MARTIN ARMSTRONG

THE SLEEPING FURY

Contents

Book I

Charlotte At Fifty

Book II

Charlotte Asleep

(Past History)

Book III

Charlotte Awakes

(Past History)

Book IV

Charlotte’s second

awakening

Book I

Charlotte At Fifty

Chapter I

Young Eric Danver, handsome, blue-eyed, and golden-haired, stood at the edge of the tennis-court unrolling the sleeves of his shirt and talking to John Pennington, who was doing the same. The two girls who had been their partners had moved away towards a group of onlookers who sat on deck-chairs ranged along the edge of the court. Two other chairs, detached a little from the rest, stood beside the two young men. Before the set they had just finished they had hung their coats on them, and now they unhooked the coats and began to put them on.

“Let us sit here,” said John to his guest. “I’m tired of talking polite small-talk. Besides, I haven’t had a chance of talking to you since you arrived. I’m glad you managed to catch the earlier train.”

“I only just caught it,” said Danver; “snatched it, in fact, when it was already well on its way.”

“Well, a train in the hand is worth two in the time-table. You haven’t, I hope, been very bored among all this crowd of strangers?”

Young Danver smiled. “Far from it,” he said. “Your mother kindly introduced me to lots of people. Besides, I’ve played tennis almost from the moment I arrived.”

“Then you haven’t seen the place yet?”

“Well,” said Eric, “I have seen something of it. I walked about, after a set, with one of my partners.”

“A nice partner?”

“Very nice, thank you.”

“Young, charming, innocent?”

Eric laughed and blushed. “The trouble with you, John,” he said, “is that you want to know too much.”

John sighed deeply and made a gesture of profound despair. The pretence that Eric was a crafty and unscrupulous Don Juan was one of his pet jokes. “Would it be too grossly inquisitive,” he asked, “to enquire if, at least, you like the place?”

“It’s marvellous,” replied Eric. “Almost too good to be true.” His eyes flitted over the courts towards the long, low front of the Manor House, half hidden among trees. On the lawns that stretched from its windows, shapes of bright colour moved slowly among the flower-beds and over the lawns. Other moving figures were to be seen through the gaps in a yew-hedge which enclosed a formal garden; there the colours of the women’s dresses showed with a gem-like richness against the walls and pyramids of black yew which rose here and there to the stiff, fantastic shape of a peacock or a dragon.

“Your father must have been glad to come back,” he said.

“He was,” said John; “and so were all of us. We used to come here a great deal, you see, in my grandfather’s time; but I was only seven when he cleared out and left the place. Couldn’t afford to keep it up. It takes some keeping up, as you can imagine. My grandfather was, unhappily, somewhat too interested in the Turf. Not this turf”—he tapped the ground with his foot—“ but the Turf in general. You understand? I thought perhaps, in your beautiful innocence … No? Forgive me. Well, my grandfather’s interest in the Turf in general was such that he had no interest left, and precious little capital either, for this particular turf, those yew-hedges, the house, and so forth. So out he had to go, and, as you know, we’ve been recovering, with the help of my mother, ever since.” He paused, and glanced at Eric. “It was lucky that my father married money,” he said.

As he had hoped, this off-hand reference to his mother embarrassed Eric. “How nice of you, dear Eric,” he went on, “to blush for my mother. But it’s useless to blink the facts: my father undeniably married money. Still, it was, I must admit, very nice money; don’t you think so, Eric? And she, on her side, poor woman, thinks that you’re nice, because I have never revealed your real character to her. I have spared her all those painful details of broken hearts, ravished maidens, inquests, and so on. No; as much for her sake as yours, I have always refrained from giving you away, Eric.”

Another four had taken possession of the tennis-court, and the game had already begun when Eric noticed with a leap of the heart that one of the two girls playing was that partner of his with whom he had walked round the grounds. He had been enormously attracted by her, so much so that he had been shy of speaking to John about her; and now, when he was dying to ask who she was and where she lived, he dared not, for he felt that his enthral-ment would betray itself at once in his eyes, in his voice, in the very manner of his enquiry. And so he talked of other things, or listened to the gaily cynical chatter of his friend. But, whether he talked or listened, his eyes followed the playing girl in fascinated wonder. What was it, he asked himself, that was so enchanting about her? Her looks certainly were enchanting; the small face with its compact, neatly modelled features, the large, deep-blue eyes under the delicate, dark brows, the alert, confident expression of her face, like a little hawk without the hawk’s fierceness. And the movements of her slim, well-knit body, alert and confident as the expression of her face, were enchanting too. But there was something that enchanted him still more than these things—something that he could not explain. Her sudden arrival on the scene had turned this garden-party into a delicious adventure for him. He sat now, his blue eyes absorbed in watching the small white figure. Shoes, stockings, and dress were all white. Even her hat was white except for the little bunch of bright blue feathers in it. He longed for her to take it off, so that he could see her hair. Gradually all talk between him and John ceased. John must have noticed his abstraction and have wearied of talking to one who refused him more than a fraction of his attention, for after a short time he got up from his chair.

“Let us walk about a bit,” he said, and Eric reluctantly rose and followed him. He heaved a deep, inaudible sigh. How wonderful life was! How wonderful this old garden, full of sunshine and shadows, shining lawns and blazing flower-beds, among which all these dignified, beautifully dressed people strolled and sat! A sudden intoxication seized him. He had an irresistible longing to shout and dance and turn cartwheels on the grass. How surprised John would have been, he thought to himself. But, however great John’s surprise, he would have shown none. He would have accepted the outbreak as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. “Evidently, my dear boy,” Eric imagined him saying, “you are in need of a drink.”

They walked on over the close-cropped lawn until the trees drew back and revealed the whole long front of the many-gabled house, its weathered brick smouldering with a dark fire behind the massed colours of the flower-beds. It was the very essence of England, the rich, rural England which flourishes still through all the superficial changes of period, creed, and politics. For four centuries the old house had brooded benignly upon its green lawns, and dignified, leisured folk, in the various fashions of the various periods, had moved in and out of its doors and paced under its trees, among its flower-beds, over its flawless turf. The gay spectacle which the place presented to-day must be the counterpart of numberless others seen throughout the four hundred summers since the house had been built, all of them identical except for the differences of fashion in the dresses of the company and the addition, perhaps, or removal, of a door or window or chimney, or a small change in the disposition of the flower-beds. The spell of the place seemed to Eric almost too intense for common daily life. Surely, living in such a place, one would be absorbed by it; one’s little self, with its desires and energies, swallowed up in the great ancestral self into which, like a single mote in a great shaft of sunlight, one had drifted for a few brief years.

“Isn’t it almost too beautiful?” he said, when they had strolled in silence for some time.

John turned his head sharply. Eric’s remark had shocked him out of his usual impassiveness. “You don’t like it?” he asked.

“Like it?” said Eric. “I’m entranced by it. That’s just it. I feel it must be overpowering to have it always.”

“One gets acclimatised,” said John; “which means, I suppose, that one becomes less acutely aware of its beauty; but that surely is inevitable, and, in fact, desirable. You can’t go about all day long in an ecstasy; neither body nor soul would stand it. Besides, one has not, I believe, reached the point of real appreciation until one has become habituated. At first the thing absorbs you; you resign yourself, and become a part of it. But after a while you absorb it and make it a part of yourself. You regain your self-possession. However, I may be wrong. I evolved the theory on the spur of the moment. What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” said Eric. “With you it may be so, because you do love the place; but I feel that a good many of these people take it all for granted. They have lovely places of their own; they live surrounded by exquisite things, and take no more notice of them than I do of my mother’s little house in St. John’s Wood.”

“No, perhaps they don’t; but the exquisite things influence them, for all that. Without them, these folk would not be what they are. Whether what they are is of any value is, I suppose, a matter of opinion. It all depends on what value you attach to what we call refinement.”

Eric was silent for a moment. “How much do you include,” he asked at last, “in what you call refinement? Mere dignity of bearing, mere good manners, aren’t worth much without goodness of heart. Nor is even refinement, in the sense of culture. They’re very ornamental, I grant you, but little more than ornamental. The most heartless and inhuman creature I ever met had lovely manners, and was highly intelligent into the bargain; but, though he was very good company, when all’s said and done he was an awful swine.”

“Oh, I quite agree that manners alone, and culture alone, and the two together alone, are not worth much.”

“And don’t you think it possible that the acquirement of fine manners, and, in fact, all conventionality of behaviour, are rather apt to suppress feeling, to choke all heartiness and gusto?”

John smiled one of his acid little smiles. “Humph!” he said. “I’m not very keen on gusto. I fancy that eruptions of feeling generally explode the feeling itself. The whole thing goes up in noise and gesticulation. Besides, your very hearty man is generally an awful bore.”

Eric laughed. He remembered his impulse to dance and turn cartwheels on the lawn a few minutes before. Yes, certainly John would have been shocked.

“I wonder who the lady was who talked to me during tea,” he said.

“Is she a case in point or merely a change of subject, Eric? Merely, in fact, another example of your shameless preoccupation with the sex? I like that expression ‘the sex,’ don’t you?”

“She is a case in point,” said Eric, “a superb case.”

“Describe her. Young? Beautiful?”

“Old, and … well … not beautiful; but prodigiously impressive. In fact, she’s formidable. The manner and dignity of the proverbial duchess; but as cold as an iceberg—a beautifully chiselled iceberg. And yet,” he added, as if reflectively to himself, “she was awfully nice to me. And I liked her eyes. But I did feel horribly cowed. I felt, you know, that she would never condescend to express the smallest emotion, and I felt, too, that all the time I was under inspection.”

“And you probably were, my son. If you will mask the blackness of your soul under that blameless and prepossessing exterior. …”

But Eric was not listening. His eyes were turned to where the broad gravel walk which ran parallel with the front of the house ended in the formal yew-hedged garden. “There she is,” he said, “there at the end of the path, with your father.”

“That?” said John. “Oh, that’s Lady Mardale. Ah! no wonder you felt as you did, my poor Eric. But Lady Mardale’s tremendous. She’s a national monument; and surely, Eric, you don’t expect warmth from a national monument. All the same, she’s an awfully good sort.”

“Yes, I felt that,” said Eric. “But I can’t live up to such flawless self-possession. It freezes me. Do you think, John, that she ever breaks out … or breaks down … or breaks through?”

“Certainly not. What a question!”

“But don’t you think there’s something rather terrible in that? For instance, can you imagine her in love?”

“No, frankly, I can’t. One does feel, I admit, that Lady Mardale is protected from the commoner facts of life. But can we, to choose another aspect, picture her stepping into a bath? And yet, being an English lady, and such an English lady, she undoubtedly does step into a bath every day of her life. You will allow, Eric, that it’s undeniable.”

“Oh, absolutely.”

“And so, you see, she must be a little different from what we suppose. Let us make another test. Can you imagine her weeping?”

Eric gave a little frown of distress. “I’d rather not try,” he said.

“But why not, if she seems to you so inhuman?”

“Well, I don’t know. …” He paused. “I feel, somehow,” he said at last, “that there would be something more than usually tragic in her breaking down.”

“And so it would appear that you don’t really deny her humanity. In fact, I suspect, Eric, that you are confusing dignity—or, if you like, austerity—with humanity. You have allowed that she steps stark naked every day into a bath, so that perhaps you will believe me when I tell you that twenty or twenty-one years ago she produced a very beautiful daughter whom we saw playing tennis when we were sitting over there.”

“What? The one in white, with the … with the blue in her hat?”

John turned his head, and saw that Eric was blushing and gaping like a schoolboy. “A … h, Eric!” He shook a reproachful finger. “You must take a few lessons in self-possession from Lady Mardale. So I’ve convinced you at last, have I, you unmitigated old Casanova?”

“Yes, you’ve convinced me,” said Eric. “But you must admit that she hides her humanity very successfully.”

“Oh, I admit that. And you, on your side, must admit that she’s a work of art, a grande dame if ever there was one, and admirably adapted to be the wife of a parson-peer.”

“A parson?”

“Yes, Lord Mardale is both a lord and a servant of the Lord. Very compendious, isn’t it?”

“And he, I suppose, is as austere as his wife?”

“Austere? Far from it. He’s the most human creature I know. Unusual in a parson, isn’t it? But he isn’t primarily the parson; in fact, you wouldn’t, I think, take him for a parson if it wasn’t for his dog-collars. But you would guess at once that he was an aristocrat, and what you do feel about him at once is that he’s that rare bird, a good man. The Halnakers have always rather run to goodness. Real goodness, I mean; not mere piety.”

“Halnaker is the family name?”

“Yes. Spelt H-a-l-n-a-k-e-r and pronounced Hannaker, with the accent on the Hann—the pro-penultimate, as we were taught to call it at school. The propenultimate, if you please. What unmitigated nonsense! Why not the last-but-two?”

Eric made no reply to these scholastic ruminations of John’s. His eyes were following the two figures that were now pacing slowly along the grass six or seven yards away. They were far enough from where he and John sat to be unaware of them, yet near enough for him to be able to inspect Lady Mardale as he had not dared to do when she had talked to him at tea; and he studied her intently, his interest reinforced now by the knowledge that she was the mother of his delightful girl.

She was a large woman, but there was nothing ungainly in her size, for she was tall—taller than he had supposed when he had stood by her chair at tea—and she carried her head and body with an ease and assurance which gave her an air of elegance. Though she appeared old in Eric’s young eyes, she gave him the impression also of being physically strong; she might almost, he thought to himself, have been called athletic. The alertness and confidence which had so charmed him in the girl had evidently come from the mother. He examined her face. No, he thought again, she could not strictly be called handsome. The nose was too large, the large cheeks were somewhat pouched, and so was the chin. There was something grim and yet kindly about the long, narrow mouth, turned down a little at the corners. From where he sat he noticed again the large, care-worn eye-sockets, but he could not see the eyes—those eyes he had especially noticed at tea, brownish-grey like agates, piercing yet kind. No, thought Eric, she was not really handsome, and yet she produced the effect of handsomeness much more than many handsome women. How entirely in her appropriate surroundings she seemed to be in this beautiful old place. But wasn’t she, after all, Eric reflected, one of those very people of whom he had spoken just now to John, who have always been surrounded by exquisite things, and take them all for granted? Was she as entranced as he was? Was she even conscious of the place at all as something marvellously rich and moving? No, Eric felt certain that she was not. She had driven over, probably in a large closed car so that her hair and hat should not be disturbed, to carry out a formal duty, bringing with her her admirable social distinction. Convention demanded that she should be there, and there she was, and the occasion was certainly the richer for her presence. She was deep in conversation now with John’s father, and, from the seriousness of their faces, Eric judged that they were talking business. He turned to John. “Yes,” he said, “she certainly is a work of art.”

John nodded. “A national monument,” he said. “But come along; we ought to go back to the tennis. I’m supposed to keep an eye on it, and make up new sets when necessary. And I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Eric, though it will go sorely against my conscience. I’ll lead the lamb to the slaughter: I’ll make up a four with you and Sylvia Halnaker as partners.”

• • • • • • • •

Half an hour later the guests were already thinning away and the set was over. Eric had hoped for another stroll with Sylvia Halnaker, but she had told him that she must go to the house, as her mother and father would probably be waiting for her. “Will you come and help me to find them?” she said, and Eric went with her across the lawn and through the house to the front hall. There they found Lady Mardale talking to Mr. and Mrs. Pennington.

“Ah, there you are, my child,” she said. “I was just going to send Hanson to hunt for you.” She smiled at Eric. “Mr. Pennington tells me,” she said, “that you will be here for a week or two. I hope we shall see you at Haughton next Tuesday.”

Eric glowed with pleasure. How comforting to know that he was to see Sylvia again in a few days! Everything seemed to be uniting to make his holiday happy. Lady Mardale and Sylvia shook hands with him, and, as they turned to go, they were joined by a short, clean-shaven man with grey hair. He was dressed as a clergyman. His eyes met Eric’s for a moment, and it seemed to Eric that he had never seen eyes so benevolent and so understanding.

Chapter II

When the car was clear of the lodge gates of the Manor House Lady Mardale leaned back and closed her eyes. She felt old and tired. The emotions of the last two hours had worn her out; yet even now she might have appeared to a casual observer the same self-possessed and impassive creature that she had seemed to young Danver at the garden-party. But Eric, if he had been able to inspect her again now, would have noticed the bluish discoloration of the weary eye-sockets and the hint of an increased bitterness in the droop of the mouth.

Two hours earlier, as she had sat on the right of her husband, as she sat now, in the deep-cushioned Daimler on her way to the garden-party, she had looked forward with sharply conflicting feelings to revisiting that place which she had not seen for over twenty years, half dreading and half hungering for the emotions which the sight of the place would certainly arouse. But of one thing she had been certain—that, however deeply those emotions might be stirred, she would not lose her self-possession. No one would suspect the storm beneath the quiet surface. And, admitting that to herself, she recognised bitterly that even the most passionate feeling submits in the end to time. Even now, after twenty years, she was not convinced that her surrender had been for the best. It had been for her husband’s sake that she had surrendered; and yet, would the damage to him have been irreparable? Time can do so much. If it had tamed her own feelings, how much more easily would it have soothed his who had so many other resources of comfort. And as for the scandal, the public memory for such things is short. The scandal would have blown over years ago. In any case, her husband would have been blameless; he would have received nothing but sympathy. As the twenty-five miles between Haughton, their own place, and the Manor House had slipped past, she had paid no attention to the familiar landscape until the car had reached the point where the wandering by-road that led to the Penningtons’ struck off from the main turnpike. There she had roused herself and begun to look out at the gliding country. She had not been down that by-road since old Mr. Pennington had let the Manor House and had gone to live in a smaller place in Devonshire. The Mardales had not known the new people who had rented the place, and so there had been nothing during all these years to take them down the once familiar road. If the Penningtons had not left, the Mardales would, of course, have continued to frequent the place, and so the precious associations which, in one brief week, the place had acquired for her would have worn off by slow degrees. But her long absence had preserved them intact. Even the winding by-road had for her the sharp, heart-searching intensity of things too strongly charged with the past. She glanced sideways at her husband. Did he, she wondered, realise what she must be feeling? It had seemed that he did not, for he had met her eyes with his usual clear open look, and had begun to speak of the Penningtons.

“Well, twenty years is a big price to pay for backing a losing horse, isn’t it, Charlotte? I’m glad Roger doesn’t follow in his father’s footsteps.”

“And yet,” she had replied, “there was something about old Mr. Pennington that one misses in Roger.”

Lord Mardale smiled. “Yes, it’s undeniable that he was a fine old boy, a gentleman of the old school. Yes, good or bad, he was more of a person than Roger.”

“It was sad for him to die away from his old home,” said Lady Mardale, and there was in her voice a depth of sadness greater than her regret of the old man’s death.

They had swung into the Penningtons’ lodge gates and up the shady drive, and soon they had drawn up at the front door, where three or four other cars had just deposited guests. These had kept Lady Mardale’s attention upon the fact of the garden-party, and shielded her from the memories which now began to crowd about her. It was a hot July day, and the flower-scented air of the wide hall struck deliciously cool as they entered from the blaze of sunshine which flooded the front of the house. Lady Mardale glanced round the hall like one in a dream, and noticed with profound relief that nothing had been altered. But yes; the curtain over the door into the dining-room was different. The old murrey-coloured one had gone, and a blue one hung in its place. That small change brought her a little stab of pain. She hoped that she would find no others; for each change in scenes which had become so precious to her would be for her the death of something to which, she now realised, she had clung desperately all these years. Would it not have been wiser to have remained at home and let these old memories rest? With what clearness she recalled the bright gold of his head as she had seen it once against the murrey-coloured curtain when he had risen from his chair to be introduced to her; and at that vision he himself came back to her now with an actuality beside which the people moving past her in the hall seemed no more than ghosts. “Maurice! Maurice!” Her heart called out his name though her lips remained closed. How was it possible to realise that a creature so vivid was dead? That his hair, that bright golden hair … For a moment her mind plunged helplessly in mist. Then, with a violent effort, she controlled herself. Something was touching her hands; she was standing in the hall, and a cheerful voice was saying: “Dear Charlotte, how nice to see you again.” Amy Pennington had taken both her hands, and now she and her husband and Sylvia were being led by their hostess across the hall to the garden door.

As she stepped out into the garden, it had seemed to her that she was two women. The one talked to Amy Pennington and took stock of the company of men and women scattered over the paths and lawns and among the shadows of the trees, recognising friends and acquaintances, making mental notes of those that she must seek out and talk to, and impassively aware of that other woman within her, crying out inaudibly and stretching out her hands to the beloved garden which had so faithfully preserved her precious memories through all these years, and waited now to receive her again. How she longed for the crowd to melt away, so that she could throw aside all pretence and revisit alone all those dear spots where the memories crowded most thickly—the grass walk under the elm-avenue, where they had strolled together that afternoon, talking happily and freely as if they had known each other all their lives; the broad walk where they had stopped to admire the late dahlias and Michaelmas daisies; and, most of all, the centre of the yew-garden, where in the early morning they had sat by the little fountain, enclosed safely within the triple yew-hedge, with the yew-tree birds and beasts standing fantastically against the blue sky. “What a good thing,” she thought to herself, “that I’m no longer alive as I was then.” It would have been impossible, if the passionate half of her had not been numbed and starved, to preserve appearances as she was preserving them now. No, there was no fear now of her breaking down; yet she wished that she had not come, for she felt painfully that it was sacrilege to preserve such calm self-possession in that place; to behave, and to be able to behave, as if it were no more to her than to all those other guests. Ah, but wasn’t the fact that it really was so much more enough? He would know, if the dead can know anything of the living, all that was in her heart, all that the hidden, inarticulate woman was suffering. And, if he had no knowledge of her now, at least she herself knew, and that was sufficient. She shook hands and talked for a moment with Roger Pennington, and then turned to meet a woman in dark red who was hurrying towards her and Sylvia. Lord Mardale had moved away and was talking to a tall woman in navy-blue and a red-faced man in a large black-and-white check. “The Crofts. Yes, I must talk to the Crofts later,” she thought as she grasped the outstretched hand of the woman in red. “Why, Winifred, this is an unexpected pleasure! And what are you doing here?”

The round, good-humoured face smiled back at her. “I’m with the Kemptons for a few days.”

The two women and Sylvia made their way slowly across the lawn. Then young John Pennington came and took Sylvia away to tennis, and during the next half-hour Lady Mardale moved from group to group and from sunshine to shadow over the soft turf, shaded here and there by the great trees. Then she had found herself sitting solitary for a moment in the drawing-room with a cup in her hand. The friend who sat near her had turned away and was talking to someone on her other side. In that pause Lady Mardale’s buried self awoke again, and her eyes explored the so familiar room. But it was hard to find him there in that crowd of the living who filled the room with the hum of their talk and hid so much of it from her with the opaque mass of their bodies. How unreal they all seemed, eating and drinking and chattering there, and obscuring the burning reality which her heart sought for.

And then, as if her reality had suddenly taken shape, that golden-haired young man had come up to her chair carrying two plates, and held them before her. For a moment it had seemed to her that a miracle had happened—that Maurice had come back to her; and her heart had lifted as if on a great wave. Next moment it sank, and the illusion died; yet even then, for some inexplicable reason, the appearance in that room and at that moment of this beautiful young man, so like the man she had loved, was deeply consoling. She felt that he had come to her there as a sign that the past was not dead, that her memories were as real as the life of the present. She had already finished her tea, but she took one of the cakes he offered her, and ate it because he had offered it—how could she have refused?—and as he passed on, offering his plates to others, she followed the bright head through the crowd.

She had wakened now from her dream and had mastered the emotion that the boy’s sudden appearance had aroused in her. He was half way across the room now, and he turned his head so that she saw his face. Already he looked different. Was he really so like that other, or had she, with her thoughts so full of him, imagined a likeness? He was obviously much younger—still little more than a boy. Maurice had been thirty-one when they met. The colour of his hair and the extraordinary blue of his eyes were exactly the same; but the features … She tried to recall Maurice’s face, and found with a pang that it was no longer clear to her mind. She no longer knew the exact shape of his nose and mouth. But his brow she remembered, the beautifully modelled brow with the eyebrows tilted slightly upwards over the temples. A sigh escaped her. No, the boy was probably not like him at all except in colour and in a certain English neatness of feature. Then her neighbour spoke to her again, and then the boy came back and asked if he could get her another cup of tea. How nice he was! She could regard him more calmly now. She refused more tea. “But what about yourself; have you had some tea?” she asked. He took her empty cup and put it down on a table. “Yes, I’ve had some, thank you,” he said, and she kept him beside her talking about … she had already forgotten what. He had seemed a little shy at being detained there, and, after a minute or two, she had let him go and had herself risen from her chair and gone to overtake Mrs. Croft, who was at that moment making for the door. With Mrs. Croft she had gone out into the garden, and again the garden had called to her with its voiceless appeal. If only the crowd of guests would vanish, and leave house and garden deserted, so that Maurice and she could have the place to themselves!

Then Roger Pennington had taken possession of her, and they had strolled away from the other guests, talking of old times and his plans for the future now that he had got the old place back. “I hope,” she had said, in her matter-of-fact voice, “that you’re not going to alter the garden”; and she had felt an immense relief when he had replied that he was determined to keep the garden exactly as it had always been. They had been strolling in the direction of the square yew-garden, and she had said, herself noticing the tonelessness of her voice: “I’m glad they kept the yew-hedges in order”; and with a trembling heart she turned with Roger under the arch of yew into the garden, and followed the narrow yew-walled path that wound towards the centre.

“But the stone rim of the basin will have to be repaired,” he said; “and the fountain, too, is out of order.”

They emerged into the little square in the centre, closely walled with yew, with stone seats set in recesses in the walls and formal beds of aromatic herbs—lavender, southernwood, rosemary, and thyme—grouped about the stone-rimmed pool in the centre, in which the metal jet of the fountain showed above the surface of the still water. How peaceful and secret it was there! It seemed as if some part of her had actually expected to find him sitting there, and now drooped in disappointment. She sat down on one of the stone seats. Roger turned anxiously. “Your dress,” he said. “I’m afraid the seats are not very clean.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she replied. What did her dress matter? What did anything that concerned this present life matter?

“A friend of mine who is now dead,” Roger was saying, “once promised to send me a statue for the fountain. He used to stay with us in London, and once, before he left England for the last time, he stayed here. Perhaps you met him here? But I don’t suppose you remember. Maurice Wainwright was his name.”

“Yes, I do remember him,” said Lady Mardale. Her voice was quite colourless, and she sat coldly and fixedly gazing in front of her.

So there was still something of him here, in this spot where they had sat together and kissed. “A dear fellow,” Roger was saying. “He was enchanted with this place. It was after he stayed here that he promised to send me the little piece of statuary—a nymph or a faun or something of the kind—for the fountain. ‘You shall have it when the place becomes yours,’ he said. ‘I shan’t forget.’ But now that the place has become mine the poor chap isn’t here to remember. But I shall have it done myself some day when I come across something suitable.”

For some moments Lady Mardale had not spoken. She was lost in thought. She was reflecting on what Roger Pennington had told her. It was after he had been here that he had promised the statue. He had wanted, she understood, to leave here, in the spot so precious to both of them, some memorial of their love. And now she herself would do what he had wished to do.

“Yes, Roger,” she said; “that is a good idea, and you must let me give you the statue.”

“But, my dear Charlotte …”

“Please, Roger. It would be a real pleasure. This is my favourite place in the garden, you know.”

Roger accepted gratefully; but Charlotte Mardale had surprised him. He had never suspected her, with her strange lack of warmth, of any such romantic feeling as she had just shown. She had never before expressed any particular fondness for the yew-garden; in fact, as far as he knew, she had never been into it before. Strange creature! Though he had known her intimately for thirty years, she had always rather puzzled him, and now she was puzzling him more than ever. They left the yew-garden and paced slowly up the long walk that ran parallel with the garden-front of the house, talking again of his return to the Manor House and the general business of the estate. In such matters her advice was often as valuable as her husband’s, for she was an admirable business woman. But how surprising, that sudden romantic impulse of hers about the fountain! Not that she was not generous; but her generosity had always taken a strictly practical turn before. They reached the end of the broad walk and turned round, and, as they began to retrace their steps, she saw the golden-headed boy again, walking away from them towards the tennis-courts with John Pennington.

“Who is that nice boy with John?” she asked. “I talked to him at tea.”

“He’s a friend of John’s,” said Roger, “who arrived to-day for a fortnight. They were at Oxford together. His name is Eric Danver. I don’t know who his people are. We see him in London from time to time. Yes, a very nice fellow.”

And then, when she was talking to Amy Pennington in the hall just before leaving, he had appeared again with Sylvia. She could see in his eyes that Sylvia fascinated him, and her heart warmed towards him. And, so that they should not lose sight of him, she had asked him to come with the Penning-tons to Haughton.

Lying back now in the car with closed eyes, she knew that she was glad that she had gone to the garden-party. She had been deeply moved during those two hours; old happinesses and old sorrows had risen again and swept her like waves; she had been alive, alive as she had not been for years. It had been painful, but the pain had brought with it, not bitterness, but a sweetness that warmed and comforted her heart.

“You’re tired,” said her husband’s voice beside her.

She opened her eyes. “I am rather tired,” she said. “But I enjoyed the afternoon. Didn’t you?”

Chapter III

After the day of the garden-party the weather had turned dull, as if in harmony with Charlotte Mardale’s mood of resigned calm which had followed the emotions roused by her return to the Manor House. Haughton, that calm Palladian house built by the sixth Lord Mardale on the site of the dilapidated Elizabethan hall which had been the home of the Halnakers, encouraged that mood. The delicately tinted walls of its rooms, the blue of the dining-room and the morning-room, the duck-egg green of the drawing-room, and the grey of her own boudoir, the pure plasterwork of the ceilings, the classic restraint of the carved white marble mantelpieces, were the visible expression of a calm and beautiful self-discipline. How different from the richness and mystery of the Manor House!

It seemed to Charlotte Mardale that during these days she saw her life, past and present, reflected in the silvery atmosphere of a series of mirrors. Calmly she would approach one of the mirrors, and, looking into it, would find a single period of her life gleaming calmly and coldly before her. She was not unhappy. Her visit to the old scenes at the Manor House had in some vague way consoled her: ever since, she had felt that the past—that small fragment of the past which was so precious to her—was not wholly lost; that something of it survived for her which permanently enriched her life. It was her secret, which she shared with no one, but it was a secret which, far from alienating her from others, warmed and humanised her heart. Even her affection for her husband was the stronger for it. Life, she realised now more than ever, was a brief business; hers was already much more than half over. How short a time it had seemed to her, as she sat with Roger Pennington in the yew-garden, since she had sat there with Maurice Wainwright! And yet that was twenty-two years—nearly a quarter of a century—earlier. In another twenty-two years she would be an old woman, not far from her life’s end; perhaps dead already. She had ceased long since to demand much of life; indeed, the only time she had demanded much it had been refused her, and now it was no longer very hard to bear the heartache which that refusal had caused. Life, though it had never completely compensated her, had given her much. It had given her a good husband, for whom she had a great affection, and it had given her more than this—it had given her Sylvia; Sylvia, in whom was centred all the love of her starved heart. She tried to imagine what her life would have been if Sylvia had not been born. Her affection for her husband, she knew, would not have been enough. It was the renewal of her own life in Sylvia’s that had saved her, bringing back to her own life the youth and warmth that had sprung into being at her meeting with Maurice and had died out of it after her separation from him. Yes, without Sylvia her life would have withered up years ago, and if anything were to happen to Sylvia now, she felt that she would die. She was determined that Sylvia’s life should be all that her own had failed to be. It would be terrible when the child married and was taken from her, but she had faced that in imagination a hundred times already. When Sylvia found the man she loved, she must know the fullness of love which she herself had never known. During these quiet, dull days, when the change from the glare of the July sunshine came as a soothing relief, her mind dwelt more than usual on the past, and, looking back on her life now, she felt as if it had been, not one, but several lives. There was the dimly remembered London of her childhood, when her father, a vague, benignant presence, still made a fourth in the family party of her mother, Beatrix, her elder sister, and her small self. That early life seemed to her now an existence apart, remembered as something that had happened to someone else, a life read of in a book. Then there was the country life of her girlhood, when their father was no longer with them—a life divided between the pleasant country home, the yearly migration to London for the season, visits to friends, and especially the yearly visit to the Mardales at Haughton. Old Lady Mardale had been a great friend of her mother’s, and Charlotte herself had always enjoyed the visit to Haughton more than any of their other visits. Little had she dreamed in those days that she would marry Alfred Halnaker, though she had always liked and admired him. Indeed, they all loved Alfred; he was one of those lovable people who remain quite unspoilt by love and admiration. But he had seemed in those days so much older than herself and Beatrix; before they were out of their teens he had already passed thirty. He had been a special favourite with her mother. How delighted her mother had been when he had proposed! Even if she had wanted to refuse him she would hardly have been able to bring herself to inflict such a blow on her mother. But she had not, in fact, wanted to refuse him. Though she had not been in love with him, she had liked him better—much better—than any other man she had known. To be passionately in love was at that time an experience which had never been hers. She had read of it in novels and poetry, and had sometimes heard of cases in real life, but she had no reason to suppose it would ever befall her. Her only intimation that she was capable of it was a sense which came to her at rare moments of a small gnawing hunger, an almost inarticulate regret, hidden deep in her heart. She had always been a sensible and practical person, and it was for practical reasons that she had accepted Alfred Halnaker. She had a great affection and respect for him; and it would, she had felt, be delightful to become one of a family so dear to her. Beatrix was already married and gone, and if she herself did not marry she would be left solitary when their mother died. To allow these considerations to be outweighed by that inarticulate romantic longing which sometimes stirred in her heart would be to fly in the face of what she had been brought up to regard as common sense and right thinking.

And she had been right. She told herself even now that she had been right. It had been the merest chance that, when it was already too late, she had actually met the man who had wakened into vivid life the vague romantic dream. Yes, just a desolating mischance. If she had refused Alfred, the course of her life would have been different; she would not have gone to live at Haughton, and Maurice Wainwright would never have crossed her path.

Such were the thoughts and memories that drifted along the stream of her consciousness during the days that followed the garden-party at the Penning-tons’. One afternoon, when her mind was full of the past, she had pulled out an old photograph-album from a heap of books which were piled under a table in a corner of the morning-room, and, drawing up a chair to the table, she had remained there, in that uninhabited corner of the large, airy room, turning over the pages. She had become so engrossed that her husband’s voice startled her: she had not even heard the door open.

“Hallo, Charlotte, what are you doing over there? I didn’t see you.”

“And I didn’t hear you. I was just looking at this old album.”

He walked over, and stood by her chair with his hands in his pockets, looking down at the album.

“Just look at Mamma,” she said, glancing up at him. “Mamma ought to have ruled a nation, not merely two rather stupid daughters. How well she brought us up.”

“Yes, too well, we used to think.”

“That’s what Beatrix once said.”

“Your mother is a wonderful woman, but as a ruler she hadn’t, I’m afraid, enough regard for the liberty of the subject. You and Beatrix, as girls, were little more than shadows of your mother.”

“Well, you can hardly blame her for that. She is ten times the woman that either Beatrix or I am even now.”

Lord Mardale stooped over her shoulder, turned a page of the album, and pointed to anotherphotograph.

Charlotte Mardale regarded herself of thirty-one years ago with a grim smile. “What a fright!” she said.

“Fright, indeed!” he answered. “I’m afraid you’re a little prejudiced, my dear. If you weren’t, you would see that she is a very handsome creature. The only thing wrong with her is that she’s not awake.”

Charlotte glanced up at her husband. “No,” she said, “I was not awake then. How old was I?”

“Nineteen. There’s the date—1894. ‘Charlotte Hadlow, 1894.’ You signed it at my request. Don’t you remember?”

Lady Mardale examined the signature. “Even the writing,” she said, “is a child’s writing. And there’s Beatrix. She’s not quite awake either; though more so than I. So you think that Mamma prevented us from waking?”

“It was rather the fashion, wasn’t it, among parents of those days to discourage wakefulness?”

“You’ve always been very good to Mamma, Alfred.”

Lord Mardale smiled. “I was always very fond of your mother, Charlotte; more, I think, than you and Beatrix were in the old days. But, after all, I could afford to be; I was independent of her.”

Lady Mardale raised surprised but not indignant eyes. “Alfred, what do you mean?”

“Well, you two were afraid of her. I wasn’t.”

Lady Mardale nodded. “Yes,” she admitted, “we were.” She paused, and then added with conviction, “And a good thing, too.”

“You think so?” Lord Mardale smiled. “Is Sylvia afraid of you?”

“No,” said Lady Mardale; “but, as it happens, it’s not necessary that she should be.”

“Not necessary? Sylvia is too good to need it, you mean?”

“Oh, certainly she’s good; but it isn’t so much a matter of goodness. Beatrix and I were good enough; too good, I sometimes think. It’s more a matter of being sensible. We two were really rather stupid girls; I especially. We had to have good sense knocked into us, and that’s exactly what Mamma’s rule did.”

“Whereas Sylvia, fortunately, has good sense ready made, so that we are spared the uncomfortable process of knocking it in?”

Lady Mardale smiled. “Yes,” she said; “as it happens, she has.”

“And she has it, my dear,” said her husband, “precisely because she’s not afraid of us. Remember, the cart always comes after the horse.”

Lady Mardale did not reply. She turned another page of the album.

“Dear me!” she said, as if to herself, gazing incredulously at her own photograph again, a photograph taken eight years after the previous one,

“That one is the best you ever had taken,” said Lord Mardale. “You were twenty-seven then.”

Lady Mardale still gazed at herself. She had not seen that photograph for many years.

“Still rather a fright,” she remarked detachedly. But she was recalling the fact that she had given one of these to Maurice. It was very like what she had been then, but how utterly different from the face she saw in her looking-glass every morning nowadays; and it struck her suddenly that if Maurice were to return now he would not know her. A pang shot through her heart. She closed the album and rose from the table.

Book II

Charlotte Asleep

(Past History)

Chapter IV

Lady Hadlow, with her two daughters, Beatrix and Charlotte, and Fanny Hadlow, an impoverished cousin of her husband’s who acted as their governess, had lived in a pleasant country house on the edge of the village of Fording. Lady Hadlow called it a small house because she had previously been accustomed to life on a large scale, and she called the garden of three acres a small garden. Her husband had held a high position in the Foreign Office, and during his lifetime they had lived for the most part in London. His early death had left her and her two little girls without income enough to keep up the London house, and so she had removed to Fording, feeling that reduced circumstances were less noticeable in the country than in the town. She herself was one of the Ebernoes of Tetford, and when she married Robert Hadlow her family had felt that she might have done better, until his rapid rise to distinction, and the K.C.B. and K.C.M.G. that accompanied it, had enabled them to revise their view. Life in London had suited her perfectly, for she was an energetic woman, of a sharp though limited intelligence, fond of society, and an excellent hostess. She loved to feel important, and during Sir Robert’s lifetime she was important. She was a special favourite with her husband’s chief, who often discussed official matters in her presence, and even invited her opinion. She had other admirable and useful qualities, for she was not an Ebernoe of Tetford for nothing. Like all her family, she was a true Victorian—one of those fortunate creatures who know absolutely, and without the smallest possibility of compromise, what things are done and what are not done. Nor was this knowledge confined to social matters; it covered the whole field of morals, religion, private behaviour, and even private opinion. It was an invaluable gift, for it enabled her to lay down the law with absolute conviction, and therefore without the smallest scruple. Though she had a warm heart, and was deeply attached to her two girls, she never indulged her feelings when it would have been weakness to do so; and, although it often cost her a pang to refrain, the certainty that she was right made that pang brief and easy to bear.

The change from the busy, social, important life in London to a quiet and comparatively insignificant existence in the country was at first very painful to Lady Hadlow. She felt once more, as she had at first been made to feel when she married, that she had fallen in social status. Her only consolation now was that the invitations to stay at large and pleasant houses did not cease with the death of her husband, and so she was not, she felt, quite shut out from society. The chief of these consolations was the Mardales. The Mardales were old friends of the Ebernoes, and when she had married Robert Hadlow they had extended their friendship to him. How nice of them that had been! Every summer she and Robert had been invited to Haughton for a fortnight, and, now that she was a widow, she and the children were pressed to prolong their visit to a month. She was unaffectedly devoted to the Mardales, but her delight in her yearly visit to them was undeniably heightened by the fact that they were members of the English aristocracy. Lady Hadlow had a profound veneration for blood. Aristocracy, for her, covered a multitude of sins. Apart from individual character, there was, for her, a virtue in blue blood. Though she was naturally warm-hearted, and had a sincere regard for individuals of almost every class, and though she would never tolerate irregularities even in an aristocrat, nevertheless she held that in some subtle and almost mystical sense the blue-blooded were the elect of God. The fact that the Mardales were her intimate friends saved her self-respect and helped her over a very painful period. Besides, she loved them, and she loved Haughton, which had, after all these years, come to seem almost a second home to her; and a home now, when Fording seemed to her anything but a home, was an immense consolation.

No; Fording at first was certainly not a home. For her first year there she was very unhappy, and she shut herself up in her unhappiness. Village affairs, as compared with national affairs, seemed to her so utterly trivial that at first she could not bring herself to be interested in them, though in later years she consented to become the dictator—it would have been inaccurate to call her the chairman—of certain village committees. Meanwhile her unemployed energies turned themselves upon her two daughters: she ruled them and her small household as in happier days she had ruled the British Empire. Her rule was a strict one. If she had been a morose or ill-tempered woman it would have been easier to resist it, but she was nothing of the kind. She was lively, energetic, and affectionate, and she always took it for granted that her commands would be instantly and cheerfully obeyed. When they were not, when she was forced to exercise severity, that severity lasted only until it had attained its object. She never bore malice. Her cook, her waiting-maid, and her head housemaid had been in her service ever since her marriage. They adored her. As for her daughters, Beatrix, who was two years older than Charlotte, did not always submit to her mother’s rule with the docility of Charlotte and the household staff. From time to time she would break out into what was known as “one of Beatrix’s tantrums.” It never occurred to Charlotte to wonder whether there was any reason for these outbreaks; for her they were merely periodic occurrences which required explanation, like Mamma’s headaches. Beatrix so obviously gained nothing by them that Charlotte never regarded them as having any practical object, such as the overthrow of Mamma’s rule. After a display of shrieking and stamping, Beatrix was locked into her room by Mamma, Cousin Fanny being powerless on these occasions. Thereupon an awed restraint took possession of the household, and Mamma, went about the house with an appearance of high rectitude and a mouth which had become very straight and very narrow. When, after some hours, Beatrix had cooled down, the constraint was lifted from the household, Mamma’s mouth resumed its normal shape, and Beatrix herself returned to her usual position in the family, having achieved nothing whatsoever. Charlotte herself had no temper, and sometimes, during one of Beatrix’s tantrums, Mamma would address her with a sigh of relief as “My good little girl.” Whenever this happened, Charlotte was aware of an uncomfortable sense of over-virtuousness. Nobody ever spoke of Beatrix’s tantrums except when they were actually occurring, and Beatrix herself never referred to them at all. As she grew older they became less spectacular. At fifteen she no longer stamped and howled, and was no longer locked into her room. She retired there voluntarily now, after bursting into tears and calling her mother a beast, for which, at Lady Hadlow’s request, she ceremoniously apologised afterwards.

To hear Beatrix call their mother a beast never failed to shock Charlotte, but the shock was not altogether an unpleasant one. There was something thrilling, almost bracing, in its effect. But even now Beatrix never spoke to Charlotte of her feelings on these occasions, nor ever discussed or criticised their mother, and it was not till Beatrix was eighteen, and Charlotte herself sixteen, that she accidentally discovered, to her immense astonishment, that Beatrix actually dared to flout Mamma’s sacred rule. The law-breaking was, of course, done in secret; externally the family equilibrium remained as perfect as ever; but to Charlotte the discovery was nothing short of a cataclysm. There was for her something terrible, and at the same time enthralling, in the realisation that Beatrix, her own sister, actually in cold blood, and not merely in the momentary heat of a tantrum, disobeyed their mother, and regarded her as fallible. It brought to her a sense of unforseen release. From that moment, life, for her, was different.

It was the spring of 1892. A few months earlier two old friends of Lady Hadlow’s, a Mr. and Mrs. Winchmere, had paid them a visit. The Winchmeres were great readers; it was from them that Lady Hadlow learnt what new books were worth reading. As for Beatrix and Charlotte, they regarded them as infallible in all matters of literature and art, and it was one of their greatest treats when, in the evenings, Mr. Winchmere read Dickens or Thackeray aloud to them, or Mrs. Winchmere, who had a lovely voice, softly declaimed Byron or Lord Tennyson. On this occasion the Winchmeres were full of a new novel which had appeared some months before; its name was Tess of the D’ Urbervilles. “A great work of art!” Mr. Winchmere had said to Lady Hadlow; “undoubtedly a great work of art!” And he had gone on to speak of the pathos and tragedy of the story, and the profound sense of the English countryside which filled the book, until it assumed in Charlotte’s mind a solemn richness which she longed to experience. When the Winchmeres had gone away they sent the book to Lady Hadlow, and Beatrix and Charlotte watched her every evening as she sat absorbed in it, expecting her to break into appreciative remarks, as she so often did, and to read passages aloud; a habit which, when they themselves were immersed in books of their own, they found exceedingly trying. But now they both longed for her to do so. But she did not do so. She read on in silence for a week, and at the end of the week she made the book into a parcel. “A powerful work,” she remarked, as she folded the brown paper in at each end of the parcel, “but quite unsuitable for you girls!”

“But, Mamma …!” Beatrix expostulated, and Lady Hadlow, raising her head, found four disappointed eyes fixed upon her.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, my dears,” she said, tying up the parcel with string, “but you must allow me to know best.”

And that was the end of Tess of the D’Urbervilles— or so it seemed.

But some months after this Charlotte went, early one morning, into her sister’s bedroom. Beatrix was half asleep. She turned over drowsily at the sound of the opening door, and unclosed her eyes as Charlotte approached her bed. At the same moment a book fell to the floor. Charlotte stooped and picked it up, and with a thrill of amazement recognised it. It was Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

“Bee,” she gasped, “where did you get it from?”

Beatrix’s handsome brows gathered into a little frown. “I borrowed it from Lucy Daintry,” she said.

Charlotte’s jaw had dropped. “But what would Mamma say?”

Beatrix smiled at the gaping, girlish face. “What indeed?” she said nonchalantly. “That’s why I have to read it in bed.”

“But, Bee, isn’t it a very … a very unsuitable book?” Charlotte asked.

She was gazing at her sister in fascinated consternation, as she might have gazed if she had seen her walk naked into the drawing-room.

“Stuff, child!” said Beatrix. “Mamma has such absurdly old-fashioned ideas that if we left it to her we should still be reading Charlotte Yonge.”

Charlotte gasped. If Beatrix had thrown a pail of icy water over her the shock could not have been greater. Mamma old-fashioned? And Beatrix, her own sister, saying so with nothing more than a calm petulance? She gasped again. Like cold water it had shocked her, but like cold water it had also been wonderfully stimulating.

Charlotte, standing there in her plain white nightgown, her shocked, earnest face crowned with curlpapers, a pigtail dangling over either ear, appeared to Beatrix exquisitely comical. She laughed outright.

“My dear Lottie,” she said, “You’re too ridiculous. But if you’re going to be so solemn about it, for goodness’ sake go and do your hair.” Then her face grew suddenly serious. “Now mind, Charlotte, not a word to Mamma.”

Charlotte stammered. “No, Bee, no … but … but oughtn’t you …”

“It would only upset her,” said Beatrix shortly. “Mamma forgets, you see, that we’re no longer children. At least, I’m not. Are you?”

Charlotte gaped. “I … I hadn’t thought,” she said.

“Then, my dear, it’s time you did. However, Mamma must be humoured; there’s no occasion to upset her.”

Beatrix’s solicitude for Mamma did not deceive Charlotte. She knew well enough, and she knew that Beatrix knew, that if Mamma got to know, Beatrix herself would be much the more upset of the two. But she said nothing; for that was the kind of thought which, when it came to her, Charlotte always left unspoken.

Beatrix threw back the bedclothes and swung her feet to the floor.

“Here, give me the book,” she said. She snatched Tess of the D’Urbervilles from Charlotte, crossed the room, opened a drawer, and turned back some of the contents. “There!” she said, tucking the book under them. “It’ll be quite safe there.”

Charlotte still gazed wonderingly; but mixed with wonder in her eyes was an involuntary admiration. “Is it very good, Bee?” she whispered.

“Wonderful!” said Beatrix, assuming the superior worldly air which she sometimes adopted towards Charlotte; and then she added, with a slight pursing of the lips: “Undoubtedly a great work of art!”

“That’s what Mr. Winchmere said,” observed Charlotte.

Beatrix glanced at her sharply; she had thought that Charlotte had caught her, as she had caught herself, aping Mr. Winchmere. But Charlotte’s eyes were round and innocent; she had merely stated a fact.

• • • • • • • •

That incident, with all that it implied, coloured all Charlotte’s thoughts and emotions during the weeks that followed. Even when she was not directly conscious of it, it lurked in the depths of her mind like a small bright star. Again and again throughout the days and nights she would ask herself what was the cause of this hidden excitement that pulsed within her. Then she would recollect once more the delicious blasphemy, and the novel suggestion which had followed it—that she and Bee were no longer children, and that Mamma was absurdly unaware of the fact. The idea that Mamma was a fallible and narrowly limited woman, and that she herself was also a woman, was constantly rising up and presenting itself to her consideration, and, though it made no outward difference to her behaviour, it profoundly altered her attitude to existence. She was like a plant that has been taken out of its pot and planted in open soil: from that moment her mind, no longer cramped and confined, began to root itself more deeply in life. She began, in fact, to grow up.

But soon another interest began to encroach. The date of the annual visit to Haughton drew near. This visit was always, for the Hadlows, the great event of the year, and involved elaborate preparations, chief among them the choosing and ordering of hats and dresses for the great Haughton garden-party which always took place during their visit. Every morning, for a whole month before they set out for Haughton, Charlotte awoke to a sense of delighted anticipation; it seemed as if her life had been keyed up to a tone richer and more intense than usual, and she would lie in bed luxuriating in the Haughton feeling—a sense of something exquisite and orderly and infinitely leisured, of high, airy rooms and passages, soft carpets, smooth, sunlight-dappled lawns and brooding trees, and, as the centre and heart of the whole scene, old Lord and Lady Mardale—he so jovial and courteous and so extraordinarily handsome, with his short white beard and his shock of white hair; she an exquisite little woman with the warmest heart and most beautiful manners Charlotte had ever known, who ruled Haughton like a beneficent but autocratic queen; and, lastly, Alfred, who came for brief visits when he could escape from his London parish, Alfred, whom Lord and Lady Mardale and everyone at Haughton, and Lady Hadlow and Beatrix and Charlotte, all worshipped.

Chapter V

The day they started for Haughton was for Charlotte, as it always was, a marvellous day. As they drove from home to the station she felt that she was being transported into an intenser life, an earthly Paradise of which, each year, she was allowed a brief taste. The whole journey was one irresponsible delight, for Lady Hadlow never dreamt of delegating any of the responsibility for luggage, tickets, or porters to either her or Beatrix. What Lady Hadlow herself didn’t look after was looked after by Elizabeth, the head housemaid, who always accompanied them as lady’s maid to Haughton. The journey to London was glorified for Charlotte by the thought of their destination and of the holiday before them. Lady Hadlow and Beatrix read books or magazines, but Charlotte was too thrilled to read. She sat idle, gazing out of the window in quiet ecstasy. At London Bridge their luggage was heaped on a four-wheeler—a “growler,” as Lady Hadlow called it, with a certain arch consciousness of her indulgence in slang. Then Beatrix and Charlotte got in, and then an unfailing incident occurred: Elizabeth stood aside to allow Mamma to follow, and Mamma said: “Now jump in, Elizabeth!” and, having taken a final look outside at the luggage, and inside to make sure that Beatrix and Charlotte and Elizabeth were really there, she got in herself, and the jogging journey across London began.

It delighted Charlotte to watch the town gliding like a slow panorama-show past the cab-window. She always looked out especially for St. Paul’s and Trafalgar Square. They sat for the most part silent, silent with excitement; and when they spoke it was only in brief phrases.

Up to this point the journey, but for the thought of Haughton, was identical with various other journeys—the yearly visit to London and visits to other friends; but as soon as they began to approach Paddington it took on its own unique quality, for they never went to Paddington unless they were going to Haughton.

Charlotte threw herself back with a sigh of complete happiness in her seat in the first-class carriage. Elizabeth having seen them duly installed, with Lady Hadlow’s dressing-case and the bundle of umbrellas and parasols on the rack above their heads and the luncheon-basket on the seat beside Lady Hadlow, had gone off to her own place in a third-class carriage.

“Now don’t forget, Elizabeth, that we change at Wilmore,” Lady Hadlow had called to her as she went. She had said it twice a year, once on the way to Haughton and once on the way back, throughout all the twenty years that Elizabeth had been in her service.

No sooner had the train started than Beatrix and Charlotte began to clamour for food. They were ravenous, with that ravenousness which comes of the excitement of travel. But Lady Hadlow was obdurate.

“Not until we are out of London!” she said.

To picnic—for, after all, luncheon out of a basket was a picnic—within the precincts of London would have been preposterous, and for half an hour Beatrix and Charlotte stared hungrily from the carriage windows for the first signs of trees and meadows.

“Now,” shouted Beatrix. “There’s a field, Mamma.”

Lady Hadlow raised her eyes from The Queen. “That, my dear Beatrix!” she said, with a twinkle in her eye. “No one in her senses could call that a field.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s an enclosure,” said Lady Hadlow, with exaggerated indifference, turning her attention back to The Queen.

“Mamma, how provoking you are!”

Charlotte watched them, smiling.

“There!” shouted Beatrix again. “There’s another, and another. The whole place is fields. I shall open the basket.” She leapt from her seat.

“Beatrix!” Lady Hadlow’s stern voice arrested her. Beatrix, half amused and half annoyed, began to pout. Then, with a sigh, Lady Hadlow closed The Queen and turned to the luncheon-basket, and, with the two girls twittering beside her, began to unpack it.

By the time the picnic was over and the basket repacked they were approaching Wilmore. The little train for Templeton, which was the station for Haughton, was waiting, as it always was, on the other side of the platform. Very small and undignified it seemed, compared with the noble engine and long coaches of the express. Elizabeth and a porter, under the stern command of Lady Hadlow, established them in a small, faded first-class carriage, and, soon after they had seen the express glide out of the opposite platform, their engine gave a ridiculous little toot, and the small train began to joggle uneasily out of Wilmore. After following the main line for a hundred yards or so, it suddenly heeled dangerously over and took a sharp bend to the left. The main line was behind them now, and on the little branch-line they were plunging deep into the pleasant rolling country. How delightful it was to see once more the familiar stations—Wichford, Shelling, Lavington, Abbot’s Randale, King’s Randale; they knew them all by heart, the unique personality of each station and the scene in which it was set; the reedy mere just beyond Lannock where a pair of swans sailed idly in water that looked like sky; the old water-mill on the little river at Rimple, its wooden wheel dripping green. Now they were slowing down for Annet Brook; the next station would be Templeton. As soon as the train had started again, Lady Hadlow began to get things down from the rack. They were all ready long before they were half way to Templeton. The last three minutes seemed half an hour. At last there was the familiar rush of the bridge overhead, the shuddering of the brakes, the lamp-posts with their oil lamps and the white palings rippling more and more slowly past the windows. Lady Hadlow let down the window and looked out. Then she drew in her head and the door was opened, revealing Walter, the groom, smiling and holding the door open for them to descend.

When Lady Hadlow had seen that Walter had brought everything out of their carriage, and had herself verified both Elizabeth and the heavy luggage, she passed, with Beatrix and Charlotte in her wake, through the gate in the white railings where the booking-clerk, who had been at Temple-ton as long as Charlotte could remember, was collecting tickets. Two vehicles stood waiting in the station yard. One was the Haughton luggage-cart; of the other Charlotte could only see, over her mother’s shoulder, the smart pair of chestnuts. She knew them well; they were Phil and Kester. Kester was, as usual, fidgeting with his bit; she could hear the continual clinking of it. Then she saw that the carriage behind the chestnuts was the four-wheeled dogcart with yellow wheels, and by that she knew that Lord Mardale had driven down himself to meet them. And there he was on the box, handsome and benevolent, with his short square white beard and his tall grey felt hat. A sudden little fountain of affection rose in her heart. He was waving to them with his disengaged hand. Lady Hadlow ran forward.

“My dear Lord Mardale, how nice of you to meet us.”

Walter, the groom, helped her up to the seat beside Lord Mardale, who stretched a hand to her from above.

“Well, and how is the trio?” he asked, smiling at them. “Delighted to see you, my dear Emily. Now, you two girls, skip up behind.”

Walter handed the two girls to the back seat, and Lord Mardale took off the brake. As they moved out of the station yard, Charlotte saw Elizabeth climbing into the front of the luggage-cart, while Walter and a porter hoisted the luggage into the back.

How intoxicating it was to be whirling along towards Haughton again, with the station buildings slipping away before their eyes and the road flowing out from under the footboard like a swift grey mill-race. Beatrix and Charlotte glanced at one another and laughed with sheer delight. Lord Mardale kept up a smart pace; the luggage-cart was not yet in sight behind.

“Just listen to Mamma,” said Beatrix to Charlotte, with a grin. Lady Hadlow was chattering as if to make up for months of silence. Sunlight and shadow flew over them; dust steamed away behind them; in half an hour they swung into the Haughton gates.

The wheels and the horses’ hooves were suddenly muffled. How cool it was under the long lime-avenue. Soon through the screen of hanging boughs they saw in broken glimpses the sunny yellow stone of the house, and then, as they wheeled to the right at the avenue’s end, the whole house-front stood suddenly displayed, a great rectangle, many-windowed and rich with frieze and cornice and pillars, its stone mellow in the afternoon sunshine, its windows bright with reflected sky. The central portion was crowned by a pediment supported on four Corinthian pillars. Between the two inner pillars, six semicircular steps rose to the front door. Charlotte, twisting herself round on the back seat to gaze at the beloved house, saw that old Manson, the butler, and a groom were waiting at the bottom of the steps; and, as the dogcart pulled up, Lady Mardale, small, exquisite, grey-haired, and dressed in grey silk, appeared in the doorway and came out on to the steps to welcome them.

Before the others had had time to get out of the dogcart, Charlotte was running up the steps to meet her.

• • • • • • • •

Half an hour later they were sitting with Lady Mardale in the cool drawing-room, and Charlotte, while the others talked, watched Manson and the footman solemnly and silently carry in and unfold the tea-table, lay the cloth, and set the great silver tray, laden with silver and porcelain, upon it. She loved the quiet, leisurely precision with which the mechanism of household affairs moved at Haughton, and she loved the silver and the beautiful cups and saucers, white, green, and gold, which were a part of the beauty and fineness of the place.

They had already begun tea when Lord Mardale came in and drew up a chair near to Beatrix’s, who was always his favourite.

“Well, young woman,” he said to her, as Lady Mardale handed him his cup, “is it to be eight o’clock to-morrow morning, as usual.”

He always rode for half an hour before breakfast, and, when the Hadlows were at Haughton, Beatrix always accompanied him. Charlotte had never taken to riding.

“There’s a nice little bay mare ready for you,” the old man went on. “I borrowed her on purpose from old Pennington.”

“But where’s Dinah?” asked Beatrix.

“Dinah’s too old now, poor dear. She’s no longer safe. I’ve had her put out to grass. We’ll go and have a word with her to-morrow. As far as looks go she’s a wonder still.”

“And when is the garden-party to be?” Lady Hadlow was saying to Lady Mardale.

“Ours? On the twenty-fifth. We have had to make it later than usual, because Alfred cannot get away from London till then. He will come down on the morning train, and arrive just in time. Then, as usual, there’s the Penningtons’; that comes next week, on the eleventh. And there is one the day after at Stornton. Of course you’ll come to the Penningtons’, but I imagine you won’t want to go to garden-parties two days running. I shall have to go, I’m afraid.”

“But certainly I shall go to both,” said Lady Hadlow. “I shouldn’t dream of losing a chance of flaunting my new dresses.”

Little Lady Mardale laughed. “I always forget your insatiable appetite for society, Emily. Then, thanks to your new dresses, I shall have the pleasure of your company at Stornton. And what about you, Charlotte dear?”

“The Penningtons’ will be enough for Charlotte,” said Lady Hadlow conclusively. “In two years’ time, when she is Beatrix’s age, it will, of course, be different.”

Lady Mardale smiled at Charlotte, who was sitting on her left, and laid an affectionate hand on hers. “Fancy my Charlotte grown up in two years’ time.”

Charlotte had almost ceased to reflect on Beatrix’s amazing suggestion that she was no longer a child, but now here were Mamma and Lady Mardale casually taking it for granted that she would soon be grown up. She glanced across at Beatrix, laughing and talking there with old Lord Mardale. How different she seemed from what she was at home. She had none of the girlish shyness and awkwardness of which Charlotte was so painfully aware in herself. And how handsome she looked, so animated and self-possessed, her eyes and mouth responding archly to something—evidently something comical—that Lord Mardale was saying to her. It struck Charlotte for the first time that Beatrix was no longer a mere girl, but a lady.

Chapter VI

Lady Hadlow was subject to neuralgia. In the autumn, after their return to Fording, she had a severer attack than usual, and the doctor recommended Harrogate. Harrogate had proved beneficial on a previous occasion, when Lady Hadlow had spent six weeks there taking the waters while Beatrix and Charlotte remained at home doing lessons with Cousin Fanny.

There had always been, in earlier days, a particular kind of pleasure in Mamma’s absences. It was not that Beatrix and Charlotte ever actually wished her out of the house, but rather that, when she did go, her absence produced a subtle and very pleasant change in their existence. Cousin Fanny’s rule was very much milder than Mamma’s, and as she had her own sitting-room, and, when Lady Hadlow was at home, lived somewhat apart from the rest of them, so during Lady Hadlow’s absence, though she did emerge to some extent, she was never so much in evidence as Mamma. And so Beatrix and Charlotte were left more to themselves, and thrown much more intimately together. Charlotte remembered how they would stand on the doorstep waving to Mamma as she drove away, feeling a little sad and forlorn and apprehensive at being left without any real governor; and then how, the moment the carriage had vanished behind the shrubbery, they would glance at one another and a delicious secret joy would rise in their hearts and blossom in their eyes. It was as if they had met after a long separation. And not only that: they became also freer and more important. In a sense, though Cousin Fanny was in charge, they felt that they were the mistresses of the house. Under Cousin Fanny’s mild sway, tension was eased, manners relaxed, and all sorts of little acts of insubordination became possible. The servants, too, became more real, much more like friends—though, of course, carefully subordinated friends—of the family.

But now it was different. Beatrix was now grown up. She had left the schoolroom and become a lady of leisure, and she accompanied Lady Hadlow to Harrogate, leaving Charlotte alone to her lessons with Cousin Fanny. Beatrix’s absence made all the difference: life at home, with no one but Cousin Fanny, was dull. It was not unbearable, but it was less pleasant than when they were all together, and Charlotte counted the days till her mother’s and sister’s return.

Then came a disappointment. “Mamma,” wrote Beatrix, “has caught a severe chill. The doctor says there is nothing to be alarmed about, but she will have to remain in bed for at least a week, and this, I am afraid, will delay the Harrogate cure. How fortunate that we took rooms instead of going to the Prince of Wales’s! Mrs. Rayner, the landlady, is a most superior woman, and when I go out I feel I can safely leave Mamma with her. When we shall return home now I cannot say; probably not until a fortnight or three weeks after we had intended. The doctor turns out to have been at school with Papa. His wife has twice invited me to tea—a kind, rather dull woman. He has a nephew, a young Dr. Swin-combe, who is staying with them—such a beau, my dear, and most entertaining besides. My poor child, I hope you are not having an overdose of Cousin Fanny. Give her my love.”

Charlotte heaved a little fluttering sigh. It was disturbing to think of Mamma ill in bed in a strange place, and the indefinite postponement of their hoped-for return depressed her. She read through Beatrix’s letter again, and then, taking in for the first time some of the minor details, smiled, thinking to herself: “How like she is, in some ways, to Mamma.” Dear Bee! She would never, she supposed, have her quite to herself again. She had not fully realised that before. She felt, with a sudden small pang, that the old childish securities were deserting her.

She and Beatrix made a pretence of keeping diaries. Often weeks passed and not a word was entered, but, since her mother and Beatrix went away, Charlotte had scribbled something in hers almost every day, as a means of occupying herself.

“I had not realised till they went away,” she wrote, “that life is a continual change. Sometimes the change is slow, sometimes quick. At present our life is changing quickly. Last winter Bee left the schoolroom and came out. Bee and I, the two children, used to be one thing and Mamma another. Now Bee and Mamma, the two women, are one thing and I another. But in a year or two I too shall have done with the schoolroom, and then what will happen?”

She stopped writing and sat up, gazing pensively in front of her. What would happen? Would they marry and leave home for good? How strange, how unimaginable, to walk out of the house for ever, leave Mamma and Bee and go to live with some man. The very thought made her quail. And what, then, would become of Cousin Fanny? Or perhaps they would never marry, but all go on living together. But even then things would not always go on being the same. Some day. … No, she ought not to think of such things. Her mind shied. But it was true, it was bound to happen, and some day she would have to face it. She forced herself to face it now. … Some day Mamma would die. She and Beatrix crept into the darkened room. She held her handkerchief in her hand; there was a choking lump in her throat; she could feel the sting of tears in her eyes. There, in the pale, white bed. … No! No! It was wrong to indulge such fancies. She shook herself free of them, locked away her diary in a drawer, and rose from her writing-desk.

But at dinner that night the question of Cousin Fanny, who sat opposite to her, came back into her mind. Cousin Fanny had been so long a part of her daily life that Charlotte had never before considered her with detachment; and now, with that question as to her future in her mind, she contemplated her as if for the first time. Even in summer Cousin Fanny always looked a little cold. Her small, pale, thin face, Charlotte realised, must once have been very pretty. In a faded way it was pretty still.

Her grey hair was of the kind which is always untidy; when it was golden its untidiness must have brought an added charm. Her thick brows and long lashes and her eyes, which were dark blue, were even now very beautiful.

“Cousin Fanny,” she said, “what will you do when I stop having lessons?”

Cousin Fanny winced almost imperceptibly at the question, and Charlotte, detecting it, realised that she had been unintentionally cruel.

“My dear child, how can I tell?”

“But I mean, you won’t leave us, will you?”

“That depends on your mother, Charlotte. There is no reason why she should keep me here when both you girls are done with lessons.”

“Then where will you go?”

“Where indeed?” said Cousin Fanny with a wan smile. “I shall have to try to find some sort of a place.”

A sudden pity rose in Charlotte at the thought of this poor little woman sent away to start again among strangers. “Oh, but that would be dreadful, wouldn’t it?” She put out a hand and took Cousin Fanny’s. “I’m sure Mamma will want you to stay with us. Then Beatrix and I could go on with our French and Italian.”

“But in a few years you will both probably be married.”

Married! She had been thinking of that this afternoon. “I’m not at all sure I want to marry,” she said.

“But of course you’ll want to marry, Charlotte. Surely you don’t want to be an old maid?”

“But you didn’t marry, Cousin Fanny.”

“My case was different, Charlotte. I had to look after my mother until I was forty, and then it was too late.”

“Well, and perhaps Beatrix and I will have to look after Mamma.”

“Your mother is rich enough to keep servants, and a companion too if necessary. My mother, you see, could only afford a general servant. No, Charlotte dear, whatever you do, don’t be an old maid. It’s a terrible thing to have no one but yourself to live for. I’m not speaking, now, of myself. I am fortunate in having you and Beatrix to live for, at least for the present.”

Charlotte thought of Beatrix’s letter: “I hope you are not having an overdose of Cousin Fanny.” That was what Cousin Fanny was to them—something of which one could easily have too much; while, for Cousin Fanny, she and Beatrix were simply life itself. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. She swallowed them down, and, dinner being over, rose from the table. But Cousin Fanny had seen the tears, and as they went together out of the dining-room she put her arm through Charlotte’s.

“You’re very kind to your old cousin, my dear,” she said.

At the end of the week Beatrix wrote again: “Mamma is certainly no worse; in fact, it looks as if she were beginning to shake off her chill. I had tea again yesterday with the doctor and his wife. My beau was there, and taught me a very curious cat’s cradle invented by the Fiji islanders or some such people. You ask me what colour his hair is. Black, my dear; or as near black as makes no matter; and his eyes are a greenish grey—hazel, I suppose. You must not refer to him again when you write, or Mamma, who of course insists on seeing your letters to me, will begin to take him seriously.”

That last sentence set Charlotte thinking. Could Bee be taking her beau seriously? Charlotte had up till now imagined that these references to him were merely one of Beatrix’s lively inconsequences, but now this indirect hint, this phrase which might lead the reader to infer that it was not serious, was leading Charlotte to infer the exact opposite. For Charlotte knew her Bee well. Beatrix never told direct lies, but sometimes she had wicked little diplomacies which neatly avoided the truth. Why had she not added, “And, of course, it’s not serious,” after the remark about Mamma taking it seriously? Was Beatrix falling in love? Charlotte felt secretly and profoundly interested. If only Beatrix would confide in her, allow her to share vicariously this wonderful thing that was happening! She sat, with Beatrix’s letter in her lap, gazing in front of her with rapt, wide-eyed intensity.

But it seemed that these theories about Beatrix falling in love were false, for that was the last mention of the beau in her letters. Either she had not met him again or she had lost interest in him. Her letters thenceforward were brief—little more than bulletins of Mamma’s progress and information about the Harrogate weather; and soon Lady Hadlow was well enough to write herself to Charlotte and Cousin Fanny.

“The money I sent you for household expenses,” she wrote to Cousin Fanny, “will be exhausted by now, or nearly so. I enclose you another cheque, which please acknowledge, and I shall be glad if you will let me know the amounts of the grocer’s, butcher’s, and Jefferson’s bills for the last three weeks, so that I can enter them in my account book. I hope you and Mrs. Ridley carefully checked the items before paying them.”

“Tell Hobson,” ran another letter, “if he has not already taken up the dahlias, as he should have done at least three weeks ago, to do so immediately.”

Evidently Lady Hadlow was recovering, and was already resuming command of the household at a range of two hundred and fifty miles. But her letters did not consist exclusively of commands. “Both you and Charlotte,” ran the same letter, “have been very good in writing me such regular and such charming letters. They were a great blessing to me during my tiresome illness, and, indeed, they are so still.”

“The doctor,” she wrote to Charlotte, “does not yet allow me out of doors. The weather is rather treacherous—damp air and cold winds—and it would be foolish to take unnecessary risks. My rheumatism, I am glad to say, has quite gone, so that when I have been out two or three times, and am fit to face the fatigue of the journey, we shall return home. But I fear, my dear Charlotte, that this may not be for a fortnight or three weeks. Beatrix has made some friends here, and is out a good deal, but I am now well able to look after myself.”

For the rest of their absence no letter came from Beatrix, but one morning, about a week after her mother’s last letter, Charlotte, to her surprise and joy, received a brief intimation of their return.

“For various reasons,” wrote Lady Hadlow, “I find it necessary to return at once. Please tell Cousin Fanny that we shall reach Fording on Thursday at 5.17, and ask her to send the carriage. Need I say, my dear child, how delighted I shall be to see my good little girl again!”

Chapter VII

Charlotte, walking impatiently up and down the station platform, watched for the red signal-lights to turn green, while her ears plumbed the evening silence for the remote roar of the train. But not a sound could she detect, and the train was already due. Then a bell rang in the signal-box at the end of the platform. Tlink, tlink! Tlink, tlink, tlink! A long silence followed, and then again—tlink, tlink, tlink!—the little bell reported the secret advance of the train. Charlotte’s impatience became almost unbearable. Then, as though the long rush of the silence had been imperceptibly intensified, a remote roar like a distant weir, a roar that was so subtle that it was hardly more than a thought, travelled across the darkness. Then quite suddenly it became loud and threatening, and Charlotte knew that the train was crossing the viaduct and that in half a minute its lights would dawn in the darkness beyond the platform end. They would appear when she had counted five. One, two, three, four … now. No, nothing yet. She tried again—one, two, three … Then with a leap of the heart that was half fright and half joy she saw that they were there, trembling and twinkling like two terribly close stars. They rushed towards her, swooped forward, and suddenly the engine behind them loomed huge and brutal at the end of the platform. Then, with a loud hissing of brakes, the train came to a standstill, carriage doors opened, there was a confusion of shapes, half golden, half black, getting out, getting in, from which two sharply familiar shapes isolated themselves, became the only objects there in the darkness. Charlotte rushed towards them. “Mamma, why how late you are!”

Lady Hadlow turned her head. “Ah, there you are, my love! I knew we should find you waiting for us. Come, let us look after the luggage.” She darted off, followed by Charlotte and Beatrix.

“You’re back at last, Bee,” said Charlotte, grasping Beatrix’s arm. “What an age it’s been!”

The luggage was found and shouldered by the porter, and Lady Hadlow led the way out of the station. “Well, Young! Here we are again, you see! No, the dressing-case inside, Sam. Jump in, girls.” In a moment they were all boxed into the dark landau, bowling homewards.

• • • • • • • •

It was a changed Beatrix that returned to Fording. Even in the landau Charlotte had felt that something was wrong, and when they reached home, and Charlotte, having gone with Beatrix to her room, sat watching her take off her veil and hat, the change was startlingly apparent. The smooth pink cheeks, the bright roguish eyes and lively mouth, were gone. It was as if Beatrix, and not Mamma, had been ill. Her cheeks were pale and sunken, her mouth drawn, her eyelids red and tired. Charlotte’s heart contracted with pain. “Bee, darling!” she burst out. “What …!” Suddenly checked either by a kind of shame in herself or some subtle withdrawal in Beatrix, she broke off, and then, hugging her, added: “Oh, how glad I am to have you back!”

“Yes,” said Beatrix, in a voice that seemed to Charlotte to be pale too, “it’s nearly two months.”

In the drawing-room before dinner, all through dinner, and after dinner, Charlotte felt it and saw it—this desolating change in Beatrix, and a stiffness, a narrowing of the lips in Mamma, as in the old days of Beatrix’s tantrums.

Next evening, while Charlotte was changing for dinner, there was a tap on her bedroom door, and Cousin Fanny entered. Her pale little face wore a tragic look. “Charlotte,” she whispered, “what is the matter with Beatrix?” The tears began to run down her cheeks. “She’s changed. She’s in some awful trouble and won’t tell me. What is it, Charlotte?”

Charlotte shook her head. “I don’t know, Cousin Fanny. She hasn’t told me, and I can’t ask her.” Charlotte too began to cry.

Cousin Fanny put a motherly arm round her. “My poor dear,” she murmured; and then, after a moment’s pause: “Well, we mustn’t give way like this. What sights we shall be at dinner.”

They dried their eyes and went downstairs together.

Charlotte felt even more cut off from Beatrix now than when she was away. But to-morrow, or in a day or two, Beatrix would tell her, and this painful estrangement would be ended.

But Beatrix never spoke, and with Charlotte that first shame persisted and she dared not ask. Was it something to do with the young doctor, Beatrix’s beau, she wondered; for Beatrix never once alluded to him, nor to her letters about him. Impossible to tell, for Lady Hadlow too remained inexorably silent, as if with that just perceptible clenching of the lips she were resolutely shutting the secret in.

• • • • • • • •

Weeks passed, and either Beatrix’s looks improved or Charlotte grew accustomed to them and did not notice them so much. But her spirits did not improve. She never laughed now, and all her humour and sharpness of tongue had vanished.

Then came enlightenment, for one evening Beatrix fell ill. Her head ached, she shivered, and Lady Hadlow discovered that her temperature was a hundred and one. It was six o’clock in the evening, and Beatrix was at once put to bed. “If you are not better to-morrow, child,” said her mother, “I shall send for Dr. Preston. But, whether you feel better or not, you must not on any account get up to-morrow until I have seen you.”

Beatrix refused food, but later in the evening was persuaded to take a little bread-and-milk.

On the following morning Charlotte, going downstairs ten minutes before breakfast-time, was amazed to meet Beatrix, in a dressing-gown, hurrying upstairs from the hall. Since the return from Harrogate Beatrix had always been the first down to breakfast, but that she should be up now, when strictly ordered by Mamma to stay in bed, scandalised Charlotte. Once more, as in the case of Tess of the D’ Urbervilles, Mamma’s laws were being flouted.

“Bee!” she exclaimed, in an astounded whisper.

Beatrix, without stopping, held up a warning finger. “Come with me,” she whispered, and hurried to her bedroom.

Charlotte followed her, and, when they were both safe in the room, Beatrix shut the door. “Can I trust you, Charlotte?“she said earnestly.

“Yes, Bee, of course!” said Charlotte.

“But trust you absolutely, really and truly, on your word of honour, not to say a word to Mamma?”

Charlotte paused, awestruck at the solemnity of the occasion. “Yes, Bee, really!” she said. “I promise.”

“You see,” pursued Beatrix, “a letter comes for me every other morning, and Mamma is not to know.”

“Is it … is it your beau, Bee?”

Beatrix nodded, smiling and blushing. “And I want you, Charlotte, to get the letter for me before Mamma sees it, and bring it to me if I’m still in bed on Thursday and Saturday and Monday— in fact, to look through the letters every morning, just for fear. I’ll show you his writing, and, of course, there’s the Harrogate postmark.”

She pulled an unopened envelope out of her dressing-gown pocket and handed it to Charlotte.

Charlotte gazed at it, awestruck and embarrassed. “What nice writing!” she said stupidly.

“Yes, isn’t it?” said Beatrix, her pale cheeks blushing with delight. She took the envelope from Charlotte and climbed back into bed.

“You’ll do this for me, won’t you, Lottie darling?”

“Yes, dear, I will. Oh, Bee, are you really in love with him?” she asked in a whisper.

Beatrix nodded intensely.

“Very much, Bee?”

“Very, very much, Charlotte.”

A sudden pity for Beatrix overwhelmed Charlotte; she seemed to her at that moment a small, helpless child; and on a sudden impulse she flung her arms round her and kissed her. A door down the passage was heard to open. “Mamma’s coming!” whispered Charlotte, and next moment Lady Hadlow entered the bedroom to examine the invalid.

That evening Charlotte, who, even after her mother’s and Beatrix’s return, had continued to write in her diary, sat at the little desk in her bedroom slowly and haltingly recording her private thoughts.

“Bee is in love. When I asked her to-day and when she answered ‘Yes,’ I could see at once in her face and eyes that it was true. How lovely she looked! It must be wonderful to be in love, as if life were full of warmth and light. I have never been in love, and yet I know what it must be like, because I know what it is like to be without it, to feel a longing for warmth and light which only love can satisfy. I love Mamma, and, yes, still more, I love Bee, but that is not enough. To love is not the same as to be in love. Shall I ever fall in love, like Bee? And if I do, will he love me in return? It seems too much to hope for. I am not beautiful like Bee.”

The writing down of these hidden thoughts brought her a deep, secret comfort. Whom would she fall in love with? What would he be like? What would his name be? She turned over various names in her mind. Arthur? No. B? She could think of no man’s name beginning with B. C … Charles … Christopher. Christopher was a nice name. D, E, F, G … Gerald … Gerrard? No. Harold? No. Maurice was a nice name, but not so nice as Christopher. Yes, Christopher was her favourite name for a man. It had the same initials as Charlotte. He would be tall, with short, straight, dark hair, and dark brown eyes. She pictured him standing and looking at her: she imagined him speaking her name in a low, intimate voice. “Charlotte!” A small, subtle thrill shot through her heart. She wrote his name in capitals on the blotting-paper, and, after considering it seriously for a moment, wrote Charlotte in capitals under it. Then she began to cancel the letters in each that were common to both. C, H, R, O, T, E. Six! They had six letters in common. What an extraordinary coincidence! Then, rousing herself, she sighed, carefully crossed out the two names on the blotting-paper, blotted the page of the diary, and locked it away.

On each of the three following mornings she watched for, and once found, the letter for Beatrix, and took it to her, watching in a kind of awe the look of shy delight that lit up her face as soon as her eyes fell on the beloved envelope. On the third day Lady Hadlow pronounced Beatrix to be recovered, and she was allowed to get up after breakfast. Thenceforward she volunteered no further confidences to Charlotte. What had actually happened at Harrogate, what had caused their premature return, what exactly was the relationship between Beatrix and the young doctor, remained a mystery for Charlotte. But by that one small confidence about the letters, and the task of faithfully conveying them to the invalid, Charlotte felt that she had to some degree won Beatrix back.

• • • • • • • •

Months passed. It was the Easter holidays, and Cousin Fanny was away, staying with a married sister. But still the old Beatrix did not return. Her laugh, on the rare occasions when she laughed, was brief, and had a bitterness at the end of it; the old uproarious gusto was gone. Her cheeks had not recovered their colour and roundness; indeed, it seemed to Charlotte that as the spring advanced they became even paler and thinner. Once, when she entered the morning-room where Beatrix and her mother were sitting, she realised that she had intruded upon a private conversation. Lady Hadlow’s mouth was grim and narrow, and Beatrix— poor Beatrix—was weeping. Charlotte was overwhelmed with shame, and the sight of Beatrix in tears rent her heart. If only they would tell her what was the matter, and let her share the trouble! She might be able to help and to melt Mamma, perhaps, if Mamma was being hard. But neither of them spoke, and, taking up a book, as if that were what she had come for, Charlotte left the room and went and wept in her bedroom.

A few days later, feeling that she could no longer bear to be cut off from Beatrix, Charlotte determined to break through her diffidence and speak. The opportunity was favourable, for Lady Hadlow was out paying a call. She knew that Beatrix was in the morning-room, and feeling, as she went, a kind of cold terror, she went to her there.

Beatrix was sitting on the sofa, her hands in her lap, doing nothing. Charlotte, as she approached her, felt that she herself was as pale as Beatrix. “Bee,” she stammered, “Bee darling!” She dropped on to the sofa beside her and seized both her poor idle hands. “I can’t bear it any longer, Bee,” she sobbed. “What is it? Won’t you tell me what’s the matter?”

Beatrix laid her arm round Charlotte’s shoulders; her hand patted her gently on the arm.

“My poor little Charlotte,” she said. “I couldn’t help it. Somehow, I couldn’t talk about it. But now you shall know, dear, because I’ve made up my mind.”

She paused, and Charlotte leaned, almost happy, with her cheek against Beatrix’s shoulder and Beatrix’s arm round her.

“I’m going to tell you a secret, dear,” Beatrix went on. “I was going to tell you, anyhow, because I couldn’t have borne to leave you in the dark. But you mustn’t breathe a word, Charlotte. Remember, I trust you absolutely.”

Charlotte raised her tear-stained face and nodded.

“I’m going away, Charlotte.”

Charlotte started. “Going, Bee?” There was fear in her voice.

“Yes, I’m going to him, Charlotte. I can’t … I can’t bear to be separated from him any longer. Mamma wouldn’t let us be engaged. She forbade me ever to see him or write to him.”

“But why, Bee?”

“Oh, you know what Mamma is. She said it was quite out of the question. I spoke to her again a few days ago—when you came in and found us here, you know. I begged and implored her. But she’s unshakable. Nothing will move her. She’s a hard woman, Charlotte,” said Beatrix bitterly, “as hard as a stone, and proud. She’d rather see us die than sacrifice one inch of her pride.”

“Let me speak to her, Bee,” Charlotte broke out volubly. “Let me—”

Beatrix cut her short with a weary gesture and a shake of the head. “It’s no good, Charlotte,” she said. “If anything could move her, she would have relented months ago. No, my mind is made up, and you mustn’t make me more wretched than I am already by trying to make me change it. I’m going to him, Charlotte.”

“Without … without Mamma knowing?”

“But certainly without Mamma knowing. What do you suppose?” She spoke irritably, but, meeting Charlotte’s agonised gaze, she melted. “I’m sorry, Charlotte darling,” she said, “but I’m tired and cross. You mustn’t try to influence me. What I am doing, I am doing quite deliberately, after long and very, very serious thought.”

“Bee”—Charlotte’s eyes were streaming; she seized one of Beatrix’s hands in both her own—“oh, Bee, will nothing I can say …?”

“Nothing, dear!” she smiled bitterly. “You see, I am as hard as Mamma. Now listen! I shall not tell you when I am going, because it will make it easier for you not to have known, won’t it, when Mamma discovers? And if she finds out that you knew what you do know, and is angry with you, you can tell her that I forced you to promise me solemnly not to tell. Darling, you mustn’t worry too much. It will all come right in the end.”

“But, Bee, it will break her heart.”

Beatrix laughed outright—a sharp, scoffing laugh. “Mamma! You don’t know your mother, Charlotte, if you really believe that. Mamma’s heart, my dear, is warranted unbreakable.”

In that last speech Charlotte heard once again the voice of the old Beatrix, and the sound of it brought her a sudden comfort.

“Dry your eyes, dear,” said Beatrix; “here’s Elson coming with the tea.”

Chapter VIII

The next two days were terrible for Charlotte. The anxiety and suspense were almost unbearable, and she looked so ill that Lady Hadlow dosed her with Gregory’s Mixture. She scarcely dared to meet Beatrix’s eyes, for whenever she did so her own filled with tears. Sometimes, when her mind had succeeded in forgetting the impending tragedy and had grown calm again, she would suddenly become aware of an urgency deep in some cavern of her being, a physical pressure of which for a moment she could not remember the significance. Was it the urge of coming happiness or threatened disaster? Then she would remember, and the nightmare would return, bringing with it the aching apprehension. If only she could escape from it, awake and find it a dream! But she knew too well that it was not a dream, that it was real, bitterly and exhaustingly real, and there was nothing for her to do but wait and suffer.

On the morning of the third day Beatrix was late for breakfast, and Charlotte and Lady Hadlow began without her. Charlotte sat there sick at heart; the food was so dry in her mouth that she could hardly swallow it. She forced herself to eat, so that her mother should not notice her trouble. At last Lady Hadlow lost patience.

“Whatever has become of that child?” she said.

“Charlotte dear, just run up and see what she is doing.”

Charlotte rose and went out of the room. She knew well enough what she would find. As she went upstairs she told herself, in a desperate attempt to escape from the appalling actuality, that in a minute Mamma would know. What would happen then? Impossible to guess; but at least the waiting was ended, the crisis was at hand, and sooner or later it would be over. In a few hours the tension would have slackened; in a few weeks, perhaps, all would be well again, and Beatrix forgiven. She opened the door of Beatrix’s bedroom. As she had expected, it was empty. She glanced round the room. The bed had been slept in, but brushes and comb, sponge and toothbrush, nightdress and dressing-gown, were gone. Those small details brought home to her the dreaded fact that Beatrix was really gone, gone for ever; that nothing would ever be the same again. She must have caught the early train; she would already be well on her way to London. Charlotte stood, her hands hanging forlornly at her sides. A sense of utter loneliness came over her, loneliness and extreme weariness. She felt that she had not the energy to go down and face her mother.

After a moment she pulled herself together. To dawdle there in the deserted room was merely to postpone the inevitable. She turned and began reluctantly to go towards the door, and then, more firmly, downstairs to the dining-room.

“Well?” said Lady Hadlow, looking up from a letter she was reading. Then, catching sight of Charlotte’s face, she exclaimed with a note of alarm in her voice: “Charlotte, what’s the matter?”

“She’s not there, Mamma. She’s … gone.”

“Gone?” Lady Hadlow rose abruptly from her chair. “What do you mean, child?”

“She’s gone away, Mamma. Her brushes and comb and other things have gone.”

Without another word Lady Hadlow hurried out of the room, brushing past Charlotte, who still stood near the door. Charlotte, left alone, moved forward and dropped into a chair near the fire. Her mind was empty; she knew only that she was very tired. After a short or a long time she heard a step on the stairs. Her mother was returning.

“Charlotte,” she said, as she entered the room, “get me the railway guide.”

When Charlotte had brought it, Lady Hadlow remained for some time immersed in it. Then, closing the book, with one finger marking a page, she remained for a while deep in thought. Charlotte knew that she was considering plans of action. At last, with an abrupt gesture of dismissal, as if deciding that any action would be useless, she rose from her chair and went and shut the door, which she had left ajar. Then, with an expression of grim determination, she walked over to the fireplace where Charlotte was sitting. The railway guide was still in her hand.

“Charlotte, what do you know of this?”

Charlotte raised her eyes slowly. “I know that she’s gone away.”

“That is obvious. Now tell me where she has gone.”

“To … to him, Mamma.”

“She told you, then?”

“She told me she had decided to go, but she did not say when.”

“And you didn’t tell me!” Lady Hadlow’s voice was still stern and cold. “So both my daughters have deceived me!”

“But I promised, Mamma,” Charlotte broke out. “She made me promise faithfully before she told me anything.”

“I see, Charlotte. And you promised faithfully to deceive your mother. I don’t seem to be very fortunate in my daughters.”

Charlotte’s cheeks flamed at the injustice; the sting of it made her suddenly bold. “That’s not true, Mamma. If I had not promised, she would have told me nothing. I wanted to know. All this time I’ve been treated like a child, knowing that something was the matter, but … but shut out, kept in the dark, by both of you. I couldn’t bear it any longer.”

“I see. So Beatrix confided in you. She enlisted you against me.”

“She told me she was going.” Charlotte began to sob. “Oh Mamma, why did you separate them?”

Lady Hadlow’s face was implacable. “Because, child—if you must know—he was not a suitable person for my daughter to marry.”

“But poor Beatrix was in love with him, Mamma.”

“I had hoped,” said Lady Hadlow, “that my girls were capable of controlling their feelings to some extent. Why,” she broke out indignantly, “the man isn’t even a gentleman.”

“Then you have seen him, Mamma?” Charlotte felt suddenly immensely interested. The fact that her mother had seen him made poor Beatrix’s beau so much more real to her.

“Of course I’ve seen him. It was after seeing him that I refused to allow them to be engaged. Beatrix will not have told you, of course, what his father is?”

Charlotte shook her head.

“He’s a dentist, Charlotte. My daughter’s father-in-law a dentist! I shall have you, next, wanting to marry a plumber.”

There was no intention of humour in Lady Hadlow’s words; there was not even an intention of sarcasm. She spoke on a note of pure tragedy. “What the Mardales will think,” she added, “I dare not so much as try to imagine.”

• • • • • • • •

Charlotte, thinking it over in bed that night, recalled Beatrix’s words: “She’s a hard woman, Charlotte; and proud!” and then the later remark, the sharp-tongued remark of the old, humorous Bee: “Mamma’s heart is warranted unbreakable.”

Yes, she thought to herself, she is hard and very proud. But next morning, when her mother came down to breakfast, Charlotte saw that her face was the face of an old woman, a face drawn and colourless. The sight wrung Charlotte’s heart, and, when kissing her good morning, she flung her arms round her.

“Mamma, darling!” she murmured.

Lady Hadlow understood. “My good little girl!” she said. “You mustn’t take any notice of what I said to you yesterday. You see, I was terribly upset.”

That afternoon Lady Hadlow appeared at the tea-table with a letter in her hand. “I’ve just received a letter from Beatrix,” she said.

Charlotte’s heart leapt. “Oh, Mamma, have you? Do let me see it.”

Lady Hadlow frowned. “I don’t know, child, that there’s any reason for you to see it.” But, when tea was over, she suddenly handed it to Charlotte. “After all, my dear,” she said, “I suppose you may read it”; and she abruptly left the room.

Charlotte’s eyes filled with tears at the sight of the familiar writing.

“DEAREST MAMMA,” wrote Beatrix,—“Having deliberately done what I have done, I think it would be impertinent, and I know it would be vain, to ask for your forgiveness, though nothing would make me happier than to receive it. I have suffered, and still suffer, believe me, as much as you can, nor should I have brought myself to act as I did if your refusal even to let me see and write to Arthur had not caused him and me a still greater suffering. I write merely to tell you, as I feel I ought, that we were married by special licence this morning.

“With much love to my dear Charlotte and yourself,

“I remain,

“Your loving daughter,

“BEATRIX.”

Chapter IX

During the months that followed Beatrix’s disappearance, she and Charlotte corresponded frequently. Charlotte did not attempt to hide the fact from her mother, and her mother, she knew, had often seen the envelopes addressed in Beatrix’s large, vigorous hand. But she raised no objections, nor did she ever ask for news of Beatrix. In the summer came the usual invitation to Haughton, and during the visit Charlotte never once heard her mother mention Beatrix’s name. Lord Mardale never spoke of her, but when he came in from his early rides Charlotte could see that he was saddened by the loss of his former companion.

Everything now seemed different to Charlotte. She had put her hair up before going to Haughton, and so had cast off the last vestiges of childhood, and the absence of Beatrix made her feel older, for she advanced to some degree into Beatrix’s vacant place. Lord Mardale paid more attention to her than in former years, and sometimes in his talk to her she caught an echo of the gay humour which had always marked his attitude towards Beatrix.

When Alfred arrived at Haughton, Charlotte felt that another conspirator against Beatrix had arrived, for the silence seemed to her a conspiracy to extinguish all memory of the transgressor. She believed, indeed, that it stood for condemnation, and was pained to feel that Beatrix was condemned when she was not there to defend herself. She herself dared not speak of Beatrix to Lord or Lady Mardale, but she determined that she would speak to Alfred, and she did so the day after his arrival as they strolled together under the beeches on the lawns in front of the house.

“Ever since I arrived here,” she said bluntly, “I have felt as if Beatrix were dead. Not a soul dares to mention her name.”

Alfred responded at once, as if he were glad that she had given him the opportunity. “Do you know, Charlotte, we heard almost nothing from Lady Hadlow of what happened. She wrote to my mother at the time saying simply that Beatrix had run away from home and married against her consent. My mother showed me the letter. ‘So now, my dear friend,’ it ended, ‘I have only one daughter.’ That is all I know. Lady Hadlow may have told my mother more since you and she arrived here, but of that I know nothing.”

“And you all condemn her unheard!”

“Condemn, Charlotte? Who condemns her? Certainly not I.”

Charlotte’s heart warmed with gratitude.

“And don’t you understand, Charlotte,” he went on, “that our silence is due simply to your mother’s silence? It represents her attitude, which, as she is a guest, we are forced to respect, I think it very unlikely that it represents my mother’s. As for my condemning her, I’m afraid, my dear Charlotte, you can’t think much of me as a parson, or even as a Christian, if you have been imagining that I condemn her before I have heard, not only her account of the matter, but even yours or Lady Hadlow’s.”

“I don’t know very much myself,” said Charlotte. “All I know is that Beatrix fell in love with a young doctor when she and Mamma were at Harrogate last autumn, and Mamma refused to let them be engaged.”

“For what reason?”

“Because … well, because his father was a dentist.”

“The first Halnaker we know anything about was a blacksmith.”

Charlotte smiled. “But several centuries ago.”

“Six, as a matter of fact.”

“I’m afraid nothing short of two would weigh with Mamma; and, even then, there’s always, isn’t there, something a little ludicrous about dentistry?”

Alfred glanced in amused surprise at Charlotte’s handsome face. How mature she had become since last year! Last year she would have been incapable of that speech, which criticised her mother with much of her mother’s asperity. “Ah, a dentist!” he said. “That accounts for it. Your mother, Charlotte, is far too good an Ebernoe to be a good Christian.”

“Alfred!” She shot a glance at him, and burst into laughter.

“Now promise me not to repeat that, Charlotte.”

“I shall promise nothing of the sort. I shall save it up and say it to Mamma when she’s being … well, more of an Ebernoe than she ought to be.”

“Then promise not to say I said it.”

“If she knew it was you who said it, Alfred, it would have twice the effect. She thinks the world of you, you know.”

Alfred was both amused and apprehensive. “Charlotte,” he said, with a seriousness which was only half pretence, “I depend upon you.”

“I’ve just warned you not to.”

“If you tell, Charlotte, I shall never dare to say anything frivolous to you again.”

“But it would do Mamma so much good.”

Alfred laughed. “It would indeed.”

“And surely you’d like to do Mamma good, Alfred?”

“I’d rather do it a little more tactfully.”

“Very well; if I say it, I’ll say it as if from myself. But I’m sorry, Alfred, that you haven’t the courage of your convictions.”

Alfred smiled, and then became suddenly sad. “Nobody ever had, my dear Charlotte,” he replied, “except Jesus Christ, and they killed Him for it.”

• • • • • • • •

Lord Mardale was probably the only one whom Charlotte had not misjudged in the matter of Beatrix. She had certainly misjudged Lady Mardale, for two days later, when she and Charlotte were alone in the drawing-room, Lady Mardale working silently at some embroidery stretched on a frame, and Charlotte, with a book on her knees, watching her, Lady Mardale raised her eyes, and, meeting Charlotte’s with her kind, steadfast gaze, said, almost as if to herself: “My poor Beatrix. how I wish she were with us!”

How like Lady Mardale, Charlotte thought afterwards, that had been. No hint of rebuke or disapproval; simply regret for her absence. How different from Mamma! But Lady Mardale, thought Charlotte, was a saint, while Mamma, as Alfred had so justly remarked, was an Ebernoe. What, she fell to imagining, would Lady Mardale have done in Mamma’s place? Suddenly she surprised herself by leaping to the conviction that if Lady Mardale had been Mamma, Beatrix would never have left home. Yes, even she herself nowadays had arrived at the point of criticising her mother. She had ceased at last to be the submissive child. And not before it was time, for in the autumn after that visit to Haughton she entered her nineteenth year, and before Christmas the schoolroom became her private sitting-room and she gave up lessons.

Cousin Fanny stayed on in an undefined capacity which involved arranging flowers, reading French and Italian with Charlotte, and taking alternate weeks of housekeeping with Charlotte under Lady Hadlow’s supervision.

It was about this time that Charlotte received from Beatrix the wonderful news that she was expecting a baby. After Christmas, when the time drew near, Beatrix wrote asking Charlotte to go and stay with her. “Mamma,” she wrote, “will probably refuse to let you come. ‘No, Charlotte; at your age it is most undesirable!’ But do try your best to thaw her, because I should love to have you here, dearest Lottie, and you would be the greatest help to me.”

When Charlotte asked for permission to go to Beatrix, Lady Hadlow refused in the very words that Beatrix had invented for her. Charlotte pleaded in vain.

“Really, Mamma, you seem to forget I’m not a mere girl.”

“Then what are you, pray?”

“I’m a woman. Why, I might be having a baby myself.”

“My dear Charlotte, what will you say next?”

“Well, you told me last year that before long I should probably be marrying a plumber.”

“Really, Charlotte!” Lady Hadlow burst into one of her irresistible laughs.

Charlotte, seeing the moment favourable, tried once more to carry her point, but Lady Hadlow at once became serious again. “No, child. I’ve said no, and I mean it. I shall send Cousin Fanny.” And Cousin Fanny was sent.

Though Lady Hadlow did her best to preserve an impassive exterior, Charlotte could see that, as the time approached, she was as anxious and excited as herself, and when at last the telegram arrived to announce a son, and both doing well, Lady Hadlow had the weakness to shed tears at the tea-table. “Poor little Beatrix,” she sobbed. “Poor child! I’m a brute not to be there!”

But by the end of tea she had so far recovered as to remark reflectively, and with a sniff: “I little thought, once, that I should share my grandson with a dentist.”

Chapter X

Lady Hadlow’s recovery from human weakness seemed to have been thorough, for in the weeks that followed the birth of Beatrix’s son she showed no further symptoms of the regrettable lapse which had befallen her at the tea-table on the arrival of the telegram. The earth thawed, trees and plants began to sprout, but Lady Hadlow did not thaw. Cousin Fanny, in her innocence, had returned full of pride and infatuation. The baby had widened the narrow horizons of her life. Before, she had had only Beatrix and Charlotte to live for, and recently Beatrix had been almost lost to her; but now this miracle, Beatrix’s baby, had come into her life, and with it Beatrix had in a measure been restored to her. On the evening of her return to Fording she babbled of the baby—the baby in its bath, the baby being fed, of its smile, the colour of its eyes, the precocious noises it made, its amazing superiority to all other babies. For a while Lady Hadlow listened in silence, with an inflexible countenance. Then, with that tightening of the lips which in old days had always accompanied Beatrix’s tantrums, she remarked:

“My dear Fanny, from the way you talk one would suppose the baby was the Prince of Wales.”

The light died suddenly out of Cousin Fanny’s face; it was as if Lady Hadlow had struck her. She spoke no more of the baby in Lady Hadlow’s presence, but in Charlotte she found an inexhaustible listener; and out of doors, indoors, in Charlotte’s sitting-room—that room which had been sacred to Beatrix, Charlotte, and Cousin Fanny—and everywhere, in fact, where Lady Hadlow was not, the two of them chattered to their heart’s content.

Life passed as it always passed at Fording; but life was different for Charlotte, for by now she had “come out” and had entered another sphere of existence—that of a grown-up person, which meant that she paid calls with her mother, and, when her mother was invited out to lunch or dinner, Charlotte was invited too. The fact that the punctual routine of lessons was abolished and she had no regular occupation except the simple and pleasant task of housekeeping every alternate week, brought a bracing sense of emancipation. Each morning at half-past nine she felt a little thrill at the discovery that it was no longer her duty to be seated, pen in hand, at the schoolroom table.

Old friends paid their accustomed visits. In their turn the Winchmeres came, and Charlotte privately told Mr. Winchmere the story of Beatrix and Tess of the D’Ubervilles.

“Bless my soul!” he laughed. “I suppose it isn’t a book for young girls. But one forgets these little details, you know, Charlotte, when one has no children of one’s own. You’ll find, yourself, that the older you grow, the more involved in human sympathies, human loves, and human troubles, the less easy it becomes to know what is proper and what improper. One has to leave it to the prigs and the prudes.”

Charlotte smiled mischievously. “And which would you call Mamma, Mr. Winchmere?”

“My dear Charlotte!” Old Mr. Winchmere, though much tickled, was also obviously much flustered. “My dear Charlotte! Your mother, I’m sure, was perfectly right. And as for you, you’re an unscrupulous creature to try to trip up a defenceless old man.”

The coming of the Winchmeres had reminded Charlotte of Tess, and awakened the old longing to read it, and, next time she and her mother were making a list of books to send to the library, she expressed a wish to order Tess. When Lady Hadlow acquiesced without any visible hesitation, Charlotte knew that even her mother had begun at last to regard her as grown up.

“And I think,” said Lady Hadlow, “that we’ll try The Woodlanders as well. The Winchmeres insist that Thomas Hardy is a great writer. And what else was it that Mr. Winchmere recommended?” She went to a desk, opened a small drawer, and returned peering at a slip of paper. “A Gentleman of France, by Stanley Weyman, which, he said, was my style of novel. You remember how we enjoyed The House of the Wolf, Charlotte, when I read it to Beatrix and you? Then there’s Catriona, a new book by the Treasure Island man, Stevenson; and something by a very young writer called Kipling—Rudyard Kipling—still in his twenties, so Mr. Winchmere said. The Fight that … what is it? No, The Light … The Light that Failed. Put that down too, Charlotte dear.”

On a morning towards the end of June, Lady Hadlow, looking through her letters during breakfast, picked one out eagerly. “From Lady Mardale, Charlotte,” she said. “This will be to arrange about our visit next month.”

She tore open the envelope, and Charlotte watched her as she read.

Suddenly her face fell. “Oh, dear!” she said. “Oh, dear! Poor Lord Mardale!” She read on abstractedly.

Charlotte’s heart sank. “What is it, Mamma?” she asked.

“Lord Mardale was taken ill last Thursday,” said Lady Hadlow, “and it seems to be rather serious.” She read a passage aloud. “ ‘Yesterday the doctor told me that there were signs of pneumonia, which, of course, at my husband’s age, gives us great anxiety. I will let you know, my dear Emily, how he progresses, but I fear that, unless things go better than we dare hope, we shall have to postpone your visit. Need I say how disappointed we shall be. Alfred hopes to come home to-morrow.’ ”

The news came as a great shock to Charlotte. It was the first time that anyone she knew well and loved had been in danger, for it had not occurred to her that there was any danger to Beatrix in the birth of her baby. When she thought of Lord Mardale now, she pictured him always as he had appeared two years ago when he had met them at Templeton station, seated, upright and handsome, on the box of the yellow-wheeled dogcart, the reins in one brown gloved hand. She had always looked upon him as a permanent part of her life. But now she felt that the world of her affections, that world which she had always supposed safe and permanent, was threatened with disaster, and she went about with a weight at her heart.

She longed for comfort. If only she had someone whom she loved so deeply that nothing else in the world mattered! Her thoughts turned again to that tall, dark Christopher whom she had imagined for a lover. She had thought of him often since the day she had invented him. If only she had him now! But something might happen to him too, for no one was safe; then she would have nothing, nothing whatever left to live for. How dangerous it was to fall in love! How did anyone ever dare so to tempt fortune?

Week by week brief notes came from Lady Mardale or Alfred, and with every note came disappointment to their hopes of improvement. Occasionally the news was more alarming: the doctors were becoming anxious about the state of Lord Mardale’s heart. Then there was mention of a proposed operation to drain the left lung, and a letter a week later announced that it had been successfully performed. The date of the yearly visit to Haughton was now long past. The summer drew to a close. In the garden at Fording the sycamores and cherry-trees began to turn. Soon the whole place was a glory of red and yellow, and then, after a week of rain, the leaves began to fall. A morning of sharp white frost revealed every tree bare, its leaves strewn on the grass in a circle about its trunk. The news became a little more reassuring. The old man was making a wonderful fight, and, though he had not yet begun to get well, the fact that no complications had shown themselves was a hopeful sign. “My father has been distinctly better for the last four days,” said Alfred’s next letter, “but we dare not be too hopeful. He is, of course, extremely weak, and even a slight check in his present condition might have serious consequences.”

Again Charlotte pictured him hale and handsome on the box of the dogcart, and then, as she read once more the words, “He is, of course, extremely weak,” she realised that her picture of him was a thing of the past; it was no longer true to life. And suddenly, with heart-rending distinctness, she saw him immovable in bed, his face pale and sunken, lying like a hollow mask on the white of the bedclothes. The vision sent a chill to her heart. Though Alfred’s news had been more reassuring than usual, it had brought home to her more vividly than ever before the danger that threatened her old friend.

But Lady Hadlow was full of confidence now. “Undoubtedly,” she said, “the worst is over. Dear, good old Lord Mardale! How thankful we ought to be, Charlotte!’

A week later, with no warning, came the news of his death.

• • • • • • • •

Though Charlotte had ceased to be a child, she had hitherto retained a child’s confidence, in life. Life, for her, was good; love and happiness were as secure and certain as dawn and nightfall. But now she knew that life could be cruel; that, however good she might be, however much she might pray to God to protect those she loved, life might at any moment strike a fatal blow at her love and her happiness, and change disastrously the whole of her existence. Only now she knew how devoted she had been to Lord Mardale. After Mamma and Beatrix and Lady Mardale, she loved him more than anyone else in the world. Haughton, and the visits to Haughton, would never be quite the same again. She became for the first time tragically conscious of the people and things she loved as of things she might lose at any minute, that she inevitably must lose sooner or later, and her heart clung to them with a passionate fondness. But these changes occurred in the depths of her being. Outwardly she did not change; her manner and behaviour lost nothing of the quiet reserve which made those who did not know her intimately believe that she was without deep feelings. She felt now painfully excluded from Haughton. The desolating change of Lord Mardale’s death had befallen little Lady Mardale and Alfred, and she was not there to share it with them. They had shut themselves away from her; they would be different when she met them again.

It was a melancholy Christmas at Fording this year. Last year it had been overshadowed by the absence of Beatrix, but at least they had achieved some sort of cheerfulness, and had had the customary holly and turkey and plum-pudding. But this year they didn’t decorate the house, and, though the servants had a goose and a plum-pudding, Charlotte and her mother agreed that they themselves, except for the giving of presents, would not keep Christmas at all. Even Cousin Fanny was away. Lady Hadlow and Charlotte spent the day alone together except for the morning and evening expeditions to church.

• • • • • • • •

Early in the New Year, Lady Hadlow received a letter from Alfred. Having run through it in silence, she read it aloud to Charlotte.

“ ‘I wonder if you would spare Charlotte to come and stay with my mother.’ ” Charlotte’s heart leapt with joy. “ ‘She is bearing up very bravely, but she is very lonely and depressed, and I feel sure that if Charlotte—who, as you know, was always her favourite—would come and be with her for a while, and look after her, it would do her a great deal of good. When I suggested it to her this morning, her face brightened at once. I am sure you will understand, my dear Lady Hadlow, why I do not ask you to come. My fear is that to have such an old friend with her now, and one with whom she had so many memories in common, would make her dwell too much on old times. This will be a relief to her later on, but at present I am sure it would be too painful. But a companion so much younger, and devoted to my mother as Charlotte is, would make her comfortable in a hundred ways, and also take her out of herself, which is what she especially needs at present. When will Charlotte come? The sooner she can arrange it, the happier we shall be.’ ”

Lady Hadlow at once became full of arrangements, and Charlotte, feeling that her sad exclusion from Haughton was at last ended, responded eagerly.

“I think we could get you off to-morrow, child.”

“Certainly, Mamma. Shall we send Alfred a telegram at once, saying I shall arrive by the usual train?”

Lady Hadlow had a moment of misgiving. “But, my dear child, you’ve never travelled alone.”

“Then it’s time I began, Mamma.”

“And the crossing of London …”

“Can safely be left to the cab.”

For the first time for weeks they both laughed. They felt almost cheerful.

“Well, at least I shall give the guard half a crown to look after you as far as London.”

Charlotte acquiesced. If half a crown would set her mother’s scruples at rest, it would be well spent.

Chapter XI

There was a strange unreality for Charlotte in that winter journey to Haughton. The land was bleak and lifeless. Under a grey sky that threatened snow the sad, frost-bound country wheeled black and grey, warmed only at rare intervals by the rusty brown of bracken and beech-thickets. She half dreaded and half longed for her arrival, and those conflicting emotions held her in a kind of limbo, a state of suspended animation like the state of the country through which the train was whirling her. She had taken a book with her, and read it deliberately all the way to London, sometimes forgetting herself in it and sometimes reading page after page without assimilating a single word. And, when she had crossed London and taken her place in the train at Paddington, she forced herself to continue her reading, pausing only to take a sandwich out of the packet on her knee. But the sight of the little train at Wilmore brought her back to reality with a stab of pain, and on that last stage of her journey she read no more, but looked out of the window as they had always done on their journeys to Haughton.

How piercingly familiar, and yet how changed the country was! She had never seen it in winter before, and the sight of it lying colourless, frozen, and dead, at such a time as this, was, for her, a symbol of the death which had come to Haughton. Wichford, Shelling, Lavington, Abbot’s Randale, King’s Randale, were all changed; their greeting was like the pale, drawn smile of one who has been long ill. At each halt, steam loomed up in a cloud from under the carriages, blurring Charlotte’s view of the station. One or two people with pinched faces passed the window or stood on the platform stamping their feet. The mere at Lannock was frozen to a waste of black flint. The swans were still there, but there was no water for them to swim in, and they stood on the ice under a bare willow-tree, looking ungainly and top-heavy on their crooked black legs. At Rimple the river was still flowing, but there was a crust of thin, frosted ice along its margins, and long icicles hung from the mill-wheel. When the train steamed out of Annet Brook, Charlotte’s heart began to beat violently. Her state of limbo was almost at an end; in a moment she would be at Templeton, and then she would no longer be able to hold life and feeling at bay: they would have to be faced and braved. But she sat still, waiting listlessly, until she heard the sharp, quick rush of the bridge overhead. Then, shaking off her numbness, she stood up and opened the window.

As she did so, she had a sudden memory of old Lord Mardale, smart and upright on the box of the yellow-wheeled dogcart; Kester and Phil standing with ears pricked, and Kester impatiently clinking his bit. It was unbelievable that he had gone, vanished for ever; that she would never see him again. Nobody would greet her at the station now. Alfred would be with his mother. They would have sent a closed carriage to meet her; Walter, the groom, would be on the look-out for her on the platform.

The white palings trickled across the windows, trickled slower and slower, till they stopped. She scanned the platform, distinguishing nobody. Then she saw that Alfred was coming towards her. A warm sense of relief came over her. He smiled and waved his hand, and Charlotte noticed, as she always noticed when she met him again, how much finer and stronger and more vivid his face was than her memory of it. His black coat and hat showed up the healthy colour of his clean-shaven face and the warm golden-brown of the hair at his temples. His fine, steadfast, blue-grey eyes looked up at her now as he opened the door of her carriage, and she realised for the first time that he was beautiful with a beauty that was at the same time austere and profoundly human. Her heart warmed with friendliness.

Their greeting was quiet; they exchanged brief, commonplace phrases. But words did not matter; each was aware of a warmth of friendship in the other which had no need of words. The air struck raw and chill after the warmth of the railway-carriage, and they hurried out of the station to the brougham which was waiting for them. Charlotte had dreaded the first meetings both with Alfred and with Lady Mardale. She had felt that the change which death had brought to them all would produce in them a feeling of repression and embarrassment. But at the meeting with Alfred there had been none, and during the drive to Haughton he spoke freely and serenely of his mother and the death of his father.

“Your coming will be a great comfort to her, Charlotte,” he said, laying his hand affectionately over hers.

But Charlotte still dreaded the meeting with Lady Mardale. She dreaded the change which she knew she would find in her, and she was afraid that if she showed the grief and sympathy which she felt she would upset her, and if she hardened her heart and hid her feelings, she would seem not to care and to be withholding the love which Lady Mardale so much needed.

Her heart sank as they turned into the lodge gates, and the mass of the many-windowed house, like a great, finely wrought casket, began to show through the leafless boughs and twigs of the lime-avenue. How bare and starved the grounds looked, denuded of all their summer greenery, their colours shrunk away to mere black and grey! But the house itself, with its mellow golden stone and its shining windows, looked warm and rich even at such a bleak time as this.

The brougham drew up, Alfred helped her out, and together they climbed the steps to the front door. Where would Lady Mardale be, Charlotte wondered? Upstairs in her little boudoir perhaps, sitting there in her widow’s black, waiting. How different from the days when she came out, small and exquisite, to greet them on the doorstep! Charlotte sadly entered the hall. After the cold light of out of doors it seemed to her at first quite dark. A great log fire crackled on the hearth, filling the dark cavern with flickering red lights. The air was full of the sweet, heart-searching scent of hyacinths, and for one unreasoning moment Charlotte, her mind oppressed with the forlorn sense of Lord Mardale’s absence, believed that it was the scent of the funeral flowers.

She awoke to reality to see that a small black figure was hurrying towards her, and in a moment she and little Lady Mardale were in one another’s arms. They embraced in silence, and then Lady Mardale, in a voice that seemed softer and remoter than the old voice, greeted Charlotte, telling her how glad she was to have her there. A footman carrying a large lighted lamp moved across the hall and set the lamp on a table, filling the hall with soft golden light. Charlotte gazed at the little woman beside her. How small and frail she looked in her black! It seemed as if she too, like the country through which she had travelled all day, had faded under the winter, abandoning the delicate, restrained colours which had been hers before—the dove grey, the lilac, the blue of her eyes, and the pink of her small, beautiful face; for her face and hands, emerging from the black dress, were very white, and her eyes, under the shadow of the brows, were black. She appeared to have become a very old woman. Charlotte’s heart bled at the sight of her. But the old sweetness and gentleness and the wonderful dignity were still there, and, behind her grief, the old serenity which nothing would ever shake. More than ever Charlotte realised how precious this little saint-like woman was to her. “If it had been her,” she thought, “instead of Lord Mardale!” And it seemed to her that such a loss would have been unendurable.

• • • • • • • •

The days and the weeks passed silently and uneventfully in the great empty house. At the old summertime visits to Haughton the house, though always quiet, had seemed populous, and full of light and movement, even when, as occasionally happened, there were no other visitors than the Hadlows. Now it seemed empty and silent; but its emptiness came not from the absence of Beatrix and Lady Hadlow. It was the disappearance of one old man, and the knowledge that he would never come back, that so denuded the place. Lady Mardale, Alfred, and Charlotte inhabited, as it were, a smaller house inside the large one, for they took their meals in a room which during the Hadlows’ summer visits, had sometimes been used as a breakfast-room. The large dining-room, because of the cold and the smallness of their party, was abandoned. So, too, was the great drawing-room; their drawing-room now was the morning-room, a pleasant room less than half its size, on the east side of the house; and in the evenings they sat in Alfred’s study. Charlotte’s days were spent in writing letters for Lady Mardale, reading to her, and accompanying her on short walks in the grounds, and in being for her what a daughter might have been at such a time. And often in the afternoon, between luncheon and tea-time, Charlotte and Alfred would take long walks in the country.

It was a happy time for Charlotte. To be with Lady Mardale and to feel that she was of help to her was happiness itself; and the walks with Alfred—those smart, invigorating walks during which their relationship, as if in sympathy with the rhythm and glow of their bodies, achieved the harmony and candour of perfect friendship—were unfailingly delightful too. Their talk flowed easily from theme to theme; they talked of friends and relations and books, of mutual reminiscences, of Alfred’s intention to take the living of Templeton, of which the Mardales had the gift, as soon as it fell vacant, which was likely to happen soon. The business incidental to Lord Mardale’s death and the care of the Haughton estate had made his presence at Haughton indispenable, and obliged him to resign his London curacy.

They talked, too, of Beatrix. “Isn’t it time,” said Alfred one day, “that your mother was converted?”

“To convert Mamma is more easily said than done,” said Charlotte.” You pointed out yourself last summer that Mamma is an Ebernoe. Are you prepared to undertake the conversion of an Ebernoe?”

“I shall certainly try when you both come next summer, and so, I am sure, will my mother. Your business, Charlotte, is to prepare the ground.”

“The first missionary to penetrate into …?”

“Yes, into darkest Ebernovia. Take care not to be eaten alive.”, Charlotte was walking with her left hand in her muff, and at that moment she felt Alfred’s hand slip through her bent arm. “I should miss you, Charlotte,” he added, with an intensity which was obvious under the absurdity of his words, “if you were eaten alive.”

Charlotte felt suddenly embarrassed and afraid. She tried to laugh, but it was a timid, unamused laugh. “Poor Mamma!” she said. “She’s not really as hard as she sometimes seems.”

Alfred’s hand dropped from her arm. “She has a heart of gold,” he replied warmly, “but, like many golden objects, it is kept in a padded case and very carefully guarded.”

That brief incident during her walk with Alfred troubled Charlotte. It had brought into their friendship something which, for her, clouded its candour, and the next time he invited her to go for a walk she accepted with misgiving. But her fears, it turned out, were groundless; Alfred was the same as he had always been, and they returned from the walk with their old relationship fully re-established.

• • • • • • • •

Early in March Lady Mardale was to go to stay with her sister in Devonshire, and so, on the first Friday in March, Charlotte’s visit to Haughton came to an end. The brougham was at the door, and Alfred stood waiting for her in the hall. He had come to know Charlotte very well during that two months’ visit. In the old days he had always liked her better than Beatrix, without knowing why. The gay, expansive Beatrix was much more obviously likeable than the quiet, restrained, immature girl which Charlotte had always seemed. She was still restrained but not so narrowly as in the old days; but he knew now why he had always liked her best, for, seeing her with his mother, and himself winning her slowly to a greater intimacy during the last two months, he had discovered her real excellence—the warm heart and the incorruptible honesty under the outer reserve. He loved, not only her mind and spirit, but her body also—the tall, shy dignity of her young womanhood, and her face, pale under the dark brows and hair, with the wide, beautifully shaped mouth and the agate-coloured eyes.

As he stood there thinking of her and waiting for her, she came into the hall with his mother, and, as she turned to embrace the little old lady, he realised all her hidden tenderness of heart. But what he had not been able to discover was the nature of her feelings towards him. Had her shy withdrawal from him that day during their walk together meant no more than shyness, or had it meant distaste? He did not know, and his ignorance bewildered him. If only he were as certain of her feelings as of his own, how easy it would be. As it was, he was afraid of upsetting her, of frightening her away from him perhaps, if he spoke too soon, when a little patience and forbearance would allow her feelings to develop in their own time.

He followed her down the steps and into the brougham. As they drove off, she leaned forward and gazed out of the window.

“Dear, dear Haughton!” she murmured. “How I love it!”

He saw that her eyes were full of tears.

Chapter XII

It seemed to Charlotte that she had been away a year. The pleasant, low-roomed house at Fording greeted her eyes with the freshness of something known long ago and rediscovered. She had never before realised how charming it was. Nor had she realised before how strong was the attachment between herself and her mother. She had found her waiting for her at the station, and when they reached home she returned to a house gay with flowers as if for a party—a great bowl of daffodils in her sitting-room and a blue pot of crocuses in her bedroom. Cousin Fanny hovered in the background, eager-eyed, and self-effacing, waiting till Lady Hadlow’s excitement had died down; and Elizabeth and the other servants greeted her with such warmth that her heart glowed with gratitude.

“My dear child,” said her mother, breaking out afresh at dinner, “how nice it is to have you back! You’ve no idea how dull the house has been, hasn’t it, Fanny, with no one but us two old women?”

After dinner, when Cousin Fanny had slipped away discreetly to her own room, Lady Hadlow began to chatter as if Charlotte’s coming had released feelings pent up and accumulating ever since her departure. Charlotte discovered for the first time something pathetic in her mother’s eager garrulity. “She’s been starved for years,” she thought to herself; “ever since Papa died and she came to live in the country.”

When Lady Hadlow’s energy had to some extent exhausted itself, and there actually fell a pause between them, Charlotte, who had risen from the sofa where she had been sitting beside her mother and stationed herself by the fire with one elbow on the mantelpiece, turned and looked at her.

“I have something to tell you, Mamma; something rather surprising.”

Lady Hadlow glanced at her with a flash of misgiving. “Well, my dear?”

“As Alfred and I drove to the station this morning, he proposed to me.”

Lady Hadlow sat bolt upright and stared at Charlotte for a moment open-mouthed, as if she suspected her of perpetrating a monstrous hoax. Then she rose to her feet and rushed at Charlotte.

“My dear, dear Charlotte!” she cried, hugging her. “What marvellous news! Why, you strange creature … never a sign in your letters! And to think …!” She smothered her own words in kisses and caresses. Then, suddenly articulate again, she exclaimed: “Well, this makes up for everything.”

Charlotte understood everything to mean Beatrix.

“Then you think, Mamma,” she said, “that I ought to have accepted him?”

Lady Hadlow reacted like a steel spring. “Accepted?” She thrust Charlotte away from her, and, holding her by the elbows and staring into her eyes, she asked with fierce emphasis: “You don’t mean to say, child, that you refused him?”

“I told him,” said Charlotte, “that I would think it over.”

“Think it over!” Lady Hadlow echoed Charlotte on a note of scornful despair. “Child, you amaze me! But what on earth is there to think over? Isn’t it a magnificent match for you, and isn’t Alfred the finest and dearest creature in the world?”

“Yes, Mamma, I really believe he is.”

“Well then?” Lady Hadlow had let go of Charlotte’s elbows, and stood with palms open and expostulating, head thrown back, and eyebrows raised in exasperated interrogation.

“I don’t think I’m in love with him, Mamma.”

“Oh, fiddledidee, Charlotte! Look at Beatrix! That’s what happens when people think of nothing but love.”

Then, as if that explosion had eased her fury, her voice grew gentle again. “Don’t imagine, my child, that I would urge you to marry a man you didn’t like or respect. But you and Alfred have always been such friends. He loves you, doesn’t he? Of course he does.”

“Yes, Mamma.”

“Then, depend upon it, Charlotte, you’ll love him too in time. Love, in the best sense, is a thing that comes by degrees from mutual friendship and respect. Besides, we must be practical too, Charlotte. My income, as you know, is not large. I may feel obliged, in the end, to leave Beatrix her share of it, and then, when I die, you will only have five hundred a year. Five hundred a year is not much for a lady to live on, and, even if it was four times that sum, an old maid’s life is to be avoided. Look at your poor Cousin Fanny. You ought to face the possibility, Charlotte, that you may never receive another proposal. Certainly you will never receive one half so good. Gracious goodness! You are asked to become Lady Mardale, and mistress of Haughton, and you reply that you will think it over.”

Charlotte glanced at her mother with a smile of surprise. “Do you know, Mamma, it never occurred to me that if I married Alfred I should be Lady Mardale.”

Lady Hadlow flung up her hands. “Bless the child!” Then she burst out laughing. “In some ways, Charlotte,” she said, “you are very unlike your Mamma.”

• • • • • • • •

Charlotte had promised Alfred to think it over, and she had thought it over as she sat with a closed book on her knee in the train between Templeton and Paddington, and she had come to the decision that she would write and accept Alfred next day. If she had not already made up her mind, she would not have told her mother that evening, for she knew that her mother would instantly throw such a weight into the scales that it would be almost impossible for her to weigh the question soberly and carefully herself. She had found it very difficult to make up her mind, for, though she had never been in love, she knew instinctively that, in spite of her warm friendship for Alfred, she was not in love with him. She liked him, loved him, indeed, with that friendly love which is free of passion, and, now that she had recovered from the shock of his confession, she felt deeply grateful to him for his love. But her feelings for him had nothing of that intense, secret rapture which the thought of that tall, dark-eyed Christopher whom she had imagined for her lover, had awakened in her; and, thinking of him, the still unmet lover, her heart ached for something which, though she had never found it, she now profoundly felt that she was going to lose for ever. But perhaps, she told herself, no one ever had such feelings for a real man; perhaps they were merely a girlish romanticism which one grew out of. Was not Alfred the dearest friend she had, and would it not be absurd to sacrifice his love and companionship to this vague, romantic dream? If she refused him she would very likely be throwing away her one chance of love, and she was desperately in need of love. How was she to discover the truth? Who could tell her? Nobody. She felt that in such a case as this her mother, even Lady Mardale, could be of no use to her; and, sitting there in the train and gazing with unseeing eyes at the wheeling landscape, she wept silently, drying her eyes from time to time with her pocket-handkerchief.

But before she reached London she had begun to feel calmer, and on the journey from London to Fording she calmly and sadly made up her mind.

When she had told her mother of Alfred’s proposal, she had not told her that she had already decided to accept him, because she wanted to sleep on her resolve and consider it again in the cold light of morning before she wrote her letter. But when, after getting into bed, she tried to ponder the question once more, she found that she was emotionally too tired to do so. She was possessed by a cold recklessness which defied thought, “My mind is made up,” she thought. “Why should I go on tormenting myself? I am going to marry Alfred.”

• • • • • • • •

She awoke early next morning in the same mood of calm decision, but now she no longer felt chilled and sad. Her gratitude to Alfred and her sense of his goodness filled her with a desire to make him happy, and she felt now that she too would be happy with him. A hundred details which, in her emotional agitation yesterday, she had left out of account, came now to reassure her. How wonderful it would be to live at her beloved Haughton, and to escape at last from the control of others into full-grown independence ! It would be invigorating, too, to become suddenly a person of some importance, and still more extraordinary, a person for whom her own mother would involuntarily feel a certain respect. She imagined her mother coming to stay at Haughton, a mere guest in the house where she herself was mistress. The thing seemed so incongruous, so unbelievable, and so comical, that she smiled to herself as she lay in bed.

Then her mind ran off on random dreams and recollections, fragments of talk, real and imaginary, with her mother, and Alfred, and Lady Mardale. She recalled her talk with Alfred about Beatrix and her mother during that walk a few weeks ago, and then suddenly, in a flash of inspiration which was more typical of the artful Beatrix than of Charlotte, she saw a miraculous opportunity of dragooning her mother into forgiveness of Beatrix.

• • • • • • • •

The presence of Cousin Fanny at breakfast prevented Lady Hadlow from at once attacking, as she was burning to do, the subject of Alfred’s proposal; but as soon as it was over, and she and Charlotte found themselves for a moment alone together in the dining-room, she opened fire point-blank.

“Charlotte! Listen to me! Go at once, before you do anything else, and write and accept Alfred.”

Charlotte seemed to consider the suggestion. Then she looked her mother in the eye. “Listen, Mamma! I will strike a bargain with you. If I write to Alfred, as you seem to wish, will you write to Beatrix and invite them to come and stay here at Easter?”

Lady Hadlow shot a sharp, enquiring look at Charlotte. “Come, child! Be serious!” she said.

“But I am serious, Mamma.”

“Then I must say I never heard anything so callous.”

“Callous, Mamma? When I am urging you to forgive your own daughter?”

“Callous,” corrected Lady Hadlow, “because you are ready—or you pretend to be—to allow irrelevant matters to determine a very serious question, instead of obeying your own feelings.”

“But weren’t you just now, Mamma, trying to make me obey your feelings?”

Lady Hadlow ignored the point. “I wonder what Alfred would say,” she remarked pensively, “if he heard he was being used as a sort of bait.”

“I happen to know,” said Charlotte, “that if he heard what the bait was for, he would be delighted.”

Lady Hadlow weakened. “Alfred thinks, you mean, that I ought to______?”

The weakness was only temporary. In a moment her face had recovered its usual firmness. “That is a matter entirely between Beatrix and me.”

“And isn’t my engagement, Mamma, a matter entirely between Alfred and me?”

Lady Hadlow raised her eyebrows, shocked, yet amused in spite of herself. “You’re very pert to-day, Charlotte. However, you must, of course, make your own decision as regards Alfred; and mine, as regards Beatrix rests with me.”

Charlotte suddenly abandoned her tactics. “Mamma,” she said persuasively, “I am writing to Alfred this morning to accept him; and you are writing to Beatrix, aren’t you, to invite them for Easter?”

Lady Hadlow melted. “You are a wicked, scheming creature,” she said. Suddenly she became stern again. “But I shall not ask him” she said.

“Mamma,” said Charlotte,” I insist.”

“My dear Charlotte, you don’t know what you’re asking. To see that odious, vulgar little man treating Beatrix with the familiarity of a … no, Charlotte! It’s out of the question. You must spare me that.”

Having achieved so much, Charlotte was willing to be generous, especially since she had realised, from her mother’s last remark, that to ask Beatrix’s husband at first might actually impede a reconciliation. “But the baby must come,” she said.

Lady Hadlow did her best to appear indifferent. “Oh, the baby! The baby can come, poor mite!”

• • • • • • • •

The letter to Alfred took long to write. Charlotte sat at her desk, alternately absorbed in writing and in gazing upwards with eyes fixed intently on the motions of her mind. She wished to lay bare to Alfred her inmost thoughts and feelings. His love for her, she felt, deserved nothing less than the most perfect sincerity in return, and she was trying to be, above everything, honest. The thought of his love for her, which had at first troubled her, troubled her no longer. It warmed her heart. She felt that keen enhancement of life which comes of being loved, and her heart overflowed with gratitude to Alfred. At last she had finished. She laid down her pen, took up the letter, and read it through.

“MY DEAR ALFRED,—I promised to think, but how difficult it is to think deliberately, and what good does it do? I did think for the whole two hours between Templeton and Paddington, but it was something else than thinking that helped me at last to decide. How I wish you were here, so that we could talk and I could tell you all I want to tell you, and must tell you! I was so bewildered when you spoke in the brougham yesterday that I could do nothing but seem cold and foolish and ungrateful. I am going to try, now that I am calm, to tell you everything as honestly as I can. I have never been in love, but I have imagined to myself, as I suppose every girl and boy has, what it must be like to be in love, and have even pictured my beau ideal. Did you ever suspect me of such romantic absurdity?

“I believe it is possible to know what it is to be in love without ever having known love. Does this seem to you ridiculous? I am going to be quite honest, Alfred, and confess to you something which may seem very foolish. When I let myself dream of that imaginary young man, I have feelings deeper and more stirring than any I have known for a real person; deeper, much deeper, Alfred, than my feelings for you. How it pains me to say that, and to confess, as I must in honesty confess, that I am sure I am not in love with you. I like you, I love you as I would love my dearest friend, and, indeed, except for Lady Mardale, you are my dearest friend. I asked myself yesterday in the train whether your death or hers would cause me the greater grief, and I knew at once that I could more easily bear to lose you. That is not being in love, is it?

“When you took hold of my arm that day when we walked to Rimple, I felt at once the presence of something which seemed to me to spoil our friendship, and, though I no longer feel that now, I felt it again yesterday in the brougham. Perhaps this was natural. Perhaps it was simply the shyness and awkwardness of an inexperienced young woman; but I do not think so. But I do want to marry and to have a home of my own and the companionship of someone I am fond of. That sounds rather cold and calculating, doesn’t it? But I can say more than that; I can honestly say that I like and respect you, Alfred, more than any man I have ever known, and I do so want to make you happy. I should be happy with you; I feel sure of that. I cannot imagine us ever quarrelling or growing tired of each other’s company; and if, after all that I have just told you, you ask me once more to marry you, I will say ‘Yes’ whole-heartedly, or with all of my heart except that little blind corner which cries out for its romance. But now you must be as honest with me as I have tried to be with you, and unless you are sure, from the bottom of your heart, that you want me still, and as I am, you must write and tell me that you think it better that we should not marry. Dear Alfred, how can I tell you how grateful I am, and shall always be, for your love.”

• • • • • • • •

A year and a half later, when Charlotte had just turned twenty-one, she and Alfred were married.

Book III

Charlotte Awakes

(Past History)

Chapter XIII

It was an August afternoon at Haughton. The warm yellow stone of the beautiful classic front glowed as if built of sunlight. Doors and windows were flung open to the garden, giving glimpses in the dim, shadowy interior of a fragment of a tall cabinet, the gleam of a mirror, or the cool lustre of a china vase; yet it seemed as if the place was deserted, for no one stirred in the house or along the garden paths, and not a sound broke the summer silence—that silence which is made up of the hum of bees and the croon of hidden stock-doves.

But the place was not deserted, for under a great beech-tree on the lawn, half hidden and wholly sheltered by its drooping boughs, two women were sitting in basket-chairs near a rustic table. One of them, the elder, was a large, untidy woman dressed in dark blue. Obviously she was not interested in her personal appearance, for her hair was carelessly arranged and her dress carelessly put on. There was no attempt to make the most of what was still a considerable beauty. There was something untidy and unrestrained even in the expression of her face, as though she were disillusioned and a little cynical about life. She looked at least forty, though in fact she was just over thirty.

The younger woman was quietly but beautifully dressed in black. Her attitude, as she lay back in the basket-chair, and her pale face with its dark eyes and large, handsome mouth, had a natural dignity and all the elegance and restraint that her sister lacked. A book lay on her lap, and she was gazing abstractedly before her. The other, seeing that she was no longer reading, spoke.

“Where’s Mamma, Charlotte?”

Charlotte Mardale turned her head. “Indoors, I think, Bee.”

“Probably writing letters,” said Beatrix a little grimly.” She is no doubt writing to poor Cousin Fanny. ‘I hope you are keeping a careful watch on Jenkinson’s bills. The one I paid before I left home included four items I had not ordered. Tell Hobson to be sure to have the sprinkler on the lawn for at least an hour every evening while this heat lasts.’”

Charlotte laughed. “You’re always down on Mamma, Beatrix.”

“Not seriously, Charlotte. Really I’ve been very fond of Mamma ever since I escaped from her, and in many ways I admire her immensely. She would have done extraordinarily well in the Army. You know, Charlotte, she treats us still as children. She was at me again this morning about my dress.”

“Quite right, too, Bee. You dress abominably, and you take no care of your looks. Look at your lovely hair—flung up like a haystack.”

Beatrix laughed her old tomboy laugh. “It’s all very well for you to talk, Charlotte. You have money and a position to keep up. I can’t afford to be smart.”

“Nonsense, my dear Beatrix. You’re not a pauper. Without spending a penny more than you do, you could dress twice as well, and it costs nothing to pay a little attention to your hair and at least to put on your dresses right way round. You seem to ignore the fact that you’re a very handsome woman.”

Beatrix’s eyes flashed for a moment; then she smiled bitterly. “I really don’t much care nowadays, Charlotte, whether I’m handsome or hideous. What does it matter?” She sighed. “One loses one’s gusto as time goes on.”

Laying one arm along the arm of her chair, she turned more intently to her sister. “Confess, Charlotte, that, even for you, life is not what it was. Honestly, does it come up to what you expected when you married? I’ve no business to ask you such a question; but there it is, I’ve asked it.”

Charlotte raised her dark, serious eyes. “Yes, Bee. I can honestly say that I’m not disappointed in my marriage.” She spoke the truth, yet her conscience pricked her, telling her that, to be really truthful, she should have added that she had not been in love with Alfred when she married him and so had not demanded much. But she could not tell Beatrix that; to do so would have seemed to her a kind of disloyalty to Alfred.

“Nor in life at all?” persisted Beatrix.

“Oh, one had such romantic ideas about life as a child,” answered Charlotte. “But I’m content. One looks at life differently now, of course.” Again her conscience pricked her, reminding her of the small, secret voice which still sometimes cried out for love as in the days of her girlhood. But that was a romantic dream; indeed, she reflected, it was strange that at her age, and after nearly seven years of happy married life, she had not yet thrown off that childish illusion.

Beatrix nodded her head grimly. “Very differently, alas!”

The pain and disillusionment in her tone touched something in Charlotte. She laid her hand affectionately on the arm that still lay along the arm of the chair. “And you, my poor Bee,” she said; “you are disappointed, then?”

Beatrix’s eyes filled with tears. “Hideously!” she said, with tragic emphasis.

“You don’t love him any longer?”

There was something heart-rending in the dry, prosaic tone of Beatrix’s reply. “He seems to me now, Charlotte, nothing more than what Mamma said of him when she met him in Harrogate—just an ordinary, vulgar little man.”

“Oh, Bee!” Lady Mardale cried out in pain. “Your beau?”

“Yes, my beau! If he had been a little less of a beau it would have been more fortunate for both of us. We soon found out that we did not really care for one another. It was he, Charlotte, who found it out first. Perhaps, if he hadn’t, I should never have found it out at all.”

“My poor Bee! But at least there’s little Bob.”

“Yes, I have Bob. If Bob had not been born I should have left him long ago—run away again, Charlotte. What a triumph that would have been for Mamma, especially as I should have had to run home. There was nowhere else to run to. It is a little cowardly, I know, to blame others for one’s own mistakes, but, all the same, I have often thought that if Mamma had been a little more tolerant we should have found out our mistake before we married. Even if she had not consented to an engagement, she might have allowed us to see and write to one another. It would have been easy to say that we must know each other a little better before becoming engaged. It was her antagonism that roused mine. Mamma and I, you know, Charlotte, are very much alike in some ways.”

“I remember thinking, Bee, when Mamma and I were here, the summer after you ran away, that if Mamma had been like Lady Mardale instead of … well, like Mamma, you would never have gone.”

“Ah, but dear little Lady Mardale was a saint. When I got your letter last April, Charlotte, I felt that something unutterably precious had gone out of our lives. If Mamma had been like her …” She paused, and then a humorous smile lit up her face. “Well, I, for one, would not have been like myself. We were far too well brought up, Charlotte. I try never to say ‘Do this’ and ‘Don’t do that’ to Bobby; and you can imagine, my dear,” she added, laughing, “how difficult I find it. Now I’m sure Alfred was not brought up on ‘Do’s’ and ‘Don’ts.’”

“But probably, Bee, Alfred did not require it, and I think we did. We needed some sort of discipline. In many ways, you know, we were rather fools, and I don’t think we can blame Mamma for that. She was certainly never a fool.”

“No, indeed. If she had been a little more of a fool and a little less of a—”

“An Ebernoe.”

“Precisely, an Ebernoe; we should all have been happier and better.”

At that moment Lady Hadlow appeared at the top of the front door steps. She stood for a moment scanning the garden; then, catching sight of her daughters under the beech, she came briskly down the steps and across the lawn.

Charlotte watched her mother, smiling affectionately. “Isn’t she marvellous, Bee?”

“As alert and important as a sergeant of the Guards. And in a moment, no doubt, she will be uttering words of command.”

“Charlotte,” called Lady Hadlow, “Lady Rod-mell has just rung up to ask if you are at home. I told Carson to say yes. She is driving over to tea. Beatrix dear, do go and change that dreadful old dress. Put on the nice grey I gave you, and for goodness’ sake get Elizabeth to put you into it. I do like to see my daughters at least decent.”

“If you would only be content with that, Mamma,” sighed Beatrix, getting out of her chair. “Come and sit here, and try to keep out of mischief while I’m away.”

“Poor Beatrix,” murmured Lady Hadlow, gazing after her retreating daughter, “she looks little better than an old-clothes woman.” Then she turned to Charlotte. “Whatever is the matter with Carson, Charlotte? He looked as if he had seen a ghost when he spoke to me just now about Lady Rodmell’s telephone message. Ah, he’s coming out.”

Carson, tall, important, and respectful, came towards them across the grass. “Might I speak to you a moment, my lady?” he said to Charlotte, casting a fleeting glance, as he spoke, at Lady Hadlow.

Charlotte, realising that he had something private to say, rose from her chair and went with him out of the shadow of the beech-tree.

“Excuse me troubling you, my lady, but something very unpleasant has happened. For the last week, my lady, I have been missing some of the silver—spoons and forks. I check them once a month, and last Saturday, when I did so, I found four large forks and six tablespoons missing. I said nothing, but I checked them again on Monday and found that two more forks and two dessertspoons had gone. I thought it best to mention the matter to Mrs. Portman, and she and I took steps to find out if any of the servants had been thieving. I have just found out that William, the footman, has been taking them.”

“William?” said Lady Mardale, in pained surprise. “But I always thought William—” She paused.

“So did I, my lady; as honest as could be. I’ve locked him into the footmen’s bedroom and thought I had better keep him there till his lordship returned. He seems very much upset, my lady, and, to tell the truth, so am I.”

“And so am I, Carson. His lordship will be back before six. We had better do nothing till he returns. When he does, I will tell him.”

Charlotte returned to Lady Hadlow, and Carson retreated towards the house.

“Well, Charlotte,” said Lady Hadlow, “and what is the matter?”

“One of the footmen, Mamma, has been stealing silver. Carson has locked him into his bedroom until Alfred returns.”

“Stealing? My dear Charlotte, which footman?”

“William. The smaller of the two.”

“And my favourite. Dear me, what next? Of course, Alfred will ring up the police at once; in fact, Charlotte, hadn’t you better tell Carson to do so now?”

“No, Mamma. Alfred may decide otherwise.”

“But how can he?”

“I can’t say. I expect he will deal with William himself, without the police.”

“You think so, Charlotte?” Lady Hadlow looked doubtful. Then her face cleared. “Well, my dear, whatever Alfred does will be right; we can rest assured of that.”

Chapter XIV

But Lady Hadlow’s faith in Alfred was tried to the uttermost by what he actually did. For when, on his return to the house, Charlotte went to him in his study and told him of the matter, he rang for Carson and questioned him.

“You’re quite sure, Carson, that William did take the silver?”

“Yes, my lord, he has admitted it.”

“Did he give any reason?”

“No, my lord; I didn’t question him. I told him I should report it to your lordship and then locked him into his bedroom.”

“Send him to me now, Carson. Don’t bring him; just tell him he’s to come.”

As Carson was closing the door, Lord Mardale called to him. “Do your best, Carson,” he said, when Carson had returned, “to discourage all talk and discussion of this among the servants.”

“Shall I go or stay, Alfred?” Charlotte asked when they were alone.

“Stay, if you don’t mind, my dear. I should like him to realise that you know all about it. It will come from us both, if you agree.”

“You won’t hand him over to the police, Alfred?”

“Not I. You didn’t expect me to, did you?”

Charlotte shook her head, smiling, as the door opened.

The young footman came in, and, shutting the door behind him, waited. His face was very white. His eyelids were red, as though he had been weeping, and he stood there with his lower jaw thrust out a little, crestfallen, wretched, yet determined, it seemed, not to be browbeaten.

“William, come here and sit in this chair,” said Lord Mardale.

For a moment the young man stared in bewilderment, and did not move.

“Come along,” said Lord Mardale. “I can’t talk to you if you stand there, and you can’t very easily talk to me.”

William obeyed.

“Now tell me first, William; you did take some silver, did you, as Carson tells me?”

“Yes, my lord. I … I …” His voice failed him as he fumbled for his handkerchief.

“Now listen to me, William. We’ve known each other now for … how long?”

“Six years, my lord.”

“And liked each other, haven’t we?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Yes. Well, now, I’m not going to worry you to tell me any more than you want to tell me. I know you well enough to be sure that you would not have taken the silver unless something very serious had urged you to. Now tell me this; could you get it back?”

The young man hesitated. “I… I don’t know, my lord. I sent it away a little at a time to be sold. I was in … in trouble about money, my lord.”

“Well, now, you had better go and see if you can buy it back. You can start to-morrow. I will give you fifty pounds in notes. If you find you can’t recover it, you must go to the silversmiths in London whose address I will give you and replace it. Tell them to engrave it in the usual way and send it when it is ready. Pay for it when you give the order, take your other expenses out of the fifty pounds, and bring the change to me when you return. You need not explain anything to Carson; if you ask him to come up when you go down, I will do that myself. As soon as you get back, come and tell me what you have managed to do. After that, we’ll say no more about it.”

Alfred got up from his chair and the footman got clumsily up out of his. He tried to speak, but his lips trembled so violently that at first he could say nothing. He held out his hands in a kind of groping appeal. “My lord,” he stammered at last, “you’ve … you’ve been too good to me. I got into trouble, my lord. I was summoned for fifteen pounds and I … didn’t know what to do.”

“And you paid the debt with what you got for the silver?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Well, that’s the end of it, William. Put it out of your mind, and Lady Mardale and I will put it out of ours, won’t we, Charlotte? If you were in trouble you might have come to me.”

William raised his head. “My lord,” he said hoarsely, rubbing his nose with his handkerchief, “I shall never be able to thank you.”

Lord Mardale put his hand on his shoulder. “Don’t try, my boy. We understand each other, and that’s all that’s necessary, isn’t it? Now go and ask Carson to come up.”

• • • • • • • •

It was one of Lady Hadlow’s rules to be dressed and down in the drawing-room at least five minutes before dinner was announced. Charlotte, going into the drawing-room an hour later, found her there alone.

“Well, my dear,” the old lady enquired at once, “and what has been done about William?”

Charlotte had intended to say no more about the incident, but the temptation to scotch the Ebernoe in her mother was too great to resist. “Oh,” she replied casually, “Alfred has given him fifty pounds to go and buy some more silver.”

Lady Hadlow stared, incredulous. “Don’t be absurd, child.”

“It’s the plain truth, Mamma. Alfred has told William to try to buy back the original silver, which, it appears, has already been sold, and if he fails he is to go to Bensons’ and buy some more to replace it. He is sending him off to-morrow with fifty pounds in his pocket.”

“But … but, my dear child, what madness! Why on earth send William, of all people? Why not send Carson?”

“Well, the only reason I can give, Mamma, is that Alfred is not only a clergyman, but also a Christian.”

“Oh, of course he is, Charlotte. Who doubts it? But one has to be practical in this world. And he expects to see William and his fifty pounds, or his silver, again?”

“I believe he does, Mamma.”

“And do you, Charlotte?”

“Yes, I do too.”

“Well, my dear, all I can say is, I don’t.”

“Mamma, I bet you fifty pounds William returns.”

“I’m sorry, my dear, but I can’t afford to lose, small though the risk is.”

“Well, if William doesn’t return, I’ll make you a present of fifty pounds on the spot, Mamma. That’s a bargain.”

“But surely William is to be punished, Charlotte.”

“I believe not.”

“Well, my dear, believe me, before long you will have all the servants stealing from you right and left. And who can blame them? You’re simply inviting dishonesty.”

“I think, on the contrary, Mamma, that we’re inviting honesty.”

“Well, Charlotte, I won’t pretend that I sympathise with these new ideas. In my time, right was right and wrong wrong, and those who did wrong were punished for it if we succeeded in catching them.”

Charlotte knew that argument with her mother was useless, and so she did not argue; but before leaving the subject she took care to ensure her mother’s silence.

“You haven’t mentioned this to Beatrix, have you?” she asked.

“I’ve told no one,” replied the old lady.

“Then don’t, Mamma. Alfred particularly wants the whole matter to be forgotten.”

“Well, Alfred’s an angel—I’ve always said so— and so I must suppose there’s some sense in all this. But I tremble for your fifty pounds, my dear.”

But Charlotte did not lose her fifty pounds. Two days later William came back, having bought back the original silver, and handed Lord Mardale over twenty pounds of change and a detailed account of his expenses.

• • • • • • • •

That night, as she lay in bed, Charlotte’s thoughts returned to her talk with Beatrix. Yes, she admitted now, Beatrix was right. Life was a disillusionment. And yet she herself had not hoped for anything better. She had longed for something almost unimaginably rapturous, something of which she had had brief, shy glimpses in those strange fancies about the dark-haired young man, Christopher, whom she had invented; but she had never dared to hope for it, to expect it. And yet, in some deep, secret corner of her heart, she must have hoped for it, or why should she nowadays feel that life was so sad, that year by year she was more and more irrevocably losing something unutterably precious to her, of which she had known no more than the shadow? Yet she had everything, or everything else, to make her happy. She and Alfred, as she had foreseen, were ideal friends. She respected and admired him even more to-day than when she had written accepting his offer of marriage. Her thoughts returned to the way in which, that very evening, he had dealt with the case of the footman, and she felt, as she had often felt before, that she had never fully appreciated Alfred’s real goodness. And yet there was still that something which she hungered for more, much more, than goodness. If only she could have loved Alfred as he loved her, she would have found it with him. And she had hoped, and tried, and prayed to find it with him. Now, apart from the fact that she was married, her youth was past; she would soon be thirty; it was too late, now, for her dream to become reality. How strange that, without regard, it seemed, for goodness or wickedness, it was granted to some people to achieve that supreme crown of life, and to others not. To her it had not been granted, and the years passed more and more rapidly, the summers and the yearly visits of Beatrix and Lady Hadlow came and went, and nothing, nothing happened to her.

The Hadlow visit to Haughton had never been interrupted except in the year of old Lord Mardale’s death, and, in the case of Beatrix, in the previous year also, just after her elopement. After Charlotte’s marriage, Lady Hadlow and Beatrix had come punctually every summer, and Lady Mardale also until her death; and there was the usual round of callers—old friends who drove over to see the visitors, and the annual garden-parties, including the Penningtons’ and their own at Haughton. Beatrix never came to Haughton except for the summer visit, but Lady Hadlow and Lady Mardale each came at other times during the year. It was years before Charlotte had grown accustomed to the change produced in this summer reunion by her marriage to Alfred. That she should be hostess and Lady Mardale a guest seemed to her always a sacrilege. It was strange, too, that she should be mistress at Haughton and her mother a guest; but this was not a sacrilege; it was simply a satisfactory readjustment. Beatrix’s husband never came to Haughton. The Mardales had invited him, but the reply had always been that he could not leave his work. During Beatrix’s visit this year Charlotte had tried again to arrange with her to bring him.

“Does he never have a holiday, Beatrix? Choose your time and come, both of you, whenever it suits you.”

Beatrix slid her arm through her sister’s—they were strolling together in the garden. “Dear Charlotte,” she said, “it’s awfully nice of you, but … well, let us leave my skeleton in his cupboard. I should hate to bring him here. There’s far too much of the snob in me not to feel thoroughly ashamed of showing him to my friends here. I’m just like Mamma, and there’s no good pretending I’m not. Besides, he wouldn’t fit in here. There’s nothing for him to do. He must have something to do on a holiday. ‘Let’s go somewhere,’ he always says to me, ‘where there’s something to do.’ How I loathe a place, Charlotte, where there’s something to do.”

“Then I’m afraid you’ve had rather a tiresome time here during the last fortnight. We’ve been to—how many?—one … two … three … the Penningtons’, four … garden-parties.”

“Oh, garden-parties aren’t something to do. They’re glorified idleness. ‘Something to do’ is sight-seeing, golf, tennis, and bathing at some horrible seaside place like Scarborough”

Chapter XV

It was in the autumn, two years later, that the Mardales were invited to dine and stay the night at the Penningtons’. Invitations to dinner between the Mardales and the Penningtons always included the invitation to stay the night; it was a survival from the days when the journey was done by carriage and the distance was too great to return the same night, though nowadays, in a motor, the drive took only about an hour.

A visit to the Penningtons’ was always a pleasant change. It was not merely that the Penningtons themselves were old friends, nor that the country was different from the Haughton country, but also that the two houses presented a perfect contrast. The old timbered Manor House, with its warm autumnal brick, its huddled gables, the long, sprawling garden front that seemed rather a natural growth than an architectural design, the long, low rooms with heavily timbered ceilings, the grey oak of the panelling and staircases, the dark corners and dim passages, were a world apart from the Haughton world of lofty, many-windowed rooms, the wide, simple spaces of airy corridors and halls, and the calm, classic artistry of its beautiful stone façades. The Manor House was full of ghostly mystery; Haughton was the very flower of sanity and sweet reason.

The country blazed in the full splendour of autumn as Charlotte and Alfred, side by side in the back of their open car, drove through the warm afternoon. When they arrived, tea was in progress in the hall. Entering from the bright sunlight, Charlotte was vaguely aware of half a dozen people sitting about in the wide, shadowy room. Old Mr. Pennington and his wife came to the door to greet them, and then Charlotte identified the Crofts, Roger Pennington and his wife, and a Miss Relton—Elizabeth Relton, whom she had met two or three times before at the Penningtons’ and liked. She shook hands, and then Mrs. Pennington introduced a Mr. Maurice Wainwright to her, who had risen from his chair and stood in a broad shaft of sunlight which fell across the room from the tall mullioned window. When Charlotte turned her eyes to this unknown man she had a sudden, extraordinarily vivid impression of the bright gold of his head against a murrey-coloured curtain which hung over the dining-room door. They shook hands, and it seemed to Charlotte that her whole being was enveloped in a sheet of flame, an ecstasy that thrilled her to the soul and swept stormlike through her body, so that she actually felt it tingle in the roots of her hair. She never discovered the cause of that strange experience. It was not merely the touch of his hand, the sound of his voice, which had set some string vibrating in her, nor his hair, bright gold in the shaft of sunlight, nor the clear blue of his eyes, that looked straight into her heart. It was not these things, though each had a share in the soul-shaking impact of his presence on her. For one brief moment she was speechless, breathless, dazed. Then she had taken a chair which Mr. Pennington had drawn forward for her and was sitting near Mrs. Pennington, talking while the old lady poured out tea for her and Alfred. How bewildering that experience had been! She felt now as if she were recovering from a violent blow on the head. Where she sat now, she was half turned away from him, but though she could not see him, and though she deliberately refrained from turning her head, she was acutely aware of his presence, and sometimes through the general murmur of talk she caught the deep, low tone of his voice, and thrilled in answer to it. How strange, she thought to herself as she sat there, calm now and listening to her hostess’s talk, that this tremendous thing should have happened to her there in the middle of them all, and no one except herself should have the slightest intimation of it. Except him, perhaps! Had he, she wondered tremulously, felt anything like what she had felt; and, if so, had he felt her response? She raised her eyes and saw Alfred sitting on the other side of the tea-table near Mrs. Croft, and it seemed that she suddenly returned after a long absence in another world.

Old Mrs. Pennington rose from her chair, and everyone else with her. Mr. Pennington was opening the door into the garden, and there was a general movement in that direction.

“Mr. Wainwright is a great friend of Roger’s,” Mrs. Pennington was saying to her. “They were at Oxford together.” Then she found herself outside the garden door. Mrs. Pennington had disappeared and Maurice Wainwright was standing looking at her, as if he expected her to accompany him. Perhaps Mrs. Pennington had said something about showing him the garden. Then her courage returned. “Have you seen the garden yet? “she asked.

“No, Lady Mardale. I arrived only about half an hour before you did.”

How it chilled her to hear him call her Lady Mardale. Alfred had strolled away across the lawn with the Crofts, and old Mr. Pennington, with Miss Relton and the young Penningtons, was slowly receding down the broad walk. Charlotte and Maurice Wainwright followed, pausing from time to time to admire the flowers in the long border that edged the walk. Between the great dahlia-shrubs, thick with scarlet, orange, white, mauve, or sulphur-yellow blooms, stood masses of Michaelmas daisies of every shade from pale lavender to deep purple. The tall spikes of hollyhocks, still bright with flowers, towered behind them, and tangles of thick-flowering clematis hung from tree-stumps set up at intervals along the border. The foliage of many of the plants, already touched with the brief splendour of the autumn, was as gorgeous as their flowers. Charlotte had regained her self-possession. She felt, now, nothing but a perfect happiness in being beside him and hearing his voice. They talked of flowers and gardens, and she told him of the gardens at Haughton, feeling, as she did so, that she was pouring out her very soul to him. She did not ask what could be the significance of the thing that had happened to her—whether it arose from some profound sympathy between them or from no more than the feverish madness of a woman long starved for love who, seeing her youth slipping from her, clutched desperately at a straw. What was the use of questions in the presence of this glowing certainty? She took the happiness which had so miraculously become hers and drank of it deeply and unquestioningly. If he had flung his arms about her as they stood together looking at the flowers, she would have given herself up to him without hesitation and without surprise. For her there would have been nothing strange in it.

At the end of the long walk they turned on to the grass and followed the avenue of elms which swung back towards the house. The great boughs that towered above them were already yellowing, and here and there a pale leaf twirled slowly to earth through the still air of the late afternoon.

“How is it,” she asked, “that we have never met before, if you have known Roger so long?”

“We were friends at Oxford,” he said, “but for the last eight years I have been in Egypt, and when I came home on leave we always met in London. I am only on leave now.”

“And when do you go back?”

“On the eighteenth. Three days hence.”

Charlotte felt a sudden chill at the heart. But he was speaking again. “I once rode over with Roger to Haughton—eleven years ago, it must have been; in old Lord Mardale’s time.”

“Before my marriage, my mother and sister and I always spent July at Haughton. You never came when we were there.” It was almost as if she were reproaching him.

“No, it was winter when I went there. I remember especially the beautiful Renaissance front. How strange if we had met! I was twenty then.”

“I should have been nineteen.”

So they talked, quietly, intimately, with a depth of meaning in their talk which was not in the words.

At dinner they found themselves opposite each other—Mr. Pennington had taken in Charlotte and Wainwright Miss Relton—and Charlotte was content. She had no wish to talk to him when others were present. It was enough, and more than enough, for her to rest her eyes on him from time to time, and sometimes to meet his.

Old Mrs. Pennington had Alfred on her left at the other end of the table.

“How well that pale green satin suits Charlotte,” she said to him. “I have never seen her look so beautiful.”

Alfred glanced down the table. It was true: Charlotte had never been so beautiful. Her pallor and the cold restraint which was her usual expression were gone. It was as if her beauty had blossomed for the first time.

Chapter XVI

Old Mr. Pennington liked late hours. When the ladies had retired he made for the smoking-room, taking the men of the party with him.

Charlotte, having undressed and dismissed her maid, sat in her dressing-gown, her heavy dark hair hanging in a plait down her back, her ringless hands clasped in her violet silk lap. She was still incapable of anything but feeling. She could not yet descend to practical thought, nor did she yet envisage the fact that to-morrow she and Alfred were returning to Haughton and she would never, perhaps, see Maurice Wainwright again. Her heart was immersed in sunshine; for the moment Wainwright was her all, and, if he had asked her to go away with him to Egypt that night she would have gone with hardly a thought of Alfred and Haughton and all they stood for. It was not that her nature had changed and she had grown callous. She was the same as she had always been; but love, coming to her so suddenly and so late, had for the moment so flooded her heart and mind that there was no room in them for any thought or feeling apart from Maurice.

After sitting motionless for an hour, she took off her dressing-gown and got into bed. There she recalled her old dreams of love and the imaginary lover Christopher. What an absurdity! And he was not in the least like Maurice. Long before Alfred came to bed she was asleep.

• • • • • • • •

She awoke early next morning. It was still the morning twilight; the birds were beginning to wake. The immense new fact of her life rushed in upon her waking senses, and with it the realisation that to-day was the end of it. A despair that was almost a panic seized her. She must go to him now, throw off the foolish restraint which they had so carefully observed yesterday, and talk honestly and openly of their love. They must fight together against the unendurable separation which life, with all its laws and conventions, was about to inflict on them within a few hours. But, despite the furious activity of her mind, she actually did nothing. Her body lay motionless beside her sleeping husband while the light slowly grew from grey to the full flower of daylight. She was wide awake, and, under that press of thought and feeling, inaction became unbearable. She turned to look at the little clock on the table beside her. It was a quarter to seven. Alfred was sleeping soundly; he had not once stirred since she awoke. No doubt old Mr. Pennington had kept him up talking till the small hours. Charlotte slid quietly out of bed, put on her dressing-gown, and crept away to the bathroom. When she returned, Alfred was still asleep. She dressed quickly and stole downstairs.

The hall was empty, but as she passed the open door of the dining-room she heard the flap of a duster, and from another room came twice the light, metallic crash of the drawing of a curtain. She hurried to a small side-door—it was already unlocked—and went out into the garden. The garden was glittering with dew and sunshine, and so miraculously still that it seemed enchanted. In the shadow of the house the air was sharp, but in the sunshine it was already growing warm—delicious blend of sting and caress. After pausing for a moment and looking about her, she took a narrow path which led to the entrance of an old, formal garden surrounded by high yew-hedges. She entered, and followed the passage which turned and doubled between the high, dark-green walls. Here and there, like the creatures of a giant Noah’s Ark, peacocks and pheasants and dragons, cut out of yew, rose above the walls. In the little square garden in the centre, she knew, there was a fountain, and stone seats in recesses of the hedge, where she could sit undisturbed. She hurried on, as if on some secret errand, between the dark hedges, till she reached the arched opening that led into the garden. There she paused. In the keen morning silence the glassy chime of the little fountain, audible where she stood, brought a sense of intimacy and security. The sound of her foot on the gravel frightened a bathing bird as she turned into the garden. There she paused again, with a suddenly palpitating heart, for there, on the stone seat nearest to the arch by which she had entered, sat Maurice Wainwright. A delicious fear thrilled her from head to foot. She could not move nor speak. Feeling that her legs were going to fail her, she put out a hand and touched the compact yew-hedge. He rose and came towards her, and next moment she was in his arms. She resigned herself to his supporting strength, and, leaning her cheek against his shoulder, broke into sobs.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” His voice soothed her as if she had been a child. She felt the firm pressure of his hands upon her. He led her to the stone seat, and, with his arms still round her, they sat down. She found a handkerchief, and, raising her head, she dried her eyes.

“What is it?” he asked again. “Did I upset you?”

She shook her head.

“Then why are you crying? Tell me.”

“Only from happiness,” she said. She raised her eyes, and found that his were devouring her face, and it seemed to her that in the fire of that blue gaze her identity was dissolved. He lowered his face to hers, and their lips met. She drew a shuddering breath and closed her eyes, and for a moment was lost in ecstasy. For a moment she was a creature without past or future, without thought or hope, lost and found in the rapture of an eternal present.

When she opened her eyes, she had a brief sense of surprise at finding him there, still individual and separate from herself. She too had returned to herself. She raised her hand and stroked his head won-deringly. “Where did you get such golden hair from,” she said, “and such blue eyes?”

“From you,” he said, smiling down at her.

The world and the world’s share in her life had returned to her now. “Oh, why didn’t you come to Haughton years ago,” she sighed remorsefully, “when we were staying there? If we had met then, it would have been the same as now, wouldn’t it? We should have known at once.”

“Yes, at first sight. Love at first sight: I never believed in such a thing before.”

She began to tell him of her early hopes of love, and of how she had married Alfred, though not in love with him. “You are the first man I have loved, and the only one I shall ever love,” she said, with low-voiced, passionate intensity, grasping one of his hands in both her own. “I want you to know that. Think of it sometimes, won’t you, when you’re away, over there in Egypt? And I wanted you to know, too, about Alfred … my husband; for fear you should think I had given to you what was already his. I didn’t want you to think I could have done that.”

Maurice raised her hands to his lips and kissed them. “If ever you tell your husband of this,” he said, “tell him that I didn’t try to draw you away, that it was something stronger than either of us; that it happened like … like a whirlwind.”

“What time is it?” she asked, with sudden anxiety.

“Five minutes past eight. We still have three-quarters of an hour.” He kissed her again, and then took in his breath in a deep, long-drawn sigh.

“Three-quarters of an hour is not very much, is it, my dearest, out of a whole lifetime?”

“Did you expect,” she asked, “that I would come to you here?”

He shook his head. “I got up and came out because I couldn’t sleep. We didn’t get to bed, you know, till half-past two, and I couldn’t sleep then for thinking of you. And did you expect to find me here?”

“No. And yet, when I found you, I wasn’t surprised. It seemed the natural end of all that went before.”

“Yes. And I, as soon as I heard your step, knew that it must be you. How strange! Can it have been mere chance—just an accident?”

“No,” she said. The bare idea that she had been led to the most precious moment of her life by the mere stumbling of blind chance was such a cynical cheapening of him and her and all the meaning of life and love that her whole being rejected the brutal inhumanity of it. “No, my dear one, it was no accident; never believe it.”

And then, as if the realisation of the briefness of their love had cut once again across her enthralment, she asked: “When is it you go?

“I leave London on Friday morning. I shall stay to-night and to-morrow night at the Grosvenor Hotel. I have various things to settle in London before I go, and the Grosvenor, you see, is convenient for the train on Friday morning. I join my boat at Marseilles.”

“And you leave here this morning or this afternoon?

“I catch the twelve-thirty.”

“Then you start just before we do. We leave at twelve o’clock.”

Each sentence, in itself so commonplace, was charged, for them, with the tragedy of their imminent separation. Then once more they thrust the future from them and forgot all but one another.

When they thought of time again it was a quarter to nine.

“We must go, said Charlotte, and her heart withered in her breast.”

He folded her in his arms for the last time. “Goodbye, good-bye, my dearest, he said.”

“Good-bye, my only love.” Her voice had died to little more than a whisper. “I shall think of you always.”

Chapter XVII

The next three hours were, for Charlotte, like a long, troubled dream, though neither her hosts nor the other guests suspected that there was anything but calm under the calm surface which, as usual, she presented to them.”

At midday they were all assembled in the hall, Maurice Wainwright and the Mardales ready for departure. The Penningtons’ car came first, to take Wainwright to the station, and he began to shake hands. Charlotte steeled herself to undergo the last terrible moment. Their farewell was over—they had separated already before breakfast in the yew-garden—but, though they had hardly spoken since, his visible presence had given her a deep and exquisite consolation. Now even that was to be taken from her. He had said good-bye to Mr. and Mrs. Pennington, and was coming towards her with his hand stretched out. She half turned to meet him. The bright gold of his head shone for a moment, as when she had first set eyes on him yesterday, against the murrey-coloured curtain, and it seemed to her again that there was a vividness of life and colour in him that she had known in no one else. They shook hands in silence, and she realised afterwards that she had forgotten, in her distress, to take that last opportunity to print on her memory his face and eyes and the sense of his hand in hers; for she did not look at him or return the pressure of his hand. She stood still and upright as a waxwork; her heart was a stone in her breast, and Alfred, glancing towards them to receive Wainwright’s handshake, saw, in a fleeting glimpse, her eyes flash with tears behind her veil. The vision was so brief that he believed, the moment after, that it had been an illusion.”

A minute later Wainwright had driven away, and the Mardales were getting into their car.”

• • • • • • • •

For some miles they sat side by side in silence. It seemed to Charlotte that she had died, that with the departure of Wainwright life had left her. “But no,” she thought next moment, “I am not dead. The dead feel no pain. I am dying—slowly and painfully dying. Months hence the pain will grow less; years hence it will cease perhaps, and I shall be dead, and able once more to take life calmly and indifferently.” For a moment she longed for the years to come quickly and bring her peace; then, as she realised that she was longing for Maurice to be carried farther and farther from her, the wish died, for it seemed like treason against her love. No; short of longing to have him restored to her, she had nothing to wish for, nothing to hope for. There was nothing for her to do but to suffer.”

Alfred began to talk of casual things—the Penningtons and the Manor House, his engagements during the next day or two—and Charlotte found it a relief to listen and reply to him. Sitting beside her in the car, he could not see her face, but at luncheon he noticed how ill she was looking.”

“Did you sleep badly?” he asked. It was not unusual for him to wake in the morning and find her gone, and, when he did, he knew that she had wakened early and, being unable to sleep again, had got up.”

“Yes,” she said, I got up at a quarter to seven and went into the garden.

“We didn’t get to bed till half-past two,” he said. “Old Pennington would have kept it up till half-past three if we hadn’t struck.”

“Yes, Maurice told me so,” Charlotte thought to herself. Her senses, like a hollow tower long after the bell has ceased to strike, still resounded with him, and that casual phrase, re-echoed by Alfred, brought him back with enthralling vividness.”

Alfred rose from the table. “I must be off,” he said. “We have a Parish Council meeting at two-thirty. I don’t suppose I shall be back before half-past six, Charlotte. I shall make various calls on the way home.”

Charlotte was glad to be alone. Telling Carson that she was not at home to callers, she took a book and went to a summer-house in a corner of the water-garden which had been laid out at the time of the building of the house. The summer-house was a little stone temple; the spaces between its pillars were closed with glass, and there was a glass door between the two central ones. Inside, there were deep wicker chairs with blue cushions and a stone table. There Charlotte knew she would be undisturbed.”

Alone for the first time since her parting from Maurice, she could at first do nothing but abandon herself to the tragic sweetness of her love. When at last she was able to consider and reflect upon what had so suddenly and inexplicably happened to her, it seemed to her either that she was dreaming or that she had gone out of her mind. She tried to bring her reason to bear on it, to face and understand the thing; but the power which had always before enabled her to assert “I am I, and this is reality,” had deserted her. Something more than herself had invaded her, and all those familiar standards and classes—thought, feeling, sense, nonsense, good, evil, justice, duty, conscience—by which formerly she had governed her life and actions and judged of the world about her, had ceased to have their old distinct significance. Her sense of duty to Alfred and Haughton and the life she had deliberately adopted, her respect for the conventions of society, had no longer their incontrovertible authority. Her impulse now was to obey the divine power which had rapt her out of her old, dull self, for it seemed to her divine as nothing in life had been before. As for duty, her supreme duty, she felt, was to Maurice. He had given her what all her life she had craved for in vain. He loved her and longed for her, she knew, as she loved and longed for him, and yet he had asked nothing of her. It was for that very reason that she longed to devote her life to him. What was it then, she asked herself, which prevented her from going to him at once—packing a bag, ordering a car, and taking the next train to London? Considered practically like that, it appalled her. Her conventionality, her sanity, shuddered. But the divine madness in her thrilled at the contemplation of that release and self-abandonment. By a sudden instinct she whispered a prayer: “O God, help me to know.” Then, for the first time in her life, she felt that such a prayer was absurd. The God to whom she had prayed in moments of difficulty and doubt seemed to her now a part of the cold, conventional world which in the last few hours had withered to insignificance before the fire of this new life which had blazed up in her. God, the urgent, irresistible God of reality, had already shown her the truth, and she dared not follow it. And all the while the brief, precious time was slipping away. In forty-eight hours Maurice would already have started; he would already be out of England. How agonising to think that he was still within her reach, and she not with him. A wild impulse seized her to go to him at once. Her heart rose fiercely against all the hindrances—not only her own doubts and weakness, but the physical and material barriers of time and space—which were holding her back from him. She struggled to rise from the long chair in which she was lying, and then, as if even that effort had been too much for her strength, she fell back, and, burying her face in her hands and turning her body to the wall, away from daylight and the world, burst into a paroxysm of dry, choking sobs. She did not try to check them; she resigned herself, lying on her side, her body curled up and shaken spasmodically. It was as if some hard, stubborn thing in her breast were melting.”

Soon her sobs became less violent, and then sank to long, shuddering sighs, like a storm that was dying down; and then, like the soft, quiet rain that follows the storm, her tears fell in silence.”

At last she sat up, dried her eyes, and blew her nose with the little ball of tear-soaked handkerchief. Then she rose to her feet, returned to the house, and, entering by a side-door to escape notice, went to her room and rang the bell.”

She told the maid that she might have to go away to-morrow. “Bring me my little black trunk, Mary,” she said.

In a few minutes the trunk was brought. “I shall not want you to pack,” she said to the maid. “I will do it myself.”

Then deliberately, but with no plan in mind, she packed the trunk and pushed it under the bed. When Alfred came home she would go to him in his study and tell him what had happened; and then she would tell him that she was going.”

Going? For how long? For ever? What did she expect to do after she had joined Maurice? Her mind gave her no answer to those questions. The only certain thing was that she must go to Maurice. She looked forward with weary despair to the talk with Alfred and the unutterable pain it would be for both of them. How would she find courage to inflict this monstrous cruelty on him? What would he do? If only he would be angry, and forbid her to go, it would make it easier. As she opened her bedroom door she heard the garden door shut. Could it be Alfred? She paused with her hand on the door-knob, listening. Yes, it was he; she recognised his step on the tiled floor of the passage below. Then there was silence. He would be crossing the hall, which was thickly carpeted. A moment later another door shut; he had gone into his study.”

She would go to him now. Feeling that her legs were going to sink under her, she hurried to the stairhead, down the stairs, and across the hall. When she opened his study door, he was standing at his desk putting some papers into a drawer.

“Are you busy, Alfred?” she said.

“No, my dear.” His pleasant, leisurely speech, so friendly and calm, filled her with sudden dismay.

He looked round and saw her face. “Charlotte!” His eyes and his voice were charged with anxiety. “Is something the matter?”

“I want to talk to you, Alfred.”

“Then sit down.” There was a fire in the grate, for the autumn evenings were cold. He drew up a chair for her, and she sat down.”

“I’ve always been honest with you, Alfred, haven’t I?” she said.

“Always, my dear. I’ve never doubted it.”

“I want to be honest now.” Her voice failed for a moment. “I told you, when you asked me to marry you, that I was not in love with you, and had never been in love.”

He nodded his head. “Yes, Charlotte.”

“I hoped I should fall in love with you some day, Alfred; but … I didn’t. And now”—her voice was no more than a whisper—“there’s someone else.”

In a flash that brief vision of her tears that morning returned to him. “Maurice Wainwright,” he said. His face had gone suddenly very white and drawn, as if the flesh had shrunk back on to the bone.

“Yes,” she said. She did not ask, or even wonder, how he knew. “I had no warning, no choice. It came upon me like … like a whirlwind,” she said, remembering Maurice’s word, “the moment I met him.”

“Does he know?”

“Yes. When I got up and went out … early this morning, I went into the yew-garden to be alone, and … I found him there.”

“By … pre-arrangement?”

“No, Alfred. Up till then we had not spoken … confessed to one another. Neither of us knew we were to meet there.”

“And then you … spoke?”

“Yes. He took me in his arms, Alfred. We kissed. He asked me, when I told you, to assure you that he had not tried to attract me; that it had come to us both suddenly, like a whirlwind. You see, Alfred, he wanted you to know that he had not deliberately behaved dishonestly. It’s true, Alfred.”

“I believe it.”

Charlotte bowed her head and wept. Then, controlling herself, she went on, in a thin, expressionless voice: “He starts the morning after next for Egypt.”

There was a silence. Alfred sat gazing in front of him, his face pale and drawn, his hands clasped, bending forward a little in his chair as if under the weight of his disaster.

“Alfred,” Charlotte broke out suddenly, her voice shaken by sobs, “I must go to him. I … I can’t …”

Alfred went and knelt by her chair. He laid one arm round her shoulders. With his other hand he took one of hers. “There, Charlotte, my dear one, don’t cry. I know you couldn’t help yourself. It was like you to come and tell me at once; I shall always remember that.”

They remained for a while silent and motionless, he still kneeling by her chair and holding her hand. “Listen,” he said at last. “You stay here, and I’ll go out for a while. You see, it has been rather unexpected for me, hasn’t it?” He tried to smile, as though what he had said had something comical in it. “And I want to think for a little.”

He got on to his feet, stooped as if he were about to kiss her; then, as if remembering, checked himself and went slowly out of the room.”

Chapter XVIII

Alfred went out into the garden. It was already twilight. The flat grey shapes of trees and shrubs stood like thin screens upon the grey desert of the lawn. Pools of pale green sky shone coldly behind the topmost branches of the highest trees, and the clear, cold depths of the zenith were beginning to crystallise into remote, faintly visible stars. He took a narrow path which wound among shrubs where he knew there was a garden seat, and when he reached the seat he dropped into it and remained for some time motionless in body and mind, withdrawn into the innermost chamber of his being which was the temple of his God. He did not pray in the sense that he uttered verbal requests; such prayer, for him, belonged only to the public worship of the church. Personal prayer, for Alfred, was to stand in the presence of God and absorb strength and health, like a tree in the sunlight. So he prayed, sitting in the twilight on the garden seat, until the cries of his suffering self grew quiet in the divine serenity. Only then did he dare to consider what had happened.”

When his thoughts turned again to Charlotte, he knew that his faith in her was unshaken. He believed what she had told him—that neither she nor Wain-wright had provoked the conflagration. Charlotte was not frivolous; she was serious-minded, self-controlled, and generous. For this reason he realised, against his own hopes, that this sudden passion of hers was no mere feverish fancy, but a fact of deep significance. Alfred was one of those rare beings, a truly humble man. His humility originated, not in fear and self-depreciation, but in unselfishness and love of mankind. He had never ceased to be grateful to Charlotte for giving him all she could give. She had held nobly to her bargain through the years of their life together. He had hoped that she might at last come to love him as he loved her, but when he had realised that this hope was not to be fulfilled, he had not been embittered. He had never been one to reckon life in terms of his losses. For him life was a positive, not a negative, thing; he counted his gains and enjoyed them thankfully. Charlotte’s affectionate friendship was very precious to him; it had brought him more happiness than love brought to many men, for he had a greater capacity than most men for happiness. It had become a part of him, and could never be taken from him, even if their life together were now at an end. To this day he loved Charlotte as he had always loved her, and at the thought that he might be on the point of losing her now his strength for the moment broke down under a great wave of despair that for a while held him engulfed. For a while he sat there, wholly given up to grief, and then again serenity returned to him. It never entered his mind to try to prevent her going, to remind her of her marriage-vow and her duty to him, to his position as Rector of Templeton and to his family honour. To hold her against her will would have seemed to him a sin so monstrously inhuman that all else would have seemed insignificant beside it. The bonds of love were, for him, the only bonds permissible in all human affairs. And yet to imagine her with Wainwright, lavishing upon him all the love he himself had so longed for, was for him the most exquisite agony. Yes, he was jealous of Wainwright—he admitted that to himself. But it was not a personal jealousy; in no corner of his heart did he wish Wainwright harm. He had liked and admired him when he met him, and he liked and admired him still. But that she should be ready to leave him and rush to a stranger, that all their years of friendship should count for nothing—gone suddenly like the flame of a blown-out candle—cut him to the heart. But was it gone? Possibly, probably, he reflected, Charlotte’s affection for him was as great as ever, in spite of her love for Wainwright. He had been assuming, he found, that her old feeling for him had died. The discovery of that mistake warmed his heart. Something, at least, remained to him. He stood up and stretched himself. It was useless to think any longer. His mind was clear now as to what he must do. The clock on the mantelpiece struck seven as he opened the study door. A small lamp was burning on the writing-table. He found Charlotte as he had left her, lying back in the chair beside the fire. She scanned his face anxiously as he came towards her. “Where did you go?” she asked. “Into the garden? I searched the house for you. There was so much I ought to have said before I let you go. Can you believe, Alfred, after what I have told you, that I still love you as much as ever I did, and that our life together is as precious to me now as ever? And yet it’s true; I assure you from the bottom of my heart that it’s true. What a cruel, selfish wretch I must seem to you; and yet, if you could see into my heart, I know you would understand.”

“I do understand, my Charlotte; never fear. I understand, and I believe in you as much as ever I did. And remember this: whatever happens, whatever you choose to do, I shall never for one moment think unkindly of you. I owe you too much happiness for that to be possible. So if you feel you must go to him, Charlotte, you must go. When … when will it be? To-morrow?”

“Yes, to-morrow morning,” she said in a dry, toneless voice. “I must catch the ten-twenty. I will write to you immediately, Alfred—directly I have seen him. No one need know anything for the present, need they?”

He shook his head. “No. You have gone to London; that’s all. Oh, Charlotte, if only we could have had children!”

She raised her tear-stained face and looked at him.”

“Yes. Then I couldn’t have done this.”

He took her arm. “Come, my dear. We must go and get ready for dinner.”

He helped her to rise from her chair. Then, as they stood together, she grasped his arms and laid her face against his breast.”

“My poor dear,” she murmured. “How terrible it is. I never imagined such things could happen. It has almost seemed, when I’ve thought of it through these last twenty-four hours, that I must have gone mad. But I’m not mad, Alfred.”

“No, my dear.”

“I almost wish I were,” she added with a deep sigh.

Arm in arm they went upstairs together.

Chapter XIX

Lord Mardale, standing in his study, heard the sound of the departing motor and then the sound of Carson shutting the front door. Charlotte had said good-bye to him in the study, and he had not, as he generally did, gone to see her off at the front door, for he had not dared to trust himself in the presence of Carson and the chauffeur. Charlotte, raising her veil and displaying a deathlike face, had kissed him twice.

“Remember, my Charlotte,” he had said to her, “that if ever you wish to return, no matter when and no matter what has happened, I shall always be waiting for you.”

She had not been able to reply by more than a small inarticulate sound, and, lowering her veil, had hurried out without a word, shutting the door behind her. Now it was all over; she had gone. The heavy thud of the closing front door seemed to him to betray the immense emptiness of the house and of his own heart. There was nothing for him to do now but to bear up as well as he could and to occupy himself as much as possible with parish work and the business of the estate. As for the future, he had not yet begun to think of that. Had Charlotte left him for ever? He did not know. He had asked her no questions, and she had told him nothing except that she would write to him. Probably, he thought, she had no plan in her mind beyond the resolve to rush to Wainwright. Ah, if only she would come back? The mere thought was balm to his heart. But it was foolish to tease himself by imagining what would never happen. She was gone. That final kiss was the last time he would ever touch her; the bloodless face over which she had lowered her veil had been his last sight of her.

With a heavy sigh he turned to his desk, and for brief intervals throughout the day he succeeded in concentrating his mind on his work. Then the shadow of his misery would loom up once more and the load descend upon him, and the weary struggle to thrust it from him would begin again. So the day passed, like a slow nightmare.

In the evening, tired out by the struggle, he sat idle before his study fire in the chair he had drawn up for her the night before. His feelings had grown numbed now; he could suffer no more; and his mind, freed from the load that clogged it, began to work feverishly, as if of its own accord. Details and side-issues involved in Charlotte’s flight, to all of which his grief had blinded him at first, leapt up now and tormented him with their mad dance. If she did not return, her flight would become public knowledge. The servants, the parish, all his friends and acquaintances, would know. How would he be able to bear the disgrace? Those who knew him and liked him would pity him and blame her. His heart sank. That would be almost worse than if they blamed him, for she was a part of him, body and soul, and whatever touched her, touched him. And he would have to leave Haughton. To go on living there alone would be unendurable; the place was too full of her. He would close the house, and go to live at Templeton Rectory with his curate. If only his mother were alive. … But next moment he thanked God for her sake that she was not. How terribly this would have hurt her! And Charlotte, too; her favourite! It was the first time that anything of the kind had happened in the Halnaker family. The Halnakers had always prided themselves on being irreproachable, and Alfred himself shared that pride. It was, for him, as it had been for all of them, their duty to be irreproachable, for it was the unique justification of an aristocracy that it should be nobler-hearted and nobler-minded than the rest. But was not Charlotte noble in heart and mind? Did he not still, in spite of what had happened, believe in her? Yes. He had told her so yesterday. How glad he was now that he had told her! His thoughts returned to his mother. If she could have seen into Charlotte’s heart, she, certainly, would have understood. But the outside world cannot see into a human heart; friends, parishioners, servants, would never understand. What then? Are we to behave so as not to be misunderstood, or to act as our hearts and souls prompt us? It was the old dilemma between the letter and the spirit. Alfred gave up trying to think it out; he was too tired. He rose stiffly from his chair and went to his solitary bed.

• • • • • • • •

To Charlotte, driving to Templeton station that morning, it seemed that she had lost all sense of reality. “I am leaving Alfred, leaving Haughton,” she told herself, but the thought meant nothing, or almost nothing, to her. She could not realise it. She stared at it dumbly, foolishly, and her heart lay like a lump of lead in her breast, without the least responsive pang. Coldly and calmly she bought her ticket. The train came in, and William, the footman, opened the door of her carriage. “Good-bye, William,” she said, feeling as she said it that she had said good-bye to the last link with Haughton.

“Good-bye, my lady.” He smiled up at her, touching his hat.

“How little he knows,” she thought, “of this unbelievable thing that is happening.”

The train started, and she leaned back in her corner. How wonderful Alfred had been with William that day three years ago when it had been discovered that he had stolen the silver. The comparison between herself and William came home to her with sudden and terrible distinctness. How infinitely worse was the thing she was doing to Alfred! William had taken a few spoons and forks; she was robbing him of his happiness, the unity of his home, and something of his good name. At that moment she seemed to herself a monster of cruelty.

Wrapped in these troubled thoughts, she sat regardless of her surroundings. She did not notice the stopping of the train at Annet Brook and Rimple. Then she looked out of the window, and the familiar mere at Lannock lay under her eyes, deep blue under the blue sky, enclosed, as if in a curling golden wall, by the tall, dense growths of autumnal flags and reeds which fringed its wandering margins. Pure white, like two great lilies, the two swans floated motionless on the blue. How closely that scene, and all the scenes along the line to Wilmore, were woven into the texture of her life. They were part of her, part of her present, and part of all the past summers of her life, and of that one winter when she had gone to Haughton to stay with Lady Mardale after Lord Mardale’s death. How she had loved them all at Haughton, and how they had loved her! Yet now she was betraying them. Yes, she was betraying even little Lady Mardale, whom she had worshipped more than anyone else in the world. For Lady Mardale, on her death-bed, had spoken to Charlotte of her happiness in leaving Alfred with her—“You, Charlotte,” she had said, “whom I would have chosen for him before any other woman.”

What would Lady Mardale have thought now? What, perhaps, was she thinking now, if the dead have any knowledge of the living? Tears ran down Charlotte’s cheeks, and she raised her veil to dry them. Now her thoughts turned to her mother. She too would be bitterly wounded. She recalled her mother’s delight when she had told her that Alfred had proposed to her. “This makes up for everything,” she had said. Now she was robbing her of this consolation. But to fail her mother was not, she felt, quite so terrible as to fail Lady Mardale, because Lady Mardale was so good, while Mamma, after all, though she loved Alfred and the Mardales, might have been consoled by any son-in-law with a peerage. Charlotte’s greatest sin in deserting Alfred would be, in Lady Hadlow’s eyes, the throwing away of her title; nothing could be more immoral than that. Then Charlotte thought of Maurice, and immediately right and wrong, justice and injustice, were swallowed up in the burning certainty of her love. To have denied that love, to have been afraid to face these griefs and heart-searchings for the sake of that supreme call, would have seemed a greater sin that all the others. She longed to lay her head on his breast and lose at once all sense of the troubles which were tormenting her. What utter consolation it was to think of him and call up the vision of him—the gold of his hair and the blue of his eyes burning in the fresh colour of his face. He seemed to her the most beautiful creature she had ever seen, ever even imagined. Soon she would be with him—in two hours, perhaps—and then she would be safe from this exhausting conflict of thoughts and feelings. If only she could fall asleep till that moment arrived! She was tired, and it seemed to her that the effort that would be required to change trains at Wilmore and to cope with the arrival in London, the drive from Paddington to the Grosvenor Hotel, the enquiries to be made there, would be too much for her. What was she to do with her luggage? Should she take it to the Grosvenor with her or leave it in the cloak-room at Paddington? That question seemed to her, in her highly wrought state, of an insuperable complexity.

As she approached London, the practical problems which her act would involve began for the first time to present themselves to her. Cold realities faced her. The reassuring glow of her passion flagged before them. What would happen to-morrow, and after to-morrow? To-morrow Maurice was starting for Egypt. Would he postpone his departure? That would probably be out of the question. Would she, then, go with him, live with him in Egypt? That would probably be fatal to his position there. But if it were not, if they could manage to live together, would Alfred then divorce her? The very word divorce sent a chill to her heart. Would she ever be able to stand up against the disgrace of it? And, if divorce seemed horrible to her, how much more horrible it must seem to Alfred. No, Alfred would certainly never divorce her. She would have, then, to live permanently with Maurice as his mistress. Socially she would have no position, no existence. That seemed to her at present the least of all the evils involved. To be with Maurice she would willingly forgo all else. But whether she was divorced and married to Maurice, or whether she lived with him as his mistress, she would bring disgrace on Alfred—disgrace and the most cruel distress in return for years of unfailing love. And yet, when she left him this morning, after he must certainly have realised that these consequences would follow her desertion, he had told her that, whatever happened, she would always find him waiting for her if she wished to return. That was the last thing he had said to her. As she recalled it, she recalled also the spectacle of him standing there, a small, serious, forlorn man, his face grey and shrunk with pain, shorn, it seemed, of everything but his innocent and unassailable dignity. That memory of him cut her to the heart; it was more than she could bear. She turned her mind from it, and, rousing herself, glanced at the window. A continuous wall of sordid houses was streaming past her; with a shock she recognised that in five minutes she would be in Paddington.

But, though she tried to free herself of that too poignant memory of Alfred, her mind returned to it as if in horrified fascination, and, as she contemplated it, pity and remorse rose in her heart. Why could she not have stayed with him, no matter at what cost to her? Justice, innocence, generosity, were all on his side. She had repaid him evil for good, cruelty for love; while he to the end had given her good for evil, love for her cruelty. She had vowed to love, honour, and obey him, but she had vowed nothing to Maurice. Vowed nothing; yet her heart, in spite of vows and duty, had given itself to him. It had never given itself to Alfred; there was no faithlessness there; she belonged to Maurice, not to Alfred.

She was roused again by a sudden darkening of the carriage and a flitting of obscure forms past the windows. She had arrived in Paddington. Her mind was in utter bewilderment. What was she to do? Where to go? If only some clear, incontrovertible voice would command and take from her the awful responsibility of choice. A porter opened the carriage door, and she told him that she would leave her luggage in the cloak-room.

Chapter XX

The rest of that day survived in Charlotte’s memory as a vague and troubled dream. She walked for what seemed a very long way from Paddington. She had confused impressions of a straight, broad road edged with trees, whose branches were almost bare, large buildings—hospitals, hotels, schools—of various shapes and colours, old-fashioned pallid houses, small and discreet, protected from the noisy street by strips of sad, faded garden.

• • • • • • • •

Later she found herself sitting on a park bench, watching grey squirrels run nimbly along the iron railings and three children assiduously collecting pebbles from the walk and arranging them in rows on the bench opposite hers, while two nurses with perambulators sat and talked and occasionally rocked a perambulator with an unconscious hand. Yes, if only she and Alfred had had children, she thought, as she watched them at their solemn game, how safely her love would have been anchored at Haughton. But the children she longed for were Maurice’s children. She sighed as the thought of him swept her away again from Haughton and the road back to Haughton. How easily Alfred and Haughton and all her past and present life were reduced to ashes by the fire of her new passion! Her heart cried out for Maurice, and yet it was her heart that wept at the memory of Alfred standing forlorn as she bade him good-bye. It was her heart, too, that urged her to forgo for Alfred’s sake the supreme gift, so long desired, which life had at last offered to her. “He that loses his life for My sake,” she thought to herself, “the same shall save it.” How sad and bleak that promise seemed to her. How could she deliberately choose to wither on the very threshold of her long-expected spring? Life henceforward for her would be grey and autumnal, like the ruined park before her eyes. She rose from her bench heavy at heart. There were dead leaves everywhere. On the grass, under the trees, a man was brushing them into heaps, while another loaded them into a barrow. The children and the squirrels had gone; only the rows of pebbles remained on the empty bench.

• • • • • • • •

In the middle of the afternoon she sat alone in the lounge of the Langham Hotel with tea on a tray at her elbow. Feeling feeble and exhausted, she had remembered that she had had nothing to eat since—months ago it seemed—she had breakfasted with Alfred at Haughton. She had hailed the first taxi and driven to the Langham. What a relief it had been to sink into an easy chair in a corner of the lounge and sip the comforting tea unobserved. She gave herself up to the soothing idleness of the moment. Soon she must irrevocably make up her mind, order a taxi, and drive either to the Grosvenor or to Paddington. But at the moment life was standing still, the devouring doubts and agonising alternatives were suspended, and she herself poised in a kind of apathetic peacefulness in which she seemed to hold her miseries at arm’s length.

When she had sat so for nearly an hour, it occurred to her that, even if she resolved to return to Haughton, she might at least see Maurice once again. To see him just once again, and say to him all the things that before she had not been able to say—tell him that she had actually left home that morning to come to him—what an unutterable consolation that would be. By that she would give him the final assurance of her love. He would know then that it was not cowardice nor callousness that had held her from him, but the deliberate sacrifice of herself to duty. It seemed to be a very necessity of her heart that she should give him her love and that he should realise the gift. It was not enough for her now that she had given it already in the yew-garden at the Penningtons’. She must give it again now on the eve of his disappearance into that appalling distance where he would be so abysmally separated from her.

Then came the idea of ringing him up before she went to see him. She rose from her chair and enquired for the telephone, but when she had shut herself into the telephone-box a sudden access of fear took hold of her. With a desperate determination to forestall the coming weakness, she lifted the receiver and gave the number.

As she waited to be put through, she felt that she was going to faint. The receiver shuddered in her hand so that she could hardly hold it to her ear, and it was only by a determined effort that she kept her senses and, when the call came through, asked for Mr. Maurice Wainwright.

She waited for an age, and then another age, her heart beating all the time so thickly that she was almost suffocated. At any moment the miracle would occur and she would hear his voice, and it seemed to her that when she did she would not have the strength to reply. There was someone there now—a few vague sounds, and then a voice. Ah, but it was not his. “Mr. Wainwright is not in, madam.”

It was almost a relief to her.

• • • • • • • •

Half an hour later she ordered a taxi. When she had taken her seat the hall-porter stood with his hand on the door:

“Where to, please, madam?”

For a moment she stared at him uncomprehendingly, then mechanically gave the order: “To the Grosvenor Hotel.”

As the taxi started, she leaned back and closed her eyes. It seemed to her that she had ceased to be a thinking and acting creature; she was no longer a woman, a complex human being. She had dissolved into a load of acutely sensitive tissue, a nucleus of tingling and shuddering sensation propped in a corner of the hurrying taxi. For a while she lay back inert, her eyes closed, her ears taking in the noise of the stream of traffic in which she flowed, her body passively responding to the swinging and jolting of the taxi.

After a long while she opened her eyes. The taxi was turning out of Lower Regent Street into Pall Mall. She leaned forward and knocked on the window in front of her. Then she took up the speaking-tube.

“To Paddington,” she shouted. “I’ve changed my mind.”

She lay back again immediately and closed her eyes.

Chapter XXI

For three years Charlotte Mardale and Maurice Wainwright corresponded; then he ceased to write, and a few months later she heard, by chance, of his death. But already for three years he had been for her no more than a radiant memory, a memory that awoke at rare intervals to a sharper intensity with the arrival of each letter. When she added his last letter to the rest there were only six of them in all. Immediately after her return to Haughton the news had come that the Penningtons were leaving the Manor House. For Charlotte their departure closed yet another door on that brief, ecstatic moment of her life, and the birth of her only child, a girl, in the following summer reconciled her finally to the lot she had chosen.

Book IV

Charlotte’s Second Awakening

Chapter XXII

It was twenty-one years before the Pennington family returned to their old home, and Charlotte Mardale was a woman of fifty when she revisited the scenes of her meeting with Maurice Wainwright. Old Mr. and Mrs. Pennington were both dead; it was Roger Pennington and his wife, and John, a grown-up son, who came back to the Manor House, and, when Charlotte and Alfred drove to the Penningtons’ first garden-party, their daughter Sylvia, already a young woman of twenty, went with them.

That return to the Manor House brought Maurice Wainwright back to Charlotte more vividly than any of his letters had done, for he had been one of those who cannot put themselves into letters. It seemed to her that their brief, passionate meeting had happened, not twenty-one years, but twenty-one months ago. How could it be twenty-one years? What had she been doing in all the long time since? Nothing. Sylvia had been born, and had grown from babyhood to girlhood, from girlhood to young womanhood, but that seemed to have happened in the space of a very short time.

The memories of Maurice had been made even more vivid by the presence of young Eric Danver, John Pennington’s friend, who, approaching her in the Manor House drawing-room with his golden hair, fresh face, and blue eyes, when her mind was full of Maurice, had seemed to be a reincarnation of her dead lover. He had just that same open gaze, the same attractive seriousness of manner, and, talking to him during tea and watching him at various times in the afternoon, she had been charmed and touched by him. If she and Maurice had married, perhaps, she dreamed, their son would have been like this boy. She had met him again as they were leaving the Penningtons’ and had asked him to come with them to the Haughton garden-party a week later. And, when he had come, she had felt a glow of happiness each time she had caught sight of him—playing tennis, crossing the hall, or standing in the drawing-room solemnly holding a cup of tea. To have him there at Haughton was for her a kind of reconciliation which she could not have explained nor defined, but which she deeply felt.

Old Lady Hadlow, who had just arrived on a visit to Haughton, picked him out as she sat, white-haired, upright, under her parasol, watching the tennis. She was always nowadays quietly but alertly on the look-out for eligible suitors for her granddaughter, and this good-looking young man struck her at once as, at least in appearance, highly eligible. But appearance was very far from being everything; there were, in fact, many much more important things to be taken into account before good looks could be considered at all.

“Who is the light-haired young man who is Sylvia’s partner?” she asked, turning her birdlike face to John Pennington, who was lying on the grass near her chair.

“A friend of mine, Lady Hadlow,” said John.

“He is with us for a fortnight.”

“And what is his name?”

“Eric Danver.”

“Danver?” Lady Hadlow weighed the name carefully for a few seconds. It was not an impossible name; it was, indeed, rather a promising name. “One of the Leicestershire Danvers?” she asked. “We used to know old Sir John, father of the present Sir John.”

“I don’t know, Lady Hadlow.”

How strange to know nothing of the family of a friend staying in the house! People were becoming dreadfully indifferent about such matters nowadays. But, of course, John’s father and mother would know; she must ask them. And she took care to plant herself on a sofa next to Amy Pennington at tea, and ascertained from her that, according to the young man, the present Sir John Danver was the young man’s uncle. He was not impossible, then; though it was to be hoped, of course, that Sylvia would marry into the peerage. Two plates appeared before her, one containing small, very tempting iced cakes, the other plain bread-and-butter. She fixed the cakes with bird-like attention; for a moment it seemed that she was going to peck at one; then regretfully she took some bread-and-butter, looking up, when she had done so, to see who had offered the plates.

“Bobby,” she said, smiling reproachfully, “you shouldn’t tempt your poor old grandmother.”

Her eyes followed the tall man as he moved away. Really, Bobby was very presentable. He looked—heaven alone knew why—a good deal better bred than many of the other men in the room. What a fortunate thing that Beatrix’s husband—that odious, vulgar little man—had died, though by doing so he had left Beatrix and her boy little better than paupers. But Alfred, as usual, had been an angel, and nowadays Bobby was making more than his father had ever made. Her old eyes wandered round the room. Goodness gracious, what a frump Beatrix looked; but—yes, thank heaven—a distinguished frump. Though she looked as if she had been dragged round the garden by her hair, one saw at once that she was a lady. Wherever could she have got her lamentable disregard of her appearance from? Certainly not from her mother—the old lady straightened herself in her chair—and even poor Robert’s family, she reflected, thinking of her long-dead husband, always dressed well; except Cousin Fanny, and she, of course, poor dear, was never able to afford to.

Having finished her tea and lost interest in the drawing-room, she rose with surprising alertness from the sofa, and, accompanied by Amy Pennington, returned to her chair near the tennis-courts.

“Who is the old lady like a hawk, with your mother?” Eric asked John.

“That is Lady Hadlow, Lady Mardale’s mother. She has been doing a little quiet detective-work about you, Eric. You had the presumption, you see, to play tennis with her granddaughter, and so it became necessary for her to enquire into your family history. Unfortunately, having omitted to do so myself during the six or seven years of our acquaintance, I was unable to enlighten her. She, you must realise, was an Ebernoe, and when one is, or was, an Ebernoe, one cannot be too particular.”

“And what is an Ebernoe?”

“Sh … sh! If you wish, in a cathedral, to enquire who God the Father is, it is wiser to do so in a whisper, Eric. An Ebernoe, you must know, thanks God daily that he is not as other men. The rest of us, on the other hand, are more inclined to thank God that other men are not as Ebernoes. But she has her points, and, for eighty-two, she’s a marvellous goer. She still turns up every year in London for the season.”

• • • • • • • •

Eric saw little that day of Lord or Lady Mardale, but, what was more to his purpose, he played two sets of tennis with Sylvia as his partner, and after the second set she took him to see the fine old water-garden, of which John had told him, which had been laid out at the time of the building of the house. How wonderful it seemed to them to be together, away from the crowd of guests; to saunter along the stone pavements between the formal ponds, each with its fountain and water-lilies, or to pause and watch the goldfish glide like small red torpedoes through the dark crystal of the water, visible between the flat green shields of the lily-leaves. They were entranced at the discovery of one another, and as they talked they glanced at each other with a shy wonder, as if each were the first human creature the other had seen. When they came to the little temple where, more than twenty years ago, Charlotte had wept for Maurice, they went in and sat down. It gave them a delicious sense of intimacy to sit together in that secret place, with its stony chill and the faint smell of mould. When their talk flagged, the glassy noise of the fountains came through the half-open door like a musical, gently persistent rain.

“I suppose we ought to go back,” she said at last in a tone that charmingly admitted her regret, and, when they had returned to the crowd and she had left him, Eric felt that they shared a rapturous secret.

During the week that followed, he met Sylvia twice again. Then his visit to the Manor House came to an end, and he returned to his mother in London.

• • • • • • • •

At Christmas-time he was invited again to the Penningtons’. “I can offer you,” wrote John, “a dance in the neighbourhood and a luncheon-party here. In case these are not in themselves inducements, I beg to add that the Mardales—all the Mardales—will be at the luncheon and are certain also to be at the dance. I make no remarks; I merely proffer the information.”

Eric could only get away from London for three days. He arrived at the Manor House on the morning of the luncheon-party and spent two agitated hours looking forward to the arrival of the Mardales. They were the last of the guests to come, and during the hour and a half that they were at the Manor House Eric and Sylvia exchanged only a few sentences. They were shy of seeking one another out and of talking in company, and each avoided the other, casting despairing glances from a distance and feeling, each, that they had drifted hopelessly apart since their last meeting in the summer. Eric’s only consolation had been that he had sat next to Lady Mardale at luncheon and she had been very friendly to him, and this, he felt, would make it easier for Sylvia and him to meet in the future. He had almost got over his awe of Lady Mardale now. He had discovered that her coldness and austerity were only external: in all she said he was aware of an unmistakable sincerity, and she charmed him by talking to him without the least suggestion that he was a young man and she a middle-aged woman. And when her stern, handsome face relaxed sometimes into a smile, he saw in her a humanity and a beauty which he had not at first suspected.

And so the pain of his disappointment was comforted a little, and a still greater comfort came when, as the Mardales were going, Sylvia came up to him and, on shaking hands, asked: “Will you be at the Crofts’ dance on Thursday?”

“Yes,” he said. “Will you?”

She nodded.

“Keep one or two dances for me,” he whispered as she hurried away to join her parents.

Chapter XXIII

Charlotte Mardale sat watching the dancers. She had not danced herself, but she was far from being bored, for there were many friends to talk to and she enjoyed the spectacle of the many-coloured shapes sliding and turning kaleidoscopically against the white and gold walls of the pleasant Georgian ballroom. Especially she loved to watch the young people. With her own youth and all the emotions of youth so far behind her, youth seemed to her a lovely and flower-like thing. The energy and gay confidence of these girls and boys touched her deeply. Young John Pennington passed her. She raised her lorgnette; no one could call John handsome, and yet there was in him, too, the magic of youth as he danced past, tall and slim, with the tall, dark girl in green. There, too, was Molly Croft, the youngest of the Croft girls, a plump, laughing, light-haired little creature, very like her mother. And what a charming, comical boy she was dancing with, laughing like herself, with ginger hair and a quaint turned-up nose—the jolly, fox-terrier type, she said to herself. And then, searching the moving crowd for her own daughter, she caught sight of Eric Danver. She would recognise that clean, golden head anywhere, with its haunting likeness to Maurice. All but his head was hidden by the crowd, and she watched for him to turn at the end of the room and come round in front of where she sat. Ah, it was Sylvia he was dancing with. They glided into view. Dress-clothes brought out still more his likeness to Maurice. “Clean,” she thought to herself, trying to define the quality in them both that so captivated her; “clean-cut; a clean-cut Englishman.” How lovely Sylvia looked in her jasmine yellow silk—that colour had been an inspiration. Beautiful, beautiful young creatures. Charlotte felt the tears rise to her eyes at the sight of them. What would life do to them? How would they be, twenty-five years hence? “O God,” her heart cried out, “be kind to them—kinder than to me.”

They glided past her, lost in one another, it seemed; or was it only that dancing had heightened their colour and made their eyes shine? There was something pool-like and flower-like in the eyes of children and young folk, a depth and purity which time dimmed too soon. They were lost now in the crowd. Again Charlotte felt that sense of reconciliation. Life, which had robbed her of so much, had somehow atoned for the robbery. Maurice, and what Maurice had meant to her, were in some inexpressible way still with her.

• • • • • • • •

Eric Danver and John Pennington, having in the small hours arrived back at the Manor House from the dance, declared that they were not sleepy, that they could not possibly go to bed yet, and retreated to John’s study, just, as they said, for a drink.

John, handing a glass to his friend, stood gravely inspecting him. “Eric,” he said; “what exactly is the matter with you?”

“The matter?”

“The matter! Concealment is useless, even if it were possible. A dance, in itself, is not sufficient to transfigure a perfectly sane young man. Is it love, Eric, or a feverish cold? I insist on an explanation. Surely you haven’t gone as far as …?”

“As it happens, I have,” said Eric, cheeks glowing and eyes shining.

“You proposed?”

“Yes.”

“To Sylvia Halnaker?”

“Well, who else would it be?”

“Oh, God knows. Hard-bitten roués like you, Eric, are quite unpredictable. And the answer, as occasionally in the House, was in the affirmative?”

“Yes. But I suppose we have to wait to hear what Lord and Lady Mardale have to say about it.”

“Unless you consider abduction simpler.”

“Sylvia asked me to go over to tea to-morrow, and I could, of course, if you wouldn’t mind letting me have a car. I could catch my train, you see, at Templeton.”

“But of course we’ll send you.”

“That’s very good of you, John. But what do I do when I get there? That’s what I want to know. Must I ask to see Lord Mardale and … ”

“And demand the hand of his daughter. Certainly. And Lord Mardale will rise from his study chair and either shake you formally by the hand or kick you formally downstairs. But here, now that I think of it, we are faced with a difficulty: his lordship’s study is on the ground floor.”

“But seriously, John, I haven’t a notion what to do.”

“It’s useless, Eric, your trying to convince me that this is the first peer’s daughter you have proposed to. But seriously; Sylvia, surely, in our immodest modern way, will have blurted the whole thing out before you get there, and Lord Mardale will, I suppose, have a talk with you. My dear chap, I do hope all goes well. I won’t congratulate you now; but you must send me a wire at the first opportunity, and, if all’s for the best, I’ll come up to London for a night and we’ll have a dinner to celebrate the occasion. And if all’s for the worst, we’ll still have a dinner, to drown our despair. Eh?” Then a dry smile lit up John’s face. “By the way,” he said, “you haven’t wasted much time, have you, when one comes to think of it?”

• • • • • • • •

It was half-past four in the morning when the Mardales got back to Haughton from the dance. Sylvia went to her mother’s room to help her to take off her jewellery and dress. As she stood behind her mother’s chair, unfastening the clasp of her necklace, she raised her eyes and saw her mother’s reflection in the mirror before her, like a portrait in its frame. What a lovely portrait she made, with her grey hair and the soft pallor of her throat and neck and face, pearly above the lustrous, plum-coloured brocade. The necklace flashed and twinkled as she tried to undo the clasp. How sad her mother’s face was! Why was it, she wondered, that she always looked so sad? The clasp yielded, and with a glitter of falling water the necklace dropped.

Sylvia stood still, holding it by one end. “Shall I tell you a secret, Mother?” she said.

Charlotte’s heart leapt as if at the sound of a warning. She looked up at the mirror before her, and saw, in the gold dust of the reflected lamplight behind her own reflection, the blushing face of her daughter. “Do, dearest,” she said calmly.

“Someone proposed to me to-night.”

“My dear!”

Sylvia laughed happily. “And if he hadn’t, I believe I should have proposed to him. You know who, don’t you, Mother?”

“I could guess.”

“Oh, do say you like him, Mother.”

“But, dearest …”

“Oh, I know what you’re going to say: I hardly know him. But that makes no difference, Mother, when you fall in love. I don’t suppose you quite realise, because you and father had known each other so long, hadn’t you? Mother, the first moment I saw him I felt that … that he was different—different for me, at least—from everyone else. Why, I spent the whole of October, November, and December thinking of him.”

“And never a word to me, you bad child?”

“But it might all have come to nothing, Mother. I wasn’t even sure that he felt the same.”

“Do you know anything about him, Sylvia?”

“Not a thing, my dear, and don’t care. I know he’s a darling; that’s enough. Don’t say you don’t like him, Mother.”

“No, I won’t, dearest. I’ll even say I like him very much indeed.”

“And think him very good-looking?”

“Very, very good-looking.”

“Are you saying this just to please me?” Sylvia seized her mother by the shoulders and stared into her eyes.

Charlotte smiled. “I’m saying it, dearest, because I really mean it.”

Sylvia gave her mother a loud kiss. “He has to go back to London to-morrow evening—that is, this evening—so I told him to come here to tea on the way, and catch his train at Templeton. You see, he will have to see Father about it. Oh, Mother, you do think Father will be pleased, don’t you?”

“Yes, dear, I do; but I think he may very likely suggest that you wait a little.”

“Wait?”

“Just a little, before you are actually engaged.”

How old and cold and calculating she sounded to herself. And all the while she longed to throw her arms round her child and tell her that she thought Eric the nicest boy in the world, and that of course they should marry whenever they liked. But common sense restrained her. Common sense, she thought to herself, my besetting sin, that fatal poison that quenches all the noble fire of life. And yet it was not only common sense this time. It was caution, care for Sylvia’s precious happiness. For, after all, they knew next to nothing yet about the boy. Alfred would have to make a few enquiries before anything was fixed. But in the end, of course, it would be all right; one had only to look at Eric to be sure of that.

Sylvia was watching her, a little crestfallen. “Oh, Mother, you think Father will say that? Well, promise me, anyhow, that you won’t put it into his head.”

Charlotte laughed. “Yes, I promise. But, if he does say so, you mustn’t be disappointed, dearest. After all, you’ll be able to meet just the same, when he can get away from his work. And now, off you go to bed, my dear. I can do all the rest for myself. One minute! Let me unhook your dress before you go.”

When the hooks were undone, Charlotte threw her arms around her daughter and kissed her. “My darling,” she said, “I do hope you will be very, very happy.”

• • • • • • • •

When the car taking Eric to Haughton had turned in at the lodge gates, and was already half way up the drive, it overtook Lord Mardale, who was walking towards the house. Eric stopped the car and got out.

“Hallo, there you are!” Lord Mardale came up with outstretched hand. The car drove on, and Eric and Lord Mardale paced slowly towards the house.

“I’m glad we have met now,” said Lord Mardale, “because we can now get our talk finished before we reach the house.”

“I’m afraid, sir,” Eric began, “you and Lady Mardale may have thought it rather sudden. You … you must want to know all sorts of things about me before. … You see, I really didn’t know what was the right thing to do on these occasions.”

Lord Mardale smiled. “Then it’s your first occasion, it seems, Eric?”

“Yes, sir, the first. I ought, oughtn’t I, to tell you of my income and prospects, and of my family?”

“Well, I think we could talk of them later, don’t you? As for the present … now, you must not be disappointed, my boy, by what I am going to ask of you, because Lady Mardale and I have no wish to discourage you and Sylvia; but we feel that you and she—and, in fact, all of us—should know each other a little longer before you are actually engaged. Remember, you have only seen one another … five or six times, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Eric admitted, “I’m afraid that’s all, sir. It seems so much more.”

“Of course. Time, where love is concerned, doesn’t seem to matter, does it? But, for all that, we want you both to wait for at least a few months before the question of an actual engagement is settled. I hope you will not feel that we don’t sympathise or are unreasonable.”

Eric raised his eyes. The kind, penetrating eyes which he had first seen last summer at the Manor House were fixed upon him.

“I should be unreasonable if I did, sir,” he said.

“You must come and stay with us when you can get away from the office, and you’re certain, aren’t you, to be at the Penningtons’ too from time to time, so you and Sylvia will not be cut off from one another.”

“May I write to her, sir?”

“Certainly you may.”

“Does she … know about this?”

“About our wanting you to wait? Yes, we talked it over this morning. You would probably like to have a word with one another now, before tea. I expect we shall find Sylvia in the morning-room. Come along; I’ll show you the way. Remember, if you really must catch the five-forty-five at Temple-ton you will have to leave here at twenty-five past.”

“You’ve been awfully good, Lord Mardale,” Eric stammered as they climbed the steps to the front door.

Lord Mardale took his arm. “So have you, old man,” he said.

They crossed the hall, and Lord Mardale opened the morning-room door.

• • • • • • • •

When, half an hour later, Sylvia and Eric came into the drawing-room for tea, it seemed to Charlotte and Alfred that they brought with them a glow of youth and happiness that filled the whole room and spread its light and warmth into their hearts too. It was as if all four of them on that January afternoon sat irradiated in a springtime of the heart that blossomed in the eyes of those two enchanted young people, and sang in subtle overtones in the sound of their voices. How foolish, thought Charlotte as she watched their shining glances, to regard life as a sad disillusionment when it can awake such rapture as this.

When the time came for Eric to go, and Sylvia had gone to the door to see him off, Charlotte turned to Alfred, and they smiled at one another. “Aren’t they adorable?” she said.

Chapter XXIV

The same evening, after dinner, Eric sat with his mother in their little drawing-room. The curtains were drawn, a big fire purred and crackled in the grate, and they sat with their chairs drawn close up to it, for the weather was very cold. He had been telling her of his brief visit to the Penningtons’, and was making up his mind to tell her about Sylvia. But it was difficult. He was not usually shy with his mother, but now an unexpected hesitation impeded him. He kept edging towards the point of confession, and then sheering off and resolving to postpone it to another occasion, and under the stress of this indecision he kept discovering that he had forgotten his mother and fallen into a dream.

He was so preoccupied that he did not notice that she too was ill at ease and only half attentive when he spoke to her. At last, after a longer silence than usual, she stirred in her chair and began to talk.

“Eric, there is something I must tell you; something, my dear, that you may think I ought to have told you long ago, but I thought it better to wait till … till you …” Her voice failed, and Eric saw that the small hand that grasped the arm of her chair was trembling violently.

“Mother,” he said, jumping up from his chair and kneeling beside hers, “what is it? Don’t be upset. Has something dreadful happened?”

“I’m so afraid, my boy,” she said, swallowing down her tears, “of what you may think.”

He stroked her hand. “Why, you needn’t be afraid of that, Mother. Tell me. You thought it better, you said, to wait … ”

“Yes, till you had seen something of the world, and could, perhaps, judge more … more charitably. When you fall in love, Eric, as you will, my dear …”

His heart leapt. He was on the point of saying, “But I am in love, Mother,” but again his shyness checked him. “When I fall in love, Mother …”

“When you fall in love yourself, you will perhaps understand better. When I was two years older than you are now, Eric, I fell in love.”

“With my father?”

“With a man who was already married—unhappily married. I loved him very, very deeply, Eric. Your grandmother and I and the two younger girls were living in London then, and he and I used to meet every week, when he came to town on business, and lunch together. My mother knew of it—I had told her—and was very much upset. She urged me to give up seeing him; it could lead to nothing but unhappiness, she said, and would prevent my settling down in life. Besides, as she said, it was not right. If people got to know, as they would be sure to do, there would be talk and scandal. I knew what my mother said was true, but love seemed to me such a wonderful, such a beautiful thing, that nothing else mattered to me. I couldn’t give him up. My mother wrote to him, telling him that he was spoiling my future and my good name, and he tried—honestly and honourably tried—to persuade me that we ought to part. But I refused. I would rather have died than not see him. And then, soon after that, I left home. He never tried to persuade me, Eric; remember that. I did it of my own free will, and I have never regretted it.”

“You went to live with him, Mother?”

“Yes. He took a little house in London and I went to live with him. How happy we were! How well worth while it seemed to me to have thrown away everything, and devoted my life to him! He spent half the week with me and half at his country home, and, except for a few intimate friends, everyone believed that we were husband and wife. A year later you were born.”

“I!” Eric’s voice was sharp with surprise. “Then I’m …” He paused, and his voice grew quiet again. “Go on, dear,” he said. He knelt beside her still, and still stroked the small white hand that grasped the arm of the chair.

“Your father is still alive, Eric; not dead, as you supposed. You have always believed he was your uncle. I often dreaded that you might get to know from someone else. You never did?”

“Never, Mother.”

“At first he changed his name a little; we were Mr. and Mrs. James Danver. Then, when you grew older and we left our little home, and I came to live here, he became Sir John Danver, and I was his sister-in-law. He actually had a younger brother, you know, who had died a few years before in Australia. What a nightmare such pretences and precautions can become, Eric! They were the only blot on my happiness at first. But then came another—my anxieties for your future, my darling, and fear for the ways in which this might trouble it.”

Eric’s hand lay now on the arm of the chair beside her own. It no longer stroked hers. She turned her head anxiously to look at his face. All the healthy colour had died out of it; he was very pale, and his eyes were fixed dazedly in front of him, as if he were watching a ghost.

“My darling,” she said, with agony in her voice, “is it too awful? Are you horrified at your mother?”

Her despair recalled him to himself. For a moment he looked at her, bewildered: then she saw the old warmth and affection flow back into his eyes. “Poor Mother,” he said, laying his face against the small hand on the arm of the chair. “Horrified? No, dear, I’m not horrified.”

“Do you think I did wrong, Eric? Do you think I ought to have given him up?”

“You did right, dear, if you loved him so much.” His eyes looked straight into hers, and she saw that he meant what he said.

“I’m so glad,” she said, tears running down her face, “so very, very glad. It’s been a load on my mind for years.”

He took her hand again. “And now the load has gone, dearest.”

• • • • • • • •

After his mother had gone to bed, Eric sat for a long time staring into the fire, and staring, through the fire, into the gulf that had so suddenly opened at his feet. He was so stunned by the shock of what his mother had told him that he could not yet realise all its implications. His first feeling had been regarding his mother. Her story, if it had been told him, as she had told it, of another woman, would have aroused only his sympathy and admiration for one who could so bravely devote herself to the man she loved. But that it was his own mother’s story—that she, however blameless her action might seem to a generous mind, had incurred this social stigma—had shocked him deeply. He had always looked upon her as irreproachable; but now she had broken one of the laws of society, and, if society chose to regard her as an outcast, it would be within its rights. Yes, she and he, her illegitimate child, were under a stigma; it was useless to blink that. None the less he felt profoundly that she was blameless; her story, the gentle tone of her voice, with its old way, which never failed to move him, of giving to a word or phrase a ring of exquisite pathos, and her painful agitation as she told it, had pierced him to the heart. He longed to protect and comfort her, and he had resolved at once, while she was still talking, that, whatever happened, he must never give her the smallest cause for remorse. He came to that resolve almost at the same moment that he realised, with a sudden chill at the heart, what this new discovery might mean, and almost certainly would mean, to himself and Sylvia. It was at that moment that his mother had seen the pallor of his face and the brooding speculation in his eyes. With a great effort he had mastered himself, and, thank God, he had succeeded in reassuring her. The load had been lifted from her mind.

But that load had fallen upon him, and he sat now staring at the fire, almost crushed by the weight of it. His first impulse now—a duty which it never occurred to him to shirk—was to write to Lord Mardale. What would be the result of that? He was only too sure of the result, but the letter must be written. His mind became so urgently concerned with it that he determined to write it at once. There was a small bureau with pens and paper in the drawing-room. Eric went to it, and, sitting down, began his letter. For three-quarters of an hour he sat there, alternately writing and staring in agitated thought at a picture that hung on the wall in front of him. Then, having addressed and stamped the letter, he went downstairs, let himself quietly out of the front door, and went and posted it.

The sharp, clear air of the winter night struck cold on his forehead. The sky was thickly sown with the cold blue sparkle of stars, as though even it were frosted. When he had returned to the house and shut the front door he was aware, deep within him, of a vague consolation. He did not know the cause of it.

When he reached the drawing-room he closed the door and flung himself into his chair again. Again he stared at the fire. What did it mean, what did it involve, to be illegitimate? How he hated the word! Many people, many of his own friends perhaps, would not receive him if they knew. Good God! All these years he had been unconsciously living on false pretences. It was as if his whole life had suddenly been undermined. He was seized with the quixotic impulse to go to all his friends and tell them, uncloak himself and give them the chance of dropping him. Then it struck him that to do so would be to uncloak his mother also, to make a public exhibition of her. What a horror!

Mr. and Mrs. Pennington and John. What would they think? He could hardly believe that it would make any difference to John: John, under his screen of cynicism, was such a loyal and generous fellow. He found himself coining phrases for him. “Unmarried, Eric? An inconvenient but surely an unimportant oversight.” Miserable as he was, he smiled at his own unuttered mimicry of his friend.

Ah, if only it were unimportant! But to him, brooding there in his chair, it seemed of overwhelming importance. Already it had changed the whole complexion of his life. Sylvia. She appeared to his mind’s eye suddenly with extreme vividness. She stood and smiled at him in the jasmine-coloured silk she had worn at the dance. How irresistibly lovely she had looked! The memory of her thrilled him body and soul. And now this new, rapturous life which had so miraculously dawned for them was to be ruthlessly abolished. Despair swept through him. His whole being rose up and protested against the sacrifice of such love as theirs to an inhuman convention.

Crouching forward, motionless, in his chair, he struggled helplessly in the meshes of those cruel abstractions which were so relentlessly closing in upon him. Then, with a deep, quivering sigh, he lay back and stretched himself wearily, and then sat up and glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes past twelve. With a lead weight at his heart he rose slowly to his feet, switched out the lights, and went upstairs to his bedroom.

Chapter XXV

Lord Mardale received Eric’s letter next day by the midday post. Carson brought it to him, among others, in his study. It was the only one among them which appeared to be a personal letter, and Lord Mardale dealt with the others first. Then he took up Eric’s. He tore it open, and, not knowing the clear, neat handwriting, turned the page and glanced at the signature. Then he began to read it through. As he read, his face contracted with pain, and, having come to the end, he laid the letter down and sat gazing unseeingly in front of him. Then he took it up and read it slowly through again.

His first thought was for Sylvia. What a cruel thing this was for her, for it was out of the question now that she should marry Eric. The thought of suddenly destroying her happiness appalled him. And how terribly upset Charlotte would be too. The fresh eagerness of the love of these two young people had touched him and Charlotte deeply. They had felt as if life at Haughton had blossomed all at once into a new spring, and now this dreadful secret had raised its head and the spring had withered. And what a terrible thing for the boy, and such a very nice boy too. From the first Alfred had liked him; in his charming openness and simplicity he had recognised a rare goodness of heart. How typical of him it was now to write at once and confess this terrible secret, knowing, as he must know, poor boy, that by doing so he was ruining his hopes of Sylvia. And not only had he lost Sylvia, but he had suddenly found himself branded with this slur, and all utterly undeserved. This, with a vengeance, was visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children. He must go to the boy at once. He would run up to London by the afternoon train and send him a wire to meet him. How horribly painful it would be! But he could not write; he must talk to him, assure him, face to face, of his sympathy and his deep regret. He rose to his feet. He must show the letter to Charlotte and arrange about going up to London. For the moment they would say nothing to Sylvia. Charlotte would break it to the poor child when she thought best.

• • • • • • • •

Eric, on his return from the office, found Lord Mardale’s telegram giving the name of a London hotel and asking him to meet him there that evening. Did that mean that Lord Mardale had got his letter or not? He had said nothing to Eric on the previous day about coming to London; and yet, would there have been time for him to receive the letter and arrive in London already? And would he have troubled to come expressly because of the letter? And if he had, what did that imply?

Eric’s mind wearied itself out with these troubled conjectures. At last he gave up thinking and went out. It would be more endurable to walk than to sit still until the hour of his appointment. He walked along the western edge of Regent’s Park, where the sedate classic terraces look out upon the canal and lawns and the trees among whose bare branches now the blue winter twilight was beginning to curdle. Then, leaving the Park behind, he crossed the Marylebone Road and continued his walk down the whole length of Baker Street.

When the appointed hour came, and he enquired for Lord Mardale at his hotel, he was taken at once to a private sitting-room.

Lord Mardale was sitting idle by the fire. A closed book lay on a table near the window; but for that, the room was bare of everything but the hotel furniture. Lord Mardale stood up as Eric was shown in, and took him by the hand.

“My boy,” he said, “your letter arrived by the midday post; it just gave me time to catch the afternoon train. I couldn’t write to you; letters are such crude things. I felt I must say to you what I have to say. And yet, Eric, it’s terribly hard to say. I can’t tell you how I appreciate your writing to me at once as you did, when you must have realised what the result, the inavoidable result, would be. That was very generous of you. You do realise, don’t you, my dear boy …”

Lord Mardale paused, overcome by the painful-ness of what he had to say.

“That I can never marry Sylvia, sir? Yes, I … I supposed it would be … out of the question. I quite see it.” His lip trembled as he spoke.

“Life plays strange tricks sometimes, Eric. It is hard, very hard, at such times as these, to believe that life is good, and that in some indescribable way this thing that has happened must be for our good. Yet I believe it must be so, and I hope you try to do so too.”

Eric hung his head. “Yes, sir,” he said, almost in a whisper. His voice, and the sight of his despair, wrung Alfred’s heart. His youth and beauty seemed made, by the very law of nature, for happiness and love, and in Alfred’s ears, his own attempts to comfort him sounded the emptiest pedantry. But what else could he do? His heart urged him to try to express the deep sympathy he felt, and to show Eric that his feelings towards him were entirely unaltered.

“Don’t imagine, Eric,” he went on, “that we have changed towards you. We haven’t. But, if I were to consent to your marrying Sylvia, I should be countenancing the breaking of God’s law, even though you are quite blameless. It would be contrary to my faith, Eric, and my conception of what is right, and for that reason I believe it would be bad for Sylvia. So I ask you—and I know it is a very hard thing to ask—to help me by not trying to hold on to Sylvia. Will you?”

“Yes, sir, I will. But you’ll let her know, won’t you, that … that … You see, I couldn’t bear her to think I had changed.”

“No, she shall not think that, Eric. In fact, if you both wish, you shall meet and talk once again. After that, it would be better, perhaps, not to see each other for some time. If you do, it will only make it more difficult, I’m afraid. Later, when you have both got over it, you will be able to meet again as usual, I hope. Meanwhile, don’t forget that Lady Mardale and I are your friends. We shall want to meet you when we can. You will come and see me, won’t you, when I come up to London, as I do from time to time?”

“You’re very kind, sir. And now I think I’d better go.” He held out his hand, and Lord Mardale shook it in silence. Neither could trust himself to speak, and Eric went to the door and disappeared without another word.

Alfred dropped back into his chair. He had had no doubts of the rightness of what he had done, but he felt as if he had condemned to exile a good and innocent young man.

Chapter XXVI

John Pennington received a letter, not a telegram, from Eric, telling him of the Mardales’ favourable reception of his proposal to Sylvia, and, immediately after it another, telling him very briefly that all was off, and giving no reason. “I will tell you when we can talk about it,” was all he said; and John, full of sympathy, at once set off for London and telegraphed to Eric to dine with him at his club.

Eric’s appearance, when he arrived, shocked John, but he said nothing.

“How glad I am to see you, John,” he said, and it seemed to John that even his voice was changed.

“Did you come specially?”

“Of course I did, my dear chap.”

“It’s awfully good of you.”

“Nonsense. Is it likely I should have sat at home twiddling my thumbs? Come, you must first have a drink. What is it to be? Cocktail? Gin and bitters? Sherry? I think you ought to have a large brown sherry; it’s more of a tonic than any of the others.”

Eric, as if relieved that John had saved him the trouble of choice, said he would have a sherry.

“When we’ve finished our drinks,” said John, “I’ll take you to a room that’s generally empty, where we can talk undisturbed.”

They sat sipping the sherry, John full of a sympathy that he could not express. “That will do you good,” he said, watching Eric drink. “I have read somewhere that sherry has twice the vinosity of any other wine.”

“And what exactly does that mean?” asked Eric.

“I haven’t an idea; but it sounds convincing, doesn’t it? Ever since I learned it I’ve regarded sherry with a greater respect.”

To John’s relief, Eric laughed. They finished their sherries simultaneously, and John took Eric upstairs to a room labelled “Small Writing-Room.”

The room, as they had hoped, was empty, and there was a bright fire. Near it was a sofa, into which they settled themselves.

“So they changed their minds, Eric?” said John, to save him any difficulty he might have in starting.

“Yes, but they had a perfectly good reason, John, and they were as nice as they could be about it. You see, on the very evening I got back here my mother told me something … that … well, that was bound to spoil everything. She told me that I am the illegitimate son of herself and Sir John Danver.”

His eyes were fixed on John’s face as he spoke. What he read there, to his great relief, was mere concern; there was not the smallest sign that John was shocked.

“My dear chap,” he said, ” and you felt it your duty …?”

“Of course; to write at once and tell Lord Mardale.”

“Yes,” said John, “I suppose it was.” He considered the case for a moment; then his lip curled. “And he didn’t feel it his duty, apparently, to show you the same generosity as you had shown him?”

“He was as generous as he could be, John. He came straight up to town to see me the moment he got my letter. No one could have shown greater kindness.”

“Except by shaking off a rotten prejudice and taking the trouble to be really honest.”

“Honest? But he was honest. He told me frankly what he felt. He feels, you see, that to let me marry Sylvia would be to … to condone adultery.”

“Yes, that’s what I call dishonesty. Does he refuse the Duke’s invitations and forbid the Duchess the house when she calls at Haughton? Not he. And yet he knows jolly well that the Duke can trace his descent only too directly from a bastard daughter of Charles the Second.”

“But he doesn’t forbid me the house, either. He told me he hoped that when Sylvia and I had recovered, as he said, that I would go and see them often.”

“Then he’s merely inconsistent. He doesn’t know what he really thinks. But to return to the Duke for a moment; if Ilderston (he’s the eldest son, you know) proposed to Sylvia, and she accepted him, would Lord and Lady Mardale refuse their consent? Not likely. They would jump at him.”

“Isn’t that a little different, John?”

“Not in the least. Once you extend your disapproval beyond the adulterers themselves, to their descendants, you can make no distinctions. To plead lapse of time—three centuries, or whatever it is—is nothing but a contemptible subterfuge, and to admit considerations of rank is to defy Christianity. In fact, I don’t see that, as an honest man and a priest of the Church, he has a leg to stand on. I’ve always cherished the belief, as I told you, that Lord Mardale was a genuinely good man; but I was wrong. The peerage and the Church together are too much for his goodness. As for Lady Mardale, she, of course, would be a fearful stickler for the conventions. I like and admire her, as you know; but she’s desperately cold and proud—one can see that. She, of course, will have been all out for the family dignity; she’s not the daughter of that hardbitten old harridan, Lady Hadlow, for nothing. The noble blood of the Halnakers must be kept untainted at all costs—that’s the slogan, I expect.”

“Well, and don’t you think, John, that there’s something to be said for it—for family dignity and blue blood, I mean?”

“Nothing whatever. It’s an anachronism, Eric. These old ideals, fine in their day, are as dead as mutton. Look at the Rodmells. Lord Rodmell’s mother is the daughter of a Yankee muck-merchant. If she hadn’t been, they would have had to sell Rodmell Castle. The Combermeres made enough money to buy a viscounty out of some sort of stomach-ache pill that was sold at a four thousand per cent. profit. The only nobility nowadays, Eric, is personal nobility. Not blood, but mind.”

John’s views, and the angry conviction with which he spoke, were very consoling to Eric, however he might try to dispute them. Though it neither made the case of himself and Sylvia more hopeful, nor altered his own feelings about the Mardales’ refusal, it cheered him to hear his good name so energetically vindicated. But he was not yet quite free from doubts.

“Then tell me this, John,” he said, studying his friend’s face once more as he asked the question, “would you be quite undisturbed if you were told that you were, to put it flatly, a bastard?”

“If we allow ourselves to be frightened by ugly words, Eric, we can never even begin to be honest. Mankind has the curious and comical habit of constructing scarecrows and then running from them in terror.”

“But you haven’t answered my question, John.”

Eric still scanned his friend’s face. John thought for a moment.

“Yes, Eric,” he said at last, “I should be disturbed, but not because I believed in the scarecrow. I should be disturbed because I knew that so many other people believed in it.”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Eric. “Many of my friends, if they knew, would be ashamed of me, and perhaps want to drop me.”

“Then I should let them drop me and be damned to them.” He was again silent for a moment. “Yes, my dear chap,” he went on, “it is bound to be rather a nuisance to you, or it would be if it were known. It amounts to this—that you carry about with you a kind of touchstone which would test your friends. Out of some it would bring the worst, but out of the best it would bring the best. But, after all, who does know? Almost nobody, I should think.”

“But that’s just it. I feel that everyone ought to know. If it were not for my mother I would tell all my friends, so that they should be free to choose. And I want you, John, to tell your father and mother.”

John stared at Eric. “My dear chap, I shall do nothing of the sort. It’s none of their business. You’re my friend; that’s got to be enough for them.”

Eric smiled bitterly. “I’m afraid you feel, John, that they would mind.”

“Do you honestly imagine, Eric, that my mother would mind? If you do, you are paying her a very poor compliment. As for my father, he has a heart of gold, but he’s a conventional old stick. It wouldn’t alter his feelings for you one jot, but it would bother him at odd moments. He would have pricks from his conventional conscience when he introduced you to old Lady Rodmell, the Yankee muck-merchant’s daughter. It would bring into action all the least honest sides of him, which it is so much kinder and healthier to allow to lie dormant. As for telling all your friends, my dear Eric, I never heard of such a piece of idiotic quixotry. Why, damn it, we are under no obligation to tell all our private history to our friends. People don’t, when they become intimate with other people, at once start making a clean breast of it. Imagine it: ‘Look here, Mrs. Wilkins, I don’t believe in God. Two years ago I got too much change at the Stores and never took it back. I committed fornication five—my memory is bad, it may be six—times last year, and my grandfather was a wholesale grocer.’ Such confessions, though they would certainly enliven the boredoms of friendship, are not necessary, Eric. How much the less is yours, which has nothing whatever to do with you personally? There are, of course, particular occasions when honesty compels one to speak, as in your own case when you felt, as I should have felt, that you must tell Lord Mardale. But to get on to the house-top and make a perfectly gratuitous announcement about it would be simply unmitigated folly. Not even the most scrupulous honesty calls for that. Believe me, Eric, it’s merely that you’re at present quite naturally over-sensitive about the thing.”

“You’re a better tonic even than the sherry, John.”

“You notice my vinosity, old man? Well, suppose we go downstairs and have some dinner.”

Chapter XXVII

After seeing Eric in London, Lord Mardale returned to Haughton by the last train. He found Charlotte alone in the morning-room. A tray containing a decanter and a plate of sandwiches stood on a table. Charlotte tried to smile a greeting, and that smile showed him how much she was suffering. “I ordered sandwiches for you,” she said. “Did you have dinner before you left London?”

“No,” he said, “I didn’t feel I could face dinner; besides, there would hardly have been time in any case.”

“My dear Alfred, then you must have something more than this. I’ll ring.”

“Don’t, my dear. These sandwiches will be quite enough. But you’re tired out,” he said, noticing the tired, sunken eyes and the sharp lines about her mouth. “You ought to be in bed.”

He sat down, and began abstractedly to eat a sandwich.

“Hadn’t you better have a little wine?” she said, pouring him out a glass of port and handing it to him. He sipped a little of it, and then asked in a low voice:

“You’ve told her, then?”

“Yes, poor little thing.” She sighed bitterly, and turned away her head. “I felt,” she said, “as if I had struck her in the face. Alfred, it is ghastly to have to treat innocent children so.”

“It is sometimes terribly difficult to do what one knows to be right, Charlotte. I felt as you felt when I talked to that poor boy this evening.”

“Did he … understand, Alfred?”

“Absolutely. He’s a noble creature, Charlotte. That’s what makes it so much harder. The very thing that has made it impossible for him to marry Sylvia has shown him as more than ever worthy of her.”

“Was he,” she asked anxiously, “very much upset?” She almost hoped to hear that he had not been, so unbearably painful to her was the thought of hurting him.

Alfred nodded with tightly closed lips. “But he was brave about it. We must help them both to be brave, Charlotte. They’re both young; they’ll get over it in time.”

Charlotte shook her head. “Never!” she said bitterly. “Life for them will never again be quite what it was before.”

“Let us hope it will become a deeper and more human thing for them. Doesn’t suffering do that for us sometimes?”

She had leant forward to refill his glass, and she saw that his eyes, serene and loving, were fixed on her face. She understood the question that lay behind the spoken question. “Yes, my dear,” she said with conviction, patting him reassuringly on the shoulder.

She leaned back in her chair, and for a while they sat in silence. Then Charlotte spoke again. “You feel quite sure, do you, Alfred, that it’s impossible?”

“That they should marry?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you, Charlotte?” There was surprise in his question. “Eric’s father and mother broke one of God’s laws, didn’t they? Eric was born in sin; we can’t get over that. That is the most terrible thing about sin; its consequences involve the innocent. If we allowed Eric and Sylvia to marry, we should be condoning his parents’ sin, shouldn’t we?”

Alfred and Charlotte never spoke of the old incident of Maurice Wainwright, but each knew now that the other was thinking of it.

Charlotte raised her eyes to his. “Christ said, ‘Let him that is perfect cast the first stone at her.’ I am no better than Eric’s mother,” she said grimly.

“You didn’t sin, Charlotte.”

“Yes, Alfred, I did.”

He glanced at her sharply; then his eyes softened again. “No, my dear; and, even if you had done, it would be no reason for committing another sin by countenancing your sin in others.”

“I remember,” said Charlotte, “something that old Mr. Winchmere—you remember him?—said to me when I was a girl younger than Sylvia. We were speaking of Tess of the D’ Urbervilles and Mamma’s disapproval of it as a book for Beatrix and me; and he told me that the older I grew, and the more involved in human sympathies and human troubles, the harder I should find it to distinguish between good and evil.”

“We should, if we were left to our own resources; but surely religion saves us from that? We have Christ’s example and Christ’s very words, haven’t we, to show us the way?”

“Yes, dear. But only the most human can rightly understand what Christ meant.”

“But Christ Himself will tell us what He means if we will give ourselves to Him. You believe that, Charlotte? You have experienced it, haven’t you?”

Charlotte sighed. “I don’t know, Alfred. Honestly, I can’t say. I have often felt myself urged by what I knew to be best in me. Is that the prompting of Christ?”

“Yes, Charlotte.”

“But, if I obeyed the impulse of what is best in me now, I should let them marry. My reasons for wishing them not to marry are contemptible reasons. I have discovered that to-day.”

“Contemptible? What do you mean, Charlotte?”

“I am afraid of what the Duke and Duchess and the Rodmells and all our friends would think.”

“That’s not contemptible, Charlotte. It means that you share with them a moral and social standard which you would be ashamed to fall below, just as you would be ashamed, and rightly ashamed, to be discovered stealing.”

“No, Alfred, it’s not quite that. If I believed in their moral standards I should be justified; but I don’t. If I listened to my own convictions, I should not hesitate for a moment in consenting to Sylvia and Eric marrying. But, though I am sure I should be right, I am too much of a snob and a coward to submit. I hate the thought of the whispers and the scandal; I’m frightened of them, even though in my heart of hearts I despise them. I imagine the old Duchess remarking in her abrupt way: ‘Well, when it comes to our aristocrats marrying … marrying …’ “Charlotte hesitated for a word.

“Bastards,” said Alfred. “That is the word she would probably use, and an ugly word too.”

“Yes, a dreadful word, Alfred; and yet it is nothing but our prejudice and our snobbishness that makes it dreadful for us.”

“No, dear; it is not snobbishness or prejudice or cowardice that makes you afraid of the talk and scandal, but religion and the authority of the ages. If we believe that man is something better than an animal, that he is a creature with a heart and mind and soul inspired by God, we must trust, mustn’t we, to the accumulated wisdom of the ages rather than to our own unaided thoughts and emotions? What seems to you snobbishness and prejudice and cowardice in yourself is really your instinctive reverence for that wisdom. You instinctively hate the thought of Sylvia being married to an illegitimate husband, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Charlotte, “and I despise myself for doing so.”

Alfred did not reply. His face was contracted with trouble, and Charlotte could see that he was exhausted.

“Come,” she said, “let us go to bed. We’re both tired out.”

• • • • • • • •

Next day was bright and frosty, and Alfred, having worked in his study all the morning, went out for a short walk in the grounds before luncheon. He crossed the lawn, which was grey with frost and rang hard and hollow under his feet. The great beech-trees had blossomed into an exquisite frosty filigree, and the firs glittered as if wrought out of spun glass. Striking a winding path, he followed it through a shrubbery of laurels and rhododendrons, and, turning through a gateway of clipped yew, emerged into the water-garden. Here everything was as still and bare as a crystal. The fountains were silent; the drippings from their stone lips had frozen into clustered columns of glass. The water-lily plants had shrunk away from the surface of the ponds into the hidden depths of the water, invisible behind the pane of ice, black as polished flint, that covered each. There was a cold and beautiful serenity upon the place that soothed Alfred’s heart as he paced round the stone-flagged path that enclosed it. He approached the little pillared temple, and suddenly it seemed to him that he had seen something move inside it. Could it be that a bird had got shut in? The blue reflection of the sky upon its windows prevented him from seeing clearly into it. He went up to the door and opened it. As he did so, someone rose from one of the chairs. It was Sylvia. She stood there, very pale, faintly and shamefacedly smiling at him.

“Sylvia!” he said. “I saw something move, and thought it must be a bird that was shut in. Why, you must be frozen, child.”

He took one of her cold little hands in his. “It’s nearly half-past one, my dear. We ought to go in to luncheon. Will you come?”

They went out together, and he slipped his arm through hers. “My poor little girl,” he said, “I wish I could do something to comfort you. But you must try to be brave, my dear. As time goes on you will be able to bear it better.”

She did not reply. She walked with her arm through his like a child at a funeral.

At last she asked: “How did he seem, Father? Very upset?”

“Eric? Yes, dear; naturally he was. I told him, Sylvia, that he might come and see you once again. After that, you had better not meet, had you, for some time? It will be easier to get over it if you don’t meet.”

“If you mean, by ‘get over it,’ cease to love him, Father, I shall never do that. We were meant for each other.”

“But you’ll try, my darling, won’t you?”

“No, Father. How can I try? It would be cruel to try, even if I knew how to. What harm has he done? He’s perfectly innocent—as innocent as I am. Then why should I make things worse for him by ceasing to love him? No, I shall try and make up to him by loving him all my life.”

Alfred’s heart sank. In his heart he agreed and sympathised so perfectly with what she said that he could not gainsay her. But he tried, gently and ineffectually, to make her see the sensible point of view.

“But if you can’t marry, dearest, it will only make you both unhappy to persevere.”

She did not reply. Then she asked: “Why is it, Father, that we can’t marry?”

“Mother told you why, Sylvia.”

“Yes, but what I mean is, that Eric himself has broken no law and committed no sin, so why do you look upon him as wicked, or in some way … unclean?”

“I don’t, my dear child. He’s one of the best-hearted and most honourable fellows I ever knew, poor boy.”

Sylvia sighed wearily. “Then I don’t understand, Father, why you forbid me to marry him.”

“Dearest, if we believe in our religion it is surely our duty to set our faces against the breaking of God’s laws. People look to us to set them an example. If their priests and their law-makers wink at contempt of religion and law, what are they to think? Our family, as you know well enough, has given the country bishops and statesmen and soldiers, and it has prided itself on its virtue. That is an honest pride, don’t you think so?”

“Indeed I do, Father.”

“Well, if you were to marry Eric, and it was known that he is an illegitimate child, people would be justified in thinking that I, a priest of the Church of England, thought lightly of the sanctity of marriage, and that you and I and Mother were not very creditable representatives of an old and noble family.”

“Only stupid and narrow people, Father.”

“But we must not be a cause of stumbling even for stupid and narrow people. Christ said: ‘I came not to call the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.’”

“But surely that doesn’t mean that we must be cruel and unjust to the good and innocent for fear of being misunderstood by the stupid and narrow people?”

“No, dearest; and we are not being unjust to Eric. It was his mother and father who were unjust to him. My dear child, all I say sounds to you, I know, cold and pedantic. But you believe, don’t you, dear, that I am only trying to choose what is right for us all to do, and that I would do anything in the world, short of what I know to be wrong, to bring you and Eric together? I’m very fond of Eric, Sylvia.”

“Dear, I know.” She squeezed his arm. “But” —and her voice trembled as she spoke—”but all I can feel or understand at present is that Eric is good and innocent, and I love him more than the whole world put together.”

Chapter XXVIII

Day followed day, and for Charlotte the sight of Sylvia’s grief became daily a greater strain. The whole thing had been so horribly cruel. She kept recalling that vision of Sylvia in the mirror, smiling and blushing in her yellow silk dress on the night when, after their return from the Crofts’ dance, she had told her that Eric had proposed, and she recalled, too, that other vision of her at tea on the following day, radiant with happiness in the presence of her lover. Never had she looked so lovely as in those brief hours of the blossoming of her first love, and Charlotte, remembering her own late springtime, had felt in her happiness for Sylvia’s sake that life was once more becoming a rapturous thing. Those visions of Sylvia kept rising before her, and then, immediately after them, that other vision of her face in the morning-room when, after Alfred had gone to London to see Eric, she had told Sylvia that she and Eric could never marry. The sudden extinction of bloom and rapture from the young face that she loved more than anything else on earth was a thing that would haunt her till her dying day.

It haunted her now, and, as if that were not enough, there was the constant spectacle of Sylvia herself, with all her gaiety and happiness and fresh colour gone. How well Charlotte knew what the poor little thing was suffering! And that was not all. There was Eric—Eric, who had appeared to her on her return to the Manor House as a living and breathing memory of Maurice, the boy who had brought her to a final reconciliation with life. The thought of him, broken too like Sylvia, cut her to the heart. Their tragedy was hers; they were, for her, all that was dearest and most beautiful in life, and their sufferings were suffered over again in her.

It was on a Saturday afternoon that Eric had come down to Haughton to bid good-bye to Sylvia. He had caught the one-fifteen from Paddington, and reached them at half-past three, and had returned to London by the last train the same evening. Alfred had been away on that occasion; Charlotte wished afterwards that he had been there. She had left the two forlorn young people alone together, and had seen Eric only at tea and dinner. How ill the poor boy had looked! His face was yet another tragic vision to haunt her days. As they rose from dinner, Carson had come to say that the car was at the door, and Eric had shaken hands with her. She longed to give him some proof of her affection and goodwill, to make him understand that it was her dearest wish that Sylvia and he should be happy. But what could she do or say? Nothing. And she shrank from empty assurances. She had turned away while he and Sylvia bade each other good-bye, but when their good-bye was over and he had reached the door, he had looked back, and she had seen the last glance they exchanged. There are some things, she thought to herself afterwards, recalling that dreadful moment, too painful to contemplate—looks and gestures which have in them an almost unendurable pathos. It had been something in the forlornness with which he had turned away and gone out of the room, and something in Sylvia’s eyes as they had followed him, that had stabbed Charlotte to the heart. She had sat down in the chair in which she had sat at dinner at the head of the table and burst into tears. Sylvia had come and knelt by her, and they had wept in each other’s arms. Then they had gone to the morning-room and sat there in silence for a while, and then, though it was still early, Sylvia had kissed her mother and gone forlornly to bed.

It had been when sitting alone afterwards over the fire that Charlotte had at last seen her way clearly. Deeply unhappy as she was, she was able to consider their normal life at Haughton with a greater detachment than usual. For her, life centred in Sylvia. She loved and respected Alfred, but she adored Sylvia. Without Sylvia life would have little meaning and no happiness for her. Alfred, too, adored Sylvia, but Alfred, Charlotte felt, was secure. If all else failed him, his religion would remain a source of comfort and happiness of which nothing could deprive him. But for Charlotte herself there was no security. She was dependent, utterly dependent, on human love, both of loving and of being loved. Love was her religion, and, if it were taken from her, all would have been taken. All the love of her heart was given to Sylvia. Sylvia’s happiness was hers; she asked no other happiness. Now, full of her jealous concern for Sylvia, she regarded the other aspects of her life. She liked society, and she enjoyed her own importance in society, and she enjoyed meeting friends and acquaintances. But how small and unimportant now all these things seemed compared with this tragic separation of Sylvia and Eric. Those whisperings and scandals, the scornful surprise of her social superiors and equals which she had feared so much before, had shrunk to things of little significance. And as for Sylvia herself, of what importance in her life was the opinion of the outside world compared with the love of a man such as Eric? Having that, she would have everything, and to deny her that, as she and Alfred were doing, was to deny her the one thing life offered that was supremely worth having. How willingly, she remembered, she herself would have discarded all else, if she could have had Maurice. Her fears of social opinion for Alfred and Sylvia and herself had been the last struggle of the Ebernoe in her.

That made her think of her mother. How horrified her mother would be if she were to hear that Sylvia had married a man who was illegitimate. Well, it was possible, quite possible, that the old lady would never know, even if they did marry; and, realising that, Charlotte realised that the thing might never become widely known. If it had not been for poor Eric’s honesty, they themselves might not have known. Certainly the Penningtons did not know, for Roger or Amy would hardly have failed to mention it to Alfred or her when they saw, as they must have seen, that Sylvia and Eric were mutually attracted. But, whether or not it was likely to be discovered, Charlotte was resolved now to persuade Alfred. She had sacrificed herself to Alfred, to his temporal and spiritual position, and even more to himself, because she could not bear to repay his love with desertion. Now Sylvia was to be sacrificed. But there was no question, this time, of desertion. It was to convention that Sylvia was to be sacrificed —to society and the Church. Alfred had a great sense of responsibility—responsibility to the Church, to society, to his own noble family. How could he hear the promptings of his heart among all these rival claims? If he could obey his heart alone, Charlotte felt sure that he would yield. And he must yield. The excruciating memory of Sylvia’s and Eric’s good-bye an hour ago returned, and her heart bled for them once more. It was then that she formed the resolve that, come what might, they should marry.

• • • • • • • •

When Alfred returned home on the following Monday, Charlotte drove to the station to meet him, and, as it was a fine frosty afternoon, they decided, half way between Templeton station and Haughton, to walk the rest of the way home, and, stopping the car, got out.

As soon as they had started walking and the car had driven on, Alfred enquired about Eric’s visit, and Charlotte, glad to ease her aching heart, told him all that had passed.

“Alfred,” she said, when she had finished, “we must stop torturing them. Saturday convinced me. If you had seen their faces when they said good-bye you too would have been convinced. I can’t bear it any more, Alfred.”

“My dear, you and I too are being tortured, and we must not turn traitor under the torture. If we give in as soon as our beliefs are put to the test, then our beliefs can’t be worth much. Anyone can do right when all goes well; it is only when we are submitted to tests such as this that we can show our mettle.”

“But I don’t believe we are right, Alfred. You speak of family pride and family virtue; are you sure the pride in this case is the right kind of pride, and that there is not too much of the letter and too little of the spirit in the virtue? Forgive me, Alfred dear. I don’t believe for a moment that you are not trying to do what is best. I know you too well to doubt that. But it is so hard to unravel one’s true motives at such a time as this. Are you quite sure that it is really that you are determined not to set a bad example, and not that your pride, like mine, shrinks at the thought of what the Duke and Duchess and the Rodmells and the Penningtons and the Crofts and all the rest of the county and country may think? You say it is hard to be good when trials come, but in this trial isn’t it perhaps easier to forbid the marriage, and avoid its unpleasant consequences, than to have the courage to say that virtue is everything and accident of birth nothing —that the innocent shall not suffer for the sins they have not committed, and that you are proud to have a boy as good and honest as Eric for a son-in-law? If the Halnakers could achieve that, it seems to me that they would prove themselves as virtuous as they pride themselves on being.”

“My dear Charlotte, I fully admit that I am afraid of what everyone, from the Duke downwards, may think, but not for the reason you imagine. I am afraid for the perfectly legitimate and creditable reason that I am afraid of behaving unworthily.”

Charlotte looked him grimly in the face. “Alfred,” she said, “I’m sorry to say I doubt that.”

“You actually think I am deceiving you, Charlotte?”

“I think you are deceiving yourself. If you had been there on Saturday and seen them say good-bye” —she put her hand to her eyes as if to shut out an unbearable sight—” it would have convinced you.”

“Dear, you are allowing your feelings to get the better of your principles. How could that have altered the morality of the case?”

“Very easily and very completely, Alfred. You accuse me of allowing feelings to get the better of principles. Are you not doing something much worse? Are you not allowing principles to get the better of feelings? You are forgetting that the new commandment is that we love one another.”

Alfred made a gesture of despair. “Dearest, you know well enough that I love Sylvia better than life itself. This is torturing me as much as it is torturing you. Don’t make it worse by depriving me of your help and sympathy.”

“I don’t want to be unkind, Alfred; but it seems that, as things are, I must be unkind either to you or Sylvia. Oh, Alfred, no mere principles are worth obeying at the cost of so much suffering to those two.”

“Our duty to God, Charlotte, has to be obeyed at all costs.”

Charlotte sighed deeply. “But it can’t be our duty to God to make them suffer. It’s a contradiction, an absurdity. Love and innocence are sacred things; it is our duty to God to protect them, not to deny them.”

For the rest of the way they walked in silence.

Chapter XXIX

Alfred stood in his study with his back to the fire and his hands in his trouser-pockets, staring in front of him. A paper half covered with writing lay on the writing-desk. He had been invited to preach one of the university sermons at Cambridge, and was now trying to compose it. But he was tired and depressed; the thoughts and words would not come. His heart was sore; to be at the same time formal, scholarly, and sincere was at the present time impossible to him. All his feelings at the moment were formless and acutely personal. He recalled suddenly how, twenty-one years ago, he had stood, heavy at heart as he was now, and heard the car drive away with Charlotte, and Carson shut the front door.

Once again he was alone. The daily sight of Sylvia’s mutely protesting misery and Charlotte’s growing hostility produced in him a bitter sense of isolation. He understood perfectly what was happening to Charlotte. Her moral sense, her sense of right and wrong, which was normally so keen in her, had broken down before the clamorous insistence of her motherhood. She had deserted him, left him to struggle alone; her one object now was to break down his resistance. She had ceased to think of right and wrong, honour or dishonour; she was thinking only of her child and her child’s happiness.

But she had not, for all that, given up argument. She fought for her emotional prejudice with unwearying and often very skilful casuistry which sometimes drove him, exhausted as he was, almost to the brink of madness.

“Tell me this, Alfred,” she had said to him two days previously, when Sylvia had happened to leave them alone together in the drawing-room. “Suppose that nobody but you and I knew that Eric’s parents were not married, and that it was certain that nobody would ever find out …”

He had sighed wearily. “But why must we bother ourselves, Charlotte, about hypothetical cases which could not possibly occur? Isn’t it hard enough, as it is, to keep clear minds?”

“I asked you that, Alfred, because it seems to me we have been all the time assuming that everyone will know about Eric’s birth. But, as it struck me for the first time this morning, the fact will more probably be that nobody, or hardly anybody, will know. Nobody seems to have known hitherto. And so there may be no question of your being misunderstood.”

“So long as we were not found out, Charlotte. And wouldn’t the very fact that we were relying all the while on not being found out condemn us in our own eyes?”

“Not in mine, Alfred. I should have done nothing to be ashamed of, and my own clear conscience would enable me to answer the rebukes of stupid and bigoted people if they did find out and were scandalised.”

“I can’t agree. In such a case as this we can’t be too scrupulous. The smallest taint of secrecy or subterfuge might involve us in the most appalling difficulties. We might at any moment find ourselves in a trap from which it would be impossible to escape without moral damage.”

Yesterday she had returned to the attack once again. She had been over to the Manor House to see Amy Pennington about the bazaar for the District Nurse Fund, and as soon as she got back she had gone to him in his study to give him an account of what had been arranged. As soon as she had finished doing so, she had once more resumed her indefatigable siege.

“I had a talk with John at the Manor House, Alfred,” she said. “I had thought that I noticed something hostile in him all through luncheon. It could only be, I guessed, because of Eric, and I wanted to know what John was thinking of us. So I got hold of him after luncheon and asked him if he had seen Eric lately. I saw his face cloud at the question. He said yes, that he had seen him in London last week. I asked how he had looked.

“‘Not very well, I’m afraid, Lady Mardale,’ he said. ‘He is, of course, terribly depressed.’

“I asked him if Eric had told him everything, and he said that he had. ‘It’s horribly painful for us all,’ I said to him, ‘but you understand how it is?’

“He did not reply. He stood with his head down, looking at the ground. Then he raised his eyes, and, seeing that I was expecting an answer to my question, he replied.

“ ‘Understand, Lady Mardale? ‘he said. ‘Well, to be quite truthful, I don’t.’

“ ‘You don’t feel, then,’ I said, ‘that it is impossible for a man in my husband’s position to consent? Do you think that if he could he wouldn’t? ‘

“ ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘my view is so very different from yours.’

“ ‘Let me hear it, John,’ I said.

“ ‘You see, my own belief,’ he said, ‘is that the only nobility and the only virtue nowadays are personal, whatever they may have been in earlier times. They lie in the man himself—nowhere else.’

“I told him that I agreed with him absolutely, and that I thought, too, that Eric was a boy of unusually fine character. ‘But for all that,’ I said, ‘my husband feels, you see, that we must not appear to condone his parents’ irregularity.’

“John raised his head and looked me in the face. ‘May I ask you a straight question, Lady Mardale?’ he said.

“I said, ‘Of course, by all means.’ I wanted to know, Alfred, what the boy thought.

“‘If one of the Duke’s sons,’ he said, ‘proposed to Sylvia, and she wished to accept him, would Lord Mardale consent?’”

Suddenly Charlotte had abandoned her narrative and asked him point blank:

“Would you consent, Alfred?”

“Certainly,” he had replied wearily.

“So I said to John,” said Charlotte. “I said I thought you would certainly consent.”

“‘And yet,’ he said, looking me full in the eyes, ‘an ancestor of the Duke’s, as we all know, was an illegitimate daughter of Charles the Second. I can’t see, Lady Mardale, where the difference comes in between Eric and the Duke’s sons. In a matter of principle like this, time and rank are mere accidents, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘They can’t be allowed to count.’

“Alfred, I had nothing whatever to say. Have you, I wonder? It is worth thinking over.”

Without waiting for him to reply, she had left the room.

• • • • • • • •

In a sense, Alfred was right about Charlotte. She had ceased to concern herself with abstract principles of right and wrong, but that was only because she was perfectly convinced of the rightness of her feelings. Love and her sense of justice dictated one thing and one thing only, and she pursued it, careless of the consequences. The happiness of Sylvia and Eric was the most important thing in her life. Friends, if they disapproved, could go; she could do without them. Still more insignificant were the opinions of mere acquaintances. As for religion, if religion was something that could be detached from love, and set in opposition to it, as with Alfred it now seemed to be, such religion was not for her. Alfred was wrong; she was quite sure of that now; and she was sure that if only he could cut himself free of this tangle of laws and principles, and listen to the promptings of his heart, he himself would know that he was wrong. How differently he was behaving now from when he had dealt with William the footman’s theft of the silver. There were no scruples then about condoning sin; and yet, according to the conventional view which Lady Hadlow had voiced so loudly, he was certainly condoning theft. But the issue was simple then, for he himself was not deeply involved; his goodness of heart had had free play. Now, he was too deeply ensnared to see his way out. His duty to Sylvia, his duty to his Church and his parish, to his family integrity, as precious to him as life, to his social position; his sense of justice and his horror of the least taint of moral obliquity—all these, and more, struggled in him, one against the other, for the upper hand. No wonder he seemed sometimes to have become stupefied. His mind and his heart were exhausted by the strain.

And she, too, was exhausted. She could argue no more. Argument, she had discovered at last, was a useless weapon. This was not, she knew now, a matter for argument. It was a matter of the heart. The most powerful arguments in the world were impotent against the heart. The only effect of argument was to embitter.

Meanwhile the hideous dilemma was sapping the health and happiness of all of them. Sylvia looked like a ghost. Charlotte watched her anxiously at meals; she was eating hardly enough to keep a bird alive. She never spoke unless spoken to, and her smile—that smile that Charlotte loved—had gone, it seemed, for ever. Charlotte had consulted the family doctor, and he had recommended a tour abroad, but Sylvia, when it was suggested, had begged so earnestly to stay at home that the project had been abandoned. Then there was that poor boy eating his heart out in London. Alfred, she knew, was sick at heart, and she herself felt old and ill.

Their unhappiness was the harder to bear because each of them had to bear it alone. Charlotte herself and Alfred were so opposed in their views that what little sympathy was left between them grew less every day, and both of them felt the unspoken reproach of Sylvia, who, though she could allow for their attitude, could hardly be expected to sympathise with it. She held herself aloof from them; that, for Charlotte, was the hardest thing of all to bear. Her loyalty to Alfred even now prevented her from telling Sylvia that she was on her side, and so she was deprived even of the one consolation of comforting her.

So the three of them lived from day to day, forlorn and dejected, going to bed each night exhausted with the day’s misery, and waking each morning, as to a daily nightmare, to the rediscovery of their inescapable wretchedness.

Chapter XXX

Next day Charlotte determined to try a last appeal. She could not argue this time; she had abandoned all faith in argument. If only she could persuade Alfred to trust his heart, and break through all those principles and conventions with which he had hedged himself in, the struggle would be over.

She found him sitting in the morning-room reading the paper. He laid aside the paper when she spoke his name, and raised his tired eyes to hers.

“I’m not going to argue any more, Alfred,” she said. “I’ve learnt at last that argument is worse than useless at such times as this; but I can’t stop trying, Alfred. I feel so sure that, if only you would let yourself see and feel clearly, your own heart would convince you.”

She bent over him, and, putting her arm round his shoulders, broke out in passionate entreaty. “Do try, Alfred, I implore you, for my sake as well as theirs. It’s too cruel—too dreadfully wrong. Can’t you just give up thinking, dear—just abandon all these hopeless questions of right and wrong and obey your heart? Think only of Sylvia and Eric; they are all that matters, and they are quite, quite blameless. Can’t you trust your heart, Alfred?”

He looked up at her, his face drawn with suffering.” If only life were as easy as that, dearest, how happy and simple everything would be. But it isn’t. Don’t try to force me to act against my convictions, Charlotte. We must never do that. So long as we hold to what is right, all must be well some day.”

She leaned forward and looked into his eyes. “Alfred, tell me this. If you listened only to your heart, would you consent?”

A deeper shade of weariness crossed his face. “But we must not listen only to our hearts, Charlotte.”

Charlotte insisted, her voice intense and low. “But if you did, Alfred?”

“If I did, dear, of course I should consent—unhesitatingly.”

“Ah! If only you would! Try, Alfred. I know—know infallibly—that you would be right.”

He covered his face with his hands. “Charlotte, you’ll drive me out of my mind. I know, much more surely than you, that I should be wrong.”

“You’re determined, Alfred?”

He nodded his head; his voice was as weak as an invalid’s. “Yes, Charlotte; quite determined.”

She took her arm from about his shoulders and left him.

• • • • • • • •

In the afternoon, in an attempt to escape from the strain and agitation which oppressed her, Charlotte set out for a walk alone. The frost which had held the country for so long had broken, and there was a faint sense of spring in the air. It was one of those dove-grey, sunless days when the sky and the haze of distance seem to be full of suppressed colours, held suspended in the prevailing grey and faintly visible through it. Charlotte felt that her heart, too, was thawing at that first promise of spring. She felt that she had escaped for a while from the tangle of human affairs. How wonderful, she thought, to be like trees or grass—never to think or act or refrain from acting, but simply to be. The soft touch of the air on her forehead soothed her nerves. Although the frost had broken, the ice in the ditch at the side of the path had not yet melted. Through its transparent panes Charlotte could see small green plants enclosed as if under glass. In one place she saw that the water was flowing under the ice. An air-bubble like a swaying clot of quicksilver pulsed with the flow of the water, now round, now elongated, now shattering to fragments and then coalescing again. It was as if she were watching the blood beginning to circulate once more in a vein of the great body of the earth.

Crossing a field, she came to an enclosure of wattles thatched with straw; it was like a model of the village of some savage tribe. It was a shelter for ewes and their lambs, and when she reached it she saw that round the open space inside the fence were snugly thatched lambing-pens. The place was full of broad woolly backs, and here and there a small, thick-legged lamb stood by its mother’s side, gazing solemnly at the new world. Half a mile farther on, on a southward-facing bank on the edge of a thicket, she found three primroses. She gathered them to take home to Sylvia. Perhaps they would give her a moment’s pleasure. The thought of Sylvia turned her mind back to the trap in which they were so hopelessly caught. The spring, of which these first premonitions had thrilled her, would bring them no happiness this year. And yet how short a time ago, on that afternoon after the Crofts’ dance when Eric had called on his way back to London, she had felt, in the presence of the radiant happiness of those two beautiful young creatures, that life was breaking into a new springtime. And what was it that had killed that spring? The omission of a certain formula which should have been recited in the presence of a certain official in the days before Eric was born. From that small omission had sprung a torrent of conflicting views and emotions which had wrecked the happiness of four perfectly blameless people. Considered thus, how fantastic, how futile, the whole trouble appeared. Yet was not that, calmly regarded, what it amounted to? Was it credible that God, the God of love who reads the secrets of every heart, should feel honoured and gratified by the sacrifice of two of the sweetest and most innocent of His creatures in expiation of that omission? To believe such a thing was mere blasphemy. So Charlotte argued with herself.

But it would be useless to argue so with Alfred. Alfred would bring forward a hundred principles to combat what he would consider such a capitulation to emotion. He would condemn them all, including himself—oh! certainly including himself, poor Alfred—to the most cruel suffering rather than yield an inch. Charlotte heaved a weary sigh at the thought of her vain attempts to move him. Her attempts only made him the more immovable, for he believed that she had given in to her feelings in defiance of her sense of right, and he felt that he must be doubly on his guard against falling, under the stress of his sympathy for the two young people, into her error. Oh, if only he would cease to think—if only he would trust his heart! Then all would be well, for Charlotte herself was ready to trust his heart; she believed in that, for she had seen it guide him boldly and infallibly on other occasions. Yet now, when they were in greater need of guidance than ever before, his heart had failed him and them.

Charlotte paused in her walking, and turned off the field path she was following to lean for a while against a five-barred gate in a high hawthorn hedge. She felt suddenly tired. The immense hopelessness of their dilemma had loomed up before her once more, and she felt hardly capable of facing it. Why had she come out alone on this long walk? The bare thought of the three miles between her and Haughton exhausted her. How would she ever get home? And what was there awaiting her, when she got home, but blank misery? It was too much. The daily spectacle of Sylvia’s despair, and the constant thought of that boy, so like her lost Maurice, struck down, like Sylvia, in the moment of his new happiness, the happiness which had seemed for her a fulfilment of what Maurice and she had forgone, was more than she could endure. Again the heartrending vision of their good-bye on that dreadful day when Eric had come for the last time to Haughton swam up into her memory. In her overwrought state it was too much for her: leaning there against the gate, she broke down in a violent fit of weeping. In her agitation she dropped the primroses she had gathered for Sylvia, and, altering her position to search for a handkerchief, she put her foot on them. For a while she gave herself up to her feelings, weeping on till her heart was empty of tears. Then with a deep sigh, as though the weeping had relieved her, she came to herself and looked about her. Then she missed something—something she had had in her hand. The primroses. Had she dropped them? She bent down and began to search on the ground. At first she could not find them; then her eye detected a green leaf half buried in the mud. Even that circumstance, desperate as she was, added its fraction to her pain. For a moment it seemed to her but another sign that all her efforts for Sylvia were doomed to fail. But her moment of weakness was over. She was aware of a growing resolution. It seemed that she had passed a crisis, and that her time of weakness and submission was ended. She leaned her arms along the top of the gate and gazed out over the country before her.

About half a mile across the fields a little red village lay sunk under the skeleton domes of leafless elms. The squat Norman tower of the church rose, a solid grey block, out of the huddle of tiled roofs. The sight of it brought calmness and strength to her resolution. She was resolved that she must end their unendurable deadlock. If they drifted on indefinitely in their present state, who could say what might be the end of it? She must compel Alfred to give in. In the end, when he came to his senses, when he saw happiness restored to all of them, he could not fail to be glad. But, whatever the result was for Alfred, she was resolved to save the happiness of Sylvia and Eric before it was too late. It was her duty.

Her face resumed its usual impassive handsomeness; the firm line of her mouth, with its hint of bitterness at the corners, became even sterner than usual. With a resolute movement she turned from the gate, regained the path, and continued her way home. Before she had reached the gate into the outer park her mind was made up. She was determined at all costs to break Alfred’s resistance. It was necessary, absolutely necessary, that he should yield, before their peace of mind was irretrievably ruined. There had been enough sacrifice to convention and moral principles; love and youth, Eric and Sylvia, were of infinitely more importance than all these dry bones. She would not hesitate. If she were to begin puzzling over the right and wrong of what she had resolved, nothing would ever be done. Was there not, after all, something callous in Alfred? Did not that adamantine goodness of his give him a certain immunity from human feeling? He could not have been suffering what she had been suffering in these last terrible days; if he had, his obduracy would have given way. The sight of Sylvia, of the sudden heart-rending change in her, would have melted a heart of stone.

She had reached Haughton at last; she entered the kitchen garden now through a door in the wall. Already the house, with its cornice and pillars and shining windows, was visible through the screens of leafless beech-boughs. Low in the west, bars of orange light showed where an invisible sun was setting. When she reached the house, Charlotte went straight to her room, took off her outdoor things, and, having put her hair into its usual faultless order and washed her hands, went downstairs and opened the door of Alfred’s study.

• • • • • • • •

Alfred, looking up from his writing at the sound of the opening door, saw Charlotte enter the room and come towards him. Her face was very pale, and set in lines of grim determination. It seemed to him, as he gazed up at it, that it was not a human face, but a face modelled in clay.

“Alfred,” she said, coming and standing at his desk, “I have determined to tell you something that I hoped never to tell you. You have driven me to it by your … your stubbornness towards Sylvia and Eric.”

“Stubbornness? You don’t believe, then, that I have been trying, all the time, only to do what is right?”

“Yes,” she said coldly and sternly, “I still believe that, but I believe that in your present state of mind you are incapable of judging what is right. You have allowed too many bonds to bind you.”

He looked at her in fear. What new attack was she going to make on him now? He was almost at the end of his endurance.

Coldly and sternly she looked him in the eyes. “Alfred,” she said, “Sylvia is not your child.”

“Not mine? “His voice was thin and toneless. “Then whose?”

“Whose could she be, if not yours? Maurice Wainwright’s.”

He stared back into her eyes, and his eyes were as stern as hers.

“Charlotte, I don’t believe you.”

“I ought to be glad of that, I suppose. Why don’t you believe me?”

“Because I don’t believe you capable of deceiving me, in the first instance, and certainly not of acting a lie for twenty-one years.”

“There were very good reasons for both, Alfred. It would have ruined your peace of mind if I had told you, and thrown you into a dilemma as … as harrowing as the one that is tormenting us all now. When I decided, after I had left you and gone to London, to return, it is clear, isn’t it, that I had repented of what I had done, and had resolved to be a good wife to you? It was a kind of conversion, Alfred—something like a revolution of heart. When I had chosen that course out of consideration for you and your position, how could I destroy the good for which I had sacrificed so much by telling you, when I discovered it a few days later, that I was going to have a child? Wasn’t it better to say nothing, and leave you at peace? It seemed so to me, from every point of view.”

He scanned her face with that grey, penetrating gaze of his, but her eyes did not flinch. The only signs that she was not perfectly calm were the little quick expanding and contracting of her nostrils and the play of aslight tremor in the lines about her mouth.

“Charlotte,” he asked her solemnly, “are you telling me the truth?”

“Yes, Alfred. You remember the dates, don’t you?”

He nodded. “Yes, the dates don’t disprove it.”

“You remember that Sylvia was born earlier than was expected.”

“Yes. Charlotte, will you swear to me that you are speaking the truth?”

“By anything you like to propose, Alfred.”

He bowed his head, and, setting one elbow on his desk, propped his brow in the palm of his hand. “And you have told me this now to escape from the difficulty of my consent.”

“I thought that if you knew that Sylvia too was illegitimate, you would no longer see any reason in withholding it.”

“Whether I do or not no longer matters. If Sylvia is not my child, my consent is not necessary.”

Charlotte stared at him for a moment speechless, her mouth ajar. “Alfred,” she gasped, “that had never occurred to me. I didn’t want to … to dispense with your consent. I wanted to give you a good reason for consenting.” She raised her hand to her forehead, as if dazed and exhausted. “I’ll leave you now, Alfred,” she said. “We’ll speak of this another time.”

Tall and upright, with her face of clay, she turned from him and went out of the room. The effect on him of her shocked surprise at what he had said was, for some inexplicable reason, to convince him finally that what she had told him was the truth.

• • • • • • • •

In the evening, when Sylvia had gone to her bedroom early, as she generally did now, they talked of it again.

“What do you feel about it now? “Charlotte asked with a tremulous anxiety in her voice.

He made a gesture of weary indifference.

“Do you feel,” she persisted, “that they may marry now?”

“There seems no reason why they shouldn’t. I can’t say. I don’t seem to have any opinions left. It is as if … as if the whole house had crumbled about my ears. I’m afraid I’m too tired to think, Charlotte, or to care to pick out the … the ethics from so much wreckage.”

He heaved a deep-drawn sigh. His face had become almost as grey as his hair. His voice was the weak, muted voice of a dying man. “Does Sylvia know about this?” he asked,

“No, and I don’t want her to know, Alfred.”

“You want her still to believe that she’s … my daughter?”

“Yes.”

Leaning back in his chair, he shaded his eyes with his hand, and Charlotte saw that he was weeping. She rose from her chair and bent over him.

“Alfred, my dear Alfred,” she moaned, “what have I done?”

“Only what you thought was for the best, Charlotte.”

“Yes, God knows I thought it best. Oh, Alfred, if you could only feel as I do!”

He was too tired even to wonder what she meant.

Chapter XXXI

Next morning Charlotte received a letter from Lady Hadlow’s companion telling her that the old lady had been taken ill. The doctor believed that it was her heart, and had ordered that she must be kept absolutely still. At the time of writing she was already very much better, “and you can imagine, therefore,” wrote Miss Ley, “how difficult it is to keep her in bed. This afternoon she was determined to get up. ‘Doctors,’ she said, ‘always exaggerate,’ and it was only by being even more determined than she was that I persuaded her to wait for a day or two. The doctor has been again, and tells me that, though the heart action is undoubtedly much stronger, there is always the fear of another attack. I will telegraph to you and Mrs. Swyncombe tomorrow morning if he thinks it advisable you should be sent for. Perhaps, however, you will prefer to come in any case.”

Charlotte determined at once that she would go. The London train left Templeton in an hour and a half. She went to see about the packing of her things. While she was busy about her preparations, the telegram arrived: “Patient no worse, but doctor recommends your coming.” Alfred brought it to her in her bedroom. He had opened and read it to save her the agitation of doing so. How kind and helpful he was to her during that hour before her departure, ordering the car, looking out her train from London to Fording, and sparing her as much trouble as he could.

“Alfred,” she said to him when he had delivered the telegram, “do nothing while I am away. I want to have your consent, your free consent, before they are engaged.”

“My dear,” he answered forlornly, “my consent doesn’t matter.”

Charlotte looked at him earnestly. “It does to me, Alfred,” she said.

There was no time to say more, nor at the moment was there more to say. Mary, Charlotte’s maid, came into the room to finish the packing, and Alfred went downstairs.

When the moment for departure came, Sylvia stole into her mother’s room to say good-bye.

“My darling,” said Charlotte, putting her arms round her, “I wish I hadn’t to leave you at present.”

Then, overcome by the pang of leaving Sylvia and an irresistible longing to comfort her, she said: “Don’t be so despairing, my dearest. Listen; there’s just a hope that everything may come right.”

Sylvia fixed wide-open eyes on her mother. “I mustn’t say more, my child; I ought not to have said so much, for fear of disappointing you.”

Sylvia continued to gaze at her mother, her eyes alight with a burning question. “Mother,” she said breathlessly, “you wish it? You want us to marry?”

“Yes, darling. But you must be patient, and not too hopeful, my dearest. And don’t say anything of it to Father while I am away.”

Sylvia gave her mother a long, enraptured kiss, and Charlotte left her feeling that she had called her child back to life. But ought she to have done so? Yes, the sudden marvellous change in Sylvia’s eyes had put all her doubts to rest.

• • • • • • • •

She arrived at Fording several hours before Beatrix, whose journey was a much longer one. Miss Ley met Charlotte in the hall, and reported that the old lady was surprisingly better, and a few minutes later Charlotte, having taken off her travelling things, went to her mother’s bedroom. At the first glimpse of the old face under its lace cap, against a background of pillow, Charlotte felt a pang, for, though she could not have said why, she was convinced that this was the end. And yet the old lady was as cheerful as ever.

“Well, Charlotte my dear,” she said, turning a smiling, birdlike glance on her daughter, “so you have come to keep me in order?”

“Yes, Mamma, and I expect implicit obedience.”

“You are very optimistic. However, with you here I shall find it less tedious in bed. Did Ley tell you that Beatrix is coming? I’m expecting her this evening. You’ll have tea with me up here, won’t you, my dear?”

She rang a bell that hung within her reach. In a short time a maid appeared with a tea-tray. “Elizabeth, her ladyship will have tea with me. Ah, you’ve brought a cup for her. That’s right. You had better pour out, Charlotte; it’s rather troublesome when one’s in bed. I never was a great one for bed, you know. However, I suppose we must humour Dr. Bridport for a day or two. If doctors relied on me for a living, the poor dears would starve, I’m afraid. Now tell me about Sylvia. How is she?”

“Very well, as usual, Mamma.”

“Not engaged to be married yet?”

“Not quite.”

“Not quite, my dear? Now tell me, who is the young man.”

“Well, Mamma, a young man called Eric Danver.”

“I remember him perfectly. A handsome boy. A nephew of Sir John Danver.”

“My dear Mamma, how do you know?”

“He played tennis with Sylvia at your last garden-party, Charlotte. A friend of young John Pennington. I asked Amy Pennington about him. I always believe in making enquiries early. It often saves trouble later. We don’t want a repetition of anything like Beatrix’s catastrophe.”

Charlotte sighed. “Mamma, I have come to think, nowadays, that nothing but love, so long as it is genuine love, matters.”

“My dear Charlotte! Well, thank heaven you didn’t think so when Alfred proposed. If you had followed Beatrix’s example, I really believe it would have killed me.”

“Really, Mamma!”

“Yes, Charlotte; sent me to my grave thirty years ago!”

Charlotte laughed, and the old lady smiled indulgently. “Dreadful child!” she said. “Even you are not a true daughter of your mother.”

When they had finished tea, Charlotte stood up. “Now, Mamma, I shall leave you to rest.”

“My dear, I’ve been resting all day and most of yesterday.”

“And a very good thing too.”

The old lady submitted with a sweet smile at Charlotte, and in her submissiveness and that smile Charlotte, with another pang, seemed to see the approaching end.

Two hours later Beatrix arrived, and spent half an hour before dinner with Lady Hadlow, and Charlotte did not see her mother again except to say goodnight. Miss Ley spent the night in the old lady’s room. They had judged it better not to send for a nurse, so as not to alarm her, and had arranged that Miss Ley should take night duty, and Charlotte and Beatrix should take it in turns to be with her during the day. The doctor had given the necessary instructions and medicine in case of another seizure.

There was something not quite real for Charlotte about those days that she spent at Fording. They had never been all three together—their mother, Beatrix, and herself—since her own marriage. Lady Hadlow, it seemed, always preferred to have them to stay separately. So it was that to be transported now, in the very middle of her own family crisis, back into her old home, produced on Charlotte an effect of suspended animation. She lived, watching and tending her mother and talking for a few hours each evening to Beatrix, as if in a dream, aware, sometimes vaguely, sometimes sharply, in the back of her mind of the disturbing crisis at home which was awaiting her return to solve itself—how, she could not guess. It was almost as if time had suddenly wheeled backwards and landed them thirty years back in the past. Almost, but not quite, for there were differences. Cousin Fanny was no longer there; she had died years ago, and the old servants had disappeared. And the greatest difference of all was the difference in themselves. When Charlotte, in a dressing-gown, went into her sister’s bedroom, now, soon after they had been called, she found not the lovely, half-affectionate, half-scornful girl, flushed with rebellion against their mother’s rule, but an old woman with dishevelled grey hair, handsome still but haggard beyond her age. Charlotte, too, was grey and old, though she still had the figure and carriage of a woman in her prime. Charlotte in the old days had been the timid one of the family; now it was she that laid down the law, and her mother and Beatrix who obeyed without a thought of protest. It seemed, indeed, that old Lady Hadlow, with her gentler ways and her sweet childlike smile, was the youngest of the three.

The evening, when Miss Ley, who slept during the day, had relieved them at Lady Hadlow’s bedside, was the only time when Charlotte and Beatrix were together. This was, besides, the first occasion that they had been quite alone together for many years, and Charlotte enjoyed their long, desultory talks over the drawing-room fire. They soothed her, and calmed the smouldering disquietude which filled her mind. The two women talked, for the most part, of old times, of which their visit to the home of their childhood brought back endless memories.

“It’s strange,” said Charlotte during one of their talks, “how quickly nowadays time seems to pass.”

“Yes, and more and more quickly,” said Beatrix, “as one gets older. And don’t you notice, too, how periods of one’s life which seemed, when one was living them, of enormous length, seem now, when one looks back on them, mere incidents. The whole of my married life, Charlotte, seems to me now an incident of a few months. An unfortunate incident,” she added grimly. “Yes, I have learnt, at some expense to myself, that Mamma’s ideas were right. One should stick strictly to one’s own class. That’s the first consideration. Convention and the proprieties are, after all, valuable guides. Mamma’s mistake was in her way of inculcating them.”

“My dear Beatrix, I have come to believe just the opposite. The only thing that really matters is love. If we can be sure of love, then everything is sure.”

“Don’t you believe it, Charlotte. It’s a charming idea, so long as you don’t put it into practice. Why, nobody could have been more certain of love than I was.”

“No, Beatrix. You didn’t give yourself time to be certain. What did you really know of one another? Nothing, or almost nothing.”

“But I was genuinely and deeply in love with him, Charlotte; and so he was with me. How is one to distinguish between loves? How can one diagnose whether it is the lasting kind or the kind that fizzles out and leaves nothing but distaste? Only by testing it, and then it is too late to repent. No; if I could begin again, Charlotte, I would out-Ebernoe the Ebernoes. I would be the pride and joy of Mamma. I would plump for wealth, position, comfort, refinement, immunity from the drudgeries and horrible proximities of comparative poverty; just as you did, my dear. If you are rich, and find you can’t get on with the man you have bound yourself to, you can keep out of his way more than enough to make life bearable. But in a little house of eight or nine rooms in all, like our horrid little house in Harrogate—how I used to hate it!—you can’t escape from one another. You are cheek by jowl every moment that one of you isn’t out of the house.”

“And so you and I, Beatrix, have exchanged views, it seems.”

“Evidently. But, fortunately for you, my dear, you had chosen the better part before the exchange took place.”

“But you’re happy nowadays, Bee?”

“Perfectly, thank heaven. No one could have a better son than Bob. My only dread is that he will marry, as I hope he will. Sometimes I wake in the night and find that thought gnawing at my heart like a rat. Yes, I dread his marrying, Charlotte, even while hoping, for his sake, that he will.”

“And when he does, you will come and live with us at Haughton.”

“My dear, what would Alfred say to that?”

“He would be delighted.”

“Alfred’s a darling, Charlotte; and so are you.”

Chapter XXXII

Alfred, deprived of Charlotte’s presence by the sudden summons to her mother’s bedside, was left in almost unbroken isolation to contemplate the shattering information which she had imparted to him on the afternoon before she left home. He was not, of course, entirely alone, for Sylvia was at home. But of her he saw nothing except at meals and on one or two occasions when they happened to meet in the grounds and walked for a while together. Her attitude to him touched him deeply, for, in spite of the fact that her separation from Eric was due to him, and that she did not share his views, her behaviour to him showed not the smallest resentment. She had the rare generosity, it seemed, to give him the credit for his honest convictions, even though she was unable to share them. He felt deeply grateful to her for that, but the realisation of it made the effects of his action even more painful to him. By force of habit he regarded her still as his own child. The habit of over twenty years could not be broken off short by a mere piece of information, however devastatingly significant its implications. He loved her none the less; the sight of her still filled him with the old wondering rapture, as if at the sight of some hardly credible miracle. The only effect of his attempts to realise that she was not his own daughter was a sense of emptiness, of irreparable loss, which lasted only while he kept his attention upon the fact. As soon as that attention was relaxed, she was his own child again, as she had been during the twenty years since her birth.

But his feelings towards Charlotte had not Charlotte’s presence to impede their more rapid development. The fact that she had so relentlessly deceived him through all these years had wounded him very deeply. The motives she had alleged for doing so were no consolation to him. The thing he had loved in her above everything was her incorruptible honesty, and the discovery that she had changed, and for twenty years had deluded him into still believing in her, was the bitterest disillusionment. Again and again he forced himself to plead for her, reminding himself that she had been swept off her feet by that sudden passion, for which, he was convinced, she was not responsible, and then, regaining her self-control and faced by the consequences of her lapse, had set herself to preserve his peace of mind at all costs.

But, try as he might, his efforts were fruitless. If she had really been the creature he had believed her to be, she would have preferred the truth to everything. It would have been impossible for her to delude him so monstrously; to stand by, watching his growing delight in the child for which they had both hoped so long in vain; remorselessly to allow him year by year to build up this structure of gratitude and happiness on a foundation of falsehood and delusion.

Then he would ask himself what difference it made. If he loved the child as he did, was not his love the vital thing? Was the fact that she was not his own of any real significance? Not perhaps to his mind, to the reasoning part of him; but to his heart it was of immense significance. To be deprived of the mysterious blessing of fatherhood was a desolating bereavement. It was as if Charlotte had deserted him again, and, this time, had snatched away Sylvia with her. Once more life became a horrible emptiness, and this new misery, following on the heels of the heart-rending complications brought by poor Eric’s confession, was almost more than he could bear. He felt sometimes, during those terrible days when Charlotte was at Fording, that his mind was on the point of giving way. If it had not been for his faith, that source of strength and serenity in which he could still, with a supreme effort of self-abandonment, immerse himself, his endurance would have broken down.

• • • • • • • •

On the fifth day Lady Hadlow had another seizure. It was much more severe than the first, and left her very exhausted. She had suddenly become ten years older. Her talkativeness was ended now, and, when she spoke, her voice had shrunk away to a mere murmur. For the most part she lay back silent on her pillows, her eyes sometimes open, but more often shut. They had sent for the doctor. There was no more to be done, he said, than was already being done. It was possible that, with her excellent constitution, she might again recover her strength, as she had done after the earlier seizure, but he did not hold out much hope.

Charlotte sat with her towards evening, when the light was failing. In the semi-darkness the pillows and bedclothes showed with the dead whiteness of snow under a grey sky, and the reflection of them in a mirror away in the darker end of the room, chill and colourless as the lights and darknesses in the water of a cistern in a roof, showed colder and ghostlier still. The old lady lay with closed eyes, her head and body motionless; only her hands were tirelessly active, fingering and groping vaguely over the turned-back sheet. Charlotte, fearing that she would get cold, had tried to make her keep her arms under the bedclothes, but she had always drawn them out again and resumed the endless, aimless, ineffectual exploration which reminded Charlotte of the first fumbling, experimental gestures of Sylvia as a tiny baby. Then the old lady spoke, so low that Charlotte could not hear what she was saying. She went over to the bed and bent over her.

“What is it, dear?”

Then she began to distinguish words. “He likes him, anyhow,” she heard.

“Who likes him, Mamma?”

“The Duke told me so himself.” Then, clear and sharp, in a voice quite unlike her own: “Well, you can think as you please, Papa.”

Charlotte went back to her chair. The rambling talk in the dim, twilit room, sometimes inarticulate, like a parrot mimicking human conversation, sometimes audible and speaking to people long dead, both touched and disquieted Charlotte.

“… don’t mind really.” Once again clear words emerged from the mumbling. “Go on, Fanny. Really … I really want to hear. … Yes … about the baby.”

Charlotte’s mind followed her mother’s to that evening, over thirty years ago, of Cousin Fanny’s return from her visit to Beatrix. It was as if that life, unseen and unheard by her, were acting itself over again, and she herself were catching in broken phrases the thoughts that her mother had never spoken. How far away that life seemed! For a moment she could not think where it had happened. Then, with a shock of surprise, she remembered that it had happened in the very house she was now in. Yes, it was in the drawing-room, the room under this room in which she sat, that Cousin Fanny had talked of Beatrix’s baby till snubbed by Mamma. Was Beatrix, who was probably sitting there at this moment, aware of this ghostly reanimation of the past which was occurring in the room above her? Charlotte half believed that the drawing-room must at that moment be peopled by ghosts—ghosts of herself, her mother, and Cousin Fanny. Her mother’s words came back to her: “Really, Fanny, from the way you talk the child might be the Prince of Wales”; and then there came, painfully clear to her memory, the change in poor Cousin Fanny’s face, the sudden quenching of the warmth and light in it.

There was a subdued sound in the dark room, and Charlotte with a start returned to the present. The door was opening softly, and a widening streak of light from the passage fell across the darkness. It was Miss Ley, come to relieve her.

• • • • • • • •

It was about a quarter to ten the same evening, when Charlotte and Beatrix were sitting talking in the drawing-room after dinner, that three taps sounded on the ceiling. It was the summons agreed upon by them in case of need. Beatrix broke off in the middle of a phrase, and both women rose from their chairs and hurried to the door. Beatrix was stout and not good at climbing stairs, and, before she was half way up, Charlotte was already at the door of their mother’s room. She opened it softly and went in.

A lamp on a small table focused the light on the bed. Miss Ley was bending over the pillows. She raised herself as Charlotte entered, and her shadow, like a huge black nun, reared itself up on the wall behind her.

“It’s all over, I think,” she said to Charlotte in a low voice. In one hand she held the limp white arm; one finger was upon the pulse.

Charlotte tiptoed to the bed. Old Lady Hadlow lay with her head on one side, the mouth slightly open. It reminded Charlotte of the open mouth of a goldfish. There was a glint of the whites of the eyes between the almost closed lids. From the door came a sound of breathing, and Beatrice came into the room and shut the door behind her.

“Is it the end?” she said.

Charlotte nodded.

Chapter XXXIII

On the day following Lady Hadlow’s death, Beatrix’s son Bob joined them at Fording and relieved them of most of the business immediately connected with the funeral. Charlotte and Beatrix were kept fully occupied, during the three days that preceded the funeral, in going through their mother’s various accumulated belongings.

The old lady’s money was left equally between her two daughters, but Fording and its contents, with the exception of a few pictures, a Worcester dinner service, and a share of her jewellery, were left, as Lady Hadlow had agreed with Charlotte when she had made a new will many years ago, to Beatrix.

Alfred had written to say that he and Sylvia would arrive on the morning of the funeral, having stayed the night in London on the way. The funeral was fixed for midday. That would enable the Mardales to catch the two-fifteen from Fording and reach home the same night.

Charlotte, her mind loosed from the suspense in which it had been held by her mother’s illness, longed now to be with Sylvia and Alfred and at home again. She was full of anxieties, but not so much about Sylvia now as about Alfred. What had he been thinking during her absence? In what state of mind would she find him when they met again? She looked forward hungrily to their arrival. At intervals a terrible misgiving overcame her. Ought she to have done what she had done? When she woke in the night and thought of it, it seemed to her that she had done a monstrous and unforgivable thing. The memory of his face when she had told him that Sylvia was not his child filled her with remorse and fear. But in the morning her courage returned. Anything was justified, even the sacrifice of Alfred’s happiness, to save those two innocent young creatures. How would Sylvia be looking now? Would the hope that she had dared to rouse in her, as she had said good-bye when she left Haughton, have lifted her already out of her despair? Had something of the flower-like beauty of her face already returned? Her heart ached with love and solicitude. She longed desperately to have her child safe in her arms again.

When the day of the funeral came, she could no longer bear the suspense, and sent word to the chauffeur, who had orders to meet the train by which Alfred and Sylvia were arriving, that she would be going to the station to meet them.

When the car reached the station, there were still ten minutes before the train was due, and Charlotte, too agitated to sit still, got out and walked the platform. Her tall, handsome, imperturbable presence betrayed no hint of the tremulous eagerness which possessed her. Her legs felt weak; it was only by a conscious effort that she could walk straight; and, finding a station seat under a gas-lamp, she sat down to rest. Her mind kept rushing ahead, imagining the arrival of the train, the opening of carriage doors, her anxiety of doubt when Alfred and Sylvia did not immediately appear, and then the longed-for forms and the release from agitation. She no longer looked beyond their arrival. The terrible problem that still obsessed them, the great question what Alfred’s feelings to her and Sylvia would now be, had ceased for the time to trouble her. Once they were together again, it seemed to her, all would be well.

The signal was down now. She got up and resumed her pacing. Then began the sound of the train’s approach, each variation engraved on her mind by years of familiarity—the roar as it crossed the iron bridge over the river, the muffled but more threatening rumble that followed, the shout of the porter—“Train for Twincombe, Appersley, and Bridge-croft”—and the storm of its arrival in the station.

She stood, a coldly impassive figure in black, scanning the carriage doors, her heart pulsing as if in response to the pulsing of the waiting engine. The porter opened a door, and Alfred, in a silk hat, got out and turned to help Sylvia. They were the only arrivals.

Charlotte rushed forward and seized Sylvia in her arms. “My darling, how are you?” She gazed hungrily into the small face under the black hat. It was changed; yes, blissfully changed; a tinge of the old colour had returned.

She turned eagerly to Alfred. His face struck her to the heart. It was still as she had seen it when she had confessed to him in his study—pale and drawn, as if the flesh had shrunk back on to the bone.

“Alfred, my dear, I had to come to meet you both. I couldn’t wait.”

His eyes kindled as they met hers, and his face lit up with the old affectionate smile.

“You’ve not brought your luggage?” she asked.

“No, we left it at Victoria. You are coming back with us this afternoon, aren’t you, Charlotte?”

“Yes, indeed, my dear. And how glad I shall be,” she said, her voice warm with emotion.

• • • • • • • •

It seemed to Charlotte, as she listened to the moving words of the burial service, that they were utterly inappropriate to her mother. The grim realism and the divine rapture were equally out of character with the proud, worldly, lovable, and strictly practical little lady. The sublime outburst of the opening, “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,” which stirred a secret ecstasy in Charlotte, soared, she felt, far beyond her mother’s strict common sense. Such dreams and aspirations had had no part, as far as she knew, in her mother’s life. It was true that she had always been an assiduous churchgoer, but she had always contrived, it had seemed, to keep religion and daily life rigorously apart. And then the grim commitment, when the coffin had been lowered into the grave and the handful of earth thrown upon it: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust”; how coldly democratic and undiscriminating for such a convinced Ebernoe! Poor little thing, thought Charlotte; to think that all her eager self-importance should end so feebly in dust and ashes and corruption—that grim and horrible word. And the heavy black coffin and the dreary pomp of the four black-coated figures that lifted and carried it—it was all wrong, Charlotte felt, all hopelessly false in its application to her mother. And it had been so sudden. A week—less than a week—ago she had been sitting up in bed, alert and aggressive, chatting with all her old vigour, and laughing to scorn her doctor’s precautions. Then had come the second seizure, leaving a small, feeble old woman with aimlessly groping hands, and hard upon it the third, that quenched the last flicker of life. Charlotte recalled the slightly open mouth like the mouth of a goldfish and the glint between the eyelids. How merciless disease could be, like a man with a club killing a rat. One blow, and, when that was not enough, another; and then a third, the finishing one. How insignificant, in the presence of these awful realities, were questions of legitimacy and illegitimacy and the whims of public opinion. Yes, Alfred had been wrong to bow to such trifles, and, worse still, to sacrifice the happiness of Sylvia and Eric to them. How could she have stood by any longer and permitted that monstrous cruelty? What she had done was the only thing left for her to do to save them. He himself would surely be glad in the end.

But her heart ached for Alfred. She turned her head to glance at him, and at the sight of his face, so beautiful and sensitive and so painfully marked now by the tragedy which had fallen upon him, she felt, in a sudden access of remorse, that she had never loved him so much as now.

• • • • • • • •

Lady Hadlow and Alfred had always been great friends, and, sitting now in Fording church at her funeral, he dreamed of old times with her and Charlotte and Beatrix and Haughton, and then recalled that day, during the time that Charlotte and her mother had stayed at Haughton just after Beatrix’s elopement, when he and she, walking on the lawn under the beeches, had agreed that Lady Hadlow was too good an Ebernoe to be a good Christian. The memory of Charlotte as she then was sent a pang to his heart. What strange vicissitudes had been theirs since those early days— vicissitudes of which no one but he and she knew anything. What would his mother have thought if she had known all? She perhaps, with her wonderful goodness of heart, would have understood and forgiven all—all at least but the long, cruel deception. Perhaps, he reflected, even that. But, if the old woman there in the coffin had known all, she would neither have forgiven nor understood. And yet how admirable, in many ways, she was, with her warm heart, her energy and precision, and her delightful sense of humour which she so often turned upon herself. He remembered her so clearly, and, it seemed, such a short time ago, as a vigorous woman in the prime of life. Yet now she had died at a good old age. How short a thing life seemed nowadays. Twenty years ago Sylvia was born. That seemed a very short time ago, and yet in another twenty years he would be as old as Lady Hadlow, if, indeed, he were still alive. He felt old—very old already. The terrible trouble which poor Eric’s discovery had brought upon them, and then, in the very middle of that, the blow of Charlotte’s confession to him, had robbed life of all its old gusto and serenity.

He had followed the coffin out into the churchyard now, and abstractedly he watched them lower it into the grave. The words he had used so often himself struck across his thoughts. “Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live.” It was true. Life was very short. He concentrated his thoughts on the service. Its spirit of resignation, rising at the end to a divine rapture, soothed his aching heart. He thought of the life after death— that state for which he devoutly hoped, of unimaginable bliss—and his ears drank in the words of the closing prayer: “Come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the Kingdom prepared for you from the beginning of the world.”

• • • • • • • •

Two hours later the Mardales were in the train on their way to London. The brief interlude of death was over; once more they were face to face with life, and the problem which life had thrust upon them. But even now, for Charlotte, the problem had lost its acuteness. The fact that Sylvia and Alfred were with her again, and that they were all going home, brought to her, for an undiscoverable reason, a great consolation. It was so great that it absorbed all her thoughts and feelings, and she sat with her mind loosed awhile from its tension, watching the familiar country wheel slowly past the windows, as if on a huge horizontal disc of which their carriage was the centre. Sometimes she would glance at Sylvia, who sat opposite her, and, when she did so, Sylvia’s large blue eyes would meet hers with a look of expectant confidence. What if the hope she had so rashly aroused had to be extinguished again? That thought passed across Charlotte’s mind, but it did not trouble her. A confidence possessed her too, a confidence which she could not justify and did not attempt to justify. What need was there of justification when it was burning so steadily in her heart?

It became even stronger when they had crossed London and were on their way from Paddington to Templeton. That journey between her early and later homes was full of memories for Charlotte. It was bound up, it seemed, with all the crises of her life; she had made it in every variety of mood, from rapture to despair. It recalled the old delight of the visits to Haughton, when her mother and Beatrix and she set off each year full of the holiday feeling and armed with new dresses for the Haughton garden-party. Then there was that later journey when, as a girl of Sylvia’s age, she had gone to be with Lady Mardale after old Lord Mardale’s death, and the journey back to Fording during which she had pondered on Alfred’s proposal made on the way to Templeton station; the tragic journey when, ten years later, she had abandoned Alfred and was rushing to Maurice, and the still more tragic journey home again when she had changed her mind. Thinking now of all those journeys, so momentous to her, she found it impossible to realise the great differences in herself which divided each one of them. It seemed to her now that she had been, all the time, the same Charlotte as she was now: the changes of age, mind, appearance, and dress did not exist in her memory. Her life, as epitomised for her in those few critical occasions, seemed to her extraordinarily brief, and yet, when the length of time which covered them had passed again, she would have been in her grave for many years.

When they changed at Wilmore it was already dark. The night was clear, a moon was already high in the sky, and, as the little train drove deeper and deeper into the familiar country, Charlotte stared through the window, searching with hungry devotion through the grey and black and silver of darkness and moonlight for the well-known landmarks. It seemed to her that she had been very far, and for a very long time, away from these beloved scenes, and she took them back to her now with a feeling of deep consolation. The mere at Lannock lay in the surrounding dimness like a great dish of silver lustre; not a blur marred its pure perfection. The little water-mill at Rimple stood out above its invisible stream, a shape carved from jet and alabaster. At the sight of it Charlotte felt the tears smart in her eyes. How strange, she thought, that inanimate things can rouse such deep and passionate feelings. They were stopping now at Annet Brook; its dim oil lamps swam past the windows and then stood still. Templeton was the next station; in another twenty minutes they would be at home. Charlotte felt the same excitement—the same, but deeper and richer—that she had always felt at that moment of the journey as a girl, and when they got out on to Templeton platform, and passed through the gate in the white railings, she expected, for a moment, to hear the clinking of Kester fidgeting with his bit—Kester who for the last quarter of a century had been the mere buried skeleton of a horse.

Chapter XXXIV

As soon as they arrived at Haughton they went to their rooms to dress for dinner, and it was only when she was once more in her own room, and alone, that Charlotte’s mood of confidence broke down. She felt now that it had been nothing more than an unconscious determination to keep her eyes turned away from the facts. The awful fact of her confession to Alfred, and its inevitable effect on him, loomed up in front of her once more in all its menacing reality. She stared at it, appalled. How could she have done such a thing? How could she have stooped to such a piece of diabolical diplomacy? But next minute, in self-defence, she recalled all her vain attempts to persuade him before she had resorted to that desperate expedient. She had resorted to it only when there was nothing else for her to do; and something—there was no question in her mind as to that—had to be done. She reminded herself, as to harden her resolution she had reminded herself so often, that her cruelty to Alfred had been perpetrated only for the sake of shielding Sylvia and Eric from an even greater cruelty. Of the two cruelties, his was the less justifiable; oh, unquestionably. Those two poor children! At the mere thought of their misery her heart bled. To put an end to that, nothing could be too drastic. No, she had been right. Alfred’s terrible wrongness had made her right. How strange it was to be convinced at the same time, as she now was, of his fundamental goodness and, in this instance, of his absolute wrongness. At the first sight of him on the platform at Fording this morning, at the first look of his eyes, she had realised once again his real nobility. Perhaps it was her rediscovery of this that awoke in her the inexplicable mood of confidence which had possessed her throughout the journey home. What a blessed relief it would be if everything righted itself in the end. But, short of a miracle, was such a thing possible?

She sighed deeply and went towards her bedroom door. She was ready to go downstairs. On her way she went to Sylvia’s room. She had not yet had her child to herself since she had left home a week ago. Sylvia was not yet dressed. Standing there in her white underclothes, bare-necked, bare-armed, and bare-legged, she looked like an exquisite little china figure which had suddenly been endowed with life.

“My darling,” said Charlotte, putting her arms round her, “I’ve hardly seen you yet.” She gazed anxiously into her daughter’s eyes.

“Mother,” Sylvia whispered, her cheeks flushing for a moment to their old health, “I wrote to Eric and told him there was some hope for us. Was that very wrong of me?”

“No, darling; how could you help it?”

“There is still hope, isn’t there, Mother?”

“Yes … yes, my dear; but don’t be too hopeful. I haven’t said a word to Father about it yet. I may have been …”

“You may have been wrong?”

“I may, darling, but I hope not.”

“And you think not?”

Charlotte hesitated. Then the sight of her daughter and the hungry enquiry in her eyes brought renewed strength to her resolve. “Yes, I think not.”

They smiled at each other, and Charlotte turned to the door and went out.

In the corridor she met Alfred, who had just emerged from his dressing-room. He took her arm, and as they walked towards the stair-head together he kissed her.

“How glad I am, Charlotte,” he said, “to have you home again.”

That unexpected impulse of his moved her so deeply that she could not reply.

• • • • • • • •

It was when Charlotte and Alfred were sitting alone after dinner, and Sylvia, tired out by her long day, had already gone to bed, that Alfred began to speak of what filled both their minds.

“I’ve been thinking a great deal since you went away, Charlotte. It was a good thing, I think, that you had to go away directly after … after what you told me. If you had been here, seeing you and speaking to you every day would have made things much more difficult for me—prevented me, I mean, from seeing my way clearly. Charlotte dear, I don’t want to reproach you now; what is past is past. But I must tell you what my feelings have been, so as to make things clear to you as they have become to me.

“What I have felt most, Charlotte, is that you never told me the whole truth. You told me a little, and so made me believe that you had told me all. Your frankness—what I believed was your frankness—touched me deeply. I felt that it was like you, that it was only another sign of what I had always loved so much in you—your beautiful honesty. And so you see, my dearest, that when you told me everything just before you went away last week, I couldn’t help feeling that what had seemed your frankness had really been … yes, I must tell you exactly what I felt … I felt that your apparent frankness had been a clever piece of deceit. Oh, Charlotte, how much better to have told me nothing than to have told me the little you did! That was much more dishonest, wasn’t it?”

He raised his eyes to hers. “Don’t you think it was?”

Charlotte nodded her head; her lips were trembling.

“It was awful to me to think that all my life with you, all my happiness in you and Sylvia for the last twenty-one years, had been based on … on mere falsehood, concealment on your part and misunderstanding on mine. That was what was so terrible to me. It was worse, even, than to know that Sylvia, of whom I had been all these years so proud, was not my child at all. And yet that was terrible enough, for by that I felt cheated. There is something sacred in the feelings of men and women towards their children, Charlotte, and to rouse those feelings falsely to make them the subject of a delusion, of a horrible practical joke, seems to me a sacrilege. We should not play, in however grim earnest, with mysteries such as that. Did you never feel, Charlotte, in all these years, that you must speak out and undeceive me? You see, dear, it is not merely that you deluded me once, one evening twenty-one years ago. Every day and every hour in the last twenty-one years you have been deluding me. And when at last you did undeceive me, it was not because you felt at last that you must restore honesty between us, but because you were determined to break my will. Charlotte, that was a terrible use to make of a terrible weapon. Don’t you yourself feel …?”

He broke off, and, as if released for a moment from the stress of his emotion, he realised the effect that his words were having on Charlotte. Her face had become almost grey, and she sat with her lips parted, as though gasping for breath, one hand clutching the arm of her chair, the other grasping a handkerchief which it had crumpled into a ball. He got up and went to her chair and took one of her hands.

“Forgive me, my dearest,” he said. “I’m doing just what I meant not to do—pouring all these reproaches on you which have been whirling round and round in my mind during the last week. But isn’t it best, after all, that you should know what I have been feeling and thinking? And won’t it be easier for me, too, to put them out of my mind, now that I have told them to you, than it would have been if I had kept them to myself? But I’ll say no more of that, now or ever; indeed, I’ve said all there is to say in the way of grievance. I have discovered other things during these last few days—more important things. I’ve discovered, Charlotte, that love is something more than right or wrong and kindness or unkindness. In spite of all you told me, I found that I didn’t cease to love you. It’s not a matter of willing or not willing. You can’t love or cease to love by taking thought. One has no choice in such things. When you met us this morning on Fording platform, I knew, Charlotte, that I loved you as much as ever. It was a blessing to discover that.”

With a sob Charlotte seized his hand in both her own and covered it with kisses. “Alfred,” she sobbed, “my dear Alfred!”

After a moment she looked up at him. “And Sylvia, Alfred?” she asked.

“And Sylvia too,” he said. “And I discovered then, Charlotte …” he went on. But Charlotte stopped him.

“Say no more, my dear, until I have told you something. As you said just now, Alfred, I told you … what I told you, to break your will. I was desperate, Alfred. I couldn’t bear to see Sylvia suffer so terribly. I couldn’t bear any longer that the lives of those two should be spoilt just when they had discovered the best thing life has to give them. At last, when nothing would move you, I decided to do what I did. I thought that if I told you that Sylvia was illegitimate, everything, when your mind had recovered from the shock, would be different for you—that you would look on Eric’s illegitimacy in a new light, and, as I thought, a truer light, and that you would at last consent. But I never realised that what I told you would do away with the need of your consent. That had never occurred to me. I wanted your consent, and I determined that even that terrible and dangerous expedient was justified if I could get it, and so save the poor little things.”

“But, Charlotte … do you mean … was it …?” He was staring at her with a wild conjecture in his eyes.

“That it was untrue, Alfred; quite untrue, my dear. Can you believe it? I think you can. Didn’t it seem almost unbelievable that I could have deluded you so cruelly all these years?”

He could not reply, but Charlotte knew already that he believed her. “When you told me, my dear,” she went on, “that you loved her and me in spite of everything, I couldn’t keep it up any longer. It would have been too cruel and too wicked to force your consent. But don’t you feel now, Alfred, that you can consent willingly? It almost seems now as if I had betrayed them at the last moment, because I’ve resigned all their hopes of happiness, and mine too, unconditionally into your hands, haven’t I? And, Alfred, before I went to Fording last week I told Sylvia that there was just the least little hope. I couldn’t bear to leave her here in that state of despair. And she, poor child, as she confessed to me this evening, wrote and told Eric. She wanted, you see, to give him a little consolation too.”

She raised her head and looked at him. “Tell me as soon as you can, Alfred,” she said.

“I can tell you now, dearest,” he said. “I give in, Charlotte, willingly and gladly. I have discovered in this last dreadful week that rules and regulations break down in the end. It is so difficult to remember the truth that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. You were right when you begged me to trust my heart; in the last resort there is nothing else we can trust.”

The remote silver chime of a clock in the hall fell across the stillness of the house like twelve crystal drops into a dark pool.

“You must tell her yourself to-morrow, Alfred,” said Charlotte.

“And we must let Eric know,” he replied.

Charlotte was silent for a while. Then she said: “Alfred, do you think I might go to London myself and bring Eric down? As to-morrow is Saturday, he will be free at one o’clock, I suppose. I should love to do that.”

He glanced at her, smiling. “Won’t you be too tired, Charlotte, after the funeral and the journey to-day, and all the troubles of the week? We can wire to him to come and stay till Monday.”

“I’d rather go, Alfred. And I shan’t be at all tired. Why, I’m already ten years younger than I was an hour ago.”

The End

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

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