Cyprian?"

"I--I've hardly thought about it."

"You ought to have thought about it.  You have been thirty-five years
in a world where there is unlimited happiness and unlimited misery.
And you haven't yet decided which you want to choose: Spring days,
and stars, and the smell of the sea, and flowers, and experiments in
queer forces electrifying every creature that lives and breathes, or
somnambulisticism ... listen, I made that word up, I think--in a
stuffy old cage, the bars of which are conventions which ought to be
broken into smither----"

"Ferlie, you are making that lion angry by beating the umbrella on
his bars."

"He can have it if he wants it," she said, hurling it into the cage.
"Martha made me bring it because she knows I hate carrying one.  Said
you always knew a gentlewoman by the make of her umbrella.  I should
think that anyone having to carry a special sort of umbrella to prove
her gentility must be----"

"Good Lord!" exclaimed Cyprian as the lion crunched through silk and
spokes, roaring insults at Ferlie the while, "Do come away.  The
keeper is on his way back here and everybody is looking at us."

Everybody is looking at us!  That last truth would have vexed him
more but for the tolerant amusement on the face of a lady standing
near them.  She seemed past middle age and indifferent to the fact,
being practically and severely costumed in dark grey, while her
iron-grey hair fitted so tidily into her toque that one immediately
divined it was shingled.  She fixed Cyprian with a placid eye.

"The unfortunate lion," she said, "breaking his teeth, like the rest
of us, on an illusion flung like a challenge at his head by Youth in
rebellion!"

Cyprian lifted his hat awkwardly in acknowledgment of the remark,
inwardly deciding, a little acidly, that she might have realized he
was, possibly, as near Ferlie's age as hers.  But Ferlie, herself,
twisted about with a rapturous greeting.

"Why, it's Aunt Brillianna!"

Aunt Brillianna accompanied them to the tea-shop, picking up the
thread of Ferlie's discourse just where the end had blown loose.

"And when you have got out of your cage, Ferlie, and are no more
mentioned by the long-suffering Misses Mayne, except in secret and
grieving prayer, and when you have trodden on your mother's heart and
taken unholy satisfaction in the fascinatingly soft squelch of it,
and when you have seen the iron enter into your unbelieving father's
soul on your flat refusal to mate with the most promising and
dyspeptically desk-chained member of his service, and when you have
laid the foundations for a new Utopia where everyone will find
himself uncaged and free and--if I mistake not--naked, will there
really be enough blue-birds in the trees to go round?"

"You are only pretending to laugh at me, Aunt B.; you know quite well
what I want."

"Six eclairs, four dough-nuts, two cream-buns, a strawberry-ice and a
dose of castor oil," Aunt Brillianna promptly informed the attendant
in lace cap and apron: adding with a scrutinizing glance at her white
face, "you look as if you could do with that list and some over,
yourself, my dear child."

The tea-girl blushed and, reading sincerity in the friendly smile,
admitted that she had had a particularly long day owing to Them being
shorthanded.

"Never mind," encouraged Aunt B., "I'll stand you treat with this
niece of mine, provided the moment you get off duty you settle down
to it at any place where the cakes are not so well-known to you as
these."

Cyprian protested at her making herself responsible for their own
three teas.

"Don't be silly," she advised him, "I am quite old enough to make a
nephew of you if I wish.  Ferlie is my great-niece and it is quite
useless to try and hide the ghastly fact.  And I have quite a lot of
money scattered about in odd corners of the earth.  Some day Ferlie
shall have some to build a Temple to her Freedom goddess or god.  She
will find, sooner or later, that the bars she objects to are made of
gold.  You ought to know that.  How are rubies?"

"Ferlie has told you what I do?"

"Ferlie has told me much more of all you have left undone.  Quite
unintentionally she has painted a portrait of you in your true
colours.  I doubt if you could paint her--or any woman--in hers."

"I hope the picture did not impress you altogether unfavourably?"

"We are discarding the fallacy nowadays that Love is blind," said
Aunt B. inconsequently.  "While young and clear-eyed it has excellent
sight.  Later, it takes to dark-glasses of its own choice, and so
gives an impression of sightlessness.  Ferlie knows you better now
than she ever will know you, Edward ... or, no, that's not the
name--What is it, Ferlie?"

"It's 'Cyprian,'" announced Ferlie from a bath of cream and jam, "and
you're frightening him to death, Aunt B."

"Can't help that.  He's rather embarrassing me by being so palpably
embarrassed.  Don't blink like that, Cyprian.  Are you young enough
to join Ferlie in those poisonous cakes or would you prefer a scone?"

Cyprian coldly selected an éclair.

"Happy man!" said Aunt B., twinkling all over, "The sweets of life
are tasteless against my false teeth.  A watercress sandwich, now..."

She was a startling contrast to Cyprian's late-lamented aunts,
influencing the life of Little Puddington, even under their heavy
slabs of marble, by the trail of Guilds, Club-rooms, and Organ
endowments left behind them.  And Martha and Mary would have said,
with one accord, that a woman's glory was her hair.  A wig, or at
least, a discreet frame, if not an actual transformation, would be
preferable to that shameless modern shingling.

Brillianna Trefusis was too obviously one of those new elderly women
who no longer found the Presence on the altar of wood and stone, and
as obviously was Ferlie in love with her.

She caused Cyprian to leap finally in his chair at this stage of his
conclusions.  Intercepting his interrogative glance at Ferlie,
exceeding the Safety First limit as to ice-cream, "You'll like me
when you come to know me better," Aunt B. assured him.




CHAPTER IV

When Ferlie was seventeen and a half, and the finishing school loomed
ahead with its extra music lessons and picture gallery tours, Peter,
too, began to have ideas about cages.  He did not quite describe them
in Ferlie's way but proved himself worthily her brother and, up to a
certain point, allowed himself to be influenced by her opinions.

At nineteen, when Caius College claimed him, he showed signs of
forging ahead at a pace which left her a little breathless.  The
enquiring expression had sobered, on the development of a
well-chiselled nose, into the self-assured look of someone who has
things to tell the world.  To Ferlie he first imparted samples of
these.

His reform scheme for the suffering Universe was to be based, of
course, on psychics.  As a first step towards bursting upon Humanity
in the guise of Universal Healer, he had taken Havelock Ellis in
large indigestible doses, concluding inflexibly that all trouble
dated, not so much from Adam and Eve as from Lilith, who made of them
Two, instead of One, like herself.

"Originally, we were in all probability One Perfect Sex," he told
Ferlie.  "Artificial experimenting caused the split, which,
naturally, left one sex the complement of the other.  We find the old
allegory of Jupiter dividing by sword the race of gods which, having
created, he had begun to fear.  Ever since, each has been looking for
its true half in order to regain the lost power the Perfect Whole
first possessed."

"But surely the bi-sexual insects are the lowest in the scale of
Evolution," argued Ferlie, shrinking somewhat from the suggestion
that Peter's new Heaven and Earth, amalgamated, would contain no
marrying nor giving in marriage.  Because, though she, at fourteen,
had pledged herself to eternally single blessedness, she rather liked
to see other people marrying and driving away in their best clothes,
looking happy.  One never saw the same people again, somehow, after
they had driven away.  The couple which returned in their place
seemed always to be a couple that asked nothing better of life than
to sit still.  The driving away spelt Adventure but, perhaps, they
came back before they had reached that.

Ferlie was quite sure that, having once begun to drive away, she
would never turn back.

"And you see"--she had lost Peter and returned with a jump to find
him grazing in new pastures--"half the hysteria at the back of crime
and all unhappiness is sexual.  The economic conditions in this
country which condemn so many women to single cursedness are
disgraceful.  And how can anything vitally important be accomplished
for the Good of the Universe and the control of its illimitable
forces, when this sex-hunt, and natural procreation, curtails such a
disproportionate amount of human time and energy?  The natural
functions necessary for the continuance of the Race should be
exercised almost as unconsciously as in the case of trees and plants,
without stultifying analysation of emotion.  It is time we strove for
a simpler and less sentimental Ideal..."

Ferlie agreed that everyone who wanted to get married should be able
to do so by means of a State Dowry, equal for all, but she did not
see how Peter's Reform Scheme was to provide sufficient male mates
even then.

"And is it a doctor you will call yourself, dear?"

"I shall be the First of my Kind," said Peter in tones which admitted
no doubt of it.  "Once through the usual exams, so as to give the
old-fashioned geezers no handle--I have always felt Barker should
have tempered the wind to the shorn lambs of his period--I shall
strike out on Lines of My Own.  I shall not attempt to explain them
to you yet.  But, first of all, there must come a Breaking Away!"  He
made a wide gesture with his arms, and Ferlie, furtively sympathizing
with this draw-a-long-breath attitude, suspected that Peter would
probably excel himself in the Breaking Away, whatever happened
afterwards.

"I may have to deal a blow to many existing institutions and suffer a
bit for my convictions," went on Peter, looking as if this would not
prove the least enjoyable part of the campaign, "for instance,
Marriage must go."

"Oh, really, Peter?  I am rather sorry."

"It is a starkly barbarous survival of prehistoric ages; and now half
the people who uphold, or at least weakly condone it, are making vows
they do not intend to keep before altars whose sacrificial fires have
long been cold."

He talked very well, thought Ferlie, and probably did not mean all he
said.

"But, Peter, do you really think that the majority of people have
stopped believing in God?"

"Few have stopped who ever believed.  Many have never believed who
assumed they did because the Christian ethics were necessary to the
civilization which they found comfortable.  Scientific minds are now
demanding proof, and finding none, of many things upon which those
ethics are said to be based.  Therefore they begin to have the
courage of their convictions.  Lack of that has, up to now, caused
them to accept marriage on the surface and to deny it by secret act.
They have entered into lying contracts which are not only against
Nature but against common sense, because they feared to be pioneers.

"In all great movements there must be pioneers.  It's not a pleasant
job, pioneering; nor is it for cowards.  At present, my own brain
refuses to admit the existence of a Personal God, who can be cajoled
or roused to anger according to the behaviour of a swarm of little
ants on one of the countless millions of whirling globes He is said
to have made in His spare time.  The Herd Law, developed by the
strongest of those little ants, is followed by the weak majority
under the guise of a Divine Law, until a stronger little ant than the
first one comes along and amends it to suit himself, still sounding
the Divinity slogan.  Whatever name is given to this religion or
binding principle, the non-courageous part of the Herd, which is the
greater part, follow, etc., etc., and etc."

Visions of Peter followed by a Herd released from lawful matrimony
caused Ferlie an instant's misgiving.

Of course it was admitted that the marriage service had been somewhat
unfortunately reformed already once in the past by Cranmer, who,
influenced by German relatives, had introduced the Germanic idea of
servile obedience for the woman, absent in the old Catholic form.
The modern Anti-Reformationists were rightly demanding fresh revision
and omissions.  "Stronger ants," she supposed.  But, if they proved
less strong than the Peters, would Free Love make a superior
substitute to an institution hitherto regarded as God-given, though
Cranmerized?  Even if God had become, for the Scientific Mind, as
obsolete as Cranmer?  Whoever re-created two imperfect sexes out of
One Perfect Sex had made a very thorough job of it.  Besides, were
all Peter's ideas quite so shiningly new as he touchingly considered
them?

"You really have remarkable powers of assimilation for your age,"
said Peter, "and, unlike many women, are not hysterically upset by
the Unobvious."  (Ferlie hoped that Cyprian might, also, appreciate
these newly-developed qualities when he came home.)  "And, therefore,
I feel inclined to trust you with an important secret."

"You know you can, Peter."

He braced himself for confession.

"I have met a woman," said Peter.

Somehow Ferlie had thought as much.

"Slightly older than myself," he went on.  "She is a hospital nurse
and, naturally, we have discovered much common ground to explore in
discussion.  The nurse, I always maintain, can form a more accurate
estimate of the patient than can the doctor.  Phyllis agrees with me
that, in most cases, mental control should be established first, and
hypnotic influence be given a more important place than medicine.
The theory should be practised, not talked about.  The advertisement
earned by Coué and Hickman and their friends, becoming mingled with
ridicule, injures their cause.  Jesus of Nazareth avoided
advertisement.  He wisely foresaw the harm it did; and he never
pretended to be doing anything that a disciple could not also do who
sufficiently developed his will-power and self-confidence."

"You--you won't talk like this to Martha and Mary?  At present, you
see, Peter, they think you are so nice."

He waved a lofty hand at the mention of these shorn lambs of his
generation.

"I have told you I believe in tempering the wind."

Nevertheless, although it was splendid to be considered fully
protected against the searching elements of Truth, Ferlie felt that
her wool might have been thicker after his final announcement.

"Phyllis and I, likewise, see eye to eye on this pioneering question.
We are convinced we have a mission.  It shall be carried out, not by
word of mouth, but by example.  We suit one another.  We are healthy
and, from a medical point of view, know all there is to be known
about contraception.  At present we meet in secret.  I feel I owe it
to the Old Folk to put my views squarely to them before coming
fearlessly out into the open to state that, in the eyes of the God we
serve, we consider ourselves married without the intervention of a
priest or State official.  Phyllis has no parents--thank
goodness!--to bring pressure to bear upon her in the form of
hysterical tears.  We shall live together without cheapening our
private relationship by becoming parties to a ceremony which, in our
case, is tantamount to a farce.  We shall remain faithful to one
another without the urge of a public vow, loyal without the necessity
of bonds to keep us so.  Should we, eventually, decide to have
children, they will be brought up on like principles and taught the
utter unimportance of sex except for purposes of healthy propagation,
and it will be a point of honour for each parent to do his, or her,
utmost to fulfil the responsibility entailed at their birth,
uncoerced by any Court of Law.  Since the whole union will be based
on reason, not sentiment, everything is bound to run smoothly.  It is
all very simple, really."

Ferlie knew that Cyprian would consider it lamentably complicated.
And wasn't Cyprian a little more experienced than Peter?  If Cyprian
had married Muriel--and an unaccountable coldness stole over Ferlie
at the thought--it would certainly have been according to Herd Law,
if not God's.

"You mean, Peter darling--_Do_ you mean that you are living with this
woman now?"

"Please remember that you are referring to My Wife, in the Eyes of
God."

But Ferlie was considering the eyes of their uncle, the bishop.  She
wondered whether, as an only sister, she had done her duty by Peter.
Mary might be a stupid old thing but she was led to believe, in spite
of oneself, that she walked with God.  Inspired by this realization
Margery had conquered the pudding.

The Influence of The Good Woman was Mary's favourite subject for a
Sunday Talk.

Mankind, she would say--she never called them "Men"--were uplifted by
it, comforted in sorrow, healed in sickness, converted on death-beds.

"A lady with a lamp shall stand, etc...."

Peter, despite his lordly airs, was slightly pinker than usual and
his eyes sought space above Ferlie's head.  He had a beautiful skin,
she thought.  She did hope Phyllis was nice.  She knew that her
mother would have given up hope right away but, perhaps, parents, and
even Cyprians, were a little out of date.

The Young were marching onwards, still soldiers, though not exactly
Christian ones; because the old Christian Leader was out of date too.
He was now just Jesus of Nazareth, the Founder of Christianity, as
the Buddha was Gaudama Theiddatha, the Founder of Buddhism, and
Mohammed the Founder of--was it Islam or Allah?

Said Peter, making a successful break-away from a pause which
threatened to become uncomfortable, "I will introduce Phyllis to you,
Ferlie; on the Q.T.  We are relying on your support."

"Dear Peter," touched by this beautiful confidence in her affection.
"Only I do hope you are both quite sure."

She wasn't a bit sure herself.

* * * * * *

Phyllis did nothing to decrease her uneasiness.  That lady proved to
be pale-faced and regular of profile, with quick dark eyes which
never came to rest on any one object for long.  Mrs. Carmichael had a
weakness for people who looked at you, as she was in the habit of
saying, "dead straight in the face."  In thinking it out Ferlie
remembered that very few ever did.  Why should they?  And, of those
few more than one had been proved, later, own brother to Ananias.
But, whether or no Phyllis was own sister to Sapphira, she scarcely
glanced at Ferlie in shaking hands.  She might, decided Peter's
sister, be incessantly calculating sums in mental arithmetic.  The
fluttering of her eyelids apparently shut out visions which sought to
steal between her brain and the addition and subtraction.

The interview was hardly a screaming success.  Ferlie was
irresistibly and unreasonably reminded of Muriel Vane and wondered,
depressedly, on the way home, if she were going to develop into one
of those women who mistrust their own sex.

She was Aunt Brillianna's guest at the time, and the latter swiftly
noticed her problematical silences, but put them down to anxiety over
the mail which brought distressing news of Mr. Carmichael.  The
doctors talked sagely of an operation and he was taking sick leave.

"If he should have to retire now he won't get his 'K,'" Ferlie
reminded Aunt B., reading from her mother's inconsequent scrawl.

Aunt B. dryly tendered it as her opinion that the Family of
Carmichael was great enough to survive that loss.  "Leave us our
nobility" had best described her attitude since the Houses of
Trefusis and Carmichael had united.  The ancestral title would ever
carry more weight with her than any that might possibly be earned or
bought by some Son of Trade with nothing to recommend him but Board
School brains or a Bank Balance.

Ferlie, however, received a clearer idea of the workings of her
mother's mind.

One returned from Exile with letters after one's name, the reward of
thirty-odd years of labour, and in Europe people knew not what they
meant nor even the order in which to write them.  The Handle, an
unmistakeable sign of services rendered, they could understand and
respect, whether or no the man who wore it had received the just
reward of his deeds.

"Your father," wrote Mrs. Carmichael, "will be the only one of the
Family to have had his career cut short, if this illness presages
early retirement.  And this with you nearly grown-up and Peter
becoming more expensive every term...!"

Ferlie could have foretold that, apart from the question of expense,
Peter, at the moment, was unlikely to exercise a soothing influence
on his mother's shattered nerves.  She had an idea that Aunt
Brillianna would prove the only satisfactory exponent of his case,
but Peter had not been moved to confide in Aunt B.

* * * * * *

His parents came, heard, but found themselves unable to conquer him.
Peter was a stauncher supporter of truth than of tact.  His mother
took refuge in unlimited tears; his father in the only ethics he
favoured, i.e., those founded on the honour of the House of
Carmichael.  Decently-bred people simply "did not do" these things.
Peter hotly denied that his bodily functions were at variance with
those of the organ-grinder.  This was the most unkindest cut of all.
No Carmichael had ever ground an organ for a living and the
comparison was odious.

Peter wanted to introduce Phyllis to them as his wife in the eyes of
whatever God the Family severally worshipped.  His father adopted the
time-honoured attitude which forbade his son to bring That Woman in
contact with the crystal purity of mother and sister.  Ferlie,
holding to the view that "better a little lie than much great
unhappiness," refrained from publishing it abroad that she had
already been subjected to the contamination of Phyllis.

Peter and his latch-key departed the house and were no more seen, and
his irate father's emotions were presently smothered in a whirl of
soft-footed nurses and suavely-smiling physicians.

"If Peter could only have waited!" wailed his mother.  But Youth
waits on nobody.

Once free of the Nursing Home Mr. Carmichael took a practical line:
Peter found his allowance stopped.  Then it was that he diabolically
exemplified his theories regarding the common Brotherhood of Man by
obtaining an organ and a particularly chilly-looking monkey who
danced to the tune of "O solo mio," thus rendered by a Carmichael
outside the paternal library window.  No one could have guessed how
the farce would end.

The last act was exclusively organized by Phyllis.  The very
opposition had lent Phyllis a fictitious value in Peter's eyes and
his philosophy became for him the bread of life.  To Ferlie, alone,
he brought his accounts of Phyllis's unfathomable comprehension of
his own soul.  "Mixed into me as honey in wine," etc., etc.

Phyllis assumed the same proportions for Peter as had Muriel Vane for
Cyprian; she was the Perfect Mate.  And then Phyllis met a well-to-do
surgeon, with reputation already established, who was not merely
ruling an ethereally beautiful Kingdom in the Clouds.  To Ferlie came
Peter, wild-eyed and incredulous.

"But she said--But she _understood_ that she was My Wife," he
repeated again and again, as if by the repetition he could find the
key to the riddle.

"And, you see, Peter," said Ferlie simply, "if she had been married
to you in the ordinary way----"

But that was going ahead too quickly for Peter.

"She said...  She promised..."  Surely that creed should be
all-sufficient which admitted the word of a mortal soul to be its
bond.

Mrs. Carmichael's sense of injury against That Creature for having
caught Peter was now transformed into indignation because she had let
him go.

His father, the danger safely over, resumed his man-of-the-world pose
as though he had never departed from it, produced an extra ten-pound
note, or so, and told his wife that boys would be boys.

Only Ferlie fully realized that by such means boys become men.

Aunt B., meeting Peter accidentally soon afterwards in the Tube,
immersed in illustrated volumes whose pages unblushingly revealed to
his neighbours on either side aspects of the human frame the
existence of which they had, hitherto, blandly ignored, nodded her
shingled locks in Sybillic understanding.

"Buses and Tubes are the most natural places to study the shapes of
one's fellow-creatures," she remarked.  "I see you are determined it
is to be Medicine, Peter."

"Medicine must be the preliminary," Peter replied, unshaken in his
resolve to arrive at summits unattained, albeit it seemed he would be
obliged to scale them unpartnered.

"I am going abroad for the winter," Aunt B. informed him.  "I may, or
I may not, return with the swallows.  When Ferlie is in her Parisian
convent and you memorizing the seventeen Latin names for the stomach,
or some equally uninspiring anatomical organ, in Caius, no one will
be needing a garrulous old woman who finds it difficult to keep her
fingers out of other folks' pies.  I suppose when I see you and
Ferlie again you will both have quite a lot of advice to give me as
to where I should ornament a bath-chair for the remainder of my days."

If Aunt B. had been able to face the English winter, or, if on
deciding not to do anything so disagreeable, she had left an address
behind her for regular correspondents to bombard with the Family
scandals, her departure might not have affected Ferlie's whole
future.  As it did.

* * * * * *

Peter had come down for the Short Vacation that Season, and Ferlie
had clung in damp farewell round the high collars of Martha and Mary,
and returned to town to lay in stores of more advanced underclothing
than had been permitted under their care in preparation for her
departure to be "finished."

The fortnight after Christmas she spent at the home of Margery
Craven, now a red-cheeked Diana of the hunting-field, collecting
brushes and masks of more than legitimate four-footed victims.

Thence, an unintelligible letter from Peter recalled Ferlie.  It was
so unusual for Peter to condescend to anything longer than a telegram
that Ferlie took the train home with forebodings she tried vainly to
allay.  Something had gone wrong, he said.  Plans for everyone had
altered and she was needed.

She reached their town house to learn from the parlour-maid that her
father had been taken back to the Nursing Home; that her mother was
with him now there, at the moment, and that Mr. Peter had ordered tea
in the library.

Ferlie sought him without even waiting to shed her muff and furs.  It
was always rather dark in the library, but the uncertain shadows cast
by the red lick of flaming tongues in the deep grate, where a new log
was crackling, could not altogether account for an odd bleared look
about Peter's eyes.  He was sitting in a crimson leather arm-chair,
his shoulders hunched, his hands on his knees.

"Hullo!" he hailed her unconvincingly; and he spoke as if he had a
cold.  "I couldn't meet you--had to do some important messages for
Mother."  Then he explained.

Even if Mr. Carmichael's second operation proved successful, he would
never return to Burma; in which case Ferlie could not go to Paris,
nor Peter back to Caius.  It would be impossible for his father to
put him through the prolonged and expensive medical course on a
pension reduced by high income tax, increased rates of living, and
the expense of interminable doctors' fees which they might have to
meet in the future.

The town house must, necessarily, be sold.  Mrs. Carmichael would
feel most the change to cramped quarters; she had been a Somebody
among other Somebodies in the East.  Moreover, out there, the "K" was
considered a foregone conclusion with regard to her husband.

Ferlie's own disappointment receded into the background as she
measured the full force of this second blow which Fate had dealt
Peter.

"It will mean----" she faltered after a long pause, and stopped.

"Anything a fellow can get," said Peter, his air-castles a blur of
undefined hues at his feet like the ruined rainbows of melted snow.

Ferlie wondered if it were true about the darkest hour coming before
dawn.  Wished that she could hear Cyprian's views on the subject.

During the next few weeks, however, she found herself consoling,
rather than consulting, people.  Her mother and Peter were too
immersed in their particular aspects of the trouble to question
whether Ferlie herself did not require most support, freshly
transplanted as she was from a world devoid of responsibility to one
teeming with seemingly unsolvable problems.




CHAPTER V

"I suppose you had better go," said Ferlie's mother.  "One had not
intended you to 'come out' so soon; but as it is impossible to tell
what the future will hold for any of us, it will be better for you to
miss no opportunity of meeting people and making friends.  Peter will
no longer be able to bring men down from Cambridge for us to know."

That took her off on a different track from Lady Cardew's dance
invitation to Ferlie.

"Poor Peter," she said, "he looks so white and wretched and I am sure
the thought of his ruined future is keeping your father back."

Ferlie said she had no heart for dancing.  She, also, was looking
white but as nothing had ruined her career it could only be caused by
their common anxiety for Mr. Carmichael.  As a matter of fact, when
one has seen as little of one's father as had Ferlie it was not him
one missed so much as his Presence and that which he stood for in a
household.

There is no law that children and parents should be one flesh and it
was with her mother Ferlie had corresponded; not with the man whose
ideas on children's upbringing dovetailed with Mary's thread-bare
creed concerning "Her that overcometh the pudding," with the added
clause that should life not provide sufficient obstacles upon which
to test the will they must be artificially fashioned.

In the end Ferlie went to Lady Cardew's dance, clad in virgin white,
reminiscent of her confirmation, since Mrs. Carmichael's mind was
nothing if not unoriginal and Ferlie did not really care.

White was not exactly the fashion for débutantes that Season, so it
was unavoidable that she should look like a snowdrop which had
somehow mistaken the time of year and arrived among a riot of summer
flowers.

So, doubtless, would the young man have put it, lounging in rather a
tired fashion in the vicinity of the Refreshments (liquid), had he
possessed poetical leanings.  As it was, conscious of the quickening
of a somewhat jaded appetite for débutantes, he decided that he would
dance this evening, after all.

Lady Cardew was greatly relieved by this decision.  Girls were
plentiful, men few; and she always prided herself upon eschewing that
modern form of invitation which requests a girl to bring her
"dancing-partner."

Ferlie was more fortunate than many in the possession of a brother
whose good nature could usually be relied upon, although he did not
describe himself as a dancing-man.  But Peter had not been able to
come to-night.

Lord Clifford Greville-Mainwaring, aged twenty-six, had lately, by an
unforeseen railway accident, succeeded to his uncle's estate.  For a
wonder, not only were these considerable, but the means to maintain
them were adequate.  He was the Catch of the Season and perfectly
aware of that interesting truth.  Mammas had a furtive eye upon him;
daughters a calculating one, as they weighed his tall but rather
meagre proportions against the knowledge that Jack here and Eric
there, if infinitely better-looking, were obliged to admit that their
chins were their fortunes.

Dancers are born, not made.  Ferlie was a Lucky One.  Clifford
Greville-Mainwaring began to enjoy her ingenuous enjoyment.  She
acknowledged very recent escape from school but wore a mystifyingly
philosophical air which intrigued him.  He had been fully prepared to
initiate her into the mysteries of a first flirtation; always
excepting, he supposed, the school music or drawing-master of ascetic
or bulbous personal appearance.

But she had proved very unapproachable, even behind the most
sheltering palms in the conservatory with its cunningly shaded
lights.  And he did not want to frighten her.

"There is something about you," he said, "which reminds one of a tune
one has heard and lost and which one always hopes someone will come
along humming so that one may recapture it for ever."

"But there are some tunes," Ferlie replied, "which, having
recaptured, one would give a great deal to lose again."

His was not a very fertile brain and he clung passionately to his
simile, which had struck him as perfect in its way; so passionately
that anyone more sophisticated than Ferlie might have suspected him,
with perfect justification, of being a little drunk.  But she was
growing sleepy and merely thought it exceedingly civil of him to
insist on seeing her home.

His own car replaced the taxi that had brought her.  She took leave
of her hostess impervious to the launched arrows of half-a-hundred
eyes.

Had Greville-Mainwaring not given his chauffeur leave of absence and
so found himself obliged to drive the new Crossley, Ferlie might not
have been so ready to accord him polite permission to call.  So
indifferent that permission.  She was really uncertain of the correct
procedure and, in her preoccupied state, took the easiest course, and
then forgot Mainwaring in finding a letter from Cyprian awaiting her
on the hall table.

Not till Lady Cardew put in an ecstatic appearance on the following
Sunday afternoon did Mrs. Carmichael learn that her daughter had been
considered "the success of the evening."

"Quite like an advertisement for Pompeian Scent or Powder, or
whatever it is that is supposed to attract the elusive male," said
Lady Cardew, warmly sympathetic with Mrs. Carmichael's reverse of
fortune and very much alive to the possibility of doing her a real
good turn.  "My dear!  Only imagine if something came of it!"

Mrs. Carmichael was a little fluttered.  One had pictured Ferlie
being introduced by her father, in due course, to the eligible
officials of Burma.  Though that dream had faded this was, to put it
tritely, so sudden.  And Ferlie's own silence seemed remarkable.
Lady Cardew misread it.

"Girlish dignity, Linda.  She could hardly assume anything on an
evening's acquaintance, even if these modern young people waste very
little time.  And though there are the usual rumours that Clifford
has been a bit wild, you and I, as women of the world, realize that
it is better for a young man to have That Kind of Thing behind him
than before."

* * * * * *

On the strength of this exciting conversation Greville-Mainwaring
received a warmly uncritical reception when he casually arrived with
his card-case the following week.

It must be confessed that, up to half an hour previously, he had
forgotten Ferlie as completely as the tune so glibly cited on the
night of the dance.  He was going to a bridge party in the
neighbourhood and the sudden recognition of her windows reminded him
of a half-finished piece of work.

It might be amusing to take her out driving, with Briggs discreetly
officiating at the wheel and the car half-closed.  At any rate, he
might as well see her again.  Now he came to think of it, that
unembarrassed survey of her fellow-creatures could not foreshadow
Victorian innocence.  And Clifford prided himself upon knowing the
modern dancing girl for exactly what she was.

He was annoyed to find Ferlie "out."  Gropingly, he fancied that she
should have remained at home during calling hours, until his expected
visit.  Evidently, such a course had not occurred to her.

Mrs. Carmichael gave him tea at one end of the big drawing-room, full
of Eastern spoil, and Peter strolled in for his, late, abstracted and
unimpressed.

"I've heard that Ferlie is a decent dancer," he said.

And, "We shall always regret that if she, eventually, has a Season in
Simla," said Mrs. Carmichael, "her father and I will not be there to
see her a social success.  Simla is always full of pretty girls, but,
sometimes, I think that Ferlie has unusual charm."

Mainwaring, thwarted in his desire to see her again, began to agree.
With Mr. Carmichael at home Clifford might, possibly, have been
weighed himself in the balance and found wanting.  The cooler
judgment of Ferlie's father would not have placed the worldly goods,
with which this young man might undertake to endow his daughter,
favourably against the fact that he did not look as if he could ever
have earned even a small portion of them on his own account, either
in the past or future.  The signs of dissipation on the not
ill-looking, but weak, face must have stung to criticism the Puritan
elements of a mind belonging essentially to the labourer who has
borne the burden and the heat of the day.  As things were, Peter took
a more healthy interest in the make of the man's car than in his
character, and Mrs. Carmichael saw no further than that here was a
possibility of Ferlie's making up for that "K," lost to their branch
of the Family.

Accordingly, Clifford Greville-Mainwaring began, rather frequently,
to be found in the drawing-room of the house about to be sold over
the Family's heads, and Ferlie, in a few hastily-bought frocks,
frequented Thés Dansant and Private Views under the complacent eye of
Lady Cardew; at which functions Clifford, invariably hovering,
fascinated by her indifference to his marked attentions, waited to
take her home.

Ferlie, too, waited for something these days, but nobody realized
that it was the mail.  Doubtful whether she realized it herself until
that inevitable event from which, in looking back afterwards, she
dated her "growing up."

Champagne-cup, mingled with the strains of "Wyoming" in a softly-lit
private ball-room, made up Clifford's vacillating mind for him; the
touch of his hands upon her thinly silk-and-chiffon-covered knees
made up Ferlie's for her.  There was no mistaking the passionate
warmth of her refusal.  Till this moment her swift glimpses of
"Society," overshadowed as they were by anxiety for the future, had
affected her only as part of a drugging dream.  Now she awakened to
the direction in which she was drifting.

"But you don't understand," said Clifford, too amazed for coherent
thought, "I meant to ask you to marry me!"

"I know you did," admitted Ferlie gravely; "no one has ever asked me
such a thing before, but I knew at once what you meant.  And if you
are disappointed I am very sorry that I don't want to."

She had a feeling that the rejection of one's first marriage proposal
should be couched in more elegant diction, but, really, there seemed
nothing more to say than just that.  Marriage meant living with a
person for always.  She was quite certain that she did not wish to
live with Lord Clifford Greville-Mainwaring for always.  She enjoyed
dancing with him but, when you came to think of it, dancing played an
extraordinarily small part in one's existence.  She was puzzled
because Clifford did not seem to understand her point of view at all,
and she wished he would sit further off.  They were returning home in
the Crossley, with Briggs driving.  Later, Peter, descending the turn
of the staircase, overheard Clifford's parting words.

"My dear girl, you don't know me yet!  I shall go on coming until I
get a different answer.  That's the sort of man I am."

Ferlie decided it would be hopeless to explain the sort of woman she
was, and wondered how often she could contrive to be absent when
Clifford called in this optimistic fashion throughout the week.  She
was, somehow, inclined to surmise that his resolution would not
survive a week's rebuffs and she wondered why she had not noticed
before that he used some sort of scent on his hair.  Meanwhile,

"That chap and Ferlie," said Peter, having faded away unnoticed to
his mother's sitting-room, "are brazenly approaching matrimony
to-night under the umbrella-stand.  From what I could gather Ferlie
seems to consider it an over-rated institution."

Mrs. Carmichael's embroidery dropped on her lap.

"You do not mean to say she is refusing him, Peter?  When Lady Cardew
and I have worked so hard."

"Oh, have you?" asked Peter.  "Why?"

"It is a mystery to me," said his mother, "how short-sighted men can
be.  Do you happen to know his income?"

"I happen to have noticed his shoes," Peter retorted: "they are the
genuine co-respondent article, and no mistake."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Do you like the chap, Mother?"

"What's wrong with him?  There is nothing to dislike so far as I can
see."

"That's just it," Peter admitted.  "There is nothing to like or
dislike--except his shoes."

Mrs. Carmichael decided that Peter was just being tiresome.

"It might mean a great deal to you if Ferlie accepted him," she
declared.  "He would be sure to make a settlement upon her--and if
you could even borrow money, Peter, just now----"

Peter started slightly and began to whistle out of tune.  Still
whistling, he strolled to the door.  On the threshold he broke off to
say: "Well, of course, it's none of my business.  To me there seems
nothing to take hold of in the man, one way or another."  A little
pause, and then, "But it's Ferlie's pigeon, after all."

They waited for Ferlie to announce her dubious tidings, but, to her
mother's surprise, Ferlie said nothing.

This was making Mainwaring too exclusively her pigeon.  Mrs.
Carmichael tackled her at the hair-dressing hour when the lights were
low.  Extracted confession.

"But, my darling, do you realize...?"  So obviously, Ferlie didn't.

She stood behind her mother and her eyes sought the shadows of
tapping branches on the window with a wistful strained expression.
The mail that week was late....

Yes, she had resolved three years earlier that she did not want to
marry.  _He_ had suggested that type of husband which men in her
father's position were usually able to provide for their daughters
and she had scorned the nebulous suitor.  Did He remember?

It was a long time since she had heard of Muriel Vane.  After her
return from abroad Muriel had gravitated to a different "Set."  There
were Rumours.  Lady Cardew palpably refrained from quoting them in
the presence of the Spotless Young of the Right Set.  If Muriel had
attracted Cyprian what would he have thought of Phyllis?

Peter looked quite stern at any mention of that quite ordinary
Christian name now.  Ferlie wondered if it were principle or whether
he still considered himself irrevocably yoked to Phyllis's memory...

What was her mother saying about Peter?  Mrs. Carmichael's plaintive
tones duetted with the singing of the kettle laying the foundations
for her nightly cup of cocoa.

"And, of course, you must do just as you think best....  Poor Peter!
Your father's convalescence is being so retarded with worry.  Though,
I'm sure, at my time of life it isn't very easy to begin to do
without things.  You, fresh from school, young and strong, will
probably not miss luxuries....  And ... your happiness is all that
matters, darling.  I wouldn't for the world persuade you against your
inclination....  Your father always says I've been too weak with my
children....  I wonder whether Peter will ever get over it?  Lady
Cardew thought Lord Clifford Greville-Mainwaring such a desirable
young man.  Your father and I would have been so much relieved--for
that Simla Season may never come off.  I was relying on the Durrants,
but Gwen Durrant will soon be leaving school herself.  There was the
question of your passage-money too.  Do you know there are more than
a million superfluous women in England...?

"... Well, good night, darling.  Yes, I'm disappointed, but you
mustn't think of Us; only of Yourself.  No, thank you.  I don't think
I feel like cocoa to-night, after all..."

* * * * * *

Two days later, a Ferlie with brooding lips, who had twice
circumvented Clifford's indications that he came of the Bull-dog
Breed, sought Peter where he was engaged in discarding superfluous
treasures for which there would be neither nor lot in the life to
come.

"Are you sorry, too, about this marriage, Peter?"

He avoided her direct gaze.

"Girls do marry," he said, rather banally.

"I know they do.  But there's such a thing as--being in love."

Peter sat back on his haunches, busily dissecting the corpse of a
camera.

"I wonder!" cryptically.  Said Ferlie, "You always thought queerly
about these things."

"Perhaps I still think queerly about them.  That is, if common sense
is queer....  Phyllis professed to be in love with me.  Of course you
are naturally more religious.  I suppose you inherit it from Mother.
I do not mean that you are an orthodox Churchwoman--save the mark!
But your sentiments are religious, Ferlie.  Love, the Sacrament! ...
and so on.  _I_ know that Love is a joke invented by Nature to enable
her to work out her own ends.  If you ask me what I think of
Mainwaring I say he just can't be thought about.  Whatever he's
heading to be he has not got there yet.  You could make pretty much
what you liked of him.  Also, you probably wouldn't see very much of
him after that first honeymoon farce was played through.  And then
you could live your own life; one which might be made as interesting
and as full as you pleased.  And, you see, it isn't as if there were
Anyone Else on the mat."

So that was what Peter thought about it.  And now Ferlie knew.

In the light of which knowledge she opened a certain despatch-case
and re-read the letters she had received from Cyprian since writing
to inform him that she had left school.

The mining life seemed lonely enough and a thread of tiredness stole
in and out of the neatly-formed syllables.  Ferlie, with faint
misgivings, asked herself whether Cyprian were not one of those men
who might be described in a book as having made a mess of his life.
Instinctive wisdom whispered that Muriel would have made a greater
mess of it for him had she given herself the opportunity; but it was
doubtful that Cyprian, even now, believed that.  No credit to him to
be so faithful to his ideals; it was just the way he was made.

"And if I had an Ideal," Ferlie told herself, "I could be faithful to
it too."

At tea her mother asked her if she had a cold....

Articles of furniture were already beginning to disappear from the
house; two valuable pictures had gone to Christie's.  Ferlie
suggested: "Margery wants me to go back for a few days.  If you don't
mind, Mother, I should like to go."

"Only till Monday, then," said her mother, rather miserably; "Next
week the packing begins in earnest."

They were chivalrous to Ferlie in their studious avoidance of
Clifford Greville-Mainwaring's name.

At the back of her brain flitted the ghost of a memory: the
Zoological Gardens and a lion's cage.  Somebody had told her that the
bars of those other cages, the existence of which she had guessed at,
were made of gold.  Was Mainwaring unconsciously forging them now for
her?  She decided to discuss the matter with Margery.  There was no
nonsense about Margery.  Her practical scrutiny of the situation
might lay the spectres of those unborn dreams filming Ferlie's vision.

* * * * * *

And Margery, once approached, certainly made things sound simpler.

"You have no reasonable objection to the man?"

"I don't like his touching me."

"Do you like the thought of anyone's touching you?  Not experimented
yet?"

Ferlie shook her head, her face bent low over the glove-satchet she
was sorting.

"Yet everyone, even in our effete, old-fashioned Guard of Die-Hards,
has to tackle Sex in the long run," Margery reminded her.
"Otherwise, how would the world go on?  The Modern Aristocracy,
_alias_ The Smart Set which gets put on the stage, believes in facing
more facts than usually exist.  But it _is_ a truth that, in
marriage, familiarity breeds indifference to many matters one would
have shied at the very mention of before."

"How do you know?" questioned Ferlie resentfully.

"I have watched my girl-friends marry and invited their confidences
afterwards," said Margery with a retrospective smile.  "Life is a
muddle of rough and smooth for them all, whether they went into it
with wilfully closed eyes or curiously wide-open ones.  I'll tell you
someone else who always seemed to me to be looking for sacramental
happiness and getting terribly hurt when he found what he thought was
trouble, just like you.  The man who ought to have been your uncle
and wasn't.  I gather some folks have extra sensitive feet on the
world's highway, and a too unshaken belief in the everlasting beauty
of the hedge-flowers.  By the way, do you know about that Vane woman
he was so keen on when you were a kid at school?"

"Only that she turned out--not very nice."

Margery laughed queerly but did not pursue the subject.

"It's a mercy," she said, "that your Cyprian-man will have cut his
wisdom-teeth by the time he sees her again.  Do you ever hear from
him now?"

"N-not lately."

"Well, his avuncular advice would probably coincide with mine if he
were here.  All men are like peas, and most women, when it comes to
the Year-after-the-Wedding.  Even Tristran and Iseult would have
pretty surely grown fat at forty when the children were growing
poetical.  At forty everyone grows either fat or thin and begins to
mistrust moonlight for reading the Book of Life by.  In Cliff
Mainwaring--I used to know him in his college days--you will have a
husband who will never set the Thames alight, nor need to.  And
you'll live very peaceable in consequence.  I shall expect to be
asked to stay with you."

And that was what Margery thought about it.




CHAPTER VI

"I have _surprising_ news for you," wrote Mrs. Carmichael, "Cyprian
is at Home!  His Company has sent him to attend some _Conference_ in
connection with the _mines_.  I have not seen him myself.  He called
when I was out and of course _Peter_ is away at Wimbledon seeing your
father's cousin about that clerkship.  Cyprian left a note to say he
had been _lent_ a flat by a friend.  One of those self-contained
affairs in Jermyn Street.  _Service-flats_, I think they are called,
with the kind of lift which always terrifies me that you are supposed
to work yourself by pressing buttons and _not_ a hall-porter.  I
should not _dream_ of going there unless Peter were with me and, as
likely as not, poor Peter would forget _which_ buttons these days,
himself, and shoot us into the _wrong_ flat when it would be _most_
awkward to explain.

"Cyprian said he should be in all _Sunday_ if any of us cared to ring
him up.  You had better write and tell him that I shall be at
Richmond this weekend myself, seeing your father in the _Home_.  I
suppose you will be returning on Monday and can arrange to meet him
then and relate our _distressing news_."

For a wonder, Mrs. Carmichael did not forget to add Cyprian's full
address.  Followed the plaintive reminder that Lord Clifford had
asked to be allowed to take Ferlie to a matinée on Monday; that the
poor fellow was looking very pulled down and she was quite certain
that if Ferlie put off Cyprian till Tuesday he would quite
understand.  P.S.--"My new georgette was _ruined_ by that _horrid_
little dog of the Glennies' which cost _a hundred guineas_.  I would
not pay that to have my carpet and my friends' dresses spoilt, and I
don't believe it, though Lady Cardew tells me it is a _fact_, but she
is never very lucid in these matters."

The strong point of this letter, also, being anything but its
lucidity, Ferlie did not waste time considering which of the canine
commandments framed for drawing-rooms had been violated at her
mother's expense.  Three words, only, hammered at her brain: "Cyprian
is Home."

(1) That explained his silence of the past weeks.

(2) He would be in all Sunday.

(3) She must see him before Monday's matinée.

Her way instantaneously seemed to grow clear and hard, like a path on
ice.  Perhaps Cyprian had escaped the rules of captivity away there
among his lonely scattered mines.

Cyprian, who had come to her rescue in nursery-days when Hell loomed
before her in the glowing grate, near the yawning tomb of the
toy-cupboard and when the night-light, which should have illumined
the tired pilgrim's path to a Heaven of sunny dreams, had blown
out....  "And ... you will always like me best, Cyprian?" ... "Of
course ...  Of course."

If anyone could now prevent the barred gates from closing upon her,
it must be Cyprian.  If he failed she would go to the matinée,
thought Ferlie.  It would not matter where she went, if Cyprian
failed.

"But," protested Margery, later, "I thought you were motoring up with
Dad on Monday?  The only possible train from here on Sunday does not
reach town till just before dinner."

"It will do quite well," said Ferlie.  "And I really must go."

At the station Margery launched her parting shaft.

"Good-bye ... My Lady! ... Remember, you can be happy, plus money,
with many a person whom you could not live beside for an hour in a
little cottage with roses round the door."

And she slammed down the window of the compartment for the
traveller's last gestures of farewell.

So motionless sat Ferlie during the next two hours that an artist,
thus minded, could have made a detailed portrait of her before the
train sighed gustily up Victoria platform.

Rain, in the evening air, and black and gold puddles reflecting the
passing figures.

She made her way along to the cloak-room and deposited the box which
did duty for a week-end of light dresses, but her suit-case went with
her into the taxi.  The man received indifferently her stammering
request to be taken to the Jermyn Street address.

Inside the taxi it was hot and steamy.  The last occupant had mingled
scent and cigarettes.  Ferlie dropped both windows and allowed the
rush of cool damp air from the flickering streets to whirl her hair
about her face.  She passed a chamois leather over her eyelids and
nose, and shrugged impatiently at the reflection the narrow strip of
glass gave back to her under a withered spray of lilies-of-the-valley.

She paid the taxi and waited to watch the man drive away, before
turning into the bare stone hallway to read the minute directions on
the lift.  Although a more adventurous spirit than her mother she
decided to walk up.  Her watch told her that it was a quarter to
eight.

* * * * * *

Cyprian had spent most of the time, since a late cup of tea, in
writing.  He was very busy.  This could not be counted as coming home
on Leave and he did not expect to have more than six short weeks in
England.

Whimsically, he wondered, as the twilight deepened what it was all
about--this busy-ness with regard to somebody else's affairs.  Since
he had chosen to turn his back upon a sheltered and unruffled peace
(or would it have been stultification?) and taken the sea-ways
towards more glowing suns than ever dawned upon the University towns
of England, what Grail had he been pursuing?  He had earned his bread
and a little butter.  For the rest there had remained the distant
echoes of a siren's singing, now without power to lure him closer,
and Ferlie's gradually maturing letters.

Had he wanted Ferlie to grow up?  She had shown precocious signs of
it during his last Leave.  If he had lost his little companion of the
Zoological Gardens England must now become as lonely as Burma.  There
was the influence of that strange woman who had had tea with them:
the aunt.  Her name had made him think of hair-oil.  Cyprian laid
down his pen.  In the brightness of the firelight he had not noticed
his omission to turn up the electric reading-lamp; and the East ages
the eyes.  He ought to feel younger than he did.  One had to take
malaria into account.  How old was Ferlie now?  Nearly eighteen?
Still a child to thirty-nine....

No one had rung him up.  He particularly refrained from asking Ferlie
to do so in his note, in case she too should be very busy these days.
There would be gaieties in town for the Carmichaels' daughter at
eighteen, and hordes of young men who did complicated things with
their feet in ball-rooms.  Young men, so much younger than Cyprian,
that they could not have shared his short career as a soldier, early
invalided out in the first push.

Sometimes now, when he coughed, he wondered whether the surgeon had
succeeded in extracting quite all the bits of shrapnel.

Ferlie, in those days, had not even attained the dignity of
flapperdom.  Too small for khaki-worship.  And it was during those
years, he had heard, that Muriel began to lose her silver-fair head.
He remembered his one last futile attempt to win her before returning
to Burma.  His hand, the forefinger stained with ink, stretched
irresolutely towards the telephone.  As if in direct answer to the
impulse a bell rang.  The electric bell of his flat.  Curious.  The
valet of his rooms used a latch-key, discreetly, when the flat's
occupant was out, and had already taken his dinner order.  The
hand-lift would do the remaining work of the evening in bringing up
the meal and taking it down.

He crossed the room and switched on the crimson-shaded lamp in the
lobby.  The dim silhouette of a feminine figure was outlined on the
frosted glass of the staircase door.  He slipped back the catch.

She stood in the frame of the dark fluted doorway.

White fox furs at her throat, fresh violets nestling in them from
some country hot-house; above, the hair of a Beata Beatrix escaped
from under her soft grey suede travelling hat.

So this was Ferlie.  Ferlie, whose letters had grown mature.

"How long do we have to stand here and look at one another, Cyprian?"

The tremulous laughter of her greeting broke the spell.

Cyprian, blinking in the red lamp-light, was beginning to believe her
an apparition.  He stood aside to let her pass and slipped back the
travelling wrap from her shoulders with hands which were not quite
steady.

"I did not think you would be coming so late as this," he said.  "You
never rang up, Ferlie."

"No." ... She curled into a chair beside the narrow fireplace and
held out chilled fingers to the blaze.

"I have been in the country all this week.  I only came up this
afternoon; the first train after I got Mother's letter.  You wrote to
Mother; not to me."

He ignored that.

"But, my dear--where are you dining?"

("Men," thought Ferlie.  "Oh, Men!")  She repudiated the thought of
food with a gesture.

"Turn up the light, Cyprian.  I want to look at you."

He obeyed and, kneeling, stirred the fire.  She noticed the hair upon
his temples, iron-grey; the little tired lines about his eyes and
mouth; the quick nervousness of the sensitive hands.  The East had
taken its toll of the scholarly dreamer who had allowed his life to
drift out on the tide rather than remain upon smooth shores to face a
woman's "No."

With lightning rapidity the impression was registered on her heart
that Cyprian wanted taking care of.  She was not absolutely right.
He was a giver himself.  He wanted someone to take care of.  Another
flash, this time searching out the exact truth: Cyprian was not used
to women.

"There has been no one since Muriel," decided Ferlie; and feared that
name no more.

A gust of wind through the open door fluttered to her feet a sheet of
close fine writing, the Greek e's betraying his classics and every
letter standing out in equal value.  It was the report on which he
had been engaged that afternoon.  She stooped and handed it back to
him.

"I have interrupted you, Cyprian."

"Of course you have.  What else have I ever existed for but to keep
my temper under your interruptions, Ferlie?"

"There is so much to say," and she drank him in with happy eyes.

He ran one thumb along the edge of the paper, still faintly worried.

"But I must arrange something.  You can't go without any dinner at
all.  I've ordered 'for one' up here and, of course, you must eat
mine.  I'll see if it's what you like."

There was a hint of exasperation in her voice as she checked his
advance upon the bell.

"Do they allow you such small helpings?  I can share your dinner when
they send it up, if you will insist upon making me eat when I don't
want to."

She pulled him down beside her, by his sleeve, into the other chair.

"Do you know you have not even said that you are glad to see me?"

"Glad?  Why, Ferlie, you know----" he broke off to stare back at her,
and then repeated, "Glad?"

"You have not changed," said Ferlie slowly, "I suppose I have?"

This was frank coquetry and she felt a little ashamed when, with
unsuspecting disregard of the fact, he said,

"Stand up again.  I haven't made any of the correct remarks.  Why,
your skirts are as short as they were before!"

"Shorter, Silly!  Fashion now decrees that one must put up one's
skirts and let down one's hair on leaving school."

"I am glad they have left your hair alone."

"There was not much sense in trying to 'put up' a head, bobbed by
Nature, when Art was busy bobbing all Nature's long locks.  This bush
will never grow beyond my shoulders, if I live to be eighty.  I
inherit it from Aunt B.  That was why she shingled, you know."

His scrutiny came to rest on the widely set grey irises, circled by
their dark golden fringe.

"No.  You have not grown up," he decided.  "You will probably eat all
the ice-cream to-night and leave me the cutlets.  We were always Jack
Spratt and his wife."

She nodded gravely and he added, "Also, you will not want your wine
dry."

"I am ignorant enough to have imagined, hitherto, that all wine must,
of necessity, be wet.  However, water out of your wash-stand carafe
will do for me.  I expect your tooth-glass is luxuriously patterned
to be in keeping with the rest of things here."

They chattered inconsequently till the lift arrived with its first
burden of dishes, and not until the dessert had returned to the
depths whence it had mysteriously emerged and after they had made
themselves as ridiculous as two picnicking children, did Ferlie get
down to the Family news.

She touched very lightly upon her "dancing partner," Clifford
Greville-Mainwaring, but the deepened tinge of her face did not
escape Cyprian because, by then, he was finding it difficult not to
look at her all the time.

"I am incredibly sorry about your father," he said, shying away from
an uncomfortable idea.  "You all strike me as being wonderfully
plucky."

"It's worst for Peter," said Ferlie.  And sat silent for a while
considering the problem of Peter.

Quite by chance, Cyprian glanced at the clock and remarked in
startled tones that it was past eleven.

"Is it?" she asked indifferently.

Her arms were clasped round her knees and her chin resting on them.
Sometimes she rocked herself gently backwards and forwards.  He
smiled to himself, remembering the pose since she was seven.

"I am thinking it is about time I saw you home," he said.  "Mrs.
Carmichael will be wondering what on earth we are doing."

"No she will not.  There is no one at home, Cyprian, and I am not
expected back till to-morrow."

"But where have you arranged to spend the night?"

She gave that little shrug of the shoulders, once characteristic of
fourteen-year-old Ferlie shrugging the Inessential off her horizon.

"Here, I think," she said with wide eyes on the ruby coals.

Cyprian laughed.  Then he protested, in his amusement, at the
simplicity of Ferlie grown-up.  Presently, he sobered and began to
attempt explanations; to all of which she turned a dispassionately
deaf ear.

"Come on, dear," said Cyprian at last.

"Where to?"

Driving it home that this unexpected arrival on his doorstep had, in
very sooth, been a Ferlie-esque escapade from which he must extricate
her; if she would lend herself to extrication.  He was honestly
puzzled.

Of course, he realized that, since they were Themselves, and not
another couple, her outlook was perfectly reasonable.  Ferlie and he.
A law unto themselves long ago, when she awoke at night to scream
because her surroundings were dark and lonely.  A law unto themselves
when he received her at the hands of Martha and Mary, mistrusters of
men in general, but willing to admit him into the fold on account of
that farcical avuncular status.  A law unto themselves in their
unnaturally unusual correspondence with its sprawled confidences on
one side and its restrained admissions on the other of his need of
her in the background of his life.

That need was within him still, but it must be his part to limit it
now that she was grown up: to take over the reins of friendship
and--and normalize it.

"Well, Cyprian," said Ferlie, quietly watching him, "are you, even
now, an occupant of a cage in the greater Zoological Garden, outside
the walls of which I promised you, a long while ago, that I always
intended to remain?"

This was utter nonsense.  Ferlie, with her talk of cages at fourteen,
was not to be encouraged, but Ferlie, holding similar views at
eighteen, was, most distinctly, to be brought up short.

He shifted the chair impatiently and she forestalled his reply.

"I suppose," she said, "that some buy their freedom in the course of
years with the big price of experience, but others are born free.  If
you have not bought yours yet you will some day.  But I was born
free.  Peter, too, I think.  He has the courage of his beliefs; he is
no captive to past customs, nor is the fear of the neighbour the
beginning of his wisdom.  If we walk into cages it will be of our own
free will, and not because any stale bait can tempt us from within,
nor any pursuing hounds scare us from without."

"Ferlie," said the bewildered man beside her, "will you please tell
me exactly what you mean?"

She shook a tangled lock out of her eyes and, at that moment, in the
gilding firelight, he had an odd fancy that a man might fill his
hands with sovereigns who had the courage to plunge them into her
hair.  Involuntarily, he touched the ruffled rebellious head.

"You and I have always understood one another," he reminded her.

She imprisoned his fingers between her two soft palms.

"It is a good many years now, Cyprian, since you and I became
friends.  Whenever I have had need of you and you could possibly
reach me, you have always come.  We have had to face separation for
what has seemed a vitally long time to me since your last leave.  To
you, already mentally settled and developed, it may not have seemed
so long.  But I have been half afraid that your return would separate
us more surely than, so far, has the sea.  To test that fear, I came
to-night, because I have need of you, Cyprian.  To-night, not
to-morrow.  When I was little, what help could you have given me by
waiting for the daylight?  I used to think you could save me from the
tomb which was all ready to close on me.  Now it is a cage of which I
am afraid.  I want to stay with you until that fear is past.  I want
to assure myself of you; to re-learn you in the light of my increased
knowledge of life.  To-night, not to-morrow.  For to-morrow I have to
make a decision concerning that cage, and the decision depends upon
what I may learn of you in the little time we have together to-night.
I knew how you would shrink from offending Convention; therefore I
have frustrated Convention.  We have only a few more free hours in
which to pick up the threads which may have got dropped and twisted.
Upon the untangling of them rests my decision of to-morrow.  I have
gone to sleep in your arms so often that it is a very natural thing
for me to remain beside you now until we can both sleep--at rest, in
one another's presence again.  I need you, Cyprian, just now.  And I
want you to realize just how much, or how little, you need me."

All but mesmerized, he listened.  That which was hide-bound in him,
and entirely reticent British, put up a dull fight against the naked
simplicity of her words.  He said weakly: "Dear, you are so young.
You do not understand."

"I understand 'What a Young Girl Ought to Know,'" and she bubbled
over with quick mockery.  "Curiously enough, the knowledge neither
distresses nor shames me.  This isn't the Victorian era.  But all
that I understand, or misunderstand, about the threadbare 'Facts of
Life,' affects neither of us with regard to this situation.  We have
cherished our hours in the past, scattered here and there, each like
a desert oasis.  We have come to another now.  Later, very much
later, I think I shall probably fall asleep in this chair and then
you may cover me up and depart in peace, yourself, to bed.  And
to-morrow we can breakfast somewhere together as if I had just come
upon the morning train and you had met me, and no one need hear that
we spent a happy night, or thereabouts, re-discovering one another."

Stirred to the depths and vexed with himself for his susceptibility
to her moods, Cyprian withdrew his hand into safety.

"You always had a way of making the unnatural seem perfectly natural
and ordinary."

"What forms your opinion on what is 'natural'?" asked Ferlle,
abruptly.

His brain groped around in the dark awhile before he found an answer.

"There is a daimon in every man," he insisted in low tones, speaking
more to himself than to her, "which forces upon him the knowledge
when a thing is not Right, even though it may be Natural."

And then, that very daimon, thus invoked, spoke to him in the ensuing
silence.

The same child who had fallen asleep on his shoulder in the past was
beside him now, expectant of the same "crystallized apricot" of
comfort.  Let him take heed that it was such comfort as healed and
did not merely drug.  What, for all her dreams, could she have
grasped of the Powers which spin the dice for good or evil?  Eighteen
to thirty-nine!  Supposing he yielded to this childish defiance of
the Unwritten Law and anyone came to know?  He got up and crossing to
the window, flung it wide.  The roar of London traffic rushed upwards
on the rising wind.  He stood, his profile directed at the struggling
smoke-befogged stars; his shoulders, so moulded to desk-work, a
little bowed.  Far below him, the haunches of a large black
draught-horse lumbered towards a mews.  Its heavy deliberation
touched a chord of memory: a fragment of verse--Yeats, wasn't
it?--assailed him in warning.

"The years like great black oxen plough the land, While God the
Ploughman gathers in" ... Gathers in ... Gathers in ... The grain?

There had been a clever fantastical novel he believed written round
the theme, and he had seen it filmed.

Someone in it had found the long-desired elixir of Youth.

At the time this had not seemed impossible, but now ... "While God,
the Ploughman..."  Anyway, He did not hold back the great black oxen.
The inexorable ploughing, sowing and garnering must go on.  Eighteen
to thirty-nine.  How possible to take advantage of Ferlie's crystal
faith and unanalysed affection?  If her words veiled the faint
suggestion that her need of him was as great as his need of
her--wonderingly, reverently, he repeated it to himself, "his need of
her"--he must pretend, for the present at any rate, that he did not
hear it.  He must be just to her Youth, that glorious jewel of Life
which she wore with such careless indifference.

"The years like great black oxen tread the world, And God the
Herdsman goads them on behind."

That was it....

"Cyprian."  Her voice brought him down from the clouds and he closed
the window with a slight sense of chill.  "Cyprian, look at me."

He raised his eyes to hers, to drop them again immediately.

"Can you tell me, honestly," she asked him, "that you consider it
would be what is called a 'sin' for me to lean upon our friendship in
the way I choose, to-night?"

He shook his head at that but he would not answer.

"Cyprian, look at me."  Nor would he do that again.  His eyelids
blinked--their old short-sighted trick--over her head, at the
sapphire resting against her white throat, at the dying embers, at
the hearth-rug where lay, kicked free by its owner, a glass-buckled
Cinderella shoe.

And she knew that she would be proved helpless against his refusal so
much as to look at his conception of the Forbidden Thing: for every
flutter of his eyelids was the drawing of a shutter which blocked
from her another window of his soul.

* * * * * *

"And now," said Cyprian at last, his voice dry with exhaustion,
"Would you mind going?"

Instantaneously, Ferlie turned her back and thrust her foot into the
errant shoe.  In the doorway she faced him, her cloak over her arm.

"You have never asked that of me before," she said, "and you will
never be required to say it again."

Half paralysed he heard the front door bang.  In another moment the
wave of reaction set in.  What in thunder was he thinking of to allow
her to go out into Jermyn Street at this hour of the night, alone?

He snatched his hat and followed, gaining on her by the fact that he
could take the lift.  She was passing under the stone arch leading to
the pavement as he crashed back the gates.

"Ferlie!" he called after her, "Wait."  But she did not stop nor turn
her head at the sound of his footsteps hurrying along behind her.  A
taxi crawled near with its flag up.  He was just too late to prevent
her getting into it.  With feverish presence of mind he noted the
number.  Fortune favoured him, for it was caught in a block of cars
returning from the theatres, as another car ejected its passenger on
the other side of the road.

Cyprian, too fiercely anxious at the moment to see the humour of the
situation, gave his penny-novelette directions.  The driver awarded
him an indifferent glance and held out his hand for earnest money.
He was used to minding his own business in his profession.

Once in full pursuit of Ferlie's taxi Cyprian found himself on the
verge of unnatural mirth.  His third night in England; and he and
Ferlie playing hide-and-seek, in and out of the London traffic, like
any hardened human satyr and some nymph of the by-streets.  And why?
What was this intangible, invisible Thing which had suddenly
interposed itself between them?  A silly whim on her part, an
instinct-driven refusal on his and the shadow had assumed these
gigantic proportions.

Outside the Carmichaels' town residence, with its Sale-advertising
boards and closed blinds, Ferlie alighted.

From the prompt departure of her driver one might divulge that she
paid him without examining the fare.  On her own front door-step,
wrestling with her latch-key, Cyprian reached her.

"Ferlie, don't be a little goose!"

Her eyes meeting his in the reflection of the street lamp were as
hard as pebbles.

"Only Beckett is here," she said, referring to the old butler, "and
he has put up the chain.  Since you must let me in for a silly
betrayal of my unexpected return you had better come down into the
basement and see if you can hoist me through his bedroom window, if
he sleeps with it open.  His room is next to the pantry and
silver-chest.  If I set an alarm going accidentally, he will only
think it is a burglar at last and plunge his head further under the
clothes."

"But, Ferlie----"  She was half-way down the area steps and he, less
familiar with the house, followed stumblingly.

Beckett's window was open and quite near it stood a rain-barrel.  She
tossed the cloak she had not troubled to put on into Cyprian's arms.

"I can't take that with me," she said, and, before he could recover
his breath to protest, she had reached the summit of the barrel.  An
instant she swayed on the edge of it, balancing herself by means of a
pipe running down from the bathroom window.  She was now only a
shadowy shape poised above him in the darkness.

"Somewhere," the coldly-spoken sentence stole down to him after she
drew herself up on to Beckett's window-ledge, "I have heard it said
that 'to the pure all things are impure.'"

The blank black square of her egress stared unfathomably back at
Cyprian, standing below it with the loose unfolded cloak, emptied of
its owner, in his arms.




CHAPTER VII

Her father said, "Well, if he is a decent chap, and Ferlie likes him,
she is lucky."  Adding, a little later, from his pillows, his brow
considerably smoother than it had been for some time past, "At any
rate, he will never leave his wife a pauper."

Her mother said, "Oh, my darling!  I _always_ knew you'd come to
see." ... And aye had let the tears down fall in thanksgiving that
there existed no Jock o' Hazeldean to abstract the bride at the last
moment.

Peter said, "There will be lots of girls ready to scratch your eyes
out with envy, Old Thing."

Lady Cardew said, "My dear, I thought from the very first that it was
Meant."

While, to Ferlie, Clifford said, "I was perfectly sure you would come
round in the end.  I know women!"

And Beckett lost his bet with the cook; perhaps because he was less
inclined to put his head under the clothes at night than one might
think.

Cyprian said nothing at all.  He was, apparently, most tremendously
busy; though, as Mrs. Carmichael justly remarked, "One would have
imagined he would make an effort to come in, considering how
interested he had always been in dear Ferlie as a child."

Dear Ferlie as a woman was beginning to show herself a little
disconcerting.  A dignified demeanour was all very well for one so
soon to wear the title of Lady Clifford Greville-Mainwaring, but this
complete aloofness to the arrival of satin-lined boxes and sealed
wooden cases was almost irritating.  People were constantly coming up
to the scratch, too, and relations who, in the event of the
prospective bridegroom's comparative penury, would have considered
pepper-pots quite suitable for the state of life unto which it had
pleased God to call Ferlie, were, in present circumstances, producing
eight-day clocks and jewellery.

Dear Clifford, also, was singularly blessed in a dearth of relatives
who would, otherwise, have been entitled to run appraising eyes over
the girl destined to assist him bear the burden of an ancient name.

"Not but that," as Ferlie's mother more than once pointed out to
congratulating friends, "the Carmichaels could hold their heads as
high as the Greville-Mainwarings in _that_ respect."  She trusted
Lady Cardew had rubbed it into the Duchess.  The Duchess herself, a
first cousin of Clifford's father, emerged presently, from the mist
of introductions, as an untidy, acidly cheerful old lady, much more
interested in horse-racing than in Clifford; though she had been
overheard to express a hope that his fiancée had not bitten off more
than she could chew.  Which vulgarity reconvinced Ferlie's mother
that everybody in the Peerage had not got in, so to speak, by the
front door.

The Carmichaels were unmistakably "front door" people, even though
Ferlie's particular branch might remain collateral for some years to
come in default of railway accidents and infantile epidemics.

There was no earthly reason to delay the wedding.  The doctors had
not made up their minds as to the date of Mr. Carmichael's operation
and the sooner his wife was free to devote all her energies to this
decision the better.

Lady Cardew advised haste on account of her own private recollection
that Clifford had, more than once, been guilty of changing a
matrimonially-inclined mind.  Had she imparted this news to Ferlie
the latter might have insisted on delay; at least until Cyprian
should be completely out of her range, in Burma.  As it was, he
received a silver-edged invitation to the wedding with everybody
else; though Mrs. Carmichael hoped to give him to understand quite
clearly that he had fallen from grace, when they met face to face on
the Day.

He had decided--nearly--to refuse it.

He had decided--nearly--that Ferlie could never have meant anything
at all by that most particularly Ferlie-esque mood.

He had decided--nearly--that he had done Right.

But the Daimon produced nothing to demonstrate that virtue brings its
own reward.

He had made two attempts to see Ferlie and arrive at some sort of an
explanation, but on each occasion she had deliberately frustrated him.

He had found it impossible to make his letter of congratulation
anything but stereotyped.  Cyprian was not good at expressing himself
except in reports where exhaustive information was required in
condensed form.  It would be more than necessary for him to send
Ferlie a wedding present.

Nothing impersonal could prove of interest in the ancestral halls of
Mainwaring.  Yet, there did not seem to be any personal message that
Ferlie would be likely to welcome from him at the moment.  A younger
man had felt more cause for resentment, that Ferlie, during the short
intimate moments when she hailed their recovered friendship, had not
confided in him her intention of marrying this man.  Cyprian was,
himself, incapable of resentment against her, however well-deserved.

By chance, he caught sight of something in a jeweller's window which
attracted him for unanalysable reasons: it was a small golden apple
attached to a slender gold chain.  By means of a catch, cunningly
concealed under the leaf, it split in half, revealing a tiny
magnifying mirror and a minute powder-puff.  Round the mirror was
engraved the legend, "To the Fairest."

Cyprian bought the apple, caused it to be packed and sealed, and
wrote the address in the shop; whence he despatched it to Ferlie,
omitting even to enclose his card.

She did not acknowledge it but, at least, she did not send it back.

* * * * * *

With the dawning of her wedding day a fatalistic calm descended upon
his tortured mentality, preparing him to see the thing decently
through.

On account of Mr. Carmichael's illness the ceremony and reception
were to be comparatively "quiet."  But when Cyprian arrived, in
response to exultant bells, at the fashionable church's door, whence
a strip of red carpet protruded like a derisive tongue, his muffled
senses perceived quite a formidable array of guests in
wedding-garments who ostensibly came to pray and remained to stare.

An immaculate gentleman, blandly manipulating yards of scarlet cords
suggestive of a royal lynching, inquired of him, "whether he were on
the side of the bride or the bridegroom," and, receiving an
inarticulate reply, pushed him into the end of the last pew and left
him to his own devices with a hymn-book.

The organ blared joyously, as if the organist aimed at drowning the
torrent of whispering and the squeaks of enraptured greeting uniting
the pews.

Here and there, was a face known to Cyprian through the medium of the
illustrated papers.

Fragments of conversation were wafted backwards through the
lily-scented air.

"The mother really landed him, I believe."

"Yes, the Glennies are furious, and Mona Glennie says..."

"But he was never actually engaged to her, was he?"

"Wild oats.  What young man doesn't...  No.  The Vane girl was older
than he was.  The attraction at _that_ establishment was the
Samaritan Actress."

"Well, it's the first time I have heard a member of the tribe of
Abraham described as a Samaritan."

"You don't understand.  Why, she took in the Vane when all doors..."

Cyprian sat back and opened the hymn-book at random.  Did he feel
things more intensely than these folk and was it a disgrace to be
thin-skinned?

Muriel, and now ... Ferlie.  "The One before the Last."  But Muriel
had figured in the life of a different man from the Cyprian who sat
here watching for Ferlie.  If intense desire could be construed by
the high gods and accepted as prayer, he did most intensely desire
Ferlie to be happy.

The buzz of conversation thickened into low murmurings and died.  The
bridegroom had entered by a side door and was speaking to someone in
a front pew.

Almost immediately the Voluntary changed to Lohengrin's "Wedding
March," and a clump of rose-coloured dresses, presumably belonging to
bridesmaids in the porch, took individual form and clustered round
someone in white.

From his post at the back Cyprian had not been able to gather more
than that Ferlie's future husband was tall and rather thin but, on
turning his head now, his eyes encountered hers fully.  He was
startled by the impression that he was staring into the face of a
perfect stranger.  How ghastly white she looked!  The fraction of a
moment and the eyes dropped, even as his own had dropped before hers
the night she had wished to keep him at her side.

She was passing by on Peter's arm.  The pair of them looked as if
they ought still to be going to school.

Peter's face wore precisely the same expression as must have adorned
it when he first took his place at roll-call among the sixth-form
"Bloods."

The bridesmaids twittered behind large bouquets of sweet-peas.

Everybody was standing.  Everybody was howling a hymn, what time all
craned their necks and stealthily mounted hassocks to stare at Ferlie
... Ferlie, who hated people to see her at emotional moments....  He
would wake in a little while to find her beside him, seeking shelter
from the Thing which had whitened her face with terror....

"Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together in the sight of God..."
Ah, well, if the man thought so.

Cyprian felt certain that, whatever God had seen fit to do in Cana of
Galilee, He was not presiding amongst these wedding-guests.

Every now and then a gap in the swaying pews would give him a glimpse
of Ferlie's mother dabbing at her face with a handkerchief, in token
that she must be regarded as bereft of a daughter against her will.
At intervals, she was, doubtless, thanking God that she had done her
duty.

Cyprian again sought refuge in the hymn-book.

The mutterings up at the altar were stilled and various people had
escaped from confinement to wander through the vestry-door in the
wake of the chief actors in this religious farce.  Or was it tragedy?

While bitter thought was crowding thus against bitter thought in his
mind, his gaze became involuntarily fixed upon the lines of the hymn
the choir was singing to fill in time:

  "O Perfect Love, all human thought transcending!
  Lowly we kneel in prayer before Thy Throne,
  That theirs may be the love that knows no ending
  Whom Thou for evermore doth join in one."

But--Good Gracious!--thought Cyprian, in the light of blinding
revelation, he and Ferlie did not need all this to make them one.
They had always known that they were one, united by some mystic Force
which had its roots in a Far Beginning and its branches in the
Eternities.

Then why were they building these barriers deliberately between them
and their united freedom?

  "With childlike trust which fears not pain nor death."

He had missed the rest of the second verse, but that last line was a
perfect description of Ferlie's approach to Love in the abstract.
(The woman in front of him would not stop sniffing.)

  "Grant them the joy which brightens earthly sorrow,
  Grant them the peace which calms all earthly strife;
  And to Life's day the glorious unknown morrow
  That dawns upon eternal love and life...."


It was over.  In a dream he had seen her flit by him, glancing
neither to the left nor to the right, but this time she was not
clinging to Peter.

With her departure the church became a happy tumult of rising sound.
The organist had pulled out everything in the diapason line that his
fingers could reach, and Cyprian escaped along the flower-strewn
carpet, and so to his taxi, with a great longing upon him for the
silence of catacombs.

The philosophic sensations which had followed his sleepless night
were no proof now against his throbbing nerves.  Ferlie, also, he
remembered, experienced physical suffering in mental sorrow.  The
knowledge formed another of the cobweb-threads binding them to one
another.

In Mrs. Carmichael's drawing-room people were now shaking hands with
her.  There was more noise and a great deal of affected laughter.
Cyprian, avoiding the Family, including the uplifted Peter, slipped
into an ante-room in search of whisky and soda.

He could not face Ferlie before all that crowd.  He could not.

From the ante-room he made his way to an apartment containing a bowl
of goldfish.  He remembered it commanded a view of the stairs.  If
she passed up or down the staircase, unattended, he might reasonably
expect to have her for a moment to himself.  He waited for a long
while, watching the goldfish go round and round in circles.  They
roused misty recollections of Ferlie's nonsensical talk of the
general imprisonment of human spirits.

When she did come, although she passed right through the room in her
white veil and flowing draperies, he nearly failed to step forward
from that sheltered corner by the bookcase.

"Ferlie!"

She started violently and swung round.

"Oh!  It's you, is it?"

She spoke on a high-pitched delirious note.  Naturally, people were
agreeing any girl would be over-excited who had achieved this
marriage.

Her whole appearance shocked Cyprian, who knew the real Ferlie.

"I never acknowledged your gift, Cyprian.  The Apple of Discord.
Clever of you to think of that.  Not that I needed a material
reminder of the fact that you and I had at last experienced ... shall
we call it a misunderstanding?"

The words raced one another to a close, and she ended on the edge of
shrill laughter.  He flinched as if she had struck him in the face.

The tale of their years for that instant reversed, he looked back at
her with the eyes of a hurt and bewildered child.  Shaded them with
his hand against the pain as he replied:

"You know that is neither fair nor true."

"I no longer know what is true," said Ferlie.

Half beside himself with the sight of her thus altered, he caught her
wrists and held them.

"Because you have formed a new and all-absorbing tie for the future,
is it necessary to mock at that older discarded friendship which
stretches out a hand to you from the past?"

A slow flush crept up her face and the grey eyes widened on a look of
anger and intense pain.

"Mock?  No, Cyprian, I am not Muriel Vane--kind to men in order to be
cruel.  If I seem to indulge in that particular vein of cruelty, it
is because I know of no other way to be kind ... now."

He saw the thin gleam of a gold chain which lost itself in the folds
of transparent softness near her throat, and was superseded by a
visible string of pearls--"the gift of the Bridegroom."

Then she wrenched herself away and left him there, staring
uncomprehendingly at the goldfish going round and round.




CHAPTER VIII

Cyprian did not return to the flat.  He went out into the restless
London streets.  Block after block he passed, from the more
fashionable quarters to the outskirts of the park, walking swiftly to
escape pursuing Memory, until at last the damp darkness of the river
divided the myriad scintillating eyes of the city.

Further along the Embankment dead forms lay huddled where the shadows
lay deepest, every now and again to start erect, galvanized into life
by the angry flash of a police-lantern.

As he paused to strike a match against a stone bench, shaped like an
incompleted coffin, one of these corpses twitched itself upright.

"Fit ter drop!" it muttered, still in the throes of uneasy slumber;
"Gawd! fer one bloody night to fergit meself in."

Cyprian replaced his pipe in his pocket and fumbled.

"Here," he said, "I don't know who you are, and you don't know who I
am, but if you, too, are in need of sleep and a little forgetting, go
and buy it with this, which will not buy it for me."

With the astonished gratitude of a "Gawd bless yer bleedin' eyes,
Gov'ner" (even here it was God, God, God, thought Cyprian, who
refused to be shut out of Man's tortured intellect even while it
anathematized His works) this invisible wreck of Humanity, made in
His image, slouched away to drink itself blind to sorrow for a short
time in some starless rat-hole known only to its kind.

And Cyprian sat and smoked on the deserted seat, still redolent with
the effluvia of rotting rags, until a suspicious arc of light
searched him out in his sins and a voice, hoarse with hectorings,
commanded him to move on.

Morning found him so far from home that a sleepy taxi-driver whom he
hailed rolled a jaundiced eye on receiving the directions of this
individual whose damp, crumpled clothes and unclean collar showed
unmistakable evidence of an unusual brand of night-on-the-tiles, and
Cyprian was obliged to disburse half the fare in advance.

His physical exhaustion stood him now in good stead and he slept
deeply on the shabby leather cushions the whole way back to the flat.
Slept again on his undisturbed bed, afterwards, till the scandalized
valet roused him for tea; his first meal in twenty-four hours.

Before he set sail for the East, he made one attempt, and only one,
to renew correspondence with Ferlie.

The letter conveyed nothing to her of the true state of his mind.  In
despair he had closed it on a pathetic admission, "I fear I have no
gift of expression."  She answered him, but her own methods of
expression were, as usual, fantastic.  In the letter she enclosed a
small gold key.  "A gift for a gift, Cyprian.  I suppose it was
inevitable that you should shut the gates upon me.  I send the sign
that only you can unlock them."

He placed the key upon his watch-chain, and, with Herculean efforts
of self-control, refrained from any attempts to discover her meaning.

She had always been such a rebel; she had always been so sure of the
light within her and, alas, she had always been so sure of the light
within him.

A few weeks later, when, the honeymoon accomplished, Ferlie and her
husband had returned to town, Mr. Carmichael died.

The operation proved successful enough but, somehow, he never really
rallied.  Perhaps the predominant feeling that his day's work was now
ended lessened the incentive to live.

He smiled with grim satisfaction the afternoon Peter came to see him;
a Peter who had already begun to regard the Human Form Divine in the
same light as the Butcher regards the liver and kidneys which he
slaps down upon the marble slab to dissect for purchasing housewives;
a Peter who would be decidedly happier using the knife than saving
the unwary limb that might stray his way.

Peter's hair was untidy, his eyes bloodshot, his collar unhygienic,
and his finger-nails in half-mourning.  His appearance was altogether
unsterilized and self-assured.  He cried, with a loud voice.  His
opinions on certain experimental operations, his criticisms on those
neighbouring embryo surgeons at work on the same yellow preserved leg
as himself, his versions, punctuated with spasms of hearty merriment,
of the latest hospital yarn, portraying his fellow-students as a set
of inquisitive young ghouls more triumphant over an eminent
physician's sponge forgotten in a victim's intestines than troubled
with sympathy for the latter's bereaved relatives.

"And I'll tell you exactly what they did to you, Father; it's old
Gumboil's favourite amusement.  First he cuts open the..."

"Peter, I am surprised at you!" broke in his horrified mother.

Thus had the path of Peter been made smooth and his way plain by
Ferlie's brilliant marriage.

"I staked little enough on her," said Mr. Carmichael, relishing the
jest of Martha and Mary's antiquated establishment.  "Your mother was
mistrustful of education for her own sex; she did quite well for
herself without it, didn't she?  Ferlie seems to have justified the
conviction that the old-fashioned girl gets the matrimonial plums.
At any rate, you will owe your sister a good deal.  See that she
stays happy."

Of his son-in-law, whom he only saw once, he said very little.

"Impossible to judge them by the young men of my day.  This type did
well enough in the War crisis."

He did not leave his wife badly off.  With Peter on the way to being
floated, and Ferlie secure, she had her widow's pension to herself,
besides a little private means and the sum the big town-house
eventually fetched when Ferlie bought it, pandering to a dream of her
mother's that Peter might one day practise there and retain the
Carmichael traditions in the old setting.  Till that satisfactory day
it could nearly always be sub-let.

Somewhat doubtful of the Christian aspect of her husband's expressed
desire for cremation Mrs. Carmichael, while respecting his wishes,
determined that the rest of the funeral obsequies should be
sufficiently orthodox to disarm his Creator.

"No proper tombstone, you see," she complained damply to Ferlie.
"The design should, so obviously, have been a severe cross, quite
plain, with perhaps a weeping angel praying.  Then a dove of peace
hovering, and maybe a few lilies.  The simpler the better, you know.
And a scroll at the foot, or an open book with one of those grand old
texts--Isaiah, is it, or Ecclesiasticus?--anyway, one of the
Prophets--'Fear not for I have redeemed thee.'  So comforting.  Or
else the one about panting for living waters that always makes me
feel thirsty myself.  Your dear father was so fond of rhetoric."

Ferlie, not quite sure whether the weeping angel was destined to wear
a delicate semblance to the bereaved wife, nor convinced that the
cross could be considered suitably symbolic of the faith of one who
had ever regarded it as the undeserved gibbet, brought upon him by
himself, of a well-meaning Eastern agitator nearly two thousand years
ago, was inclined to demur.

"Father never evinced either the slightest fear of his condemnation
hereafter, nor any faith in an ultimate redemption," she protested,
"and I think it would have been rather hypocritical to parade a
thirst for living waters after death in anyone who can hardly be
described as having gasped for them during life."

Then, responding to her mother's grievously shocked demeanour, she
relented into explanation.

"I think I never admired Father so much in his life as I did at his
death.  He closed his eyes, restfully and unfearingly, upon the
consciousness of work well done and principles truly upheld.  What
business is it of ours if they were mistaken principles?  So many
people, who profess to cling to the creeds supported by the Churches,
live as if they had none, and then drift out on a tide of terrified
remorse and shame.  But, personally, I would not feel fit to
intercede for Father's 'forgiveness,' if he really requires to be
forgiven for being true to his lights."

Ferlie's mother was too religious to see it, and, since it seems to
follow that the brighter the hope of Eternal Life, the blacker the
garb in which it must be approached, there was much melodious moaning
at the bar when her husband's ashes were interred upon the shores of
that Eternal Sea which brought us hither and upon which, in
imagination, she had safely launched his sceptical soul.

A week later she was still sewing bands of crepe on to Peter's
various coats and seeking consolation in those little details of
mournful respect she was able to accord her Dead.

* * * * * *

In due course, Aunt Brillianna, returning from the uttermost ends of
Italy, was overwhelmed by the volume of water which had poured under
the Family Bridge during her inexcusable retirement.

As the younger relatives, who had expectations at her hands,
remarked: "Anything might have happened to her at her time of life."
Why, Death had happened to her nephew!

To Ferlie at the Black Towers she went: that historical country
residence of long-ago Greville-Mainwarings.

The place bored Clifford, Ferlie informed her, and just now he was
obliged to be in town.

Clifford let her do what she liked at Black Towers, so long as she
did not offend old Jardine, the retainer who acted as head seneschal
and cherished insurmountable objections to innovation of any kind.

"It's a grim-looking pile," said Aunt Brillianna, sniffing the odour
of musty armour in the subdued hall.  "You look as if you had been
living among ghosts, child."

"It's quite natural that I should not look very well just now," said
Ferlie.

And Aunt B. scolded herself for not having foreseen that it would be
so.  Family Name to carry on and all the rest of it.

But where was this Clifford?  A flattering portrait of
him--life-size, in oils--blocked one end of the dining-room.  She
studied it for a long time; made a few non-committal noises; reserved
her opinion until she had scrutinized his Father and Grandfather in
the long Gallery above.  And when she had made up her mind she still
reserved her opinion for the benefit of her own reflection in the
bedroom mirror.

"Presentably aristocratic.  On the downward grade.  Will Ferlie act
as a strong enough brake, even with a child in her arms?  Lord!  What
a mouth!  A few more years shall roll and then if degeneracy does not
set in I'll--anyway, I'll leave Ferlie all my emeralds," resolved the
old lady.

She would hardly have been reassured could she have seen the original
of the portrait at that instant in Ruth Levine's flat.

"And Peter?" inquired Aunt B.

"Peter, when he is not classifying the internal machinery of some
antiquated corpse, is examining Roman Catholicism."

"Whatever for?" asked Aunt B. interested.

"For the fun of listening to Mother arguing against it, I think,"
said Ferlie, unenthusiastically.  "I told Mother that, if her views
were really so strong, she had better tell him that she had no
objection to his conversion."

Aunt B. chuckled.  "You have become very wise in your generation,
Ferlie.  And did she?"

"She could not resist correcting the term to 'perversion'," said
Ferlie, "and it would have been so easy to have kept it at 'vert'."

"Her father, the bishop, must often have shown himself impressively
sarcastic upon the query, 'Can there any good come out of the
Vatican?'" mused Aunt B.  "And your mother always had an indefensible
memory for things best forgotten."

"What on earth does it matter to anybody but Peter?  His argument is
that, as he has no time to go into the matter of a Personal God's
existence thoroughly himself and is by no means convinced that the
same Deity has ceased to exist at the bidding of admirable
rationalists like Father, it is best for him to join a cocksure
religion, wherein he knows what he has got to believe and he knows
what he has got to do.  I think Peter could only be held by a
religion that was cocksure.  And he is, also, a little mistrustful of
his own judgment these days, and certainly all for strengthening the
matrimonial chain."

"And your own views, Ferlie?"

"To give according as one receives," said Ferlie wearily.

Far from satisfied was Brillianna Trefusis on her way back to town.
She had been told that Cyprian Sterne had shown little or no interest
in Ferlie's affairs and her shrewd brain was being interrogative.
What had he thought of this marriage who knew the Ferlie-nature so
well?

"Perhaps--Another Woman," reasoned Aunt B., "though, somehow, the
idea does not fit.  I used to consider the situation dangerous
because the child got such little understanding at home.  But, apart
from the difference in ages, those two 'belonged'."

Then she warned herself that her imagination was getting out of hand.
Ferlie, at present, would have been more unnatural without moods than
with them.

* * * * * *

Who could tell that, on opposite sides of the Equator, Ferlie and
Cyprian were both battling against that apathy which descends, like a
canopy of darkness, upon ultra-sensitive spirits who have reached
their limit of controlled mental suffering, blinding a vision
ordinarily (since the high gods are just) unusually clear to
distinguish between immortal and merely mortal beauty, and affecting
them with that terror, however diffidently one may approach the
Example, which wrung a cry of agony from the Leader of all Christs,
whose lips were silent in the utmost extremities of bodily pain?

And these, as yet devoid of the Christ-Power assured to every
struggling heart that responds to its stirring, whose sun is
withdrawn and who possesses no artificial light to relieve the
paralysing blackness of the Shadowy Valleys of Self-mistrust, may
well lose their way in strange unexplored by-paths before they win
through into the open country to find the dawn-star shining still
above the distant hills.




CHAPTER IX

Up the valley, beyond the well-established mines, where Burmese,
European and International pariah digs the disguised jewels from
Earth's mountainous breasts, Cyprian sat limply in an office with red
wooden walls, smiling to himself at the remembrance of the
untravelled folk who might picture ruby-mining as a series of endless
descents into Aladdin's cave.

The washing of the ruby dust was about the most interesting part.
The routine work and the daily examination of the naked coolies, who
had even been known to swallow promising earth-stained lumps of
treasure, in the hope of secreting them later for private
exploitation, very soon lost its excitement.  The rough surroundings
and dusty atmosphere were, in themselves, the ordinary lot of
colonists and pioneers, but the average man had some purpose for
their endurance.

Cyprian was conscious of none.  He sometimes asked himself,
seriously, what he had done in binding himself to drive,
interminably, another man's plough.  There appeared to be no reason
why he should remain, save the natural reluctance of his type to look
back before the furrow was run.  And that might not be for some while
yet.

His Company's mine, a small one, had been a secret discovery above
the area in those wilds where the mines were supposed to reach.  He
contrasted the life he had chosen with that of the average business
man.  The roads he travelled from the green banks of the Irrawadi,
more than fifty miles into the interior, lay through a bewildering
loveliness of mountain pass and rocky defile.

The country on either side of the river, steaming down which one
encountered the unique floating villages of the log-raftsmen,
remained primitively Eastern the whole way to Bhamo, where Burma
joins hands with China.

The philosophy of Gautama's fatalistic children was beginning to soak
into Cyprian's ego.  From this point of the valley, breathing
incessantly an atmosphere of absorbing toil connected with those open
workings from which the Byon, or ruby-earth, was hauled up by washers
of half a dozen different nationalities, he grew almost able to
persuade himself that Ferlie's England of tall houses and dignified
streets humming with modern traffic, belonged to a lost pre-existence.

Nevertheless, after three more years of monotony endured on lethargic
river-boat, irresponsive mule-back, or at the inexorable office-desk,
always, more or less, drawn apart from his fellow-men, he suspected
that it was nearing the time when he should be born again.  It was so
long since he had slept well at night.  Sometimes he imagined the
pain in his heart had lulled, but each mail-day, blank of news he did
not expect, roused it again.

He could have remained longer at head-quarters now, had he so chosen,
but Cyprian never really fitted in with his pioneering countrymen of
the East, and round about his part of the world there were few women.

Burma had solved the problem of loneliness for the forest officers
and others in her own particular way.  And Cyprian, in the noonday of
his life, tormented by insomnia, had begun to look upon it as an
inevitable way.

A dull throbbing ache in his temples made him lay down his pen.  He
could take Leave, of course.  The idea nauseated him.  For what
reason should he wish to take Leave now?  Even if Ferlie were unhappy
with the tall futile individual he had seen her marry, what could
Cyprian do?  For him the road stretched thus solitary to the end of
the horizon, lengthened by the fruitless wooing of the sleep that had
deserted his tired plodding brain.  If he stopped working, inaction
would only increase the pressure of thoughts which work held at bay.

* * * * * *

And then ... the thing happened so quickly.  There was no battling
with decisions; no weighing pros and cons, and the Daimon had simply
held its peace.

One day as he walked up the hill to his inelaborate bungalow he began
to nurse a delirious fancy that the Country, herself, was holding his
head in an iron grip, and only the Country herself could draw out
those claws pressing into his temples on either side.

And, when he reached the four-roomed residence, the Country Herself
was awaiting him, as it had awaited, to some purpose, many another
transplanted Briton whose national sense of proportion had become
blunted after long rooting in alien soil.

She sat there, patiently, outside the dyed bamboo chick, a
lemon-coloured _lungi_ swathed about her hips, a white muslin jacket
concealing her contours, and frangipani blossoms nestling like stars
in the midnight of her hair.  Her age, was, perhaps, sixteen, but her
smile revealed that placidity of soul suggesting many adventurous
incarnations.  They called her Hla Byu, or Beauty Fair.

Her father was with her: a practical, soft-spoken, obliging old
gentleman, who had heard the Thakin was a lonely Thakin, and
unmarried, and thought that, for the exceptionally reasonable sum of
Rs.200 something might be arranged to the mutual advantage of all
parties.

Some atrophied instinct tried to whisper dead words to Cyprian's
wearied spirit as he paused in the doorway, one hand separating the
rattling strands of bead and bamboo, to gaze at Hla Byu with bodily,
but not mental, concentration.  In response to that fixed regard her
smile intensified, becoming a happy thing reflected again in her eyes.

"Ohe, Thakin "--and her voice was honey-soft--"It may be in my hands
to heal the river-fever."

Thus he construed the quick-spoken sentence.  His smarting lids were
lowered in token that he did not wish to argue the matter to its
close.  But he held aside the pattering curtains for her to enter and
let them fall again behind him with the noise of dried leaves
laughing in a hot breeze.

* * * * * *

From the first the experiment acted as a narcotic.  He had never
discussed with other men of his acquaintance the modes and methods
employed by all who adopt what is generally known as the Burma Habit.

During the War, just after his own swift flight from the mines to the
trenches, and his almost immediate rejection after that early
knock-out, an opportunity had been afforded him, by chance, of
observing the question from the viewpoint of the British soldier.

It clothed in an unearthly beauty what had, till then, struck Cyprian
as wholly sordid and unclean.  But that soldier had certainly taken
part in an exceptionally pathetic human drama, which he proceeded to
relate with the utmost _naiveté_, flavoured by almost untranslatable
epithets of Tommyese.

One travelled third in trains those days unless one was the
engine-driver or had made a corner in lead before it became the staff
of life.

There was a lot of khaki coming up from Southampton; tired,
wet-looking khaki which had seen better days but none so worthy of
its cloth.  It steamed with damp because the Mother Country had
greeted the shipload of travellers from across the Channel with her
customary flood of hopeless tears.  The slippery platforms were
picturesque, after a fashion, from behind a window-pane of the
lingering train.  It was waiting for the hospital train to leave
first.

Then three soldiers had stopped outside Cyprian's carriage window.

"'Old 'ard, mates," said a voice, checking his companions from
further exploration, "this 'ere is practically hempty."

Cyprian retired behind his paper as, with squelching boots and
reeking bundles, they proceeded to instal themselves.

"Bit of orl right, eh?" sighed the first with a creek of content as
he settled down to scrutinize the grey streaming pane.  "The very
rain smells different."

Cyprian had scented an Optimist.

"Hell!" was the reply in startlingly convincing tones, "I'll be
floated out o' me blasted boots if I tries to stand up again."

This was obviously the Pessimist.

"All the same, them boots could take the prize at the beauty show if
Hathi's 'ere was put alongside 'em for comparison," declared the
Optimist, giving a poke at the footgear of Number Three.

His were certainly gaping in all likely and unlikely places, while
with the size of them one rightly connected the mode of address.  The
Hathi smiled absent-mindedly as a man used to exciting comment upon
extremities, in more senses than one.

"'E keeps 'is like that a-purpose to show 'is Archiebald socks,"
commented the Pessimist, disgustedly.  "I ain't 'ad so much sock on
me nine toes for six months as the Hathi 'as kep' on 'is corns for
the 'ole of the last push."

"You ought ter 'a kep' that missin' toe to sell, you ought," chaffed
the Optimist.  "We could 'ave 'ad a auction in barricks after the
last big Bosch fungeral, always supposing we git barricks over our
'eads once more in the sweet By 'n By."

The Pessimist snorted.

"I wouldn't miss 'em none if we didn't," he stated flatly.  "It's my
belief they'll be so sick of the sight and stink of soldiers that
they'll disband the bloomin' army."

"Always s'posin' there's any army left to disband," volunteered Hathi
in the soft even tones of the philosopher.

"One can't but 'ope," said the Optimist, producing a square packet
from an inner pocket and proceeding to unwrap it.  "'Ope and smoke is
all the army 'as to feed on these days."

"'Ullo!" broke from the Pessimist, as the packet revealed cigarettes;
"where d'ye raise that, Rooseveldt?"

"These 'ere," returned the fortunate possessor, "was give to me by
'oo might be called a member of the yaller Fair Sex and I've 'ad 'em
treasured in oilskin the best part of a year waiting for this moment."

"An' we'll 'ope for 'ooever was with you at the moment," suggested
the Pessimist.

His companion shook his head sadly.

"I ain't allowed the privilege of sharin' wi' you, matey," he said,
"though with a generous nature like mine the situation goes crool
'ard.  Fact is, I took a oath to smoke these with me solitary self on
the first day I set foot on the 'ome shores--always s'posin' I 'ad a
foot left to set on 'em."

"That sort of oath is 'ated in 'eaven," said the Pessimist,
incredulous.

"It's 'ated worse on earth," replied the Optimist, eyeing him
speculatively.

The Philosopher spoke.  "Why don't you buy a penny packet of fags if
you want 'em?  I see a Mother's Darling runnin' round jes' now wiv a
right pritty lil tray.  I wouldn't want anyone's fags 'oo didn't want
me to 'ave 'em."

"You correck that," commanded the Optimist threateningly.  "I tell
you it's a slap-up genuine affydavid that stands in my way.  'Ave you
ever known me refuse a pal me own wipe--alway' s'posin' 'e was in the
kind o' trouble wot needed a wipe?"

Apparently they hadn't, for the Philosopher prodded him gently in the
belt with the toe of his boot by way of stemming his rising
indignation, and the Pessimist hung unresentfully out of the window.

"This way, sonny," he yelled, on sighting the said Mother's Darling.
"'Urry your twinklin' tootsies!"

But the cigarette boy did not hear.

"Try 'im with 'Cuthbert'," advised the Optimist sympathetically, "or
Rodney.  Rodney is a nice name," he mused.  "I once 'ad a gawd-child
named Rodney.  It died o' croup."

"O blast the bloomin' train!" (in effect) exclaimed the Pessimist
impatiently as the engine showed signs of restlessness.  "'Ere, you!"

But the boy sighted him too late as, with a shrill warning, the
engine lurched forward and the long line of carriages rattled after
it, protesting, out of the station.

The Pessimist flung himself backwards with an unprintable expression.
His nerves were obviously needing a Woodbine.

"I'll have to commit perjury, I suppose," said the Optimist sadly,
handing him the oilskin-guarded case.  "It's punishable by law but
I'll look to you and Hathi to bail me out."

"Quit foolin'," commanded the Philosopher, "and tell us, afore we
help ourselves, wot's makin' you so greedy-like the very day you
ought to be bustin' to share your soul with your pals?"

"Always s'posin' they ain't got none of their own," murmured the
Optimist, throwing him a box of matches.

"I ain't foolin'.  There's a regular romance about them cigarettes
you indelicate spirits is about to enjoy without appreciatin' of."

"Regular your Granny!" growled the Pessimist.  "Which of your beauty
gals robbed Dadda's case for this little lot?  Why, they're Burmese!"
he finished in astonishment.

For answer the Optimist nodded to Hathi.

"You was up at the Daggone a fair piece?" he inquired.

Hathi reflected.

"When we was quartered at Rangoon?  You bet!"

"You'll mind them festival nights afore the battalion was ordered for
Bosch fightin'?"

"I mind all them festivals," broke in the Pessimist.

"You minded too many festivals if I don't mis-remember," retorted the
Optimist.  "I 'eard wot the sergeant said afterwards about you, my
man."

"It's a temple wot makes your mouth water, that," ruminated the
Philosopher, turning the discussion.

"It ain't the temple wot affects me that way," said the Optimist
decisively, "it's wot sits on the steps."

"I ain't seen none to equal the Daggone lot," agreed the Pessimist.

And, in a flash, behind Cyprian's paper, light broke upon a vision of
the Shwe Dagon Pagoda at festival time with its flight of steps
bright with humanity in coats of many colours.  Yellow-robed, shaven
priests, gay-turbaned sweet-sellers, picturesque beggars and always
girls, girls.  Girls in soft lungis of peach-coloured silk,
heliotrope, dull-rose and lemon; for unlike the Hindu woman the
Burmese has an artistic sense of colour highly developed.

Cyprian had never seen a native of Burma crudely clad.  His thoughts
wandered.

"She 'adn't got the sort of name a parson could 'a got round his
tongue at the font," the Optimist was saying when he again turned his
attention to him, "Always supposin' she'd want 'im in that capacity.
She wore them frangipani flowers be'ind 'er ears.  Woof!  Whot a
jolly stink they 'ad."

The other two puffed acquiescence.

"Used ter remind me of a Putney bus on a 'ot day," soliloquized the
Pessimist, "I once picked up a lady's 'andkerchief in a Putney bus.
But no matter...."

"That's a tale of 'is gloomy past, that is," said the Optimist to the
Philosopher with a wink.  "It'll be better kep' in its cawfin."

"So'll that yarn of lil Frangipani, if I ain't much mistook," snapped
the Pessimist.

A slow grin stole over the imperturbable countenance of the
Philosopher, but he did not speak.

"Funny goods, wimmin!" mused the story-teller, letting the remark
pass.  "There's two sorts, when all's said and done--the sort a man
keeps in 'is 'ome, and the sort a man keeps in 'is 'eart."

"Lil Frangipani being the 'earty kind," suggested the Philosopher.

The Optimist searched his inner garments again.

"I got 'er 'ere," he said, and half-shamefacedly produced an envelope
containing a few crumpled snapshots taken with a large-sized Kodak.
He handed it to the Philosopher in silence and the Pessimist peered
over his shoulder.

"Why, I know 'er!" he exclaimed in triumph.

The Optimist greeted the information with scorn.

"You!" he said.  "Why, she never ain't 'ad nothin' to do with a
gentleman wot Gawd 'adn't blessed with blue eyes and a pleasant
countenance."

"Wot's wrong with my countenance?" demanded the incensed Pessimist.

"There ain't nothin' right that I kin see," insisted the Optimist.

"'E got it at the same shop as yours came from," the Philosopher
gently reminded him.

"Wherever 'e got it from 'e was 'ad," insisted the Optimist.

"Well, if you call your eyes blue--" began the Pessimist.

"I don't," interrupted the other.  "But she did, and that was good
enough."

"They say them extry small ones is colour-blind and stone deaf,"
stated the Pessimist.  "It's along o' the life they lead."

"I've 'eard tell the same o' you," returned the Optimist, "but I
never pays no 'eed to gossip."

Again the Philosopher interposed.

"We'll take it she wasn't neither," he said soothingly.  "And anyway
you 'appened to be to 'er taste and she 'appened to be to yours."

"We kep' company, as you might say," continued the Optimist,
"for--'ow long was we stationed there, Hathi?"

"Best part of a year," replied the Philosopher.

"So!  Gawd, 'ow time moves along.  I wouldn't 'a bin on-reasonable if
the lil gal 'ad kep' 'er 'and in wi' one or two of the next smartest
privates in the regiment...."

"Wot's that?" ejaculated the Pessimist, but the speaker took no
notice.

"But s'welp me if she looked at another blighter the 'ole time."

"S'welp me if she didn't!" came from the Pessimist.  "I tells yer I
knows 'er."

"And I tells yer, yer never was able to tell one gal from another,
out there," contradicted the Optimist.

"I'd know that one in my sleep, anyway," went on the Pessimist.

"That's how you probably know her best," put in the Philosopher,
"it's a touchin' tale of a too-trustin' little 'eart, I don't think."

"Seein' as 'ow you're smokin' her fags..." began the Optimist.

"Let 'im git on with the yarn," remonstrated the Philosopher.

"Garn!" said the Pessimist, "I was only pullin' of 'is leg.  Wot
'appened to the little picture?"

"You've said it," declared the Optimist, mollified.  "She were a
picture; in 'er pale yellow lungi, wiv a blue scarf and the flowers
all over 'er on a festival day, she could 'a walked out wiv the
Prince of Wales and 'ad the folk all lookin' at 'er instead of 'im."
He sighed dreamy-eyed at the view of Eastbourne Pier over the
Philosopher's head.  "As I say, she was mighty fond of me," he
continued simply.  "And I thought a 'eap too much of 'er even to 'ave
a dekko at any of 'er little friends in pink and blue.  There was one
Chinese woman, 'oo 'ad green dragons on 'er silk coat, and she gave
me the R.S.V.P. eye more'n once, but I was always goin' shoppin' wiv
Mother."

"I know that Chinese woman," said the Pessimist again.

"Then don't tell Mother about it," advised the Optimist.  "The Hathi
'ere, 'e knows too little about trouble, and you, you knows too much
for your 'ealth.  Well, my gal she 'ad been popular all 'er life and
'ad saved a tidy pile of rupees which she was for puttin' down my
socks, willin'.  'See 'ere,' I told 'er, 'I can't no-'ow treat you
different from as if you was a lady-maid airin' the pram in 'Yde
Park,' I says.  'You keeps your chinkers, my dear'!"

"'Old 'ard," interrupted the Pessimist, "'owd you talk to 'er in that
bat?"

"She knew three words of English to six words o' Urdu," explained the
Optimist, "and I knowed two o' Urdu to one of Burmese.  And our kind
o' friendship did not need talkin' much at that o'clock."

"A he-male and a she-female under ninety niver need none at no
o'clock," said the Philosopher decidedly.

"Then came the rumour that we was to shift," went on the Optimist.
"I telled 'er, and she sung out somethink upsettin'.  She wanted me
to chuck the army and join 'er in keepin' 'ouse out Signal Pagoda way
and be as 'appy as two little birds in a chimbly.  She didn't see as
'ow my missus at 'ome could be reckoned a just cause or impediment
neither.  She'd got 'er divorce from two 'usbands easy enough in the
past.  Divorce is easy come by, accordin' to their rules, it seems."

"Which, takin' it all round, ain't surprisin'," said the Pessimist.

"I put it to her this way at last.  'See 'ere, Ladybird,' I sez, ''is
Majesty, the Bara Raj, 'e finds 'e can't do without me sword-arm in a
tamasha agoin' on agin a low-down lot o' soowar ke bachars called
Bosches,' I says.  'The British Raj 'e sends a chit for Private Cobb
to come along and give 'im a 'and, so naturally I replies, "Anything
to oblige."  Now, 'ow could you expect me to do 'im down after that?'
I sez.  'Them Bosches, they've been eatin' babies and boilin' the
Raj's own Aunties in oil," I sez.  That kind o' soothed 'er and she
begins to see I'd 'ave to go.  'You not come back,' she says.
''Course I come back,' I sez (for you know 'ow one 'as to work wiv
wimmin) 'I come back with a necklace o' Boschy teeth,' I sez, 'and
you can wear it on the next bara din to the Daggone.  That took 'er
fancy some but, would you believe it, she didn't swaller me all at
once.  'You not remember me, 'ome," says she, 'you buljao.'  'Never,
on your life!' I tells 'er, 'you ain't the sort a man forgits easy.'

"The next time I sees 'er she brings me the fags, all wrapped up in
oilskin and air-tight in a little tin.  She got me to promise I'd
smoke 'em when I were 'ome to keep me from forgittin' 'ow I was to
come back.  They ain't the three-rupee a 'undred kind as you can
smell a mile neither."

"The day the orders was 'eard definite I was a-wanderin' round the
wharf takin' a look at the ship wot was to land the troops Gawd
knowed where, when I seed someone a-hailin' me from a sampan on the
river.  It was jes' after them sampans 'ad been put out o' bounds
because of them two blasted Crusoes in B. Company wot 'ad drowned
themselves axidentally foolin' round in one.  And they bein' a
disgrace to the regiment in not knowin' ow to swim, to my thinkin'."

"S wimmin' don't 'elp none in that river, bless you!" said the
Philosopher.  "No man ain't never saved 'oo tries divin' stunts in
that current."

"Well, you listen," said the Optimist.  "I looked 'ard and I seed
that the sampan was full o' fruit, and on top o' the fruit, perky as
Charley's Aunt, was that little yeller lungi seated.  'Course I
answered the wave o' 'er 'and, when the sampan gits near the wharf
she pointed at the fruit and then to me.  She'd collected it from all
over the shop for me to 'ave on my journey."

"You never giv us none," said the Pessimist.

"You'll hear why," replied the speaker.  "No one could 'a exactly
told wot 'appened after that, but there was a barge comin' down
stream, between the jetty and the sampan, and a steam-launch comin'
up opposite.  The barge got in the way of me view fust and then
everyone 'eard a shout and the barge let out over its far end with
ropes, and then the sampan swept past 'er with a chunk missin' and a
speck of yeller 'angin' on, while the fruit was floatin' about on top
of the water."

"Gawd!" remarked the Pessimist.  "Did they git 'er?"

The narrator paused.  "Some men in a boat comin' up-stream lugged 'er
in," he said.  "The man wot was rowin' the sampan 'ad gone down, and
so, o' course, they knew they needn't expect 'im up again inside a
week, and then it would be some miles along the river.  But they got
the little gal ashore and took 'er to the 'ospital.  'Er 'air was
'angin' down and 'er little face was the colour of the inside of a
banana, and 'er silk lungi all tore and stained green."

"What did you do?" asked the Philosopher.

"What a man could.  I went round to the 'ospital and they wouldn't
let me up, but I 'eard as 'ow 'er ribs was stove in.  Through 'er
lung they stuck and that was 'ow they couldn't save 'er."

"Didn't you see 'er again at all?"

"Next afternoon I turned up to inquire, and a Burmese nurse said the
gal 'ad been askin' to see me as she knowed she was dying.  They took
me up.  There was screens all round the bed because she couldn't get
better, jes' like an English 'ospital.  And O Gawd, some 'o them
wimmin in the ward as I passed, didn't they look 'arf ill!  'Wot's
this ward?' I asked the nurse, and an English matron wot 'ad come to
take my name and address said they were mostly police cases.  She
didn't seem to like my face none, but she showed me to me little
friend.  I Gawd-damned the 'ole blasted lot o' them when I see 'er,
an' jes' knelt down and put me 'ands on 'er little 'ands and sez:
'See 'ere Ladybird, 'ow you goin' to wear that Boschy tooth necklace
if you don't get well?'  She opened 'er eyes wide as saucers for a
minute, and then she sees me and smiles a baby twisted smile.  She
gasps a bit and I put me ear down close so's she wouldn't feel it any
effort to speak a piece.  'No buljao,' she whispers, so faint I
couldn't 'ardly 'ear.  'Never on your life!' sez I, and I meant it.
Then I brings out the fags to show 'er where I keeps 'em in an inner
pocket.  She looks at 'em and, 'Soomoke,' she sez.  I thought at fust
she wanted me to smoke one then and there, and I'd 'ave done it if
Gawd Almighty 'ad pointed out as it was against the rules.  But then
'er tiny fingers nipped mine an' I kep' still.  'Don't you be
afeared,' I said, 'I ain't goin' to leave you yet,' thinkin' I'd put
my tongue out at the matron if she tried to shift me.  With that she
kinds of seems to settle.  'Soomoke 'ome,' she gasps; and I answers,
'I'll smoke the bleedin' caseful, beginning the fust day I sets foot
in Blighty, and I'll blow back the smoke to the East so's all smoke
you see think it's my lot comin' to tell you as I ain't nearly
bulgaoed, nor goin' to'."

The Optimist stopped and coughed violently.  Then he got up and
fussing with the window-strap let the pane down with a bang.  The
rain had ceased, and breaths of English Spring blew in across the wet
fields.

"These 'ere do irritate the throat after a while," said the
Philosopher sympathetically.

"And wot happened next?" asked the Pessimist, who had no fine
perceptions.

The man at the window turned on him with eyes still glistening from
the effects of his cough.

"Wot 'appened next?" he repeated scornfully.  "Oh, 'er and me did a
barn dance down the ward, of course!"

The Philosopher handed him back his matches and the photograph which
he was re-studying.

"It's got to come to all on us," he said thoughtfully.  "And I bet,
matey, it come easier to that lil girl there than if she'd 'ad to
face it later without a pal at 'er side."

"That's so," assented the Optimist cheerfully, but he tucked the tin
case of cigarettes away with reverent fingers.  "What troubles me,"
he said confidentially, "is these 'ere pictures.  I can't 'ardly take
'em 'ome to my missus and explain--particularly the poser where me
arm's aholdin' of 'er waist.  Under the banana tree.  We got 'em took
by a Eurasian mugger wot I'd met."

"Don't you show 'em," warned the Pessimist.

"It ain't a question o' showin," said his friend.  "You don't know my
missus.  She's a-meetin' me at Waterloo and if she don't turn out me
pockets in the station she'll do it in the bus."

"My 'ole Umbrella is meetin' me too," said the Pessimist, "and she'll
find me all ready to tell 'er that 'ere is the fust petticoat I've
brushed agin' for a twelve-month.  So don't you go suggestin' nothin'
different, in a pally way, if you do 'appen to be near."

"Let's 'ope your pockets'll bear you out if I do," said the Optimist.

The Philosopher shifted his position and leant forward.  "You take my
tip, 'ole love," he said impressively to the Optimist.  "Jes' you
wipe out that lil yaller gal.  She's in safer 'ands than yours now
and you can't git at 'er with cigarette smoke, nor nothin' else.  You
tear them photographs right now and put them out of the winder.  It
ain't no good explainin' 'em to a woman--least of all to one wiv
marriage lines.  I know, 'cos once I tried it on.  My old missus is
one of them earnest Christians wot do a lot more forgivin' than
forgettin', and 'er forgivin' of me 'as been more'n I can bear for
the last five years.  Now, whenever we 'as words, I git the wust of
it straight off, owin' to the 'andle I giv' 'er agin' me.  You all of
you poke fun at me for bein' quiet-like, but if you'd seed my missus,
or 'eard 'er, you'd know where I got the 'abit of 'oldin' me tongue.
I go on tip-toe now when there's a gal around 'oo suits me."

The Optimist gazed at him admiringly.

"You're deep," he announced with conviction.

"Nothin' in me pockets or in me kit," wound up the Philosopher, "is
nothin' on me conscience or on me wife's, and no bustin' of the 'appy
'ome.  You wipe that lil Frangipani off the slate and forgit the
stink o' them flowers."

The Optimist shuffled the photographs thoughtfully.

"Seems 'ard," he said, running his fingers round the rims.
"Still--'ere goes!"

He tore them up slowly and the fragments were whirled away into space
by the draught outside.

One small piece floated back to his feet.

"This 'ere is the tail of 'er lungi," he said, picking it up.

And then, since there is nothing conceivable in God's world so
sentimental as the British soldier, he slipped it into the
cigarette-case where it could tell no tales.

The Philosopher rose to shut the window for there was a nip in the
air.  He looked back up the line and down on the footboards where a
couple of shreds still clung.

"That the best place for _them_," he said with conviction, drawing up
the glass.  Then he muttered a profound truth.

"Honesty may be the best policy," he said, "but it ain't the one wot
keeps a weddin'-ring from wearin' loose."

Fortified by which assurance, Cyprian had seen the three Galahads
alight on Waterloo platform, ten minutes later, each to imprint a
chaste salute on the nearest portion of waiting wife, which presented
itself at the carriage door with a string bag, a shabby umbrella and
dewy eyes.

And as, now, in recalling the whole scene which had deeply impressed
him at the time, he compared the insignia of the string bag with that
of the white frangipani flower, the cynicism of the Greek Philosopher
crossed his mind, who summed up the whole conditions of life, since
male and female created He them, in the words:

[Illustration: Greek text]




CHAPTER X

Hla Byu's outlook was too Eastern to be contemplated by any woman of
the West.  Very much the dog's point of view.

There is endless talk about the faithfulness of dogs, but does not
experience teach that it really consists of faithfulness to a master
rather than to one master?  The dog who loses one master, to be
kindly adopted by another, suffers from the change only until he has
grown accustomed to the new touch upon his head.  His heart beats as
happily in a little while to the new tread along the garden walk.  He
is still faithful in his allegiance--to the hand that feeds him.
When the old master returns he will remember, till then he will
philosophize.

The Burmese woman who is sold to the white man has this advantage
over his dog.  The Unexpected does not occur.  She knows that she
will, possibly, change masters more than once in her life.  She may
prefer one to another, but, in most cases, the change is accepted
philosophically and is followed by few heart-burnings and useless
regrets.  So that the man be just to her and kind, so that he clothe
her and approve of her housekeeping, she is content.  Her
lighthearted affection goes to the children, who are bone of her
bone, and of whom she need not stand in awe.

If the man has any notion of fair play, when the time comes for him
to leave her, he will provide for the children; if he deny all
responsibility, there are still the missions, who look upon such
things with solemn and sentimental eyes, and are, consequently,
helpful.

Cyprian learnt during the next two years to understand this enduring
passivity of the Buddha's children.  Not that they followed blindly
the precepts of the Great Teacher: they had simply adapted them to
the changing times and needs of the Race.

Little Hla Byu was a regular attendant on festival occasions at the
Aracan Pagoda in Mandalay.  She knelt before the big gold Buddha,
solid from many coatings of precious metal, when the flickering
candles dripped grease, and the scent of the incense-sticks
penetrated through the scent of perspiring humanity.

There, she prayed for her son.  She did not consciously connect him
with the foreign father who might, any day, desert her for a woman of
his own race, and legitimately deny all that linked him to his former
life.  She prayed quaintly, mechanically, regarding the proceeding in
the light of a charm, and with no very clear idea as to who should
hear the prayer.  The priests should know.  But the priests, indeed,
if they knew anything up at their bare stone monastery, should have
taught that the Master could not hear the cry of human suffering or
desire, even if he would, since he had obtained the final Silence,
"where beyond these voices there is peace."  But, to Hla Byu, spirits
there must be--Someone, Anyone.  Prayer could do no harm, anyway, and
might certainly do good.  Contemplation was not for the
Burman-in-the-street, but any follower of the Buddha can hold a
wooden rosary and repeat two thousand times in a dull monotone, some
such golden truth as that "Honesty is the best policy," before
leaving the lighted Pagoda and going back to the bazaar to cheat his
brother.

At least, her creed gave some outlet to those emotions which the
practical things of life cannot satisfy.

She was richer than Cyprian, who had none.  The simple honesty of her
beautified their relationship.  Nature, surely, must have meant just
this simplicity between the sexes in ministering to each other's
needs.  He knew that Ferlie would have been struck with the hypocrisy
of Society-life in the big towns of Burma.

There the white women-folk knew of such as little Hla Byu but
pretended ignorance.  No aspiring mother would encourage her daughter
to join hands with an ex-public-school boy at the beginning of his
career and flit away into the jungles to share the making of his
future.  That was Hla Byu's part.  But, later, when the same future
was assured, when the public-school boy had become submerged in the
fever-eaten official with a bank-book and, possibly, a
passion-ravaged past, then it was the turn of some clear-eyed
débutante to receive with thankfulness God's gift of a good man's
love--and his motor-car.

* * * * * *

Cyprian's face, bent over the official note-paper upon which he had
been idly sketching while listening to the klop-klop of the postman's
mule mounting the hill, was less lean now and far less strained.  The
great bitterness curving the corners of his mouth was contradicted by
the level calm with which his eyes looked out across to the horizon
despite their awareness that the Lot had fallen unto him in a rugged
ground.

A slight stir in the vicinity of the waste-paper basket caused him to
turn his head, and, with an oddly detached air, he surveyed for some
moments the explorations therein of a naked baby.

Its creamy amber skin shone like satin in the sunlight, relieved by
its stiff cap of black hair.  And the eyes riveted suddenly upon
Cyprian's were widely set apart and, most incongruously, most
tellingly, blue.

The man, unexpectedly, with a brusque movement of his head, shook
down the eye-glasses he used to correct his astigmatic vision when
concentrating for long upon close writing, and the small inquiring
face receded, mercifully blurred.

But its marked and precocious intelligence remained branded upon his
mentality as if somebody had pasted an imperfectly-developed
photograph there.

"One is responsible," and he turned the word over in his mind,
stupidly probing its meaning.

Hla Byu picked up the restless bundle as she flitted into the shaded
gloom of the sitting-room, out of the white glare blocked by the
verandah chicks.

Cyprian absently received his letters from her hands.

"The school is in Maymyo," he said inconsequently.  "It will be best
for him to go where there will be others like him."

The puzzled wonderment of her expression merged into amusement.  She
had learnt something of this man during the last two years.
Something, also, of latent powers in herself which he would have paid
much, in after life, to have left unstirred.  She gave a tiny
exclamatory chirp of laughter.

"At fourteen months, Thakin?  That would, indeed, be somewhat early,
even for him."

With relief he recalled that the time for such decisions was not yet.
One might drift a little longer....

But Fate disproved that.  Among the official letters lay one in a
strange handwriting.  He turned it over incuriously, but there was a
seal on the back which quickened his interest.  He could not
recollect where he had seen it before.  The first words of the letter
startled him.

"Dear Ferlie's Cyprian,"--Stiffening, he turned the sheet over to
read the signature, "B. Trefusis."  Then he remembered.  A
tea-shop....  Ferlie buried in ice-cream and, to the right of her, a
vivacious shingled head ... the same seal on a thin white wrinkled
finger, curved over a plate of honey-coloured scones.  He spread the
letter out upon the blotting-paper and, resting his drawn forehead on
sheltering palms, read it slowly through.

"If you were ever a friend of Ferlie's, try and come to her.  Once, I
should have said, if you were ever a friend of Ferlie's try and leave
her.  I never considered you a successful substitute for the uncle
she did not possess, but the very difference in age between you,
which I deplored, I now rejoice in.  Perhaps, she will confide in
you; perhaps, you will be able to help where the few that are near
and dear to her are excluded from helping.

"For all I know, you may have forgotten that there ever was a Ferlie.
This may find you with another woman at your side.  You may have
ties--children; then, for their sakes, come and hold out your hand in
friendship to a child you once knew.  I am not satisfied with the
little I gleaned about her marriage.  I am not satisfied with the
accounts I heard of you then.  The only thing I am satisfied about is
that Ferlie needs you and would tell you what she will not tell me.
Perhaps, you may have the key to the whole situation; perhaps, you
know nothing.  At any rate, if you were ever a friend of Ferlie's
come and learn."

After all, the ties which held him were slenderer than cobwebs;
surprising the ease with which he snapped them.

Hla Byu did not question.  She merely accepted.  But her slanting
brows creased painfully.

"Will the Thakin let me come back to him?"

Through the rising tumult of his mind he detected the note of alarm.

"There is nothing to fear," he told her.  "I will arrange for regular
money to be supplied to you.  The child shall be provided for all
during his life."

The momentary relief in her face struck a feeling of shame to
Cyprian's soul.  There were men, he knew, who would consider him
quixotic.  He blinked away the thought.  Custom could not lessen the
dominion of the Daimon in this matter.  Responsible.  For all that he
had made of life.  For the weakness which had originally driven him
from his acknowledged sphere.  For the narrowness which had spurned
Ferlie's confidence in its rightful setting; for the indecision which
had kept him from following his truest instincts to love and to
declare his love; for the apathetic purposelessness through which he
had accepted Burma's bribe of Hla Byu, and the child with the
questioning blue eyes.

"What will happen no one can foretell," he said.  "Serve another
Thakin, or wait; in either case you can always appeal to me for your
needs."

Seemingly satisfied, she nodded and then turned from him to hide
something on her lashes which made rainbows of the sunshine.  She had
always been a little afraid of him, although he never got drunk, nor
beat her, nor threw things about the house as she knew, from her
friends, so many foreign masters did.  He was always silent,
work-absorbed, apart from her--it was like living with the marble
Buddha on the river-bank, who eternally contemplated, in the
regulation attitude, the water traffic slipping by on its very mortal
affairs, from town to town.  She clutched the baby to her in a spasm
of passionate regret--although, of course, there remained nothing to
regret since their future was assured.

"It has been peace here, Thakin?" she said, on a timid note of
interrogation.

He laid a gentle hand upon the yielding shoulder; her tiny bones felt
soft like a kitten's bones.

"It is never peace for long, child," he answered.

* * * * * *

He had wired the date of his arrival to Miss Trefusis; the compromise
of a reply to the letter he had not felt capable of answering.  But
he was not prepared to see the severely stately figure of that
decisive lady waiting at the docks.

She greeted him as if they had parted yesterday.

"People remain vivid to me," she said in explanation, leading him to
the closed limousine.  "We are motoring to my place near town, and
your heavy luggage can go by train.  You are coming to stay with me
until you've had time to choose your roost.  On the way down in the
car I can elucidate.  Meanwhile, a brief catechism will clear the
air.  Married?"

Cyprian shook his head.

"I am glad," said the old lady.  "Your having no responsibilities
will simplify matters.  Was leave due to you?"

"I took 'Urgent Private Affairs'."

"Good.  They should more than occupy your attention.  Get in."

Her hand directed him towards the car.

Cyprian obeyed, hypnotized.  Once they were seated she swung sideways
to look him full in the face.

"Do you know why I have risked this?  For love of Ferlie.  You might
have consigned me to the devil, had you developed into an official of
high standing, very much married, with a brace of inarticulate,
spectacled children.  Instinct told me that you were alone in spirit,
even if among your fellow-men; overworking, and living at the bottom
of a mine, not of rubies, but of buried hopes.  Was I right?"

He nodded, blinking nervously at his hands.  Her voice had lost its
hard-edged clarity.

"When I saw you two, one afternoon at the Zoo--you remember?--I
thought that the link, strengthening between you as the years went
on, was wholly unnatural.  You were Ferlie's sun, though neither of
you realized it.  And she stood to you for refreshment and comfort
and utter peace.  Again--Was I right?"

He stirred uneasily.

"Can you not spare me this?"

"No," said Aunt Brillianna emphatically.  "I can spare you nothing if
Ferlie is to be spared a little.  Listen."

She lowered her tone and, above the humming of the car, her voice ran
on earnestly.  Pain was again wrenching at his nerves and the
sentences sounded blurred and disconnected....

"And no one knows the real truth.  They are not, officially,
separated, but she lives alone at Black Towers with John, her little
boy...."

A companion of lesser perception might have faltered discouraged
before his immobility.  This one had the good sense to keep her eyes
upon the shifting hedges.

"She tells us nothing, and lives like a nun, cloistered in her
pathetic youth behind the walls of that crumbling old tomb.
Mainwaring fills the town house with his friends, and there are queer
stories afloat about him.  He has never shown any interest in the
child--looks upon its arrival as a duty mutually performed.  There
has been no public quarrel; no cruelty that we know of, and the
rumours, however unsavoury, do not provide the evidence for divorce
proceedings.  In any case, Ferlie has joined the Church of Rome.
Gave no explanation why; merely announced it as an accomplished fact.
I saw a marble statue once, called 'Endurance.'  It was in a private
show, by an unknown man.  A nude figure with hands extended to push
back some invisible advancing foe.  I bought it.  There is terror in
the face, lest the unknown power should crush completely; but there
is also cold resistance and the strength of despair.  I will show you
the thing.  You, who remember Ferlie as so poignantly alive...."

The speaker broke off for a moment.

"... But I must come to the incident which prompted my letter to you.
I had gone unexpectedly to Black Towers, and only John greeted me in
that mausoleum of a hall.  He is a Ferlie product all right, but only
just four.  And ... one never knows....  The servants told me that
Lady Greville-Mainwaring was at home but could not be disturbed.  I
asked if she were ill.  They denied that and, politely resistant to
further inquiries, supplied me with papers, afternoon tea, and, being
well acquainted with my erratic habits, asked if I would stay the
night.  I said 'yes,' and turned my whole attention to John in the
hope of discovering what his mother was doing.

"'No one could ever go up between five and six,' he informed me.
'But go up where, John?' I asked.  With some difficulty I extracted
the fact that Ferlie was in the West Tower.  I knew there were unused
rooms in the towers.  I asked him what his mother did there between
five and six, and he said she shut the door and 'just was quiet,'
adding proudly that he took her up messages if it was important.

"I hated the sound of these proceedings which he evidently regarded
as normal.  'This is important, John,' I said.  'We won't tell
anybody else, but you take me up to Mother.'  He demurred at
first--thought the occasion did not justify that weary journey--but,
at last, I persuaded him.  The steps were high and dark and narrow.
We might have been perambulating in Dante's Purgatory as we circled
round and round.  We stopped outside the door of a circular room.  So
strict were her orders that she had ceased to expect intrusion, and
only a curtain hid her from us.  I stood for some while behind it,
listening to the silence.  John, queer intense little soul that he
is, sat down on the top step nursing his legs, for he was never very
strong and I suppose they ached from the climb.  And suddenly perched
up at that height in the dark, relieved only by the spears of
ghost-coloured light shooting through the slit windows behind us on
the stair, I lost my nerve and felt that, dishonourable or not, I
must know what Ferlie was doing.  If she had turned into a witch in
that setting I was not prepared to be surprised."

Miss Trefusis stopped to wipe from her face the dampness which had
gathered there.  She gave a little gasp and moistened her lips.

"Cyprian.  I stood and peeped through the curtain folds at a room
soaked in gold light.  I thought I was demented until I realized that
the rays of the western sun must touch this turret last of any room
in the house, and then they struck through a round aperture glazed
with orange glass.  When no longer dazzled by the discovery I found
Ferlie.  The place was unfurnished save for a cushioned oak chair in
which she was sitting, motionless as if she had been dead for years.
On the palm of one opened hand lay a spherical object which retained
at one spot a pin-point of reflected light like a minute star.  On
this it seemed to me Ferlie's eyes were fixed, and, even when
throwing discretion to the winds, I went in to her she neither spoke
nor stirred.

"I stooped low to her face and realized that she could not be aware
of my presence.  She was in some sort of a trance.  Terrified, my
first idea was to rush for help.  Mercifully, I thought better of it.
I did not know what kind of help was needed.  I could only guess that
Ferlie was self-hypnotized.  But with what object?  And had the thing
been accidental, or deliberate.  Not daring to pick up what she held
in her hand I saw it was a small golden apple.

"I went back to John and asked him where the nearest doctor lived.
We were some while whispering while I dug for information, and during
that delay I heard Ferlie give a long sigh.  Back I sped to her side.
The apple had rolled into her lap and her body relaxed as I hovered
round like a distracted hen.  Then, to my joy, I perceived that she
was realizing me.  She did not seem astonished, and lifting her head
spoke as if hardly out of a dream.

"'Nearly,' she said.  'Very nearly.  But there is always some
Presence standing between him and myself--and it is not God.'

"I was tactful and apologetic, putting the blame of my intrusion on
to John and pretending I saw nothing out of the way in finding her in
the turret.

"But, later, by deduction and confidences half-won, I arrived at some
sort of explanation.  Ferlie had been dipping deep into the
ultra-ancient and ultra-modern volumes of every species of literature
which stock the Black Towers library.

"'Do you believe that mankind have lost the power of communicating
with one another by thought-transference?' she asked me.  'If they
ever had it,' I said, determined not to encourage her.

"But her face checked my inclination to snub.

"'Christ had it,' she said.  'He healed _from a distance_, and
promised that all He did we might do.  No one seems to have taken
that promise seriously enough to test it--unless perhaps the
Christian Scientists.'

"'I'd prefer to rely upon the twopenny post, myself,' I insisted.
She shook her head and said, 'That would not be right in my case,
Aunt B.  I may only struggle to attain the fulfilment of the promise.'

"'With whom do you want to communicate by this unnatural method,' I
asked.  But she would not tell me.  Only by accident I stumbled upon
that item.

"Late that same night I heard through my open window a faint sound of
somebody crying.  It was one of those desperately still
star-saturated nights.  I was up in an instant and along the corridor
without waiting for a candle.  Ferlie's room was next to John's.
Through his open door I watched her, but this time I did not rush in
to put to flight any stray ministering angel who might be in the
offing.  Cyprian, it is a terrible thing to come, unawares, upon a
soul in Gethsemane.  What has lain between you two in the past I do
not know; what may lie between you in the future I dare not think.
But I at my eavesdropping post grew colder and colder.  If Ferlie
continued much longer to carry this secret burden I was certain she
would go out of her mind.  And I am convinced that whatever the
stereotyped and doubtless to your mind worthy, principles to which
you have succumbed in this matter, no man can count himself wholly
irresponsible whose name is thus centred in a woman's prayers."

The great car swept forward, increasing speed along a clear stretch
of road.  Between the occupants for some moments there reigned an
unbroken silence.

Then Cyprian spoke, still without moving; his rigidity outlined
against the transparent pane.

"How far are we from Black Towers?"

"We pass within thirty miles of it."

"Then...."  Their eyes met.

Aunt B.'s head jerked suddenly forward.

"I thought you'd understand." ...




CHAPTER XI

The Autumn twilight was thickening with milky opal reflections when
they rolled through the heavy iron gates of the park.  Gigantic trees
shadowed the curving drive; every now and then sending a swirl of
jewel-coloured leaves to join their brothers carpeting the soft turf.

They passed one copper beech, tinted like the understrands of
Ferlie's hair.  But, though the grounds were obviously well
cared-for, nothing could relieve a brooding sense of desolation, due
to the over-luxuriant vegetation which darkened the surroundings of
an already dark, if beautiful, house.

Well-merited the name, Cyprian thought, as the solid old turret
towers rose at last, picked out in inky silhouette against the
flaming aftermath of sunset cloud.

Upon the flight of black marble steps a child was standing; a
miniature bull's-eye lamp in his hands.  He had evidently been trying
to light it with the aid of a box of matches which would not strike.

A footman came down the stairs as the car drew up, and his expression
of surprise gave way to placid recognition of its lady-occupant.

"Her ladyship said she was expecting you, Madam, but did not think
that you would be arriving till Wednesday."

"I have brought a friend of hers with me," Miss Trefusis told him.
"Where is she?"

The man did not answer; he had turned back to speak to his
colleagues, now gathering about the limousine.

Jardine, the old butler, with the forceful impassive face, informed
them that her ladyship should be told.  He left them before the hall
fire and glided away.

"I always regard him as a sort of Keeper of the Keys," whispered Miss
Trefusis, hysterical with fatigue and achievement.

Cyprian took out his watch as if suddenly reminded of something, but
he did not look at the time; only at the securing ring of a small
gold key dangling from the watch-chain.

"He has been in the Family so many years," went on Aunt Brillianna,
"that Ferlie says he believes himself a kind of Influence on the
Greville-Mainwaring destinies."

The child, whose lamp one of the footmen had lighted now, passed
through the hall, carrying it carefully.  She called to him.

"Come here, John.  Don't you know me to-day?  Where is your mother?"

He was advancing towards her but checked himself at the inquiry.

"She said not to take no one up the stairs," he informed them with
emphasis.  "She are having a key made for the door."

He spoke clearly and with only a slight slurring of the S's which
could not be described as a lisp but which gave a more human
childishness to his unnatural gravity.

Scarcely concealing the effort it cost, Cyprian raised his head and
looked at him.  Yes.  That hair, also, would have flaunted a
rebellious crop of sunny waves had they been allowed to grow.  He was
too white and frail-looking for prettiness but it was with his
mother's wide steady gaze that he returned Cyprian's survey which
shifted first.

"Nonsense!" said Aunt B. on a low quaver of amusement, "you can't
afford to be jealous of Ferlie's son."

Cyprian replied with a vexed laugh,

"Don't read me so clearly out loud.  There are some things a man
wishes to hide from himself."

She rose, holding out her hand to John.

"Take us to the foot of the stairs, laddie.  I do not want you to go
up.  We may hear Mother coming down."

John hesitated, but, finally, led the way, vouchsafing one piece of
news as he pushed back a nail-studded door.

"I have got a tricycle."

It gave Aunt B. her opening.  At the foot of the stairs she turned
and gestured to Cyprian, standing behind her.

"The key is not yet made to lock you out," she reminded him in an
undertone.  And aloud to John, "Show me the tricycle."

Was it not yet made?  Cyprian asked himself; or, rather, would the
lock be too rusty for it to turn, after such long disuse?

Up and always up.  And Ferlie climbed thus, daily, the ascent of her
lonely Purgatory for the little hour when she might unmask her
suffering, and face the truth that her soul was exceeding heavy.

It was a long time to Cyprian before he stood outside that door.  It
had a heavy looped iron handle like that which turns the latch of a
church.

He paused but heard no sound within.

His hand grasping the ring was steady; the oaken panels swung back
easily under that strong pressure.

She was leaning against the Gothic window, and the lingering touch of
long sun-fingers rested upon her head in comforting caress.

He spoke her name in a whisper.  Her head turned slowly but she did
not move.  So often had he come to her at this time and, so often,
faded back into the gloaming.

His shoulders relaxed as dawned the explanation for her dumb
acceptance of his presence.  He crossed the threshold with
outstretched hands.

"My dear ... Oh, my dear..."

She crumpled up in his arms, not unconscious, but sick with shock.

The last red ray withdrew from the turret, leaving them in the gloom
of a grave from which resurrection seemed very far away.

* * * * * *

The presence of Aunt B. made all the difference to the situation.
She effaced herself and entertained John, but lent a more commonplace
air to his visit than would have seemed possible, in the
circumstances.

The erratic arrivals and departures of Lady Greville-Mainwaring's
elderly aunt had ceased to be a matter for comment in the servants'
hall.  Jardine palpably respected her uncompromising utterances; John
met her as an equal, and Cyprian and Ferlie, at peace in one
another's companionship along the garden walks, passionately blessed
her in their hearts.  She had done wisely in warning Cyprian that
Ferlie's appearance must startle him.  She wore the look of some
Inquisition victim whom the torturer's power had reduced to that
exhaustion which ceases to feel.  Instead of the limp body, incapable
of further suffering, Ferlie betrayed a like condition of soul.

"Was this change of religion any use?" Cyprian asked her.

Her eyes might swiftly have become sightless as she replied, "There
was no 'change.'  It had to be that or Father's way of thinking.  And
I could not trust my small strength with Father's self-sufficient
philosophy.  This represented one more cage, but a necessary one, if
I was to obtain enough self-discipline to enable me to live.  You
know I am not being dramatic.  Sometimes I thought of that way out,
only it did not seem quite fair to John, until he should be old
enough to understand about heredity and choose for himself."

"You--you don't make yourself exactly clear."

"No.  Well, never mind! ... Peter, by chance, knocked up against a
clever Jesuit.  I do admire that much-criticized sect, Cyprian.
Their hard logic; their cold positivity of thought.  This one
thrilled one's sense of humour first by a speech made to a Church of
England padre, which, beginning on a note of toleration crashed to
conclusion on a chord of glorious bigotry.  'After all,' he assured
his vacillating companion, 'We both serve the same Master; you in
your way, I in His.'

"Later, this man was discussing the conversion of a well-known
statesman with Peter.  'He was too intellectual,' said the Jesuit,
'to be satisfied longer with less than all the Truth his brain could
assimilate.'  That speech impressed Peter as, doubtless, it was meant
to do, with his tendency to brain-worship.  He, also, began to be
sure that the World's Thinkers, among whom he would like to be
numbered some time, must, universally, find the Whole Truth here.

"And you know, Cyprian, he _is_ clever.  They did not make the
mistake of approaching him on the sentimental, or even the
romantically beautiful side, of the religion.  He is certainly a more
valuable ally to the Catholic Church than undoctrinal I."

"The thing has not yet interfered with Peter's instinctive love of
liberty," Cyprian pointed out.  "Whereas, you and I are, surely,
threatened by its precepts."

He went no further.  Not yet had he broached to her that which he
understood to be passing in Aunt Brillianna's mind; more tentatively
in his own.  But Ferlie smiled with wistful understanding.

"There is no public cause for a divorce, that I know of," she said
quietly, "And, apart from Catholicity, isn't divorce rather
impossible as a solution for Us?"

She was placing her finger upon something which formed the basis of
their mutual pride.  They did not give to take back again, whatever
the type of altar to which they had dedicated the gift.

The mockery of her marriage-service struck him afresh....  "That
theirs may be the love which knows no ending, Whom Thou for evermore
doth join in one...."

"Dear," and his voice was vibrant with pain, "How could you ever have
imagined that any public vows could unite you to him, who were
already part of..."

Habit of mind checked him; Ferlie was braver.

"Of you," she finished steadily.

They walked the whole length of the lawn before she added,

"You did not realize that, Cyprian, while there was time.  If you had
realized it I should not have been free.  There was no time to give
you time to weigh your love.  When you held back my light seemed
clear."

"And I had no light," he said shortly.

"You haven't told me whether you now share these modern views about
divorce," she reminded him.  "Even the Church you nominally belong to
is divided in its opinions on the subject.  Its members talk very
fluently, and go on their way, self-convinced.  Like Peter, who, at
nineteen, could talk himself into that sort of convinced state about
anything."

"There are exceptional circumstances..." Cyprian began, but she
stopped him then.

"And now you are going to do it!  No, Cyprian.  You must be either
'for' or 'against,' with principle at the back of you.  Don't you see
that everybody's exceptional circumstances would always be his own?
That is how the Individual now dethrones God in favour of himself."

"Ferlie, you forget you have not yet told me your circumstances.  And
I have a right to know."

He watched her clouded face and waited.  Twice she seemed about to
speak but the constrained reticence of the past two years still
fettered her tongue.

"I have never told anyone," she said huskily.  "I don't know how much
I ought to tell.  I only believe that it may be a divorcing matter,
according to Law; if I had not put myself under Catholic discipline."

He placed his hands on her shoulders and pushed her down on to a
moss-upholstered bench near which, perched on a pillar, mocked a
laughing stone faun.

"You must tell me," he said.  And took his place beside her, covering
her hand with his own.

Presently, with an obvious effort, she asked,

"You will not have forgotten Muriel Vane?"

His fingers contracted and she paused to reflect that if Cyprian had
not remained so true in the abstract to his First Vision he would
hardly have been Cyprian; and her god.

But she could not long mis-read the expression of raw disgust on his
face as she lifted hers.  It puzzled her.

"Nothing would hurt now, Cyprian--if you knew.  She is--not quite
normal now.  Not since a long time has she----"

"I know all that."  His tone was cruelly hard.  "For a long while I
would not allow myself to believe those rumours....  And once I
thought to put her before you!  It is that I shall never forget."
Even so does a man resent his mistakes on their object instead of on
himself.

"Cyprian, don't.  Haven't the years taught you compassion?"

He shrugged that view away.

"What compassion is possible, or even right and decent?"

"You may feel inclined to shun a leper but, surely, you would desire
to help him, too?"

She surprised him.

"What makes you think of it that way?"

"Experience," said Ferlie, so low that he hardly caught the word.

She braced herself for explanation.

"You once met a woman called Ruth Levine."  She went on without
heeding his start of acquiescence.  "She has been very good to Muriel
Vane.  Muriel's people separated; then her mother died.  Her father
took to drugs, or something; they were a queer family, degenerating,
like--like so many.  And Muriel developed into--what people said.
Ruth thought she had foreseen it and might have done something to
prevent it happening.  I should have imagined that impossible; often
it is caused by heredity insanity.  Anyhow, she saved Muriel from the
usual kind of 'Home.'  It is always the woman, Ruth says, who is
judged; men so affected can often live undetected or screened from
public criticism....  Ruth knew Clifford before I married him and
when I concluded that, for John's sake--if only for that--there must
be a complete break between Clifford and myself, she came to ask me
to get divorced, as she had cared for him first.  She was quite
matter-of-fact about it.  I told her that I could not dream of using
the evidence she offered to supply.  I told her that Clifford and I
had privately arranged to live apart but that I was a Catholic and it
was not in my power to unsay vows once spoken.  I told her that I did
not think she understood why Clifford ought to be in other hands than
those of women.  She looked at me as if I were crazy and went
away....  I--I don't know any more, Cyprian."

Ferlie's voice had almost vanished.  Suddenly her head went down upon
her knees and her body shook with dry sobbing.

Cyprian, with half-closed eyes which did not wish to see, was
wondering whether he had understood.

She had conjured up dark visions the like of which had rarely crossed
his horizon.  He was inclined, like many self-sheltered individuals,
to blink at the most sinister of Life's shadows, as if by so doing he
could blink them out of existence as easily as out of his thoughts.

His inarticulate prayer: "_Et ne nos indue as in tentationem!_"  A
wise one with reference to the safety of his individual soul but
hardly conducive of expansive sympathy to others.

The horror he experienced in hearing this child, a score of years
younger than himself, approaching for commonplace--as indeed they
might be elsewhere in the world, for all he cared--issues which,
until now, he had always succeeded in pushing far from his own sphere
of action, hindered him from pressing her further.

* * * * * *

He might never have realized the immensities at stake for her, but
that Chance interfered to drive his newly-acquired knowledge home.

At that moment Jardine was seen to be coming across the lawn, a
silver salver in his hand.

Cyprian aroused Ferlie in time.  When the old butler stood before
them, with the telegram, she was presentably calm.

"Mrs. Minchin sent me out with it, your ladyship; it was addressed to
her.  His lordship wishes her to inform you that he is arriving
to-night and would like one of the cars to meet the 8.15."  Mrs.
Minchin was the housekeeper.

Ferlie took the yellow envelope from the tray and, as she did so,
Cyprian wondered whether it were only in his imagination that a look
passed between mistress and man, electric with mutual warning.

Just the flash of an eyelid, and Jardine was pursuing his majestic
course over the grass, his back-view impervious to criticism and
comment.  Not until the last glimpse of his black coat-tails had
disappeared behind the yew-bushes did Ferlie rise to her feet and
face Cyprian beside the laughing faun.  Again that illusory
sightlessness filmed her dilated pupils.  She looked through him and
beyond into a blank pall of darkness.

"Cyprian," the voice was dead like her face, "Take me away."

He fancied the half-human leering thing of stone stirred in evil
exultation.  The twisted weather-beaten features made an unholy
contrast to those others of still soft flesh on a level with them.

"I have nothing more to say to you than that," she said, when he did
not answer.  "I will tell you nothing more.  Whether you go with us
or not, John and I leave here to-night--in time.  You could not trust
me five years ago; can you trust me now?"

"It was not you five years ago; it was my own creed that I could not
trust."

"But now it is different, Cyprian.  You have out-lived one stage of
self-mistrust now."

Did man ever arrive beyond the reach of that urging Power in a world
peopled with mortal flesh, he wondered.

Strange that, in forcing a decision upon himself concerning Ferlie's
future, Cyprian forgot the very existence of Hla Byu and his son.  It
was not his intention to conceal from Ferlie the temporary loss of
will-power which had changed the tenour of his life during the last
two years.  But the Burmese girl, received in a moment of sick
physical weakness and retained in pure apathy of soul, had existed so
mistily for the real Cyprian that, the practical arrangements for her
safe-keeping concluded, she simply slipped out of the picture.  When
he did remember her she had become so superfluous among the host of
living memories he and Ferlie were storing up that he could not bring
himself to recall her, even by speech.

"I know too thoroughly by what means the latent forces of the body
can accomplish the spirit's murder"--she was speaking again and he
recollected himself--"But you and I have nothing to do with such
perishable links.  Nor do we require witnesses to ratify a spiritual
marriage for which we should not have been prepared without these
last enforced years of disciplined control."

She stopped, confronted with his unyielding silence, and, all at
once, grew limp and human by that other inhuman watcher in stone.
Her shoulders relaxed, bowed and aged beneath their invisible burden.

"I am not playing the part of Eve.  It is all right.  I promised that
you should never need to ask me, a second time, to leave you.  I
understand.  I am going now, alone."

He drew towards her then.

"You are going with me.  I am giving you no choice.  Do you
understand?  This decision is mine, not yours.  You are going where I
shall take you and under whatsoever conditions I lay down, now, and
during your whole future.  The responsibility is mine; you have got
to put your trust in me."

Was it credible that the ripple of breeze through the swaying stalks
of a bed of tall Madonna lilies drowned a satyr-laugh of derision?

Standing shoulder to shoulder they made no attempt to touch one
another's hands.

So might the Little Saint of Assisi have mythically wedded Poverty,
while Chastity and Obedience supported her on either hand.

Said Ferlie, "I have nothing to give you that you have not already.
Everything of yours has been guarded safely behind a locked door.
And, Cyprian, you have the key."

* * * * * *

To Miss Trefusis he outlined his scheme and found her a little
dubious.

"But, my dear man, this is the twentieth century.  Why not meet this
fly-by-night lord and arrange matters with modern sanity over a
whisky and soda?"

"You are the only modern one of us three," he reminded her, amusedly
recognizing that her unusually broad views, contact with which he had
once feared for Ferlie, were responsible for their present re-union.
"Ferlie tells me that she has no evidence for a divorce, nor can she
seek it, in consideration of the Church she has joined."

"Bless my soul!" exclaimed Aunt B., exasperated that any Church
should continue to consider joined what she had been at such infinite
pains to put asunder.  "Surely you, Cyprian, are old enough to smile
at sects and Churches!  Ferlie would not be true to type if, at her
age, a cardinal did not seem too picturesque to be a liar.  And,
believe me, the Pope was the only safe substitute for you."

"You, surely, are not advocating collusion?" asked Cyprian, tickled,
in spite of himself, at this feminine Juggernaut, the wheels of whose
common-sense responded to no brake till she had guided them
triumphantly past her goal.

"I don't believe there is 'no cause,'" she snapped: "If he is a
gentleman he will make one, since he has obviously admitted her right
to leave him.  It can't affect the child's inheritance.  An atom of
patience, and the whole affair might be straightened out with a
minimum of scandal."

"There is no necessity for even a perfectly respectable scandal,"
Cyprian assured her.  "Ferlie is coming out to Burma with me, to live
there as my sister.  After a time, the man can get his marriage
annulled if he wishes, on the ground of desertion; but that is
unlikely to affect us."

Miss Trefusis searched his face with an expression of mingled
admiration and incredulity on her own.

"Yes, I am afraid you mean what I think you mean," she said.  "You
are more of a child than she is, and I'd like to shake you.  I'd
almost rather you eloped healthily--without a new wedding-ring."

"I am so sorry to disappoint you," Cyprian said.

She laid a hand on his arm which he immediately imprisoned in his.

"Excelsior, then!  Go and freeze to death upon your mountain top,
both of you.  I have interfered enough in bringing your bodily forms
together.  I dare not dig inquisitive fingers into your souls."

It was arranged that her chauffeur should return with them to the
coast so as to render negligible the chance of delay if any suspicion
were aroused.

"But there is no earthly reason why Clifford should want to argue it
out with me," said Ferlie.

* * * * * *

At the last moment she gave way to a curious attack of nerves, and
again Cyprian suspected that the incident was due to some secret
reminder conveyed to her by Jardine.

From the step of the limousine, into which the sleeping John had been
carried, she let go Cyprian's arm and darted back up the steps.

"Aunt B.!  You will go home yourself to-night, won't you?  Take the
Daimler!"

"Hurry, child!  It is twenty minutes to eight.  Yes.  I am all ready
to start, and you can trust me to take care of myself."

"Come, Ferlie, don't waste any more time."

She ignored even that quiet voice, looking uncertainly at Jardine who
dropped his eyes with an almost imperceptible movement of his head.

"You will see my aunt comfortably off, Jardine?"

"Ferlie, don't be foolish!  Since when have I needed dry-nursing?
Make her get in, Cyprian.  There, darling!  There.  Shut the door.
That's right, Cyprian.  Write to me, both of you.  What is she
shaking about?  I won't let Clifford eat me in any case.  Good-bye.
Look after her, Cyprian.  Good-bye!  Good-bye!"

They were whirled out of her sight.

* * * * * *

Whereupon, the temptation of Eve descended upon Aunt B.

She had never met this husband of Ferlie's and, on reconsidering that
fact, it seemed that Ferlie herself had always intervened in the past
to prevent a meeting.  There was really no need for her to hurry home
to-night; she might even serve the fugitives best by staying to
produce some plausible reason for Ferlie's sudden "journey to town."

Jardine, to her amazement, was respectfully inhospitable in his
opposition to this proposed change of plan.  He made it unmistakably
clear that he wished to be rid of her.  And the more insistently he
conveyed that impression, the more obstinately did Miss Trefusis
desire to see the owner of Black Towers.

To settle the matter out of hand she went to her room, unpacked a
dinner dress of silver-grey velvet, and came downstairs wearing it
and an assured air which discouraged argument.

Said Jardine to her in the hall where he was hovering like a
distressed bat among the chain-mailed ancestors.

"It is to be expected that his lordship will dine in his own
apartments, Madam.  I have not put off the dinner hour to suit his
late arrival."

Therefore, at 8.15 precisely, Aunt B. found herself frustrated thus
far, at the end of the long table.

Half-way through the meal came the sounds of arrival: the footman's
hurrying steps and a man's voice in the hall.

She strained her ears, but silence soon followed the retreating feet
and then Jardine came in to ask if she would have coffee on the
terrace.

"Too chilly," was her cross verdict, and he agreed that the little
drawing-room and a fire would be more comfortable.

Even after she had drunk the coffee and was immersed in the
newspaper, she remained aware of the old servant's flitting presence.
He appeared to be finding matters to occupy him in the small
drawing-room and only after she had twice looked up inquiringly over
the printed page did he make reluctantly for the door.

She sat on when the paper, restlessly devoured, had slipped from her
knees to the floor.  Soft radiance glowed about her through orange
silk shades, etherealizing the dignified feminine figure with its
close-fitting crown of silvery hair.  The features, in repose not
unlike Ferlie's, were attractively gentle.  She leant back in the
dark tapestried chair and thought of the lovers, of the long trail
which lay before them, of the spiritual courage supporting their rare
decision.  Could a man and a woman live under such conditions, loving
as these two loved?

And something told her that it was just because they so loved that
the improbable became possible.

If they failed that Utopian ideal in the end--  She broke off her
reflections with a sigh.

"Who is to judge?" she asked aloud of the flames on the open hearth.
"Who is to judge These, or Any?"

A man on the terrace, rolling a cigarette with uncertain fingers,
heard the quiet question and paused in his occupation.  His eyes
glittered oddly over the flickering match, just struck, and the face,
as he lifted it starwards, was not unlike the face of the deriding
faun, aged by the battering years into a very surely alive satyr.

* * * * * *

Cold, suffocating darkness in the hall, and the comforting impassive
bulk of old Jardine.

Later, a square of corpse-coloured light, and the black marble steps
making a row of ebony mirrors for the waning moon.  Beyond them, the
blurred lines of Ferlie's Daimler, heralding escape to the dainty
simplicity of the lavender-scented garden and rooms sweet with the
pot-pourri of clean sane memories.

Finding her voice, she turned fiercely upon the man supporting her
trembling descent.

"And you knew--and remained silent, while she was facing That!"

His slow gesture was controlled but unyielding.

"For forty years, Madam, I have served the Greville-Mainwarings.  As
their like dies out so does my like die out which has learnt the
lesson of silence."

He closed the door of the car upon her, adding with cold dignity,

"Her ladyship chose to become a Greville-Mainwaring."




CHAPTER XII

"Do you know what I think, Cyprian?" asked John, lost in admiration
for the ingenuity which had lined the channel leading from his
sand-castle with practically watertight slates and stones, "I think
you've got a Brain."

"So that's what your mother tells Miss Trefusis of you," deduced
Cyprian.  "By the way, I have an uneasy suspicion that she intended
you to address me as 'Uncle.'"

"What for?"

"As a mark of well-deserved respect, I fancy, and in token of my
thinning locks."

"You don't look like 'uncle.'"

"Oh, I don't know.  Considering I had reached a man's estate when
your mother was not much higher than you----"

"Did Mother call you 'Uncle' then?"

"Just you ask her if not why not," advised Cyprian.

John mused awhile.

"Anyhow, I won't," he decided.

"Won't ask her?"

"Will call you by your real name."

"That's what she said," Cyprian admitted.  "But, as man to man, John,
I must warn you that she will probably have the last word in the
matter, even if it is an inconsistent one.  I have known her longer
than you have."

"But I have known her most," returned John in some agitation.  "She
was _my_ mother first."

Cyprian took warning.

"God bless you, yes.  She would be the first to admit it.  Go your
rebel way, then, and get the better of the woman.  _I_ shan't
interfere.  I have my own troubles."

The conversation took place on a sunny portion of the Brittany coast
where Ferlie had, for some weeks, been trustfully waiting for John
and Cyprian to decide that they liked one another.  Neither of them
possessing gaily expansive natures the discovery took time.

A neutrality pact had been sealed earlier on this particular
afternoon when Cyprian, armed with an offering of peppermint rock,
having fallen unawares into the well of sea-water outside John's
castle, had aroused in himself a throng of dimly ecstatic
recollections and intimations of the Immortality of Childhood, as the
poet simply puts it, and so flung himself whole-heartedly into the
business of constructing an aqueduct, a smouldering ambition of his
childhood, ever frustrated by the inopportune interference of the old
and wise....

"You," said John presently, touched by his conscientious absorption,
"may have the 'nother stick of peppermint rock when you've done."

"If it's to save your life I will accept it but I feel it only honest
to confess that I am not allowed to eat sweets between meals."

"Neither am I when Mother comes out with us....  I want Mother."

"So do I want her.  But I am man enough to put the aqueduct before
the yearnings of my softer nature."

"Well, but you don't want to be sick."

Cyprian dropped the spade to look at him.

"What on earth are we going to do about it?" he asked at length.
John showed him.

"And now," said Cyprian bitterly, "as, prompted by a kind and noble
heart, I bought you the beastly stuff, I suppose she'll blame me!"

"I won't tell," John assured him faintly.  And didn't.

* * * * * *

Almost immediately after this incident sealing his position in John's
world, Cyprian received news of his Company's affiliation to a branch
of mines in another district, and of his own transfer to a station
more or less populated.

It meant a fresher beginning for himself and Ferlie in Burma than if
he had remained under the eye of old acquaintances.  He would be now,
practically, in a managing position with much sedentary office-work
in head-quarters and only a limited amount of inspecting.

But Ferlie and he would find it difficult to isolate themselves from
their neighbours, even if Cyprian's reputation as a recluse preceded
him and Ferlie's advertised one as a widow.

Fortunate for her now that the Burma Season had never materialized
before her father's enforced retirement; for, though Burma is not the
size of a London suburb, news there travels in more persistent
circles.

As things were, the few remaining officials who had known her father
well enough to remember he had a daughter would hardly connect the
knowledge with the advent of "Mrs. Clifford" to keep house for a
brother, up-country, who was not a Member of the Services.  Cyprian
felt that the change might result in a more normal and wholesome life
for Ferlie, at her age, than he could originally have offered her,
and she owned to rejoicing in the prospect of medical aid should John
get ill.

The first time she saw their bungalow of dark crimson wood, with its
shingled roof and white painted verandah, the porch trembled beneath
the red tubes of blossoming kuskwalis, the subtle velvet scent of
which mingled with the thick creamy sweetness pouring from the waxen
stars of two leafless frangipani trees in the garden.

"Cyprian, how beautiful!" as the loose crowns showered over her with
every gust of breeze.  "I wonder why there is something sorrowful in
the message their scent holds for me."

But he remembered that the lilies sentinelling the church for
Ferlie's wedding had been numerous enough to saturate the air with a
similar sickly-sweet fragrance.

Since they were seeking forgetfulness in these surroundings he said
nothing.

The radiance of their life together during the next few months was an
amazement to his unintrospective soul.

He had sometimes wondered on what foundation rested Ferlie's
invincible faith that, in this purely spiritual companionship, they
would not be tempted beyond their strength to trample the Code.

He did not know that, since John's birth and her husband's
development in a direction which made normal married life with him
impossible, Ferlie, with her passion for complete understanding
unclouded by merciful ignorance, had delved into strange
formidably-backed volumes in her efforts to tear out by the roots the
tragedy which had shattered her innocence.  She had shrunk at first
towards asceticism as an answer to the racking question "What shall
we do to be saved?"--from Self; a mankind weak and bewildered but
sub-conscious, nevertheless, of an attainable state of grace
synonymous with Immortality.

But, with Cyprian dwelling still in her heart, and refusing to be
ejected even during this complete reaction, she had been forced to
seek a more modified code than that of the professed nun.

Quite by chance, she discovered it in Chrysostom's outcry against the
anti-pagan, but, as he considered it, also the anti-Christian,
custom, which had become known among some of his contemporary
ascetics; who lived at the side of virgins in uplifting and intimate
companionship, the chastity of which was never called in question.
More than one Father of the Church, cast in sterner mould, had felt
it his duty to reprove and deplore this method of cheating the devil.
Among them, and the fact had caused Ferlie some amusement, leavened
with a queer aching, there was Cyprian's own namesake insistent on
the "weakness" of her sex and the "wanton" tendencies of youth.

But it was significant that even Chrysostom acknowledged that in such
seemingly unnatural friendships there was room for a love deeper and
more lasting than any found in the fulfilment of legitimate bodily
passion.

Upon such an admission Ferlie had built her temple to Love, and in
the lonely turret at Black Towers learnt something of the power of
concentrated thought.

Of her studies Cyprian remained unaware.

Sex-psychology had never obsessed him as it has so many modern minds.
He knew that Tolstoy, for whom he retained a very real admiration,
had developed into a married ascetic, but had been inclined to smile
at the humour presented in the situation of a man, married and with
his own quiver quite literally full, advocating a higher life, rooted
in celibacy, to his fellows.

The apple eaten, where the merit of flinging away the core and
informing the world that the fruit was sour?

But for that abnormally sensitive streak in him, which forced him to
respond to the suggestion of an idealistic love as naturally as the
sunflower to the sun, Cyprian might have degenerated into the
egotistical scholar, thick-visioned as to the needs of Humanity, and
justly derided by ribald undergraduates as "the product of a long
line of maiden aunts."

This, supposing Muriel Vane had not wounded him in time and sent him
fleeing into the desert to hide his hurt.

The same streak, unsatisfied and hungry, had enabled him to close his
eyes, temporarily, to the tenets of the rigid creed natural to this
type, when Hla Byu smiled up at him in the pitiless sunlight; the
same streak, legacy perhaps of some long-dead Tristrannic
ancestor--hardening at the sight of Ferlie's suffering, had inspired
the courage preparing him to set at defiance every other normally
narrow instinct of his senses which shrank from the abnormal, and had
led him to accept a position at her side, for which, once, more
bitterly than the severe Cyprian of bygone centuries, he would have
condemned a fellow-man.

The fact remained that he and Ferlie, and Ferlie's son by the rival
he had every reason to consider better dead, had entered into a
kingdom so glad with light and deep with peace; its ways so rich with
psychological exploration; its gates so strengthened with spiritual
discipline, that they became nearly oblivious to the world of
non-mystics, who would neither have understood these strangers in
their midst, nor have desired to understand.

And the eye of the materialist is critical and his tongue,
unsheathed, a two-edged sword.

* * * * * *

The first intimation either of them had that other mortal inhabitants
of the earth were interested in them, as fellow-pilgrims to the goal
of pensioned and idle security, occurred after a period of nearly six
months, when Sterne's good-looking little widowed sister might
reasonably be expected to have started advertising her weeds in the
exchange and barter column of the _Pioneer_.

"Weeds?  My dear fellow, she's never worn 'em.  Flits about 'clothed
in white'--what-do-you-call-it 'mystic, wonderful,' and flaunts a
promising scarlet head."

"Scarlet, did you say?  You're colour-blind.  I've only seen her from
the road, myself, but she'd rank as a 'Beaut' with that hair if she
had a face like a mince-pie."

"Fancy old Diogenes possessing a sister like that!  I was with him at
G. and he never mentioned her."

"Must be a 'half.'  She's twenty years younger at least.  What's the
name?"

"She's a Mrs. Clifford."

This conversation took place in a long low building, flanked by a
hard tennis court and dignified by the title, "Club."  The speakers
were congregated at a kind of counter commonly known as the "Bar."
Cyprian did not frequent it and Ferlie was still postponing her
public appearance.

The wives had found her difficult of access during the customary
calling hours, and mildly resented a reticence which might almost be
described as unfriendly.

John mingled with the other children in the so-called "Gardens" of
the Station, at first entirely as an onlooker, in charge of the
impassive Burmese servant, but, later, in the capacity of a leader,
of few words and indomitable energy.

John, at Black Towers, during those short years of his life when his
mother, like Cyprian, was hiding from an Argus-eyed Society, had
existed as a dreamer of dreams and an inventor of games peopled by
imaginary companions.  It was not long before the notion struck him
to cast the youth of the Station for the various roles hitherto
filled by bolsters, chain-armour and stuffed animals.

Ferlie noted with satisfaction that he fitted his own niche in
Cyprian's heart, and, while remonstrating, she was secretly
entertained when Cyprian discoursed with him in the terms of an equal.

"He simply inspires me with multi-syllabic expressions," pleaded
Cyprian, "I think it is his insuperable gravity."

At that she sighed a little.

"One would imagine he had already learnt that, though we may make a
game of Life, Life is often more successful in making game of us."

To which he answered, "Nonsense," adding, most inexcusably, the
over-worked saw, "I am the Master of my Fate; I am the Captain of my
Soul."

"I am delighted to hear you say so," Ferlie told him, "I can remember
a time when your soul captained you pretty thoroughly, though, pagan
that you are, you could hardly own to such domination."

She sometimes reflected upon that self-sufficiency which induced him
to dismiss the Churches as unreliable excrescences upon a useful
ethical foundation.

Cyprian was, undoubtedly, one of the characters which cling
passionately to the Christian Commandments and let the Christ pass by.

"The woman Thou gavest me," accused Adam, meanly ungrateful, and,
"The Brain Thou gavest me," blamed Cyprian and all his calibre.

Man's mentality, thought Ferlie, had not altered much since Eden,
though he did not, now, make the Woman the sole excuse for his
shortcomings, being obliged to admit that she was more often an
inspiration than an obstruction to Faith.  But there were other gifts
for whose shoddiness and lack of wearing-power he could still taunt
their Giver, and among them ranked that Brain which was incapable of
surrendering to belief in One who could so love the world.

Ferlie, her own conscience still at rest with that Great Lover,
simply because of her trust in a love which, knowing all, forgives,
had never attempted to probe the blank agnosticism to which Cyprian
speechlessly held.  She was sensible of the admiration due to an
intellect which, in the face of such pessimism, could stand for Right
merely for Right's sake.  He had no guide but an instinctive sense of
duty and when that failed him he looked to her love.  Only hers in
all the world, remembered Ferlie, exultantly hugging the realization
of his aloofness to her heart.

And then.

* * * * * *

"Mother," said John, "there are a nice little nigger-boy in the
verandah, and a grown-up nigger-girl, too.  And she's crying," he
added as an afterthought.

Ferlie, suspicious of the diseases John might contract from
mendicants on the steps of the picturesque but unclean pagodas had,
nevertheless, acquired a well-merited reputation for filling the
hungry with good things.  To John, who knew by heart the exciting
nursery epic dealing with a dusky youthful band, whose ranks dwindled
in the course of their unforeseen adventures, from ten to one ("So he
got married and then there were none!") all members of the Eastern
races were descendants of that fortunate survivor.

"You didn't touch the little boy, John darling," asked Ferlie with
misgiving.

She recalled the burnt-out lepers which crouched at the gilded god's
feet, unmolested in sun-soaked apathy.

"They're very clean niggers," evaded John, "And they don't want you;
it's Cyprian."

Now Cyprian did not suffer gladly these invasions of his premises by
the lame, the halt and the blind.

He had more than once given Ferlie to understand that, in his
opinion, charity to the guileless Burman should begin anywhere but at
home.  Therefore, it struck her that the couple announced by John
would, in all likelihood, be connected with the labourers in the
mines.  Perhaps a dismissed washer whose wife and child had come to
effect his reconciliation with Authority.

She found Hla Byu shrinking in the shadow of the riotous creepers,
and smiled upon her.

Then turned particular attention to John's "nice little nigger."  The
first glimpse showed her that he was remarkably fair even for a young
high-class Burman child, but after a closer inspection a bewildered
and then an inscrutable expression came over her face.  She looked
from the child back to the tear-stained and apologetic mother.

Ferlie did not yet know much Burmese.

"Who are you?" she inquired haltingly.

The woman replied in clipped English.

"I come to see the Thakin."

The child screwed up his eyes in a way wholly familiar.  They were
exceeding blue: Cyprian's eyes in a small cream-coloured face.

John, regarding him with unbated interest, reiterated,

"Aren't he a nice little nigger?"

It seemed a very long while to Ferlie before Cyprian came home.

* * * * * *

As luck would have it, he had undertaken to meet a business
acquaintance at the Club, demi-officially, to discuss the contract
for some new machinery.  They concluded the conversation in the now
nearly empty bar-room, since it had been prolonged late and
club-members were drifting home.

One man lingered; a breezy loud-voiced individual from Cyprian's
former district, to whom Life was one long smoking-room yarn.
Forrester had shown himself rather perturbed when the news leaked out
that Sterne, on departing for his Leave, had provided for his Burmese
"keep."  Creating these Quixotic precedents!  All very well for a
blooming bachelor of his amiably inexpensive habits, but how in hell
was a man with a missus and kids in England to pension off every
little bit of yellow fluff that drifted his way?

Therefore, he was delighted, on this particular evening to run across
Sterne in the one place where he could refer to the matters
pertaining to men in general.

"Hullo, Sterne!" he roared joyously.  "Have one with me.  You'll need
it.  Saw your latest _lune-de-mielle_ toiling up the long, long trail
just now in search of your bungalow.  She wasn't alone, neither.
It's a good-looking kid, I must say.  But isn't Mrs. Clifford going
to sit up and take notice?  You shouldn't have such characteristic
eyes, man."

"Did you say you'd have a drink?" asked Cyprian jerkily.

"No, no, it's my shout.  And it's no use your trying to change the
conversation.  Homer has nodded and we all know about it.  Where you
slipped up was in letting your past know your present address."

Cyprian saw the thing through, his brain working busily.  He had been
a fool not to gauge the possibility of Hla Byu's reappearance,
considering the terms on which they had parted.  And he could not
excuse himself for having omitted to tell Ferlie.  He supposed that
his reluctance to do so sprang from the fact that, since their long
acquaintance dated from her childhood, it was difficult for him to
accept her even now as altogether a woman and, moreover, a woman who
had touched pitch without being defiled.

He climbed the hill in the dusk, his face troubled, trying to decide
how far Hla Byu would have succeeded in making herself understood.
Unfortunately, his own memory convinced him that little Thu Daw's
eyes would not take very much understanding of either Ferlie's
instinct or her intelligence.

He had not the remotest idea what he was going to say to satisfy her
of the strange truth that his very heart-hunger for her was
responsible for Thu Daw.

Once more the word leapt out as if written in letters of flame across
the blackening hill-side.  No explanation could make him anything but
"responsible" for his son, as surely as Ferlie was for hers.

He swung back the garden-gate and clashed it behind him, thereupon
hastening his footsteps, urged by a nauseating desire to get this
scene with Ferlie over.

And saw her in the grey gloom, coming to meet him between the two
long borders of flaming lilies with his child in her arms.

When she reached him it was to lift a face glorified with the
forgiveness he had not asked.

"My very dear," she said, "Why did you not tell me?"

Even thus far could Ferlie trust her earthly god.




CHAPTER XIII

So Cyprian did very little explaining.

Hla Byu settled down like a shadow over their existence in one of the
rooms, awaiting suggestions, and for some time none were forthcoming.

John welcomed the addition of Thu Daw to the household, but he was
the only person to whom the addition was not fraught with strain.

Neither Cyprian nor Ferlie knew quite how to handle the question of
Thu Daw's eyes and the message they carried.

Cyprian was broodingly silent during those days and looked tired.
Till, at last, Ferlie stole into his office, balanced herself on the
edge of the writing-table and sat there swinging abstracted legs.

He gave her time; only laying down his pen and sitting back in his
chair.

"Perhaps," she said presently, "I am being rather careless in my
handling of high explosives.  Women and gunpowder can seldom come to
a perfect understanding."

"Which being interpreted is----?"

"That I have no right to force my opinions upon anyone so much older
than myself as you are--and I do realize that a woman cannot feel
with a man."

"I know one who seems to," Cyprian told her gently.

Her mouth smiled gratefully at that but she kept her head bent over
the tangling fingers in her lap.

"Cyprian.  One should not try to run before one can walk.  In some
ways I am stupidly ignorant about practical facts....  Is this life
too great a strain on you?"

Then, as he hesitated, while searching for her exact meaning, she
went on in a swift rush of breathlessness.

"Let me get it out--somehow....  Man cannot help his dual nature.
Women mostly can.  If you have found Her helpful--I know you are
without the mystical help religion brings in its wake--when my
absence was more than you could bear, I would be willing to
subordinate my prejudices on this gigantic question, to your
common-sense, and let her help again should there be times when my
presence may be more than you can bear.  After all, she is
the--mother of your son."

The last sentence was whispered and she did not move as his chair
creaked.

"Ferlie!"  For the first time in their lives there was a very real
anger in the eyes which, unflinching now, captured hers and held them
steady.  His lips closed in a thin line and for a full minute she
watched him, almost fearfully, as he framed his reply.

"How dare you?" he asked at long last.  "How dare you?"

He got up and walked to the open door, to stand in it with his back
to her, looking up and down the verandah.  The act was instinctive
since they were always alone, but he drew the glass panels together
with a quick snapping of the latch before turning to face her again.

"You can only be a child, indeed, to come cold-bloodedly to any man
with such an insult in your mind; most of all to the man you profess
to respect."

"Respect!  Oh, Cyprian----"  But he could not spare her anything just
then.  He was too cruelly wounded.

"How can you--how can I believe that you have the smallest respect
for me when I see myself, through this indefensible proposal of
yours, as you must see me?  Cannot you understand that what
constituted a drug to deaden the physical suffering--I repeat the
word, for that mental pain was physical to me caused by your
withdrawal and your silence in a life which had been unconsciously
centred in you for nearly eleven years--must affect me like a
corroding poison, even in retrospect, now that sanity and mental
control have returned with your presence?"

She stirred restlessly, struck with the justification for this point
of view.

"Then, there is the moral aspect.  Sometimes, I think that you,
despite your genuine religious mysticism, are absolutely unmoral in
your normal outlook.  One can condone wrong too far.  Your very
compassion for that which right-minded people should shun becomes, of
its injurious weakness, a sin.  But--Good God!--who am I to talk to
you of sin.  I have not denied that you are infinitely above me, but
I did not grasp you considered the gulf between us quite so wide as
this morning you have made it out to be."

"Cyprian!"

The anguish in her voice roused him to some realization as to how far
he had lost his temper.  Still dazed with the shock she had afforded
him, he saw her crumple up like a victim of lightning herself, across
the solid writing-desk.

He went to her then and gathered her against his angrily-beating
heart.

Strange that neither of them wondered what lay hidden in the heart of
Hla Byu.

Ferlie, whenever she met her about the house, would smile kindly in
place of the conversation which was impossible, and Thu Daw's
picturesque little mother invariably smiled back, but her slanting
brows lent enigma to this acknowledgment of the white woman's
recognition.

She had been told that her Thakin, on whose generous supplies she had
patiently lived apart, had returned across the great water, bringing
with him a sister.  But this was no sister, determined Hla Byu.
Once, also, in careless answer to discreet questioning, the Thakin
had informed her that he was alone in the world; except for herself,
she had understood.

She came of a race to which love is the be-all and end-all of its
women-folk's existence.  The Impassive Teacher had not succeeded in
releasing them from its bondage.  For this reason must a Burmese
woman be re-born as a man before she can attain Nirvana.

Hla Byu, once established by Cyprian in his house, finally ceased to
worry about any Nirvana that did not include him.  Naturally quick
and full of initiative, she gleaned something from the orderly
regulation of his days and more from close association with the
class-refinement of his habits.  He was truly one of the greater
Thakins and not one of that set which dines in the costume it also
uses for sleeping; though, doubtless, it seemed sensible to choose
one's coolest garments for the exertion of eating, thought Hla Byu,
in those past days when she had been able to compare notes with other
women in her position.

And, now, she was eminently suited for the post to which Ferlie
relegated her: that of nurse-companion to John and Thu Daw.  There
was little enough for her to do but to superintend the games of her
son with the Thakin's acknowledged nephew and to watch Thu Daw's
latent intelligence developing daily along the lines of a European
child's.

Yet, as the weeks slipped by, she did not appear to find them happy
and the unguessed-at resentment, veiled under her submissive
demeanour, was smouldering into a gnawing flame which hurt while it
burnt.  To Cyprian she had become more than a stranger, being of less
account in his life than a table or chair.

The star-flowers she gathered to wear drew appreciative comments from
Ferlie, which, oddly enough, angered her so that she ceased entirely
from thus decorating the polished ebony of her hair.  She had brought
with her new lungis of soft gay silk, rejoicing in them as his gifts,
but she might have gone in rags for all he remarked of her daintiness
and charm.  Not so immune does a man become on account of a sister's
presence.

Even Thu Daw failed to sweeten the bitterness of her cup of
humiliation.  He would stretch out welcoming arms to Ferlie now for
her to carry him away to look at pictures with John, and his Burmese
mother began to feel alienated from the foreign blood in his veins.
A child was of his father's nationality.

No one read her soul nor conceived the approach of the ultimate
crisis.

One night Ferlie heard Cyprian call to her from the room he occupied
at the far end of the long verandah.  She had not begun to undress
and hurried along to him immediately, carrying a hurricane lantern
since scorpions sometimes lay out on the cool stone after dark.

He stood in the doorway, his face queerly expressive.

"I want you to look at this."

In the pale-lemon flame of an oil reading-lamp, the room showed
shadow-streaked, but the air was saturated with the sweet heavy scent
of some freshly-plucked flower.

He took the lantern from her hand and lifted it high, flinging its
rays across the bed.

His pillow and counterpane were invisible for a mass of starry blooms
whose warm sweetness petalled this prepared fairy couch.  Ferlie
caught her breath, uncertain whether she most wanted to laugh or to
cry.  True to her immortal tendency to snatch beauty from every
corner of the world, however close it lurked, she said swiftly,
"Cyprian, it's pretty!  It's so _pretty_.  Look just at the
prettiness of it.  But oh ... if only it had not been ... inevitable!"

He answered, simply enough, without facing her,

"I guessed you'd say that.  I never dreamed of this.  I never do seem
to foresee things.  But, however you look at it, she must go."

It was not then that they discovered she had already gone.

* * * * * *

She was taken out of the river very early in the morning when a
silver film of dew veiled the rushes and new buds were blossoming to
life upon the soaking trees.  Flame-of-the-forest reared its
scorching beauty above her when they laid her limp upon the shore;
her bright draperies draggled, and the once shining coil of her hair
hanging in a tangled shroud over her breast.

And so Cyprian saw her when summoned to identify her as his
"servant."  Well and truly had she served a Master more crushingly
exacting than he.

In the haunted days--and nights--which followed for him, Cyprian felt
that, but for Ferlie's gentle patience and sense of vision, he might
easily have lost his reason.

At first he was merely stunned.  Later, when he thawed to
understanding of the part his own impotent hand had taken in
directing the tragedy, he spoke of himself as a murderer.

Ferlie stepped in and sternly banished the word.

"It is pure hysteria that makes you use it," she told him.  "I blame
myself more than you, for I am a woman and should have been enough in
sympathy with another women's mind to have prevented this.  If you
are a murderer then I am a murderess."

He railed at her foolishness but sped off on another track.

"Why should this have happened to me?" in bewildered anger.  "No
other man of my acquaintance has ever had to face such an experience,
and I have done no more than what so many do.  In this custom there
is no disgrace to the woman.  She usually settles down, in the end,
with one of her own race.  I--Ferlie, believe me--I tried to play the
game.  She need never have done it.  I tell you there was no
disgrace."

"There was something else though," she reminded him, "and that left
her little choice.  It is as I said, Cyprian; no one seems able to
escape its scourge."

"But they don't love like that," he persisted.  "How can they?  There
is no link but that frail fleshly one of which a man remains vaguely
ashamed the whole time."

"There is that link," and she pointed to Thu Daw, perilously employed
with a coloured wooden mallet and a rusty nail.

She moved across the room to take it away from him and, substituting
a woollen ball, returned to lay her arm lightly about Cyprian's bowed
shoulders.

"There has been enough in the past," he said.  "Why should Fate have
picked me out for this extra bruising?"

Thought Ferlie of the declaration that whom the gods love they
chasten.

"Perhaps, Cyprian, because you are so worth while to try and teach
things to."

But this was cold and cryptic comfort and she knew it.

In the night she heard him restlessly passing from room to room till,
finally, his footsteps paused on the verandah.  She slipped a wrap
about her shoulders and went to him where he leant against the open
trellis-work of the porch, astir with shivering leaves.

His face, clear-cut against a sheet of trembling moonlight, was drawn
and ghastly, and when she touched his arm his whole body started
violently.

"Cyprian," said Ferlie sharply, "Can't you take your medicine like a
man?"

The taunt stung him to an effort of self-control.

"It's that damned frangipani," he told her apologetically, "And it is
part of Burma--and so of my life henceforth--eternally."

She slipped a hand in his and drew him down the garden-walk till they
stood beneath the trees, stiff with their own sweetness.

"You have got to face that scent, here and now.  You have got to
think of it for what it is: a rich passionate fragrance embodying all
that was generous and brave and joyous in the spirit of Hla Byu.
That is what she would have wished, Cyprian.  _That is what she is
wishing now._"

The velvet glory of the night was musical with faint sound and every
flower and shrub raised a deified shadow to the searching purity of
the inscrutable stars.  Now and again a delicate moth rippled by,
like the ghost of some dead blossom, on an unknown quest into the
Unknown.

"And there, God rest her soul!" said Ferlie, presently.

The man at her side felt the Amen he could not bring himself to utter.

What he did reply was, "My dear, I love you.  It's all right now
because of that....  It will be all right."

* * * * * *

At the Club a few days later...

"Did you hear that Mrs. Clifford has adopted her brother's
Indiscretion?"

"Lord! ... Wonder what he told her?"

"Maybe, that the lady represented the mourning and destitute widow of
some mining accident."

"Mourning and destitute widow of your grandfather!  Haven't you seen
the kid?"

"I have.  Never imagined anything so uncanny.  The eyes, you know.
Same old delphinium blue--but that might be explained away as a freak
of Nature.  Not much the identical trick of screwing 'em up and
blinking at you!  That's what betrays the whereabouts of Pussy."

"I don't care what he's told her.  She's been married and is
certainly no fool.  She must be a good sort."

And, in that capacity, Ferlie found herself welcomed by the male
population of the station when she, perforcedly, began to drift in
and out of social gatherings.  She was inclined to regret the
precious hours thus wasted outside the borders of their Kingdom.

"We have so much past unhappiness to overtake, as yet, Cyprian."

But a whole year had slipped by and he decided that it was wiser that
she should make friends with people now that she had no longer any
excuse for isolation.

She had received a curious epistle from Clifford, through Aunt
Brillianna, to whom he had sent it under the impression that Ferlie
was occupying some Villa of hers in Italy.

"I hope you will agree," he wrote, "that I have, at least, proved
myself no dog-in-the-manger.  The only thing which might make it
necessary for me to worry you with divorce proceedings would be if
anything happened to John.

"You see, granted that you are right in considering the
Greville-Mainwarings a decadent lot, it remains my job to carry on
the line somehow, and the heirs would have to be legitimate.  I am
not actually apologizing for any lurid behaviour (as you might
describe it) of the last four years, but I have notions of fair play
and we are not living in the reign of the lady who wept to wear a
crown.  I might have more reason to weep if she were wearing it now.

"Mercifully, matrimony is not, these days, the shackled and
testamentary thing it was reckoned to be before the Jews originally
lost Jerusalem.  If ever you outgrow your mysterious ideas and want
to marry again, let me know and I'll see what I can do for you.  For
myself, I am content with the present position so long as there is
John to carry on the title some time or other.

"I wish you well, Ferlie, and, if it comforts you, I do not think it
would do any harm if you occasionally prayed for my unregenerate
soul."

Ferlie laid this sheet before Cyprian, without comment.

"Swine," was his exact expression.

"Do you really feel like that, or is it only pose?"

"Pose?  How do you suppose any average man would feel?"

"You're not the average man."

At the moment neither was his face good to look upon.  She removed
the letter and deserted the subject.  And prayed quite a lot more for
Clifford's weakened soul.

At the beginning of the next Cold Weather her mother died.

"We had drifted apart since my marriage," she told Cyprian,
remorsefully tearful, "But, at the end of the first year, when I
realized that things were hopeless and that Clifford and I must
separate, I could not conquer the feeling that she should have been
capable of protecting me instead of selling me to a title that had
existed too long.  After all, I was so very young to throw in my lot
with any man."

"I got no thanks for trying to protect you from this one," said
Cyprian.

She smiled up at him with wet lashes.

"Poor Mother!  I see now that she thought she was doing her utmost
for me."

Soon after, a happier species of news came from Peter.

Peter had qualified smartly and accepted a hard-worked job in a
mental institution, which had offered him scant opportunity for
leisurely experiment and involved very considerable strain on nerves
already somewhat stretched by exams.

That old friend of the Carmichaels, Colonel Maddock, had now made him
the unique offer of a free trip on his yacht which, he declared, had,
like himself, entered on a very new lease of life.  He was determined
as a "Last Kick" to sail it again in Eastern waters, and required the
attendance of a qualified medical man on this somewhat, at his age,
hazardous undertaking.  Peter, he pointed out, would be none the
worse for a sea-trip, combining business with pleasure, and he would
be able to find time for a certain amount of useful reading.

Peter gave details of their tour, adding that he was not sorry to get
the chance of inquiring into the methods by which lunacy was treated
in the East, and, also, that he was beginning to be "rather keen" on
leprosy, the most common disease ever cured by psychical, or
"miraculous," powers of old.  He studiously refrained from mentioning
Cyprian but, from the fact that his letter came direct to Ferlie, it
would appear that Aunt B. had entrusted him with some sort of outline
of the true facts.

"He was always rather a delightful person," said Ferlie, "But I am
not sure that, in his present phase, he is likely to be particularly
sympathetic."

"Peter!  Why, I always imagined him at the head of the newest
Communistic Party: his hand against every settled law of man or
nature, from birth and vaccination to death and burial."

"That was Peter at twenty, seeking the freedom of the Universe.
Peter at twenty-five, is a martinet for the regulations of taxes by
Cæsar and of emotions by the Church through the Seven Sacraments."

"Never heard of them!"

"That is your loss, Cyprian," Ferlie assured him.

"I admit to having hoped," he said, ignoring the snub, "that you
would think yourself out of that particular creed towards which
circumstances forced you.  The majority of your priests, in this
country especially, hardly inspire me to follow, as an unquestioning
disciple, in their footsteps."

"Nor me, as a rule," she owned calmly, "But what have the priests to
do with the creed?"

"It is a priest-ridden creed.  The Protestant section, at least,
leave one to deal direct with the Highest Authority."

"Have you studied the teaching of either party?"

"I have not.  There is no need.  One judges the tree by the fruits.
The Roman version of the law produces bigots; the Protestant
produces----"

"Agnostics."

He laughed, and they left it at that.  He knew himself to be soaked
in prejudice and dreaded lest they should try to influence her
against the visions which kept her at his side--those Men in Black.
Had they not delivered over one of their, since acknowledged,
girl-saints to the stake and its flames for seeing visions and
dreaming dreams in which their own uninspired blindness could not
share?

Infallible?  Infallible!

He knew nothing of that other Cyprian, with whose condemnation she
was familiar.  He only knew that, having Ferlie, he meant to hold.




CHAPTER XIV

Certain inevitable consequences followed after Ferlie had once put in
a public appearance.

It was hardly to be supposed that, in a land where women were scarce
and men plentiful, her sovereign-coloured hair was to be allowed to
glow unseen by the male contingent, nor her rather absent-minded
aloofness to pass unchallenged by the solid phalanx of self-contented
wives.

She could not be described as a general favourite.  Her thoughts were
elsewhere; she was obliged to act a part which failed to interest her
whenever she descended the hill to mix with her own kind.

The men, slow-witted as to any point of feminine psychology that did
not exactly jump to the eyes, were not aware of any concealing veil,
and summed her up as quite a little bit of All-Right and decidedly a
"Beaut," but women are not so easily deceived in one another.  They
were quick to suspect that this Ishmaelitish woman, too obviously
pretty to need the support of her own sex, and round whose chair the
men showed signs of clustering (of course!) had not put all her cards
on the table.

They attempted to dismiss her nervily distracted attitude, her
laggardly recognition of individuals to whom she had once been
introduced, and her complete detachment from all rules of official
status, as affectation.

The words would not quite fit because her manner was, if anything,
unnaturally natural, and she was inclined to think startling things
out loud when over-excited.  They began to discuss her rather a lot
in her absence so that new-comers became rather prejudiced before
meeting her and convinced that here was a to-be-discouraged specimen
of their sex, seeking notoriety.  And notoriety with women in a
circle on the "Ladies'" side of the Club means "Men"; while "Men" may
mean anything.

Ferlie was to blame, in that she made no effort to conciliate.  She
had not, it must be remembered, known initiation as a débutante into
the ritual pertaining unto the Mammon of Precedence.  All women were
alike to her, from the Leading Lady to the Most Junior Bride whom
everybody had voted, "of the Country, my dear."  Not all men,
because, very shortly, they showed signs of desiring, one by one, to
make an individual impression.  They began to discuss Themselves with
her, preparatory to fathoming that complex of laughter and jarringly
grave philosophy which was Herself.  And here, her youth affected
matters.  Her past tragedy had separated her, for some while, from
her fellows: her knowledge of character necessarily rested upon her
own experience.  She was, as Cyprian had warned her, over-pitiful to
confidences she should have checked, and tendered tolerant sympathy
where a hurt, deliberately inflicted, would have proved the only
curative physic.

This, since, ultra-sensitive to pain herself, she could not believe
in the thickness of some folk's skins.  Her encouragement therefore,
of some unbalanced youth, whose voiced cravings for the Good, the
True and the Beautiful, were rooted in a most natural desire to hold
a pretty girl's hand, lacked wisdom, to say the least of it.

Some time passed before Cyprian began to speculate on her habit of
drifting into corners accompanied by this pair of Shooting Boots or
that, while a restrained current of Christian hostility, founded on
the useful direction to be angry and sin not, oozed insinuatingly
from the Women's Fellowship.  He knew them for Nice Women, and was
sorry; likewise puzzled.  In his opinion, Ferlie should have taken
all hearts by storm.  By which he betrayed nearly as deep a
simplicity of soul as Ferlie herself.

However, the Club, representing as it did the unimportant world
outside their fairy gates, occupied too small a proportion of their
days for him to put his misgivings into words, and not until Digby
Maur came to the Station did a certain incident drive him to her with
protest-framing lips.

Digby Maur was not his real name.  Everybody knew that.  But whether
his mother had called him Maung Man, or whether his father was truly
a connection of a certain Digby St. Maur, who had retired from the
country with a string of exciting letters after his name, was never,
so to speak, put on paper.  People said things and people winked or
maintained a priggish silence.  Anyhow, Somebody had manipulated the
wires of State to make a Government Servant of the man who called
himself Digby Maur; who had received most of his education in a type
of school connected with the Missions, and whose brain, if not his
character, was inherited from one who did not come forward to share
the resultant fruits of it.

In appearance Digby Maur was unexpected.  Tall, supple, small-boned,
his skin weakly tea-coloured and with hair so black and shiny that it
might have been enamelled on to his head, his eyes were fine and
slanted very little under their dark brows; his mouth was weak and
romantically bitter.

He was a man with a grievance, and a passionate aptitude for slashing
canvas with the warm bright hues of the Eastern land to which one of
his parents belonged.  His talent for drawing had smoothed the way
for those who had placed him in a profession where it could be
exercised in moderation.  The Turneresque fruits of his recreation
did not concern them.

But they did concern Ferlie, to whom he showed them, and enthralled
her.  For her he unbandaged his secret wounds.  He understood that
the world in general considered his nebulous father had done the
decent thing by him.  What was his grouse?  What more could the
fellow expect?  All unknown to them, and him, his paternal
grandfather had achieved a great reputation as an artist before he
died.  As things were, his own canvases told Digby much.

"If I'd only had the chance!" he said to Ferlie.  "The power is
within me.  I feel it.  And I know that I could make my mark; perhaps
found an entirely new school of painting!  Japan has, long ago,
evolved her own style.  It has outstripped primitive India and Burma.
Say you believe in me!  The faith of even one human soul would be an
inspiration."

"Take it," Ferlie's admiring gaze told him, fixed upon a sure, swift,
impressionistic splashing of Gul Mohur trees against a faintly
emerald sky.  The pictures spoke to her in some subtly intimate
manner; she, the unswerving huntress after all elusive beauty.

She and Digby began to hold long colour-struck conversations and,
under fire of her encouragement, he neglected his office table for
his easel.

To a few discerning eyes, in the modern Art Schools of England, his
latent genius might have been apparent, but to the handful of
earth-bound treasure-seekers in the out-stations to which Digby was
ever sent, the paintings remained somewhat incomprehensible efforts
at self-expression.

Ferlie glimpsed the tragedy behind them; wondered complicated things
about little Thu Daw and finally submitted to sit for an impression
of herself, full-length against a background of those same fiery
branches of blossom.

"The trees in my garden are now in full bloom," he told her.  "My
bungalow fronts the river and we shall be in perfect seclusion.
Think of the sunlight flung back from those flower-flames to become
entangled in your hair!  A scattered splendour of strewn petals at
your feet, shadowed to scarlet where the light falls low on the grass.

"I shall call the picture 'Imprisoned Flames,' and shall give it to
you."

"I shall give it to Cyprian," said Ferlie, smiling.

"To your brother?  Would he appreciate it?  Could he?  He
doesn't"--with a laugh--"appreciate me."

Ferlie felt that to be true.

Cyprian and she had seemed, almost by tacit consent, to avoid
discussion of Digby Maur.  But then, they seldom discussed anybody,
happy egoists that they were.

In this case Cyprian had definite reasons for his dislike though they
were not reasons he would be likely to confide in Ferlie.  His
respect for Womanhood in the abstract was stringently old-fashioned
for days when the modern débutante has been known to discuss the
works of Havelock Ellis with her partner, between dances, at the
latest fashionable night-club.  Sometimes, in odd corners of the bar,
men raised their eyebrows and shrugged at the mention of Digby's
name.  He was not boycotted by any means, but he was not exploited
before their women-folk.

"What can you expect?  This mania for 'enlightening' education which
develops the vices of both Races and the--well, one can't but believe
in the truth of the saying.  Left to itself, the bazaar element
triumphs, and why not?--so that it flourishes in the bazaar.  Oil and
water will never mix.  And even under this broad-minded
administration one must draw the line somewhere."

Cyprian heard, marked, learnt and inwardly digested.

Came a day when he overheard.

He had taken a hand at bridge, where the table stood close to the
half-open door of the bar, and he sat nearest the voices which
occasionally floated through into the card-room.

"What gets my goat is, that her brother should allow it."

"Do you think he knows?"

"She has had no use for anybody but--That--lately."

"It was a case of mutual attraction at first sight."

"Well, either someone ought to tackle him or he ought to tackle her."

"You don't be a damn fool!  It ain't anybody's business to tackle a
grown man about the doings of a married woman in his house.  My wife
says----"

Low murmurings.

"It can't be true!"

"Fact, I assure you.  Cecily saw her actually going through his
garden-gates."

"I must say I can't see the fascination these fellows seem to
exercise."

"And you'd think a girl like that----"

"My dear fellow, do remember she is a married woman.  Probably Sterne
could do nothing, even if he wanted to, with that hair!  What I say
is, there can't be smoke without fire."

When Cyprian revoked, Dummy got up and, muttering of thirst, ordered
drinks all round before closing the glass doors.

The bridge-players avoided Cyprian's eyes in saying good night.

He walked home slowly, his head buzzing.

What in the name of all that was impossible did they think and mean?
What had Ferlie been doing, and--here the sting!--what had she been
concealing from him?

She had, in fact, decided that the picture was to be a birthday
surprise.  She was still young enough to attach a joyous importance
to anniversaries which he was beginning to regard as intervals of
mourning, best celebrated by a black tie.

It would not have proved difficult to extract her simple secret had
he not been too inwardly disturbed to approach her with an
unprejudiced mind.

As it was, he began by applying an unflatteringly descriptive
adjective to Digby Maur's name, which brought the championing colour
to her cheek, before he demanded if it were true that she had visited
him at his house.

Her chilled affirmative produced an equally chilled request for
explanation.  And now Cyprian, himself, might have remembered her
much-discussed hair, the legacy of an Irish grandmother famed for a
quick tongue and a plucky elopement.  It made her granddaughter say
the sort of thing easier said than forgotten.

"Narrow, narrow, narrow!  You who ought to be so merciful to your
fellow-creatures."

"No one in his senses attempts to show mercy to a poisonous reptile."

"That's simply melodrama.  Digby Maur is a man whose position, you,
at least, should hesitate to criticize."

"Thanks for the timely reminder.  I had, of course, forgotten a good
deal that you must constantly recollect.  All the same, I will not
have you visiting this pseudo-artist on the transparent pretence of
arraigning his pictures."

"Did you say 'pretence,' Cyprian?"

He wanted to hurt her though in his heart he was ashamed.  He
twitched his shoulders impatiently.

"Very well," and her calm was heavy-laden.  "To leave you no excuse
for using the word again, understand that, in future, I will go where
I please, when I please, and without pretence."

"Do you mean that exactly, Ferlie?"

"You have no right to prevent me."

For him that ended the discussion.

"I suppose not," he answered, and walked out of the room.

She made a quick movement as if to follow.

What she counted a sense of justice prevented her.  It would not be
fair to Digby Maur--poor boy!--to leave him with his picture
uncompleted, merely on account of Cyprian's unprovoked animosity.

When Cyprian understood he would be sorry.  But for his accusatory
attitude she might have been quite willing to tell him the truth.
She was a little eager to punish him and terribly miserable because
she had left her pride no choice but to do so.

Meanwhile, he was asking himself what on earth she could see in Maur.
The answer, as he supplied it, gave him furiously to think.  Perhaps
... Youth.

An impossibly unsuitable comparison struck him.  Worshipping
whole-heartedly at Ferlie's shrine, what had he seen in Hla Byu?  No
wonder Ferlie refused to admit his right to protect her.  He had
forfeited it by his failure to protect himself from the insidious
fascination of slant-eyed laughter and Youth's intense happiness.

Was Ferlie really attracted to----?  But at this point Cyprian flung
himself, with drawn brows, into his work.

They lived through three days of such Purgatory as only the great
Lovers of this earth can inflict periodically upon themselves.

Then Ferlie, becoming desperate, betrayed her impatience to Digby,
wildly immersed in his burnt siennas, chrome yellows and Venetian
reds.

"You see, I dare say, Cyprian may be common-sensically right about my
not coming here," she suggested with some hesitation.

"You stood up to his prejudices for my sake?  You defied him for me?"

"I did nothing of the sort," contradicted Ferlie, hotly aware that
that was exactly what she had done, and wondering why.  If Digby took
a day longer over his wretched picture she felt that, in the course
of it, she should heave a stone at it and him.

She was angry with Cyprian for having upset her pleasure in it, angry
with herself for not having explained accurately what was happening
during the afternoons she spent in Digby Maur's garden.  But--poor
Digby again!--she all but laughed at the pathetic figure he cut with
the splotches of brilliant paint on his forehead where he had run his
fingers through his sleek hair in despairing moments connected with
hers.

Her expression, as she regarded him in his neglected and, to the Club
folk, unrecognizable state, reconsidering the ill-mated stock from
which he sprang, became maternally tender.

He drew his brush with a last sweep across the canvas background and
flung it down joyfully.

"Finished."

She smiled back, sensing with her uncanny insight all the delight of
achievement tingling in his weary limbs.

That he should mis-read her sympathy was inevitable.  The time was
ripe for a climax of some sort on his side.

... His hot kisses scorched her throat and her disgustedly closed
eyes.  His arms imprisoning her were hungry.

It was a long while before she had hurt him sufficiently to make him
understand....

Cyprian, savagely covering sheets of office paper with close
paragraphs he constantly re-read and re-wrote, heard her hurried step
along the drive and dully noticed that she had not stopped to sneck
the gate and, therefore, the waterman's white cow would get at the
lilies again.  He supposed Maur had been talking more Art drivel.
Why could he not find courage to check this nonsensical friendship
once and for all?  She did not really consider that he had no right
to object.

His pen went flying as she flung herself against his chair.  She
curled up on his knees, hiding her face in his shoulder and breathing
quickly as if she had been running.  He glanced abstractedly at a
running rivulet of ink down a confidential report.  His relief to
find her within reach again, and to know the cold mutual politeness
of the last three days ended, was so great that all anxiety and doubt
went out in thankful amusement at the unexpectedness of her.  He
wondered if she had blown up the whole Station with an experimental
bomb, or whether she had merely been cut by the Leading Lady.  At any
rate, he was there to fill the post of Whipping Boy,
and--Heavens--how willingly!

"Ferlie," he said, half-stifled by those dear slender arms, "What
have you been doing?"

"Oh, Cyprian, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry.  Just go on forgiving me hard.
You have proved yourself so ghastlily in the right.  Some men exist
who are not ready for toleration of their weaknesses and sympathy in
their sorrows.  Sooner or later, they misunderstand what you offer
them and turn into Circe's beasts--and blame your attitude for the
change....  I suppose he had some reason to say I'd asked for it; but
I didn't know...."

He took her flushed face between his palms and turned it round.

"Did he say that?"

"Yes.  And more.  Much more.  But it was what he did that matters.

"Go on."

"He caught hold of me and held me against him and kissed me ... all
over ... I thought I had done with that brand of kisses for ever.
And he wouldn't let me move.  And at last I got a chance to b-bite
... and, oh, Cyprian, it was all so hopelessly vulgar!  I'm bruised
with the smirch of it.  I'll never leave the house again till I die,
unless you are with me to tell me whom I can safely speak to.  I'll
never trust my wits, henceforth, beyond the front gate.  I--what are
you laughing at?  Don't laugh!  Why are you finding it funny, when I
only want you to _wash_ me and--and comfort me?"

"It's all very well, but I am glad this has happened, my dear."

"Glad!"

"You needed some such"--he was about to say "lesson" and veered away
from the priggishness of the word--"experience, to keep you in my
despised conventional way.  Now, tell me.  Are Maur's intentions
strictly--er--honourable?"

"Honourable!  What are you talking about, and will you stop smiling?"

Her head tucked itself out of sight again under his chin and he
rested his lips an instant on it before explaining.

"I mean, is he wanting to marry you?"

"I am sure I don't know.  I should think it hardly likely now.  If
so, he can't have considered that my reception of his advances
augured matrimonial bliss.  But you were all out to put him in a
lethal chamber before and now you seem to be excusing him."

"To him, I am your somewhat elderly brother; you are a widow, and of
age, who lives with me pending the next suitor on the scene.  No one
could imagine, who does not know the truth, that there will not be
several others, and, amongst them, someone to whom you might
reasonably be expected to listen.  I have my own small sense of
Justice, you see," Cyprian finished dryly.  "And I, of all men,
should have learnt to be merciful."

"Touché," admitted Ferlie.  "It is my turn to tell you to go on.  But
what do you expect me to do about his lunatic scheming and dreaming?"

"I expect you, just for this once, to do as you are told.  What I am
going to do is what I should have done in the first place: forbid him
to speak to my--sister.  So much is simple.  But I am looking ahead,
and I think you should, in the circumstances, cultivate women-friends
more and men less!"

She made a little face before she said meekly.

"They don't seem so anxious to cultivate me, you see, as the men."

He chuckled.  "I'd noticed that."

"You have no right to start being unexpected, Cyprian, at this stage
of things.  It's so humiliating when I have been browsing contentedly
on the belief that I can foresee all that you are likely to foresee
and notice."

"It is not the first time, is it, that I have made an effort to
exceed my rights?"

"Please resist the temptation to go on driving it home.  According to
the Book you should be striding the room muttering dire threats
through your clenched teeth."

"Concerning your behaviour or his?"

Then, as she wriggled her annoyance, the laughter in the heart of him
materialized.

"My dear, I am incapable, at the moment, of taking anything seriously
except the fact that you have come back to me.  Which is a matter
rather for rejoicing than for imprecations.  If I seem to pass off
this occurrence as unimportant, it is only because it is so
over-shadowed by the importance of the realization that I exist again
for you."

"I have never imagined you existed for anyone else," she protested
indignantly.  "Another time you'll know that when it looks as if I
were thinking of someone else it's really that I am concentrating
extra hard on something connected with your happiness."

"I'll remember," Cyprian promised, slightly catching his breath.

* * * * * *

They had dismissed Digby Maur and his picture too airily.  His
suffering was intense enough to cause his hatred of Cyprian to
reflect again on Ferlie.

Everybody in the Club could see that he and Mrs. Clifford no longer
held sweet converse together nor walked in that House of Rimmon as
friends.  Its numerous unmystical members openly rejoiced that Sterne
had, at last, put his foot down.

The iron entered into Digby Maur's soul.  His was not the nature to
forgo visions of public revenge.  Ferlie was involved in them
because, although he had unjustifiably presumed upon her frank
comradeship to the extent of insulting her, his desire, outweighing
the elements of purer passion which she had primarily awakened in
him, was an emotion more likely to breed wounded resentment than
humble submission, on the well-deserved withdrawal of its star.

Ferlie, though secretly confessing herself blame-worthy, realized too
thoroughly by now that dynamite, in proximity with a match-box
however innocently decorated, is not a reliable combination, and,
having once capitulated to Cyprian's judgment, could be safely
trusted to abide by it.

Hence, even an armed truce was out of the question.  She welcomed
with relief the news that Digby had taken casual leave and gone to
Rangoon.

"It shows he has accepted the position and means to be sensible," she
told Cyprian.  "When he returns we can meet as club-acquaintances and
it will be forgotten that we ever appeared to be anything more."

"Burma does not forget," he said cloudily, and she understood that he
had learnt that lesson bitterly enough.

She might have been less sanguine of a happy ending to her own affair
if she had connected with Maur's departure a detailed announcement in
the Rangoon papers of a forthcoming Art Exhibition, on a large scale,
and for which contributions were invited in the form of original
sketches, paintings, leather-work, pottery and all the usual articles
universally acknowledged, on such occasions, a joy for ever.

Shrewdly positive that he possessed a work of Art worth exhibiting,
and a golden opportunity of advertising his hitherto unexploited
talent, Digby Maur had well-timed his leave.  All individuals
occupying the local seats of the Mighty would be present; besides, at
this height of the Season, many outside visitors.

There must follow comment and inquiries as to the identity of the
artist who had produced "Imprisoned Flames."

He was right.  There were visitors, and, among them, a millionaire on
a private steam-yacht and his personal physician; a young man with an
inquisitive expression, reddish hair and a loud happy voice which he
dogmatically raised upon matters which the Elderly and Unenterprising
had long elected to approach with caution.

In due course the new-comers found themselves conducted by the
residents, to the Art Show, where the chief item was already admitted
to be a unique painting which most people only remembered as the Girl
and the Gul Mohurs, though the artist had baptized it more erotically.

Said Peter to his neighbour, after a cursory glance, "Why, that's my
sister!"

Several people turned, and, amongst them, a hovering Anglo-Burman,
referred to in hushed tones as the artist.

Colonel Maddock put up his eye-glass with an astounded, "Bless my
soul!  It _is_ Ferlie.  Where on earth did the little minx have it
done?"

"It's damned good," said Peter.  "Probably it is Cyprian's.  I'd like
to have a copy.  When we run them to earth we will ask them why they
never told us it was here."

The Colonel and Peter never discussed the fugitives.

Aunt B., mistrusting the frailty of human flesh, had not mentioned
the relationship under which they were masquerading.  They might have
already dropped it in anticipation of the divorce to which in common
sense they must finally succumb.  Better, she thought, to let Ferlie
tell her own tale to Peter.  She had not foreseen that Ferlie would
delay too long in replying to Peter's letter, on the basis that least
said on paper soonest mended.

So Peter and the Colonel only knew that the two were together and
that Ferlie's name was Mrs. Clifford to stave off the world's
curiosity.

Digby Maur was already lionized, and, being Digby Maur, his head
already felt a little light.

He longed for Ferlie and Cyprian to hear of his triumph at first
hand, and appreciated, with a tinge of malice, that the daily papers
would afford Cyprian a resentful shock over the publicity bestowed
upon the painting of Ferlie.

He decided to find means of introducing himself to explain that the
picture was not for sale.

The opportunity occurred sooner than he expected, by way of a lady
who had once known the man reputed to be Digby Maur's father, and who
felt sorry for the quasi-European son, and glad of his success.  She
had met the Colonel, and, aware of the respect in which the Banks
held him, thought to put the young artist in touch with a possible
order for Burmese sketches.  Finding herself near Peter she
man[oe]uvred the two opposite one another and was about to explain
that Digby was the artist of "that red painting," when a friend
jostled against her in the crowd and engaged her in conversation.
Peter and Digby, barely introduced, were left face to face.

"I must say you have not even a family resemblance to your brother,"
hazarded Digby.

"Which is not surprising," and Peter eyed him with interest, "seeing
that I have no brother."

Maur recalled the Club conclusion of Cyprian's relationship to Ferlie.

"I should have said your half-brother, Mr. Sterne."

"Oh, you've met old Cyprian?  No, he is not even my half-brother,
though people used to take him for an uncle.  He is just an old
family friend.  But if you have met him you may know my
kiddie-sister.  She is staying with him in Burma at present."

A sudden unhealthy pallor left his companion's face putty-coloured.

"I didn't catch your name," Peter was saying when Digby recovered his
breath.  "Mine's Carmichael.  My sister is a Mrs. Clifford."

He slightly over-emphasized the unfamiliar title.

The eyes scrutinizing him narrowed.

"I have had the honour of painting Mrs. Clifford."

"By Jove!  Then it was you----"  Peter studied him afresh and
stopped, faintly uneasy.  This man must know Ferlie quite well.  What
on earth had made him suppose Cyprian his brother--or hers?  Better
not inquire, lest he should put his foot on some unexplained
situation.  He drifted into enthusiastic comment on the portrait and
escaped to warn Colonel Maddock of the artist's identity.  He had
been prepared for an equivocal attitude from the narrow-minded, who
might criticize Ferlie's staying with a friend of Cyprian's calibre.
Odd of Cyprian to rush her off like that to Burma.  The uncle part
could be overdone.  Aunt B. had said they were living in the wilds
and seeing no one, so it had appeared not to matter.  He had assumed
them lost to both hemispheres till Ferlie should become stronger
after her troubles and able to make some satisfactory arrangement
with Clifford.

She should have confided in her mother, or her only brother long ago.
Of course he saw that she could not be left to the care of a chap
who, from Aunt B.'s hints, was little better than a maniac on one
point, however sane he might be on all others.  Like the Vane woman,
he would probably end in a Home, unless--and Peter eagerly recalled
certain experiments he had been requested to make in Ruth Levine's
flat and on the efficacy of which he was now awaiting her final
verdict.  He was so "keen" on insanity and if his ideas consolidated
into success there seemed no limit to his horizon.

His gaze into space grew abstracted and he dismissed Maur's inquiry
with a shrug.  People always took for granted that old Cyprian was
some sort of a relation: this fellow had obviously noticed that
Ferlie did not use the prefix "Uncle," and had assumed the rest.

Rum chap, Cyprian.  A queer friend for her to have stuck to all these
years.  He really must hint to her, though, that she could not, in
any country, pay an indefinite visit to a man friend, however
elderly, without asking for the acidulated comments of catty women
and coarse-minded men.

By the time he found the Colonel that gentleman had already been
presented to Maur; who had made hay to some purpose; having decided
to try another tack and assume Cyprian something different from a
brother, this time.

"Yes, I have had the great privilege of painting Mrs. Clifford, sir.
Do you happen to be acquainted with her husband?"

The Colonel was grateful for the lead.  He thought Peter had
suggested that Ferlie was posing as a widow.  Much better to have
admitted separation, since, at this distance, awkward questions could
not be answered anyway.

"I have met him and have no desire to meet him again.  You can take
it from me, Mr. Maur, that she was altogether wise in insisting that
they should live their lives apart.  As for your picture of her I
should have much pleasure..." etc., etc.

He certainly thought he must have done Ferlie a good turn if this man
should be a talker.  The chances were now people would get to know
the husband was impossible.  He blandly concentrated on the picture.

"This one is not for sale," Digby assured him.  "But if I can
persuade Mrs. Clifford to sit again--and I think that will be
possible--I should be happy to execute you a fresh order, though I
never reproduce.  I wonder if a bank of our red lilies and the hint
of a gold pagoda-roof in the middle distance, reflected in water--you
have visited the lakes?"

Maddock eventually gave the order for another portrait, subject to
Ferlie's acquiescence.

"We shall be hoping to arrange a meeting soon.  Must run up to
Mandalay first."

However, after an interview with Peter, they both came to the
conclusion that Ferlie should not have left her nearest friends so
much in the dark as to her tactics.

"Aunt B. declared that she was calling herself a widow," said Peter,
"hence the 'Mrs. Clifford.'  It was easier to avoid publicity and the
interest of the folk who covet their neighbour's peace of mind.  The
'brother' mistake is fishy preceding his attitude to you.  We must
pick our way if we don't want to get Ferlie's name handed round with
the ice-cream at every official show going.  When we see her I shall
put it to her straight."

Digby Maur's leave at an end, Government House had shaken him warmly
by the hand.  He had gained for himself a reputation, and the power
to shatter one.




CHAPTER XV

"Ferlie," said Cyprian, one morning, pushing back his chair from the
breakfast-table, "are you feeling all right?"

"Feeling all--what do you mean?"

"You're not, then?"

Her smile was uncertain.

"Don't be silly!  Why should I be feeling wrong?"

"That's just what I have been asking myself for more than a week.
The Hot Weather is not nearly upon us yet."

"I'm quite well," she insisted listlessly.

"Then, what is the matter?"

"Nothing."

"Oh!"

"Cyprian, don't tease," and her unnerved vexation contained, he
imagined, a hint of alarm; "there is nothing the matter.  Though I
see you are determined to believe that a lie."

"It is one," he replied, opening the newspaper.

She resorted to a stormy exit.

What else could she do when he was right?  It seemed sometimes a
great deal too high, the price she was paying to preserve their
flawless peace.  At least, it had been flawless until Digby Maur
returned from Rangoon, but not to fall easily into his niche as a
casual acquaintance.

She wondered, when she sat staring at him on the river-bank below the
garden with its wild, concealing foliage, why she had never before
thought of comparing his eyes to a snake's.

He painted on, grimly speechless, but when they travelled over her,
devoid of expression, coldly alive, she could have fled in panic.
And she had got to see the thing out or everyone would learn that
Cyprian had brought her here under false colours and that, somewhere
in England, dwelt her husband, complacently aware of their flight.

The scandal would force Cyprian to resign, to whom public criticism
of his private affairs, even in simple matters, was real torture.
For him, through her, to be obliged to retire on an inadequate
pension in a tempest of slander was unthinkable.

Why had she been such a fool as to shrink from confiding, by letter,
in Peter?

It had seemed immaterial whether she did so or not, considering that,
in Rangoon, one could safely assume nobody had heard of her
existence, and he and the Colonel were not contemplating a long stay
anywhere.

Peter at present, she knew, made a remorselessly logical Catholic
with no time for visions unsanctioned by the Pope.  Order and
discipline everywhere, if you please, for Peter, once as thoroughly
lawless as he now showed himself law-ridden.  But Peter was an
extremist in everything.  He had really little use for the
non-fanatic who hesitates to sacrifice, at any rate, his neighbour's
Life and Limb, for his opinions.  But, while he had made his
submission to Rome in calm, wholehearted conviction, which might or
might not, in another ten years, be followed by as calm and
wholehearted a recantation, annulled in its turn by a general
clear-up of his whole life and a death-bed repentance--"for, though
it may be a darned uncomfortable religion to live in, it's the only
tidy one to die in," had ever, like Charles Stuart, maintained
Peter--Ferlie had crept through the gate as a battered ship creeps
gratefully into an unexpectedly discovered harbour, anchorless, after
the storm.

She had found there warmth and healing and a kind of companionship
among the angels that only very sensitive worshippers of abstract
holiness know.  The Unseen Hosts were to her lone spirit so really
present at the altar steps that she could no longer consider the most
deserted church empty.  Doctrinally, she was unsound.  Authority had
recognized the bewildered pulsing of a heart too bruised for
searching examination, and admitted her with far less circumspection
than they accorded Peter of the minutely inquiring habit of mind.

The Peters are well known later to deny; not so the Ferlies.

By reason of that very loyal complex in her was Ferlie passively
chained to the Force from which she had once drawn strength, since
there could be no severing of her fetters without a severance also
from those who had comforted her in affliction.  How mean to accept
the sweets and deny the obligations incurred!  To question only the
rules which affected her personal desires!

That Force had stood by her in her darkness: therefore she must stand
by it now that she walked in sunshine.

Yet, Cyprian was wondering whether she would outthrow superstition
when happiness set in, and she was sure that, if so, he would soon
persuade himself, for her sake, that, though divorce in itself might
be an evil thing, in their case it became a necessary good.  Clifford
could be trusted to make things easy; he to whom all women were
merely, Woman.

The doors would swing wide on very little pressure (... _Et ne nos
inducas in tentationem_).

Since, white-faced and petrified, she had undertaken to deceive
Cyprian, and steal by secret ways and unworthy evasions into Digby
Maur's garden, yielding him the triumph of another picture in return
for his promised silence, she had conversed with him only in
monosyllables and, since he earnestly desired to complete the
commission which might set him on the road to future recognition, he
had borne her self-absorbed misery without making any attempt to
counteract it or effect a reconcilation.  His feelings towards her at
that time were an irreconcilable mixture of angry desire and aching
remorse.

The picture completed, it was his intention to make a final effort to
re-arouse her forfeited pity.  If she should throw up the sponge
before he were ready he determined to stick at nothing which should
force her and that canting Sterne to eat the dust of the same
humiliation they had publicly heaped upon him.

He was incapable of believing that they were not lovers in the term's
worst accepted sense.  And what man has done man can do, and the
woman who takes one step in that direction will take another, he
promised himself.

Ferlie, nervous of Cyprian's penetration in the matter, attacked
Digby one afternoon, when the work was about half finished.

"I don't think you quite understand," she said, "the strain this
deception is putting upon me.  Cyprian is inventing reasons in his
own mind for my looking so ill.  But I simply can't sleep."

"Tell him then."

"Do you really imagine that he would allow you to finish this, if I
did?"

"In that case I should distinctly advise you not to tell him."

"Oh, you are a cad!" she burst out.  "What man, worthy of the name,
would take advantage of a private confidence inadvertently yielded,
to further his own ends?"

"You forget," he said, "your Cyprian never, from the beginning, would
admit that I was worthy of the name.  Do you happen to know the terms
in which he forbade me your company?"

"Whatever he said he was right."

"Why not, therefore, resign yourself to the worst where my actions
are under discussion?"

"We had an agreement before T consented to this course," she reminded
him.  "I suppose you will not forget it."

"I denied any intention of employing tactics which had already failed
to make you see my side."  There was a sneer in his voice.  "I have,
nevertheless, abided by the word of a--no, I'll spare you.  You
started this conversation, not I."

She relapsed into hopeless silence.

"Do you think I have not suffered too?" he asked, more humanely.
"Once, you would have noticed that I am hardly looking as if my own
nights were undisturbed."

Then, as she answered nothing, "You had better ask Sterne where he
intends to bring up his son that no stigma shall attach to his name
in future as he seems persuaded it does to mine."

"You could save yours if you wished," she said, in tired tones.  "It
is what we are that matters, not what other people think we are."

"You may not be the hypocrite you seem.  But as for your reputed
brother ..."

"I think, if I were you, I'd leave it at that," Ferlie told him, so
significantly that he paused and passed the rest of the sentence off
with an unpleasant laugh.

"I don't understand exactly what you remind me of," was his next
opening.  "Have you, in England, any legends referring to the spirits
of trees?  We, in Burma, people our mountains and rivers and trees
with 'nats,' which are powerfully angelic or demoniac spirits, but
the tree-nats are the most popular, I think.  I might have painted
you as my conception of a Gul Mohur Nat, but, then, you would have
had to stand nude among the shadows--hardly visible, but still nude,
with the dull golden reflections of the flowers upon your pale skin."

Ferlie looked back steadily into the hard brightness of his eyes.

The attitude of purely English Club members might be, in part,
responsible for the character-development here of weak expansiveness
into bitter withdrawal, and natural animal passion to the impotent
rage of unnatural excesses which lent him a spurious sense of power.

The real power on this occasion lay in her own self-control, and she
knew it.

She spoke impersonally.  "There is a story of the first Old Master to
paint from the nude.  It is not a story that appeals to me, somehow.
The model and the artist regarded the occasion so sacred as to
warrant their joint attendance at Mass first.  Myself, I feel that
they should never have realized the suggestion of lust, in anything
so aloof as Art, enough to anticipate its interference."

She astonished and disconcerted him where he had hoped to disconcert
her.

"You would, therefore, have raised no objection?" rather lamely.

"I should assuredly have refused--you.  There is a form of Art, which
only artists of a higher evolution than you are fit to practise.  My
objection would not have been founded on any idea that the human body
must be concealed to all for the sake of those who misread its
allegorical beauty."

He unscrewed a fresh tube with savagely nervous fingers, and
descended to cheap reviling.

"Sterne, I gather, is one of the fortunately evolved specimens who do
not misread the allegory and are, hence, privileged without the
artist's excuse."

"Your thoughts just bore me," said Ferlie flatly.  "I can see them
passing across your face and they are ugly enough to mar any work you
attempt.  And, underneath all my angry disgust, I am sorry for you.
If you came across a wounded snake what would you do?"

The palette crashed to the ground as he took a pace forward,
clenching his stained hands.

"Put it out of its pain," he said.

A faint shadow of that hypnotic power, which Peter had so long
suspected and, finally, developed in himself, supported her.

"If you are, as I believe you to be, a true artist under your skin,"
and she kept very still, "you will practise the restraint which
should enable you to put your picture before your--passions.  I have
stood long enough for to-day."

She turned swiftly and retreated through the trees; nor did he
attempt to call her back.

* * * * * *

Towards the end of the week Cyprian, who had left Ferlie at the Club
surrounded by a new batch of English papers, and ridden out, himself,
to an inspection connected with his work at some distance, returned
late in the afternoon, to find her missing.

"Your sister, Mr. Sterne?  No.  She only stayed at the Club about a
quarter of an hour."

Someone had seen her walking towards the river-path.

"Then I'll go home that way, skirting the hill," said Cyprian.  "The
servant met me with a telegram for her, having been to the bungalow
and found her out."

He rode slowly off, flicking at the flies with his crop.  Once on the
narrow path above the bank he let the horse pick its own way.  The
back compounds of one or two bungalows, set far apart, straggled to
the bushy slope above the water, but the vicinity of the river was
too feverish in the evening to be popular, and it struck Cyprian as
particularly unwise of Ferlie to choose this spot for a walk, in her
present languid state of health.

He made up his mind to tackle her outright when they got home and
insist upon knowing what was worrying her.  He had taken refuge in
patience, but she sometimes needed rousing by sharper methods.

There might have arrived a letter from Peter criticizing what Cyprian
felt to be none of that gentleman's business.  As an only brother,
and older than Ferlie, it was possible that Peter's scruples had
outweighed his discretion.  Cyprian, having overcome his own, was not
prepared for re-discussion of the situation with anybody.  To have
and to hold, whatever the future brought to either of them.  He would
plough the furrow now to the very end.

As he registered this resolve afresh, he heard voices ahead, but
their owners were hidden behind a natural crescent of thick
undergrowth which somebody had attempted, in the past, to train as a
rude hedge.  Above the tumble of scattered bushes appeared the ragged
outline of a garden, flanked by two huge Gul Mohurs.

Cyprian recognized them as those which stood in Digby Maur's
compound, reflecting with satisfaction that the latter had remained
largely invisible since his return from leave.

The ruin of decaying vegetation on the dank path muffled the sound of
his horse's hoofs and he had passed within a few yards of the foliage
concealing the speakers when the identity of one was revealed to him.

"I told you yesterday that you make me pity you, in spite of myself,"
Ferlie was saying excitedly.  "I am speaking cold sense when I repeat
that it will be impossible for me to hide much longer from Cyprian
that I am not spending my afternoons at the Club.  I actually had to
go there to-day to avoid questions before he went out into the
district."

"Well, it's no use," Digby Maur's huskily uneven tones replied.
"You're great on 'control' and all that, and the means you employ to
get here do not concern me.  You will continue to come for as long as
I need you, because you can't help yourself; and I am not nearly
finished with you yet."

Cyprian, on this statement, became entirely primitive man, and did
not wait to consider the metamorphosis.  He dismounted, crashed
through the interlacing branches, and found himself standing between
Ferlie and the individual who had made this astounding claim on her
time.

The air was pregnant with the labouring emotions of a drama as old as
the world.

Digby Maur recovered first from the intrusion, for, aware that he now
had his back to the wall he was, also, reliant on the sharpness of
his teeth.  Sterne was the kind of man to sell his soul in avoiding a
scandal should such a drastic price be required of him.

"Good evening," he said.  "These are my grounds and you will be ready
to admit that even my humble home is my castle?"

For answer, the intruder stepped forward and slashed him across the
face with the riding-crop.

The insolently poised figure reeled backwards as Cyprian spoke to
Ferlie.

"The horse is here.  I am going to put you up on it and lead it home.
You don't look fit to walk."

Without a word she went with him down the slope.  She would have
refused his help in mounting only that he lifted her bodily and set
her sideways on the saddle, putting the reins between her nerveless
fingers.

The dull thudding progress of the horse was out of time with her
quickening pulses....  Something in the life of Cyprian and herself
was over, and of the new phase which loomed ahead she was afraid.

Arrived at the house she motioned him away and slipped unaided to the
ground.  He tossed the reins to a servant and followed her up the
path to his office.  She sank into a chair and sat motionless resting
her chin in her palms, dimly aware that he had passed into his
dressing-room.  She heard the splutter of a syphon, and immediately
he returned to push a weak mixture towards her.  "Drink it up," he
ordered in matter-of-fact tones.  "And then, just when you're ready,
Ferlie, you can begin."

So he had not forgotten his promise.  Cyprian never made the same
mistake twice.  It took a long while for her to tell him, and during
the whole recital he refrained from interruption.  When she ended he
drew a deep breath and stretched out a hand through the gathering
dusk to lay it over hers in the old protective way.

"I have this to say," he told her.  "We are through with any childish
arguments concerning one another's rights.  You have taken no
irrevocable vows to obey me--in fact, I believe the word has lately
been deleted from the orthodox marriage service, has it not?--but our
united brains must be clear upon the point that two cannot walk
together unless they are agreed, and, as it is impossible for two
human souls of widely different impulses to agree identically upon
the treatment of every problem they may be called upon to solve, it
is necessary that in final decisions one should yield precedence to
the other.  In visionary matters beyond my ken I am willing to sit at
your feet.  Over practical matters and the verdicts that affect our
material welfare, I claim precedence, Ferlie.  You gave it to me when
you gave yourself into my keeping at Black Towers.  I am responsible
for you; not you for me.  Are you satisfied for this to be so?"

It was not in her power to speak, but she bowed her weary puzzled
head over his hand and rested it there.  He laid his free one upon
her hair and continued speaking, while he absently smoothed the
ruffled "bob."

"Yes?  Well, in the circumstances, you had no shadow of right to take
the law into your own hands and act deliberately against my wishes,
just because my trust in you was too complete for me to conceive the
possibility of such a thing.  If that trust between us is to remain
solid, our problems, in the future, will have to be shared.  Neither
must spare the other for a mistaken sense of self-sacrifice.  You
would not hide your joys from me--why, then, your sorrows?  Again, I
ask you: are you satisfied that I am right?"

"You know," said Ferlie's muffled tones.  "You know...."

"Do I?  Then I am going to extract a promise from you, here and now,
that you will be fair with me, as I have been fair with you.  Did I
lie to you after the return of Hla Byu into our joint lives?  Did I
leave you and withdraw to fight my battle alone when she drowned
herself?  I wonder whether the earthly years make a difference,
Ferlie, after all?  I wonder whether you are capable of understanding
what love means to a man who has lived nearly half a century without
it, and who suddenly finds himself face to face with its illimitable
mysteries?  Surely, you will admit the fact that, since my probation
has been double yours, I have earned the inevitable right to lead
before I follow?"

Even then she did not stir under the strengthening touch of his
sensitive fingers.

"Lead on," she said....




CHAPTER XVI

Said the Most Important Lady, she always knew that there was
something queer about it.  "Looks as if the whole of his ultimate
objections to Mr. Maur were rooted in the fact that he knew Maur
would probably let it out."

"But how did Maur himself find it out?"

"Probably the girl told him."

"Sounds hardly possible.  Why should she?"

"My dear!  He is not a young man exactly and she was obviously
attracted by Maur.  Hence these stripes!"

"Have you seen his face?"

"The men are rather inclined to doubt Maur's version."

"My dear!  The men!  She'd have had them all in tow if she hadn't
suddenly concentrated upon Maur and disgusted everybody.  Men are wax
when it comes to a red head and a white skin.  Children!"

"But what does Maur exactly say?"

"Apparently Sterne saw green over the portrait-sittings and insulted
him.  Maur referred him to his own little indiscretion and all
parties began to snarl about their rights.  The girl appears to have
played the part of passive resister to both sides.  That Type of
Woman....  Well, Sterne lost his temper and hit Maur unawares when he
was quite defenceless, and then the girl rushed between them and gave
away the true relationship.  From what one gathers, she was
infatuated with Maur--got him to paint her twice over for an excuse
to be with him--and, while he remained under the impression that she
was Sterne's widowed sister, he admits to having considered the
possibilities of matrimony.  His discovery of what she really
was--you know they say the husband divorced her and is still
alive?--startled him into confessing that his feelings had altered in
one respect.

"There was nothing for it then but for her to go home with Sterne;
and Maur can hardly be blamed for doing his duty by this credulous
Station which has also been suffering under the delusion that all was
square and above-board."

"For the sake of the natives alone, one's got to be so down upon That
Sort of Thing in this country."

"All the same," drawled the more tolerant voice of Somebody's
Husband, "I don't see how anybody has suffered particularly except
the Eternal Triangle.  I've always considered Sterne a jolly decent
fellow, and Mrs. Clifford not nearly so red-haired as Maur has
probably painted her."

"Well, I think the whole business is fishy.  There's something horrid
about a household, in any case, which brazenly maintains that kind of
Burmese child; and John is probably the co-respondent's son of the
divorce case.  The co-respondent can't be Sterne or, surely, he'd
have married her.  Probably the real man bunked after marrying her,
and Sterne, aware that his own past would not bear too close a
scrutiny, took pity on her and..."

"Aren't we getting on a little fast, Dolly?  It makes a good story,
I'll admit, but we couldn't hold to it in the face of a summons for
libel, and you know you want to send the boys to Winchester."

In the bar one heard a good bit of low chuckling.

"And Diogenes wearing the air of a Trappist monk through the whole
joke!"

"All the same, when it comes to bringing a woman of that stamp into a
respectable God-fearing district, and introducing her to its wives
and daughters under false pretences, it's a bit thick."

"Of course he'll have to go."

"Good God, yes!  He'll have to go."

"And I shouldn't be sorry to kick out Digby Maur along with him."

"Oh, Maur!  His doings cut no ice.  But, somehow, we have looked upon
Sterne as a creature with principles, and I, for one, am sorry for
this smash-up."

"Personally, I was dashed keen on the little lady."

"Well, none of the crowd were better than they should be.  Still, I
am glad that someone has whacked Maur.  I can't quite believe in his
injured innocence.  If he didn't deserve a licking for this he's
simply asked for it elsewhere, for many moons.  But I hate a rotten
show of this sort in any Station.  I wish Sterne would hurry up and
get out.  But wherever they go in Burma now, people can hardly be
expected to call."

* * * * * *

Yes, most decidedly Cyprian would have to go.  The children
complicated matters, particularly Thu Daw.  Otherwise, things were
made easier by Peter's telegram which Cyprian had forgotten to give
Ferlie until the morning after that interview in Digby Maur's garden.

It was a long telegram explaining that Maddock had been invited to
betake himself, and party, on a visit to the Andaman Islands, where
an old friend of his was acting as Chief Commissioner.

"Bring John and come self Cyprian if possible," ended the telegram.

"It's so like Peter to prepay the reply in order to give me no time
to think," said Ferlie.  "Do we go, Cyprian?"

That they should separate she did not contemplate for a moment.  But
he glanced at Thu Daw before raising questioning eyes to her.

She picked up the gurgling golden-skinned atom and smiled at him over
its head.

"Why!  We have no choice in the matter."

"I haven't, my dear, but you..."

"Have none either, then," said Ferlie.

He had sent in his resignation.

"And from now on," he said inconsequently, "it is to be the truth?"

"Why not?" she asked.  "Can anything hurt us so long as we are
together?"

His answering smile was very wistful.

"I had great ideas of protecting and caring for the woman I loved
when I was twenty-eight," he said.

"And I had great ideas of protecting the man I loved when I was
seven," said Ferlie.

She gently placed little Thu Daw on his feet and took up her position
along the side of his chair, drawing his arm around her.

"When you come to think of it, Cyprian, it was very stupid of us not
to guess that we couldn't live without one another.  The night I was
frightened, and you came up and told me about Muriel!  Do you
remember I wanted you to marry the vicar's daughter in my sublime
faith that her home-made chocolate fudge would utterly console?  And
you promised that whoever you married you'd always love me best.  And
then, I was the first to marry, eleven years later.  Oh, Cyprian,
Cyprian!  I want to get out--I want to get out of the cage."

Her sudden sobbing hurt him.

"Don't, dear.  We are out.  To me, we seem the great exception to
every rule on earth."

"But earth isn't the end of everything," Ferlie gasped, "and you'll
see that too, some day; even if I were to take advantage of your
blindness now.  Is there not one corner in all this wide world where
you and I can hide ourselves with John and Thu Daw and live out our
friendship in peace?"

"Dear, you've given me the key and I have turned the lock.  The bolt
is on the inside.  I yielded up some none-too-solid convictions to
your mysticism; cannot you, in return, yield a little of your
mysticism to my common sense?  We are in the twentieth century: it is
a day of elastic ideas for all who have imbibed the plain truth that
to live in peace we must let our neighbours live in peace.  The
minimum observance of Herd Law, and Civilization is satisfied.  As a
woman who has divorced her husband--in the last divorce bill we can
find cause for that without touching upon more personal
reasons--you'd be remarried to a man who had had a son by a dead
Burmese girl.  The position would, at least, be comprehensible, even
to the narrow-minded.  Why are we torturing ourselves with the
precepts of a dead Jewish Teacher, whose dead words are only kept in
evidence by those to whose interest it is to exploit them?"

He spoke with quick diffidence, pricked by the thought that he was
literally attacking her God.

The circumstances in which they were living might meet with the
censure of the Church's accumulated wisdom and understanding of human
nature, but he would have had her oppose directly the inflexible word
of One who taught all lovers that His Name is Love.

She pulled herself together and stood up, spreading wide her arms as
if to embrace the light which eluded her.

"This much I will yield, Cyprian.  Let me try and find some quiet
place where we can be alone and think.  I am glad we have been forced
to sever all artificial connection with our fellow-men.  Bless Aunt
B.!  We have enough money to go where we please, and when I have
chosen a refuge where we can be, figuratively, apart in the desert,
when we have had time to forget the harsh inharmonies of the past
weeks; when there is no need any longer for us to live under the
shadow of a lie, then I will promise you to approach the whole
question with an open mind; to make sure that my sense of values is
rightly adjusted.  And there we can decide, at rest in one another's
trust, which of us two in these visionary matters, as you describe
them, is finally to follow and which to lead."

Before he could answer John walked into the room; the broad-brimmed
cow-boy hat which he usually wore for shade, pressed flat against the
back of his head like a plate.  The Burman boy, who accompanied him
daily on his afternoon jaunts, silently disappeared as he caught
sight of the master and mistress.

"How funny you look, John," said Ferlie.  "Pull your hat on properly
if you are going out."

But John demurred.

"The Lord Jesus wears his topee like this," he informed them
pleasantly.

And, "O crumbs!" exclaimed Cyprian collapsing.  "Yet another Infant
Samuel!"

But his amusement was short-lived.  John had a grievance and had come
to report it.

"Mother," he said, "there was one tea-party in the Gardens and nobody
didn't let me go to it."

"How do you mean, darling?"

"It was Jimbo's birthday this day.  And I tooked him the red
coal-truck what Po Sein did make me to-morrow.  And I saw's Jimbo
going to the party and his nurse saw'd me and didn't stop, and Jimbo
runned back an' she was werry angry.  An' he said he could not take
the truck, 'cos his mother said he wasn't not to play with me any
more.  An' he said Derrick's mother said he wasn't not to play with
me neither, an' then his nurse comed up and told Po Sein we couldn't
come up that road 'cos it was Mrs. Grey's party and Jimbo must go
away at once."

Ferlie turned to look blankly at Cyprian.  The sins of the fathers...

For the first time in her life he swore thoroughly and completely in
her presence, and without apologizing.  Then he pushed back his chair
and swung John up on his shoulder.

"We have no time to think of parties now, you and I.  Don't you know
that we are going away in the train?  And I do believe you've not
packed a thing."

But when the pair of them had vanished down the verandah, shouting,
Ferlie knelt down beside the baby on the floor whence it was
surveying her with the puzzled concentrated gaze of the man she
worshipped.

"Little thing, forgive them!" she whispered.  "They, who know not
what they do...."

As soon as it was possible the four of them, and Po Sein, boarded the
evening express for Rangoon, and the house on the hill with the
frangipani trees stood forlornly empty for quite a long time.

* * * * * *

They had decided to account for themselves verbally and not attempt
the written word.  Accordingly, they arrived, unwelcomed, to take up
their quarters in the hotel, and it was agreed that Ferlie should
send for Peter, while Cyprian sought an interview with Maddock.

Eventually, the exact opposite transpired.  Peter, wearing a
Head-of-the-Family air, presented himself before Cyprian with "my
sister" possessively decorating his lips, and Ferlie ran the old
Colonel, accidentally, to earth on the yacht, in the meantime.

Just as well, perhaps; for, while Cyprian was quite equal to Peter's
lofty dutifulness, Ferlie was much more likely to prove a match for
the Colonel.

He had known her all her life but they had not met since her
marriage.  She did not mean to make a Father-Confessor of him, but
his mellowness invited confidence.  He had outlived all passionate
visions of altering his neighbours' landmarks and had developed,
instead, a distinct sense of humour.

Ferlie imagined Peter to be lacking a little in that commodity.

"Well, young woman!" was the Colonel's greeting as he unbashfully
embraced her.  "So you are playing truant and, likewise, leading the
future Lord John Greville-Mainwaring astray from his ancient
heritage.  Are any of us to be enlisted as peace-makers?"

"Peace is my present objective," said Ferlie, "but I do not
anticipate that Black Towers will supply it, Uncle Ricky, even at
your invitation."

"What's the trouble, Duckie?  I've given up trying to fit square pegs
into round holes at my time of life.  I'm a lonely old man and the
secrets of a pretty girl would just about rejuvenate me."

"Yes, you're nice and old," she agreed pathetically; "it's the young
who are so cruel."

"The young!  Well, I'm...  And who has been accusing you of dyeing
that burning bingled bush?  Show me the woman, for it was never no
lady!"

"Uncle Ricky!  You've asked Cyprian, John and me to join you.
There'll be a Fourth Child too if we come.  Will you be quite serious
and listen to me for at least a quarter of an hour?"

He noted the tired shadows under her eyes and drew her arm through
his.

"You come into my cubby-hole," he commanded.

He heard her out over American iced drinks with fruit floating in
them.  He was sane and sea-bronzed and unexclamatory.

"Of course, m'dear," he told her in the end, "the position would just
about have killed your poor mother."

"I can't help being glad that I have been spared the hopeless task of
trying to make darling Mother understand, this side of her
tombstone," owned Ferlie.  "But I've always been sure that if Father
had not been so ill, he would have positively forbidden me to marry
that particular Catch of the Season."

"Ill or well, he never knew, any more than the rest of us, that you
cared for--anyone else," he reminded her.

"That was because Anyone Else wouldn't admit that he cared for
me--no, not even to himself.  And I couldn't force him to, though I
did try.  I knew we 'belonged.'  But there was Peter and Mother and
Margery Craven and Lady Cardew and everyone sighing over my
hesitation, and at last it seemed the only thing to do to yield.
Right up to the Wedding Voluntary I wondered if, perhaps, Cyprian
might not rouse up and rescue me.  But he only sent me a golden
apple, and not a line with it!  I began to believe that I'd mistaken
what I knew was the truth about Cyprian and me."

He leant forward and patted her hand.

"What's finished is finished.  The question now is to find the
shortest cut to regularizing the affair.  Divorce?"

"I'm a Catholic, you know."

"So?  Most short-sighted of you.  I thought it was just another dish
Peter wanted to taste.  But he, too, is going to set up a row of
names, like ninepins, for me to knock down.  Rude names that suit
Biblical Royalty but not the sort of people one knows.  Tut! tut!
You were always a complicated couple.  What of our self-restrained
hero?"

"Cyprian?  He--he is against divorce on principle, but..."

"Quite so!  Quite so!  Circumstances over which he has no control!
By Gad, I'd take that line myself if you were the woman in the case!"

"Uncle Ricky!  You've been a Christopher Columbus all your life.
Don't you know one spot on this troublesome earth where Cyprian and I
could have a peaceful holiday with the babies?  He's had to retire,
and without work and nowhere to go--Oh, don't you see we can't come
to any conclusion while we are occupying the situation of living
targets to Society's very natural curiosity?"

"Where on earth do you suppose you'd like to be?"

"Somewhere with sea and sands and open sky and trees and warmth and
loveliness and ..."

"Here, Ferlie!  Put the brake on.  You want a tropical island, fully
supplied with everything but worry."

She jumped at that.

"An island!  Yes.  You are going to the Andamans.  What are they
like?"

"Populated where habitable, alas!"

"Don't tease.  There must be an odd one among the number, where we
might picnic."

"Under what flag?  I mean, with what suitable excuse?  You'd be
hunted up and fêted and asked to Government House....  No, but let me
think."

When he next raised his head she saw a solution had struck him.

"It's a daft scheme enough," he muttered.  "But you are just a pair
of lunatics at present, so here goes."

He pulled open a drawer and unrolled a couple of maps, selecting one
to push towards her.

"These are the Nicobars; the nearest of 'em is twenty-four hours'
journey from Port Blair of the Andamans.  The Nicobarese are a
totally different race from the Andamanese aboriginals, and a
solitary missionary lives among them obeying the letter of the
Christian Law with more spiritual optimism than horse-sense.

A ship takes his mails from Port Blair every three months, and, once
a year, the Chief Commissioner inspects the tin church on bamboos,
the dozen beehive huts and the wooden shanty which constitutes the
Settlement of Car Nicobar.  The missionary has a luxurious wooden
house of three or four rooms and a verandah.

He has to flavour his diet with quinine, and so will you if you join
him.  Mind, I don't advocate it, I'm merely putting it to you that,
as I know him, I can run down there--it won't alter our course enough
to matter--and introduce you as friends of mine who--well, desire to
study the flora and fauna of the islands!

He'll offer to put you up at the Settlement, overwhelmed by the
prospect of your company, but of course, if you prefer it, I suppose
you can build yourselves huts, or get the converted sheep of his fold
to build them for you----"

"Oh, huts!" cried Ferlie.  "Of course, huts!"

He paused to study her transformed face.

"Bless my soul!" said the Colonel.  "And I half expected to be
dismissed as an old fool for my pains!"

* * * * * *

Cyprian and Peter interrupted them making detailed lists of stores
and physic.

Cyprian had been finding Peter a little difficult; Peter had been
finding Cyprian, to use his own desperate expression, "as little open
to reason as Balaam's donkey."

"Which saw the guiding angel and was prepared to follow it, while
Balaam was only likely to bump his nose against a tree," said
Cyprian.  And then resorted to brutality.

"Do you think it in the best of taste to criticize Ferlie and myself
when our destiny has been completely blasted in order that yours
might flourish?" he inquired.

"What are you getting at?  Ferlie is a Catholic."

"Driven to become one by a marriage to which she was driven by
necessity for money.  Has it never struck you that Ferlie and I meant
a great deal to one another before Greville-Mainwaring appeared upon
her horizon--and her family's?"

Peter looked blank.

"The little idiot never said so!"

"No.  She did not consider herself at all, Peter."

"All the same, that being true, you gave her up to him pretty coolly,
if I remember rightly.  Even Mother remarked that you seemed to have
lost interest in Ferlie."

"I was cowardly enough to leave that particular decision to Ferlie,"
admitted Cyprian.  "I bear my share of all now.  But I hardly see
where you come in."

"What you've told me certainly rather slams the door in my face.  I
thought Ferlie had cut loose simply because Clifford was impossible;
not because you were the only possible dispenser of her happiness.
But as to Clifford--have you heard anything about my hypnotic
experiments?"

"I know the line you've taken up.  It must be hellish work."

"I suppose that's the best way to describe dragging folks out of
hell," said Peter.  "It's not always their own fault that they are
there, you know.  To my way of thinking, unfortunate products, like
Clifford, and the Vane woman, are less worthy of censure than you
with your Burmese kid."

Cyprian made no reply to this.  His close-lipped control appealed to
Peter as could have neither anger nor attempted self-justification.

"Never mind," he added, "you're a damned good fellow, Cyprian, and
you'll be relieved to hear that I'm not going to shove my oar in any
more.  As Ferlie's only brother I considered I had no choice but to
tackle you.  It's a rotten business, and I am more sorry than I can
say for you both; but, after all, I'm not Ferlie's confessor."

"That's all right, old chap," said Cyprian.

So Peter, though tempted to facetiousness, was inclined to be
encouraging about the island.

"We could leave them the small motor-boat," he suggested to Maddock.
"We never use it, Uncle Rick."

"Ferlie has wheedled more than half the contents of the yacht out of
me already," grumbled the Colonel, who was immensely in his element
as the only genuine man-of-the-world in the party untrammelled by
Creed or Convention.  "Look round my cabin, Sterne; mark down what
suits you.  Don't mind me."

"I wonder," said Peter, "when we call to fetch them, three months
hence, before the monsoon sets in, whether they'll be tattooed all
over and chastely clothed in the Nicobarese Sunday gear of half a
coco-nut and an old top-hat?"

Thus, by a maintained flow of chaff, the sense of incipient strain in
the atmosphere was dispelled.

Cyprian regarded Ferlie ruefully when she first broke the news.

"And you really want to disappear into this incomparably rural
retreat?"

"Don't you think it's a perfect plan?  We shall, at least, have time
to breathe."

"Yes, there'll be plenty of time--for everything," he agreed.

One matter troubled the Colonel.

"It'll have to be as Mr. and Mrs. Sterne, you know, Ferlie.  Not that
that little Jellybrand is of a suspicious nature--they won't want a
passport from him, hereafter, to prove that of such is the Kingdom of
Heaven.  But, hang it all, I'm standing sponsor for you, and I desire
to take my undeservedly unblemished reputation to the grave.  And you
and Cyprian don't look at one another with either a brotherly or a
sisterly regard.  Best make it 'Ferlie Sterne,' and no questions
asked."

"As if it were necessary for me to wear Cyprian's hat to indicate
that I have belonged to him since the world began," stormed Ferlie.
"All this bother comes from Civilization's idiotic habit of changing
a woman's name.  I am just 'Ferlie Marguerite' in this Evolution, and
that's all about it.  I'd rather be 'Ferlie Cyprian' than 'Sterne';
which is only half his name, because it certainly wasn't his
mother's."

But Uncle Ricky was not going to be drawn into any more Ferlie-esque
controversy.

"In whatever capacity you belonged to Cyprian twelve thousand years
ago," he said, "and in whatever capacity you intend to belong to him
when there is no more marrying and giving in marriage, you're landing
on Car Nicobar as his lawful, or unlawful, wife."




CHAPTER XVII

Robinson Crusoe had had, as yet, little time to do more than leave
his footprints on the stretch of white sand sliding into the summer
seas of Car Nicobar, and the tide washed those out very quickly.
Wilder, lovelier, more brilliant were these islands than the
Andamans, while the Andamanese and the Nicobarese proved to be
separate races indeed, having no connection with one another.

Their very huts and canoes were secular in design.  The Nicobarese
names, marking the different islands on the map, fascinated Ferlie.
Chowra, Teressa, Bompoka, Trinkat and Katehal of the Central Group,
and Great and Little Nicobar, with their satellites, Kondul and Pulo
Milo in the south, varied as to dialect in a language so primitive
that, as the Reverend Gabriel Jellybrand mournfully complained, there
seemed no words to express either "gratitude" or "forgiveness."
Which abstract nouns once eliminated from the Christian religion, his
sermons became uphill work.

For some years he had toiled in seclusion among this semi-civilized
yellowish flock, of whom it was said that, until Christianity came to
their territory, never one had been known to steal or lie.

Originally acknowledged to be of Indo-Chinese extraction, they were
Malayan-Mongolian in type; often above average height, well-made,
simple, lazy and cowardly, but very good-natured and polite to
strangers.

This, then, was the people among whom Ferlie and Cyprian came, with
their respective sons, to reflect upon the sequel to Eden's story and
decide what parts they would play in it themselves.

Gabriel Jellybrand accepted their arrival as a direct answer to
prayer, for he had been sick of a fever lately and very lonely.  His
weak green eyes, rounded like marbles behind an enormous pair of
sun-glasses, protruded so unusually that Ferlie expected them to pop
out and hit her when she made clear her ambition to choose the
quietest corner of the quietest island and erect a row of Nicobarese
huts.

The padre invariably fought a losing battle with the letter "w."

"But there is no need to do that," he persisted.  "The little
bungalow w-which the forest officer uses on inspection is standing
empty.  There w-won't be enough beds, but if you say you've brought
hammocks--a most original idea!"

He led the way to the Settlement, clad in a cotton cassock, tied
round with a black cord which swung out and scourged anybody who
ventured too near him when he held up the garment to leap from rock
to rock, revealing an expanse of white cotton sock below a short
tussore trouser-leg.

From time to time he would lose his topee, and then a faithful
bodyguard of Baptismal Candidates, palpably prepared for total
immersion at any moment, would hasten to hand him a large khaki
umbrella, lined with green, which they took it by turns to carry
again after the topee had been recovered from the puddle or
overhanging branch which had claimed it.

"You might have warned us that he was a Comic Turn," Cyprian told
Haddock reproachfully.

"Describe him to me again at our next meeting," said the Colonel, for
whom Jellybrand betrayed a pathetically guileless admiration.

"Uncle Ricky has always had a number of the queerest friends," Ferlie
whispered.  "Generally they are lame dogs who would have perished in
some one of the world's ditches but for him.  This one, at any rate,
seems too nearly an imbecile to take any interest in the obstruse
riddles of our existence."

The jungle road, strewn with bamboo leaves, twisted them out on to a
cleared space among the coco-nut trees, where a tiny church, which
would have lost itself in an ordinary-sized drawing-room, stood on
stilts, as indeed, did everything in the form of a building, so that,
to reach the platforms on which they were built, it was necessary to
run up a short step-ladder.

The interior of the church was fraught with the pathos of primitive
endeavour.  There was a crucifix, smothered in fading hibiscus heads;
a great many common candles, some of which were, nakedly, two
shortened corpses stuck one on top of the other to attain the
regulation length; a canopy of bamboo and coloured paper, enshrining
a Madonna with a broken nose imperfectly mended by means of hot wax,
which gave her a somewhat rakish appearance; the crudest of
moral-enforcing missionary prints; a framed St. Paul (after whom the
building was named) so literally "in the pink" as to impress one
instantaneously with his possible value in a football scrum, and--Oh,
lift up your heads!--a small shiny harmonium on which the little
padre had, in the course of a year, just learnt to accompany his
flock with one finger, though he had not yet given up hope of
bringing the other nine into requisition somewhen.  For the rest,
they relied upon a catechist with a concertina, who knew seven hymns
which he performed in strict rotation.

"But now that you have come..." said Jellybrand, eyeing Ferlie with
eager expectancy.  And she had not the heart to erect a barrier of
doctrinal differences, for her protection, between his hungry
enthusiasm and the harmonium stool.

"I see you have started a shop," said Colonel Maddock emerging from a
thatched fastness, wherein lay heaped up some yards of calico, red
flannel, a few tin pots and pans, coloured prints, packets of tea,
pounds of sugar and several bright glass necklaces.

"Oh, dear me, yes.  W-would you believe it?  Mr. Pell, here--w-where
are you, Mr. Pell?--a most unselfish person, w-who always acts on the
excellent principle that it is more blessed to give than to receive,
w-was left in charge of the shop w-when I w-was over at Nankauri,
visiting.  And--w-would you believe it?--he gave every single thing
away w-without taking any coco-nuts in payment!  Of course, the
people are ready now to let the Government start any number of
shops...."

Mr. Pell, hitching up the nether garments which were the outward and
visible sign of his inward state of grace, beamed urbanely upon the
newcomers.

"This," said Jellybrand, indicating a gentleman with a string of
cowrie shells about his middle and a battered English straw upon his
head, "is Friend-of-England, the chief of the village.  He is not yet
a member of my little community though he w-wishes us w-well, I am
sure.

"A long w-while ago, he had forty devils extracted from him by the
menluana, or w-witch doctors, and it is hardly surprising that, under
their conscientious exorcism, he nearly died.  All the men in the
village sat round him in a circle and on anyone's perceiving a devil
he pounced on it, w-wrapped it in a leaf, and put it in the corner of
the house.

"Every year, the Chief Commissioner, w-when he inspects us from Port
Blair, presents him w-with a suit of clothes in virtue of his
position; but he reserves them for festivals and always puts them
away w-when it rains.

"The two beside him are Mr. Corney Grain and Mr. Don Juan.  The
traders coming to the islands give them those names in fun, but I
hope to baptize them soon and then they w-will be Peter and
Paul--much more suitable."

Ferlie wondered why.

A man with enormous calves supporting a very small body approached
the speaker confidentially and, presently, Jellybrand interpreted.

"This is James Snook.  He and Friend-of-England have both, as you
see, got elephantiasis.  A lot of them suffer from it--most
unfortunate.  He w-wishes to show you his new house."

Encouraged to proceed, James waved the party towards a thatched
beehive supported on four rickety poles, seeming not to possess, at
first sight, either door or window.  However, a ladder discovered
underneath the contraption vanished into a yawning hole, and Cyprian
and Ferlie braved this first, to fall gasping on to a palm-plaited
floor which bounded like a spring mattress beneath them.  They could
not stand upright and there was a thick warmth of atmosphere and
almost total darkness until Mr. Snook removed a loose lump of thatch
from the wall.

In one corner of the room lay his cooking utensils opposite the rag
bundle on which he slept nightly, after blocking out all oxygen.

The walls were covered with works of art cut from any ancient
illustrated paper which had happened to fall into his hands from the
padre's stock.  They were hung, for the most part, upside down, and
thus Pavlova waved mocking legs at a Mission print of Christ
crucified, into the Figure of which the enlightened James had
brilliantly bethought himself to hammer real nails.

Above, glared a garish painting on talc of a Hindu deity with six
arms.

Truly, Gabriel Jellybrand stood in need of that optimism which
accompanies the faith of all Heaven's "little children."

* * * * * *

The steam-yacht pushed off again with the evening tide, leaving
Cyprian and Ferlie wandering back from the shore, the coco-nut trees
chattering above their heads in the falling breeze.  Occasionally she
picked up Thu Daw whose legs were not, as yet, quite to be trusted,
and would carry him away to the left or to the right, down slight
inclines into some cave of dark foliage.

"And is this Heaven?" asked John, following out some private train of
thought connected with Jellybrand and the concertina, the owner of
which could be heard practising in the distance.

"'Over the fields of glory,' you know, Mother, and 'over the jasper
sea'!"

"Not that Heaven, yet," said Ferlie.  "This is more like the Garden
of Paradise in your Hans Andersen."

"I sometimes wish," said Cyprian, "that you and John were not so
inordinately well read."

"Anyway," finished John, after a thoughtful pause, "will I be let
sleep in one of them kennels to-night?"

"There!  He has said it."  Cyprian rounded on Ferlie.  "I trust,
Ferlie, you are going to permit us the unromantic shelter of the
forest bungalow, but I have not really any hope.  Of course, if John
honestly finds it coincides with his conception of the Simple Life to
share the couch of James Snook--but I noticed several holes in the
roof of the bungalow which should give primitive colour to the place
for our satisfaction and more holes in the floor, which intuition
tells me represent the overcrowded tenement lodgings of considerable
families of snakes and rats."

"Firstly," said Ferlie, "you are sleeping out of doors.  We will
sling our hammocks between trees, under the mosquito nets.  Secondly,
John, you are not so much as to enter a kennel without leave.  I
don't know whether that elephantiasis is catching.  Thirdly, an
educated man's intuition should assure him that snakes and rats
seldom dwell together in sunny amity."

"Scorpions, then," insisted Cyprian gloomily.

"Fourthly, a perforated roof cannot affect us until the Rains, and
there will be ample time before they break, should we still be here,
for you to have constructed us a model mansion with hot and cold
water laid on and clematis and cabbages before and behind
respectively....  Do I hear the sweet chiming of the village bells?"

"You do," replied Cyprian.  "And, if I mistake not, shortly they will
be drowned by the pious fervour of the village choir."

When they emerged at the clearing the bell was, indeed, ringing to
Evensong.

Jellybrand had added a voluminous surplice and a limp stole to his
attire, but had raptly removed his white canvas shoes instead of his
topee, in absent-minded imitation of his parishioners.

A procession was forming outside the church led by Mr. Pell in the
capacity of cross-bearer; in fact, it was Mr. Pell's top-hat that
caused the padre to recollect that he was being reverent the wrong
end for the colour of his skin, before the red-breeched row of boys
proceeded to "survey the wondrous cross" in the highest key of which
the concertina was capable.

The Unsaved of the village were cutting bamboo decorations, in the
background, for a moonlight festival about to be held with the object
of securing a mate for a lonely demon, who had been bringing bad luck
to the community and was expected to depart in peace as soon as a
she-demon could be found to share his flitting.

Ferlie and Cyprian stood some way apart from the two groups of
worshippers while the crimson sunlight streamed across the stems of
the coco-nut palms, and stained the uplifted cross as its followers
passed, two by two, into the toy church and the last notes of the
hymn thinned into silence.

The words were dragged out painfully by the child-voices singing in a
strange tongue of a strange story, brought to them by strangers from
another land.

  "His dying crimson like a robe,
  Spread o'er His Body on the Tree;
  Then am I dead to all the globe,
  And all the globe is dead to me."


Ferlie left Cyprian among the lengthening shadows and, herself, moved
slowly across the sunlit space, and so up the wooden steps, into the
tiny forlorn mansion of God.

* * * * * *

By the time they had decided to settle the bungalow as their
headquarters, and making expeditions in the motor-boat to the
neighbouring islands whenever they desired complete isolation,
Cyprian, whose instincts for research had awakened with the cessation
of his ordinary work, brought Ferlie an oddly carved board covered
with paintings and punctured sketches.

"The padre calls these Henta.  They are samples of the form in which
the Nicobarese preserve their legends, and I ask you to look at the
tangled thread of Christianity running through the whole.  Jellybrand
has been explaining.  The first man offended the Chief of the Spirits
at the instigation of the first woman.  The Spirit's name, Deuse,
savours of the mission teaching by your Church.  Here, you see Deuse,
in arresting _négligé_, surrounded by his cooking-pots, and below him
huts, trees, birds and dancing figures.  Also mermaids and mermen,
because dugongs and whales are indigenous to these waters.  The Henta
are made to please the iwi-ka, or good spirits, and to alarm iwi-pot
or demons."

"You are an inquisitive soul, Cyprian.  Are you hitting at the
Missions, or what?"

"No.  Except that, but for them, in this Eden we should have been
able to escape the story of the Fall.  Apart from that teaching, the
people believe their origin dates from the time a shipwrecked sailor
was cast up on these shores with a pet dog.  By her he had a son whom
she concealed in her leaf petticoat, or ngong, and this son, on
attaining years of discretion, slew his father and married his mother
to continue the race.

"Therefore, the young men wear a bow of coco-nut leaves on their
foreheads, representing the ears of the dog-ancestor, and all dogs
are well treated in her honour."

"And poor little Jellybrand is trying to replace their allegories
with ours?  The one they will really appreciate will be Jonah and the
whale."

"The most ridiculous part of it all to me is the way that each race,
temporarily in power here, has striven to produce a different form of
Christianity.  Think of the waste labour since 1756, after the Danish
Mission departed and was followed by the Dutch.  When the Dutch
attempt at colonization failed, the Jesuits and Moravians were
inspired to try their luck till the British took over with Danish
consent in order to try and stop the piracy then rife in these
waters.  But I don't understand Jelly's line, Ferlie.  He is not a
Roman."

"In England he would belong to what was once known as the High Church
Party, but now has developed into Anglo-Catholicism.  I can easily
imagine that his successor will probably have ultra-Protestant and
anti-Catholic notions and solemnly smash the pink St. Paul and the
battered Madonna which to-day are the pride of the converts."

"I think he is an amazing specimen," said Cyprian.

"I think he is an amazing duck....  And doesn't he just remind me of
a white rat!"

"Mother," and John broke in upon Cyprian's amusement, "I've found a
house and they say the man in it is going to have a baby.  Come and
see how he does it."

Ferlie looked at him.

"The daily round and common task will furnish all you need to ask
here, I can foresee, my son," she told him.

"Dare we investigate?" asked Cyprian, when he had recovered his
gravity.  "He may have discovered something interesting in the way of
a rite."

He had.  The hut he referred to was, to the islanders, tabu, or
forbidden, since an unfortunate husband, about to become a father,
was imprisoned within it beside his wife, sharing her troubles by
sympathetic imitation.  He was deprived of the luxury of a bath and
betel-chewing and, for some while before, he had not been allowed to
bind any objects together nor to attend feasts.  Moreover, a whole
month must elapse, after the child's birth, before he would be
permitted to escape.

Friend-of-England, whom they chanced upon in the vicinity, described
the custom in much-broken English, and Ferlie managed to keep a
straight face while Cyprian examined the texture of coco-nut leaves
and wished, for the time being, that he had never been born at all,
or, at any rate, that nobody knew how.

"Ought John to discover these things?" he asked Ferlie later; "isn't
it spoiling his innocence rather young?"

She laughed at him.  "I should be sorry to think that you had lost
yours in learning of them," she said.  "Nature did not fall with the
Fall.  But so long as Mankind is content to lie supine, including all
Nature in his own disgrace, so long will the serpent insinuate horror
into the man-made Eden."

"I suppose, in due course, you will interpret; but sometimes I do not
know whether to regard you as a totally unnatural product of
Super-civilization or merely a successful example of the triumph of
mind over matter."

He did not know, either, how to read the look she gave him.

"In a little while, my dear," she said, "you will be able to decide."

* * * * * *

The days fled by; long days of lethargic rest.  The children had
grown popular with the Mission, and one lady member in particular had
attached herself to them as a kind of voluntary nurse.  This left the
two Explorers time for longer expeditions round the islands than they
could have taken with John and Thu Daw.

One day they lost themselves in a more impenetrable part of the
forest, where ten yards of experimenting with paths was sufficient to
shut out the sky and enclose inexperienced travellers in a leafy
tomb.  On escaping from it, stained and breathless, just as they were
beginning to think they had better make their peace with the
invisible heavens, preparatory to holding it for ever, they nearly
fell over the bank of an unexpected river.

Ferlie contemplated it awhile in silence and then turned deliberately
back a little way into the jungle.

"You can have that palm tree all to yourself," she told Cyprian.

But he was still attitudinizing, incomprehensive, on the bank of the
river when she returned in a somewhat scantily improvised bathing
dress.

"Ferlie!"

"Aren't you ready?"

The quiver of amusement in the challenge did it.  He flung back his
head and laughed outright.

"Why not?  But, oh, Ferlie, you are incorrigible!"

She was trailing her feet in the water when he joined her, forgetful
of all problems not directly connected with the cool green water.

"I shall dive off and swim to that log," pointing to one barely
visible near the opposite bank.  "From there I shall encourage your
amateur efforts and proffer suitable advice."

Said Ferlie: "I shall be sitting on the most comfortable end of the
log long before your slow-coach head has emerged from the weedy
depths to be mistaken for a floating coco-nut by some water-fowl in
search of a raft."

But as she slipped into the water, the log on which they anticipated
basking rolled over without rhyme or reason into deep water.  It
splashed lazily upstream breaking the green jade surface into a
million ripples before, having yawned in their faces with thoughtful
deliberation, it sank gracefully out of sight.

After an instant's smitten silence they collapsed backwards on the
soft mud above the bank, sobbing with relieved merriment.

"Which is the most comfortable end of him?" gasped Cyprian.

Cheated of their swim, they threw themselves on to higher ground and
stretched full length along the warm grass.

She was wet to her arm-pits and Digby Maur might have long sought a
more suitable subject for a River Nat.

The sense of comfort and physical well-being, as he lay sunning
himself, occupied Cyprian too completely for his attention to rivet
itself at once upon the near intimacy of her, outlined on an emerald
shield, defenceless in her slim fairness against his eyes.

Idly tossing twigs into the stream, one missed its mark and alighted
on her bare shoulder.

She smiled in absent acknowledgment, but her gaze remained fixed upon
the shifting reflections ahead.

He studied her then, with sleepy interest and, by the subconscious
link between them, was aware that she knew his attitude of mind to be
both puzzled and interrogative.  He gathered that something was
busily revolving in her brain which she would not yet disclose.

And as the leaves above them made changing patterns upon his own
rapidly browning limbs, he forgot the scantiness of his attire and
this outright defiance of all safeguarding law which stood between
him and the whip of that Master Force from whose dominion she had
despairingly wondered whether Mankind would ever be free.

Once-known sentences in Greek intruded, word by word, upon his brain,
till the whole resolved itself into a fragment from Plato's immortal
Republic preserved fresh, since, on the earlier waxen tablets of the
mind, impressions remain cut singly and deep, though neglected for
long periods in the crowded years which follow:

[Illustration: Greek text]


He saw himself again, an angular youth still in the magic teens,
wrestling studiously with the paragraph; his sympathies completely
with Thrasymachus of Chalcedon and his subsequent bull-like attack
upon Polemarchus and Socrates, when, "playing the fool together in
mutual complaisance," they had expanded the drivellings of old
Cephalus concerning the abatement of his appetites into an
interminable and exceedingly toilsome-to-translate discussion on the
nature of Justice.

Words, words, words, thought Cyprian, now as then.  The ancient
writers of all nations might philosophize and analyse and theorize
through pages of intellectual war, but still Justice struggled to
dwell upon this globe, and still the Frantic Master scourged men on
to deeds which drove her out.  With what object?  The perpetual
propagation of a mortal race, apparently doomed (while the chemical
atoms of mud and water to which they clung, held together) to blind
burrowings for some Philosopher's Stone upon which might be engraved
the key to their existence.

Always that awareness, stifling their half-developed senses, of
bodily decay and rotting death, mental and physical, till the spirit
cried out like a terrified child in the imprisonment of a gradually
enveloping Darkness.

Was it wonderful if the mind strove to drug realization of the
conditions under which it existed by resorting to fruitless
accumulation of metal and mummified matter, materially precious only
because so far as Man knew, there was not enough of it to go round?
Was it wonderful if, wearying of this empty labour, he passed from
the opium dreams of wealth to the cocaine illusions of power over his
fellows, or acted yet another part, inebriate with meditation upon a
solitary mountain top, or grovelled in a secret cave, denying access
to any who might wish to awaken him from dreams to cold reality once
more?

Was not the ascetic, hugging and hoarding his visions, as useless a
product as the miser hugging and hoarding his gold?--and the mystic,
luxuriating in a religious mirage, as much a glutton for prayer as
his Epicurean neighbour might prove himself a glutton for pleasure?

What did he, himself, desire of the gods that be, asked Cyprian.
Ferlie?  And of Ferlie, what?  Her white limbs entwined in his, ever
and anon, throughout the years, in the thirsting hope that much
yielding to a fitful and passing emotion would so unite him with her
Being that nothing could separate them again?...

  "For sudden ... a peace out of pain...
  Then a light, then thy breast,
  Oh, thou, soul of my soul!  I shall clasp thee again,
  And with God be the rest!"

Not this way lay the road to that satisfied unity.  And she knew it.
God, yes!  How terribly well she must know it!  He, in Thu Daw, she,
in John, had yielded to the Earth that heritage it demanded of all
living creatures which crawled upon its face.  They had added their
quota to Creation, lest Life perish here before its incomprehensible
purpose should have been fulfilled.

Was another life required of them to perfect the love they bore one
another?  All life is by no means conceived in love.  Did not that
which was weigh more precious in the scales of Eternity than any
conceived in duty to the natural law of a source called "God"?  And
yet ... out here, where one could almost listen to the pulses of
Nature beating, unregulated and unquickened by the fevers which dull
the senses of Earth's normal sons and daughters, how had these
barriers melted which the crowded places interposed between his Self
and Hers?  What law but the natural one was good in the eyes of
Nature's Creator?

And Nature bade him reach out to her his starving arms.  He stirred
among the shrivelling strands of fibre, strewing the turf, and sat
up, clasping his hands about his knees.

Still she did not look at him, and savagely he tore in imagination at
the filmy veil barring him out of her dreams.

But she spoke, dispassionately as an oracle, from her strongly
splendid aloofness.

"Think it out a little further, Cyprian, before you decide."

He felt the Master's lash about his body; and was stung by it to
sharpened understanding.

Deliberately and fearlessly, Ferlie was challenging his faith.  By it
she would rise or fall.

If it drove him along that path of desire which led but to the grave,
she would follow because her own will was pledged to his, "through
all the beauty and all the loving of the eternal years...."  She did
not believe that this momentary impulse was grounded in his faith.

He saw, as in a drowning panorama, all the forms of all the
acknowledged great lovers who had staked their gift of life upon
Desire and, with the fading of that frail rainbow thing, had
discovered themselves upon the edge of the burnt-out desert, Age,
beyond which flowed only the bitterly black waters of Death.  With
the inexorable tread of the years Ferlie and he would be dying slowly
before one another's watching eyes.  The end must come in sweating
battle with the impotency of those same bodies, glowing now in the
deceiving radiance of a sun which would, some day, itself be
darkened.  Of what avail then the agonizing vows, sealed lip to lip
in the sheltering purple shadows of dead nights whose beauty was now
a scorching memory to contrast with the starless darkness of the
opening tomb?  (Ferlie had always been able to visualize that tomb.)
There must be some other fulfilment for the love which has kept watch
o'er its immortality.  Some other road than this, along which the
faithless "Little Ones" had stumbled with bleeding feet down the
revealing arches of the years....  One was risking all for a
shadow....  But as one saw the shadow it was that of a very mighty
reality....  Behind every shadow there must be a substance.  Ferlie
had decided that herself ... already.  In this, it was, fairly, hers
to lead.

"Lead on," echoed Cyprian aloud of his heart, remembering when she
had used the selfsame words to him.

She put out, to touch his, a hand still cool and damp with undried
crystals of moisture.

"It is extraordinary to remember," she said, "that the crocodile had
probably never set eyes on a human being before.  There is,
practically, no animal life in these forests, so Jelly told me,
except pigs and birds.  In the interior there are rumours of bison
and, of course, the hamadryad we have always with us."

"Yes, your Garden of Paradise is certainly not serpentless," Cyprian
answered, a note of amusement now in his voice.

She got up and shook the clinging twigs from her hair.

"I am dry.  I must go and dress.  The one thing which calms my fear
of serpents is a discovery that if you keep still when they are
about, and leave them alone, they invariably leave you alone."




CHAPTER XVIII

On returning home, they passed close to their own village which
seemed unusually noisy.

Half-way across the Settlement John came to meet them in charge of
Naomi, the shining light among Jellybrand's converts.  John was armed
to the teeth, a shaped coco-nut husk upon his head and a wooden spear
in his hands.

"Mother," he called out, on sighting them, "there was a deaded man
took out of one kennel, only they have tooken him away to Heaven now
and everybody are very angry about it."

"You appear to have been seeing life during our absence, John," said
Cyprian, as Ferlie questioned Naomi.

"One man make himself dead," that lady explained pleasantly.
"'Nother village angry with his family."

The Settlement, when they reached it, appeared also, to be on the
defensive.  Little Jellybrand, bustling about with a shot-gun, which
Cyprian instinctively recognized as a more dangerous weapon to its
owner than to anything he aimed it at, explained that James Snook
had, indeed, hanged himself from one of the stilts of his hut, having
had trouble of some sort with his family while not in particularly
good health.  One of his sons had, lately, caught an evil spirit and
launched it triumphantly on the deep in a small model canoe.  The
canoe landed its invisible occupant near the hut of an enemy's
village and, hence, these furious preparations to meet a revengeful
raid.

Three members of the Mission village's aristocracy, Scarecrow,
Kingfisher and Captain Johnson, one of whom wore a bowler hat, green
with age, and another, a child's tam-o'-shanter, legacies both of
passing traders, had painted their faces scarlet and prepared
quarter-staves dipped in pig's blood.  Helmets of coco-nut husk were
being rapidly distributed.

"W-we have these troubles periodically, w-would you believe it?" said
Jellybrand.  "There is no cause for alarm, but one has to show that
the Mission is quite able to defend itself, should the raiders come
on here.  I am shutting up all my children in the Mission School and
shall patrol outside it to-night w-with a loaded weapon."

He waved his gun valiantly at Cyprian and then let it off
accidentally within a yard of Friend-of-England, who despite his
elephantiasis, leapt lightly into the air.

"That ought to teach them to keep away from a loaded gun," the
Defender of the Young remarked placidly, having ascertained that no
one had received a pellet in the back.

"Young Brown has been detailed off to parade your house to-night, Mr.
Sterne, and he will rouse you if your assistance is required."

Young Brown, a veteran of sixty, roused nothing but Cyprian's bitter
enmity by the tumult of his snoring outside the bathroom door.

Luckily, the quarrel petered out in the village, where there was
enough noise to attract every ghost in the cemetery, and as one party
was getting the worst of a species of warfare worthy of Tweedledum
and Tweedledee, the women interfered and separated the combatants
with dahs.  Whereupon, all broken fingers were displayed and
bandaged, and the enemy remained on to feast with the raided party,
returning peacefully homewards after a couple of days.

"Mr. Toms," the Government agent of doubtful nationality, made a note
in his diary that, "James Snook, elder and landowner of Car Nicobar,
committed suicide by hanging himself, owing to domestic troubles with
his children, whom his ghost will, no doubt, exceedingly trouble."

* * * * * *

A few days later, the padre fell upon Ferlie and the children when
they were sunning themselves in a sand-pit, clad in sea-weed, bathing
costumes and shells.  He, literally, fell upon them sliding down the
soft slope and subsiding gracefully into Ferlie's lap, hitting
Cyprian en route, a swinging blow with the cord of what the latter
called the "wedding garment."  He asked them if they would care to
drive with him into the interior to view a moonlight festival that
night.  He made the suggestion rather wistfully as though aware that
these twain needed no outside excitement to keep them interested in
one another.

Ferlie, her conscience pricking, tendered him radiant thanks.  After
his departure Cyprian demurred.

"It's a track through the jungle where a Red Indian would knock his
shins every five minutes, and if the blighter intends driving us out
behind Slippery Sam at night, I prophesy that you will spend the
small hours of the morning sitting in a cactus hedge and consigning
him elsewhere."

Slippery Sam, a one-eyed horse, by whose exertions the padre proudly
made his rounds, was nearly as great a danger to the community as his
shot-gun.

Jellybrand had bought him, cheap, of a trader because his one eye,
making him nervous, he was a consistent kicker.

However, though there happened to be a brilliant moon which silvered
the palms and blackened their shadows to thick treacley pools,
Slippery Sam, with Ferlie behind the driver and Cyprian perched on
the back seat of the rocking tonga, appeared that evening to be in
spiritual rather than spirited mood.

"He's really a very nice horse," Jellybrand's mild accents assured
them, "and w-would you believe it?--he loves ripe coco-nuts."

"I saw you picking yours to-day, Padre," said Ferlie.  "What do you
expect to make off your plantation?"

He sighed.  "It's only an experiment of mine.  I am so anxious to
have a chancel lamp.  One that burns perpetually, you know.  My Party
is coming on so at Home.  All the Anglo-Catholic churches have them,
I am told.  It is so unfortunate that I can only afford a night-light
in a glass.  I have pasted red paper over the glass, as you have
probably noticed.  It isn't altogether impressive as a substitute,
but it pleases the children."

"Of whom you are the most childish," thought Cyprian; but aloud he
said, "do you seriously think that, if your Mission left the natives
in peace for one year, there would be a Christian left in the islands
at the end of that time?"

"The Lord is mindful of His own," returned Jellybrand reproachfully.
"One puts one's trust in the rising generation.  But the mothers
_will_ hide the children at census times, lest the Government spirit
them away to school!"

"Wise women!" muttered Cyprian; but the speaker, unhearing, went on:

"I have had twelve babies born this year and baptized them all.
Twelve among the Converted!  It is God's will to provide the
children."

"You can call it that if you like," Cyprian admitted.  And Ferlie,
uncertain that he was going to behave well throughout the drive,
plunged into a dissertation on sweet potatoes.

Another mile and a half and the road became exciting enough for
private prayer.  All at once, a darksome pit yawning at the feet of
Slippery Sam, he freed himself of his master's mild restraint by a
coolly-timed kick at a vital piece of harness where he had been led
by knowledge of Nicobarese psychology to expect the feeble
co-operation of a bit of frayed string with his leather shackles, and
proceeded to crop by the wayside.

"I am afraid we will have to get out," regretted the padre's dulcet
tones.

From a hedge that was, luckily, not cactus, Ferlie succumbed to the
retort courteous.

"I am out," she said.

No word came from Cyprian, and she was just wondering whether one of
them ought not to be lowered, like Sinbad, into the pit in search of
his mangled bones, when an angry pattering announced his arrival from
the dark behind them.

"Why, where did we shed you?" in amazement.

"Half a mile back," he stormed.  "I howled like a maniac, but you
were engrossed in invoking your patron saint, and the padre, Slippery
Sam."

They continued their way on foot down paths wherein they feared much
evil, between patches of moonlight, bursting brightly enough through
the interlacing branches to have enabled them to read a letter.

Weird sounds guided them to a ring of scantily-clad revellers round a
bonfire and a young lady, attired in rings of silver wire which
crawled up her legs and arms, impeding free movement.

The Chief of the family, who introduced himself as "Captain Tin
Belly," told them that the girl was _mafai_ or bewitched, and there
to be fêted.  She had been very ill and was inspired by convalescence
to prophesy on the heels of an extraordinary dream.

Thus, also, were witch-doctors licensed, but if the aspirant to that
honour was, later, doomed a failure he was again relegated to private
life.

Mr. Toms, who had arrived at the festivities, proved a useful
interpreter.

"This lady was cured by English prescription," he told Ferlie.  "That
which you doubtless use, when Eno's Salts are added to water with
some turpentine and powdered camphor.  They gave twice a day for
belly-ache."

Wild chanting heralded another procession from a neighbouring
village, the members of which beat a pig-skin drum and bore aloft the
corpse of a sacrificial pig, while indignant squealing from the rear
betrayed the whereabouts of more pigs, bound for burnt offering.

The great dance of the evening was executed to hand-clapping,
accompanied by a low monotone introducing here and there odd English
phrases, culled from the Converted, in compliment to the foreigners
present.

"Where-is-my-hat-safe-in-the-arms-of-Jesus-give-
him-more-pig-God-save-the-King," one man sang piously in passing
Ferlie.

"Is Delilah the _hors d'[oe]uvre_ or only the dessert?" asked
Cyprian, watching the hoisting of the Amazon in silver armour to an
honourable situation beside the dead pig.

Mr. Toms announced that she would now heal people by her touch and
the art of shampooing.

"Plenty little cannibalism in the islands," he reassured them
cheerfully.  "When discovered in the past, on Camorta Island, for
secret rites, it very punishable.  The Nicobarese a simple people and
a musical."

"One had guessed as much," said Cyprian, putting his hands to his
ears as the chorus grew deafening.

Captain Tin Belly presented them each with a plaited palm-leaf box
from a shrine bristling with votive bananas.  The boxes were not the
same size and the discovery seemed to worry him; he measured them
several times in the faint expectation that one would grow in the
process.

On the way home, with Slippery Sam consistently practising the
double-shuffle, Ferlie asked: "Padre, do you never grow tired of
smiling at them and appreciating their customs, and settling their
infantile disputes?  Don't you often give up hope?"

His pathetic pink-rimmed brown eyes were glorious with vision as he
answered: "I never grow tired of praying for them; and then one hopes
again."

As Cyprian said afterwards to Ferlie, "One can hypnotise oneself into
any state of semi-imbecility through prayer."

He remained restlessly convinced that whether or no the islands were
going to bring him any closer to Ferlie's visions they were not going
to bring him any closer to her God.

Nor to the God of the Reverend Gabriel Jellybrand.

* * * * * *

An incident which occurred during the following week seemed to
confirm that impression.

Ferlie never forgot that evening; the last which spelt peace for them
for many a long day.

The children had built a camp-fire on the edge of the jungle; not for
warmth, but because it was a good way to dry the wet things of
juvenile adventurers who had been assisting at fish-spearing or
canoe-racing throughout the day.

Mr. Toms and Friend-of-England would often join them in the murmuring
twilight and the elder folk drew near also, when he and the old
Nicobarese spun little stories and island legends for John's benefit.

The favourite, related again on this particular occasion, was the
story of Shoan and the Mermaid.

It had, originally, been invented by the traveller, De Roepstoff, who
knew that the cachelot lived in Nicobarese waters and that, according
to the natives, the mermaid is the whale's daughter.  De Roepstoff,
re-visiting the islands years later, had the tale re-told him as one
of their own.

Mr. Toms related it now in English, periodically assisted by
Friend-of-England in Nicobarese.

"Come all Nicobarese and foreigners, old and young, men and women,
boys and girls, youths and maidens, and listen to a story.

"There was formerly a man by the name of Arang, whose wife had borne
(him) three sons and three daughters.  He made himself a nice house
and possessed much property.  One day he went out on the sea with his
eldest son, called Shoan, and wanted to fish with hook and line.

"Strong wind got up and heavy sea sprung up.  Then it happened that
one of the outriggers of the canoe broke and both sank into the sea.

"Arang was drowned, but the boy crawled up on the back of the canoe
and cried: "'What shall I do?  My father is dead; what am I to do?'

"Whish!  It is the whale arriving.

"'Why are you crying, child?'

"'Oh, my father is dead; I cannot survive; how shall I get home?
(lit.: 'there is no road.')  What am I to do?  My father is dead.'

"'Sit down on my back.  I know the road,' said the whale.

"'Oh no, I will not,' said the boy.  'I am afraid.  I do not know the
road as my father is dead.'

"But after a while Shoan did sit on the back of the whale.

"Whish!  Off they went, quickly, swiftly!  The whale is the chief of
the sea.  At sight all got afraid of him.

"The flying fish flew in all directions; the turtle dived down
suddenly; the shark sank down (below) his fin; the sea-snake dug
himself into the sand; the ilu danced along the sea; the dugong
hugged her young one; the dolphins fled, for they were afraid of the
whale.

"Thus (sped) the two.  By and by, they arrived at the country of the
whale.  It was a big domed house.  The walls were of red coral, the
steps were made of tridachua.

"In the house they saw the daughter of the whale, whose name was Giri.

"'Do you like this boy?' said the whale.

"'All right, let him stay,' said Giri.

"'Do you like to stay, Shoan?'

"'I am willing to stay here.'

"Then Shoan became the servant of Giri.

"Giri's face was like that of a woman; below she was shaped like a
fish-tail; her breast was the colour of mother-o'-pearl; her back was
like gold; her eyes were like stars; her hair like seaweed.

"She said to Shoan, 'What work do you do?'

"'I collect coco-nuts in the jungle.'

"'Never mind, we have no coco-nuts, but what other work can you do?"

"'I can make boats.'

"'We do not want boats, (but) what other work do you know?'

"'I know how to spear fish.'

"'Don't!  You must not do it, (for) we love the fish.  My father is a
chief among the fish.  Never mind; comb my hair.'

"Shoan remained.  He combed her hair.  They (used) to joke together,
and they married.

"Said Shoan: 'How is it, wife, that you do not possess a
looking-glass, although your face is so nice?'

"'I want a looking-glass; look out for one.'

"'In my parents' house in the village there is one looking-glass
(but) I do not know the road.'

"'Never mind!  I know the road; sit on my back and I will bring you
near the land.  I cannot walk in your country but do (I pray you)
return quickly.'

"Then Shoan returned to the village.  He came to (lit.: "saw") his
father's house.

"'Who is there?' said his mother.

"'It is I, Shoan.'

"'No (you are not).  Shoan died with his father on the sea.'

"'Look at my face.  I am Shoan, your son.'

"He came up into the house.  When they heard (about it) all the
people (of the village) came.  They asked many questions and Shoan
answered.  He told the story about the whale, and the story of his
marriage with Giri.  The people laughed and said he was telling lies.
Shoan got so angry.  He ran away with the looking-glass.  The people
went after him and speared him, and thus killed Shoan.

"Giri stops in the sea near the coral banks, and she sings and calls.
In the night, when the moon is high, fishermen hear a sound like
singing and crying of a woman.  They ask other people (about it) and
wonder, for they do not know (about) Giri.  Giri will not return
alone (that is why) she sings and calls out, 'Come (back), Shoan!
Come back, Shoan....'"

Ferlie used to love to think she could hear the voice of Giri, crying
loudest when the nights were happiest, since the Grey Lady of Sorrow
loves best to walk in quiet places which have once known laughter and
love.

She and Cyprian lingered after the tale was finished and the children
in bed, dreamily feeding the red heap of dying logs with grass and
leaves and rousing little spurts of angry blue flame.

To them came Jellybrand to crouch, rather exhaustedly Ferlie thought,
in the violet shadow; his chin thrust forward; his thin shoulders
hunched.

"It is difficult," he said presently, "to know quite how to act when
immorality creeps unexpectedly into my small garden."

Cyprian glanced up at him sharply, but his ferrety eyes were
fanatically searching the embers for an answer to the question
troubling him.

"The Nicobarese are really a moral people.  The w-women have equal
rights w-with the men; in fact, being so necessary for the
continuance of the race, they are really considered more valuable
than the men.  And, though among the Unconverted, a divorce can
easily be arranged by the co-respondent's paying the injured husband
a fine of pigs, one seldom hears of such a disastrous necessity."

There was a pause, during which Ferlie cleared her throat nervously.

Then Cyprian sat upright.  "And by this you are leading up to tell
us, Padre...?"

"That there is a couple of professing Christians, living in sin in
the midst of the Mission," said Jellybrand dejectedly.

It was out, and Ferlie sighed a little tired sigh.  So, even here,
they were to meet with criticism.  She was past interesting herself
as to how he had guessed.  She hoped Cyprian would be patient with
him.  But Cyprian, blinking rapidly in a manner that foreboded battle
answered: "I should have thought that what you may call 'living in
sin' was nobody's business but their own."

Little Jellybrand looked his amazement at this unsympathetic
attitude, from one to the other.

"How can it not be my business?" he asked in a hurt voice.  "I am
here to see that they set a good example to one another.  And these
were two of my own children.  I baptized them with my own hands."

This naïve admission drew a choking laugh from Ferlie.  As the padre
turned his astonished face towards her Cyprian exclaimed impatiently:

"Good Lord, man!  Are you referring to two of the natives?"

"Who else could I be referring to?"

Ferlie, with a final gulp of relief, rushed to the rescue.  "It's all
right, Padre.  We were stupid.  Please tell us more."

Encouraged again, he confessed that he was having great trouble with
two actual communicants in the Mission--Naomi and Kingfisher.

Naomi was, virtually, the wife of Young Brown.  She had played her
star part in the most complete Wedding Mass, decked out in the
scarlet robes of the Mission calico, two years ago, amid the general
rejoicings of a family much enriched by Young Brown's substantial
dowry of pigs and pandanas.  The pair had no children, and, a
twelve-month later, Kingfisher, who had been showing marked interest
in the Bible Class regularly attended by the young wife, was brought
forward by her for enrolment in the True Fold.

The toiling priest had thanked Heaven before the paper swathed
night-light for this unexpected windfall in addition to the slow
fruits of his labours.

Some months after the baptism Naomi produced a son whom Young Brown's
common-sense did not permit him to regard as an answer to prayer,
and, on his refusal to lay claim to the child, Naomi and Kingfisher
had boldly taken unto themselves a hut on the outskirts of the
Settlement, whence neither consistent appeals to their better nature
nor the threat of excommunication could dislodge them.

"This is my man," was all Naomi had to say about it.  And confronted
with the Woman's Credo her Father-in-God found himself helpless.

"The villagers consider that I ought to be able to put a curse on
them," he complained worriedly.  "The Mission is losing prestige by
my very patience and I fear a great deal of harm may be done to the
Cause.  I am wondering whether I should appeal to the Chief
Commissioner at Port Blair, since the Nicobars, being under his
jurisdiction as well as the Andamans, he would be able to have the
couple tried and sentenced for bigamy."

Cyprian took his head in his hands.

"Oh, my hat!" he groaned.  "If I were the Chief Commissioner, Padre,
I would have you locked up for a dangerous lunatic.  Living in sin!
Had they ever heard the word before you taught it them?  By what
authority do you keep a healthy young female animal tied, for
sentimental reasons of your own introduction here, to a man who is
incapable of giving her a child?  Anyone sane would tell you that the
Law was made for man and not man for the Law.  Let the poor
unfortunates alone, for God's sake."

Painfully, Jellybrand replied to him.

"There was a Man whom many accounted insane, but Him only do I serve
and from Him do I take my authority.  And He said: 'Thou shalt not
commit adultery'."

For a moment nobody moved.

Then Cyprian threw a stone shatteringly into the fire.  It lay there
unaffected by the ruin of hot ashes.

"These people are not Jews any more than we are.  Why should any of
us follow the letter of the Jewish Law?"

"Hear how He amplified it to the multitude upon the mountain who were
not Jews," said the Padre, and a hectic spot burnt on each cheek-bone
as he recited: "'Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time,
thou shalt not commit adultery, but I say unto you that whosoever
looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with
her already in his heart....  But I say unto you, that whosoever
shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication,
committeth adultery, and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced
committeth adultery.'"

Cyprian rose disturbingly, trampling the smouldering branches under
his feet and kicking the stone back into the cool dewy forest.

"I am going to bed," he said.  "I prefer logic to theology.  And my
logical conclusion is that anyone who applies the word 'sin' to these
folks would be quite prepared to try a tiger before twelve good men
and true, and hang him, for devouring a human intruder in his jungle."

They heard his footsteps mounting the wooden stairs of the bungalow
blurred black against a starry horizon.  From the distance stole the
sound of breakers on the coral reefs; the children's hammocks were
just visible under an ingenious canopy of mosquito-netting.

"And will you also go away?"

The question was asked more to himself than to Ferlie, but she
replied to it gently; she, who hated hypocrisy from the depths of a
soul which felt plunged into it.

"No, Padre.  I understand what you feel.  I belong to a Church much
criticized for its adamant attitude towards such logic as is
Cyprian's."

"You cannot think," he told her in a broken voice, "w-what it has
meant to me to have you two here.  Merely to w-watch you both makes
me less lonely.  It used to be my dream, before I vowed myself to
celibacy, that one day a w-woman might stand to me, even me, in the
same relationship that you stand to him.  I could be tempted to pray
for it, even now."

She shivered slightly.

"And God would reply that you know not what you ask," she said, so
low that he did not catch the words, and went on speaking: "But
sometimes I have thought that, in spite of the perfect unity between
you, w-which turns this self-chosen isolation into an Utopia of
contentment, there is yet something troubling you; something deep and
painful.  Forgive me if I am mistaken.  Living apart, as I do--I have
deliberately chosen Mission work, you know, though Colonel Maddock
offered to help me to a Living--one's instincts become sharpened,
like a dog's when someone it knows is in trouble."

Then Ferlie made a resolve she would have found impossible to justify
but, in after-life, found it impossible to regret.  Peter had always
condemned her as doctrinally unsound, and wondered that the Church
could not see it.

Perhaps the Church did see it but was wiser than Peter in its utterly
trained patience.

Poor Cyprian, who, in these lost islands, could not escape the
pursuit of the Men in Black.

* * * * * *

Every Saturday evening the communicants of the toy church arrived in
a complacent body, turn-about to kneel under the struggling
night-light and receive mild directions from their harassed shepherd,
balanced on the harmonium stool behind a yard of green baize, as to
the speedy restoration of unlawfully-acquired coco-nuts and pigs
illicitly retained in huts to which they did not belong.  Most
defrauded neighbours could be certain of recovering the fowl that was
lost, before the metal bell was jerked by Young Brown for Sunday Mass.

That Ferlie should contemplate lending herself to such a farce acted
as the final blister on Cyprian's already irritated spirit.  Having
divulged her intention, he let fall a few dangerous remarks; quite
clever remarks most of them.  She only turned on him the straight
grey look he was learning to accept as impervious to outside
influence.

"I understand that you were going to preserve an open mind on all
these subjects with a view to embracing my ideas?"

"How does this affect your ideas, Cyprian?"

"I fail to see what support you can expect from that religious maniac
in our affairs."

"I am not requiring either his support or his advice over _our_
affairs."

"In the name of Heaven what are you requiring from him?"

"If you did not require it yourself--in the name of Heaven--you would
know."

"Ferlie, will you promise to resist the temptation to confide in him,
just because he wears a last century's fashion in angelic uniform?"

His tone roused her to real anger.

"There are things which you are not at liberty to say to me.  Every
human soul knows of shadowed places within its circle which even the
angels dare not enter."

He got up, took some native fishing-tackle off the window-sill and
made for the door.

"I won't intrude again.  If you'll not be needing the boat to-day for
the children, I suppose you can have no objection if I take
Kingfisher, my fellow-sinner, and go fishing."

She saw the pair of them from her window, plunging into the jungle,
while she was washing Thu Daw.

The little chap was beginning to say whole sentences in English,
though he seldom honoured anybody but John with his conversation.

Drearily, Ferlie blamed herself for the reticence which had prevented
her from attempting to make clear her reasons for admitting territory
from which all but Divine Love must be locked out.  She was steadied
by that conviction.  And Cyprian would come back.  She must try and
satisfy him before seeking satisfaction anywhere herself.




CHAPTER XIX

Cyprian took the motor-boat to a further point than he had originally
intended choosing.

Kingfisher, who had fastened his canoe behind it, with forethought
concerning creeks which did his intelligence justice, found his
companion, even for a foreigner, exceedingly stupid over the fishing.
Cyprian, on the other hand, was regretting proper tackle, and finding
Kingfisher's methods irritatingly childish.

Everybody in the islands was childish.  Jellybrand with his weak chin
and his goggles, and his ridiculous tuft of hair sticking out at the
back, and his lisping faith; the natives with their infantile
intellects, not half a degree removed from John's, and now Ferlie
with her clouded illogical trust in the differing satellites of a
long-dead Teacher, who, to Cyprian's mind, had shown less courage in
deciding the doubtful question of the Life-to-Come than had the
Buddha.  Cyprian recalled the words of one modern writer, "Buddhism
is the religion of men; not of children."  Assuredly, had the Christ
only professed to preach the religion of children.  Well, Ferlie was
a child.  She would outgrow it, and he, in the light of his extra
experience, must be patient.

It never occurred to him that there might be something childish in
his angry flight from the thing that had annoyed him.  He decided to
give her time to get this uncomfortable mood over before he went back
and, consequently, steered the boat towards a likely-looking creek
biting into what was known as the mainland.

To his astonishment he was checked by Kingfisher, who, for some time
past, had been shading his eyes and muttering at the reflection of
trees in water so clear that it was difficult not to believe that
there was no material substance to the drowned world it mirrored.

He now clutched Cyprian's arm, indicating that they must not land.
The latter was in no temper to be thwarted.

"Is it ghosts or devils which will prevent you, Kingfisher?  Or is
the ground tabu on account of a birth or a death?"

The man could not explain himself any more clearly than to insist
that it would be unsafe to land.

His fear was very genuine and when he had gauged Cyprian's obstinacy
he climbed resignedly into his canoe, from the motor-boat, and cut it
adrift.

"All right!" Cyprian agreed cheerfully, "If you fish long enough you
may catch a whale.  I am going to explore."

He beached the motor-boat, and the jungle swallowed him up.

Then Kingfisher did a very sensible thing: he seized his paddles and
made for home.

* * * * * *

Ferlie was going down the forest road to the shore to meet the
fishermen.  Long before he saw her Kingfisher heard her singing to
herself and thought, for a little while, that it was Giri.

  "Oh, ye'll tak the high road and I'll tak the low road,"

... and ever the last two lines filled the green gloom with haunting
sorrow....

  "But me and my true love will never meet again
  On the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond."


But there was no sorrow in Ferlie's face just then.

It was the little padre who wiped the joy out of it after he had seen
Kingfisher.

* * * * * *

In a few moments everybody in the Settlement had collected round the
two of them while the sun reached out long scarlet-sleeved arms
through the plain glass window of the church and took St. Paul in a
ruddy embrace.

The agent's face was grotesquely serious, thought Ferlie.  No one
could make her understand why for quite a long time.

It sounded so incredible--the thing they were telling her.  A patch
of colour from a boy's adventure book.  That there existed a tribe of
savages, within reach of a comparatively civilized Mission
Settlement, whose hand was against every human being and against whom
every man's hand was raised in enmity; that Kingfisher's trained
sight had noticed signs of them along the shore in a vicinity to
which they seldom came, and that Cyprian, ignoring Kingfisher's
warning, had landed on that particular stretch of beach--this was the
gist of it all.

"But what will they do to Cyprian?" asked Ferlie, desperately
incredulous.  "He is unarmed and, they can see, unaggressive; if they
are not cannibals why should they want to interfere with him?"

"They shoot at sight," explained Jellybrand slowly.  "They do not
wait to find out if harm is intended.  They strike first, even at the
neighbouring tribes, w-which go in terror of them.  They are called
the Shorn Pen."

She turned on him in cold fury.

"And you never warned us!"

"They live so far afield; right out in Great Nicobar.  How w-was one
to dream----?  The Andamanese have a similar tribe to cope w-with,
the Jarawas.  But they, like the Shorn Pen, are so seldom seen that
one forgets.  For centuries the Shorn Pen have managed to isolate
themselves from the remaining islanders, and they are now practically
a different people.  Markedly Malayan.  Intermarriage and contact
with foreigners has altered the ordinary Nicobarese and civilized
him."

She became, of a sudden, stoically calm.

"What are we going to do about it first?"

Jellybrand and Mr. Toms, having decided on a search-party, had a
little difficulty in organizing their men, and, since this too was
necessary, in arming them.

The people, by nature, were no heroes, and it took more than the
sight of the foreign lady's stricken insensibility to induce them to
collect canoes at this late hour, when the labours of the day should
be over.

The padre's influence did more than Mr. Toms' promises of reward, but
little Jelly, having finally shouldered his shot-gun, was surprised
to find Ferlie prepared to accompany them armed with a small despatch
case and Cyprian's revolver.

"The children, Mrs. Sterne," he stammered.  "Surely you w-will remain
w-with them."

"There will be Naomi and Young Brown," said Ferlie coolly.  "And I
want to explain that, should anything happen to us, those converts
who take care of the boys till my brother and Colonel Maddock return
will be very substantially rewarded for their trouble.  I have left a
note with Naomi."

The hardness of her voice frightened him.

"Nothing should happen," he said haltingly.  "Really----"

She was not listening.

"John," she called, "Come here."

He came, dragging his imitation spear, and she knelt down putting her
arms about him.

"I have got to go away for a little while, John.  If I do not get
back very soon, wait for Uncle Peter and look after Thu Daw.  And
when Uncle Peter comes, tell him that Mother went away to follow
Cyprian wherever he had gone.  Can you repeat it after me?  Say,
'_Wherever_ he had gone.'"

He spoke the words wonderingly, straining back, boylike, from the
close pressure of her arms.

He was always proud to be entrusted with a commission and the charge
of Thu Daw.  Only when she had hurried a little way down the road,
walking between the padre and Mr. Toms, some intuition made him drop
his weapon and run after her, crying, "Mother!  Mother!"

She whirled back to meet him and lift him against her heart.

"You are a man," she told him.  "And one day you will stay by your
woman, please God, as I am going to choose to stay by my man to-night
and through Eternity."

Jellybrand surveyed the little scene, his face troubled, but he did
not again try to prevent her from joining them.

In the canoe he leaned forward and touched her cold hand.

"The smallest boy," he said softly.  "Did you adopt him?"

"No.  He is Cyprian's.  His mother is dead."

He was puzzled, but not inquisitive.  Ferlie added dully, "That was
before we found one another."

"I see."  said her companion compassionately.  And did not.

It took a long time in the canoes, under Kingfisher's guidance, to
arrive at the spot where, eventually, they caught sight of the dim
outlines of the motor-boat.

There was no sign of any living thing on the shimmering starlit
shore.  The canoes crept closer and closer, under the shadow of the
bank, cutting the water noiselessly as otters.  The foremost one,
containing Kingfisher, had only just been beached when he took a
sudden flying leap into the creek.  They heard him scruffling with
someone on the far side of the motor-boat.

The two struggled out into the open; two naked forms grappling in the
stream where the water was just shallow enough to allow a precarious
footing.

"Keep quiet!" commanded the padre in Nicobarese, whispering, as
another of their party splashed to the leader's relief.

"There!  They've got him....  Yes.  It is one of the Shorn Pen!"

The man was dragged towards the bank and a dozen willing hands
stretched out to draw him up.  Scarecrow, who, generally, showed more
initiative than his fellows, stepped forward to act as spokesman.
Fingers were firmly pressed against the prisoner's mouth, lest his
alarmed shout should attract his friends.

"Tell him," said Jellybrand, "that if he gives us the information we
require, no harm shall come to him; but that on his making the least
sound it w-will be the w-worse for him.  Our revenge w-will be
horrible," he informed the man himself with the utmost placidity.

The latter had, evidently, made up his mind not to risk shouting.
Or, maybe, he was only a stray member of the tribe, lured back to the
motor-boat out of curiosity.

To get him to speak, however, was another matter.  His dialect, also,
differed from that of his interlocutors.

"He must speak," said Ferlie.  "He shall speak.  He will speak under
torture."

"Mrs. Sterne!"

She wheeled round upon the padre as he advanced hastily to her side,
pushing him back into the arms of his huddling flock.

"Let me be!" cocking the revolver.  "Stand aside, any one of you who
does not want to be shot.  But if I shoot this wild beast to bits,
inch by inch, I will know where Cyprian is to-night."

This, Ferlie, the long-suffering and so-compassionate of all human
pain.  There may have been an hour, far back in some forgotten life,
when she stood, herself a half-savage incarnation of Womanhood,
surrounded by her slaves, directing the slow doing-to-death of a
feudal enemy who had deprived her of mate or son.

Whether or no, the present captive, who had obviously never set eyes
until that moment on a white woman, was startled by the impression
that she was an avenging devil, it was certain he considered her
supernatural.

He broke shuddering from his gaolers to prostrate himself at her feet
in crawling supplication.

In due time they extracted from him a promise to lead them to "the
place where they had put the white man."

Yes, the white man had come there in the boat.  Yes, he had walked in
the jungle.  Yes, he had been captured.  The rest was not clear.

Jellybrand saw that, although they might be moving directly into a
trap, there was nothing for it but to go on.  Everybody understood
that there would probably be a scrap.  They must rely upon the
terrorizing effect of their fire-arms.  He stopped to make the sign
of the cross.

Ferlie noticed that unsympathetically.  She felt insanely cruel, and
he avoided those wild eyes.

It was not long before they arrived at a fired clearing, the centre
of which showed the remains of an earth-oven.  A low bamboo platform,
beyond, supported a primitive hammock of plaited grass, hung round
with queer indistinguishable objects.

The whole thing suggested a funeral pyre; not an unlikely idea, since
the padre knew that the Jarawas in the Andamans burnt the bodies of
their dead.

Ferlie was the first to push aside the grass and leaves completely
screening the still form on that rude dais.

And then the birds of the forest rose in fluttering distress,
disturbed by the exceeding bitter cry of a soul in torment.

Cyprian lay there with an arrow, dimly discernible, pinning his coat
to the dark stain which had spread over his breast.  They held the
dancing torches high, and poured brandy between his lips, but he did
not appear to swallow; they splashed his face with water from a flask
and listened desperately for the beating of his heart.  His hands
were clammy cold.

The arrow had pierced clean through his coat to the other side of the
shoulder; after cutting off the barbed head they were able to remove
the shaft.  And Ferlie, having done all she could with no result,
flung herself moaning like a wounded thing upon the charred ground.

All at once she raised her tortured face to the priest's and out of
the extremity of her suffering challenged him.

"You talk of faith!  Use yours.  You talk of prayer.  Pray!  You
believe there is Someone to pray to: speak to Him, then, but do not
come near me nor try to take this revolver from me, until I see
whether the God you uphold as faithful answers faithful prayer."

It was fruitless to attempt comfort; utterly hopeless to argue.  He
knew that her face would remain imprinted on his memory to his dying
day, wearing just such a look as must have shadowed the faces of
those sorrowing women who stood beneath the Cross of the Beloved.

But he also considered the danger of resorting to such prayer before
the marvelling undeveloped intellects of the adult children round
him, so hardly-won to Christ.  Their faith was ever-ready to rise or
fall to the success or failure of a sign.  How could he thus tempt
the Lord his God?

His hesitation scorched her to scorn.

"You are afraid!" she said.  "And there is not even God left."

"Hush!" he pleaded.  "Hush, child.  W-wait and I w-will pray ... that
His w-will be done."

It was a strange scene: the girl writhing in her mental agony at the
foot of the savage bier; the frail diminutive figure of the little
shepherd, in his unsuitable draggled white robe, who had proved
himself, whatever his weakness, no hireling to his Master's flock;
the scared human animal, naked as his Creator made him, starting from
the grasp of the hybrid agent clad in khaki shorts and bowler hat;
and, behind, the straight smooth-skinned forms of the Nicobarese,
leaning on spear and long bow, awaiting the miracle their Christian
witch-doctor must, surely, perform upon the white woman's man, who
lay so still in the dead light of torch and mocking star.

Jellybrand knelt forlornly on the earth.  It has been shown that St.
Francis--the "little sheep of Christ"--was small and starved of
appearance with no physical beauty but his transfiguring trust....

"Our Father----"  And that was all.

For coincidence or miracle, at the same moment the man on the rickety
erection twitched one hand faintly and opened glazed eyes.

"For God's sake get the arrow out!" he muttered, and once more
relapsed into unconsciousness.

* * * * * *

Ferlie never remembered how they got him home.

From the fact that those present ever after respected her as a
superwoman, she supposed she must have taken over charge again of the
reins she had relinquished, for the time being, to the padre and his
God.

In her dreams she would often hear the padre's voice saying,

"Let him bleed; it is best."

She had necessary things with her in the despatch-case.  It was
really blood-poisoning they had to fear, for the actual hurt proved
not serious.

They had reason to be glad of the glassy night-harbour and the smooth
stealing of their canoe.

Their prisoner they took with them, it being the padre's inspiration
to load him with gifts and send him back to his tribe with a
wholesome narrative of good returned for evil.

He obviously expected protracted death, but Ferlie was now
indifferent to his fate, where she sat silent in the bows, holding
Cyprian's head on her knees.

Mr. Toms clung to a theory that the Shorn Pen, amazed at the
appearance of their quarry, had left him for dead at a popular
festival ground, in charge of the prisoner, wishing to display him to
the rest of their tribe before burning him with due ceremony.
Probably, not more than three or four were responsible for the actual
outrage....

Several delirious nights dragged between drawn-out days of tireless
nursing before Cyprian opened comprehending eyes upon the world.

Before that hour came Gabriel Jellybrand had learnt more than he had
ever sought to know of his new friends.  He took his turn at watching
beside the fever-stricken bed and was able to spare Ferlie a
considerable amount of the sick raving that wrung her heart.

Sometimes, Cyprian, who so seldom needed to emphasize his speech with
oaths, would break out into frantic blasphemies entirely alien to his
mentality.

"It is nothing."  And the padre would describe other sick-beds at
which he had officiated.  "He is not worse.  It is as if he were
speaking in a foreign language, absorbed at some time or other by his
sub-conscious mind."

But always the sick man returned to the same poignant theme; that
Ferlie was his and the barrier between them a figment of her
imagination.

"Do not distress yourself over that delusion either," Jellybrand
implored her.

"No," said Ferlie at last, shocked by revelations of the restraint it
had been Cyprian's part to endure.  "That is not delusion.  That is
Truth....  And now you know...."

"My poor child," he answered, "I ought to have understood....  I am
not very clever, you see.  I only w-went to a cheap school.  My
mother w-was a w-widow and did mending for Colonel Maddock at one
time, in order to give me my chance.  He w-was very good to us.  But
I only got through my exams by much prayer....  My mother prayed too,
and that helped.  I w-was able to visit her as an ordained priest
before she died....  I, wh-wo w-was so stupid and--and not very
strong.  W-we both felt that God had w-worked a miracle."

She saw that he was shying away from her admission, eager to show
that he claimed no right to pry into more than she willed to confide
in him.

It was inevitable then that she should make known to him the
circumstances which had driven them to seek temporary refuge at some
spot where they would not be hampered by the living lie represented
in their lives side by side.

"And even here," she finished pathetically, "there was you to
deceive."

He thought it all out for some while before his slow wits responded
gropingly.

"You see, though God understands, His 'little ones' can't.  And it is
forbidden to cause them to stumble....  And so again...  There were
only three magi w-who came across the thirsty desert in their
w-wisdom to the Cradle.  But many shepherds clustered about it,
simple and adoring, w-who imagined the star to have been lit in the
Heavens that very night by some supernatural hand.  The w-wise men
did not seek to convince them, by astronomical data, that it had
probably existed before the w-world began.  They merely followed them
and adored."

"But they did not accept the shepherds' view," objected Ferlie.
"They reserved their own.  What matter, if it was the same star and
led them to the same Cradle?"

"I know--I know.  But, by action, they accepted the belief of the
simple folk.  They conformed, outwardly, for the sake of those
'little ones'..."

He passed his hand over the back of his head, accentuating the tuft
of hair, like a drake's tail.

"I am so sorry for the W-wise; they have such heavy responsibilities."




CHAPTER XX

The day came, at last, when she was able to approach the subject with
Cyprian, lying in a hammock beside her under the trees.

He had, up to now, avoided all reference to his unsatisfactory
departure, armed with fishing tackle, into hostile territory.

As she sat making tea, late in the whispering afternoon, preparatory
to hailing the padre from his drudging attempts in the Mission school
to explain the evil of coveting your neighbour's pig, likewise his
pandanus grove and his coco-nuts and anything that is his, including
his wife, she looked up to catch Cyprian's whimsical expression.

"Which of us apologizes this time, Ferlie?  Me?"

"I'll let you off," she replied shakily, "If you'll make adequate
restitution by getting well."

"I am well."

She took his cup of tea to him and placed it within reach of the
uninjured arm.  His stiffened shoulder still prevented free use of
the other.

"The monsoon will be breaking soon," dreamily twisting a floating
curl round his finger as she stooped, "Shall we remain on here and
beset the even tenor of Jelly's existence with a similar problem to
his bigmatical ones?"

"Cyprian.  He _is_ a little saint!"

"I know it.  You are both saints, and I eye the haloes with envy, but
not much hope.  I want you, as well as your halo."

"Take!" said Ferlie.  But she went back to her chair and sat looking
at John chasing Thu Daw across the clearing.

He followed their flight and then said, "We can't stay.  'Unto each
his mother beach, bloom and bird and land.'"

"That's true," agreed Ferlie, and rolled Thu Daw's ball back to him
from under her chair.

"What will we do about it, Cyprian?"

"What indeed?  John's future is clear.  Winchester, I suppose, and
Oxford, and so to Black Towers, finally.  You are right to remind me
where the greater responsibility lies.  At an English school, would
he find himself out of it?  Would they take him?"

"If we could circumvent the first question he could live the other
down."

"Why should he be forced to live down my--sins?"

"The alternative is Burma, and, there, you and I have much to live
down, whatever course we take."

"Ferlie!  For God's sake reassure me on one point."

To that stifled passion she instinctively reached out comforting
hands.

"You--you are not thinking of separation?"

She said, "I hardly know.  It seems to me we cannot go back now on
what we have done.  As we might tell Peter, 'there must be pioneers!'
... But I do think our pioneering is going to lie along a very rough
road and I am afraid--for you."

The sight of Jellybrand on his way from the school checked Cyprian's
reply.  The padre beamed joyously as Ferlie waved him to the second
straw chair.

"W-would you believe it?  My choir can now sing the w-whole of
'There's a Friend for little children,' by heart.  W-we are going to
have it at Benediction to-night.  The Bishop is not quite certain
w-whether I ought to be allowed Benediction, as an extra service, but
I hope to be able to persuade him to my point of view when he visits
us.  He's not a very Protestant Bishop, and most w-wide minded."

"Does it make any difference to Friend-of-England and Co. which you
have?" asked Cyprian.

"Nothing makes any difference to them, but it makes a very great
difference to me to be allowed to teach and practise w-what I believe
to be necessary."

"If I were the Bishop," said Ferlie, "I shouldn't be able to help
feeling that you must know best and that you mattered more than he
did.  He has so much to encourage _him_.  Does your brain never
bother you into believing the work useless and the source of all your
inspiration a dream?"

He crossed his knees, displaying a badly cobbled rent in the trailing
uniform he loved too proudly to lay aside more often than was
absolutely essential.  "Even my poor intellect questions sometimes.
Doubts come and go, but nothing can take away one's past spiritual
experiences."

"I don't know that a single unlooked-for spiritual experience can
influence a mind which leans naturally towards agnosticism," put in
Cyprian suddenly.  "There is a work-a-day agnosticism which satisfies
most men, supported by certain ethics, coloured with what for nearly
the last two thousand years has been regarded as Christianity....  It
is not my fault if I have not a temperament which can rest content on
Faith.  I did not make my brain."

"That is just the point," said Ferlie.  "You are incapable of making
a single thing about yourself.  But you are able, if you wish, to
insist that your brain, and all the attributes of your particular
temperament shall serve instead of rule you.  Faith is within the
reach of all who reach out towards it.  The Christ, whose ethics you
adopt, explained that whenever He met educated doubting men."

"But sometimes," said Jellybrand, "one fears to presume."

Ferlie saw that he was thinking of that night in the forest when she
had defied him to test his own faith for her sake, and she replied,

"Perhaps that should be considered an experience especially given to
me."

Unexpectedly, he chuckled.

"W-would you like to spend a happy hour now torturing our prisoner?
It might entertain the invalid.  I have often w-wondered w-what I
should have done if he had not confessed and you had proceeded to
carry out your intention of making a second St. Sebastian of him
w-with revolver bullets."

"Did she intend doing that?" asked Cyprian.  "Ferlie, what a joke!"

"It was no joke, I assure you," contradicted Jellybrand, "She stood
there--w-would you believe it?--w-with that horrid little w-weapon
pointing in all directions at once, and rank murder in her face."

Then Ferlie said a horrible thing.  So horrible for her that the
padre dropped his tea-cup and Cyprian raised himself upright to meet
her blazing eyes.

"I'd have re-crucified Christ!" said Ferlie.

In the petrified silence which followed Cyprian extended his one arm.
She went to him, startled into comprehension of her own words, and
hid her face in his sleeve.

"It's all right," muffled tones assured them.  "Do you suppose that,
because you don't understand, all Heaven doesn't?"

Neither answered, till Cyprian said uncertainly,

"You might make me terribly conceited, Ferlie."

"Or terribly humble," she answered, still in the dark.

Jellybrand mopped up, with his handkerchief, the mess he had made,
and poured himself out some more tea.  His wrist was unsteady and he
slopped the milk afresh over the table.

"I meant to tell you both"--they heard his words stumbling towards
them through a clogging mist--"I have thought a good deal about
you--and prayed.  But, somehow--I suppose because I am not quite sure
of my right to advise--light has not come to me yet.  The solution
slowly dawning may be a mirage.  I must leave you to judge of that.
It is not for me to follow the w-wise across the desert.  My place is
in the fields w-with the blind flocks.  Still, since you must go back
and live practical lives in a practical w-world, there is such a
thing as rendering unto Cæsar.  In this case--to a custom, if an
unlawful custom, as many considered Cæsar's tribute.  Yet, the
disciples were permitted to pay that, to give their enemies no
handle.  You could pay it--this tribute to our so-called
Civilization--by obtaining your divorce and contracting, according to
the law of the land, to live together as it permits you.  A marriage
in a registry office counts as no marriage to a Catholic; but this
you know.  Your lives together after it w-would be a matter for
yourselves and your own consciences, supposing you can continue to
live together under the same conditions you have observed up to now.
If you find you cannot, then I, honestly, see no w-way out but the
one w-which seems to spell living death to both of you--separation.

"There is another consideration.  The Roman Communion and its rules
are outside my scope.  You know best w-whether it w-will permit a
w-wife separated from her husband, in such special circumstances, to
remain under the innocent protection of another man, in a state
fulfilling the demands of both Civil and the Ecclesiastical Law.  In
my own very humble opinion--and I speak after much consideration--the
thing is permissible.  But I live so far beyond the reach of those
dogmatic burdens w-with which Man impedes his progress to bear as
offerings along the steep road to God.  Clever theologians w-would,
doubtless, frustrate my arguments, in one sentence.  I can only say
that I do not think they could alter my feeling in the matter.

"The views of any Church are immaterial to one of you, who has been,
hitherto, a law unto himself.  They are not immaterial to me; but my
heart is ready to let the situation rest between you and the Greatest
of all Lovers, who sees further than His disciples in the Church."

The speaker pushed his untasted tea aside with a little clinking jerk
of china, and moved swiftly away from the two under the restless
palms.

In the distance they watched him climb the steps of the toy ark and,
a moment later, the cracked bell clanged.

* * * * * *

Cyprian spoke first, when the cadences of the concertina would have
been inciting to hilarity most listeners superior to the Nicobarese
and inferior to the angels.

"Did you ever hear of Er, the son of Armenius?  No.  You never trod
the mill of the ordinary Greek classics.  Er was a brave man who was
killed in battle, and the story goes that, ten days later, his body
was discovered quite fresh.  The twelfth day they laid him on a
funeral pyre, when he wisely came to life again.  He brought news
that he had been permitted to see the other world and return, and
described a long and complicated vision--Socrates' idea of the
justice meted out to Man after death.

"While I was ill my brain was troubling itself with an account of the
method by which the sky's vault was held together, in the vision, at
either end, by a belt of light."

"What are 'whorls'?" Ferlie asked him suddenly.

He laughed, his fingers busy with her hair.

"I can well believe that I babbled about them.  Er's idea of the
eight whorls, inserted in one another was founded on the Greeks'
conception of astronomy.  Never mind.  I'll lend you the
translation....

"I am only prefacing my own vision (if you can call it that when you
know) with the mention of all this, to show you how my mind has been
running on Plato for the sake of one passage in his Republic,
portraying Earthly Love as a frantic and savage Master."

Said Ferlie, "He is a Master who can be enslaved."

"Your faith tells you so.  I only saw it in my--dream.  Do you know
that I believe, like Er, I have been dead?"

"You were dead.  Your heart had stopped beating.  You must have been
unconscious for a long time.  And now, being you, you are wondering
whether knowledge acquired during an experience in Death should be
pushed aside by your well-balanced living mind.  What did you see?"

"It was not exactly a seeing.  It was a knowing.  I was dead and I
knew I was dead.  But I was still alive, most terribly and
poignantly.  You were the Dead--on this side of the Dark, belted
down, like Er's universe, from the light.  But I was struggling so
passionately to return and be dead with you here, rather than alive
with all those other Living, that, like Er, I think I was shown the
way to break through....

"One has heard of people in trances waking in the grave.  Can you be
sure with me, Ferlie, that this was more than a trance?"

"God knows I can!" she said earnestly.

"You need not have been afraid.  I would have wrenched the way
through to you if you had not come back to me.  For that reason I
took your revolver."

After a silence he said, "Then I see now why I was allowed to find
the way.  I was not worth such a sacrifice ... the sacrifice of your
unfinished work here.  That is quite clear."

"Ah, never!  Never till that night did I know the depths of my own
weakness.  For the memory I must go humbly all my days.  Cyprian,
believe, rather, that you have been allowed the vision because only
through its acceptance can you receive the strength which must make
me strong."

"Well, whatever the explanation," said Cyprian, "it is only certain,
as it was to another man before me, that, whereas I was blind, now I
see.  I see the truth of the Resurrection."

Bright with revelation was Ferlie's face.

"Dear, it is enough and more than enough.  The rest follows as it is
needed, making all things possible for us who can look forward into
Eternity.  I fear nothing, in whatever shadowy valley our steps may
be turned ... now.  The light will break some time when our eyes are
strong to bear it.  We have been united in all things save the one
thing that was needful: belief in the Life Everlasting.  Without that
faith our love must have mastered us.  And I knew it.  Your Frantic
Master drives as his slaves those who see no further than the end of
this fragment of life.  Cyprian, my lover, do you not understand how
it is that I am not afraid to stay beside you now?"

Across the gilded bamboo leaves the children's voices stole to mingle
incongruously with the shouts of the returning fishermen, to the
drawling melody of----

  "A Friend Who never changeth, Whose love will never die.
  Our earthly friends may fail us,
  And change with changing years ..."


Cyprian slipped out of the hammock and raised Ferlie to her feet.

* * * * * *

Yet, finally, the leadership, even in mystical matters, was to
devolve on him.

There were only thin wooden walls to the little forest bungalow.

Ferlie and he had been sleeping indoors since his illness so that she
might have all medicines and the paraphernalia for nursing within
easy reach.

Therefore, it happened that in turning his head restlessly to escape
an intruding beam of moonlight through the curtainless door, he
roused himself with sudden completeness, straining to catch the
echoes of quiet sobbing.

He only paused an instant.

Ferlie was lying face downwards: her forehead on her arms, which
gleamed lily-coloured in the pure light.

He knelt beside her, attempting to raise her head.

"My dear...  My dear..."

She grasped thankfully at the steadying sensitive fingers.  "Help me,
Cyprian!  You were always, really, the stronger.  Help me to conquer
it....  I know you have thought that everything mattered a great deal
more to you than to me.  That I was satisfied with the knowledge that
the end is not yet.  But sometimes--at night--Heaven is very far away
and earth is most powerfully real, and doubts creep over me, who have
laid the great burden of this faith on you, whether I am fit to bear
the burden of my own human loving.  You see, Cyprian, there is one
instinct given to women at Creation; the roots of which are in
Creation itself.

"John is mine by duty and Thu Daw is yours by desire, but I
want--and, at the moment, I'd sell my soul to eternal death to make
it come true--your son in my arms ... through love...."

So came again to Cyprian the inexorable phantom of that Master of
whose subjection he had been made falsely confident by the soothing
sympathy of a celibate's idealism and the magic of Ferlie's trust, a
few short hours back.

Though he came in the form of an angel of light; though he came in
the form of a roaring lion; though now in a more mysterious guise
than either, it was the same despotic power which drove and drew.

How to battle now with this image of shadowy radiance?  And, after
all, why?  He summed up the matter afresh.  If there was not truth
here it was nowhere, and only in following the truth could man be set
free of his ills.  Thus had taught that same Nazarene, whose spoken
word of two thousand years ago was causing all the trouble; since
even in the sceptical circles of modern scientific research men were
to be found to follow the gleam along His trail.  Across which lay
Ferlie exhausted; himself hesitating above her in the knowledge that
she would yield, inevitably, to the guidance of his groping hands in
the dark.

He had said to her, "I see the truth of the Resurrection," and she
had replied that all else followed; but she had not then meant to
signify the strength for this sacrifice.  And he saw, blindingly,
that there might be no half-measures.  The ghost of an unborn child
barred the way of compromise.

Shaken with pain, mental and physical, Cyprian of the once
all-satisfying ethical agnosticism called with the impotent despair
which is akin to anger upon that Lover who stood between them as
lovers, and who was becoming in conception unwaveringly the same as
the God who brooded over the disciplined Churches.

"Why should Ferlie let them torture her?" he had asked fiercely again
and again of himself in the past, and now that the power lay with him
to stay the hated pressure he found himself weakly refraining instead
with the question, "why should I let them torture me?"

Even if separation had spelt material death for them both, Ferlie's
Church would concentrate only upon the spiritual death their life
together must effect.

Had not the time really come to dismiss as out-worn sentimentality
this talk of a soul's death?

His own, such as it was, and _if_ he might barter, and gladly, for
the fathomable happiness of To-day, despite that secret glimpse of
wisdom imparted during his unconscious hours.  But what of Ferlie's
soul, such as That was, and now in his keeping--a stainless loyal
Existent?

He had fought to make it see with material vision and the mastering
Force had fought on his side.

Yes, she had indeed fallen, spent, in the fearful starlessness and it
was his at last exultingly to lead.

Incoherent shreds of forgotten argument worried him.  Magi or
shepherds ... the wise with their great responsibilities....

He became contemptuously aware of the aguish shaking of his body.
How did one pray? ... How _did_ one pray? ... The opalescent tropical
dawn found him still at her side, his hold unrelaxed of hands now at
rest, the glory of her hair making a halo about the face of a very
tired sleeping child.

Above the dim blue mists still shrouding the patient jungle the sun
floated, a scarlet ball, heralding the resurrection of another day.

Resurrection.  That whisper continued with its insistence upon
horizons beyond the vision of all earthly eyes.

Others, like the legendary Er, had proved that the pulsing of the
soul does not cease with the pulsing of the heart; nevertheless it
was well-nigh impossible to rest one's faith in this matter upon the
experiences of others.  Just in this matter.  One was prepared to
believe the incredible statements of scientists and astronomers
without wrestling individually with their proofs.  Why not,
therefore, the vision of those who had eyes to see and ears to hear
beyond the grave?  His own past contact with that death-state was
failing to inspire now that his body felt, once more, gloriously
alive.  One had to remember not to forget.

"Nothing," had said that exasperating duplicate of St. Francis in the
islands, "can take away one's spiritual experiences."

To that slender link with the future he must trust.  Many had not so
much and yet walked untroubled.

Was there not some special revelation for those who, not having seen,
were yet ready outside Gethsemane's gates with the bitter admission,
"Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean"?  The wraith of the dying
Emperor, forced to accept such defeat, seemed to smile mockingly at
him from the distorted patches of light and shade outside.

Cyprian appreciated afresh that Ferlie would hardly prove courageous
enough to face her own defeat now without waiting on his decision.
His to lead, forward or back.

And with the poignant realization something snapped.  He rose stiffly
to his feet to stand a moment at the window, drawing the salt
sea-breeze into his lungs.

The surrender had become suddenly possible.

He lifted tired eyes to the on-stealing light and his lips moved.
They framed the one word which Ferlie, waking, might have recognized
as representing the clarion call of her utter triumph.

"_Vicisti_," said Cyprian.









*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 73273 ***