BEGGARS ON HORSEBACK

NEW SIX SHILLING NOVELS

OLD DELABOLE.
By Eden Phillpotts.

OF HUMAN BONDAGE.
By William Somerset Maugham.

THE FREELANDS.
By John Galsworthy.

MUSLIN. By George Moore.

OFF SANDY HOOK.
By Richard Dehan.

THE LITTLE ILIAD. By Maurice Hewlett. Illustrated by Sir Philip Burne-Jones, Bart.

THE IMMORTAL GYMNASTS.
By Marie Cher.

MRS. CROFTON.
By Marguerite Bryant.

THE LATER LIFE.
By Louis Couperus.

CARFRAE'S COMEDY.
By Gladys Parrish.

THE BOTTLE-FILLERS.
By Edward Noble.

CHAPEL.
By D. Miles Lewis.

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
21 Bedford Street, W.C.

BEGGARS ON
HORSEBACK
By F. TENNYSON JESSE
AUTHOR OF "THE MILKY WAY," ETC

LONDON MCMXV
WILLIAM HEINEMANN

London: William Heinemann, 1915

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED
WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE
TO
MISS HANNAH MERCY ROBERTS
(NAN)
AS A SMALL ACKNOWLEDGMENT
OF A LARGE DEBT

Contents

The stories in this volume are printed in chronological order.

A SHEPHERDESS OF FAUNS

A SHEPHERDESS OF FAUNS

Archie Lethbridge arrived in Provence thoroughly satisfied with life. He had just sold a big picture; was contemplating, with every prospect of success, giving a "one-man-show" in London of the work he would do in Provence; and the girl he loved had accepted him.

Miss Gwendolen Gould was eminently eligible—her income, though comfortable, was not large enough to brand her husband as a fortune-hunter; she was pretty in a well-bred way that satisfied the eye without causing it to turn and gaze after her; and above all, she could be relied upon never to do, say, or think an unusual thing. Like all painters, when they are conventionally minded, Archie was the fine flower of propriety—he owned to enough wild oats of his own sowing to save him from inferiority in the society of his fellow-men, and he held exceedingly rigid views on the subject of his womenkind. Gwendolen might—doubtless had, for she was one of the large army of young women brought up to no profession save that of sex—give this or that man a kiss at a dance, but she would never have saved all of passion and possibilities for one man, and lavished them on him, regardless of suitable circumstances. Archie's name (that he hoped one day to adorn with some coveted letters at which he now pretended to sneer) would be perfectly safe with Gwendolen.

The only drawback to his complete content was that his fair, sleek person showed signs of getting a trifle too plump—for he was only young as a man who is nearly "arrived" counts youth. On the whole, however, it was with a feeling of settled attainment that Archie left Nice and proceeded to strike up into the Alpes Maritimes, totally unprepared for any bizarre or inexplicable event—he would have laughed satirically at the bare idea.

To do him justice, he worked hard, and he had a tremendous facility and a certain charm that concealed his lack of true artistic sensitiveness. There is probably nothing more difficult to interpret in paint than an olive-tree—the incredible grey brilliance of the thing, each leaf set at a slightly different angle, and refracting the light till the whole tree seems made of blown mist and sharp-cut shadows. Archie painted olives under every effect; sparkling in the sun, fog-grey on a grey day, and pale with the shimmering under-side of straining leaves against a storm-dark sky. He also painted very dirty children picking the ranked violets and stocks that grew along the olive terraces, and this he achieved without once descending into the realms of the "pretty-pretty," while at the same time infusing just the right amount of sentiment to ensure a sale.

He painted here and there from Grasse to Le Broc, and then one day, feeling he had taken all he could from the soft-scented land of olives and flowers, he hired a motor to convey him up into the Back o' Beyond, and drop him there. Once he met a couple of women bearing on their heads the sheaves of tight little red rosebuds that look exactly like bundles of radishes, and caught a whiff of the strange, bitter-sweet smell of the newly cut stems. Then he passed an old shepherd in a cloak of faded blue, with sheepskin legs cross-gartered to the knee, taking his lean, golden-brown flock up into the mountains.

After that he saw no living thing, neither bird nor beast nor human, for many miles. Rounded hills, opening out from each other in endless succession and covered from crest to base with harsh yellow grass, and strewn with grey boulders. Deep gullies that at one time had been set alight and now were scorched and brown like plague-pits, with here and there a patch of pale stones showing up lividly from the charred thorns and blackened soil. Archie shivered, partly because of the keen wind blowing down from the great plateau beyond the hills, partly because something savage in the scene gripped at him.

The car throbbed on, higher and higher, till the road, winding acutely along the edge of precipices, developed a surface that caused his chauffeur to swear gently to himself. Valley after valley opened out, long and narrow, and Archie noticed signs of a long-past cultivation in the curved terraces into which the bed of each valley was cut, forming an endless series of semicircles. There was no trace of any crop, and the whole effect was as of some rude amphitheatre where prehistoric man had sat and watched gladiatorial shows.

The car, sticking now and then in a rut, or jolting violently over stones, finally crested the last rise, and Archie found himself on a vast stretch of land ringed in by sharp-edged hills, like some dead, gigantic crater; to the right, far away on a slope of the mountain ring, lay a grey straggling town that looked hacked out of the hardened lava. The only sign of life was in a patch of vividly green grass near at hand, where hundreds of crocuses had burned their way up through the earth and showed like a bed of thin blue flames.

Archie directed the contemptuous chauffeur towards the town, and they finally drew up at the inn—a little green-shuttered affair, with a stone-flagged passage, and a tortoise-shell cat drowsing beside the door. Outside a buvette opposite was a marble-topped table at which sat a couple of workmen drinking cider. An evanescent gleam of sun shone out, and the tawny liquid caught and held it, making each glass throw on to the table a bubble of gold fire enmeshed in the delicate shadow of the vessel itself. Archie stood transfixed for a moment with pleasure, then, as the gleam faded and died, he entered the inn.

* * * * *

Like most people with the creative temperament, Archie Lethbridge was the prey of environment. The unborn child is not more influenced by the surroundings of its mother than a book or picture by those of its creator. Draginoules took such a deep, sure grip of Archie that it did more than merely affect his work—it began to upset his neatly arranged values, and, since Nature abhors a vacuum, to substitute fresh ones in their place. Draginoules, in short, behaved like a master of scenic effects; it allowed a couple of days for the background to permeate Archie's consciousness, and, when he was ripe for it, introduced the human element, which, to a man of his type, means a woman.

It was one morning when he was washing brushes in the dim inn kitchen that he saw her first. She came out of the buvette to serve some workmen, and Archie stopped dead in the act of swirling a cobalt-laden brush round and round in the hollowed yellow soap he held. He always saw the whole scene in memory as clearly as he saw it then—the low-fronted buvette,the glass of the door refracting the light as it still quivered from her passage; the pools of blue shadow that lay under the table and chairs on the pavement; the blouse-clad figures of the workmen, particularly a young man with a deeply burnt back to his neck; and the girl herself, holding aloft a tray of liqueur glasses, that winked like little eyes. All this he saw framed by the darkness of the kitchen and cut sharply into squares by the black bars of the window; then, as he mechanically went on frothing blue-stained bubbles out of the soap, he said to himself, "I must paint that girl."

He soon found out that she was the niece of the stout couple who kept the buvette, and that her name was Désirée Prévost. As they mentioned her most people shrugged their shoulders. Oh, no, there was nothing against the girl—though it was true her eyebrows met in a thick bar across her nose, and old people had always said that was a sign of the Loup-Garou; enlightened moderns, however, did not really hold by that. The town was proud of her looks, for it considered her très bien, the highest expression of praise from a Provençal, who is a dour kind of person, taking his pleasures as sadly as the proverbial Englishman, and whose chief aim in life is to place one sou on the top of another, and when possible insert a third in between.

Archie approached the aunt of Désirée on the subject of sittings with some trepidation, but met with an agreeable pliancy from her, and a calm though indifferent assent from Désirée herself. She had a high opinion of her own value, and no amount of appreciation surprised her.

Scanning her afresh as they stood on the pavement making final arrangements, Archie inwardly congratulated himself. From the heavy brass-coloured hair massed with a sculptured effect round her well-poised head, to the firmly planted feet, admirably proportioned to the rest of her, she was entirely right for his purpose—she seemed the spirit of Draginoules incarnate. Owing to the opaque pallor of her skin, her level bar of fair eyebrow and heavily folded lids, her big, finely modelled nose and faintly tinted mouth, all took on a sculptured quality that made for repose; the very shadows of her face were delicate in tone, mere breaths of shadows. Yet she was excessively vital, but it was a smouldering, restrained vitality suggestive of a quiescent crater. Her face was too individual to be perfect—the nose over big; the brow too narrow for the full modelling across the cheekbones, but she had an egg-like curve from turn of jaw to pointed chin. When she laughed her teeth showed large and strong, and her throat was the loveliest Archie had ever seen—magnificently big—and she had a trick of tilting her head back that made the smoothly knitted muscles of her neck swell a little under the white skin. As he painted her Archie used to find himself racking his brains for some speech that would make her head take that upward poise, so that he could watch the play of throat.

He chose his background well; a sheltered spot in a fold of hill just beyond the town, where a slim young oak sapling still retained its copper-hued autumn leaves, that seemed almost fiery against the deep, soft blue of the sky. He had conceived of her as standing under the oak-tree, so that, to him, working lower down on the slope she too showed against the sky, seemingly caught in a network of delicate boughs. Being below her he was also the richer by the soft, three-cornered shadow under her chin, and the whole of her became a tone of exquisite delicacy, as of shadowed ivory, in the setting of sky—that sky of southern spring which seems literally drenched in light. The tawny note of the oak-leaves was to be repeated in some sheep, which, though kept subservient to the figure of Désirée, were to supply the motive of the picture—or so Archie thought till the sudden freak that made him introduce the fauns.

Désirée was all for robing herself in her best—a black silk bodice with a high collar, and a be-trained, jet-spangled skirt, but Archie coaxed her into wearing the dress he first saw her in; a mere wrapper of indefinite prune colour, belted in at the waist to show the lines of her deep chested, long flanked figure, and cut so low as to leave her throat bare from the pit of it. Her sleeves were rolled back to the elbow and her arms showed milk-white as far as the reddened wrists and the big, work-roughened hands that held a hazel switch across her thighs.

Archie was Anglo-Saxon enough to feel a slight stiffness at the first sitting, but Désirée was a stranger to the sensation of tied tongue.

"I like the English," she announced. "Not many of them come here, but I have not spent my life in Draginoules, no, indeed! I was in a laundry once at La Madeleine. Do you know it? It is where they take in the washing of Nice. So I used to go much into Nice, and an English lady there painted me. She had a talent! She made me look beautiful. In Draginoules, do you know what they call me? They call me l'Anglaise manquée!"

"Because you like the English so?" asked Archie. His French was considerably purer than hers, she spoke it with the Provençal accent that sounds exactly like a Cockney twang.

"Because I have the nature, the habits of an English woman. Oh, I assure you! I like to live out of doors—to be out all day with one's bread and a bottle of wine and sleep on the hillside—that is what I call living. I always open my window at night, though my aunt says it is a folly. I could go to England if I chose, as a maid. My English lady would have me. Ah! how I long to see England. One gets so tired with Draginoules."

"But your friends—you would be sorry to leave them?"

"Oh, for that, I do not care about the people of Draginoules. It was my mother's place, not mine. I was born in Lyons, where my father was a silk-weaver. But he was a bad kind of man, so I came to my aunt to live. I do not think much of the people of Draginoules. They all like me, but I do not like them!"

"Why don't you go to England, then? Though I think you are far better here!" quoth Archie, on whom the glamour of the place was strong.

"My fiancé would kill himself," said Désirée serenely.

"Oh—you are fiancée?" murmured Archie, wondering why he felt that absurd mingling of relief and regret.

"To Auguste Colombini. He is a mechanician in Nice. We are to marry when he gets a rise. Hélas! je ne serai plus fille!"

Her words, so simply and directly spoken, caught at Archie's imagination—"Hélas! je ne serai plus fille!"

"What a vierge farouche!" he said to himself. "If I can get that feeling into my picture!" Aloud he said: "And your fiancé—he is very devoted, then?"

"He adores me. It is a perfect folly, see you, to feel for anyone what he does for me. He is mad about me."

She spoke with a calm arrogance that was very effective. How sure she was of her man! Was it a peculiarity of temperament in her or her fiancé that made such confidence possible? Archie flattered himself he was something of a student of human nature, and he absorbed all of Désirée that he could get in a spirit positively approaching that of the journalist.

When a man and woman fall into the habit of discussing the intimate things, such as love and marriage; and, above all, of comparing the sexes; disaster, even if only a temporary one, is apt to follow. Archie returned to the themes next time she posed for him.

"So you think a man can care too much for a woman?" he asked, and stopped for a moment with raised brush to watch her answer. She shrugged her shoulders slightly, yet enough to make the folds of her wrapper strain upward for a fleeting moment.

"As to that I think women are worth it. But it is foolish to care everything for one person."

"You could care for others, then—as well as M. Colombini?" asked Archie with a sudden stir at his pulses.

"I? One can care a little—here and there. But commit a folly for a man, that is a thing I would never do. And I am very fond of Auguste. If I did not think we should be happy and faithful I should not marry him. I look round on all the married people I know, and see nothing but betrayal everywhere. Here a husband plays his wife false, there she in her turn cheats him. Bah!—it is not good, that!"

"How right you are!" said Archie virtuously. "But you do not then think it necessary to care as much for Auguste as he cares for you?"

"Damme, no! How should I? He pleases me, and he is good—I can respect him. And I like him to kiss me . . ." the most charming look of self-consciousness mingled with reminiscence flitted over her face—"but for him—he is mad when he kisses me. Women do not care like that. It is a folly. And it is always happier, Monsieur, when it is the husband who cares the most. That is how men are made."

Oh, yes, thought Archie, she was a woman after all, this vierge farouche, and more unashamedly woman, franker in her admissions of knowledge—for she admitted in her expressive face and gestures more than she actually said—than any woman of his world. He worked in silence for a while then told her to rest.

She flung herself on the turf with an abandonment of limb and muscle usually only seen in young animals, and he came and lay a little below her and lit a cigarette. Désirée lay serenely, her face upturned, and he studied her thoughtfully.

"Surely very few of your countrywomen are as blonde as you?" he asked her. "Your eyes are blue, and your brows and lashes a faint brown and your hair is——"

He paused, at a loss how to describe her hair. It was not golden, rather that strong brass-colour that, had he seen it on a sophisticated townswoman he would have dubbed "peroxide." It was oddly metallic hair, not only in its colour, but in the carven ripples of it where she wore it pulled across her low brow and massed in heavy braids round her head. That way of wearing her hair right down to her brows, except for a narrow white triangle of forehead showing, boy-like, at one side, gave her an oddly animal look—using the word in its best sense. A look as of some low-browed, heavy-tressed faun, fearless and unashamed—it was only in her eyes that mystery lay.

"My hair?" she exclaimed, showing her big white teeth in a laugh as frank as a boy's; "but that, you know, is not natural! It was an accident!"

"An accident! How on earth——?"

"Why, I was doing the ménage for a chemist and his wife over the border, at Cannes. And she had hair like this, and one day she gave me a little bottle and said: 'Désirée, you're a good girl, but you don't know how to make the best of yourself. You put some of this on your head.' I rubbed some on, one side only, just to see what would happen, and next day I found one half of my head golden—golden like the sun. 'Mon Dieu!' I said, 'but what do I look like, one half yellow and one half brown!' So I poured it on all over. It is nothing now because I have not put on the stuff for so long, but at one time it was beautiful. Such hair! Below my waist, and gold, oh, such a gold! Now it wants doing again."

She ducked her head down for him to see the crown of it, and he perceived from the parting outwards two inches of unabashed dark hair—almost blue it looked by contrast with the circling wrappings of yellow. Archie, immensely tickled at finding this splendid young savage in the Back o' Beyond with dyed hair, could but shout with mirth, and Désirée, totally unoffended, joined in. When he went back that evening he felt he knew her far better than on the preceding day. In intimacies between men and women each day marks a distinct phase, making a series of steps; and the only possible thing to do is to see that the steps do not lead downwards. Like most people when on those magic stairs, Archie gave no heed to the question.

The next day he unconsciously took up their conversation of the day before—a sure sign of intimacy if ever there were one. They were resting again, for he said it was too hot to work; and the sunset effect he wanted was growing later every day.

"So you could care a little for some one else before you marry Auguste?" he suggested lightly enough, and looking away from her to the snow mountains that bared white fangs in the blue of the sky.

She laughed a little, stretched herself, drooped her lids, was in a flash, and for a flash, entirely woman—alluring, withdrawing, sure of herself. As she gained in poise Archie felt his own tenure on self-control slipping away from him.

"Could you?" he persisted, his eyes by now back on her changing face.

"How does one care? What is it?" she evaded. "I do not think you would be able to tell me. You are so cold, so English, you would care just as much as would be pleasant and never enough to make you uncomfortable!"

The penetration of this remark displeased Archie.

"But you are like that yourself," he objected. "You are the most cool, calculating girl I ever met—everything you say shows it."

She rolled over slightly on the grass, so that her head, the chin thrust forward on her cupped hands, was brought nearer to him but kept at the provocative three-quarter angle suggestive of withdrawal. Her thick heavy lids were drooped, but suddenly they flickered and half-rose to show a gleam so wild, so unlike anything he had ever seen in her, that Archie caught his breath. It was as though some alien spirit, a pagan, woodland thing, was looking at him through the eyes of the self-possessed, level-headed young woman, who at times even seemed more bourgeois than peasant.

"Désirée! How beautiful you are!" he cried.

"As beautiful as Mademoiselle your fiancée?" asked Désirée.

With a run Archie descended into the commonplace, and Désirée became for him nothing but a pretty girl who went rather too far.

"Englishmen do not care to discuss the lady of their choice," he said grandiloquently. "May I ask how you knew I was fiancé?"

"I have seen her picture in your room," said Désirée frankly; "the patronne told me there was one there. She is pretty, but yes, very pretty. Her hair is so beautifully done in all those little rolls, one would say it must be false. She is altogether mignonne, one would say the head of a doll!"

Désirée was absolutely sincere in thinking she was giving Miss Gwendolen Gould the highest praise possible. She would willingly have exchanged her splendid muscular body for the slim, corseted form of Miss Gould, and have bartered her strongly modelled head for the small, regular features and Marcel-waved hair of the other girl. It was only his perception of this that kept Archie from anger, and as it was the truth of the praise hit him sharply. That night he sat down before the miniature and conscientiously tried to conjure up the emotions of a lover. The experiment was a failure.

When he came to go to bed he found, to his amazement, a sprig of myrtle lying on his pillow—just a spray of leaves and a cluster of the purple berries with their little frilled heads.

"How did that get there I wonder?" he asked himself, and then stooped, with an exclamation of disgust. A corner of the turned back sheet that trailed on the floor was lightly powdered with earth as though a muddy shoe had stood on it. The footprint—if footprint it were—was oddly impossible in shape, short and rounded, more like the mark of a hoof.

"Can the patronne's goat have got up here? I saw it wandering in the passage to-day," thought Archie vexedly. "Beastly animal to drop half-chewed green food all over my pillow!"

The injured man thumped his pillow and turned it over, so that the despised myrtle sprig lay crushed beneath it. Then he went to bed and to sleep.

"I dreamt of you all night, Désirée," he told her next day.

"I was pursuing you round rocks and over streams and through undergrowth all night long. You were you and yet you weren't. Somehow I got the impression that it was you as you would have been hundreds and thousands of years ago. And I kept on losing you and then little satyrs beckoned at me to show me the way you'd gone, and I stumbled on after the hoofs that were always flashing up just ahead—just vanishing round corners."

"Satyrs? What are they?" asked Désirée.

Archie explained as picturesquely as possible, but was brought to a stop by a curious change in Désirée's eyes. They wore the strained, misty look of the person who is trying hard to catch at some long-lost memory. Again he was startled by that strange feeling that something else was looking from between those placid lids of hers.

"But I know," she began—"those creatures you are telling me—what is it I know about them?" She broke off and shook herself impatiently. "Bah! It is gone. And then what happened—did you find me at the end?"

"I can't quite remember," said Archie slowly "Something happened, but what it was is all blurred. I believe you're a wood-nymph, Désirée—a wood-nymph whose father was a satyr—and he chased and caught your mother and took her down through his tangle of undergrowth with his hands in her hair, never heeding her screams. You have very definite little points at the top of your ears, you know! We all have them a bit to remind us of our wild-dog days, but yours are the most so I've ever seen. Do you never take off all your clothes and go creeping and slipping through the woods at night, to bathe in one of the crater-pools by the light of the moon?"

"How did you know?" She turned wide, startled eyes on him, her quickened breath fluttered her gown distressfully.

"What!—you do it, then?" exclaimed Archie.

"No! no! What folly are you talking!" She sprang to her feet and slipped behind the oak-sapling, as though it were a defence against some danger; across the boughs he saw her puzzled, fearful eyes. As he watched her the expression of alarm faded—she put up her hand to her hair, gave it a quieting pat and tucked some stray strands into place, then she looked across at the easel.

"It must be time to work again!" she exclaimed. "Have we been resting long, M'sieu? I feel as though I'd been asleep and you'd just awakened me." She yawned as she spoke, stretching her strong arms in a slow, wide circle, the muscles of her shoulders rounding forward and making two little hollows appear above her collar-bones. The sight aroused the artist in Archie, and he too scrambled up, and betook himself to work. The sheep and goats that he had bribed the shepherd to pasture there happened to "come" as he wanted them that evening, and he began to work away at them in silence. One of the goats, a piebald, shaggy creature, reared itself up on its hind legs, with its fore-feet against the tree trunk, and began to nibble at the foliage. Something about the pose of the creature sent a swift suggestion to Archie's mind, and he just had time to rough in the legs, with their slight outward tilt, the hoofs set firmly apart and the tail sticking out and up from the sharply curved-in rump, before the animal dropped on all fours and moved away. Archie, with the smile of the creator in his eyes, worked on, and the goat's legs merged into the beginnings of a slim human body with the hands leaning against the tree and the head, tilted on one side, peering around at the figure of Désirée. Suddenly he gave an exclamation of annoyance.

"There is some one watching us from those myrtle bushes. Confound the beggar—some one from the village, I suppose."

Désirée turned sharply, just in time to see a brown face grinning through the leaves. It was a face compact of curiously slanting lines—upward-twitched tufts of brows, upward wrinkles at the corners of the narrow eyes, and a slanting mouth that laughed above a pointed, thrusting chin.

"That! That is only my little brother, M'sieu. It is one of God's innocents and lame on both feet. Sylvestre! Come out and speak to M'sieu—no one will hurt you."

The bushes rustled and parted and an odd little figure, apparently that of a boy of about ten, came scrambling out with a queer, lungeing action from the hips. The child's legs were deformed, but he swung himself forward at a marvellous speed on a pair of clumsy crutches. Archie saw that when he was not laughing his brown eyes were wide and grave, with a look of innocence in them that contrasted oddly with the knowing gleam they showed a minute earlier.

"But he is exactly what I want for the picture!" cried Archie, running his hand through the boy's tangled curls and tilting his face gently backwards. "He is exactly like the things I was telling you of. He must sit to me."

He deftly tugged the boy's shirt out of his belt and peeled it off him, exposing a thin little brown body with a skin as fine as silk. When he felt the sun on his bare flesh the child made guttural sounds of delight, flinging himself backwards on the ground; and, supported by his elbows, letting his head tip back till his curls touched the grass. As the shielding locks fell away, Archie saw with a thrill which was almost repulsion, that dark brown hair grew thickly out of the boy's ears. . . .

"Would he stay still, do you think?" he asked Désirée.

"He will if I tell him," replied Désirée. "Come to me, Sylvestre," and drawing the child to her she stroked his head and whispered to him with a motherly gesture of which Archie would not have thought her capable. He had listened to her exceedingly modern views on the subject of the family, and her own strictly limited intentions in that respect.

After the addition of Sylvestre the picture made great strides, even if the intimacy between Archie and Désirée advanced less rapidly than before. And yet every now and again, in sudden flashes of wildness, in a half-uttered phrase totally at variance with her normal self—little things that she seemed to remember from some forgotten whole, Désirée would give him that impression of being two people at once; and always, on these occasions, she was as puzzled as he, and with an added touch of something that seemed almost shame. For the everyday Désirée, that calm, practical and comely young woman, Archie's friendliness was touched by nothing warmer than the inevitable element of sex; but the shy, bold thing that sometimes peeped from between her lids, that thing that seemed to take possession of her beautiful body, and mock and allure and chill him in a breath, that thing was waking an answering spirit in himself, and he knew it. Miss Gould's portrait was unable to protect him from wakeful nights, when he turned his pillow again and again to find a cool surface for his cheek, nights when he would at last fling off the clothes and lean out of the window to watch the steel-blue dawn turn to the blessed light of everyday. He was living in a state of tension, and it seemed to him that some great event was holding its breath to spring, as though the very trees and rocks, the brooding sky and quiescent pools, were all in some conspiracy, hoodwinking yet preparing him for the moment of revelation.

It was on to the sensitive surface of this mood that a letter from Gwendolen, announcing her speedy arrival on the Riviera dropped like a dart, tearing the delicate tissues and stringing the fibres to the necessity for haste. Gwendolen, aunt-dragoned, and Baedeker in hand, meant the return to the acceptance of the old values that had once filled him with complacency. And yet, with all the jarring sense of intrusion that Gwendolen's advent instilled, there mingled a feeling that was almost relief—as though he were being saved, against his will, but with his judgment, from something too disturbing and beautiful to be quite comfortable.

Three or four days after receiving Gwendolen's letter, he put the last touches to the picture and informed Désirée he would need her no more. She received the news quite calmly, apparently without regret—thus do women tactlessly fail in what is expected of them. Archie felt absurdly flat as he wrapped up his wet brushes in a week-old sheet of the Petit Niçois. He also felt very virtuous, and told himself it was not many men who would have refrained from making love to the girl under the circumstances. It is astonishing what a comfortless thing is the glow of conscious virtue—it is bright in hue but gives off no warmth.

There was a little hut, used for stacking wood, close to where he worked, and here, thanks to the courtesy of the owner, he was wont to put his picture for the night. Désirée, as usual, helped him to carry it in and plant the legs of the easel firmly into the earthen floor. He had worked late, and the sun had just slipped behind the far ridge of the mountains; the tiny hut was filled with a deepening half-light, the stacked brush-wood seemed wine-coloured in the warm shadow, here and there a peeled twig stood out luminously. By the open door hoof-marks in the trampled earth showed that the patronne's mule had been carrying away wood that morning. That was as palpable as the fact that it must have been Sylvestre's deformed foot which had soiled Archie's sheet, yet those marks re-created the atmosphere of his dream, and seemed, in the sudden confusion mounting to his brain at the warmth and nearness of Désirée, to mix madly with Sylvestre, and rustled undergrowth and the glimmer of elusive hoofs round myrtle-bushes—and the glimmer of something whiter and more elusive still.

He could hear Désirée's breathing beside him—not as even as usual, but deeper-drawn and uncertain, and turning, he met the sidelong glance of her eyes.

"Désirée . . . you said you sometimes slipped out at night and played in the woods—and the pools. Take me out with you to-night and show me where you go and what you do. . . . I'll be awfully good, I swear I will—you're not a woman, you're a nymph, a strange, uncanny thing. I believe you meet your kinsfolk there and dance with them—Désirée!"

She looked at him for a moment in silence. In her eyes her normal and her unknown selves contended.

"It is true I often go out as you say, something drives me, but I do not know why myself. And I get very tired and can never remember clearly what it has been like. It is as though I did it almost in my sleep, or had dreamt it."

"It is a dream—everything's a dream, and I've got to wake up soon. Let's have this bit of dream together—Désirée!"

She yielded. They took bread and wine and apples for a midnight feast, and set off together over the lava-fields to the woods that tufted the mountain slopes. Through the deep, soft night the pallor of her face and throat glimmered as through dark water. She held his hand to guide him over the fissures and round the piled boulders, once he slipped on a hummock of harsh grass, and felt her grow rigid on the instant to check his fall. They were very silent, until, seated at the edge of the woods, they ate their supper, and then they laughed softly together like children, with fragmentary speech; and once Désirée sang a snatch of a Provençal song; Archie, who knew his Mistral, joining in.

Presently, when they fell on silence again, it seemed the wood was full of noises—stealthy footfalls, snapping of dry twigs, the rustling of parted shrubs. As the late moon, almost at the full, swam up the sky, making the distant snow-peaks gleam like white flames against the dusky blue, and shimmering on the pools cupped here and there over the hollowed expanse below, Archie could have sworn that the penetrating light showed quick-glancing faces and bright eyes from the thicket. . . . Once a great white owl did sail out with a beating of wings; so close to them that they could see the stiff brows that bristled over his lambent orbs, and once a strong smell and a gleam of black and white told of a wild cat tracking her prey.

They buried the disfiguring remnants of their little feast, and then Archie solemnly poured out what was left of the red wine on to the slope below.

"For the gods!" he announced, "the liquor for us and the dregs for them!"

"Ah!" cried Désirée, as though his action pricked sleeping memories to life, "now I remember it all again! I forget when I go home, but then the next time everything is clear again, and so it goes on."

She disappeared in a jutting spur of the wood, and Archie scrambled to his feet and followed her. As he broke through to the further edge, which hung over a wide pool, he caught his foot in something soft—Désirée's clothes that lay in a circle, just as she had slipped out of them.

She stood at the pool's brim, her hands clasping at the back of her head; a thing to dream of. She was so lovely that all feeling died save a passionate appreciation, keen to the verge of pain; she was so lovely that of necessity she awoke an impersonal motion. Slowly she stretched herself, and as the muscles rippled into curves and sank, the delicate shadows ebbed and breathed out again on the pearl-white of her body. Archie's every nerve was strung not to lose one line or one breath of tone.

Putting out a foot she touched the water, so that little tremors soft as feathers fled over the surface; then, as she waded in, deeper and deeper, the water parted round her in flakes of brightness that shook and mixed up and broke away. When she rose, dripping wet, the moonlight refracted off her, was mirrored in the water, and thrown back again on her—a magic shuttle weaving an aura of whiteness. Long arrows of light fled back through the pool as she waded to shore, where she stood for a moment motionless; head slightly forward, arms hanging, and one hip thrown outwards as she poised her weight. Myriads of tiny, crescent-shaped drops clung to her limbs like fish-scales, so that she seemed more mermaiden than wood-nymph, but Archie's eyes proclaimed her Artemis—she would have calmed a satyr as she stood. Thoughts of forest glades were chill, sweet sports were held, and the wildest hoof was tamed to the childlike kinship with Nature that is pagan innocence, floated through his mind like visible things.

Suddenly she became conscious of his presence, and gave one glance in which invitation and a certain calm aloofness seemed to mingle.

"Désirée!" stammered Archie, "Désirée!"

All at once excitement tingled through him, blurring his ideas, just as chloroform sets the blood pricking with thousands of points and edges, while dizzying the brain. She stayed still a second longer; then, either the fearful nymph swayed her utterly, or, as it seemed to Archie, a sudden rejection of him, the clumsy, civilized mortal, sprang into her eyes. She flung up her head, turned, and was gone in the tangle of the woods. Without more than a second's hesitation he plunged in after her.

To Archie, whenever he looked back, that night seemed an orgy of chase-gone-mad; gathering in force as it went and sweeping into its resistless flow the most incongruous of elements.

He ran after her, stumbling, tripping, whipped across the face by brambles. Everything in life was crystallized into the desire to catch up, to track her to the enchanted green where, with her, he could become part of a remote free life he had never imagined before. All his own personality, except that in him which was hers, had ceased to exist—work, Gwendolen, the great world, and the inn at Draginoules, were wiped out of knowledge by the force of his concentration on one thing. The arbitrary line drawn between the actual and the unreal, the credible and the impossible, sanity and so-called madness, was swept away. She, the descendant of the gods knew what strange race—a race that perhaps had lingered in these crater-fastnesses and myrtle groves long after it had died off the rest of the earth—was fleeing before him through a wood alive with brightened eyes and quickened hoofs; and in her veins the slender strain of blood derived from some goat-legged, tall-eared thing—a strain asleep through the generations of her ancestors, had mastered all the rest of her heritage, and was triumphant in her soul as in Sylvestre's body. She ran on, swiftly, and without effort, and Archie ran after her.

* * * * *

Dawn broke at last, reluctant, chill, showing the woods clear-edged and motionless as though cut out of steel, glimmering on the quiet pools and the ribbed lava slopes, though the hollow of the plain still held a great lake of shadow.

Désirée's clothes lay no longer by the pool where she had bathed; no trace of human presence remained; even the marshy edge showed only trampled hoof-marks, as though some goat-footed herd had watered there.

To Archie, breaking through the undergrowth at the edge of the wood, it seemed incredible that everything should look so much as usual. Still more he felt the wonder when, with the broad sunlight, he reached his inn. He himself felt so shaken in soul that even the thought of the Englishman's panacea—a cold bath—failed to appeal to him as a solution of all trouble. Plucked out of his accustomed place, flung by the sport of what strange gods he knew not, into a headlong medley of undreamed emotions, his values had been so violently disrupted that he could not have told which held true worth—the normal life of Gwendolens and one-man shows and newspaper criticisms, or what had passed in the woods that night. And, whatever strange rite he had surprised, and whether it were golden actuality that a man might live happy because he had once seen, or the mere wildness of a dream, there had been something about it which taught him not to blaspheme the revelation. He did not tell himself that the vin ordinaire must have gone to his head, or that he had been a romantic fool worked on by moonlight. This was remarkable, for few people are strong enough not to profane the past.

So much of grace held by him even when he found a letter awaiting him to tell of Gwendolen's arrival with the obedient aunt at Cannes, whither she summoned him. He debated whether to say good-bye to Désirée or not. The matter was settled for him by meeting her accidently outside the buvette. She was looking pale and jaded, not at all at her best, but her eyes were blankly unknowing and clear of all embarrassment. She said good-bye with charming unemotional friendliness and informed him that she was going to be married very soon—Monsieur Colombini had had a rise that justified it. Here was anti-climax enough, even if the cold bath, the letter and the prose of packing were not sufficient. And yet, since it had not been Désirée, the frank peasant, who had shown Archie the wonders of that night, his memories remained. Half-fearful and half splendid, not enough to make him walk with the vision beautiful, but merely enough to spoil his pictures for the public, because instead of being content with the merely obvious he was now always trying for something beyond his powers to express. Enough also, to prick him to an occasional weary clear-eyed knowledge of his Gwendolen—a knowledge that was hardly criticism, for he admitted his kinship with her world. And what it was that companioned him, that he strove to show in his pictures, he never entirely told; for just as no woman ever tells what it is her sex has and the other lacks—that something which makes all the difference—just as no man tells a woman what it is he and his fellows talk about when the last skirt has trailed from the dinner-table, so no one ever tells the whole truth about the beloved.

THE LADDER

THE LADDER

I
THE TRIAL

(Account taken from a contemporary journal)

"To-day, March 3, the Court being sat in the Castle at Launceston, about eight o'clock in the morning, the prisoner was set to the bar.

"Sophia Bendigo, of the parish of St. Annan in this county, was indicted, for that she, not having the fear of God before her eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil, on October 20, in the 24th year of his Majesty's reign, and again since, to wit, on October 21, with force and arms upon the body of Constantine Bendigo, Gent., her father, did make an assault, and in her malice aforethought, did kill and murder, by putting into some water-gruel a certain powder called arsenic, and afterwards giving to him, the said Constantine Bendigo, a potion thereof, knowing it to be mixed with the powder aforesaid, so that he, the said Constantine, was poisoned, and of which poison, he, the said Constantine, died, on the 22nd of the said month of October; against the peace of our Sovereign Lord the King, his crown and dignity.

"The Counsel for the Crown were the Hon. Mr. Bathwick; Mr. Sergeant Wheeler; Mr. Grice, Town Clerk of Launceston; Mr. Rose, Mr. Kirton, and the Hon. Mr. Harrington: And for the prisoner, Mr. Ford, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Walton.

"The Counsel for the Crown having opened the indictment, proceeded to inform the Court and Jury that this prosecution was carried on by the order, and at the expense of his Majesty (who is ever watchful to preserve the lives, liberties, and properties of his subjects) against the prisoner at the bar, Sophia Bendigo, for one of the most atrocious crimes; the cruel, inhuman, and deliberate murder of her own father: That the prisoner at the bar was the daughter and only child of Mr. Constantine Bendigo, Squire of Troon, in the hundred of Penwith, a gentleman both by his birth and education; that as she was the only, so she was the beloved child of her father, who had spared no pains in giving her a genteel, as well as a pious education; that her father, indeed, had used this pious fraud (if he might be allowed that expression) in saying that her fortune would be £10,000, to the end, he supposed, that his daughter might be married suitable to such a fortune. That in June of the preceding year one Capt. William Lucius Crandon came to Penwith map-making, and hearing that Miss Bendigo was a £10,000 fortune, and having a mind to marry this fortune, notwithstanding he had a wife and child alive, contrived to get acquainted with this family; how well he succeeded, and how sadly for this family, this unhappy catastrophe has shown. That Mr. Bendigo, having been informed that Mr. Crandon was married, he desired his daughter to break off all correspondence with him; that instead of doing so, she acquainted Mr. Crandon with her father's command, who, instead of clearing his character to her father's satisfaction, contrives the means and persuades this beloved, this tenderly indulged daughter, to be an actor in her father's destruction.

"That the Captain left Cornwall at the end of September, since when, on the miscarriage of his plans, he had disappeared entirely; and soon after he is gone, we find this wicked scheme beginning to be put into execution. That on October 20, Mr. Bendigo found himself much disordered after taking some tea, that next day, the prisoner having made him another dish of tea, deceased had thought it to taste odd and sent it downstairs; that Crandon, to hasten the work of destruction, sent a letter to the prisoner, making use of an allegorical expression, not to spare the powder, in order to keep the rust off the pebbles. That the tea being too thin to admit of a larger quantity at the time, you will find by the witnesses that shall be produced, that the prisoner did mix a large quantity of the powder in a pan of water-gruel and gave some of it to her father next day which had such terrible effects as to occasion his death on the morning of the 23rd. That he would call the physicians first, and they would prove that what was administered to the deceased was poison and the cause of his death.

"Mr. Harvey, of St. Annan, and Dr. Polwhele, of Penzance, were then called and both sworn; and Mr. Harvey said that, being on the evening of the 22nd sent for to Mr. Bendigo, he thus made his complaints: That he had a violent burning pain, saying it was a ball of fire in his guts, that he vomited much since taking some tea two days before and again after taking some gruel that evening, that he had a cold sweat, hiccups, prickings all over his body, which he compared to a number of needles. He desired to drink, but could not swallow, his pulse intermitted, his tongue swelled, his throat was excoriated, his breath difficult and interrupted. Towards morning he grew worse, became delirious and sank gradually, dying about six o'clock in the morning.

"Being asked if he thought Mr. Bendigo was poisoned, witness answered, He really believed he was, for that the symptoms, while living, were like those of a person who had taken arsenic; and the appearances after death, like those that were poisoned by arsenic."[A]

"King's Counsel: Did you also make an examination of the powder found in the gruel?

"Mr. Harvey: I did. I threw it upon a hot iron; boiled ten grains in water and divided the concoction, after filtering it into five equal parts. Into one I put oil of vitriol, into another tartar, into the third spirit of sal ammoniac, into the fourth spirit of salt, and into the fifth spirit of wine. I tried it also with syrup of violets, and made the like experiments with the same quantity of white arsenic which I bought in Penzance. It answered exactly to every one of them, and therefore I believed it to be white arsenic.

"Mr. Harvey further deposed that Mr. Bendigo told him that he suspected poison, and that he believed it came to his daughter with the serpentine beads, for that his daughter had had a present of those damned pebbles that morning; that if he, this witness, would look in the gruel, he might find something, that when he, this witness, asked Mr. Bendigo whom he imagined gave him the poison, he replied, A poor love-sick girl, but I forgive her; what will not a woman do for the man she loves?

"That later on the evening of the 22nd, Mr. Bendigo being a trifle easier, consented to see Miss, that he, this witness, was present when Miss came into the chamber, and fell down upon her knees, saying, Oh! sir, forgive me! Do what you will with me, and I'll never see Crandon more if you will but forgive me. To which Mr. Bendigo replied, I forgive thee, but thou shouldst have remembered that I am thy father, upon which Miss said, Oh, sir, your goodness strikes daggers to my soul; sir, I must down on my knees and pray that you will not curse me. He replied, No, child, I bless thee and pray that God may bless thee and let thee live to repent. Miss then declared she was innocent of this illness, and he replied, that he feared she was not, and that some of the powder was in such hands as would show it against her. Witness added that deceased, before Miss Bendigo's entry, had bidden him look to the remainder of the gruel.

"Prisoner's Counsel: Who was it sent for you when deceased was taken ill?

"Harvey: James Ruffiniac,[B] the steward, fetched me and said it was at the command of Miss Bendigo, who said, to-morrow will not satisfy me, you must go now, which he did.

"Prisoner's Counsel: All the years you have known Miss Bendigo what has been her behaviour to her father? Has she not always done everything that an affectionate child could for her father's ease?

"Harvey: She always behaved like a dutiful daughter, as far as ever I knew, and seemed to do everything in her power for her father's recovery whenever he was indisposed.

"King's Counsel: Did she tell you that she had put anything into her father's gruel and that she feared it might in some measure occasion his death?

"Harvey: She never did.

"Dr. Polwhele, having been sworn at the same time as Mr. Harvey, and stood in Court close by him, was now asked by the King's Counsel if he was present at the opening of Mr. Bendigo and whether the observations made by Mr. Harvey were true: he said he was present and made the same observations himself. He was then asked what was his opinion of the cause of the death of Mr. Bendigo, and he replied, by poison absolutely.

"Eliza Ruffiniac, being sworn, said, that on the afternoon of the 20th, her master being unwell, from (as they thought at the time) an attack of bile, Miss Bendigo, the prisoner at the bar, made him a dish of tea. That after taking it he was very sick, but seemed easier next day, when Miss again made him some tea which he did not drink. That next evening he sent for the witness and asked for some water-gruel to be made; that Miss on hearing of it, said, I will make it, that there's no call for you to leave your ironing; that Miss was a long time stirring the gruel in the pantry, and on coming into the kitchen said, I have been taking of my father's gruel, and I think I shall often eat of it; I have taken a great fancy to it.

"King's Counsel: Do you recollect that one Keast, the cook-maid, had been taken ill with drinking some tea the day before, and tell the Court how it was.

"E. Ruffiniac: Hester Keast brought down the tea from my master's room and afterwards drank it in the scullery, where I found her crying out she was dying, being taken very ill with a violent vomiting and pains and a great thirst.

"Prisoner's Counsel: On that occasion, how did Miss Bendigo behave?

"E. Ruffiniac: She made Hester Keast go to her bed and sent her a large quantity of weak broth and white wine whey.

"King's Counsel: Did you ever see Miss Bendigo burn any papers, and when?

"E. Ruffiniac: On the evening of the 22nd, Miss brought a great many papers in her apron down into the kitchen and put them on the fire, then thrust them into it with a stick and said, now, thank God, I am pretty easy, and then went out of the kitchen; that this witness and Hester Keast were in the kitchen at the time; that they, observing something to burn blue, it was raked out and found to be a paper of powder that was not quite consumed; that there was this inscription on the paper; Powder to clean the pebbles, and that this paper, she, the witness, delivered to Dr. Polwhele next day. Being shown a paper, with the above inscription on it, partly burnt, she said she believed the paper to be the same the prisoner put into the fire and she took out.

"This witness was asked if she ever heard the prisoner use any unseemly expressions against her father, and what they were? Replied, many times; sometimes she damned him for an old rascal; and once when she was in the dairy and the prisoner passing at the time outside, she heard her say, Who would not send an old father to hell for ten thousand pounds?

"Hester Keast, the cook-maid, deposed, That, on the 21st she bore down her master's dish of tea and drank of it, being afterwards taken very ill, that on the next day, being down in the kitchen after her master was taken ill, Lylie Ruffiniac brought a pan with some gruel in it to the table and said, Hester, did you ever see any oatmeal so white? that this witness replied, That oatmeal? Why, it is flour! and Lylie replied, I never saw flour so gritty in my life; that they showed it to Mr. Harvey, the apothecary, who took it away with him.

"James Ruffiniac was next called and sworn.

"King's Counsel: When your master was dead, did you not have some particular conversation with the prisoner? Recollect yourself, and tell my Lord and the Jury what it was.

"J. Ruffiniac: After my master was dead, Miss Bendigo asked me if I would live along with her, and I said no, and she then said, If you will go with me, your fortune will be made; I asked her what she wanted me to do and she replied, Only to hire a post-chaise to go to London. I was shocked at the proposal and absolutely refused her request. On this she put on a forced laugh, and said, I was only joking with you.

"Charles Le Petyt, Clerk in Holy Orders, was next called and sworn, and said, That, meeting Miss Bendigo in St. Annan when the crowd was insulting her, he took her into the inn, and spoke with her there, asking if she would not return home under his protection; she answered yes, that upon this he got a closed post-chaise and brought her home; that upon her coming home she asked him what she should do, that he, having heard her, said that they should fix the guilt upon Crandon if she could produce anything to that end, but in some agony she replied she had destroyed all evidences of his guilt.

"Prisoner's Counsel: Do you, Mr. Le Petyt, believe that the Prisoner had any intention to go off, from what appeared to you, and if she was not very ready to come back with you from the inn?

"Le Petyt: She was very ready to come back, and desired me to protect her from the mob, and she had, I am sure, no design to make an escape.

"Here the Counsel for the Crown rested their proof against the prisoner, and she was thereupon called to make her defence.

"Prisoner: My Lord, in my unhappy plight, if I should use any terms that may be thought unfitting, I hope I shall be forgiven, for it will not be with any desire to offend. My Lord, some time before my father's death, I unhappily became acquainted with Captain Crandon. This, after a time, gave offence to my father, and he grew very angry with me over Captain Crandon. I am passionate, which I know is a fault, and when I have found my father distrustful over Captain Crandon, I may have let fall an angry expression, but never to wish him injury, I have always done all in my power to tend him, as the witnesses against me have not denied. When my father was dead, being ill and unable to bear confinement in the house, I took a walk over to St. Annan, but I was insulted, and a mob raised about me, so that when Mr. Le Petyt came to me I desired his protection and to go home with him, which I did.

"I will not deny, my Lord, that I did put some powder into my father's gruel; but I here solemnly protest, as I shall answer it at the great tribunal, and God knows how soon, that I had no evil intention in putting the powder in his gruel: It was put in to procure his love and not his death.

"Then she desired that several witnesses might be called in her defence, who all allowed that Miss Bendigo always behaved to her father in a dutiful and affectionate manner. And Anne Lear and Elizabeth Pollard, women occasionally employed at Troon, deposed that they had heard Lylie Ruffiniac say, Damn the black bitch (meaning the prisoner), I hope I shall see her walk up a ladder and swing.

"The prisoner having gone through her defence, the King's Counsel, in reply, observed, That the prisoner had given no evidence in contradiction of the facts established by the witnesses for the crown; that indeed, Anne Lear and Elizabeth Pollard had sworn to an expression of Lylie Ruffiniac, which, if true, served to show ill-will in Ruffiniac towards the prisoner, but that he thought the incident was too slight to deserve any manner of credit. That the other witnesses, produced by the prisoner, served only to prove that Mr. Bendigo was a very fond, affectionate and indulgent parent, therefore there could be no pretence of giving him powders or anything else to promote in him an affection for his daughter. That if the Jury believed the prisoner to be innocent, they would take care to acquit her: but if they believed her guilty, they would take care to acquit their own consciences.[C]

"The prisoner desired leave to speak in answer to what the King's Counsel had said, which being granted, she said, The gentleman was mistaken in thinking the powders were given to her father to produce his affection to her, for that they were given to procure her father's love to Captain Crandon.

"The judge summed up the evidence in a clear and impartial manner to the Jury, and they, without going out of Court, brought in their verdict: Guilty, Death.

"After sentence of death was pronounced upon her she, in a very solemn and affecting manner, prayed the Court that she might have as much time as could be allowed her to prepare for her great and immortal state. The Court told her she should have a convenient time allowed her; but exhorted her, in the meantime, to lose not a moment, but incessantly to implore the mercy of that Being to Whom alone mercy belongs."

II
FIRST STEPS

To the making of such a scene as that recounted in the contemporary journal, much had gone during the months so crudely analysed. That damning pile of evidence had been building itself up, touch upon touch, since the first moment when Sophie Bendigo's eyes lit on the instigator of the trouble; and the causes of her own share in it had been strengthening from far earlier even than that. In after years the Wise Woman of Bosullow would recount that when the baby Sophie was brought to her to be passed for luck through the ringed stone of the Men-an-Tol, she had foretold for her the rise in life that eventually came about. True, the terms of the prophecy had been so vague that beyond the fact that a ladder, metaphorical or otherwise, was to play a part in Sophie's career, Mr. Bendigo had not been much the wiser. The mother had lain in the bleak moorland churchyard for several years now, but she had had time, during the most malleable years of a girl's life, the early teens, to impress Sophie with a sense of destiny. Not for her the vulgar loves and joys of other country girls, to her some one shining, resplendent, would come flashing down, and Sophie must learn to bear with powdered hair and hoops against that moment. For London, of course, would be her splendid bourne, and as to saying that hoops got in the way of her legs—why, hoops were the mode and to a hoop she must come. Since Mrs. Bendigo had died, worn out by the terrible combination of the Squire's slow cruelty and his suave tongue, Sophie had given up the struggle with hoops and powder, but she still lived for and by her vision of the future. If Sophie Bendigo had not glanced over her shoulder in Troon Lane, thereby presenting an exceptional face at the most alluring of angles—chin up and eyes innocently sidelong—to the view of Mr. Crandon, she might never have climbed so high. When she saw Mr. Crandon, his white wig tied with a black ribbon, and an excellent paste pin flashing from his cravat, riding up the lane, she never doubted that her star had risen at last.

Sophie Bendigo was of the pure Celtic type still preserved among the intermarrying villages of West Penwith. Her rather coarse hair was a burnt black, so were her thick, straight brows, but her eyes were of that startlingly vivid blue one only meets in Cornish women and Cornish seas. There was something curiously Puck-like about Sophie; the cheekbones wide and jaw pointed, while her mouth was long, the thin, finely cut lips curving up at the ends, and there was a freakish flaunt at the corners of her brows—Crandon thought of piskies as he looked. She wore a plain white gown, low in the throat and short in the sleeve, and she carried an apron-load of elder-flower, the pearly blossoms of it showing faintly green against the deader white of the linen.

"Excuse me, but does this lead to St. Annan?" asked Crandon, bending a little towards her. Sophie felt one swift pang lest he should be riding out of her life straightway, and swiftly answered:

"You are out of your way," she told him, "this lane only leads to our house. You must go back to the highway and follow it past the 'Nineteen Merry Maidens' and turn on to your right—but it is a matter of three or four miles."

For a moment they remained looking at each other, then Crandon said:

"Is there perhaps an inn near here where I and my mare could rest? We have come from Zennor this morning, and she is newly shod."

"There is no need for an inn," said Sophie, "we are always glad to rest a traveller at Troon Manor. I am Sophie Bendigo."

Crandon smilingly dismounted and walked by her side up the lane.

"It would be ungracious to refuse when the Fates have led me and Venus herself seconds the invitation. . . . Have you just risen from the sea, I wonder, that your eyes still hold its hue?"

Sophie, used only to the clumsy overtures of the county squires, flushed with pleasure, not at the allusion, which she did not understand, but at the air of gallantry which pervaded the man. She glanced up admiringly between her narrowed lids—Crandon was accustomed to such glances, so had his girl-wife in Scotland looked at him, before he deserted her and her child. He meditated no harm to this girl, no plan was formulated in his mind; and as to the ten thousand pounds, of which so much was heard later on, no whisper of it had then reached his ears. The road had led to her, her own face lured him on, and a few hours of a pretty girl on such a June day, where was the harm? The innocence and spontaneity of his feelings gave the Captain a delightful glow of conscious virtue, and he walked beside Sophie with a slight swagger of enjoyment.

The drive was a mere rutted cart-track; hemlock, foxgloves, purple knapweed, blue scabious and tall, thin-stemmed buttercups grew along the tangled hedges, and the blackberry flowers patterned the brambles with pearliness. The luminous chequer-work of sun and shadow fell over Sophie's white gown, and the green light, filtering through the trees, reflected on her face and on her glossy head, so that she seemed to be walking in the depths of the sea, and Crandon's simile gained in aptness.

At the bend of the lane they came on the Manor House, its whitewash dazzling in the sunshine, even the shadows thrown on it by the eaves and sills were so clear they gave a curious effect of being as light as the rest. Only the Bendigo arms—a clenched fist—carved on the granite lintel, had been left untouched by the whitewash, and showed a sullen grey. A few fawn-coloured fowls, blazing like copper in the sunshine, pecked at the dusty ground, and some white pigs, looking as utterly naked as only white pigs can, snuffled at a rubbish heap, their big ears flapping. A tall, lean woman, clad in a dirty silk dressing-jacket of bright yellow, was talking to a labourer by the dairy door. There was something oddly suggestive of secrecy in the turn of their shoulders and their bent heads, and the woman's soiled finery made her thin face—that of a shrewd but comely peasant, framed in an untidy pompadour of reddish-brown hair—seem oddly incongruous. The man lapsed into insignificance beside her, yet something of likeness in their sharpened lines, and in the tinge of hot colour showing up through them, proclaimed them kin. They were Lylie Ruffiniac, Squire Bendigo's housekeeper, and her brother James, who acted as bailiff on the estate. Sophie, her head turned towards her companion, did not see them, but Crandon did, and was pricked at once to curiosity. Living as he did by his wits, his every fibre was quickened to superficial alertness, though of intellectual effort he was almost incapable. An old journal for 1752 that published, in addition to its account of the trial, some "Memoirs of the Life of Lucius William Crandon, Esq.," had enough acumen to remark: "He was not, however, destitute of parts, for he would often surprise those who entertained a mean opinion of his abilities, by schemes and concertions which required more genius than they thought he had been master of. . . . As he was not of sufficient learning to qualify him either for law or for physic, he turned his thought towards the army, where a very moderate share of literature is sufficient, and where few voices disqualify a man from making a figure. . . ." And a figure Lucius Crandon certainly made—a figure that caused the woman in the yellow jacket to stop and stare, then to disappear into the house by a side-door—Crandon received the impression that she had gone to warn some one of his approach.

III
THE WOOING

It is said that rogues know each other by instinct—certain it is that the Squire and Captain Crandon had no need of disguises once they had crossed glances, and therefore each man cloaked himself with an elaborate pretence of being unable to see through the other's garment. It was not by any wish of Squire Bendigo's that Captain Crandon heard of the rumour of the ten thousand pounds, but when one has circulated a report with diligence for several years it is impossible to withdraw it at will, and so the Squire found, and it only needed this report of Sophie's marriage portion for Crandon to attempt the capture in earnest; what happened to the map history does not relate, but the Captain stayed at the "Bendigo Arms," making explorations in the familiar but always surprising country of a woman's mind. A mind simpler, more passionate, and more one-ideaed than any he had met before, a mind at once proud, confiding and reckless—a mind fitted, both by the quality of it and its loneliness, to be easily influenced by the flattery of love.

Sophie Bendigo had a fixed belief in her star. The predictions of the Wise Woman and of her eager mother, and her own knowledge of her superiority to the people among whom she moved, all tended to give her that confidence in her fate which does not think misfortune possible. She had always led a hard life with her best of fathers, the smiling old rogue who had never been heard to address a rude word to her, and who was harsh and immutable as granite. She had always waited, with such sureness she had not even felt impatience, for her opportunity to come, and mingled with the half-shy, half-innocently sensuous imaginings of a young girl on the subject of love, ran a streak of personal ambition, a hardness inherited from her father.

At first, before he had found out beyond a doubt that the Captain was a needy fortune-hunter, the Squire allowed his visits at Troon, and Crandon soon grew to be on terms of intimacy with the members of the household. These consisted of the Bendigos, father and daughter, Lylie Ruffiniac, her brother, and the servant, a girl called Hester Keast. The three latter were supposed to live more or less in the back premises and take their meals in the kitchen, but once when Crandon surprised Lylie Ruffiniac with the Squire, there were two glasses of spirits and water on the table, and, several weeks after, when he had to meet Sophie by stealth and at night, he saw a light being carried from the servants' quarters towards the Squire's room. As for Hester Keast, she was a pretty girl in her way—a way at once heavier and less strong than Sophie's. She had the dewy brown eyes, the easily affected, over-thin skin, and the soft red mouth, blurred at the edges, which betray incapacity for resistance. There was no harm in the girl, she was merely a young animal, with very little instinct of self-protection to counteract her utter lack of morals. Crandon kissed her behind the door on his second visit, and James Ruffiniac's wooing of her had long passed the preliminary stages—so long that with him ideas of marriage were growing misty, the thing seemed so unnecessary. Lylie's blood was controlled by scheming, and the most charitable explanation of the Squire's tortuous nature was that some mental or moral twist in him made him love evil for its own sake, and embrace it as his good. Such was the household where, for the last three years, Sophie had lived, practically alone—her egoism had done her that much service, it had won her aloofness. Crandon, who was by nature predisposed to think the worst of humanity, made the mistake, at first, of thinking Sophie's innocence assumed—it seemed a thing so incredible in that house of hidden schemings and furtive amours. When he found that partly a natural fastidiousness, and partly her young crudity had kept her clean in thought and knowledge as well as in deed, he wisely guessed there must be some outside influence on the side of the angels, and scenting opposition to his own schemes, he set himself to discover all he could. That was not difficult in such a sparsely inhabited district, hemmed in on three sides by the sea, and he soon made, at St. Annan's Vicarage, the acquaintance of its vicar, Mr. Charles le Petyt. He no sooner set eyes on the clergyman's plain and frail physique, with the burning eyes and quick nervous hands, than he knew he was right to fear him as an influence, though he could scorn him as a rival.

Charles and Sophie had practically grown up together, Charles' six years of seniority making him stand in the place of an elder brother to her, until he had become her urgent lover. Charles' father, the former Vicar of St. Annan, had given Sophie what little education she possessed—a medley of mythology and history, some incorrect geography, and a smattering of literature—all the things that go to fire the imagination. Mixed with these was a mass of all the wild legendary lore of the Duchy, solemnly believed in by the common people at that date, and by no means without its effect on the gentry. Sophie would not have been of her race and time if she had not had faith in charms, witches, death-warnings and love-potions; and in Charles the spiritual sense was so acute that, though from sheer sensitiveness it rejected the more vulgar superstitions, it responded like a twanged string to the breath of a less gross world. The finer side of Sophie, the delicate feeling for the beautiful, which owed so much of its existence to Charles, received a severe shock when she discovered the change in his viewing of her. She had been so used to think of him as her brother, and as her leader in the intangible matters which were sealed books to the rest at Troon, that the discovery of warm, human sentiments in him filled her with repulsion, and she took to avoiding him as much as she had sought him before. Poor Charles, whose earthly love, though as reverent, was as fiery as his heavenly affections, and who was handicapped by the lover's inability to understand that his devotion can be repellent, suffered acutely. It was some time before he understood that Sophie was so accustomed to see him burning with a white flame that she could not forgive him for being alight with a red one as well. A more sensual love, and coarser in its expression than his could ever be, would have revolted her less coming from a less exalted man—Mr. Le Petyt paid for the high opinion she held him in. If Lucius Crandon had never come to Troon, Sophie would in time have grown used to the idea of Charles as a husband, for there is no combination of circumstances, incredible as it appears to youth, that time does not soften and make bearable. But Sophie, destiny-ridden, gave no heed to Charles, save as a friend who had made her dread him even while she was still fond of him, and Lucius Crandon stepped in just when her nerves, awakened to the existence of actual love, were beginning to calm from the shock and even to set towards curiosity—just when she was most receptive. Pitiful and ignorant Sophie, whose only protection from gross housemates and a hot-blooded, cold-hearted lover, was a dreamer as guileless as herself!

With all his unworldliness, the unfailing instinct of the spiritual-minded warned Mr. Le Petyt against the Captain, and when the Squire, strangely friendly, sent word asking his vicar to come and see him on urgent business, Mr. Le Petyt guessed to what matter the business related. He found the Squire seated in his writing-room, a glass of rare old smuggled brandy before him and a packet of letters on his knee. The Squire was a big, pursy man, with a large and oddly impassive face, where even the hanging folds of flesh seemed rigid; only his small eyes, of a clear light grey, twinkled like chips of cut steel from between his wrinkled lids. His bull neck, wide as his head across the nape, sagged in a thick fold over his cravat, and his thighs swelled against the close-fitting cloth of his riding-breeches. The only contradiction to the stolidity of the man was his hands, and they were never still, but were for ever fiddling with something; with his waistcoat buttons, his rings, with a paper-knife, or the cutlery at table, or with any live thing they could get. Charles Le Petyt well remembered how, as a small boy, he had come on him superintending the reaping, and fingering a puppy behind his back. Whether the Squire was aware of what he was doing or whether his fingers did their work instinctively, without his brain, Charles never could decide, but when the Squire, turning away from the reapers, unlocked his hands, the puppy lay limp across his palm—the life choked out of it. The Squire stood still for a moment, looking at the little body, and then, moving away in a straight line from the labourers, so that it was concealed from them, he dropped it into a rabbit-hole and stuffed it down with his cane. Sick to the heart, little Charles stood at gaze, and glancing up, the Squire saw he was watched, and for a moment his impassive features were convulsed with rage—he looked as though he would have liked to treat Charles as he had the puppy. The memory of that day would have been enough, without the sight of Sophie's dread of her father, to prevent Mr. Le Petyt from joining in the general praise of Squire Bendigo.

The two men made a great contrast as they sat opposite to each other in the little room, the Squire solid and imperturbable, the parson transparent in mind and physical texture, the quick colour flying up under his skin with his emotions. The dust lay thickly over the table and books, for Sophie, the careful housewife, was seldom admitted here, and however Lylie Ruffiniac spent the hours when she was closeted with the Squire, it was evidently not in work. The evening light shone into the low-browed room through an ash-tree by the window, filling the air with a luminous gloom, gilding the dust films, gleaming on Mr. Le Petyt's shoe-buckles, and making a bright crescent in the glass of spirits which the Squire was jerking between his finger and thumb.

"You want to consult me on something?" began the younger man, going straight to the point. The Squire, with a gesture of protest for such methods, nevertheless fell into an agreeing humour.

"The fact is, Charles," he began, with that disarming air of candour none assumed better than he, "I have had cause to be uneasy at the intimacy between my dear but headstrong daughter and this Captain Crandon, so I wrote to a trustworthy man I know in London to find out all he could for me. His letter came to-day by Mr. Borlace, who was riding down in all haste from London to his wife's bedside—thus does Providence permit the trials of others to be of use to us."

Here he paused, but Mr. Le Petyt, throwing in no suitable remark, he continued:

"I will read you some extracts from the letter, and you shall judge for yourself whether a parent's anxiety has not been justified. Let me see—ah, here we are! 'I find' (says my informant) 'that about the year 1744 Crandon became acquainted with a Miss Isabel Thirsk, then at her uncle's. Miss Thirsk was remarkably genteel, delicate, and of a very amiable disposition, which gained her a great number of admirers. Her uncle, observing that Crandon always discovered an inclination of conversing with his niece alone, desired him to explain himself fully on a point so very delicate. Crandon declared he counted Miss Thirsk on the most honourable terms, but the young lady's uncle desired that Crandon's visits should be less frequent, lest his niece should suffer in her reputation. Soon after, this gentleman's affairs caused him to be absent from his home for some time, during which Crandon proposed a private marriage, which the young lady consented to, and for some time they lived together without any of their relations being privy to it. The natural consequence arising, and her uncle, some time after his return, suspecting it, she readily acknowledged she was with child, and protested she was married to Crandon four months before, adding, that her husband, who was soon to set out for London, had not yet publicly acknowledged her for his wife. Accordingly the uncle dispatched a messenger to Crandon demanding full acknowledgment of his wife before his departure for England. Crandon wrote in answer that he never intended to deny his marriage with Miss Thirsk, and that he would ever love her with conjugal tenderness, but that at the moment he had to hasten to London, which he did. There he every day saw young fellows making their fortunes by marriage, and he imagined nothing but his being married could hinder him from being as successful as the rest, thus he began to neglect a person whose beauty and virtue merited a more worthy spouse. When he returned to Scotland that country was involved in a civil war, and rebellion raging in its bowels. He found all the relations of Miss Thirsk joined in the mad expedition and in all probability would suffer at the hands of their country for disturbing its peace. He therefore concluded that it was not in their power to give him any disturbance, and, consequently, it was a good opportunity for renouncing his wife. The affair, at last, after various meetings and expostulations of friends, came to a trial before the Lords of Session in Scotland, who found the marriage valid and settled fifty pounds a year on the lady, which she now enjoys by their decree.'"

The Squire put down the papers.

"So much for Captain Crandon!" he said, in a glow of rage at the man for trying to deceive him, mingled with pride in his own acuteness and a dash of assumed piety: "Who but a person, something worse than a villain, could ever have indulged a thought of using so innocent, so lovely a being as Miss Thirsk in such a monstrous manner! Surely Divine justice will pursue him for this unnatural, this unheard-of piece of brutality!"

"Divine justice has at least saved Sophie from the same fate," replied Mr. Le Petyt. His first feeling was for her, his second, to his own shame, was the relief of the jealous lover.

"Ah—Sophie!" said the Squire thoughtfully—"that is where I crave your help. She is headstrong, poor child, sadly headstrong, but your opinions have always had weight with her. You have an influence, Charles. Use it to save my unhappy child from this villain Crandon."

"I would save her from all villainy if I could," said Mr. Le Petyt.

The Squire pulled the bell-rope, and on the appearance of Lylie, splendid in what even the guileless parson could not but see was a new silk, stiff enough to stand up by itself, the Squire told her curtly to desire "Miss's" presence. Lylie withdrew with downdropped lids, and a few minutes later Sophie appeared. She glanced quickly from one man to the other, and scenting a conspiracy, remained standing, her head up, and her hands strongly clasped behind her. She was against the window, so that subtleties of expression were lost to Mr. Le Petyt, and only the aloofness of her pose struck at him miserably, as confounding him and her father together. The big white muslin cap she wore showed delicately dark against the daylight, the outstanding frill of it framing the solid shadow of face and neck with a semi-transparent halo, and a yoke of light lay across her shoulders—to Mr. Le Petyt's quick fancy she looked like some virgin-saint of old at her trial.

"Sophie," said the Squire gently, "I feel I should not be doing my duty by my dear daughter if I did not inform her that her lover, Lucius Crandon, is a married man."

He watched, smiling. She stood a little tense, but with scorn of him and not with fear, and he went on:

"He married a Miss Isabel Thirsk, by whom he had a child——"

A slight convulsion swept over Sophie, passed, and left her rigid, and the Squire continued:

"A lovely child, I believe—a boy, and the image of his father. . . . But that is not the chief matter of interest. Captain Crandon deserted his young and trusting wife, and appealed against the validity of the marriage. The law decided against him, and condemned him to pay fifty pounds a year for her support. It was a sad scandal, a very sad scandal. You, my sweet child, do not know the wickedness of the world as I do, therefore I must shield you from it—in short, I forbid you to have speech with Captain Crandon again."

"Is that all?" asked Sophie.

"All—save that I should much regret having to lock you up in your room to enforce obedience."

"And you, Charles?" cried Sophie, "are you, too, in this plot to speak ill of an absent man?"

"Sophie," cried Mr. Le Petyt, "do not take it so, I beg of you. There seems only too little doubt that what your father says is true."

"You are against me, too!" said Sophie cruelly. "Papa, I am going to meet Captain Crandon now, and I shall ask him for the truth."

"Sophie! You will not believe him?" exclaimed Mr. Le Petyt, half-rising in his agitation.

"Every word he says," cried Sophie, with a little laugh of utter confidence. Her hand was on the latch, and the Squire, restrained by Mr. Le Petyt's presence, dared not put out a hand to stop her by force. For half a moment more the three emotions held—the scorn of the girl, the distress of the one man and the vindictiveness of the other, then the door had closed behind Sophie as the will to see her lover swept her on; and the taunt, one-ideaed feeling of the men fell into complexity as they turned first towards each other, then away, in the gathering dusk.

Sophie found Crandon awaiting her by the dam above Vellan-Crowse mill. The daylight was all but gone and a darkly soft glamour seemed to hold the full-foliaged trees and shadowed water in a hush of expectation. There was still enough of red reflecting from the West to make the grass and leaves a vivid though subdued green; but of the hollow in the bushes, where the lovers met, darkness already seemed to make a nest. Everything to lull the mind and stir the heart and blood was there, and Sophie's generous trust, her pride in taking his word against the world, were not more powerful allies of Crandon's tongue than the time and the place. It was of little avail later to marvel that his ingenious reconstruction of events won upon her; his garbled confession of a liaison with Isabel Thirsk, and denial of the marriage, his statement of Miss Thirsk's infidelities, and his evident nobility in voluntarily allowing her an income. As for the sin itself—"It was before I met you. You could make me what you will."

Sophie, only too willing to be convinced, sat by him in the little clearing, and listened almost in silence. Behind them on both sides the hazel-bushes made a faintly whispering screen of darkness, at their feet the mill-dam lay silent save for the occasional plop-plop of the tiny trout rising at late flies, on the further bank the hedge was a network of tangled black against the deepening sky, while overhead the elms and sycamores were pierced by the first faint stars. The two were set in a hushed sphere of aloofness, and for Sophie it was the world. "Trust me, my sweet Sophie—only trust me!" was whispered in her ear, and when she answered that she did, and he told her that if it were really so she would not draw away from him, she let his arms creep round her and his mouth come to hers. Weeks of carefully calculated love making had gone to make her pliable, kisses at which all the chill girlhood of her would earlier have shuddered, as it had at the same thing in Charles Le Petyt, she now bore, if not yet with passion, yet with the woman's tolerance of it in the man she loves. Crandon knew it was the moment to bind her to him irrevocably, for he guessed that to a woman of her type faithfulness is a necessity of self-respect, and with him desire was one with deliberate planning. Whether he threw a spell of words over her, or whether the mere force of his thought pleaded with her to prove she trusted him utterly, Sophie could never have told. She only knew that the still night, the soft air, the rustling leaves and the pricking stars, his presence, dimly seen but deeply felt, and the beating in her own frame, all cried to her, "It was for this that I was born! For this, for this, for this!"

IV
THE SPELL

Every one, on looking back at the past, even from the near standpoint of a few months, realizes how it falls into separate phases, unnoticed at the time, but nevertheless distinct. When she had reached her apex, Sophie saw how that night by the mill-dam had shut down one phase for ever, and ushered in a new one. Deceptions, and constant evading of her father's suspicions, secret meetings, to connive at which it became a bitter necessity to bribe the servants, hard Lylie and slow-tongued James—while at the same time instinct warned her to keep the thing from Hester Keast—all these were wearisome and galling, but by the quality of affairs with Crandon fell into insignificance, merely an added irritation, flies on a wound.

What first suggested to Crandon his idea of the love-potion was the discovery of Sophie's credulousness. Like all West Country folk, especially in those days, she was a firm believer in witches and spells, to an extent incredible to a Saxon. As late as the latter half of the nineteenth century an old woman was accused by a farmer of ill-wishing his bullocks and was brought to trial; while a "cunning man," or "white-witch," lived until lately in the northern part of the Duchy. A century earlier, therefore, when Cornwall was practically cut off from England, when even the coach came no further than Saltash, and travellers continued on horseback or in a "kitterine"; when newspapers were unknown, and books only found in parsonages or the biggest of the country houses; when animals were burned alive as sacrifices to fortune, and any man out at night went in fear of ghosts and the devil, then there was no one, of whatever rank, who did not believe in witchcraft. That Sophie, lonely, romantic, with the superstitious blood of the Celt unadulterated in her veins, should give credence to such things, was inevitable; and when Crandon suggested giving a love-potion to the Squire, so that he might feel his heart warmed towards his would-be son-in-law, she seized at what was to her more a certainty than a hope.

It was an afternoon in late September, and she and Crandon had met in a wood about a mile away from Troon, when he first mooted his plan; she sat beside him on one of the great grey boulders with which the sloping floor of the wood was covered, and listened with growing eagerness. It was a damp, steamy day, gold and tawny leaves, blown down in one night's gale, were drifted thickly in the fissures of the rocks and over the patches of vividly green moss; and livid orange fungi grew on the tree-boles. Sophie, always affected by externals, shuddered a little and drew closer to Crandon. Slipping his hand under the heavy knot of her hair, he laid it against the nape of her neck, and as she closed her eyes in the pleasure of his touch he looked down at her with a queer expression on his narrow face.

"You have the loveliest neck in the world, my Sophie," he said, making his hands meet round it as he spoke, "see—I make you a living necklace for it."

Sophie tucked in her chin, and bending her head, kissed the clasping fingers. Although he was not of those men to whom the attained woman gains in attractions, yet there were still things about Sophie—little flashes and gleams, swift touches, that fired him afresh. She stirred him now, yet he was cold enough to be glad of the stir because it gave him added eloquence for his purpose.

"I will get you a better necklace," he told her. "Nothing very fine, or what would the Squire think? I have been collecting choice bits of serpentine, and had them cut out and polished, and you shall have a necklace of them—the stones of your own country. Your throat will warm them, my Sophie, as it would warm my hands if they were cold in death."

"Death!" murmured Sophie, shuddering again, "we should not speak of it, lest it hear us."

"Then we will talk of love instead—of our love, Sophie."

"Alas, that way too lies sorrow! Lucius, what is the end to be? My father would kill me if he knew."

"Does he hate me so?"

She nodded, with the look of dumb fear in her eyes that thought of the Squire always brought there.

"Dear heart, we will change his hate to love. There is a way—if you will trust me and obey me."

A tremor of exquisite delight thrilled through her at the words. She had no arts of allurement, no strength of will to make her play the coquette with him, and she was unable, for the purpose of leading him on and tantalizing him to fresh excitement, to deny herself the joy of being his slave.

"Obey you!" she said, slipping a little lower on her rock so that her back-tilted head lay against his knee as she looked up at him, "I am yours for you to do with as you will."

Stooping, he kissed the swelling curve of her throat, and privately marvelled at her for being such a fool.

"Sweetheart," he began softly, "we will call in the aid of higher powers than our own. You know my mother was a Scotswoman, and she had the second sight, like your old Madgy Figgy of the Men-an-tol. She was learned in all kinds of charms, too. Well I remember as a child seeing her staunch the flow of blood from an old servant by crossing two charmed sticks from the hearth over him and saying a charm."

"It was Madgy Figgy who told about my ladder," Sophie said, "she has many charms, I know. She carries the water from St. Annan's spring to the church whenever there's to be a christening. No one baptized in water from St. Annan's spring can die by hanging, every one knows that. Was your mother as learned in charms as old Madgy?"

"She was a wise woman in more than mere charms, yet we will not slight her knowledge of them, since through that we will win your father's affection for me."

"If it could be!" cried Sophie.

"It can be. Listen, my sweet. My dear mother, in dying, left me, among books of the craft of healing and suchlike things, an old love-charm she had had from a Wise Woman in the Highlands. It is nothing but a little white powder, yet it affects the very heart-strings of him who takes it."

"Could it turn my father's heart towards you? Lucius, how happy we should all be. . . . But surely it might make him love some one else instead—Mr. Le Petyt, perhaps?"

"You should know better than that, my foolish Sophie. These things all depend on the intention of he who gives them. You have but to concentrate on me while you give it him, and all will be well."

"He would be furious if he guessed," objected Sophie.

"Neither he nor anyone else must guess, or the charm will fail. I will send it to you in packets with the serpentine beads, and mark it 'Powder to clean the pebbles.'"

"Why not give it to me?" asked Sophie.

"Because I have to go away for a time, my sweet. Not for very long—" as Sophie made a movement of distress, "but I have business I must see to in town. I will send you the beads to remember me by in my absence. Will you wear them for my sake, Sophie."

"I will wear them night and day, but I need no reminders of you, Lucius. But you—will you forget me in London? It is so big and far away and full of great ladies who will put your poor Sophie out of remembrance. Lucius, Lucius. . . ."

"My sweet, silly little Sophie," he whispered, soothing her as she clung to him, "how can you misjudge me so? Is not one black hair from your head, one glance from your blue eyes, dearer to me than all the women in the world? What have I done that you should think so ill of me?"

"Forgive me, dear. I know men are not like women, and I cannot see what there is in me to hold you—except my love for you. No other women could love you half so well, Lucius. It is my only gift, but it at least could not be bettered by anyone."

"I know it, my sweet," he told her, "and when your father is of a better mind towards me you shall give me your love before all the world, and then I need no longer travel alone. Would you like to see London, heart of mine?"

"Ah, with you!" breathed Sophie. "Once, before I met you, I thought of nothing but London, and how I meant some day to be a great lady there, but now I think of nothing but to be with you. Perhaps, after all, this is what the Wise Woman meant and my golden ladder is my love for you, and I've climbed on it from loneliness to joy."

"A Jacob's ladder, for the feet of an angel, then, my Sophie."

"If it could only reach from here to London! Oh, Lucius, need you go?"

"I must, my sweet. Don't make it harder for me."

That checked her plaint at once, as he knew it would.

"When do you go?" she asked quietly.

"In a day or two, sweetheart. Ah, Sophie, how shall I live without you?"

While she comforted him, forgetting self, he made a mental calculation as to how soon he could get away. He kissed Sophie's hair somewhat absently.

"I will write to you, heart of mine," he murmured, "and I will contrive so that he finds I have gone completely away, and that will lull any suspicion he may have against us. And while I am gone you will be working for us, my Sophie. Do not be alarmed if at first the powder seems to cause an indisposition. It has to expel the evil humours from a man before it can turn his nature to good. Give it to him in a small quantity once or twice, and he will vomit and be rid of this disaffection towards me, and the rest will work beneficially. Your father will arise and call you blessed, my Sophie, for having sworn him the evil of his own heart. Do not write me word when anything definite happens—I am leaving my servant at Penzance, and he will post up to me at once when you give him news."

"And then—then you will come down again, and we shall all be able to be happy. Perhaps my father will even dismiss Lylie Ruffiniac when his heart is turned towards you. That woman frightens me, Lucius. She is always looking at me as though she wished me away. No one loves me except yourself—and poor Charles. Hester avoids me, and James never did speak a word to me that he could avoid. Lucius, sometimes it seems to me that he and Lylie and Hester have all grown to hate me, that they would harm me if they could. It frightens me—Lucius, Lucius, what shall I do when you have left me?"

Crandon fought down his boredom and gave himself over to consoling her, with now and again a surreptitious glance at the watch dangling from his fob. He had another interview to go through—with Lylie Ruffiniac. She had to be fostered in the belief that he was going to take Sophie away as soon as possible, leaving the housekeeper free to influence the Squire—for Lylie's ambition rose to being legitimate mistress of the Manor, and Sophie once gone, she saw no reason why she should not attain her end. She knew that the ten thousand pounds was a mere myth, but that she kept hidden from Crandon, even bringing forward, as women can, apparently casual little pieces of information that would all tend to fix him in his belief. Crandon had been wise to impress on Sophie the necessity for keeping the love-potion hidden from every one—Lylie, who had a fine nose for a rogue, would have been in possession of his scheme—a scheme so devastating to her own—at once. As soon as safety and decency permitted he would carry Sophie off, go through the ceremony of marriage with her in a place where he was not known, gain possession of the money—and clear out of England for good. This was his last throw of the dice in his own country—let him but win the stake and he would disappear and enjoy his fortune elsewhere.

He took a last glance at his watch, a last kiss of Sophie's mouth, and scrambled to his feet. He walked back with Sophie as near Troon as was safe, then took an affectionate good-night of her, and started off for the cove to meet Lylie Ruffiniac.

"Thank the gods, that hard-headed vixen of a Lylie won't want me to kiss her!" he reflected as he went. "Ah, there's a woman might have been some help to me if I'd met her in the shoes of Isabel or of this Sophie. Lucius, my son, you are playing a very risky game, but the stakes are worth it. Ten thousand pounds, a fresh country—and entirely new women!"

V
THE LOVE-POTION

Two weeks after Crandon's departure the first instalment of serpentine beads arrived for Sophie. There was no concealing the fact, and Sophie replied to her father's suave inquiries that the beads were a keepsake from a friend. Enclosed with them was a tiny packet of white powder, on which was written "Powder to clean the pebbles," and this Sophie secreted at once.

A few days later the Squire was unwell with a violent headache and bilious attack resulting from too much port and smuggled brandy the night before—Sophie suggested that she should make him a dish of tea. In the night he was taken with violent sickness, but by the next day he had not only recovered from that but apparently actually benefited by it, as it had cured him of the result of his orgy. Next day, to continue the cure, Sophie again sent him up some tea, but this time the Squire thought it tasted odd, and Hester, on bearing away the dish, finding that the rare beverage was left untouched, hid it in the scullery and drank it that evening. She was soon taken with violent pains and sickness and a raging thirst, and it was in this condition that Lylie found her.

"My life, Hester, what have 'ee got?" asked Lylie.

"The pains of death, I do think," gasped Hester. "Oh, oh!"

Lylie looked at her unsympathetically.

"Simme you'm whist wi' en," she observed, "scrawlen' like that. Some bad you do look, though, there's no denyen'."

"I'm dyen'!" wailed Hester.

Sophie, who had come into the kitchen, heard the commotion, and went into the scullery.

"Why, Hester, what ails you?" she exclaimed. "Lylie, what has happened?"

"'Tes the pains o' death, she do say," replied Lylie, "but 'tes nawthen but to be in the bed and somethen' hot that she needs."

"She must get to bed at once. Here, Lylie, you take her arm that side and I'll take this. She's getting quieter."

Indeed, the worst spasms were over: Hester, weak and exhausted, was put to bed, and Sophie, her dislike of the girl forgotten in compassion, sent up weak broth and white wine whey. Late that evening as Lylie sat with the Squire, he asked her what all the noise had been about.