THE
SUNDERED STREAMS

THE HISTORY OF A MEMORY THAT HAD
NO FULL STOPS

BY
REGINALD FARRER

AUTHOR OF
‘THE GARDEN OF ASIA,’ ‘THE HOUSE OF SHADOWS,’ ETC.

‘Shōshi no kukai hétori nashi: Sodé no furi-awasé mo tashō no en.’

[There is no shore to the bitter Sea of Birth-and-Death: even the
touching of sleeves in passing is the result of some connection in a former life.]

LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
41 & 43 MADDOX STREET, BOND STREET, W.
1907

[All rights reserved]

TO
‘MILADI’

ALICE, COUNTESS OF BECTIVE

THE SUNDERED STREAMS

CHAPTER I

The English language, flexible and rich though it be, lacks words in which to convey the subtler social distinctions. We have had to go abroad for ‘nouveau-riche’ and ‘parvenu,’ to say nothing of ‘Philistia,’ ‘Bohemia,’ the ‘demi-monde,’ and all the other geographical names that we have taken from the atlas of the human world to describe some small corner in our own little parish. But, as our civilization grows more and more complex, so does our borrowed vocabulary grow less and less adequate, until nowadays we find not a few fine differences in our microcosm which no word of our own or of any other nation avails to identify. The ‘Arrived’ and the ‘New-rich’ are familiar figures, but what of those many families who suddenly become wealthy and prominent after many generations of well-bred obscurity? They cannot fairly be described as ‘nouveau-riche’ or ‘parvenu’; they have been there all the time, though not in evidence; to brand them with the stigma of novelty would be manifestly unfair. They have antiquity without importance—a vast difference, in the eyes of social astronomers, between them and the blazing stars of wealth that so suddenly emerge from the black night of genealogical non-existence. As well compare a dazzling meteor, here and gone in a flash, with a genuine star which, after æons of inconspicuousness, abruptly swells into a luminary of the first magnitude. To describe such fixed lights in our English hemisphere a new word must first be coined in another language, and then borrowed. Such people are not ‘nouveau-riche’; they are ‘renrichis.’ And to this class belonged the Dadds of Darnley-on-Downe—that obscure dynasty from which it is now necessary to show the gradual genesis, through many quiet generations, of Kingston Darnley, its apostate offspring.

Among soft Kentish meadows sleeps the little metropolis of Darnley-on-Downe. It lies on the grassy plain like a neat poached egg on a vast green plate, and, over all, the blue vault of heaven makes a domed lid. The Downe meanders placidly at the foot of its gardens, and comfortable little Georgian houses speak of agelong ease and decent leisure. Darnley-on-Downe has no local peer, no local palace; rank and fashion, therefore, are represented only by these dignified dwellings of red brick, each enclosed in shrubberies of rose and laurel and lilac, each tenanted by some family well known for generations in Darnley-on-Downe.

As Cranford was, as Highbury was, so also was Darnley-on-Downe—placid, happy and exclusive, intolerant of all new-comers and of all change. Mrs. John succeeded Mrs. Joshua, and Mr. Reuben Mr. James; and no outsider was ever permitted to disturb the orderly dynasties that so long had ruled in the little town. Crowns fell, but the serenity of Darnley-on-Downe remained unruffled, and the collapse of the Corsican ogre took no higher rank in general conversation than the misdoings of Mrs. Blessing’s Matilda, or the strange theft of Miss Minna Dadd’s Leghorns. So, talking only to themselves, and only of themselves, the aristocracy of Darnley-on-Downe passed inconspicuously from the nursery to the grave, through the leisurely old days when the peace of the country contrasted so strongly with the restless misery of the great cities, and, in the absence of halfpenny morning papers, only rare rumours filtered down into the provinces of a young Queen gradually making her seat secure on a dishonoured and endangered throne.

Nowadays Cranford, probably, plays pit, and motors hoot beneath the walls of Donwell Abbey. Nowadays clash and clangour fill the one main street of Darnley-on-Downe, and the Georgian houses are being swept away to make room for glassy palaces of art-nouveau design. But, in the days when Fortune swooped so suddenly on the Dadds, only peace and slumber haunted the Market Place and St. Eldred’s.

Clean, humble, small, and quiet, the cottages and shops of the working-classes lined the broad pavement, with here a neat bank fronted by Corinthian pilasters, and there a rambling, wide-mouthed inn, haunted by loafing dogs and ostlers full of leisure. Then came the church, solid and unassuming, very essence made visible of that orderly if unimpassioned spirit that then possessed the Church of England. Under its shadow, flanked by tall clipped obelisks of yew, squatted the solid square of the vicarage, with green lawn and beds of roses leading down to the wicket that opened on the roadway. And beyond this again began a wide, ancient avenue of limes, fragrant and tranquil, on whose either side stretched that series of red-brick houses in which the Upper Ten of Darnley-on-Downe discreetly led its days, and formed an aristocracy no less rigid, no less zealous for birth and tradition than that higher world called ‘county,’ with which it had nothing to do, and yet so much in common. St. Eldred’s was the name of this provincial faubourg, and the wayfarer, passing down its green length, might divine its exclusive character from the lack of any invidious distinction made between the houses. The identity of each was kept sacred for the elect, and the outsider was to know nothing. In our own assertive time each gate would bear a curly Gothic title—‘Chatsworth,’ ‘Arundel,’ ‘Sandringham’ would gratify our loyal eyes. In those days Mrs. Blessing knew Miss Dadd’s house, and Miss Dadd knew Mrs. Blessing’s. This knowledge was held to be amply sufficient, and it was even felt that to share it with the unprivileged world at large would be profane and vulgar. Thus the unguided stranger would have travelled uninstructed past gateway after gateway, past trim red wall after trim red wall, without being able to attribute any definite personality to the dweller in each cloistered precinct. And therefore he must necessarily have passed on his way without gathering any idea of the extent to which the Dadds dominated St. Eldred’s.

All the dwellers in these houses lived in a small way, and all of them drew their incomes from some retail trade. ‘County’ people, from their own high circle, contemplating these lesser worlds, would never have guessed the intense and silent arrogance with which, in turn, these lesser worlds looked down on the struggling aspirants from beneath, on the new and unknown persons who painfully fought to win a footing in St. Eldred’s. But, in the close ring of this aristocracy, the Dadds were certainly the ruling dynasty. Had the wayfarer been privileged with a guide, he would have learned that every fourth house in St. Eldred’s enshrined a Dadd or the relation of a Dadd. Here dwelt Mrs. Reuben Dadd; yonder Mr. and Mrs. Joshua Dadd; and, not a stone’s-throw farther, was the house of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd. As for the head of the family, Mr. Dadd, with his consort, dwelt in a stout-pillared edifice which even an uninstructed stranger must have seen to be the residence of a presiding Power.

The Dadds permeated social life in Darnley-on-Downe. They were everywhere, had married into every family, had accorded brides to every neighbouring house of repute, had come at last to be, as it were, the very incarnation of decency and proper pride in Darnley-on-Downe. They were no richer than their neighbours, but in those days wealth gave no precedence, and the Dadds had a prestige which their fellow-nobles in St. Eldred’s lacked. For the Dadds owned land, and, though St. Eldred’s made no attempt to connect itself with the world of landowners and county families, yet a vague aroma of grandeur still clung to the one family in its midst that might be said to verge on the territorial class. The glory of the Dadds was a big freehold farm beyond the town, where they had been established from time immemorial, honourably obscure from the days of Henry the Eighth. St. Eldred’s, accordingly, cherishing its own pedigrees and antiquities, as it did, with as fervent a passion as any Austrian noble, yet by tacit consent accorded supremacy to this landowning family in its midst.

The Dadds by now had gone down, alas, in the world; however, St. Eldred’s never dreamed of making worldly prosperity a criterion for approval. St. Eldred’s lived, itself, in a penurious prosperity or a prosperous poverty; wealth, being unattainable, was held to be undesirable as well as rather vulgar, and the fading income of the Dadds only set the seal on their title to general admiration. The farm was still theirs indeed, but its yield was less and lessening. All through the good old Protection days their corn had brought high prices; but, unfortunately, the cost of living had grown even higher in proportion, until the Dadds found themselves forced to renounce agricultural hopes, leave the farm fallow, and plunge into small trade. From this they made a fair livelihood, and were able to support their regal position in the world of St. Eldred’s. So they lived, married, ruled, and died, till never a house in St. Eldred’s but was kin to the royal family of Dadd.

James Dadd after James Dadd contentedly took up his sceptre, swayed it during his time, and laid it by. Their clan, like all others in St. Eldred’s, was magnificently complacent in contemplation of its own position. No Dadd was ever heard to aspire to more giddy worlds, no Dadd was ever known to show any hankerings after wilder flights, after new courses, after original thought or action of any kind. In a young member of the family, in a collateral, the weight of his elders would immediately have crushed out such sparks of discontent; as for the head of the dynasty, so surrounded was the ruling Dadd by now with uncles, cousins, and aunts, not to mention dowagers of bygone sovereigns, that it would have been as easy for him to revolt as for a Pope to make headway against the College of Cardinals. Such, then, was the decorous state of affairs, when suddenly a most astonishing thing happened.

The railway mania was sweeping over England. Counties were being opened up, and landowners being driven crazy with hysterical apprehensions of ruin, and opposition to every threatened change. At first all these commotions left the quiet waters of St. Eldred’s unruffled. But eventually a railway company came sniffing round the ancestral but profitless farm of the Dadds, and, somehow, during the negotiations, it was discovered that those barren acres covered a coal-field of exuberant richness.

It was not to be expected that this new fact should bring about any sudden alteration in the feeling of St. Eldred’s towards the Dadds. Only a mild flutter agitated for a while the red-brick houses. Then it was felt that the acquisition of wealth by the Dadds was very right and proper. Wealth was only vulgar when in new and plebeian hands. A Dadd could be trusted to avoid giving offence, a Dadd would never be ostentatious, nor presume to change his mode of life. So, undeterred by any disapproval from their peers, the ruling Dadds proceeded quietly to develop their new possibilities. What those possibilities were no one had the audacity or the grandeur of mind to compute. Unsuspected, unrealized, volumes of money rolled ceaselessly in to the account of the mine-owners, while they, in their innocence, continued unperturbed in the old simple ways, never caring to dream that their new wealth could do more for them than add, at most, a parlourmaid.

It was some years before even this grand addition was made to their scale of living, and then it was only when the sudden death of James Dadd the Eighth had left the family sceptre in the hands of a queen-regent. The widow ruled for her son (now, at a tender age, raised to the rank of James Dadd the Ninth), and hardly had she grasped the reins of power than she began to show signs of wishing to use the abundant resources which had now been accumulating for fifteen years or more. Her ambitions were not approved, and the extra parlourmaid was only condoned as an indulgence for the sorrows of widowhood. But from that moment a little rift began to widen between the reigning Dadds and Darnley-on-Downe. The money began insensibly to come between the rulers and the ruled. It was inevitable that it should. An income—even an unspent income—of fifteen thousand a year cannot long live on terms of perfect friendly equality with incomes of several hundred or so. The richer, sooner or later, condescends; the poorer, sooner or later, grudges. Thus it was in Darnley-on-Downe. Even the suspicion that Mrs. Dadd had ‘notions’—that she would have liked a landau, and had conceived thoughts of sending her sons to Eton—caused a certain vigilant enmity to exasperate the keenness with which her every action was watched and weighed by her council of relatives. The slightest sign of ambition was soon marked as a treason to the clan. All the Dadd connections, all the Dadd collaterals, all the dowagers and younger branches of the Dadds made common cause with St. Eldred’s, and joined in the general suspicion with which the conduct of Mrs. Dadd was viewed. The widow found herself unable to carry out the smallest extravagance. Very innocent and trifling were the few indulgences that she had hoped for, but even these were put beyond her reach by the decree of her relatives, by that incorruptible synod over which even a Dadd queen-regent had no more power than a doge of Venice over his Council of Ten. Nor was her submission able to redeem her popularity. The very fact of having once had ‘notions’ was enough to mark her out for ever as a traitor to the Constitution of St. Eldred’s. She was no longer quite ‘one of themselves.’ The excommunication was pronounced by those terrible princesses, the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd, and no one was found to question its justice as it thundered across the tea-table.

Inquiries were made into her remote ancestry, and it was soon found that, though by birth an unblemished Blessing, yet she had inherited the sinister tendencies of a Messiter great-great-great-grandmother, whom history convicted of eccentricities that went the length of reading her Bible in French. From such a tainted spring what purity could be expected? The situation was summed up by the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd. The stream cannot rise higher than its source, was their stern pronouncement. A regretful loyalty, a disapproving adherence now marked the family’s attitude towards her—a loyalty, an adherence as faithful but as disapproving as ever a virtuous believer in Divine right can have felt for a drunken and profligate Pretender, or a patriotic Catholic for Queen Elizabeth.

So far, it is true, her eldest son, James Dadd the Ninth, seemed a model of Dadd virtues. He had made no open move towards ostentation and prodigality. His younger brother Robert, however, was the incarnate tragedy of St. Eldred’s, the incarnate accusation of Mrs. Dadd’s regency. Briefly, this ulcer of St. Eldred’s must be skimmed; Robert Dadd had run away from home, and when next heard of, many years later, was understood to be in Japan, and to have become a Mormon or a Buddhist, or a disciple of whatever religion rules in those benighted parts. Never again was his name heard in St. Eldred’s, but the Messiter great-great-great-grandmother was held accountable for such a strange, terrible aberration—the first break in the impeccable succession of the Dadds. There was yet another child—a daughter—but she was ten years younger than her brothers, and could not as yet prove, in her own person, the corrupt heredity of her mother. However, she was already watched with care, and every tearing of her pinafore was held symptomatic of inherited depravity.

James Dadd the Ninth came at last to his own, and his unhappy mother, crushed by years of disapproval, sank, unregretted, to the grave. And hardly had St. Eldred’s consigned her decently to the tomb, than James Dadd gave abundant proof of the evil spirit that all his relatives had long suspected. He left Darnley-on-Downe. He shut up the family house; he travelled; he began timidly to live on a scale that drove St. Eldred’s dizzy with horrified astonishment. Thanks to his mother’s economy, he was now extremely rich, and bit by bit began to realize the extent of his opportunities. But, though St. Eldred’s shook its head over him, though the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd refused to read the papers any longer, for fear of finding his iniquities chronicled, James Dadd remained the true son of his fathers. Wealth could not make him wealthy; it takes a generation at least to make the genuine spendthrift, to ingraft the joy and the splendour of purchasing. James Dadd remained nervous, awkward, bourgeois in his uneasy enjoyment of his money. Assertive one moment, he was uneasy and parsimonious the next, always self-conscious, always troubled by the disapproval of the only world he really knew—the world that had made him and written its signature large across the face of his personality. Wherever he went, he carried St. Eldred’s, and heard the mild but tremendous tones of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd among the arches of the Colosseum as in the silences of the Desert. Sometimes he defied the voices, sometimes he quailed before them, but escape them he never could. He was out of his sphere; they told him so. He had cast off his own world, and could enter no other.

Often in his travels he met other men on similar errands of pleasure, young men and old, sons of country squires or illustrious families. In most cases they had not a quarter of his income, but they seemed to have the careless knack of getting more pleasure out of half a crown than he could ever buy with a five-pound note. Poor as they might be, generations of spending ancestors had left them the secret of spending easily, gaily, serenely, of letting money flow unperceived between their fingers, of securing a double return for their outlay through their very indifference as to whether they ever got any return at all. This was the whole distinction between himself and them. Actual superiority of birth and breeding they had none, though their forbears might be more prominent than his. But centuries of inconspicuousness disqualify a man for the conspicuous position conferred by sudden wealth, and James Dadd, for all his long pedigree, was far less fitted for his new place in life than many a grandson of some successful politician or lawyer, who might number, perhaps, two generations to James Dadd’s twenty, but made up for this lack of quantity by the eminence of the father and grandfather whose high and hard-won position he had painlessly inherited.

So James Dadd, misplaced and ill at ease, passed thus through life with occasional spasmodic attempts at the assumption of a defiant self-complacency. He knew that he was an outcast from St. Eldred’s. Even if he would, he could never now return to the red-brick house of his early years. In the flesh, perhaps, he might, but his spirit could never again be admitted within its doors, could never again be admitted to intimacy by the spirit of St. Eldred’s. Rashly he had cut himself off from his own people, and must henceforth face the fact. Nor, though either diffident or vehement in the spending of his money, could he really contemplate returning to the life of Darnley-on-Downe. He had tasted of headier joys—tasted awkwardly, perhaps, and incompletely, but even so the small-beer on which St. Eldred’s had reared him must for evermore be insipid to his palate. Though now he never heard from his brother Robert, he sympathized with his revolt, and resolved that he, too, could never again have any part in the life of Darnley-on-Downe. And at this point, just after the one brief tragic flash of romance that broke into his life, he came across Lady Kirk-Hammerton.

Lady Kirk-Hammerton was the sonless widow of a second-rate Lord Chancellor. Devoid of wealth or breeding, she and her husband had had recourse to blatancy to emphasize their value. Now that he was dead she redoubled the intensity of her methods, and soon acquired that notoriety which she considered synonymous with fame. Bereft of her husband, there was no reason why people should ever take notice of her again, unless her demeanour forced them to do so. Therefore she set herself heroically to the task of making her existence conspicuous in the eye of the world, with such success that, with the best resolve, nobody could succeed in ignoring her. Physically and metaphorically, she shouted her way from place to place, and her conversation blazed no less obtrusively than her gowns. As for a foil, she felt that her brilliancy needed none, and therefore had no reason for tolerating her daughter’s incorrigible respectability. With the more joy, therefore, did she fall upon James Dadd at Naples, and hurl him, not unwilling, into the company of her undesirable offspring.

But if the daughter emphasized the mother’s mature and vehement charms, so did the mother’s overwhelming presence show up the pale grace of the daughter. Lady Adela Vayne-Kingston was pretty, shrinking, mild, domestic—the very type that, in happier circumstances, would have been most dear to St. Eldred’s. She hated her mother’s loud voice and louder manners; her one hope was to marry someone obscure and gentle, who would remove her from the burning atmosphere of Lady Kirk-Hammerton, in whose train, since her girlhood, she had been dragged hither and thither, never protesting, but always reluctant. James Dadd, for his part, found in Lady Adela a reminiscence of his old home-life. She seemed to him the ghost of peaceful St. Eldred’s, with an added touch of worldly experience and travelled charm. Her character, far from repeating her mother’s, harked back to some obscure ancestress, probably in domestic service, and was so meek and placid as to be the very incarnation of all that James Dadd had been brought up to love and respect. On the other hand, this same gentleness of temperament, which St. Eldred’s considered the hall-mark of good breeding, was believed by Lady Kirk-Hammerton to be especially distasteful to those high circles after which she hankered; and she had long, therefore, been eagerly seeking a chance to be rid of the daughter whom her best efforts had failed to render brazen and clamorous. Her delight, accordingly, surpassed all bounds, when at the end of a week’s acquaintance, James Dadd proposed to Lady Adela, and was thankfully accepted.

Though the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd had ceased to subscribe to ‘the Paper,’ they yet had their recognised channels for the reception of news. For the butcher conveyed the events of the world to their cook, and she, in turn, laid edited selections before her mistresses. In this way was brought to their notice the approaching marriage between ‘James Dadd, Esq., of Darnley-on-Downe, and the Lady Adela Vayne-Kingston, daughter of the late Earl of Kirk-Hammerton.’

That afternoon was hurriedly convened a great meeting of the Dadd family to consider this announcement. Unmixed disapproval filled every bosom in the tribe. The engagement was held equivalent to the abdication of James Dadd from the headship of his race. In two ways the proposed marriage was disliked. It was thoroughly unsuitable to a Dadd; it was thoroughly unworthy of a Dadd. Lady Adela was at once too high and too low to be a fair match of James Dadd. Accident had given her a titular position superior to her lover’s, while her birth was in every way disastrously inferior to his own. Even St. Eldred’s had heard something of Lady Kirk-Hammerton, and it was impossible to imagine that her daughter could, by any stretch of courtesy, be called a lady in the true sense of the word. All the Dadd pride of birth rose up against the thought of connection with a girl without a grandfather—a girl, too, whom uninstructed sections of the world might dare to consider her husband’s social superior. It was felt that James Dadd had inflicted a crowning insult on his family in thus threatening to misally it. Mrs. John, Mrs. Reuben, Mrs. Joshua, coincided in the opinion firmly announced by the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd; the young Johns, Reubens, and Joshuas, dissented in nothing; only the peccant James’s sister, now a girl of promising beauty, held her own counsel, and decided to write congratulations to her brother and his destined bride. For in her, too, the blood of great-great-great-grandmother Messiter was at its fell work; her soul longed for change and variety and gaiety; and all these things she saw attainable through James’s marriage with the daughter of that notorious Lady Kirk-Hammerton.

But she was too wise to make her heresy public; and the condemnation of James’s choice was passed without protest by the assembled council. An ultimatum was drafted by the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd, and would have been dispatched on the morrow, with the approval of all, had not the morrow brought news that destroyed every hope of reconciliation with the traitor. It was announced that, with royal permission, James Dadd, of Darnley-on-Downe, would in future be known as James Darnley. St. Eldred’s gasped at the wickedness of this public repudiation.

In point of fact it was Lady Adela, gentle and winning, whose vitality had stirred to a great effort, under great pressure, and had risen to urge upon her lover this change of name. She pointed out that to ask a girl to become Lady Adela Dadd was to exact a sacrifice as far beyond mortal power to grant as beyond mortal justice to demand. James Dadd, recognising that he could never hope to be reincluded in the clan whose nominal sovereign he still was, found himself inclined to consider Lady Adela’s plea in a favourable spirit. Together they decided to adopt the more euphonious name of Darnley, and James Dadd hastened to make his decision public, that thus he might at once be finally cut off from any remonstrances or embassies of his family. He judged the temper of St. Eldred’s rightly. His announcement was taken as an irremediable declaration of war. His name was never mentioned again in Darnley-on-Downe, except as that of one deservedly dead and unregretted. The sceptre passed into the capable hands of Mr. and Mrs. Reuben Dadd, and by silent consent it was agreed that no infant henceforth should bear the dishonoured names of James or Robert. Only James Dadd’s young sister remained hopefully loyal to his memory, and when, a year later, the redoubled severity of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd alone betrayed their secret knowledge that a son had been born to Mr. and Lady Adela Darnley, the one acknowledgment of the event that reached the outlaw from Darnley-on-Downe was a surreptitiously-posted letter of his sister’s. If anything could have aggravated the wrath of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd it would have been the knowledge that the infant, that their own great nephew, had been christened, not James, but Kingston.

Kingston Darnley, indeed! There was a name for a child! You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, said the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd; and they were universally felt to have expressed the situation in all its bearings. And thus, from years of corrupting wealth and secret disloyalty, was generated the culminating disgrace of the Dadds, in Kingston Darnley. Kingston Darnley!

Why, why had great-great-great-grandfather Blessing married a Messiter of eccentric tendencies? And what a curse is money! Better decorum and a competence than stalled peacocks and a marriage with the daughters of Heth! It became the fashion in St. Eldred’s to affect, by contrast, a greater poverty than the circumstances of anyone necessitated. To give two cakes at tea became vulgar, and the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd took to going to church with only one Prayer Book between them. Nothing could have induced St. Eldred’s to confess that it knew anything of the Darnleys, and the various steps in Lady Adela’s progress were sternly ignored by a watchful world. Even when Mr. and Lady Adela Darnley entertained a Princess for some charitable function, the only comment made in St. Eldred’s was the tacit one involved in the simultaneous retirement to bed of the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd. Another outcast, however, was soon added to James and Robert—another topic for the silence of St. Eldred’s. For, after some secret correspondence, James Darnley’s sister eloped from the care of her aunts, and was next heard of under the wing of her brother’s wife in London. Within a year she had married a stockbroker of abundant wealth. The lips of St. Eldred’s snapped on this fulfilment of the disasters brought about by great-great-great-grandmother Messiter. The old dynasty of Dadd was ended in Darnley-on-Downe. The main royal line was wiped out, and the Reuben Dadds reigned in its stead.

CHAPTER II

The new-made Darnleys, James and his sister, were triumphantly ushered into the upper world by Lady Adela, whose father’s rise, whose mother’s persistence, had won at last a reluctant toleration from her betters. Accustomed from her birth to live on terms of acquaintance with more or less interesting or conspicuous people, Lady Adela had developed something of that native air and ease which James Dadd had never been able to acquire in all his long exile from his own social hemisphere. Nor did James Dadd, transformed into James Darnley, ever succeed in fitting himself perfectly to his altered conditions. His wife, besides loving him devotedly, if placidly, did all she could to acclimatize him; she made him buy a vast new house on the Yorkshire moors; she filled it with people, she made her husband play the squire; but to the last this man of many descents remained less adaptable, less congenial to his new environment than many a versatile Hebrew whom twenty years of unlimited wealth transform into what is nowadays considered a very tolerable imitation of an English gentleman—especially as seen on the stage. Among people who talked of money and diseases with a freedom that struck him as indecent, James Darnley, brought up to think both topics unmentionable, remained timid and uncomfortable to the end of his days, and when at last a combination of dyspepsia and a Primrose League banquet caused him to retire from a world in which he had always been a stranger, even Lady Adela felt that he was somehow set free from a long bondage. Gentle in her grief as in all her other emotions, she resigned herself to becoming crapes, and found new pleasure in the guardianship of her son Kingston, now turned eleven.

But if James Darnley, first of his line, died a failure, far otherwise was it with his sister. In her the blood of great-great-great-grandmother Messiter must have seethed and boiled with concentrated virulence, for she took to her new life with a zeal that left nothing to be desired, and soon dropped behind her all trace and all memory of Darnley-on-Downe. Her manners, from the first, were forward and easy; her ambition was to be considered a woman of fashion, and she carried to its accomplishment a temperament entirely devoid of bashfulness or indecision. Mr. Mimburn, her wealthy stockbroker husband, soon shrank into mere cheque-signing obscurity beside the flaming figure of his wife. Her remarks were quoted, her gowns described; she became at last, in those far-off days, a precursor of that modern type of woman who is perfectly virtuous, except in dress, manners, and mind. Nothing would have horrified her more than illicit proposals, except the accusation of being shocked by them; nothing have more appalled her than an attack on her virtue, except the suspicion that she had any.

Her gossip always made a point of flirting round impropriety, and she was at pains to damn her own flawless character by arch implications. She had cultivated French, and now was a walking chronicle of the demi-monde, as well as a living picture of its most prominent inhabitants. A passport to her friendship was the possession of a past, and she hastened to attribute amorous adventures to all her dearest friends on any foundation or none. The foundation did not matter; the point was that the suggestion glorified them in her eyes; part of her admiration for Lady Adela arose from the fact that she suspected that saintly woman of having ‘consoled herself’ during the lifetime of the late James Darnley. Mrs. Mimburn’s knowledge of her sister-in-law’s untried and incorruptible virtue was never allowed to interfere with this romantic possibility; in the face of all probability, in the face of all evidence, she must imagine some such episode in any career that touched her own, or else immediately cease to take any interest in it. So far had she travelled from the mental chastity that ruled in Darnley-on-Downe.

So, between mother and aunt, the young Kingston Darnley journeyed through boyhood to maturity. Lady Adela was an ideal parent, and discharged her maternal duties with a gentle ease that made her son’s progress altogether pleasant. She was one of the cushion-women whose numbers nowadays are yearly diminishing. Without initiative, without any clearness of mind, she had the placid receptivity that often accompanies such a temperament. The lack of colour in her own character made it harmonious and restful as a background to more vivid personalities. Therefore, without effort or desire on her part, she attracted confidence. She was good to lean on; she listened well—though often without hearing, and always without understanding. But her sweet acquiescence gave everyone the idea of being fully comprehended, and her incapacity for independent action added to her value as a recipient of confidences. She could be trusted to say little and do less; and the large majority who, in making confession, only desire a sympathetic listener, felt that Lady Adela was an altogether soft and comfortable personality to repose against. What more could be required? The faithful adviser frequently gives much less, and is, as a rule, much less valued than the imperturbable Lady Adelas of life. Kingston Darnley was universally held to be highly fortunate in his mother, and, by the time he came of age, as he had neither married an actress nor gone to ruin on the turf, her skill in managing him was considered marvellous, and even beyond what might reasonably have been expected.

‘I assure you, La-la, considering what young men are nowadays, I do think you have done wonders,’ said Mrs. Mimburn, who had called to congratulate her sister-in-law on the latest triumph achieved by her diplomacy.

‘Kingston is the dearest child,’ acknowledged Lady Adela, deprecating undue flattery of her own genius. ‘One only needs to guide him. He is all obedience. I have never attempted to drive him, Minnie.’

Mrs. Mimburn tossed her head. Her name was always a sore point. She had suffered heavily in the matter at the hands of her parents, who had christened her Minna Adelaide, after her great-aunts of formidable memory, the Misses Adelaide and Minna Dadd. Understanding that such names were a grievous handicap to any runner in the race of fashion, and desirous, too, of obliterating all traces of Darnley-on-Downe, Mrs. Mimburn did the best she could to remedy the disaster by resolutely calling herself ‘Minne-Adélaïde.’ This Gallicism Lady Adela could never bring herself to remember, and embittered the life of her sister-in-law by calling her Min or Minnie when in a good temper, or plain Minna on the very rare occasions when she happened to be in not so good a one.

‘Well,’ tartly replied Mrs. Mimburn, with another toss of her plumed head, ‘I think you have been wise, La-la. But you need not be too sure of Kingston. There isn’t any reason to believe, La-la, that even your son is not made of flesh and blood. Such stories one hears! And a mother is the last person a boy could think of confiding in. Depend upon it, you don’t know everything. Boys don’t let their mothers marry them off at Kingston’s age unless there is a reason for it. Dear me! of course not; everyone loves a little bit of freedom,’ concluded Mrs. Mimburn, filling her voice with the suggestion of a wicked past.

Lady Adela had the happy knack of never hearing anything that displeased her. The process of years had brought her a sweet serenity that nothing could ruffle. Whatever happened Lady Adela smiled.

‘Dear boy,’ she answered reflectively, without any symptom of having noticed her sister-in-law’s remarks, ‘dear, dear boy! he has always been as free as air. And he has been so good about the engagement. Min, you know, five-and-twenty is such a charming age for a man to settle. If one waits longer the nice girls of one’s own age have all got married off, and one has to put up with an elderly one, or a widow, or something dreadful like that.’

‘Or something even worse,’ supplemented Mrs. Mimburn, with a smile of worldly knowledge. She was looking most typical that afternoon. She was a little round dark woman, with deep, luscious eyes, and more black hair than Nature had provided. Her gown was of brown velvet, adorned with an incalculable number of ruckings, tuckings, ruchings, quillings, flutings, flouncings, rosettes, and insertions. Her parasol lost its outline in a foam of scarlet, and her brown tricorne hat, with its one enormous geranium-coloured plume, was worn at an audacious tilt, in exact imitation of that assumed by Marie de Lorraine in the second act of ‘Mélanges du Divorce.’ That gorgeous lady, whose notoriety almost passed into fame, was Mrs. Mimburn’s favourite model. She had constituted herself the especial chronicler of Marie de Lorraine, copied her clothes devotedly, bought every scent and powder that bore her name, and collected her anecdotes, apocryphal or unpublishable, with as much enthusiasm as a pious Pope accumulates relics. While the hat recalled ‘Mélanges du Divorce,’ the parasol to-day was based on that in ‘Infidèle,’ the gown was collated from two that appeared in ‘Messalineries,’ the tippet’s prototype had figured in ‘Autour de Mitylène,’ and the Parisian pearls that twined round Mrs. Mimburn’s throat had been specially copied from the historic necklace which her heroine had extracted from Prince Henri de Valois, to the general scandal of Europe. Even in the matter of cosmetics Mrs. Mimburn was faithful to her model, and her rich complexion glowed like a plum behind its bloom through a skin-tight mask of Blanc de Perle ‘Marie,’ while her ruby lips owed their flamboyancy of tint to the Vermeil de Lorraine.

Lady Adela looked at her across the tea-table with a kind smile. She felt that her sister-in-law added colour to the room. Lady Adela was one of those women whose habitations have a certain cool tonelessness that matches their own character, and, like their disposition, suits with any tint that may be introduced. Her boudoir was nondescript and mild in scheme; pale, sweet flowers stood here and there in transparent glasses, and the summer light flowed in, pale and ghostly, through the lowered white silk blinds. Entrenched behind china and silver, Lady Adela seemed the incarnation of the room’s spirit; she also had the same indefinable pale sweetness. Her gown was grey, her abundant beautiful hair snow-white, her features were filled with a gentle complacency. Altogether she irresistibly called to mind an old white rabbit—a very soft, very fluffy, very reverend and lovable old white rabbit.

‘Dear Min,’ she said at last, ‘you have no notion what a comfort this engagement is to me.’

Again Mrs. Mimburn bridled. Why could La-la never realize the difference between Min and Minne?

‘Ah, ma chère,’ she replied, ‘indeed, it must be. And you certainly have done wonders. It is not every mother who can say that her son has never given her an hour’s anxiety in his life, and ended up by marrying the very first girl that she picked out for him.’

‘Never an hour’s anxiety,’ repeated her sister-in-law, always behindhand in a conversation. ‘No, dear Min; I can truly say that ever since Kingston had diphtheria at school he has never given me another hour’s anxiety. And they said afterwards that that was only some other kind of sore throat. But it was quite as alarming at the time, I remember. Anyhow, since then the dear boy has been everything I could wish.’

‘It makes him sound terribly dull,’ commented Mrs. Mimburn. ‘Now, I like a boy to be a little bit naughty myself—a—well, a bêtise now and then, you know.’

‘There is nothing of that kind about my son, Minna,’ protested Lady Adela in a momentary spasm of dignity. Mrs. Mimburn, as in duty bound, had, of course, suspicions that her nephew was not all he had the tact to seem. But she was anxious to hear details of his engagement, and therefore waived the question of young men’s iniquity, which she was usually inclined to treat with a wealth of illustrations and many anecdotes from the career of Marie de Lorraine.

‘But tell me about Gundred Mortimer, La-la,’ she said. ‘I have never met her. What is she like?’

Lady Adela warmed into the expression of a more positive enthusiasm than she usually showed.

‘Min,’ she answered, ‘Gundred is absolutely the dearest of creatures. Everything that is nice. I really feel that I have quite found a daughter—thoroughly well brought up, and charming manners, and truly religious, which is such a great thing nowadays. Not at all forward or fashionable, but just a steady, old-fashioned, good girl. I am sure you will love her, Min.’

Mrs. Mimburn began, on the contrary, to conceive a strong dislike for the future Mrs. Darnley—a dislike tempered only by the hope that she might be found to have had a mystery in her life.

‘Quite a bread-and-butter miss,’ she tittered.

‘Do have some more, Min,’ pleaded Lady Adela, with apparent irrelevance, exercising her usual happy power of ignoring unfavourable comment. ‘Yes, nothing could be luckier in every way. She is the very wife I should have chosen for dear Kingston. She will make him perfectly happy. And now, Min, I do really feel that my work is finished. It has been a great responsibility, you know, having sole charge of a son all these years. There are so many dangers. Mercifully, he has always had confidence in me, and I have been able to keep him away from everything undesirable. But, of course, as time goes on, one gets to feel more and more anxious. You can say what you like, but it isn’t always easy to understand young men. Even a mother’s sympathy finds it difficult sometimes.’

Mrs. Mimburn had a very terse answer to the riddle of young-manhood. Human nature presented no mysteries to her mind; woman was the solution of them all. She sniffed knowingly.

‘I think I could manage it, La-la,’ she replied. ‘However, you are marrying off Kingston, and that is the great thing. I suppose he is very much in love?’

‘Oh, very, very, even before I suggested it. And she adores him, of course. I saw that long ago. But dear Kingston is so simple and good, he had no idea until I told him.’

‘And he proposed—when? Yesterday?’

‘After lunch, dear Min. I asked Gundred on purpose, and we had some really delightful Caviare biscuits. And then I managed to leave them in the drawing-room—and—and—it came off, dear Min. I am so pleased.’

‘What does Mr. Mortimer say, La-la?’

‘Naturally he is charmed, Minna. What should he be? Besides, nobody cares much what Mr. Mortimer says. But his dear aunt, Lady Agnes, is quite on our side. In fact, you may imagine that she and I talked it all out between us.’

Mrs. Mimburn laughed.

‘What an obedient boy Kingston must be,’ she said. ‘Had he nothing to say in the matter?’

‘Kingston trusts to his mother to know best,’ answered Lady Adela with gentle dignity. ‘Gundred is altogether pretty and good and sweet, so what more could he want? Besides, as I pointed out to him—and he quite understood—such a marriage will be a great help to him in his career, when he finds one.’

‘But Mr. Mortimer is very silly, surely,’ protested Mrs. Mimburn. ‘How can he be a help to anyone?’

‘One shouldn’t be harsh,’ replied Lady Adela, ‘and I am sure when he succeeds to the dukedom nobody will think him as foolish as they do now.’

Mrs. Mimburn was still in a carping mood.

‘The Duke himself is actually an imbecile, isn’t he?’ she asked. ‘How dreadful to marry into a family where there is madness, La-la! A mad, ga-ga—great-uncle, isn’t it? Yes. Poor Gundred!’

However, Lady Adela refused, as always, to take any but a hopeful view.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘we must trust that it will all be for the best. And there is a little insanity in my own family, too, Min, so that will make us quite quits, won’t it? No; the only thing I do regret is that dear Gundred has not got more relations. You see, Lady Agnes has never married, and Gundred is an only child herself, so that really poor Kingston will hardly have got so many nice new connections as I could have wished. There was an Isabel Mortimer, I am told, an aunt of Gundred’s, but they don’t talk about her. She married a New Zealander, or something dreadful, and went out there and died. I forget if she left any children, but of course it can’t matter whether she did or not.’

Mrs. Mimburn scented romance, and immediately became more friendly towards the match.

‘Ah, well, poor thing!’ she said. ‘We all have our temptations. I should be the last to blame anybody. Life teaches one to understand, La-la. It’s not Miss Gundred’s fault. Probably it runs in the blood. These things do. You know Marie de Lorraine’s mother used to drink methylated spirits, and they say she herself can never act unless—well, dear me, these things are very odd, aren’t they?’

Lady Adela was not listening; she rarely did listen to anyone, and never to Mrs. Mimburn. ‘Yes,’ she said, returning on her tracks. ‘I spoke to dear Kingston quite plainly. I told him that such an opportunity would never come in his way again. And after all, it is something to make a good marriage nowadays. And I said to him how delighted I should be if he would take it. He was so nice about it. I am sure he had been in love with Gundred all the while. I know he used to say how pretty and sweet she was. Anyhow, he made no sort of difficulty, and they will be married at the end of the season.’

‘What an anxiety off your mind!’ cried Mrs. Mimburn, giggling archly.

‘Yes,’ replied Lady Adela gravely. ‘One wants one’s son to settle down; and, of course, one likes cleverness well enough in other people, but in one’s own children one can really have too much of it. When it came to Kingston’s telling me he thought it wrong to shoot grouse, I knew it was time to see him safely married. Grouse are so truly excellent. It always happens, I am sure. If a young man does not marry early in life he becomes clever, and gets into every kind of uncomfortable fad. But Gundred will prevent and cure all that, I am quite sure. She is so religious and good, dear Min, as I told you; she will have no patience with humanitarianism and all those dreadful fashionable crazes. Humble and simple and devout, Min—just the wife that dear Kingston wants. I have never been really anxious about him, I need not say, but I certainly was beginning to think it time he fell into the hands of some nice sensible girl or other.’

Mental aberrations never interested Mrs. Mimburn. Her curiosity was confined to the vagaries of the flesh.

‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘that will wear off, you know, all that nonsense. You may be thankful it was nothing worse. Most young men—ah, well! One must be grateful that Kingston never got into the clutches of Marie de Lorraine, for instance. She is such a terror. Even her garters, you know, diamonds and pearls. Oh, dear me, how delightful life would be, wouldn’t it, if one didn’t have to be good?’

‘Men,’ continued Lady Adela in a ruminant manner, ‘are always a little puzzling at the best of times. Even if they seem perfectly satisfactory in every way they are quite liable to break out sometimes into most extraordinary freaks. One can never tell. Though dear Kingston is as quiet as anyone could possibly be, I do feel that it is satisfactory to get him settled so nicely.’

‘As you say,’ admitted Mrs. Mimburn knowingly, ‘one can never tell. The strangest things one hears! Quite old men, too—so very funny! There was Lord Bennington; they say he wanted to run away with Marie de Lorraine—seventy, if he is a day, La-la, and eight grandchildren. Dear me, yes; one can never prophesy what a man will do. Only be ever so little polite to one, and the next minute—well, I suppose it is human nature, after all.’ She sighed coyly, as one whose virtue is for ever being besieged.

‘Even my own dear husband,’ continued Lady Adela, ‘the best and most devoted of men, had had his moments of madness—really, one can call it nothing else, can one, Min? You remember how good and orderly James always was? Nothing seemed able to excite him, and though I am sure he loved me most warmly, still—well, it wasn’t at all public, Minnie. And yet, you know, there was a Frenchwoman, or something dreadful like that, whom James quite lost his head over, so I am told, before he met me. Perfectly crazy, they say he was, and when she was drowned he wanted to commit suicide. Now, could anything sound more unbelievable, Min?’

‘I have heard about it,’ replied Mrs. Mimburn; ‘one of those ridiculous affairs I was talking of. Poor, sober, straightforward, stodgy, bourgeois James, and some terrible creature with padded hips and a French walk. That is just what happens. Your nonconformist, your decent provincial, always gets caught by the most brazen horizontale. James was absolutely idiotic about it, so people told me—met her—now, where did he meet her?—anyway, he suddenly made himself more absurd than a schoolboy—and I could tell you stories of them, La-la—fell in love with her at first sight, and talked the most amazing nonsense you can imagine. She was his affinity, if you please, the other half of his soul, the lost love of a century ago. And all this from sober old James. She must have been a shameless creature, too—but they always are, ces dames; for she seems to have met him—well, quite half-way, and encouraged his monstrous craze. And then she was most mercifully drowned, and after a week of sheer madness, James calmed down into his right mind again, and was only too glad to marry a nice quiet girl like you, La-la. Now, that just shows. If there ever was a person whom one would have thought perfectly safe from a passion like that, the person was our decent, beef-eating James. But no, one can never count on a man. Nine out of ten of the men we marry, however placid and devoted they may be, have had some dreadful insane romance in their lives, La-la. One knows what it is to be a man’s romance one’s self, and, dear me, it’s not by any means the same thing as being a man’s wife!’

‘Such a sad, dreadful story,’ commented Lady Adela comfortably, taking no notice of Mrs. Mimburn’s artful, question-courting sighs. ‘And to think of its happening to James, too. Do you know, Min, he always wore black for that woman on the twentieth of July. So stuffy of him, in the hot weather!’

‘Oh, my dear La-la, trust a man always to afficher himself in the most ridiculous way he can.’

‘Minna, do you think Kingston is at all like his father?’

‘My dear La-la, all men are alike. Let us trust that Kingston’s marriage will prevent him from playing the fool like that, though.’

‘Minnie, do you know Kingston sometimes seems to me so like his father that I am almost frightened. And yet he is quite different, which makes it all the odder. Somehow, his father seems to look over Kingston’s shoulder at me from time to time, and every now and then I hear poor James’s voice distinctly in something Kingston says. And yet they are two quite different people. Isn’t it uncanny? I take quinine for it, Minnie. And I know dear James is safe in heaven, of course, but yet I can never quite help feeling that the father and son are the same in some mysterious way. And that is so uncomfortable, Min. One does like to think that people are really dead when they have been buried. It seems so much more proper, somehow.’

Exhausted by her effort of subtlety, Lady Adela sighed and poured more water into the teapot. Meanwhile Mrs. Mimburn was growing impatient.

‘Well, dear La-la,’ she said, ‘Kingston is just a man. That’s all the likeness there is between him and his father. It is the male element you feel in both. No woman can help feeling it—voilà ce qui donne les frissons. And now, La-la, I seem to have been a perfect age, and, really, I ought to be going on. Do you think Kingston and Gundred are likely to be in soon? Because I did want to see her, and it is getting so late that I can hardly spare more than another minute or two.’

Lady Adela looked helplessly at the clock.

‘The play surely must be over by now,’ she answered. ‘Do wait, Minnie. They will be here any time now.’

‘What has he taken her to this afternoon?’

‘“La Tosca.” It sounds a very dreadful sort of play, and not at all one to take a nice girl to. But dear Kingston has always been interested in literature and things like that, so I suppose he wants to interest dear Gundred in them, too. There are such pretty books nowadays; I never can see what people want with clever ones. However, I do think Gundred will cure dear Kingston. She has the sweetest, simplest tastes. We agree in everything.... Ah, there they are,’ broke off Lady Adela in tones of triumph, as if the return of the lovers were a personal achievement of her own. Mrs. Mimburn rose, diffusing an eddy of Peau de Marie as she did so.

‘Just a moment,’ she announced, ‘and then I must fly. I must, indeed.’ She gathered herself into a welcoming posture, picturesquely assumed the parasol, and stood with protruded hips to watch the opening of the door and the entrance of her nephew’s future wife.

Miss Mortimer had clearly no false bashfulness about confronting and challenging the approval of her future husband’s family. Sedately and collectedly she came into the room, greeted Lady Adela, and then underwent the introduction to Mrs. Mimburn. Her lover followed close upon her track—tall, fair, handsome, radiant, his manner filled with proprietary joy.

Miss Mortimer might be recognised at first glance as the very fine flower of that type which, after all, even Lady Adela only copied. From head to foot her appearance and bearing proclaimed that she belonged to a class that had ruled unquestioned for many generations. She was very neat, placid, clear-cut in dress, build, and demeanour, an elegant, tiny figure, unalterably, coldly perfect in every detail. Everything about her was exactly as it should be, from the elaborate neatness of her pale golden hair to the nice grace with which she accepted Mrs. Mimburn. Her manners, her smile, were consciously faultless, and she radiated the impression of imperturbable good breeding. She was, in fact, a crisp and charming specimen of that type which develops later into neat-featured peeresses with royalty fringes, violet toques, and short cloaks of sable or mink. It was easy to see how she had attracted Lady Adela. The two women had ease, gentleness, placidity in common. But there the resemblance stopped. Miss Mortimer’s mind was as definite, as clear, as simple as her appearance; she had none of that soft vagueness which characterized Lady Adela; her decisions were as swift and firm as their expression was gentle and well bred; one could divine in her the immovable obstinacy of one who is never violent or angry, but always unchangeably certain that he is right. As she smiled upon Mrs. Mimburn’s congratulatory fondlings, she conceived an instantaneous dislike for that over-decorated woman, and had no difficulty in feeling sure that her disapproval was righteous.

‘Call me Minne,’ Mrs. Mimburn was saying effusively, gladly conscious that she was making a highly favour-impression on the bride-elect. ‘Always remember to call me Minne.’

Mrs. Mimburn had never allowed her nephew to emphasize her age by calling her aunt, and saw no reason for delaying to make the situation clear to her prospective niece.

‘So kind,’ murmured Gundred, smiling into Mrs. Mimburn’s eyes, and noticing the heavy rings of bistre that enhanced their charms. Then she turned to Lady Adela.

‘Just one cup of tea, dear Lady Adela, if I may? And then, really, I must be getting home. Kingston and I have been having the most delightful afternoon, but papa will be thinking I have been run over, or something terrible. And I sent the carriage home, too.’

Lady Adela poured her out a cup of tea, and Kingston Darnley offered it to her with due devotion.

‘No, dear, no sugar,’ said Gundred gently, repulsing his offer. ‘You forget, I never take sugar.’ His ardour was such that he persisted in plying her with all good things; hers was such that she expected him to remember minutely all her preferences and dislikes. Accordingly, her clear, sweet voice conveyed a hint of reproach.

‘And have you enjoyed the play, dear?’ asked Lady Adela.

‘Very wonderful,’ replied Gundred. ‘But so painful, Lady Adela. I cannot see why they should want to perform such painful things. There is so much beauty in life—yes? So why should we look at the ugly things?’

‘It’s all in the day’s work,’ suggested Kingston Darnley. ‘Beauty as well as ugliness. One has to face both in life.’

‘But beauty can never be ugly,’ answered Gundred, ‘and art only deals with beauty——’ Her calm tones carried the conviction of perfect certitude, and flattened out the conversation like a steam-roller.

She was too pretty, however, for such syllogisms to be as daunting as they might have been from the lips of a plainer woman. Kingston contemplated the speaker with a pleasure that obliterated all close consideration of the thing spoken.

‘I like a play with plenty of passion in it,’ announced Mrs. Mimburn. ‘English plays are so absurdly mealy-mouthed. These things exist, and, really, the whole of life is wonderfully interesting. And yet English writers leave out the most exciting half of everything. Why, for my own part, as soon as I have read the haut goût parts in a book, I take no further interest in the story.’

‘It is all a matter of taste, I suppose—yes?’ answered Gundred, her cold tone implying that it was a matter of good taste and bad, and that on the point her own was as good as Mrs. Mimburn’s was bad.

‘Some women like to pretend that they are not flesh and blood,’ began Mrs. Mimburn.

Clearly, sweetly, decisively, Gundred interposed.

‘Dear Lady Adela,’ she said, ‘really, you make the very best tea that anyone could imagine. And it is such a rare art nowadays. But, do you know, I must not stay another minute. Poor papa will be getting quite anxious. Kingston dear, you may get me a hansom if you like, but I cannot let you come with me. Your mother will almost forget she ever had a son. You must stay with her and tell her about that dreadful play.’

‘Look here, do let me come with you,’ pleaded Kingston. ‘I hardly feel to have seen you at all to-day. I want to talk to you.’

‘Dear boy,’ smiled Gundred, ‘you have just had three and a half hours of my company.’

‘In a stuffy theatre, with four hundred people looking on the whole time. Besides, one can’t talk—really talk, in a theatre. It isn’t really being together, sitting side by side in the stalls. One might as well be with one’s grandmother, for all one is able to say. There are ever so many things I haven’t had a chance of saying to you. Take me home with you, Gundred, and let me dine with you.’

Gundred shook her head. ‘Impossible, dear,’ she answered decidedly. ‘We have got people coming, and it would put the table out. You may run in to lunch to-morrow, though. And now, may he ring for a hansom, Lady Adela?’

But at this point Mrs. Mimburn intervened with an urgent plea that Gundred should let herself be driven home in Mrs. Mimburn’s carriage.

‘Now, do, dearest Gundred,’ pleaded Mrs. Mimburn, nerving herself to the inevitable audacity of calling the new niece by her Christian name. Then she fetched her breath in a gasp of relief, and went on. ‘Our horses go like the wind, and you will be home in a flash—an éclair, a positive éclair.’

To Gundred’s British mind the word merely suggested confectionery, and the proposal, as emanating from Mrs. Mimburn, was altogether distasteful. She smiled a cordial refusal. But Mrs. Mimburn pressed her point.

‘We must really see something of each other, dear,’ she went on, ‘now we are to be relations. A cosy little drive together, now, don’t say no. I shall be quite offended if you do.’ Mrs. Mimburn persisted until Gundred saw that there was no hope of being able decently to decline the offer.

‘You are so kind,’ she said. ‘Well, if you are really sure it will not be taking you out of your way? Kingston, dear, may I have my parasol?’

He told her he had left it outside the door.

‘Where?’ asked Gundred. ‘Come and show me.’ Together they slipped out of the room, leaving Mrs. Mimburn making her farewells to Lady Adela, and exchanging comments.

‘But look here,’ protested Kingston, as they stood on the landing, ‘why am I not to see you again till to-morrow? Why shouldn’t I dine with you? Confound the table, you know.’

‘Hush,’ said Gundred, but not sternly. ‘It really would put the table out. And papa is so particular. Besides’—she faltered for a moment—‘besides, Kingston dear, I—I don’t want you to see too much of me before we are married. You might—you might get tired of me, you see.’ She raised her eyes and looked full into his. In the smiling depths of her gaze might have been seen the whole truth. Sedate, restrained, correct, she loved her choice with a passion that no one was allowed to guess from the cool suavity of her usual demeanour. Only in stolen flashes of privacy such as this was even Kingston permitted to realize his triumph. Gundred lived, as a rule, in public; every gesture, every inflection, was calculated to satisfy that pervasive invisible arbiter whose approval confirms its object’s title to ‘good form.’ Few and brief were the moments in which she consented to be, in body and spirit, alone with her lover. And rarely had he time to grasp the concession, before the blessed instant passed and Gundred slipped back into her cool, normal self, hastily evasive, as if frightened of her own self-revelation. So it was now. He heard her murmured words on the cool, dim landing, saw the look in her eyes, and realized her meaning. But as he caught at her hands, and broke into a hot protest, the mask flew back on to the girl’s face again. She reclaimed her hands and busied herself in putting on her gloves. It was the polite, public Gundred that stood before him. To his contrast with her public self, so self-contained and orderly, was due half the sweetness and the charm of that shy wood-nymph soul that only allowed itself to peep out at him so timidly and rarely. He saw that the moment was over.

‘You are so demonstrative,’ said Gundred calmly. ‘And putting on one’s gloves is a serious matter. One cannot do two things at once. And, oh, dear me! I have never said good-bye to your mother.’

She slipped quickly back into the drawing-room before he could stop her, and, as he remained outside, playing disconcertedly with the tassel of her parasol, he heard the well-known clear level tones taking a daughterly farewell of Lady Adela. Then Mrs. Mimburn emerged in such a roaring surf of silk petticoats that other sounds became indistinguishable. She squeezed her nephew’s hand.

‘A thousand congratulations,’ she whispered. ‘Charming, charming! Just the sort of girl that pays for marrying. You will wake her up. She will be quite a different creature when you have been married a little while. I know that sleeping-beauty type of girl.’

Mrs. Mimburn smiled darkly upon him, and put a world of knowledge into her glance. But she had not time to say more, for Gundred now appeared, and the two women descended the stairs, exchanging civilities. Kingston followed, to see them safely tucked into Mrs. Mimburn’s elaborate victoria.

‘Lunch to-morrow; don’t forget,’ said Gundred, as a last reminder. Then the carriage drove off, and Kingston went upstairs again to his mother.

CHAPTER III

To love is by no means necessarily to understand, and Kingston Darnley, as Nature and life had moulded him, was a very different character from Kingston Darnley as his mother’s vague mind imagined him. In point of fact she, good woman, knew little of her son but his face, though, with the splendid intrepidity of the benevolent stupid, she claimed an intimate acquaintance with every detail of his being. Her complete ignorance was due to no conscious process on either side; he as little dreamt of concealing anything from her as she of ignoring any quality in him. But time had taught Kingston that whether he confided in his mother or not, she was just as wise after the revelation as before, being totally devoid of any power to understand what she was shown, or, indeed, to realize that she was being shown anything at all.

Kingston Darnley soon learned to lead his own life without reference to his mother; to help by listening was her province; to help by comprehending was beyond the capacities of her nature. So Lady Adela was left to dwell serene in the world of her own happy little kindly fancies, while the facts of life went by her in a roar, without ever being able to capture her notice. She felt that never had mother been more loving or more beloved; that never had son been more loyal and devoted; her parental eye was fixed unerringly on her child, and she knew his nature down to the uttermost convolutions of its smallest eccentricity. Did she ever forget that he disliked the smell of onions? Had she ever failed to notice and deplore his coldness towards her favourite clergy? And had she not succeeded in the last, noblest, highest ambition of a mother’s life—that of imposing upon him a thoroughly nice and suitable bride? And he, for his part, had never rebelled, never repined, never objected, not even to the bride. Accordingly, Lady Adela felt proudly secure that she understood her son in every fibre of his being. So she smiled upon him with perfect unintelligence, and gave nightly thanks to the Powers that had so gifted her with the perfect tact of motherhood.

Kingston Darnley at one-and-twenty had found himself a great deal older than his years. His contemporaries were mere children. He had lived the sheltered life at his mother’s side, until at last came the belated time when she reluctantly permitted him to go to Oxford without her shielding company. General opinion—even that of her son—seemed opposed to Lady Adela’s plan of taking lodgings in Holywell Street, and thence keeping a mother’s eye upon her child. And to popular opinion Lady Adela accordingly yielded. She never made more than a mild and flabby resistance, and could always be induced by opposition to give up her most cherished plots with a smile. But until Kingston, alone and undefended, set off one sad October evening from Paddington, he had never been allowed outside the sphere of his mother’s presence—one can hardly say of his mother’s influence—for any influence that Lady Adela may ever have had must always have been merely that of kindly, null proximity.

However, reared by carefully-selected tutors in the gentle but stifling atmosphere of a widow’s house, the mind of Kingston Darnley had shot into premature and unsuspected growth. Intelligence he would always have had, but his training forced it into early development. And, as the growing pains of the mind are always painful as those of the body—especially if experienced too soon or too keenly—so Kingston suffered from the unseasonable expansion of his thoughts, and his discomfort was increased, no less than its cause, by the fact of his essential loneliness. He had no one to speak to. On the first mention of an idea, Lady Adela confidently diagnosed the need of pills; and any perception of inequalities in this best of all possible worlds must be treated by the purer air of Brighton or Bournemouth.

So Kingston was driven in upon himself, and, by the time he came of age, had ardently discovered all the paradoxes that more fortunate people come to in due time at twenty-five or so, and then are able to take as platitudes. The injustice of wealth, the iniquities of sport, of religion, of land-tenure—all these crimes Kingston Darnley felt to be his own particular revelation, and they fermented in his mind until he had few thoughts in common with his fellows. They, meanwhile, went placidly on their way, and when Kingston arrived at Oxford, he found himself a stranger and misplaced among the men of his own years. He was filled at first with a gnawing, cavilling discontent that arose as much from idleness and opulence as from too rapid and unhealthy growth. They, for their part, were honest, jolly fellows, who looked on discontent as an uncomfortable and ‘bad-form’ thing, to be strenuously frowned and jeered out of their circle. To enjoy what came, without analysis, was their scheme, and they resented being asked to inquire into the reasonableness and the morality of their enjoyment. At one-and-twenty no really sane creature wants to think. The time for thought comes later, when the first ardours of action are passing.

Kingston Darnley, though he had far too much sense and geniality to preach or impose his ideas on anyone, was felt to be always suggesting questions, never to be accepting the joy of the moment, in a properly acquiescent, youthful manner. And nothing is more annoying to the hedonist, of whatever age, than the companionship of someone who seems to be examining the sources of his joy. It may be that no joys can stand the test of reason, and the hedonist’s dislike of the sceptic may gain its intensity from the hedonist’s own unacknowledged realization of the fact. Even when Kingston got drunk his tone of mind seemed analytical, far removed from the frank, bellowing joyousness of the more healthy enthusiasts round him. They sat about in the Quad and howled, or beat baths beneath the windows of the junior Dean; Kingston, anxious to please, howled and beat baths with the best. But, whereas the ebullition was pure nature and joy of living with them, with him it was always an assumption, a pose, no matter how carefully assumed and disguised. And the consciousness of this was no less galling to him than to them. All felt ill at ease, disconcerted, disillusioned by his presence. His well-intentioned hilarity seemed somehow to turn the gold of their pleasure to brass, to strike a jarring note in the chorale of enjoyment they were playing so whole-heartedly. So, though never unpopular, Kingston Darnley was isolated. His own set in the college did not want to be bothered with the iniquitous why and wherefore of the game-laws, or the manifest impossibility of miracles; and the other sets to whom he would have brought these discoveries in glad pride had grown accustomed to them long ago, and for many years had looked on them as the buried foundation-stones of all reasoning. So that Kingston fell between two stools, and must needs keep company with his ideas until the passing of time should bring him level with the contemporaries over whom his training had given him such an unhealthy and fictitious advantage.

In any case it is hardly likely that he could ever have taken any really intimate part in Oxford life. Training or no training, his mind had that inquiring tone so fatal to unreflecting hilarity. He was too much interested—in the wrong things, too, and in the wrong way—in people, in causes, in problems. The men who should have been his friends were concerned almost entirely with the joy of living and the avoidance of all unnecessary work. And how is the son of a widow, reared at home decorously, without other boys to riot and tumble with—how is he to have any personal enthusiasm for the joy of living, as understood by healthier, normal men of his own age? Nor is the precocious cleverness of the unquiet mind any real test of ability. Few of Kingston Darnley’s contemporaries but had as good an intelligence as his. Their brains, however, developed naturally along the natural path. In twenty years he had lived hurriedly through five-and-twenty of feverish mental development; their five-and-twentieth year—of mind no less than of body—still lay well ahead of them. By the time he and they would be thirty they might all, perhaps, be contemporaries together. The unhealthy, straggling shoots of his forced growth would have been blighted down to a level with theirs, sturdy and natural; and by the time they came to consider the game-laws and the gospels, they would bring a ripe and genial intelligence to bear on such points, neither thinking nor talking in excess, but letting profitless points of doctrine slide, for the sake of hitting on a sane and decent scheme of living, such as can best be attained by the average sensible gentleman’s compromise between abstract justice and sound, everyday behaviour.

And Kingston himself would find, in the course of years, that the rubs and jars of life would bring his point of view to the same pitch as theirs, and would perceive that thought is a frivolous and profitless indulgence of the idle mind, as compared with the more fruitful achievement of an honest man’s daily duty, along the lines of obvious, rough-cast morality. Meanwhile, however, though without conscious arrogance, he realized his isolation, and viewed it alternately with pride and regret. On the whole, as self-satisfaction is the postulate of all human life, the pride predominated, and he carried unconsciously through Oxford the idea of being a chosen candlestick for spiritual light.

Other feelings, too, contributed to his sense of loneliness. Birth and wealth had given him caste; but custom had not yet trained him to it. From the middle-class, staid traditions of Darnley-on-Downe he had inherited several hereditary tendencies that not the most determined efforts could eradicate. He was conscious of them; they annoyed him, they disconcerted him by making him feel more than ever that he did not match his surroundings, and this mortifying consciousness was unsupported by any such heroic glamour as that which attended the independence of his sceptical spirit. He knew that he was not careless enough in the spending of money. Spend it he did, freely and eagerly; but he always knew what it had bought, and his mind kept accounts long after he had fiercely broken himself away from the spell of pass-books and schedules. This was not as it should be. Money, to be spent correctly, should be scattered loosely, and the spender should have as little idea as possible of the way in which it has gone. Only thus can a well-bred indifference to finance be attained. The ideal of his contemporaries was to be perpetually in debt, and never to have anything whatever to show for all that had been spent. On four hundred or four hundred and fifty a year right-minded people might attain to complete destitution, bare rooms, shabby clothes, and a perpetual assumption of bankruptcy. One very popular man even achieved the result on six hundred. This was a rare triumph of extravagance, however, and a reasonable ambition would confine itself to a complete ignorance as to all outgoings. And this Kingston Darnley could never acquire. The ghost of his father stirred in him, demanding a solid recollection of every purchase. He bought the best, bought it and lavished it freely. But he never could rid himself of the knowledge that it was the best, and thus a faint suspicion of ostentatiousness hovered over all his entertainments, and the happy, slovenly wastefulness with which his contemporaries ran into debt for atrocious port or uneatable dinners could never be reached by a man with his finical instinct for perfection. This lack of carelessness, either as to quantity of pounds spent or quality of things purchased, stigmatized its owner for ever as an outsider—not to mention the fact that he invariably paid money down for all he bought. His wealth might as fairly have been blamed for this vice, perhaps; nevertheless, a hatred for debt was one of Kingston’s most inalienable legacies from Darnley-on-Downe, and, had he not been able to pay cash for the best, he would certainly have remained content to buy the worst. And this, again, was a suspicious trait in the eyes of his contemporaries, who, though quite happy to buy the worst, always made it their pride to run up bills for it that would have been exorbitant had they been ordering the best.

These small hereditary feelings set James Darnley’s son apart from his contemporaries, and it only required the remains of middle-class prudishness to achieve his isolation. Kingston found it impossible, in spite of habit and effort, to acquire the easy personal sans-gêne, the tripping, untrammelled tongue of his contemporaries. He did his best; listened genially, accumulated anecdotes and retailed them among his friends; but always heavily, never as to the manner born. His friends held the free, frank language only possible to the perfectly cleanly mind, naked and unashamed; he, for his part, was always uneasy in his nudity, and took his share in the talk with that consciousness of impropriety that doubles impropriety. The Dadd respectability still hampered its rebellious descendant, and prevented him from ever entering into perfect harmony with that world where decency is a matter of conduct, not by any means of language. On this point his aunt Minne-Adélaïde had certainly the advantage. But the woman is proverbially more adaptable than the man.

Still isolated, then, at home and abroad, Kingston came down at last from Oxford at twenty-four, a character untried, unformed, unground by any real contact with the mills of life. An inordinate sensitiveness to impressions, an excessive personal daintiness, were the marks of his nature at that time, so far as a friend could discern it. For the rest, very pleasant of look and temper, friendly, honest, and no more selfish than a good-looking young fellow of four-and-twenty has every right to be. Lady Adela was delighted to receive him under her wing once more, and noticed with joy the subsidence of some of his more tumultuous ideas into tranquillity. She had a fearful notion that everyone left Oxford ‘a roaring atheist,’ and it was a great joy to her that Kingston completely disproved this fallacy, not only by accompanying her to church, but also by carrying her hymn-book. She devoted herself to exploiting her son, and he, not finding rebellion necessary for his pleasure, allowed himself to be guided wherever his mother wished.

Rich and handsome in high degree, he began to find London a very pleasant and companionable place, without the ostentatious thoughtlessness of Oxford, or the frank intellectual apathy of his home. In point of fact, London began to do for him what neither home nor Oxford had succeeded in doing. Gradually he grew down to his own level, his edges were rubbed off, his generous, exaggerated ideas dwindled to their proper place in the perspective of life. He realized that to live well and beautifully it is not necessary to be for ever examining the foundations of action; that life is simple and enjoyable for those who prefer living it to discussing it; that justice, while august and unattainable in the abstract, and astonishingly contradictory in its precepts, is yet, in the concrete, very easily discerned and followed in this workaday sphere by plain-minded people whose eyes are fixed, not on the stars in high heaven, but on their reflection in the muddy ways of the world. He ceased to nourish fantastic theories against the hanging of murderesses, conceived the possibility of good in vivisection, and began at last to contemplate a Piccadilly midnight with the not unkindly stoicism of a man of the world. Inwardly, as he often told himself, his ideas remained the same, but their outward manifestation grew calmer and more ordinary. When he met his Oxford friends he found that he was much more in sympathy with their way of taking life as a matter of course.

Meanwhile Lady Adela was bent on seeing him safely married. This, she considered, was the easiest and most desirable way of protecting him against all the wicked possibilities that lie in wait for a young man. To save him from the contamination of many women by tying him tight to one, before he had had time to look about and make his choice, seemed to her a very prudent, not to say holy, course. So she paraded desirable damsels before him, and held amicable counsel with mothers not at all averse from an alliance with Kingston Darnley’s wealth. The mothers and Lady Adela worked and manœuvred with Machiavellian cunning; needless to say, their designs would have been plain to a sucking child; and, equally needless to say, Kingston, pleased and flattered, lent himself more or less amiably to their strategy, with a guilelessness that quite reassured them as to his ignorance of their purposes.

But that very blamelessness of her son’s which Lady Adela wished to safeguard was the ruin of her plan. For, as a matter of fact, Lady Adela, by an accident of fate, rather than by any perspicacity of intellect, was right in holding the mother’s usual superstition of her son’s purity. Kingston Darnley, emotional and fastidious of temperament, impressionable rather than passionate, curious and idealistic, had hitherto not gone the way of all flesh. He had avoided ‘experiences’; and experiences had never sought him out. The sense of personal decency remained strong upon him, and its strength was reinforced by his old theories of morality, and by his strong tendency towards mental, rather than physical passion. So he remained a spectator in the great sexual battle of life.

And this onlooker attitude is not endearing even to the most holy and maidenly of women. Women require to feel that a man is a man—that is, they require to feel the thrill of his virility in the deep fibres of their consciousness—to have their interest caught and held by the proximity of the dominating male. It is only to the depraved woman that the saint is of personal interest; and, even then, her interest is depraved as her nature. The normal girl—though she has not the faintest understanding what her wishes mean—needs to feel the possible conqueror in the man she is talking to—at least, if he is to rouse her curiosity and grow in her acquaintance. And this mysterious thrill, of the man triumphant, Kingston was utterly unable to communicate. Therefore his friendships with women were almost wholly impersonal. He had none of that love-making power which experiences confer; had no idea of how the blood is stirred and defiance stimulated; no gift for that bold expression of physical approval which is so dear to even the best of women. Women had to ask him if their frocks were pretty, and if he liked their hats; even then his answers never went the fervent lengths that their questions had been meant to open up.

His flirtations were abstract, platonic, unearthly—all that a mother considers most unprofitable, though perilous. The artist, indeed, can be a sensualist; but the artistic spirit and the sensual have no real relationship. What attracts the one repels the other, and it is only within the fierce energetic soul of genius that the two can be reconciled. Kingston Darnley, without genius, had the artist spirit. And the artist spirit was for ever showing him fresh superficial blemishes in the offered maidens—blemishes whose deterrent force his animalism was not powerful enough to overcome. This one had hands that didn’t match; that one perpetually wore lace mittens; a third had a nose that perspired at dances; or an irritating cackle that revealed a golden tooth. One and all, he liked them—even loved them—in so far as their minds were clear, pleasant, friendly, lovable. But to be loved for her mind is the last thing that a well-looking young woman requires. And when he thought of marrying them, when he considered the prospect of living for ever with a perspiring nose or a mittened hand, Kingston revolted at the idea, no matter how precious the soul that owned the nose or the mitten.

It may be imagined, then, that, whatever his relations with older, plainer women, settled in life, he was neither popular nor at ease with the marriageable maidens provided by his mother. In vague dissatisfaction with his home, he was even anxious to marry and settle down with some sympathetic, adorable woman—but always that accursed prosaic aspect of the case came uppermost, and repelled him in horror from the plan.

Only once had he ever felt what he hoped might be the premonitory thrill of a really great passion—a passion such as might tide him over the more difficult questions involved. In this hope he had nurtured young love; and as love in so many lucky people is a matter of habit and determination, he had seemed soon to be in a fair way to success. The girl, too, showed signs of approval, and everything appeared so prosperous that Lady Adela gave hearty thanks and put half a crown into the plate, feeling that Heaven had earned more than its customary shilling. And then one day he had sat with the girl and her aunt in Kensington Gardens. And the cruel glare of daylight had shown him a fine colony of down on her nose, and the places whence and where her maid had transferred a rosette to hide a stain on her gown. All was over. The girl was everything delightful; but the idea of being bound eternally to a potentially bearded nose was impossible. Kingston could no longer bear the thought of marrying, and told his mother that his hope had proved fallacious. Heaven only got sixpence the next Sunday; and, even so, it was in coppers.

It was shortly after this episode that Heaven, bearing no malice, had thrown Lady Adela into the track of Lady Agnes Mortimer. Lady Agnes was a single woman of small means, and an eccentricity that passed all bounds. However, she was something of a personage, by virtue of her name as well as of her character, and the great-niece whom she was trying to marry might do very well for Kingston Darnley. So thought Lady Adela, pondering the many eligible qualities of the girl who would one day be daughter to a Duke of March and Brakelond, and who, besides, had so many qualities that endearingly resembled her own—at least, so far as kindness, devotion, sweetness, and piety went. She brought her son, accordingly, into contact with Miss Mortimer, and was surreptitiously overjoyed to find him obediently disposed. As for Lady Agnes, she contemplated with equanimity the introduction of the Darnley wealth into the impoverished House of Mortimer, and tried to soften down her asperities lest the match should be impeded.

The House of March and Brakelond no longer loomed so large in the public eye as once it had, and as Gundred still felt it should. The reigning Duke was an imbecile, uncomfortably poor and very aged. There was no Duchess, no near relations, nothing to give prominence or interest even to the daughter of the heir-apparent. Gundred Mortimer attracted little notice in London, keeping house parsimoniously for her father in Russell Square, and going out on the rather shabby arm of Lady Agnes. Lady Agnes was accepted because her eccentricities made her so incalculable as to be amusing; but Gundred was soon found to be almost depressingly normal and correct. There were scores of more naturally noticeable girls in London; Miss Mortimer, as Miss Mortimer, had no sort of personal importance, whatever power and dignity Fate might see fit to bestow at some later date on ‘Lady Gundred.’ Nicely mannered, nicely minded, nicely dressed, Miss Mortimer was an inconspicuous, if pleasant, figure in the crowd, and the elevation of her father to the dukedom seemed so remote that there was no according her any advance on her face-value. Had the prospect of finding her mistress and deputy Duchess at Brakelond only been more actual or imminent, then the world might have lent Miss Mortimer credit and respect on the reversion; but Mr. Mortimer and his daughter had been Mr. and Miss Mortimer for so many years now that no one found it easy to think of them as prospective ‘Duke of March and Brakelond’ and ‘Lady Gundred.’ Whenever anyone thought now of the Mortimers, it was always of the old—incredibly old—imbecile, dying eternally at Brakelond among his parrots.

Nor was Mr. Mortimer himself of a commanding character, fit to capture that popular interest which his daughter’s quiet neatness had been unable to attach. Mr. Mortimer, son of the late Lord Roger, and heir-apparent to his uncle, must always, whatever his position, have been a nonentity, not only from his poverty, but from his silliness. Mr. Mortimer was strangely, unbelievably silly. He was merely silly. He was silly in the wrong way. He neither shocked people nor amused them. Even his daughter realized that he was silly, and felt no grievance with the world for ignoring him. The world had, at one time, done its best to encourage a coming Duke. But the long delay in the succession, coupled with Mr. Mortimer’s overwhelming foolishness, had gradually worn off the patience of even the most far-sighted; and now his daughter went about inconspicuously with her great-aunt, while her father stayed unregretted at home, and presumed on his prospects in a placid, most-comfortable-chair-assuming way.

Gentle, neat, polite, Miss Mortimer, in her heart of hearts, resented the indifference with which the world seemed to treat the future mistress of Brakelond. And this resentment, demure and calm as it was, did not make her more attractive or approachable to the men from whom she would have liked to claim attention as her right. She stiffened herself into a rigid piety, and by contrast with the gay, attractive girls around her, made herself defiantly dull and godly in demeanour, pluming herself the while on her unfaltering maintenance of old-fashioned piety in degenerate days. And as soon as the men discovered that, in her way, she was mildly sulking at them for not making more of her, they ceased their efforts to make anything at all, and took refuge with the hundreds of other bright, pleasant girls who had twice Miss Mortimer’s charm and none of her prospects or pretensions.

It was strange that Gundred, delightfully pretty in her cool way, serene, beautifully mannered, could exert no compelling force on her surroundings. That she wished to claim attention was the sign of her weakness; for those who can command attention never take the trouble of asking for it. But Gundred’s mind was always secluded, self-centred, reserved. She never gave out any light or warmth. She accepted, absorbed, received with gracious dignity; she never had the power of radiating any return of friendly feeling, any comforting geniality of human sympathy. As a talker she was gently frigid, sweetly insipid in her way of avoiding all topics of general interest, and, while restricting the conversation to her own concerns, of restricting it entirely to such of those as were most obvious and least interesting to the world at large. The weather, as it affected her plans; the visits that she paid, the churches she attended, and the cooks that she engaged; such were the subjects on which she pellucidly discoursed in the prettiest of voices, with the most pleasant of smiles; to the unutterable weariness of some partner who wanted a little more vitality in the conversation.

Nor was she more successful as a listener. Even during the most thrilling recitals her eye might be seen wandering towards the next comer, or her mind guessed to be wondering whether she had not accorded the speaker enough of her attention. Men soon ceased to tell her anything of value, and followed her own example of talking amiably but saying nothing. Lady Agnes was beginning to despair of her great-niece’s prospects when Kingston Darnley was ushered into the lists by his mother.

He came, he saw, he conquered. Idle-looking, tall and fair, beautiful in build and feature, he could not but command personal admiration; while in mind, keenly active, riotously fanciful, he was the last man in the world to conciliate Miss Mortimer’s approval, and, therefore, the first to captivate her attention. To her prim and maidenly habits of thought he was seductive in his lazy twinkling moods, seductive in his moments of emotion, seductive in those ebullitions of ridiculous gaiety that Gundred knew to be so disorderly and unconventional, yet reluctantly felt to be so delightful. Hitherto men had either bored her or been bored by her, had always failed to penetrate the closed garden of her attention; Kingston Darnley now came swinging carelessly into the sacred enclosure, and paid her the compelling compliment of making her believe herself brilliant and amusing.

Often it happens that the staid and decorous, hard as iron in their disapproval of all frivolity, are suddenly and completely melted by someone frivolous beyond their uttermost possibilities of disapproval. One is liable to love one’s opposites, if those opposites be sufficiently opposed. Only a little less different herself, and Gundred might have disliked Kingston Darnley; but he was so madly divergent from all her ideals that the very sharpness of the contrast drove her to capitulate rapidly and completely. She even ceased to claim his attention; she began to beg for it.

Her training had collaborated with her nature in guarding her from self-betrayal. Her manners continued gentle, guarded, suavely frigid as before. But Lady Adela, with the eye of a hopeful mother, pierced the disguise of Gundred’s feelings, and lost no time in proclaiming the discovery to her son. Kingston Darnley, for his part, was strongly attracted by Gundred. To his fastidious temperament she never offered a jarring note. She was always crisp and cool; always deliberate and graceful; her hair was never disordered, nor her hat crooked, nor her stockings ill-gartered. At all points she was unalterably serene, impeccable and satisfying. Emotionally, too, she gave him what he wanted. He needed no ardent, unbalanced temper in his wife. He needed just that gracious acquiescence which Miss Mortimer supplied. She was restful in all her ways, her mind was thoroughly well-mannered, and her smiling calm assured him of a sympathetic nature. As he laid his ideas before her he was enraptured to see how sweetly, how reasonably she listened, and found full agreement in her cool grey-blue eyes, behind which, in reality, her inattentive brain was admiring the tact of his tie. But, whatever her secret thoughts, she never revealed them, and those cool, grey-blue eyes had been trained to express decorous attention; therefore Kingston Darnley soon realized that in Miss Mortimer he had found that perfect conjunction of ideal soul with ideal body in the quest for which his five-and-twenty years had hitherto been vainly spent.

That his feeling was not a great passion he sometimes felt—that it was not even commensurate with the passion which he had sometimes found himself forced half-incredulously to divine behind the chill fires of Gundred’s eyes. But his experience with the lady of the downy nose had daunted him and disillusioned him; with the knowledge of wide experience he now knew that a great passion falls to the lot of very few, and that it is well to take the good the gods provide. Failing the Supramundane Mate to whom all idealists look with longing, he would compromise with a woman in every respect charming, alluring, delightful—a woman of temperate mood, a woman of neat and faultless style in body and mind, a woman, in short, who could be trusted never to clash with any of life’s harmonies or discords.

Her name, too, tragic and glorious, fired that curiosity of man to possess something rare and old and precious. Of Brakelond he only thought as a fit setting for Gundred’s mystic charm. For Gundred’s serene correctness, so prosaically pleasing in a London drawing-room, became ‘mystic charm’ when associated in the mind of her idealizing lover with the long oaken galleries of Brakelond. And Gundred, for her part, considered the possible glories of position and power only as gifts to confer on her radiant, ridiculous captor. She did what she decently could to please and captivate Kingston, deployed cunning little unsuspected wiles of dress and manner; brightened her garments and her ways; achieved at last that miracle only possible to a first-rate woman, of being gay without becoming skittish. Little need had she of wiles. Her gentle flawlessness satisfied Kingston Darnley completely; and at his time of life, after his experience, he knew enough to be humbly content with satisfaction, asking no more of life, and expecting much less. What folly to let a plump chicken escape from the hand on the chance of a Phœnix flying out of the bush at some far-distant date! Better give thanks that the chicken is at least plump. Kingston Darnley gave thanks accordingly, and dawdled along the happy path that leads to proposal.

He could only see perfection everywhere. If Gundred was sometimes unresponsive, that was surely her cold and lovely maidenliness. If her acquiescent sweetness lacked salt at times, and seemed to promise biliousness, the criticism showed, in itself, a bilious bachelor for whose ailment that sweetness had been especially prescribed by Fate. If Gundred’s answers sometimes seemed remote, inadequate, half-hearted, that was but the effort of a loyal soul struggling to get into perfect stride with his, and neglecting the interests of the present for the sake of the future. As he looked and listened, her unruffled pleasantness destroyed for his emotions the grosser terrors of marriage, and yet gifted them with a strange, appealing fascination. Carried away by his approval, he proposed at last, and was placidly accepted by a heart resolutely dissembling its delight. Lady Adela heard the news with joy, and a pound was not too much for Heaven next Sunday.

CHAPTER IV

‘My dear,’ said Kingston Darnley to his mother one afternoon, ‘being in love is the strangest thing.’

Long habit had taught him to indulge in soliloquy under the mask of a dialogue with his mother. She allowed him to talk, and never interrupted the flow of his self-communings by any sudden sign of understanding them. Few people are more comfortable to confide in than those who can always be safely reckoned on to understand nothing of what is said to them. Lady Adela laid down her knitting and beamed lovingly at her son over her spectacles.

‘A strange and blessed thing,’ she answered in her soft tones.

‘I wonder,’ continued her son, ‘whether everybody feels alike. More or less, I suppose—although everyone thinks that he has the secret all to himself.’

‘Love is sent, sooner or later, to everyone,’ replied Lady Adela.

‘But how do people know that it is the right love?’ questioned Kingston. Then he went on, without waiting for the irrelevant answer which his mother would surely provide. ‘Uncertainty is a deadly thing. And the worst of it is that everyone who really wants to find happiness must always be uncertain as to the way. Only those who don’t care can ever be perfectly, securely certain.’

‘True love is always unmistakable,’ replied his mother, who, in her time, had married the late James Dadd from a feeling that anything would be preferable to prolonged existence with Lady Kirk-Hammerton.

‘Yes; but it must have different manifestations. I remember when Tom Clifford was engaged to that Menzies girl he couldn’t bear her out of his sight, never let any other man have half a dozen words with her. Now, I don’t mind who Gundred talks to, or what she says—not a scrap. And—well, it’s always a joy to see her, of course—everyone must feel that—but I haven’t any wish to go about all day at the end of her hat-ribbon. Is that because I am cold-blooded, or is it the proper normal thing to feel?’

‘My dear boy is so full of chivalry,’ answered Lady Adela with affectionate vagueness. ‘No nice girl would like to be too much monopolized. It is hardly delicate.’

‘One had a sort of notion,’ continued Kingston, unregarding, ‘that love-making was more of a desperate flesh-and-blood affair. I suppose the real thing is more ethereal than the everlasting philanderings that one reads about. Heaven knows, they are earthly enough.’

‘Marriages are made in heaven,’ replied his mother reverentially.

‘And love is made on earth, I gather—at least, love of the novelist’s sort. Certainly marriage is happier in every way—calmer, less discomposing, more orderly and decent and—and—abstract, as it were. I cannot imagine anyone not loving Gundred. She appeals to everything that is best in one. And the crowning mercy of it all is that she never gives one thrills of any kind, never rouses any primitive, prosaic emotions. She is always just what one expects—gentle and charming and satisfactory—and nothing else. There is no intoxication about her. And, really, you know, that is a relief. One had imagined that love—love in the completest sense—was a kind of celestial drunkenness. It is a tremendous relief to find that it is only a quiet temperance drink after all—the Water of Life, as it were. I don’t think either my head or my stomach care very much for intoxicants.’

‘Your dear father was just the same,’ replied Lady Adela calmly; ‘two glasses of port never failed to upset him. Some people’s interiors are so sensitive. If one is in the least troubled that way, it is far better never to touch stimulants. Or peppermint, they say, does wonders.’

‘One has wrestled through loves of different kinds,’ said Kingston, securely continuing his soliloquy, ‘and it is certainly a blessed surprise to find that the real thing is placid and satisfying. The hunger and thirst of passion are fierce and dreadful—it never seemed likely that perfect happiness could be found in the mere appeasing of them. I am sure I much prefer the lasting, tranquil completeness of an emotion to the feverish clamour of an appetite. And that, after all, is what most people seem to mean by love. I have always rather hated violence and brutal manifestations. They seem a little vulgar, very crude and indecent, very unworthy of our higher emotional powers.’

‘My boy is so full of nice feeling,’ said Lady Adela; ‘violence is a terrible thing. I remember I once saw a dog run over by a tram. I have never forgotten it.’

‘One feels a certain something solid and eternal about real love,’ went on her son, contentedly talking to himself aloud under pretence of addressing his mother. ‘It is a huge level tract of feeling, stretching out into the immensities, without anything to break the enormous flat surface of it. It goes on for ever and ever, without valleys or pinnacles, or rough places of any kind. And surely that is better than perpetually scrambling up peaks and falling off them again, into abysses. Real love is not a mountain track; it is a solid turnpike road with a smooth, sound surface. One’s life jogs along it imperceptibly, and one’s attention need not be kept fixed on the driving to see where one is going. With Gundred I feel that I am with someone whom I have known for ages in the past, and whom I shall continue to know for ages in the future, without jars or disconnections. There is something monumental, something filling about the sensation. People who find the hot rough-and-tumble pandemian love enough for them would think the real heavenly feeling stodgy and perhaps—well, perhaps even a little dull. It does lack diversity somehow. It offers repletion without any sauces to appetise. But, then, I suppose the immensities must of necessity seem monotonous to our small, jigging intelligences.’

‘I am sure, Kingston,’ said Lady Adela with conviction, ‘that no one could have a better intelligence than you. It is quite something to be thankful for.’

‘Now, Gundred, for instance—very often with her I have a shut-out feeling of getting no further, of finding locked doors and stone walls. Sometimes I have nothing that I want to say to her, and sometimes she has nothing that she wants to say to me. Sometimes she does not understand what I mean, sometimes we seem to be talking different languages, without any real wish to make ourselves intelligible. When we have said that we love each other there is nothing much left for us to say. And isn’t that exactly as it should be? The love is the only thing that matters, after all. One does not marry for the conversation, but for the love. Other people can give one the conversation. No; one has to look forward over the whole field of life—it is not only the present amusement that matters. What is very amusing and delightful for half an hour would be quite intolerable to put up with for fifty years of marriage life. Marrons glacés and caviare sandwiches are excellent in their way, but, when everything is said and done, bread is the real staple of existence. The primitive passionate lover is trying to make half an hour’s surfeit of sweets and savouries supply the place of all healthy meals through all the years to come; it is only the idealist who sets himself calmly down to a long indefinite course of bread-and-butter. There can be no doubt that the bread-and-butter regime is the saner and the more blessed and the more refined of the two. But, of course, if one simply lives from hand to mouth and from hour to hour, the bread-and-butter scheme is apt to look a little dull by comparison with frequent snacks of indigestible, exciting dainties. However, thank Heaven, I have got what is best for me—and sense enough to recognise the fact. If Gundred sometimes fails to feed me up with pretty fancies from hour to hour, she is laying up for me a supply of satisfying bread-and-butter for the rest of our lives. And one’s whole life is obviously more important than any given half-hour of it.’

‘Yes,’ replied Lady Adela after a pause, ‘but one must be careful about bread-and-butter. Too much is apt to make one stout. I quite agree with dear Gundred, though, as to plain food being the most satisfactory in the long run. I read the other day a very nice book, in which the characters sat down to “a plain but perfectly-cooked meal.” Now, that struck me as expressing so exactly what one wants.’

‘My dear,’ said her son abruptly, ‘what did my father and you talk about when you were engaged?’

Lady Adela, who had expected from her son the soothing accompaniment of another monologue to the music of her knitting, started at his abrupt question, lost count of her stitches, then looked vaguely up at last, her lips moving in a vain effort to recover her place in the row.

‘What did we talk about?’ she repeated. Then she blushed faintly. The distant past was transfigured with romance.

‘Dear boy,’ she resumed in hushed, reverent tones. ‘The engagement is the sweetest time in a woman’s life. The loveliest things your poor dear father gave me. We were at Naples, you know, and one gets the most charming corals there, and mosaics, and brooches carved out of lava. I have got them all. And then your poor dear father and I used to go out on to the terrace in the evening and look at the sunset and Vesuvius, and the steamers coming into the bay. He used to take my hand, and we stood there, saying nothing. There was nothing to say, dear. We both felt too much. One does not want to talk. And sometimes he—he would give me a kiss. And all the time—well, there was nothing else in the world, somehow, but just ourselves. We were quite alone. We should have been quite alone, even in a crowd.’

‘Ah, that is just exactly different with Gundred and me. We are never alone. We should not be alone in the wilderness. Gundred seems to live her life before an invisible audience of hundreds of people. That is why one can never get near her real self; there is always the consciousness of the audience restraining her.’

Lady Adela, however, was lost in roseate reminiscence.

‘So well I remember,’ she went on, ‘how the evening used to get darker and darker as we stood on the terrace, and the smell of dinner used to float up to us so deliciously from the ground-floor. Your poor dear father adored the Neapolitan cookery, and we used to talk of how we would have someone who could do risotto when we were married and settled down. But none of our cooks ever could. Dear me, and the lights in the bay, and the warm, quiet darkness of it all, and just us two, alone in the world.’

The sweet and innocent sentimentality of Lady Adela had succeeded in draping the usual beautiful gauze of romance across an episode which, in its time, had been marked by plain and practical precision. As ivy, in the course of years, grows over the bare stone of a ruin, so does romance cover over the hard bare facts of a woman’s past. No matter how stark and cold it may have been, yet, if her nature be loving and soft, its softness will subdue and transfigure the roughnesses of many crude bygone days. By this time Lady Adela believed in her romantic marriage as firmly as she believed in her vicar and her Sovereign.

‘So delightful it was to be with your poor dear father,’ she went on; ‘he was the kindest and most thoughtful of men. He always saw that I had a footstool and a corner seat, and the sun nicely shaded off my eyes. He used to come and sit by me, too, while I was sketching, and read aloud to me until we both fell asleep. I have never liked any one else to read aloud to me since. Mamma was very bustling and worldly, and I was not at all happy with her. But when your poor dear father came and found me, the whole of my life was changed. He was the fairy prince that came to rescue me.’

‘But you told me once, my dear, that my father had once cared very much for someone else.’

‘The world, dear boy, abounds in the most dreadful women. And, indeed, why God made so many women at all—and most of them so plain—nobody has ever yet been able to tell me. There was a horrid creature who made your poor dear father think he was in love with her, as they call it. But, of course, he was nothing of the kind. For as soon as she was safely drowned and out of the way, he forgot all about her, and came and married me, and no two people were ever happier together in the world than he and I. Ours was a case of true love, dear boy, if ever there was one. And I am certain yours will be the same. It is my earnest prayer, dear, and my sure hope. Gundred is the most thoroughly nice, good girl.’

‘And it would not matter if a shade of dullness sometimes seemed to fall between us?’

By this time Lady Adela was, for a wonder, awake to the purport of her son’s questionings. Her excursion into the past had brought her back refreshed into the present.

‘Kingston, dear,’ she answered, ‘what else would you expect from a really nice-minded girl? She is not a married woman yet. The time has not yet come for her to enter fully into your life, or you into hers. Remember how your poor dear father and I used to sit silent together for hours, never saying a word.’

‘Yes; but you did not feel the want of words. I think we sometimes almost do. That makes all the difference.’

‘Words will come, dear—words and all other blessings in their time. Gundred will be the greatest help and comfort to you in your life, and I am sure you love each other tenderly.’

Kingston suddenly began to feel the difficulties of the dialogue. To confide is all very well and comfortable, so long as the confidant is not listening or understanding. The moment he shows signs of noticing what is said, the mortifying indelicacy of the proceeding becomes plain. Finding his mother unwontedly awake to his remarks, Kingston’s sensitiveness drew in its horns.

‘Oh, thanks, my dear,’ he said lightly. ‘I am sure everything will turn out for the best. I am the luckiest fellow alive, and don’t suppose I forget it.’

‘Some people always touch wood,’ said Lady Adela meditatively, ‘when they say a thing like that. Such a silly superstition. But, still, there may be something in it.’ She rapped the tea-table firmly.

Mother and son had been so absorbed in their dialogue that they had not heard the hall door bell ring. Suddenly the door opened, and Miss Mortimer was announced. Fresh, crisp, pleasant as ever, Gundred entered the room and kissed her future mother-in-law.

‘Dear Lady Adela,’ she said, ‘I felt I must come round and see how you were. This heat—so ridiculously trying for a climate like ours.’ Then she turned to Kingston. ‘And Kingston,’ she added; ‘how is he?’

‘Poor gentleman,’ replied her lover tragically. ‘Mr. Darnley has been quite on his last legs lately. But he recovered miraculously all of a sudden, as soon as he saw Mapleton showing somebody into the room.’

‘You really do talk the most shocking rubbish,’ said Gundred sensibly, but without disapproving sternness. ‘Lady Adela, why do you let Kingston talk such rubbish?’

‘My mother,’ replied Kingston, intercepting the mild remonstrance of Lady Adela’s reply, ‘brought me up to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. You asked me about the state of my feelings, and I gave you a truthful reply. Behold! Your coming has taught me, for the ninety-ninth time, that life is worth living. Sit down and I will ring for tea. My dear, surely it is tea-time? Gundred has clearly come here simply and solely to get a cup of tea. With me she will have nothing to say. It is tea she wants. She pants for it, like the hart for cooling brooks.’

‘Hush!’ said Gundred; ‘don’t talk like that. It’s irreverent. But, indeed, Lady Adela, I certainly should be delighted if you would let me stay and have some tea with you. I lunched with Aunt Agnes, and she gave me a lunch of unimaginable nastiness, so that now I feel as if I had not eaten for days.’

‘You poor darling!’ cried Lady Adela with pitying indignation; ‘that is always the way. Wait, and I will order you something really nice. Look after Gundred, Kingston dear, while I go and interview Tessington about to-night. I have been wanting to see her all the afternoon, and I can just as well have her up to the dining-room.’

Having thus tactfully explained her departure, Lady Adela left the lovers alone. A silence fell.

‘What are you thinking of?’ asked Gundred at last.

‘I am wondering,’ replied Kingston, ‘what, precisely, is going on behind those inscrutable eyes of yours—what thoughts are playing about behind that cool white forehead of yours. And the worst of it is that I can never find out. You will never let me in of your own accord; and if I took an axe and forced my way in I should only find a mess of blood and bone.’

‘Don’t be horrid,’ said Gundred, shuddering. ‘I am sure I tell you everything I think. I hide nothing from you.’

‘Perhaps not, you well-mannered Sphinx. But you reveal nothing. Nothing about you gives any index to your thoughts. You are too fearfully and wonderfully trained. I have seen you suffering agonies of boredom with a smile; I have seen you suffering torments of cold and discomfort with the sweetest blandness. No one can ever guess what a person like that is really thinking. For all I know, you may, at this very moment, be remarking a smut on my nose or a blemish on my character. Your behaviour gives no clue.’

‘But, Kingston dear,’ protested Gundred, moved by this denunciation, ‘you would not have a rude and boorish wife, I am sure. And you know I have no fault to find with you. I think I have shown that—yes?’

‘With really rude people one knows where one is. Their amiability means true friendship and true approval. With your suave, elegant, charming sort smiles may mean anything or nothing. One never knows where one is. “Mind you come again soon,” you tell me, ever so pleasantly. And the very instant before you have said exactly the same thing, in the same cordial inflection, with the same inviting smile, to some woman whom I know you intensely dislike, and only allow inside the house on sufferance. Now, what am I to think?’

Gundred began to feel quite distressed.

‘But, Kingston,’ she cried, ‘one must be civil. One simply must. Why do you attack me like this? What have I done?’

‘You are such a beautiful little icicle,’ answered her lover. ‘Will you never thaw? You are an icicle inside an iron safe. How can one get at you to thaw you?’

‘How utterly absurd you are, Kingston! Haven’t I given you the key? Besides—oh, I’m not an icicle; I’m not a bit of an icicle. Only—well, what is it you want?’

‘Be quite, quite honest for a minute, Gundred. Strip your soul stark, and tell me whether you love me.’

‘Oh, don’t hold my hands like that. It’s so hot....’

‘You are always cool, my dear—a capital refrigerator you are.’

‘Kingston, you are unkind this afternoon.’

‘Well, what about my answer? Do you really love me, Gundred?’

Gundred still shirked the inquisition, though secretly she enjoyed it.

‘I am engaged to you,’ she answered.

‘That is the muffled up, overdressed sort of thing you always say,’ replied Kingston. ‘Give me the bare, naked truth. Do you truly love me, Gundred?’

She turned upon him with a flash of inspiration.

‘You would never ask me such a question if you weren’t sure of your answer already,’ she cried.

‘Perhaps not, but give it me all the same. It’s not enough to know a thing; one wants to be told it sometimes.’

‘Oh, that is just like a silly woman—never believing a man cares for her unless he goes on telling her so twice a minute. Oh, Kingston, don’t let us be so childish. These things don’t need to be talked about. I hate talking about them. It isn’t decent. The more one feels the less one should say. Only kitchen-maids chatter about their love affairs, and wear their hearts on their sleeves.’

‘Anyhow, that’s better than wearing it in someone else’s pocket, as so many others do.... Gundred, does your soul never take off its stays? Does it always live in public, on view, in full Court dress and train and feathers?’

‘Kingston—dear Kingston, I think you must be a little bilious. I am not always in public. Here I am alone with you—yes?’

‘Alone? Oh dear, no! You are always acting, always posing to half a hundred people in the room whom I can’t see. They prevent you from ever speaking honestly to me, as I speak to you. They dictate the way you walk, the chair you sit in, every word and action of your day.’

‘I don’t understand you, Kingston. A woman has so much more to think of than a man in some ways. Surely ... you know by now that I—well, that I do care for you. You mustn’t ask me to be always saying so. You wouldn’t like it if I did. Do be reasonable. One has to behave decently—yes? Our points of view are so different. It seems to me that I tell you far too much—sometimes I think I am shameless and horrid—and yet you—you think me cold and unsatisfactory.’

‘Can’t you realize how a man starves for a little warmth, Gundred?’

‘I hate to think of men like that; I am sure you are not one of them. Anyhow, I hope we shall never condescend to their horrid level. You are engaged to me, Kingston, and that ought to be quite enough.... It is for me.’

She glanced at him with gleaming eyes. He heard the cool, level tone, and missed the gleam. He sighed.

‘And some people have thought me cold and fish-blooded,’ he thought, in a spasm of irritation. But clearly it was useless to dash himself against the firm rock of Gundred’s placidity.

‘You are almost as impersonal as one of those Buddhist saints that my Uncle Robert has lived with,’ he replied. ‘You make one feel cold.’

Gundred, resolved in her attitude, would take no notice of his renewed attack. ‘Your Uncle Robert,’ she said, ‘have I heard of him? Oh yes; he is that brother of your father’s who ran away to Japan so many years ago and became a Buddhist himself, poor man, didn’t he? Will he ever come back to England?’

‘Not if he’s as wise as he sounds. His life out there seems to be almost perfect contentment.’

‘How strange that is—yes? Well, I have got odd relations, too, in out-of-the-way corners of the world, you know. There’s poor papa’s sister, Isabel Darrell, away in Australia, with a daughter. I really rather hope they will never come home. Colonial relations are apt to be so truly dreadful. And now, Kingston dear, what I came to see you about to-day is this. Have you any very strong ideas as to the honeymoon? Because papa and Uncle Henry and Aunt Agnes are all very anxious that we should go to Brakelond. And I do think there is something rather nice in the idea. After all, I suppose it will be our place some day, and our children’s after us. In a way it is my wedding-present to you. Don’t you think we might begin our married life there? Uncle Henry won’t be in our way at all. He is kept in a wing right apart from the rest of the Castle, and the building is so enormous that you might put up twenty people there, and no one need have any notion that there was anyone in the place besides himself.’

‘Yes,’ replied Kingston, warming to the prospect; ‘it sounds a delightful plan. I was wondering when we could go to Brakelond. Hugh Frazer did say something about lending us his place, but I can easily explain. Luckily, all my Dadd relations are out of the reckoning, so there is no one to claim any tiresome rights. By all means let us go to Brakelond. It must be the most gorgeous old place. Haven’t they still got the room where Queen Isabel sat and worked?’

‘Yes, horrid woman!’ said Gundred tersely. ‘I don’t like to talk about her. I can scarcely believe she was my ancestress.’

‘But splendid, Gundred—splendid and tragic and romantic.’

Gundred’s firm, pale lips tightened into a line of disapproval.

‘I never can see why wicked people are especially splendid or tragic or romantic,’ she said. ‘Goodness is so much nicer—yes?’

‘Perhaps it is,’ replied Kingston, after a pause, ‘but not always so interesting.’

‘One has no wish to be interested in anything that is not pure and beautiful and good,’ announced Gundred, with an air of virtuous finality.

‘Oh, well, we’ll go there, anyhow,’ answered Kingston, shying away from the imminent argument, ‘and have no end of a mystic splendid time. We’ll sit about all day, and forget the world, and read novels to each other.’

‘Not novels, dear,’ said Gundred gently; ‘sensible books—yes?’

Kingston shrugged his shoulders. Clearly the conversation had run into one of its frequent culs-de-sac, and there was no continuing it. Gundred was impregnable to all assaults of the picturesque, and adamant to all new opinions or suggestions. Over Kingston was coming that bruised and daunted feeling to which, sooner or later, his meetings with her seemed invariably to lead. She held him at arm’s length, baffled him, rebuffed him, deliberately kept herself a stranger from his ardours, his intimacy. Each dialogue of theirs seemed to resolve itself inevitably into a futile if friendly discussion of topics indifferent. Of course this offered all the richer promise for the long years of coming matrimony, but meanwhile Gundred’s maidenly reserve turned the preliminary canter of courtship into a jog over rather arid and sterile ground. When Lady Adela tardily returned to the room, in the wake of tea, she found the lovers canvassing the Academy. Gundred, however, was so perfectly certain that her choice was sound and holy that the conversation was unfruitful if amiable. Lady Adela joined it, and it easily admitted a third voice.

CHAPTER V

Brakelond had the impassive mouldering grandeur of a great house that has outlived the troubled hours of its glory, and settled into a lethargic contemplation of its past. From very far away its castellated mass could be seen dominating the country from the steep wooded hill on which it perched. On three sides the forest flowed down in ample splendid folds, a cloak of emerald in spring, and, in autumn, cloth of gold. And along the fourth side the crag dropped away sheer into the western sea. Seen from afar, the Castle on its pinnacle had a remote and fairy-like effect, as if, indeed, the scene had been of Camelot or Broceliaunde. Into the clear blue of the sky pricked the soft sapphire masses of the Castle, the looming great Drum Tower, and the smaller, indistinguishable turrets; while, below, fell smooth and swift the dim violet of the woodland, like a misty drapery of colour. Over the country ran other lesser ranges, clothed in younger, neater woodlands; but the great building on its eminence ruled supreme, and the forest round the skirts of its hill was the very fairy-haunted forest of old romance. Among those gnarled trunks, in those green eternal twilights of the thicket, might Merlin still lie sleeping, or King Mark, a-hunting, yet hap on Tristram of Lyonesse. And far overhead, the crown of the country, rose the mystic walls of a Castle that might have held the fair Iseult or Morgan the Sorceress, a great drowsy splendour of stone, willingly cut off from the rush and turmoil of to-day, dreaming for ever, in complacent calm, of that hot and glorious life that it had long ceased to live.

As an old illustrious man or woman carries always the consciousness and the glamour of his achievement, no matter into what feebleness or decrepitude old age may have brought him, so buildings that are not of yesterday carry always the haunting sense of their past, and achieve a tranquil pride in desolation and the world’s oblivion, for ever beyond the reach of any smug, inglorious new country-house, all red-brick and sham Elizabethan gables.

The country-house has telephones and electric light and all the latest devices of luxury; the old castle has matted corridors and inadequate lamps, and a general air of shabbiness. But that shabbiness is more beautiful and well-bred than all the clamorous elegancies of the other; the comparison is between some old and splendid lady, poor, dowdy, and forgotten in the clacking crowd of tongues, but serene in her impregnable charm, the incarnation of all that is finest in the traditions of a thousand years—and some scented, powdered woman of to-day, frilled, curled, decorated with all the lavish and assertive ornaments by which novelty seeks uneasily to impose its fancied supremacy over antiquity—a woman of loud tones, loud colours, loud movements, in her own person a great braying band of jingles from the latest edition of that comic opera which is such a creature’s London life.

Only the self-sufficient—in fact, only those who are perfectly calm and indifferent to the general suffrage, secure in their unalterable, unselfconscious certainty of breeding—can afford to ignore the tricks and trappings on which the less fortunate have to rely for notice. Only the well-bred can afford to be dowdy; only the well-bred can afford to ignore the Peau d’Espagne or the Violette des Bois which may happen to be in fashion, and trust for their triumph only to the faint, unanalyzed fragrance of beauty and nobility that accompanies them inseparably from birth to death, without effort or expense of theirs. And as a modern building, decked out in modern old oak, and fussy with stolen ornaments from bygone times, must always base its claim to admiration on the self-advertisement of its luxuries, so some old collapsing turret, the haunt of dead Queens, the chosen home of sad beautiful memories, needs no adornment, no advertisement to reinforce its calm and unconscious right to our worship. Brakelond, old, gorgeous, forgotten Brakelond, was too proud to trick itself out for popular applause, too quiet in its self-centred pride to allure the vulgar; it challenged reverence by right divine, and held the attention without desire to do so.

All this of Brakelond far away, throned on the undulating horizon of misty woodland. It was a sapphire crown on a pinnacle of the world’s rim. It did not flop and flounder along its hill, like Windsor; rather, it held itself bravely, concisely, on its seat, with something of Belvoir’s distant majesty. But Belvoir is as generous as it is beautiful, offering itself to the world’s admiration; Brakelond, on the contrary, was governed by a grimly selfish passion of seclusion, severe and rigid. It kept aloof as if it had indeed been some magic Castle of Lyonesse, and none was permitted to approach beyond the outermost borders of the forest precincts. Lonely, menacing, fearful, Brakelond frowned away the approach of all new-comers. The spirit of its owner haunted it, insisted on inviolable privacy.

For, from the great dominating Drum Tower flew perpetually the flag that told of an old man, brainless, dribbling, dreadful, dying for ever by slow inches in his high, drug-scented rooms. Around him ceaselessly screeched the parrots whose bright colours were the one consciousness of his life, whose poignant yellings made the one music capable of penetrating to his ears. Their clamour drove his attendants frantic, but the old Duke, immobile, log-like, gave no sign of discomfort, gave no sign at all of life or its energies. He seemed dead, had seemed dead for many years; his existence tottered on a breathless poise that a hair’s touch might send swinging over the border-line of death; but that poise was firm and even; nothing shook it; nothing, in the cool unbroken lethargy of his days, could agitate the balance that rested so unwaveringly on such a razor’s edge of insecurity. So the parrots daily rent heaven with their screams, and amid the infernal din the aged wizard of the fairy castle, shut away from all the world by a barrier of stout walls and locked gates and impassable centuries, lay and awaited his end, a creature long since wiped out of life, having no part in to-day or to-morrow, but already one with the innumerable yesterdays of the dead.

Into this haunt of sad mystery did Gundred bring her husband for their honeymoon. So stern and tragic a setting for the bright, modern drama of their lives had something stimulating about the abruptness of its contrast. Happiness, after all, could build beneath the eaves of that immemorial tragedy, and the flower of joy spring gaily from the crevices of that citadel whose mortar was tears and blood and the bones of innumerable generations, crushed and mangled. Kingston and Gundred took their pleasure lightly amid the surrounding atmosphere, and, in the labyrinthine vastness of the building soon lost all consciousness of that secluded presence, high up in the remote wing where the parrots made their song in the undiscerning ears of the dead that could not die.

The main bulk of the Castle was old—some of it very old. On one projecting spur of rock that overhung the sea a hundred feet and more below, stood the most ancient relic of all—a suite of little wooden-panelled rooms, low, many-cornered, slippery-floored, with strange turns and steps between them. This wing was cut off from the rest of the Castle, which towered over it from behind like a crouched monster. It was connected only by one small corridor, and held a rough primeval chapel which dated from days before any other stone of Brakelond, and was given by tradition as a place of assignation between Tristram and Iseult. This fragment of myth made visible seemed to be no part of the building, but a precious jewel of the past extruded from its enormous fabric.

The body of the building, too, contained ancient, history-haunted corners. A series of rooms was credited to the design and the occupation of Queen Isabel. Here the She-Wolf of France, old Queen Jezebel, had dwelt with the lover whom she nearly seated on the throne of England. A traditional portrait of her still gazed out across the rooms she had owned, a stiff daub on a wooden panel, giving the fierce, tight-lipped stare of the adventuress, high-boned, pink-cheeked, archaic in drawing, angular, convincing in its very primitiveness of workmanship—jewelled and furred there and here in dimmed patches of colour that had once been crudely brilliant. Brakelond had been the scene of Queen Isabel’s highest fortunes. Her ghost still seemed to hold the high halls of her prosperity, her pitiless spirit dominated that wing which owed its life to her. This was her true burial-place—rather than Castle Rising, where at last, after all the changes of her eventful life, she died, old, fat, monstrous, honoured in dishonour, incredibly wealthy, the first millionaire of Europe.

Dark and dusty were the windings of the Castle corridors—dark and dusty as the winding paths of Mortimer and Isabel. The building had been put together from time to time, added to, built on to, with no thought of conformity, of harmony, of convenience. It was rather a congeries of Castles than one unanimous edifice. From far off it was seen as a single fabric; within its walls the daunted visitor could gain comfort from noticing its many discordancies, the innumerable violent breaks in the continuity of its development. There was no complete rhythm in the building’s design; part clashed with part, and in the jarring conflict of tastes and periods the enchantment which distance had lent was shattered by the sudden onslaughts of criticism. Here jutted out a Georgian wing, solid and stiff, but ill-attuned to the austere majesty of the great Drum Tower. There, a Duke of the eighteenth century, a friend of Pope and Lady Mary, had erected a Chinese pagoda, that perked impertinently up with its fantastic, saucy eaves among the stalwart turrets that had frowned on Edward of York, and given vain shelter to Marguerite of Anjou. Then, again, another Duke, contemporary of George the Glorious, had appended to the Elizabethan front of the Castle a small but accurate copy of the Brighton Pavilion. Its wriggling cupolas, its fluted minarets, shone white with plaster, and its main plantation of bulbs, like gigantic onions, bulged and swelled beneath an oriel whence the Virgin Queen had watched a masque.

Each inhabited portion of the Castle, too, was of a style violently and even deliberately discordant with the severe and uninhabitable splendours of the Drum Tower and the old Keep. These contained huge, gloomy rooms, with infinitesimal windows, that looked out, for the most part, on sunless little courtyards, mere wells of darkness, made by the addition of new buildings to the old. Here, in these big, stark halls, were mouldering arrangements of armour, or acres of dingy pictures, bloated Flemish boors, dubious angular Madonnas, riotous female nudities, all hidden from the world by a merciful veil of dirt. The stone floors were inadequately disguised with worn matting, and at night one feeble, smoky lamp was allotted for the illumination of each apartment. A proud neglect, an almost arrogant ostentation of poverty and discomfort, reigned supreme.

The inhabited wings of the Castle were different in effect, though similar in scheme. Rows of bare barrack-like rooms lined the corridors—hung with glaring chintzes, and furnished with chairs of rep and horsehair. Their ornaments were meagre as their blankets, and their large windows threw a merciless glare of daylight on their serviceable sterling ugliness. Each had a square of carpet from which the pattern had long been trodden out and through in patches; each had cupboards and washstand of light grained wood; each was coldly spacious, airy, cheerless, and inhospitable. Most loud of all the discords that many generations of bad architects had contributed to the original of Queen Isabel’s castle was the high white wing where the old Duke lay dying. An Early Victorian Duchess had made this addition; it was big and bald and bare, faced with white stucco and adorned with modern-Gothic pinnacles. It grew out like a monstrous polyp from the side of a gracious little Jacobean pavilion, and dominated the main entrance with its stalwart blatancy. To crown all, the same Duchess had built on to the great Drum Tower a porte-cochère on the model of the Erechtheion, and had holystoned the Drum Tower itself of a pale and repellent buttermilk blue.

Of all this accumulated history Gundred was, as it were, the sum and incarnation. The Castle, village of unconnected houses though it was in reality, yet had a collective personality of its own, even as a crowd of unrelated human beings has a collective personality beyond and above that of a mere aggregation of units. And she, its daughter and heiress, was also its result. It is written that neither man nor woman can ever escape from his or her traditions. The traditions are the character, and we are the reincarnated spirits of very many dead ages. As sunlight brings out all manner of unguessed possibilities from the innocent blank photographic plate, so the influence of Brakelond on the last child of its history must bring out in her nature new moods and unguessed colours of mind that had lain dormant in the undistinguishing atmosphere of London. And thus Brakelond could not but set a distinction between Kingston and Gundred. Between the flaming memories of Brakelond and the long, quiet, eventless story of Darnley-on-Downe there must always be a great and significant difference. Gundred, gentle, unimpassioned, mild and calm, was yet the daughter of fighting centuries, of men and women who had lived, suffered, loved and died magnificently, flamboyantly, full in the eye of the world. She was the daughter of a ruling race.

And he, emotional, energetic, ambitious, was sprung from an interminable line of sterling, honest mediocrities. Great glories, great sorrows had avoided Darnley-on-Downe; the crashing crises in the House of Mortimer had no parallel in the long unchronicled history of the Dadds. No more than his wife could he escape from his traditions. And those traditions, well-bred, decent, honest though they were, yet were not the traditions of a ruling race. Inconspicuousness was their keynote. And Kingston found himself an alien in the citadel of the dead Mortimers. Their ghosts, insolent, gorgeous, tyrannous, looked down with contempt on the colourless shadows of all the sober Dadds. Those ghosts had ruled, in their great day, over counties of Dadds, over legions of good honest gentlemen of coat-armour who had been glad and proud to take service under the banner of the Mortimers. The House of March, perpetually struggling for sovereignty, had drawn to its service squires and knights innumerable from all the counties that it ruled. And the sense of feudal over-lordship was strong in the inherited blood of the Mortimers, even to the uttermost generation. Those others, those lesser people, noble and gentle, were but small and insignificant in the eyes of men and women who had violently swayed the destinies of England. They were loyal subjects, those others, perhaps, but equals and allies never. And now a man of the obscure order was lawful possessor of the last Mortimer. Queens and the sons of Kings had been, in old days, the mates of Brakelond; and the Castle seemed as if it could never accustom itself to the formal ownership, even to the presence, of one who might in former years have been squire or feudatory, indeed, to some Lord or Lady of March, but who could never, in the wildest upheaval of King Henry’s time, have hoped to become the master of a Mortimer.

Gundred had given her whole heart to her husband. But now, in the shadow of all her ancient selves, something began to thrill in her veins that was more than the mere pride of part-proprietorship in a splendid and historic house. An old house, soaked in all the personalities of a thousand bygone years, must needs retain the flavour and fragrance of them; and on one who in his own person resumes the lives of twenty generations, the compelling influence of his home, the scene and material of all those lives that throb again in his, must necessarily be so dominant that insensibly he takes the colour of the past by which he is surrounded. If this was so in the case of Kingston, hampered and controlled by all the decent ancestors that had lived and died unnoticeably in Darnley-on-Downe, it was likely that the effect would be far more obvious in the case of one whose own character was so neutral as Gundred’s, and whose ancestors were so terrific and blazing as the Mortimers. From every flagstone, from every wall, pressed out upon Gundred the influence of some masterful forefather; and in her quiet nature here and there a secret nerve or fibre, latent hitherto, and unsuspected, recognised the call of the soul in which it once had formed a part, and thrilled to life again. At Brakelond Gundred insensibly took the lead. It was she that decided to settle in the little ancient wooden wing that jutted away from the main mass of the Castle out upon the spur of cliff by the Chapel of King Mark. Her gentle manner grew more and more imbued with sovereignty, and her husband found himself now amused and now rebuffed by Gundred’s obvious sense of being at home. Away in London she might be anyone in general, or no one in particular, concealed her family pride in the Mortimers, was able to give her zeal for morality full sway in the condemnation of Queen Isabel. But at Brakelond her own individuality was swamped. Half reluctantly at first, but soon openly and even proudly, she began to contemplate the career of the wicked Queen, and exalted her with faint damnation that soon passed into positive sympathy. She spent her days unfolding to her husband all the nooks and secrets of the Castle. And, whereas normally she was a person of the most sensitive and neat-minded righteousness, hating fierce crimes, frigidly abominating love-intrigues, here in Brakelond her sense of right and wrong was in abeyance, and at times she canvassed old bloodstained stories with an unmoral calm, and a manner that admitted a not uncomplacent participation in their horrors.

To Kingston it became a relief to hear her retailing the legends of her house. The honeymoon, in its undiluted intimacy, may well become a strain. However much two people may have to say to each other, the knowledge that there is absolutely no one else at hand to speak to may well impart that itch of rebellion which most people experience when bowed under the yoke of necessity. Not to be able to do a thing often brings the wish to do it; a wish which, without the prohibition, might never have occurred. So an enforced duet may occasion faint hankerings after an occasional trio.

In a honeymoon, too, after the first emotional stress and glory are over, a revulsion well may threaten—a revulsion to which ardent lovers are more liable than those couples who have married on lower calmer levels, and who, having never risen to great ecstatic heights, can never, therefore, fall to the emotionalist’s profound abysses of languor and depression. And, if two people shut up together in a lighthouse, with the hope of some day parting, develop insane, irrelevant furies against each other’s ways, how much greater danger of disillusionment must there be for a man and woman forced into minute prolonged contemplation of one another, with no reasonable hope of any release on this side of the grave. The most passionate love leaps over crimes and vices in the loved object; but stumbles at times over a personal habit, a veil ill-tied, a faulty taste in hats. The Ideal is a high and holy empyrean where love can range unfettered and unimperilled; the kingdom of daily life is a lumpy and uneven territory where the winged feet of emotion are apt to trip over some mean, unlooked-for obstacle. And the honeymoon is a time for complete revelation of personal as well of spiritual peculiarities, in which the veil of mystery is finally torn away from the nude reality of two people’s lives.

Kingston and Gundred began insensibly to enter on that period of prosaic exploration which lies between the mystic raptures of the first hours and the later harmonies of settled married life. The day of blind passion seemed over. Gundred found herself commenting inwardly on Kingston’s habits; the smell of tobacco was no longer so precious to her as in the days when it stood for part of an enthralling enigma; his ways were untidy, he dropped the newspapers on the floor and never picked them up, he wrote his letters at odd times instead of setting aside a definite hour for correspondence; he was never in really good time for meals. And then he had mannerisms which, in the dual solitude, began to prey upon his wife. He sometimes walked up and down the room like a bear in a cage, until she wanted to scream; when he sat quiet, he occasionally kept up a maddening succession of little rhythmical taps with his feet; and, above all, he was given to whistling. Then in mind, though altogether precious, of course, and adorable, he had certain flaws. His religious views were clearly lax, his moral attitude was not strenuous, he was too eager, too inquisitive, for Gundred’s intelligence, which preferred to hold on firmly, with the unswerving trust of the dutiful pupil, to everything it had received at second-hand. She took life for granted, considered the scheme of things very admirable, and her own position in it more admirable still. Nothing was to be questioned. Therefore Kingston’s habit, divined or expressed, of accepting nothing without examination, made his wife feel worried and restless, as if her mind had mated with an earthquake. Finally, as the days went by, Kingston dissatisfied her inmost desires by gradually relaxing the amorous enthusiasm of their first married days. It is usually the man who first wearies of conjugal outbursts—men having other business in life, and women, under the old primeval dispensation, none. And Gundred’s discontent was the more exasperating that she was secretly ashamed of it, and had far too much personal pride, far too strong a sense of decorum, to express it. As Kingston grew less and less demonstrative in his affection, Gundred revenged herself at once on him and on her own feelings by stiffening herself into an added primness of factitious maidenhood, by which she had the power of holding herself aloof from her nearest and dearest, as well as of repelling that very sense of intimacy that her own most secret soul desired. Her soul was of those that render themselves to no subduing warmth of love, but, whatever the fate of the body, must be violated, if possible, and taken by assault.

Kingston, for his part, found that marriage had not dissipated or broken the spiritual barrier between himself and Gundred. Her citadel was still locked against him, inexpugnable, not to be captured by any guile or violence. There were still great heavy gaps in their conversation, great tracts of desert country across which their souls were incapable of taking hands. The calm beatitude that Kingston had foreseen began to reveal itself a state of something not unlike sterility, diversified with moments of irritation when he skirmished round the stone walls of Gundred’s guarded mind, and only succeeded in bruising himself, no matter how furiously he attacked. She could not be led, forced, cajoled, kissed, harried, or bullied into understanding. A sense of hopelessness sometimes seized him before the sweet indomitable obstinacy of her mind. It was at once so hard that no blow could make an impression, and so soft that no blow could strike home. Unlike Anne Elliot in all else, her manners—of mind and body alike—‘were as consciously right as they were invariably gentle.’ That invariable, gentle consciousness of rectitude was cruelly trying to the restless, questioning, agile temper of her husband. He longed to stir up its provoking serenity, to stick pins into its lethargic mass. But nothing, no effort of his, could move it, shake it, upset that tranquil self-complacence. It was like grappling with a phantom in a nightmare. Neither men nor angels could ever turn Gundred Darnley from an opinion or a habit. She knew that her outer and her inner woman alike were both thoroughly, faultlessly dressed, in the best-fitting, most suitable garments, and no jot or tittle would she alter of her physical or mental trimmings. Neat, not gaudy, was her equipment, and, secure of perfection, she could not conceive the possibility of any improvement.

That was another thing—her neatness was something inhuman, something almost appalling. She always put everything back in its place, always folded up the papers and laid them down tidily on the table when she had finished them, always devoted the hour after breakfast and after tea to the writing of letters, was always dressed and ready exactly a minute before the gong sounded. Neat, neat, heartlessly neat, were all her proceedings, from the way she docketed her ideas to the way she buttoned her boots and did her hair. True it was, indeed, that the maid was responsible for these details, but she, too, had evidently been mastered by Gundred’s devastating tidiness. Never a thought mislaid, never a curl misplaced, never too much or too little of anything, no excess, no enthusiasm, no hot outbursts, nothing but a serenely equable development, as cruel and crushing in its steady, remorseless movements as the advance of a steam-roller. If she sat, she sat with perfect correctness: feet in the proper position, hands folded in her lap, or prettily occupied with some pretty piece of work. If she walked, it was crisply, concisely, without softness or undulations, erect, well-modulated, and poised in the certainty of faultlessness. And the very qualities that had so appealed to Kingston’s fastidiousness a month before, now became a terror when he contemplated a lifetime’s endurance of them. To see Gundred ruffled, muddy, untidy, would have been as great a joy to him as water in the wilderness; but no wind ever tumbled the orderly daintiness of her hair, no gale ever pushed her hat out of place, no mud ever dared adhere to her brilliant little boots. Never tired, never angry, never out of looks, Gundred was also never buoyant, never ecstatic, never radiant, and the bland sweet monotony of her threatened to become as maddening to her husband as the incessant repetition of one level, unvarying note.

One or two small habits she had, too, which exasperated him at times. She was fond, for one thing among others, of talking about God in a frequent, casual way that he found intolerable in its assumption of intimacy, and in its cheapening of the soul’s most private thoughts. God’s, to Gundred, was the biggest name on her visiting-list, and she displayed it with a pride that people quite devoid of terrestrial vulgarity sometimes think it allowable to display when talking of their acquaintance in celestial circles. Her soul had a tinge of supramundane snobbishness, and though, on earth, she would not have thanked a Queen for a kiss, she took a gentle satisfaction in emphasizing her possession of the Almighty’s approving friendship. She conceived heaven as an enormously magnified and everlasting Court-concert, where only the “nicest” people were admitted, and where she herself was not only to have the entrée, but to be in the very heart of the royal set.

She had, besides, a way of appending an interrogative ‘yes’ to every other sentence, which, by degrees, drove her husband to distraction. He found himself looking ahead for it along the conversation as one looks ahead for the next telegraph-pole on a slow journey. And as surely as the telegraph-pole that ‘yes’ would come, maddening him with the certainty of its reiteration.

Brakelond, accordingly, was a relief to both husband and wife—how great a relief they neither of them knew. They could take refuge from themselves among the ghosts of the dead Mortimers. Gundred almost grew excited as she repeated the stories of her people, and the spirits of the dead seemed to fill her veins with some of the blood she apparently lacked. A stark thorny tree it was, to have borne, at the last, so mild and white a bud as she. Always in opposition, always ambitious, always unscrupulous, maniacs in persecution, in martyrdom, in love, the Mortimers had risen and fallen, tempestuously fighting, up and down the steps of the throne. Ruined with Queen Isabel, they had survived only to fall again before the House of York. With the Tudors their glory towered once more, until a characteristically ambitious attempt to marry the Queen of Scots had destroyed the March of the time. Then, after a few years of comparative quiet, they had risen conspicuous as the only great house that had sided with the country against King Charles. This unpopular piece of patriotism forced the Mortimers into discreet seclusion through Restoration days, until a new opportunity of manifesting it arrived with the Great Revolution. The House of March, always especially patriotic when patriotism involved enmity to the Crown, had had a narrow escape of ruin at the time of King Monmouth’s disaster, and, for its safety, the Prince of Orange did not land a day too soon. His coming, however, with the comparative loyalty that followed, and its resultant dukedom, had established March and Brakelond in that period of slow prosperity which had led on through two centuries of gradual inanition to its present effete or atrophied state. It seemed as if the furious old Castle and the furious old race that owned it could not live fully nor thrive without that atmosphere of violence in which they had so often gloried and agonized together. Peace—slackening, corroding, monotonous—was fatal to the vitality of the Mortimers.

But, despite the obvious influence exerted by the Castle on the individuality of Gundred, Kingston could not but be struck again and again by the contrast between his pin-neat, impeccable wife, orderly in mind, body, desires, and the many riotous scarlet lives that she summed up in her own neutral-tinted nature. Always turbulent, always passionate, impatient of rule, loving and hating without limit or bond of reason, breathing the air of battle from birth to death, and flagging in the close air of peace, the Mortimers were a strange race to end thus, in a woman to whom peace, order, reason, limit were the very conditions of her being. As she talked to him of her people, Kingston noticed the small, flickering flames of vitality that leapt up in her nature out of the dead past. Here and there in her utterance from time to time some bygone tyrant dictated an inflection, some dead Queen contributed a thought. Kingston heard these voices so distinctly, noticed so clearly the occurrence of each foreign thought that twanged abruptly in the music of Gundred’s voice, like the sudden throb of a harp across a piano’s level ripplings, that it seemed to him at last as if, at moments, she were the mere mouthpiece of ghosts. For a vanishing instant, now and then, her lips spoke what her mind had not conceived, what her heart had not sanctioned. She was possessed by a fragment of the life that had gone before. But was this all? Robbers and wantons that they were in their lawless splendour, had the Mortimers given their descendant nothing beyond these fragmentary reminiscences? Was there in her, far down under the orderly, decorous placidity of her surface, no stirring possibility of those old primitive passions, of those fierce blood-lusts or those religious frenzies, that should have come with the very fabric of her life out of the buried long-ago? The question was strangely interesting, in the bizarre contrast between the neat, methodical thing she was, and the wild daughter of the past that, by some freak of fortune, she might perhaps again become. Kingston watched her keenly, hoping that some day, sooner or later, might raise again the hidden depths of her nature, and reveal, in a tempest of passion, the frantic possibilities of the Mortimers. The idea was inconceivable, monstrous, grotesque; but attractive as a romantic paradox. As with most paradoxes, deep down in his heart he utterly disbelieved it.

CHAPTER VI

Kingston Darnley, as usual, was late for breakfast. He had loitered pleasantly over his toilet, relieving the repellent prose of the process by frequent intervals of poetic rest at the open window. The little old diamond-paned casement of his dressing-room was open, and the crooked oak-panelled apartment was flooded with morning sunlight. Very far below, against the feet of the cliff beneath, the blue and gold of the clear water came lapping in friendship, and its lazy utterance rose faint and thin to the listener through the virginal clarity of the air. The day was not yet old enough for the haze and stress of heat: all was still clean and fresh from the cool sweetness of the night and the unclouded dawn. To the uttermost horizon spread the level floor of the sea, a glory of scent and colour, gleaming, vital, incredibly buoyant and young for all its uncounted æons of life. Again and again Kingston stayed to dally with the enormous loveliness of life, leaning from the window whence he might have dropped a pebble straight into the purple ripples a hundred feet and more below, where they played leisurely at hide-and-seek among the rocks under the cliff.

It was indeed a morning to be up and alive—a morning to be naked in the naked embrace of the world. As the hours go by, the world, no less than man, puts on its clothes. Clouds and shadows and haze come up to cover the strong free limbs of the earth. It is only in the short space after sunrise in some still morning that the world stands out pure and glorious in its nudity—vivid, stainless, triumphant as the white flawlessness of the young Apollo newly risen out of the dark, formless void. The upspringing day is our emblem of youth fresh from slumber—beautiful, ardent, splendid in the clear glory of his build—before he makes haste to hide himself in the sombre, ugly trappings of convention. Kingston was in no haste to take that leap of many centuries that separates man, as Nature set him forth, from the clothed, shapeless dummy that man has made himself.

From the adjoining room his wife recalled him again and again to the flight of time. She was never to be distracted from her duties by any beauty or ugliness of the outer world. Had the Last Day dawned in fire, Gundred would have duly finished having her hair done before confronting it. There is a time for everything, she says, and all reasonable people know that the time for looking at landscapes is after lunch, while taking one’s afternoon drive, before going home to tea and the second post. Then, at the proper moment, ecstasies are allowable, and even suitable. But every minute of the day has its task, and nothing can be plainer than that dressing-time is the time to dress. Kingston, however, whistled idly at his desultory work, and dawdled as if the whole forthcoming week were vacant. He loved the young tenderness of the sunlight, and drew great breaths of life at the open window. Overhead, and far away to the right, stretched along the cliff a mighty, menacing shaft of darkness, the shadow of the huge Castle behind. But this little old wing, on its spur of rock, jutted so boldly out from the main mass of the building that all here was radiance. Gundred, too, enjoyed the sun, but did not allow his ardours to distract her from her duties. She had the white blinds pulled down, and her toilet was cheered merely by a subdued consciousness of the warmth outside. Then, when all was carefully and properly accomplished, she made her way down twisting steps, and along a strip of corridor, to the end of the wing, where the last two rooms on this ground-floor were portioned off as dining-room and sitting-room. The whole arrangement was quaint enough to please her, but neither so inconvenient nor so unusual as to offend her sense of what was becoming. It was better than living, sitting and dining, in the grim, mouldering halls of the Drum Tower, or in the bald, chintz-hung rooms of the modern wings.

The unexpected booming of the gong roused Kingston to a sense of time. With an effort he tore himself from his ecstatic contemplation, and compressed the remainder of his toilet into half a dozen crowded moments. Then, flurried, and filled with the feeling that he ought to be apologetic, he hurried towards the dining-room.

He found his wife seated at the breakfast-table, decapitating a boiled egg with her usual crisp neatness, which always suggested that she was doing the egg a favour in making it an example of exactly how an egg should be eaten. She was a lesson to the world. And he felt that she knew it.

She, for her part, noticed immediately that his tie was under one ear, that it was exceedingly ill-knotted, and that it was the wrong sort of tie for that particular collar.

‘I thought I would begin, darling,’ said Gundred. ‘I did not know when you would appear. Such a lovely morning—yes?’

Here, also, she had shown her appreciation of its loveliness by having all the blinds drawn down. A muffled white radiance was all that she allowed to reach her from outside.