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Jane Oglander

By Mrs. Belloc Lowndes

"Something even more imperious than reason admonishes us that life's inmost secret lies not in the slow adaptation of man to circumstance, but in his costly victories and splendid defeats."

New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
1911

Copyright, 1911, by
Charles Scribner's Sons

Published April, 1911

CONTENTS

[PROLOGUE]
[CHAPTER I]
[CHAPTER II]
[CHAPTER III]
[CHAPTER IV]
[CHAPTER V]
[CHAPTER VI]
[CHAPTER VII]
[CHAPTER VIII]
[CHAPTER IX]
[CHAPTER X]
[CHAPTER XI]
[CHAPTER XII]
[CHAPTER XIII]
[CHAPTER XIV]
[CHAPTER XV]
[CHAPTER XVI]
[CHAPTER XVII]
[CHAPTER XVIII]
[CHAPTER XIX]
[CHAPTER XX]
[CHAPTER XXI]

JANE OGLANDER

PROLOGUE

"Elle fut née pour plaire aux nobles âmes,
Pour les consoler un peu d'un monde impur."

Jane Oglander was walking across Westminster Bridge on a late September day.

It was a little after four o'clock—on the bridge perhaps the quietest time of the working day—but a ceaseless stream of human beings ebbed to and fro. She herself came from the Surrey side of the river, and now and again she stayed her steps and looked over the parapet. It was plain—or so thought one who was looking at her very attentively—that she was more interested in the Surrey side, in the broken line of St. Thomas's Hospital, in the grey-red walls of Lambeth Palace and the Lollards' Tower, than in the mass of the Parliament buildings opposite.

But though Miss Oglander stopped three times in her progress over the bridge, she did not stay at any one place for more than a few moments—not long enough to please the man who had gradually come up close to her.

Having first noticed her in front of the bridge entrance of St. Thomas's Hospital, this man had made it his business to keep, if well behind, then in step with her.

A human being—and especially a woman—may be described in many ways. For our purpose it was fortunate that on this eventful afternoon of her life Miss Oglander happened to attract the attention of an observer, who, if then living in great penury and solitude, was yet destined to become what a lover of literature has described as the greatest interpreter of the human side of London life since Dickens.

When he was not writing, this man—whose name, by the way, was Ryecroft, and whose misfortune it was to be temperamentally incapable of sustained, wage-earning work—spent many hours walking about the London streets studying the human side of London's traffic, and especially that side which to a certain type of observer, of saunterer in the labyrinth, is full of ever recurring mystery and charm. He wrote of the depths, because the depths were all he knew, with an intimate and a terrible knowledge. But he had your true romancer's craving for romance, and his eager face with its curiously high, straight forehead crowned with a shock of rather long auburn hair, was the face and head of the idealist, of the humourist, and—now that he is dead, why not say so?—of the lover, of the man that is to whom the most interesting thing in the world remains, when all is said and done,—woman, and man's pursuit, not necessarily conquest, of the elusive creature.

Ryecroft had been already on Westminster Bridge for some time before he became aware that a feminine figure of more than common distinction and interest, a young lady whose appearance and light buoyant step sharply differentiated her from those about her, was walking toward him. As he saw her his eyes lighted up with a rather pathetic pleasure, and in an instant he had become sensitively aware of every detail of her dress. She wore a plain grey coat and skirt, and a small hat of which the Mercury wings, to the whimsical fellow watching her, evoked the Hellas of his dreams. A black and white spotted veil, which, as was then the fashion, left the wearer's delicately cut sensitive mouth bare, shadowed her hazel eyes.

Ryecroft noticed—he always saw such things—that the young lady wore odd gloves, the one on her right hand was light grey, that clothing her left moleskin in colour. The trifling fact pleased him. It showed, or so he argued with himself, that this sweet stranger had a soul above the usual pernickety vanities of young womanhood.

For a moment their eyes met, and he admired the gentle, not unkind indifference with which she received his eager, measuring glance.

In a sense, Jane Oglander never saw at all the man who was gazing at her so intently, and he never saw her again, but for some moments—perhaps for as long as half an hour—this singular and gifted being felt himself to be in sensitive, even close, sympathy with her, and in his emotional memory she henceforth occupied a niche labelled "The Lady of Westminster Bridge."

Ryecroft allowed Miss Oglander to pass by him, and then quietly and very unobtrusively he followed her; stopping when she stopped, following the direction of her eyes, trying as far as might be to think her thoughts, and meanwhile weaving in his mind a portrait of her having as little relation to reality as has a woodland scene in tapestry to a real sun and shadow-filled glade.

"Here," he said to himself, "is a girl who is assuredly not accustomed to walking the more populous thoroughfares of London by herself. Were she quite true to type she would be what they called 'chaperoned' by a lady's maid, that is by a woman who would be certainly aware that I was following them, and who would probably take my attention for herself. A dozen men might follow this young lady and she would not be aware of their proximity. There is something about her of Una, but Una so completely protected by a quality in herself, and by her upbringing and character, that she has no need of a lion.

"For me she holds a singular appeal, because she is unlike the only woman I ever have the chance of meeting, and because we, that gentle, austerely attractive creature and I, have much in common. Effortless she has achieved all that I long for and that I know I shall never obtain—intellectual distinction in those she frequents, the satisfaction attendant on proper pride, and doubtless, in her daily life, refined beauty of surroundings. She is very plainly dressed, but that is because she has a delicate and elevated taste, and happily belongs to that small, privileged class which is able to pay the highest price, and so command the best type of gown, the prettiest shoes, the best fitting gloves—even if she wears them odd—and the most becoming hat.

"But what has Una been doing on the Surrey side of the Thames?"

Ryecroft smiled; he thought the answer to his question obvious.

"She has been"—he went on, talking to himself, and forming the words with his lips, for he was a very lonely man—"to St. Thomas's Hospital, either to see some friend who is in the paying ward, or to visit a poor person in whom she is—to use the shibboleth of Mayfair—'interested.' It is a more or less new experience, and though she is evidently in a hurry, she cannot help lingering now and again, thinking over the strange, dreadful things with which she has, doubtless for the first time, now come in contact. She doesn't care for the Houses of Parliament—they represent to her the thing she knows, for she often takes part in that odd rite, 'Tea on the Terrace.' But she is timorously attracted to the other side—to the dark, to the pregnant side of life. And above all what fascinates her is the river—the river itself, at once so like and so unlike the Thames she knows above Richmond where she goes boating with her brothers' friends, with the young men with whom she seems on such intimate terms and of whom she knows so extraordinarily little, and who treat her, very properly, as something fragile, to be cared for, respected...."

When she reached the end of the bridge, after looking to the right and to the left, the young lady walked across the roadway with an assured step, and Ryecroft's eager, sensitive face brightened. This was in the picture, the picture he had drawn and coloured with his own pigments. "For this kind of young Englishwoman the traffic stops instinctively of itself," he said to himself; "and she has no fear of being run over" (perhaps it should be added, that this little one-sided adventure of Henry Ryecroft's took place before the advent of the trams). And still he followed, keeping close behind her. Suddenly she turned toward the Underground Railway, and this annoyed him; he had hoped that she (and he) would walk down Great George Street, across the two parks, and so into old Mayfair.

As an alternative he had promised himself the pleasure of seeing her get into a hansom-cab. Were she to disappear into the ugly gulf of the Underground it would disappoint him unreasonably. But stop! She had turned her back on the cavernous entrance to the station and she was gazing down at the posters of the evening papers.

The placards were all emblazoned with the same piece of news, differently worded: "General Lingard in London," "Reception of Lingard at Victoria," "Return of a Famous Soldier."

Ryecroft's lip curled. He had an intellectual contempt for the fighting man as such, and a horror, nay a loathing, of war. He knew what even a brief and successful war means to those among whom his own lot was cast, the London woman whose son, whose brother, whose lover is so often called Thomas Atkins.

And now, at last, he heard his lady's voice. She beckoned to the smallest and most ragged of the lads selling newspapers:—

"I want all to-night's papers:" her voice fell with an agreeable cadence on Ryecroft's ears. He was singularly susceptible to the cadences of the human voice, and he thought he had never heard a sweeter. She took a shilling out of her purse, and, rather to his surprise, he saw that her purse was small, black and worn.

"How much?" she asked gently.

The boy hesitated, and then answered, "Five-pence halfpenny."

She handed him a shilling. "You can keep the change," she said, and a very charming smile quivered across her face, "for yourself."

The man who was watching her felt touched—unreasonably moved. "Thank God," he said to himself, "that, unlike many of her friends, she has nothing to do with the C.O.S.!"

Then to Ryecroft's surprise, instead of going on as he expected her to do—he had already made up his mind that she was taking the papers home to an invalid father, or to a brother who had hurt himself in one of those mad games in which, as the watcher knew well, the young English oligarch delights to spend his spare time—the young lady turned, and crossed over again on to the bridge, but this time she chose the other side, the side which commands the more beautiful view of the London river.

"Dear me," he said to himself, "the plot thickens!" and then he suddenly told himself that of course she was going back to the hospital. The person she was going to see had asked for an evening paper, and in her generosity she had bought them all.

But on the bridge she stayed her steps, and, opening one of the papers, spread it out against the parapet, and began eagerly reading it, unheeding of the human stream flowing to and fro behind her.

Ryecroft gently approached closer and closer to her, and at last he was able to see what it was she was bending over and reading with such intentness: "General Lingard's Home-coming." "Splendid Reception at Victoria Station." So was the column headed, and already her eyes had travelled down to the last paragraph:

"To conclude: by his defeat of the great Mahomedan Emir of Bobo, General Lingard has added to the British Crown another magnificent jewel in the Sultanate of Amadawa."

Then came a cross-head—"Pen Portrait."

"Lingard is above all things a fighter. His eye is keen, alert, passionless. He is a tall man, and he dominates those with whom he stands. His life as a soldier has been from the beginning a wooing of peril, and as a result he has commanded a victorious expedition at an age when his seniors are hoping to command a regiment. He does not talk as other men talk—he is no teller of 'good stories.' He is a Man."

Jane Oglander looked up, and there came a glow—a look of proud, awed gladness on her face.

Then, folding the paper, she walked steadily on. But though she crossed over the bridge as if she were going to the hospital, to the side entrance where visitors are admitted, she walked on past the mass of buildings. Then she turned sharply to the left, Ryecroft still following, till she came to a small row of houses, respectable, but poor and mean in appearance, in a narrow street which was redeemed to a certain extent by the fact that there was a Queen Anne church at one end of it, and next to the church a substantial rectory or vicarage house. To Ryecroft's measureless astonishment, she opened her purse, took out a latch-key and let herself into the front-door of one of the small houses....

Three weeks later Henry Ryecroft happened to be in that same neighbourhood, and he suddenly remembered his Lady of Westminster Bridge. Greatly daring—but he ever loved such daring—he rang at the door of the house at which he had seen her go in.

A typical Londoner of the hard-working, self-respecting class answered his ring. She stood for a moment looking at him, waiting for him to speak.

"Is the lady in?" he asked, feeling suddenly ashamed and foolish. "I mean the young lady who lives here."

"Miss Oglander?" said the woman. "No, she's away. But I'll give you her address."

She handed him a piece of paper on which was written in what he thought was a singularly pretty handwriting:—

Miss Oglander,
Rede Place,
Redyford,
Surrey.

He took the little piece of paper and walked away. When he found himself on the bridge he dropped the paper into the river. "Oglander," he said to himself, "a curious, charming name, rhyming with Leander, philander——" he shook his head and smiled, "no, no, not philander," he said, speaking the words aloud. "Lavender, that's what her name should rhyme to,—Lavender...."

Henry Ryecroft, in his way a philosopher, would have been at first gently amused, and then perhaps moved and interested, had he known both how right and how wrong had been the kitcat portrait he had evolved out of his inner consciousness.

He had been right as to the type. He had even been successful in realizing something of Miss Oglander's inward mind and character from her outward appearance, but he had been quite wrong as to the present circumstances of her life.

It was true that she belonged to the privileged class who alone in the seething world of London have the command of money, and also the command, materially speaking, of the best. But if born and bred in the west of London, she now belonged by deliberate choice to the south side of the Thames. At a moment when she desired to hide herself from the world, she had chosen that ugly, formless district of London which lies between Westminster Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge because a distant relation of her mother's had married a clergyman whose parish lay there, and he had offered to find her in that parish plenty of hard work to still her pain.

As a young girl, Jane Oglander had lived the life that Ryecroft imagined her to be living now. While keeping house for a bachelor brother, she had seen, from a pleasantly sheltered standpoint, all that was most agreeable and amusing in the cultivated London world. Treated with the gentle gallantry and respect Ryecroft had supposed by her brother's friends, she was—as is so often the case with a young woman who has been almost entirely educated by men and surrounded with masculine influences—graver, less frivolous, more austerely refined than were most of her contemporaries.

Her nature, the core of her, was happy, tender, sensitive, capable also of a depth of feeling—and feeling always implies a certain violence—unsuspected by those round her. Thanks to the circumstances of her birth and upbringing Jane Oglander might conceivably have lived a long beneficent life, and have finally slipped out of that life without becoming aware that there were such tragic things as sin, shame, and acute suffering in the world.

Humility was not lacking to one endowed with many of the other endearing graces. Jane Oglander was very conscious of the lack in herself of those practical qualities which make their fortunate possessors ever punctual and unforgetful of the minor duties of life. She would forget to answer unimportant letters, mistake the hour of unessential invitations, arrive late for trains, and, as we have seen, tempt gifts her way by putting on odd articles of clothing which her wiser friends always wore in pairs.

But she was never found lacking in that beautiful quality which the French call la politesse du cœur. Thus, her mental lapses were never of a nature to hurt the feelings or the pride of those whose feelings and whose pride are often regarded by people more fortunate in a material sense than themselves as so unimportant as to be probably non-existent.

First her father, and then her brother, had been instinctively careful that she should only know the best of life. They had preserved her with firm decision from any of those influences which might have injured, thrown ever so small a speck or blemish, on her feminine delicacy. Her father's death, occurring when she was eighteen, had meant that the first year of her life as a grown-up girl had been spent in sincere mourning.

Two very happy years had followed, and then on a certain thirteenth of September—that is, almost exactly five years ago—there had befallen Jane Oglander a thing which befalls daily, it might be said hourly, some unfortunate human being.

There had cut right into and across her young, peaceful life a tragedy full of ignoble horror, of that horror which attracts the eager interest and attention of the morbid, the idle, and the vulgar.

Jane Oglander's kind brother, some years older than herself, whom she had taken as completely on trust as all normal young women take those who are near and dear to them, had left the club where he had been dining, and hailing a cab, had driven to a distant quarter of the town, a quarter of which the very name was unknown to his sister and to those with whom she generally associated. There, in the space of a very few moments, he had killed, not only a man who was regarded as in a special sense his friend and as a peculiarly harmless individual, but also the woman with whom he had found this man.

Certain circumstances of the affair, circumstances of quite an everyday nature, though they had appeared to the amazed and agonised sister incredible, had roused a good deal of public sympathy with Jack Oglander. Though the fact that he had taken a pistol with him, as well as some confidences he had made to yet another friend who had played a minor part in the sordid drama, pointed to premeditation, the verdict had been manslaughter.

Fortunately, as everyone except his poor sister thought, Jack Oglander fell ill and died a normal death in the prison infirmary within two months of his trial.

Friends had rallied—too many rather than too few—round the unfortunate girl; but her best friends, those to whom she felt she owed the greatest gratitude, were a certain Richard Maule, one of the trustees of her small fortune, and Richard Maule's wife, Athena.

Mr. Maule, at the time of the tragedy already an invalid, had been able to do nothing in an active sense, but his country house, Rede Place, had immediately become, whenever she chose that it should be so, Miss Oglander's home. In this matter the husband and wife were one in a sense they had scarcely ever been, but in the happy, cloudless days which now seemed to have belonged to a former existence, Jane Oglander had already become as much as a young girl can be to a married woman some years older than herself, Mrs. Maule's closest friend.

With these two dear friends was joined in the same wordless sense of deep gratitude Dick Wantele, Richard Maule's cousin, and in this affair his spokesman and representative.

It was this young man who, shaking himself free of a constitutional lethargy, had become the indispensable adviser and friend of both brother and sister; it was he who had persuaded Jack Oglander to plead "not guilty"; it was he who had gone to great personal trouble in order that Miss Oglander might be spared, as much as was possible, the dreadful publicity into which each such tragic happening brings innocent victims.

During the weeks which elapsed between the arrest and the trial, Miss Oglander learnt to lean on Dick Wantele, to ask for, and defer to, his advice, far more than she was at the time aware. Wantele's tact and good feeling, and his intelligent withholding of the sympathy with which she was at that time nauseated, were almost uncannily clever considering the end he had in view.

An offer of marriage very seldom takes a woman by surprise, but twice Jane Oglander was so surprised immediately after her brother's arrest.

The very next day a man much older than herself—whom she had regarded with the kindly affection and indifference with which girls so often regard one whom they unconsciously consider as a contemporary of their parents rather than their own—had come and implored her to marry him there and then. He was a member of the administration then in office, and he had hinted that by doing this—that is, by marrying him—she would almost certainly benefit her brother's cause. But though she was touched, and touched to tears, by the strangely worded proposal, it formed but an incident, to herself an unimportant incident, in days crowded with such pain and amazing unhappiness.

Some weeks later, while driving back with Jane Oglander from her first interview with her brother in prison, during that long—it appeared to her that endless—drive from Holloway to Westminster, Dick Wantele also asked her to marry him, and this offer she also refused. But Wantele would not allow his disappointment to affect their apparently placid friendship. He it was who brought her the news that her brother was ill, and he was actually present at Jack Oglander's mournful deathbed in the prison infirmary.

Rather ruefully aware that it was so, Dick Wantele now stood to Jane Oglander much in the position her dead brother had once stood. She had come to feel for him a deep unquestioning affection; it was to him she would have turned in any new distress.

They met frequently, for though Miss Oglander had become absorbed in the work among the London poor to which she henceforth dedicated her life, her happiest, her only peaceful days—for she took keenly to heart the material cares and sorrows of those with whom she was brought in contact—were the weeks she spent each year at Rede Place.

When there, the thrice welcome guest of Richard and Athena Maule, and of their kinsman and housemate Dick Wantele, Jane's content would have been absolute had her host and hostess been on the terms of amity Miss Oglander supposed all married people as noble as Richard and as good and beautiful as was Athena should be. But she had in this matter, as one so often has to do when dealing with a dual human relation, to compromise. She gave, that is, her grateful love to both these people who, if themselves on unhappy terms, were yet one in their affection for her.

It was to her an added perplexity and pain that her friend Dick sided with his cousin Richard Maule rather than with Richard's wife Athena. Nay, he went further—he took no pains to conceal his contemptuous indifference to the beautiful woman who was perforce his housemate for much of the year. Small wonder that Mrs. Richard Maule generally absented herself from home when her friend Jane Oglander was there to take the place only a woman can fill in a country house of which the master is an invalid, his heir a bachelor.

So it was that the two women only saw much of one another when Mrs. Maule was in London.

CHAPTER I

"A flag for those who go out to war,
A flag for those who return,
A flag for those who escape hell fire,
And a flag for those who burn."

In spite of many a proverb to the contrary, a plan or plot, when carefully imagined and carried out by an intelligent human being, does not often miscarry or go wrong.

The fact that Mrs. Kaye was now sitting staring through the window of the little waiting-room of Selford Junction was the outcome of a plan—what she knew well the one most concerned would have called a plot—which had succeeded beyond her expectations. She had come there secretly in order that she might see the last, the very last, of her son now starting on his way to rejoin his regiment in India. She was here in direct disobedience to his wish, aware that had he known she would be there he would have found some way of eluding her vigilance.

The plan she had made had succeeded by its very simplicity.

After the quiet, measured "Good-bye and God bless you, Bayworth!" uttered by the father to his only son at the gate of the poverty-stricken garden of the vicarage; after the mother's more emotional farewell, Mrs. Kaye, leaving her husband to go out into the village, had hastened back to the house. There she had flung on her shabby bonnet, and waiting a moment till the trap in which her boy was driving to Selford Junction, some four miles off, had turned the corner, she had gone quickly out of the garden. Walking at a rapid pace, for she was still a vigorous woman, she had taken a short cut across the fields to the small station where she knew she would be able to catch the slow local train which was run in connection with the London express.

Once at Selford Junction, it had been a comparatively easy matter for her to slip into the waiting-room and take up her station close to the grimy window commanding the platform alongside of which the express had already drawn up.

Mrs. Kaye had had two motives in doing what she had done. Her first and very natural motive was that of seeing the last, the very last, of her son. Her second, which she hid even from herself, was to discover why he had refused, with a certain fierce decision, her company as far as Selford Junction, where, ever since he was a little boy bound for his first school, she—his mother—had always gone with him when there had come the hard moment of saying good-bye.

To the tired labourer in the further corner of the waiting-room; to the sickly-looking, weary working woman, accompanied by two children, who had unwillingly made way for her, the sight of Mrs. Kaye was familiar, and, in an apathetic way, unpleasing.

Each of them—even the children—had disagreeable associations with her tall, spare figure, her severe looking weather-beaten face, crowned with still abundant fair hair streaked with grey. They knew, with a long, contemptuous knowledge, her short black serge skirt and the old-fashioned beaded mantle, which formed her usual week-day, outdoor costume in any but the very hottest weather.

The poor are better judges of character than the rich. Mrs. Kaye's hard good sense and intelligent idea of justice, secured her the grudging respect of her husband's parishioners, but her rigid closeness about money—which they argued must mean either exceptional poverty or else unusual meanness—alienated them. And yet the working woman, sitting there, looked at Mrs. Kaye with a certain furtive sympathy. She well knew that Bayworth Kaye—he had been christened Bayworth because it was his mother's maiden name—was leaving for India that day.

Now Bayworth was in a sense part of the village. He had been born at the Vicarage. His father's parishioners had followed him through each of the stages of his successful young life, and they all liked him; partly because the kind of success Bayworth Kaye had achieved is not the kind which arouses dislike or envy, and even more because he was an open-handed and good-natured young gentleman, very unlike—so the villagers would have told you—either his gentle, unpractical father or his hard mother.

Also, and this was very present to the woman now watching Mrs. Kaye, "th' parson's son" had been, during the last few months, the hero of one of those dramas which, because of certain elemental passions slumbering in all men and in most women, whatever their rank or condition, always arouse a certain uneasy, speculative interest and sympathy in the onlooker. All unconsciously the village was grateful to young Kaye for having provided them with something to talk about, something to laugh about, something, above all, to relieve the uneventful dullness of their lives.

This was why the man and woman whom Mrs. Kaye—if she was conscious of their presence at all—regarded as merely of the earth, earthy, were keenly aware of the last act of the tragi-comedy being played before their eyes. They knew why their clergyman's wife was sitting here in the waiting-room, instead of standing out on the platform saying a last word to her son; and over each stolid face there came, when the eyes of these same faces thoroughly realised at what the lady sitting by the window was looking, an expression of cunning amusement, as well as of doubtful sympathy.

Mrs. Kaye's eyes were fixed on a group composed of two people, a man and a woman. The man—her son Bayworth Kaye—was standing inside one of the first-class carriages of the London express; and below him on the platform, her right hand resting on the sash of the open carriage window, stood Mrs. Maule, the woman whom Mrs. Kaye had only half expected to see there. In coming to Selford Junction to see the last of Bayworth Kaye, Mrs. Maule was doing a very daring thing; those of her neighbours and acquaintances whose opinion counted in the neighbourhood would have said a very improper and shocking thing.

To Mrs. Kaye—such being her nature—there was a certain cruel satisfaction in the knowledge that she had been right in her suspicion as to why her son had told her that he would far prefer, this time, to say good-bye at home. Given all that had gone before, it was not surprising that Mrs. Kaye had guessed the reason why her boy had refused her company at Selford Junction.

And yet, now that the reason stood before her, embodied in a slim, gracefully posed figure which she and the two dumb spectators of the little scene knew to be that of the squire's wife, she felt a dull pang of resentful surprise.

She had hoped against hope that Bayworth would be here alone, and that there might perhaps come her chance of a last word which would break down the high, gateless barrier which had risen during the last few months between herself and her son. Mrs. Kaye staring dumbly through the waiting-room window knew that last word would never now be uttered.

Young Kaye's good-looking, fair face—the look of breeding derived from his mother's forebears crossed with the more solid good looks which had been his father's—was set in hard lines; yet he was making a gallant effort to bear himself well, and he was smiling the painful smile which is so far removed from mirth. The anguished pain of parting, the agony he was feeling had found refuge only in the eyes which were fixed on his companion's face.

Mrs. Kaye tried to see if that beautiful face, into which her son was gazing with so strange and tragic a look of hungry pain, reflected any of his feeling. But the delicately pure profile, the perfect curve of cheek and neck, the tiny ear half concealed by carefully dressed masses of dark hair, in their turn covered by a long grey veil becomingly wound round the green deer-stalker hat, revealed nothing.

Now and again she could see Mrs. Maule's red lips—lips that told of admirable physical fitness—move as if in answer to something the other said.

Bayworth Kaye was leaning out, speaking earnestly. With a sudden gesture his lean, brown fingers closed on the little gloved hand resting on the window-sill. Mrs. Kaye could not hear what her son was saying, and she would have given the world to know, but in the composed, steady glance directed by her through the waiting-room window there was nothing to show the bitter, helpless anger which oppressed her.

The excursion train for which the express had been waiting glided into the station. Mrs. Kaye reminded herself with a strange mixture of feelings that the time was growing very short; that not long would her eyes be offended, as they were now being offended. In five minutes the London train was due to start.

And then there came over the mother an overmastering desire which swept everything before it. She must hear what it was her boy was saying; she must see him clearly once more; she must run the risk of his becoming aware that she had spied on him.

Mrs. Kaye rose from the hard wooden seat, and she made what was for her a mighty effort to open the grimy waiting-room window; but it remained fast.

Words were muttered behind her, words of which in her agitation she was quite unconscious.

"Help the lady, can't ye!"

The big labourer in the corner rose to his feet; he lumbered across the boarded floor, and laid his mighty shoulder against the sash; the flange gave way, and as the window opened there seemed to rush in a loud, confused wave of sound. A crowd of Saturday holiday-makers were streaming over the platform, and as they swayed backwards and forwards they completely hid for a moment the man and woman on whom Mrs. Kaye's eyes had been fixed.

Then, as if the scene before her had been stage-managed by some master of his craft, the crowd thinned, divided in two, seeking on either side the few third-class carriages in the express, and Mrs. Kaye once more saw her son and Athena Maule; saw, with a sharp pang, that the look of strain and anguish had deepened on Bayworth Kaye's face, that his poor pretence at a smile had gone.

The train groaned and moved a little forward, bringing the first-class carriages quite close to the waiting-room window. Putting out her hand, Mrs. Kaye could almost have touched Mrs. Maule on the shoulder; she shrank back, but the two on whom her whole attention was fixed were so far absorbed in each other as to be quite oblivious of everything round them. And at last Mrs. Kaye heard the voice she loved best in the world, nay the only voice she had ever really loved—asking the pitiful, futile little question:

"Athena? Darling—say you're sorry I'm going!"

There was a pause, and then the woman to whom the question had been put did in answer a very extraordinary thing. After having looked round, and with furtive, deliberate scrutiny noted that the platform was now practically deserted save for one man standing some way off, facing the bookstall and with his back to the express—she moved for a moment up on to the step of the railway carriage and turned her face, the lovely face now flushed with something like tenderness and pity, up to the young man.

"Of course I'm sorry you're going——"

Her clear, delicately modulated tones floated across the short space to where Mrs. Kaye was sitting.

"Kiss me," breathed the beautiful lips; and then with a touch of impatience, "You can kiss me good-bye. Don't you understand?"

His sudden response, the way his arm shot out and crushed her face, her slender shoulders, was far more than she had bargained for. She stepped back and shook herself like a bird whose plumage has been ruffled.

And then the train began to move.

Young Kaye leant out, dangerously far, but, in answer to a slight movement of Mrs. Maule's hand, he sank back quite out of his mother's sight. She heard his last hoarse cry of "good-bye," and for the moment it had a strange effect on her heart. It seemed to set a seal on her deep pain and wrath, to bring a certain fierce comfort in the knowledge that her boy was gone, that he had left the shameful joy of the last year, the tragic pain of the last few weeks, behind him. She even told herself that, in the years that must elapse before he came home again, he would have time to forget—as men do forget—the woman who had made such a fool and worse, such a traitor, of him.

Mrs. Maule stood for a while looking after the train. Things had not fallen out quite as she had expected them to do. She sometimes—not often—acted on sheer impulse, but she seldom did so without very soon repenting of it. She had been suddenly moved to do a daring thing,—one of those things which give a sharp edge to a blurred emotion. But she had not known how to allow, so she told herself, frowning, for the existence in the subject of her experiment of an unreasonably primitive violence of feeling.

She moved back and looked about her with an uncomfortable, rather fearful, look in her eyes. As she did so, the man standing by the bookstall also moved, and she became aware, with the quick instinct she had for such things, that he had a striking, in fact, a very peculiar face. She hoped he had seen nothing of that foolish little scene with Bayworth Kaye.

As she looked at the stranger—he was still unconscious of her presence—a wave of colour came over her face, or rather over as much of her face as the veil swathed about her hat allowed to be seen of it. With a curious, impulsive, un-English movement she pulled off one of her gloves and put up her hand to her hot cheek. Then she turned abruptly and began walking to the further end of the platform.

Mrs. Kaye, looking grimly after her, believed that Athena Maule had seen her, and, having the grace to be ashamed, had blushed. But, in so thinking, the clergyman's wife made one of her usual mistakes concerning the men and women with whom her life brought her into unwilling contact. Mrs. Maule had not seen her, and had she done so it may be doubted whether she would have felt any more ashamed or annoyed than she did now.

With a feeling of infinite lassitude, of physical as well as mental fatigue, Mrs. Kaye turned her back on the window through which she had seen a sight which was to remain with her for ever.

There were still some minutes to run before there would come into the station the local train in which she could return to her now empty home, and so drearily her mind went back, taking a rapid survey of the whole of her son's short life and hitherto most prosperous career.

Mrs. Kaye came herself of a long line of distinguished soldiers, and even before her child's birth she had been determined that he should follow in the footsteps of her own people, not in those of his mild, kindly father's. From his cradle the lad had been dedicated to the god of battles, and only the mother herself knew what her intention had cost her in the way of self-denial and of incessant effort.

Inadequate as had been their clerical income, supplemented by pitifully small private means, she and her husband had grudged nothing to Bayworth. Mrs. Kaye was a clever woman, cleverer than most; she had been at some pains to find out the best way in which to put a boy through the modern military mill, and everything had gone with almost fairy-like smoothness from first to last.

From the preparatory school, where she had ascertained that he would have among his mates the sons of the then Minister for War, down to the day when he had won the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst, young Kaye had been everything that even his exacting mother had desired. Nay more, he had once or twice said a word—only a word, but still it had amply repaid Mrs. Kaye for all she had gone through—implying that he understood the sacrifices his father and mother had made for his sake.

When he had been specially chosen to take part in a dangerous frontier expedition, it was his father who had appeared miserably anxious, but it was with his mother, softened, carried out of herself, that the whole neighbourhood had eagerly sympathised when there had come the glorious news that Bayworth Kaye had been mentioned in despatches for an act of reckless courage and gallantry, and recommended for the Victoria Cross.

Then had followed the lad's happy home-coming, and quite suddenly, before—so it now seemed to his mother—Bayworth had been back a week, Mrs. Maule had thrown over him the web of her fascinations. Not content with having him constantly about her at Rede Place, she had procured for him invitations to the houses where she stayed, and made him her slave in a sense Mrs. Kaye had not known men could be enslaved.

Mother and son had had one painful discussion in which the mother had been worsted. With terror she had plumbed for a moment the hidden depths of her boy's heart. "You tell me there has been talk," he said very quietly. "If you will give me the name of any man who has talked unbecomingly of Mrs. Maule, I will deal with him——" "Deal with him, Bayworth? What could you do?" "I could kill him." He had uttered the words almost indifferently, and Mrs. Kaye looking into his set face had said no more.

It was well that his father had known and suspected nothing.

The whole matter was to Mrs. Kaye the more amazing and iniquitous because she had hitherto always defended Mrs. Maule when that lady's conduct was discussed, as it constantly was discussed, in the neighbourhood of Rede Place. At Redyford Vicarage such talk had never been tolerated; and with a few stinging words of rebuke Mrs. Kaye had ever put the gossips in their places.

It had suited her far better to have to deal with a brilliant, beautiful, rather reckless woman, who was much away from home, and who always treated her with the courtesy and indifferent good-humour due to an equal, rather than with the type of great lady to whom she knew some of the other clergy's wives were in subjection.

CHAPTER II

"L'opinion dispose de tout. Elle fait la beauté, la justice, et le bonheur qui est le tout du monde."

To say that the most important events of life often turn on trifling incidents has become a truism, and yet it may be doubted if any of us realise how especially true this is concerning the greatest of human riddles, the riddle of sex.

Had the man of whose presence on the platform of Selford Junction Mrs. Maule had become aware, turned round and watched the London express before it steamed out of the station, his own immediate future, to say nothing of that secret, inner life of memory which each human being carries as a burden, might have been considerably modified. But at the moment when Mrs. Maule had been engaged in trying her not very happy experiment with Bayworth Kaye, the only other occupant of the platform was staring with a good deal of interest and curiosity at a long row of illustrated newspaper pages pinned dado-wise round the top of the bookstall.

The newsagent's clerk, when arranging his wares that morning, had had what he felt to be an unusually bright idea. Picking out what he considered the two most attractive items in the illustrated paper with which he was dealing, he had repeated these items alternately with what to most onlookers would have seemed an irritating regularity.

The two pages he had selected for this honour were very different. The one consisted of a set of photographs, nine officers in uniform: General Hew Lingard and his Staff, just returned home after the victorious Amadawa Expedition. "Here," the bookstall clerk had probably argued unconsciously, and quite wrongly, to himself, "is a page that will interest gentlemen and boys. Now I must find something that will cause ladies to purchase the paper," and he had accordingly put next to the page of military portraits one consisting of a single illustration—the reproduction of a beautiful painting of a beautiful woman.

The man staring up at the black and white pages was true to what the clerk took to be the masculine type of newspaper buyer and reader, for he devoted his whole attention to the group of military portraits. He had, however, a special reason for staring up as he was now doing at the rather absurd dado, for it was his own portrait which occupied the place of honour in the centre of the page.

Being the manner of man he was, Hew Lingard felt at once elated and ashamed at seeing himself hung up in this queer pillory of fame. He was moved more than he would have cared to admit, even to himself, at seeing the honour paid to that old photograph taken some seven years before, at a time when he was out of love with life, having been, as he imagined, shelved by a small home appointment.

The portraits of his staff were comparatively new; they had doubtless been supplied in haste by the happy mothers and sisters of the sitters, and his grey eyes, set under deep overhanging brows, rested on them proudly. It was to these eight comrades—so he would have been the first to admit, nay to insist—that he had owed much of the sudden overwhelming success which had now come to him.

At last he resolutely concentrated his attention on the opposite illustration, and coming up a little closer to the stall, he read what was printed underneath:

"This modern picture, only painted ten years ago, fetched ten thousand pounds at Christie's last week. It is a portrait of the beautiful Mrs. Richard Maule in the character of a Greek nymph. Mrs. Maule, before her marriage to the well-known owner of Rede Place, one of the show places of Surrey, was Miss Athena Durdon. Her father was British Consul at Athens, and her mother a Greek lady of rank; hence her interesting and unusual Christian name."

"Why, it's Jane's friend," he said to himself. "How very odd that I should see it here and now!"

General Lingard had glanced at the illustration, when his eye had first caught sight of it, with distaste. But now that he knew that this rather fantastic picture was a painting of the dearest friend of the woman who was going to be his wife, he looked with kind, considering, and even eager eyes at the Greek nymph.

The famous soldier did not find it easy to adjust his imaginary portrait of Athena Maule, Jane Oglander's Athena, to this lovely embodiment of a pagan myth. But artists, or so he supposed, sometimes times take strange liberties with their sitters—besides, this was not in any sense a portrait....

"Your train's in, sir. Redyford is the second station from here."

He turned away and walked quickly to the side-platform where the short local train was standing ready to start.

There were still some minutes to spare, and Mrs. Maule, on her way to the train, stopped and looked up with a curious sensation in which pleasure and anger both played a part, at the dado formed of the two pages taken from the Illustrated London News.

Only one of those pages—that which was a reproduction of the picture sold the week before at Christie's—attracted her attention and aroused in her very mixed sensations: pleasure at the thought that her portrait should be displayed in a fashion so wholly satisfying to her own critical and now highly educated taste; anger at the knowledge that the splendid painting had been sold to an American, instead stead of taking its place in the picture-gallery of Rede Place. When the picture had suddenly come into the market, she had ardently desired that her husband should buy it, and she had even ventured to convey her wish to him through his cousin, Dick Wantele, but to her mortification Richard Maule had refused.

Mrs. Maule now remembered with a sharp pang of self-pity the circumstances which had surrounded the painting of this picture. A portrait which her husband had commissioned the famous artist to paint of her was scarcely begun when the painter, who had taken an adjoining villa to theirs at Naples for the winter, had asked her whether she would sit to him in the character of a Greek nymph. Pleased and flattered, she had assented. Then, mentioning what she was about to do to her then indulgent and adoring husband, he, to her great astonishment, had disliked the idea: disliked it sufficiently to beg her as a personal favour to himself to make some excuse for not keeping her promise.

But even in those malleable days Athena Maule was incapable of denying herself a fleeting gratification. While appearing to assent to her husband's wish she had secretly fulfilled her promise to the artist, and the picture had excited such keen admiration when it was first exhibited that it had made Mrs. Richard Maule's beauty famous even before she came to England. The episode had also resulted in her first serious quarrel with Richard Maule.

When he had first seen the painting—for rather against her will the great artist had insisted on showing it to him—Mr. Maule had expressed an admiration it was impossible not to feel for the technical qualities of the work, but he had refused, with angry decision, any thought of commissioning a replica for Rede Place.

At last Mrs. Maule made her way to the train, and deliberately she chose a carriage which had, as its one occupant, the man she had noticed standing by the bookstall a quarter of an hour before. She had liked the look of him then, and she liked it even more now. She wondered where he was going to stay—whether with people she knew.

As she sat down in the opposite corner, she glanced at him with instinctive interest and curiosity; he was lean and brown, and his face had the taut, tense look of the man who achieves—whose life is spent in combating forces greater than himself.

She longed for something to distract her mind from the emotion—a mingling of impatient annoyance and self-pity—induced by her parting scene with Bayworth Kaye. She blamed herself for having come to Selford Junction; they, she and Bayworth, had said good-bye, in a real sense, yesterday. Why, acting on a good-natured impulse, had she been so foolish as to write him a last word saying she would come and see him off? He had not understood, poor fellow—men never did. Instead of having something touching, sentimental—in a word, soothing to look back to—there would only be a sad, painful memory. She was still, even now, haunted by young Kaye's desperate, unhappy eyes—and yet she had been so kind, so very kind to him!

Yes, she had made a mistake in coming to Selford Junction. With a pettish movement she pulled down her veil yet further over her face.

Three more travellers made sudden irruption into the railway carriage, and both Athena Maule and the man opposite to her turned round with frowning faces; they were one in their dislike of noise and vulgarity. But the man soon looked away, indifferent to his surroundings; he opened a German Service paper, and was soon reading it intently.

Athena Maule glanced distastefully at the three people who had just come into the carriage. She knew them to be a Lady Barking and Lady Barking's married daughter, very wealthy people new to the neighbourhood. They had been pointed out to her by her husband's cousin, Dick Wantele, only a day or two before, driving past in one of the horseless carriages which were then becoming the fashion, but with which Richard Maule obstinately refused to supersede—or even allow them to be added to—his stables.

She also knew, and in a more real sense, the man who was with the two ladies. He was a Major Biddell, one of those men only to be found, so Mrs. Maule now reminded herself, in hospitable England. Such men drift about from country house to country house, making themselves useful to the hostess; they are able to take part with modest success in any of the games and sports that may be going on; and with advancing years they endear themselves to the dowagers by an unceasing flow of malicious and often very unsavory gossip.

Athena Maule had no use for this type of man, and as for the particular specimen who was now fussing round his two companions, thrusting illustrated papers into their hands, pulling up and down the window, and offering to change seats with them—she remembered that she had snubbed him once, cruelly. They had met at a moment when she was enjoying the new, the intoxicating experience of a suddenly acclaimed beauty.

She turned her head away, for she did not wish to be recognised by Major Biddell; and then, as the train moved out of the station, she suddenly became aware, not without a certain amusement, that she was being discussed by the two ladies.

The younger lady, "the vulgar married daughter," as Athena mentally described her, had opened the illustrated paper with which Major Biddell had provided her, and begun looking at the reproduction of the picture which had fetched a record price at Christie's.

"If that is really like Mrs. Maule, then she's a very beautiful woman," she said thoughtfully. "Is she really very like that, Major Biddell? You know her, don't you?"

"Oh yes. I know her quite well," he said promptly. "She often stays with the Kershaws of Cumberland, old friends of mine."

He bent his sleek head over the page, and jerked his eyeglass in and out of his right eye. "H'm," he said, "rather a fancy portrait that! I doubt if the fair Athena was ever as lovely. Of course she may have been when she first married poor Maule, a matter of fifteen to sixteen years ago."

"Has she been married as long as that?" said Lady Barking. "I am surprised! I thought Mrs. Maule was still quite a young woman."

"She's fairly young still—but then Maule married her when she was almost a child. She was Greek, you know, and the women blossom and fade very quickly out there. But still, I'm not denying that she's good-looking. In fact she's still an uncommonly handsome woman," he admitted generously. "I saw her at Ascot this year, and I was quite struck by the way she was wearing."

The elder lady leant forward with sudden eagerness. "If you know her so well"—she hesitated—"I wonder if you would mind going over and seeing her, Major? Rede Place is the only house that hasn't called on us since we've been in the neighbourhood."

Major Biddell shook his head very decidedly.

"Oh no," he said, "you don't understand the kind, my dear lady! It's true that I do know her very well in a sense—but the likes of her doesn't condescend to look at the likes of me," he laughed uncomfortably. "She has no use for any one who isn't in love with her, or who hasn't been in love with her. The first time I saw her the whole crowd were at her feet. I was the only one who stood apart, so you can imagine whether she likes me or not!"

"Do tell us, Major Biddell; is it really true that——" the voice dropped, but the two other silent, unknown occupants of the carriage caught a word or two which the young lady who spoke them had certainly not intended them to hear.

"They're all like that in her particular set," declared Major Biddell briefly. He looked round uncomfortably. It is always a mistake to talk of people, especially women, by their names, in a railway carriage or any other semi-public place.

Then the mother chimed in: "One does hear very peculiar stories about her, Major."

The little man winced. "Well," he said, "there's a lot of excuse for her, isn't there? Think of the state Maule's in! There she is, a beautiful woman tied to a kind of mummy!"

"I don't think a woman, however good-looking she may be, has any excuse for breaking her marriage vows," said the elder lady uncompromisingly.

She felt that Major Biddell was not behaving very nicely to her. She had understood that he was a very useful man to know, but during the last two or three days it had begun to strike her that he was a selfish little man. Of course he could have contrived a meeting between herself and Mrs. Maule if he really had a mind to do so! She also felt indignant with him for pretending to her and to her daughter that there was nothing specially scandalous in the behaviour of Mrs. Maule.

Why, everybody knew what Mrs. Maule was like! Even before she, Lady Barking, had become a part of Society, she had heard of the beautiful Mrs. Maule and her "goings on"; and in this part of the world the escapades of Mrs. Maule, the extraordinary things she had been known to do, were the standing gossip dish of the neighourhood. Even now, everyone was talking of the way in which she had bewitched young Bayworth Kaye, the Redyford clergyman's son, during the last few months. It was absurd for Major Biddell to pretend that Mrs. Maule was just like everybody else!

Perhaps something of what she was feeling betrayed itself on her large, round face, for Major Biddell moved a little nearer to her. After all, Lady Barking was his hostess, and he desired to stay on at her comfortable, luxuriously appointed house for at least another ten days.

"I see you know a good bit about her," he said, grinning. "I can tell you one really funny story about her," and then he proceeded to tell it, the two hanging on his lips, though the elder of his listeners felt uncomfortable, half-ashamed at listening so eagerly to what in another mood she would probably have described as "garbage."

A hand was suddenly laid on Major Biddell's shoulder. He faced about quickly. A stranger of whose presence in the railway carriage he had scarcely been aware, was standing before him, tall, grim, formidable.

"I must ask you, sir," the stranger spoke very clearly, "to withdraw every word that you have said concerning Mrs. Richard Maule. As for the story you have just told, you and I heard it at Undulah a good many years ago. It was told—I remember the fact, if you do not—of another lady, of, of—no matter—" he stopped himself abruptly.

Major Biddell jumped up. If no gentleman in the higher sense of the word, he was also no coward.

"I shall say exactly what I like," he said sharply, "and I question your right to interfere with me in any way. You say you met me at Undulah a good many years ago? If that's the case, you have the advantage of me!"

There was a moment's pause; then it was broken by a nervous laugh and a whisper from daughter to mother, "Poor man, I suppose he's another of Mrs. Maule's victims!"

"Perhaps I should add," said the stranger, his voice thick with anger and contempt, "that though I have never met Mrs. Maule, I know quite enough of her to be assured that this vile gossip, these—these foul allegations, are utterly, damnably untrue."

Major Biddell felt very much relieved. For a horrible moment he had supposed, not unnaturally, that the man who had just administered so sharp a rebuke to him was nearly related to Mrs. Maule. He had at once realized that the speaker was a member of the profession he had once adorned, nay more, he was uncomfortably aware that the man's dark face had been seen by him before. The unpleasant stranger was eccentric—to say the least of it. But of course there are such men in the world—Major Biddell thanked God he hadn't hitherto met many such—who go through life breaking lances for the sex.

The little scene was over in a very few moments, and, after one quick look round, the woman who sat in the furthest corner had apparently taken no interest in what was going on. Her face was turned away. She was staring out of the narrow window. Major Biddell, glancing at her apprehensively, could only see her slim, straight back, and the veil twisted round her small hat hiding the dark shining coils of hair.

The train began to slow down. The two ladies got up with an air of rather ostentatious relief. Major Biddell opened the door and jumped out. He carefully helped his companions down the high steps. As all three moved away, Lady Barking's sonorous voice could be heard saying, "I should think that man was mad!"

"Oh no, he wasn't, mother," said her daughter loudly. "He's an adorer of the lady—that's what it is. I expect he's on his way to stay there now!"

"But they never have any visitors at Rede Place except that Miss Oglander."

The train moved on. To the woman sitting in the corner the atmosphere of the railway carriage was still charged with a not unpleasing electricity.

Very deliberately she raised her veil and subjected the man sitting opposite to a long, thoughtful scrutiny. She raked her memory in vain for the strongly-drawn dark face, the large, loosely-made figure.

Suddenly he raised his eyes and met her full, considering glance. No, they had never met before. No man who had ever known Athena Maule, even for only a brief space of time, would look into her lovely, mobile face, meet the peculiar glance of her large heavy-lidded violet eyes, as this stranger was now doing, coldly, unchallengingly.

Mrs. Maule reddened, and hurriedly pulled down her veil. She felt—and it was a disconcerting sensation—as if she had been snubbed.

CHAPTER III

"The world is oft to treason not unkind,
But ne'er the traitor can admirers find."

It was the evening of the same day.

Two men were sitting together in what was called the Greek Room by the household of Rede Place.

The elder of the two was close to the fireplace, his stiff, thin hands held out to the blue shooting flames of a wood fire. Although he was dressed for dinner, there was that about him which suggested invalidism. Cushions were piled behind him in the deep, capacious chair in which he seemed to crouch rather than to sit, and a light rug was thrown across his knees, although it was only the 1st of October.

This was Richard Maule, whose name was known to the cosmopolitan world of scholars as a Hellenist, an authority on classical archæology, on the slowly excavated story of long-buried civilizations. To those who dwelt in the present, and who only cared for the things of to-day, he was enviable as the owner of a delightful and, in its way, a famous estate in Surrey.

Rede Place! The enchanting, rather artificial pleasaunce created out of what had been a primeval stretch of woodland by an early Victorian millionaire! The banker virtuoso, Theophilus Joy, had committed what we should now consider the crime of pulling down a fine old Tudor manor-house in order to reproduce in the keener English climate and alien English soil those Palladian harmonies of form which have their natural home only beneath southern skies.

There had been a time in the 'fifties and the 'sixties when Rede Place had been a synonym for all that was exquisite and perfect in art and life. But Richard Maule, though he shared many of the tastes, and had inherited all the wealth of his grandfather, was a recluse. Not even the possession of a singularly beautiful and attractive wife ever made him throw open Rede Place in the old, hospitable, magnificent way in which it had been thrown open during his own childhood and early youth.

As far as was possible, he lived alone—alone, that is, with the companionship of his wife, when she was willing to favour him with her companionship, and fortunate in the constant society of his kinsman, Dick Wantele, whom all the world knew to be Richard Maule's ultimate heir, that is, the future owner of Rede Place.

Each of the rooms of the long Italianate house was filled with curious, rare, and costly works of art, offering many points of interest to the collector and student, and this was specially true of the room in which now sat Richard Maule and Dick Wantele.

In 1843 Theophilus Joy, the friend rather than the patron of Turner, had persuaded that eccentric and secretive genius to accompany him from Italy to Greece. The enduring result of this journey was a remarkable series of water-colours forming the decoration of what was henceforth called the Greek Room of Rede Place. Over the mantelpiece was a copy, by the artist, of "Ulysses deriding Polyphemus." Below the Turner water-colours, and forming a latticed dado round the room, were a row of lacquered bookcases containing Richard Maule's unique collection of books and pamphlets, in every language, dealing with the Greece of the past and of the present.

Dick Wantele sat as far from the fire as was possible, close to a window which he would have preferred to have open. His long, angular figure was bent almost in two over his knee, on which there lay propped up a block of drawing paper. He was drawing busily, sketching a small house, by the side of which was a rough plan of what was evidently to be the inside of the house. A heavily-shaded lamp left in shadow his pale, lantern-jawed face, only redeemed from real ugliness by its expression of alert intelligence.

The two, unlike most men living in the difficult juxtaposition of owner and heir, were on the most excellent terms the one with the other. Theirs indeed was the happy kind of intimacy which requires no words, no futile exchange of small talk, to prove kindliness and understanding; and when at last Richard Maule spoke, he did not even turn round, for he was used to the other's instant comprehension and sympathy.

"Then the Paches are bringing over General Lingard to dinner next Tuesday?"

The younger man looked up quickly. "Yes, on Tuesday," he said. "Athena seems to think that will be the best day for them to come. You see, Jane Oglander will be here then."

"I'm glad of that," said Richard Maule.

"I hope their coming won't bore you, Richard. Athena couldn't get out of it. You see Pache practically asked her to ask them over. They want to show their lion, and they also want to entertain their lion! I confess I'm rather looking forward to seeing Lingard."

"I've seen so many lions." Mr. Maule spoke with a touch of weary irritation. And then he added, after a rather long pause, "I never cared for soldiers, at any rate not for your modern man of war who goes out with a Gatling gun to kill a lot of poor niggers."

"Lingard has done more than that, Richard. He succeeded where three other men had failed, and what is really wonderful, he did it on the cheap."

"That I admit is wonderful," said Richard Maule dryly, "but I don't suppose the people who are now fêting him are doing it as a reward for his economy. However, no matter, we'll entertain the Pachian hero."

The mahogany door at the end of the long room opened, then it was closed quietly, and a woman came in, bringing with her a sudden impression of vitality, of youth, of buoyant strength into the shadowed, over-heated room.

Athena Maule advanced with easy, graceful steps till she stood, a radiant figure, in the circle of warring light cast by the fire and by the shaded lamps. Her cheeks were flushed, tinted to an exquisite carmine that seemed to leave more white her low forehead and now heaving bosom.

She stopped just between the two men, glancing quickly first at one and then at the other. And then at last, after a perceptible pause, she spoke, her clear accents, slightly foreign in their intonation, falling ominously on the ears of her small audience of two.

"I've just had a letter from Jane Oglander."

The younger of the two men wondered with a certain lazy amusement whether Athena was aware of how dramatic had been her announcement of a singularly insignificant fact. As to the older man—he who sat by the fireplace—he had turned and deliberately looked away as the door opened. But now it was he who spoke, and this to Dick Wantele was significant, for Richard Maule very seldom spoke of his own accord, to his wife.

"Then isn't she coming to-morrow? It seems a long time since Jane left us—in August, wasn't it?"

"Jane Oglander," said Mrs. Maule, her left hand playing with the tassel terminating the Algerian scarf which slipped below her bare dimpled shoulders, "Jane Oglander wishes me to tell you both that—that she is going to be married."

Richard Maule fixed his stern, sunken eyes on his wife. It was a terrible look—a look of mingled contempt and hatred.

"Anyone we know?" asked Dick Wantele quietly.

Athena Maule looked at him with a grudging admiration. Dick was certainly what some of her English friends called "game," and her French friends "crâne." She had now lived in England for some eight years, but she did not yet understand Englishmen and their ways; and of all the strange Englishmen she had come across, there were few that struck her as so queer—queer was the word—as her husband's cousin, Dick Wantele. But he had long ceased really to interest her.

Walking slowly down the long gallery upstairs, Mrs. Maule had thought deeply how she should make her startling announcement, how reveal the news which had hurt her so shrewdly as to make her wish—such being her nature—that others should share her pain.

She had thought of coming in with Jane Oglander's letter open in her hand, but no, this she decided would be rather cheap, and would also in a measure prepare Dick—it was Dick whom she wished to hurt, whom she knew she would hurt. Richard Maule was incapable of being hurt by anything. But still it was very pleasant to know that even Richard would be irritated at the thought that Jane Oglander, who had now been for so long the one healing, soothing presence in their sombre household, and whom he had stupidly believed would end by marrying Dick Wantele was now going to disappear into the morass of British matronhood.

"Anyone we know?" she repeated consideringly. "No, not exactly, but someone who is quite famous and whom we shall know very soon."

Dick Wantele shrugged his shoulders with a nervous movement. His cousin's wife was fond of talking in enigmas, especially to him, and especially when she knew he desired to be told a simple fact simply and quickly.

Then something unexpected happened. Richard Maule again spoke, and again addressed his wife.

"I suppose," he said, "you mean General Lingard?"

"How did you know? Has Jane written to you?" Mrs. Maule flashed the questions out.

The one who looked on was vividly aware that this was the first time, so far as he knew, for years, that Athena Maule had asked direct questions of her husband, questions demanding answers.

Even now Richard Maule did not vouchsafe his wife the courtesy of a reply. It seemed to him that her questions answered themselves, and in the negative.

But Dick Wantele got up. "Is this true, Athena?" he asked abruptly. "Is Jane engaged to General Lingard? What an extraordinary thing! Why, he hasn't been back from West Africa more than a fortnight."

She nodded. "Yes!—it's quite true. Apparently his parents were friends of her father ages ago. She knew him when she was a child. They met again quite by chance last time he was in England. Then he began to write to her. It all seems to have been arranged by letter. At least she says they corresponded all the time he was away, and then he appears to have gone straight to her on the evening of the day he arrived in London. I suppose," she concluded not very pleasantly, "that she could not dash his triumph—and so she accepted him. It is very difficult," she continued, "for a woman to say no to a hero."

Dick Wantele smiled. His eyes met hers with a curious flash of rather cruel raillery. Her own dropped for a moment; then they seemed to dilate as she went on, "I really do know what I am talking about, for you see, Dick, Richard was a hero when I married him. In Greece we all looked upon the great, the noble, the famous Mr. Maule as quite a hero!"

For a moment she allowed her full glance to rest on the unheroic figure crouching by the fire, and Dick Wantele felt keenly vexed with himself. He was not often so foolish as to wage war with Richard Maule's wife in Richard Maule's presence.

All three hailed with relief the interruption caused by the announcement of dinner. Wantele got up with more alacrity than usual. He walked with a quick, sliding step to where Mrs. Maule was still standing. With a little bow he offered her his arm.

As they left the room Mr. Maule's valet came in by another door. Quickly, noiselessly, he brought forward an invalid table and placed on it a tray. There was soup, some whole-meal bread, a little very fine fruit, and a small decanter of claret. Then after the man had asked, "Is there anything else you require, sir?" and had noted the scarcely perceptible shake of the head with which Mr. Maule answered him, the master of Rede Place was left alone.

Richard Maule looked at the silver bowl containing his half-pint of soup—everything he ate was measured and weighed and prepared with the most scrupulous accuracy according to a great doctor's ordinance—with a kind of fastidious distaste. Since his illness he had grown particular about his food, and yet as youth and man no one had been more indifferent than he to the kind of luxury by which most men set such store. During the years which had immediately preceded his marriage, it had been his boast that he could live for days and even weeks on the rough, unpalatable fare dear to the Greek peasant.

Steadying his right hand with his left, he ate a spoonful of soup, then pushed the bowl away. The news his wife had taken such malicious pleasure in telling had disturbed and pained him more than he thought anything could now disturb and pain him. He was attached to Jane Oglander; she was the only human being apart from Dick whose presence was, if not agreeable, at least not unpleasant to him. In the rare moments of kindly thought and musing on the future which sometimes visited him, he saw Jane mistress of Rede Place, bringing peace and, what is so much nearer the heart of life, love satisfied, to Dick Wantele. He had felt sure that Jane, with her tenderness, her simplicity of nature, would end where most women of her type end, by surrender.

That she would marry anyone excepting Dick Wantele had seemed impossible. But in this life, as Richard Maule had learnt far too late, it is what would have seemed impossible which happens.

Dick Wantele and Mrs. Maule sat opposite one another at a round table set at one end of the great tapestry-hung dining-room. A stranger seeing them would have thought the plain young man singularly blessed in having so lovely a table-mate sitting with him at so perfectly cooked and noiselessly served a meal as they were now enjoying.

But though there was a side of his nature peculiarly alive to certain sensuous forms of beauty, to-night Wantele only saw in Athena the malicious, almost the malignant, bearer of ill news.

But civilized man, if eating in company, must also talk, and so at last, "One sees now," he said reflectively, "why the worthy Paches have been so greatly honoured."

"What do you mean?" asked Mrs. Maule. It was, she found, sometimes easier to ask Dick to explain himself than to try and guess what he meant.

"I mean," said Wantele, "that one can now understand why General Lingard accepted his dull relations' invitation. It was because he knew that his young woman would be in the neighbourhood, staying here with us."

"Your choice of phrase," said Athena sharply, "is not very refined."

"Isn't it?" he said mildly. "But then, Athena, I don't know that I ever set up to be a particularly refined person."

And then, as they sat sparring and jarring as they so often did at their quickly-served meals, Dick Wantele gradually became aware that Mrs. Maule was eating nothing, nay more, that her short upper lip was trembling—large tears rolling down her cheeks.

"Why!—Athena?" he exclaimed. "You mustn't allow this unexpected news to"—he hesitated for a word—"to upset you so much." He looked up across at her with a not very kind curiosity. His light observant eyes suddenly seized on what was to him an amazing sight, namely that a folded letter, covered with a fine clear handwriting he knew with a dear familiar knowledge, was working up out of Mrs. Maule's short bodice and forming a grey patch on her white neck. In spite of himself, Wantele was rather touched.

"Of course I have always known that Jane was devoted to you," he said musingly, "but I didn't realise that the feeling was reciprocated to such an extent as it seems to be!"

A flush of stormy anger reddened Mrs. Maule's face.

"With Jane often here it has been bad enough!" she said passionately. "But what will my life be like henceforth?—I mean when I shan't even have her to look forward to? Richard will force me to be here more than ever now."

"I think you will still manage to be a good deal away——"

He had been right after all. Athena was only thinking of Jane Oglander's marriage as it affected herself.

"Of course I shall stay away as much as I can!" she cried. "You and Richard much prefer my absence to my presence——" her look challenged a contradiction Wantele did not—could not utter.

"And then—and then that isn't all, Dick! I didn't mind being here when Jane was here too to make things go well——"

"Perhaps Jane will sometimes leave her hero during the very few weeks of the year that you are, as it were, in residence, Athena. He's going, it seems, to be given a home appointment. I suppose they will be married very soon?"

Wantele did not look at her as he spoke. He was tracing an imaginary pattern on the tablecloth. The numbness induced by the horrible blow she had dealt him was beginning to give way to stinging stabs of pain. He longed to know more—to know everything—to turn as it were a jagged knife in his heart-wound.

Mrs. Maule dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief, then she laughed.

"No, no, Dick," she cried, "there's no such luck in store for you—I mean for us! We're going to lose Jane—once for all. Jane has taken it rather badly. I never thought that dear saint would fall in love!" She suddenly became aware that his eyes were fixed on the letter she had thrust into the bodice of her gown when walking down the long gallery upstairs. She took it out of her warm and scented bodice, and held it out to him.

"I think you'd better read what she says."

Wantele looked at the pretty hand holding Jane Oglander's letter, but he made no attempt to take the folded paper. "I should like to read it—" he said lightly, "but I think I'd better not."

"Yes, do read it, Dick. Why shouldn't you?" She added slowly, "There's something about you in it too——"

Wantele hesitated, and then he fell. He leant over and took Jane Oglander's letter from her hand. His own was shaking, and that angered him. He turned his chair right round, and holding the two sheets of grey paper up close to his eyes deliberately read them slowly through.

As at last he handed them back to her, he said quietly, "You told me a lie just now, Athena. I am not mentioned in Jane's letter."

"Indeed you are!" She pointed to a thin line of writing across the top of the second sheet.

"'I hope Dick won't mind much'—" she read aloud.

"There's something else!" he cried quickly, and getting up strode round and took the letter again from her with a masterful hand. "'I hope Dick won't mind much'—" he read aloud, "'or dear Richard either.'"

Then he let the letter drop on the cloth beside her. The numbness had all gone, the pain he felt had become almost intolerable.

Mrs. Maule again tucked Jane Oglander's letter inside her bodice, then she got up. As he held the door open for her, Wantele put his hand, his cool, long-fingered, impersonal hand, on her arm.

"Athena," he said softly. "I wonder how it is that you have always had the gift of making me do things of which I knew I should live to feel ashamed. A unique gift, dear cousin——"

She turned and laughed mischievously up into his pale suffering face. "The woman tempted me, and so of course I ate!" she exclaimed. "You're not much of a man, Dick, but you have always been a thorough man in the matter of making excuses for yourself!"

CHAPTER IV

"He smarteth most who hides his smart
And sues for no compassion."

After he had closed the door behind his cousin, Dick Wantele did not go back to the little round table, its fruit and wine. Instead he began walking up and down the dining-room, his hands clasped behind his back. The reading of Jane Oglander's letter had brought with it sharp and instant punishment.