The Daughters of Danaus

by Mona Caird

CHAPTER XVI.

“... when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die.”
Tithonius, Tennyson.

A COUNTRYMAN with stooping gait touched his cap and bid good-day to a young woman who walked rapidly along the crisp high road, smiling a response as she passed.

The road led gradually upward through a country blazing with red and orange for rolling miles, till the horizon closed in with the far-off blue of English hills.

The old man slowly turned to watch the wayfarer, whose quick step and the look in her eyes of being fixed on objects beyond their owner’s immediate ken, might have suggested to the observant, inward perturbation. The lissom, swiftly moving figure was almost out of sight before the old man slowly wheeled round and continued on his way towards the hamlet of Craddock Dene, that lay in the valley about a mile further on. Meanwhile the young woman was speeding towards the village of Craddock on the summit of the gentle slope before her. A row of broad-tiled cottages came in sight, and on the hill-side the Vicarage among trees, and a grey stone church which had seen many changes since its tower first looked out from the hill-top over the southern counties.

The little village seemed as if it had forgotten to change with the rest of the country, for at least a hundred years. The spirit of the last century lingered in its quiet cottages, in the little ale-house with half-obliterated sign, in its air of absolute repose and leisure. There was no evidence of contest anywhere—except perhaps in a few mouldy advertisements of a circus and of a remarkable kind of soap, that were half peeling off a moss-covered wall. There were not even many indications of life in the place. The sunshine seemed to have the village street to itself. A couple of women stood gossiping over the gate of one of the cottages. They paused in their talk as a quick step sounded on the road.

“There be Mrs. Temperley again!” one matron exclaimed. “Why this is the second time this week, as she’s come and sat in the churchyard along o’ the dead. Don’t seem nat’ral to my thinking.”

Mrs. Dodge and Mrs. Gullick continued to discuss this gloomy habit with exhaustive minuteness, involving themselves in side issues regarding the general conduct of life on the part of Mrs. Temperley, that promised solid material for conversation for the next week. It appeared from the observations of Mrs. Gullick, whose husband worked on Lord Engleton’s model farm, that about five years ago Mr. Temperley had rented the Red House at Craddock Dene, and had brought his new wife to live there. The Red House belonged to Professor Fortescue, who also owned the Priory, which had stood empty, said Mrs. Gullick, since that poor Mrs. Fortescue killed herself in the old drawing-room. Mr. Temperley went every day to town to attend to his legal business, and returned by the evening train to the bosom of his family. That family now consisted in his wife and two small boys; pretty little fellows, added Mrs. Dodge, the pride of their parents’ hearts; at least, so she had heard Mr. Joseph Fleming say, and he was intimate at the Red House. Mrs. Gullick did not exactly approve of Mrs. Temperley. The Red House was not, it would seem, an ever-flowing fount of sustaining port wine and spiritually nourishing literature. The moral evolution of the village had proceeded on those lines. The prevailing feeling was vaguely hostile; neither Mrs. Gullick nor Mrs. Dodge exactly knew why. Mrs. Dodge said that her husband (who was the sexton and gravedigger) had found Mrs. Temperley always ready for a chat. He spoke well of her. But Dodge was not one of many. Mrs. Temperley was perhaps too sensitively respectful of the feelings of her poorer neighbours to be very popular among them. At any rate, her habits of seclusion did not seem to village philosophy to be justifiable in the eyes of God or man. Her apparent fondness for the society of the dead also caused displeasure. Why she went to the churchyard could not be imagined: one would think she had a family buried there, she who was, “as one might say, a stranger to the place,” and could not be supposed to have any interest in the graves, which held for her nor kith nor kin!

Mrs. Temperley, however, appeared to be able to dispense with this element of attraction in the “grassy barrows.” She and a company of youthful Cochin-China fowls remained for hours among them, on this cheerful morning, and no observer could have determined whether it was the graves or the fowls that riveted her attention. She had perched herself on the stile that led from the churchyard to the fields: a slender figure in serviceable russet and irresponsible-looking hat, autumn-tinted too, in sympathy with the splendid season. In her ungloved left hand, which was at once sensitive and firm, she carried a book, keeping a forefinger between the pages to mark a passage.

Her face bore signs of suffering, and at this moment, a look of baffled and restless longing, as if life had been for her a festival whose sounds came from a hopeless distance. Yet there was something in the expression of the mouth, that suggested a consistent standing aloof from herself and her desires. The lines of the face could never have been drawn by mere diffusive, emotional habits. Thought had left as many traces as feeling in the firm drawing. The quality of the face was of that indefinable kind that gives to all characteristic things their peculiar power over the imagination. The more powerful the quality, the less can it be rendered into terms. It is the one marvellous, remaining, musical fact not to be defined that makes the Parthenon, or some other masterpiece of art, translate us to a new plane of existence, and inspire, for the time being, the pessimist with hope and the sceptic with religion.

The Cochin-Chinas pecked about with a contented mien among the long grass, finding odds and ends of nourishment, and here and there eking out their livelihood with a dart at a passing fly. Their long, comic, tufted legs, which seemed to form a sort of monumental pedestal whereon the bird itself was elevated, stalked and scratched about with an air of industrious serenity.

There were few mornings in the year which left unstirred the grass which grew long over the graves, but this was one of the few. Each blade stood up still and straight, bearing its string of dewdrops. There were one or two village sounds that came subdued through the sunshine. The winds that usually haunted the high spot had fallen asleep, or were lying somewhere in ambush among the woodlands beyond.

The look of strain had faded from the face of Mrs. Temperley, leaving only an expression of sadness. The removal of all necessity for concealing thought allowed her story to write itself on her face. The speculative would have felt some curiosity as to the cause of a sadness in one seemingly so well treated by destiny. Neither poverty nor the cares of great wealth could have weighed upon her spirit; she had beauty, and a quality more attractive than beauty, which must have placed many things at her command; she had evident talent—her very attitude proclaimed it—and the power over Fortune that talent ought to give. Possibly, the observer might reflect, the gift was of that kind which lays the possessor peculiarly open to her outrageous slings and arrows. Had Mrs. Temperley shown any morbid signs of self-indulgent emotionalism the problem would have been simple enough; but this was not the case.

The solitude was presently broken by the approach of an old man laden with pickaxe and shovel. He remarked upon the fineness of the day, and took up his position at a short distance from the stile, where the turf had been cleared away in a long-shaped patch. Here, with great deliberation he began his task. The sound of his steady strokes fell on the stillness. Presently, the clock from the grey tower gave forth its announcement—eleven. One by one, the slow hammer sent the waves of air rolling away, almost visibly, through the sunshine, their sound alternating with the thud of the pickaxe, so as to produce an effect of intentional rhythm. One might have fancied that clock and pickaxe iterated in turn, “Time, Death! Time, Death! Time, Death!” till the clock had come to the end of its tale, and then the pickaxe went on alone in the stillness—“Death! Death! Death! Death!”

A smile, not easy to be accounted for, flitted across the face of Mrs. Temperley.

The old gravedigger paused at last in his toil, leaning on his pickaxe, and bringing a red cotton handkerchief out of his hat to wipe his brow.

“That seems rather hard work, Dodge,” remarked the onlooker, leaning her book upright on her knee and her chin on her hand.

“Ay, that it be, mum; this clay’s that stiff! Lord! folks is almost as much trouble to them as buries as to them as bears ’em; it’s all trouble together, to my thinkin’.”

She assented with a musing nod.

“And when a man’s not a troublin’ o’ some other body, he’s a troublin’ of hisself,” added the philosopher.

“You are cursed with a clear-sightedness that must make life a burden to you,” said Mrs. Temperley.

“Well, mum, I do sort o’ see the bearin’s o’ things better nor most,” Dodge modestly admitted. The lady knew, and liked to gratify, the gravedigger’s love of long-worded discourse.

“Some people,” she said, “are born contemplative, while others never reflect at all, whatever the provocation.”

“Yes’m, that’s just it; folks goes on as if they was to live for ever, without no thought o’ dyin’. As you was a sayin’ jus’ now, mum, there’s them as contemflecs natural like, and there’s them as is born without provocation——”

“Everlastingly!” assented Mrs. Temperley with a sudden laugh. “You evidently, Dodge, are one of those who strive to read the riddle of this painful earth. Tell me what you think it is all about.”

Gratified by this appeal to his judgment, Dodge scratched his head, and leant both brawny arms upon his pickaxe.

“Well, mum,” he said, “I s’pose it’s the will o’ th’ Almighty as we is brought into the world, and I don’t say nothin’ agin it—’tisn’t my place—but it do come over me powerful at times, wen I sees all the vexin’ as folks has to go through, as God A’mighty might ’a found somethin’ better to do with His time; not as I wants to find no fault with His ways, which is past finding out,” added the gravedigger, falling to work again.

A silence of some minutes was broken by Mrs. Temperley’s enquiry as to how long Dodge had followed this profession.

“Nigh on twenty year, mum, come Michaelmas,” replied Dodge. “I’ve lain my couple o’ hundred under the sod, easy; and a fine lot o’ corpses they was too, take ’em one with another.” Dodge was evidently prepared to stand up for the average corpse of the Craddock district against all competitors.

“This is a very healthy neighbourhood, I suppose,” observed Mrs. Temperley, seemingly by way of supplying an explanation of the proud fact.

“Lord bless you, as healthy as any place in the kingdom. There wasn’t one in ten as was ill when he died, as one may say.”

“But that scarcely seems an unmixed blessing,” commented the lady musingly, “to go off suddenly in the full flush of health and spirits; it would be so discouraging.”

“Most was chills, took sudden,” Dodge explained; “chills is wot chokes up yer churchyards for yer. If we has another hard winter this year, we shall have a job to find room in here. There’s one or two in the village already, as I has my eye on, wot——”

“Was this one a chill?” interrupted Mrs. Temperley, with a nod towards the new grave.

“Wot, this here? Lord bless you, no, mum. This here’s our schoolmarm. Didn’t you never hear tell about her?” This damning proof of his companion’s aloofness from village gossip seemed to paralyse the gravedigger.

“Why everybody’s been a talkin’ about it. Over varty, she war, and ought to ’a knowed better.”

“But, with advancing years, it is rare that people do get to know better—about dying,” Mrs. Temperley suggested, in defence of the deceased schoolmistress.

“I means about her conduc’,” Dodge explained; “scand’lous thing. Why, she’s been in Craddock school since she war a little chit o’ sixteen.”

“That seems to me a trifle dull, but scarcely scandalous,” Mrs. Temperley murmured.

“... And as steady and respectable a young woman as you’d wish to see ... pupil teacher she was, and she rose to be schoolmarm,” Dodge went on.

“It strikes me as a most blameless career,” said his companion. “Perhaps, as you say, considering her years, she ought to have known better, but——”

“She sort o’ belongs to the place, as one may say,” Dodge proceeded, evidently quite unaware that he had omitted to give the clue to the situation. “She’s lived here all her life.”

“Then much may be forgiven her,” muttered Mrs. Temperley.

“And everybody respected of her, and the parson he thought a deal o’ her, he did, and used to hold her up as a sample to the other young women, and nobody dreamt as she’d go and bring this here scandal on the place; nobody knows who the man was, but it is said as there’s someone not twenty miles from here as knows more about it nor he didn’t ought to,” Dodge added with sinister meaning. This dark hint conveyed absolutely no enlightenment to the mind of Mrs. Temperley, from sheer lack of familiarity, on her part, with the rumours of the district. Dodge applied himself with a spurt to his work.

“When she had her baby, she was like one out of her mind,” he continued; “she couldn’t stand the disgrace and the neighbours talkin’, and that. Mrs. Walker she went and saw her, and brought her nourishin’ things, and kep’ on a-telling her how she must try and make up for what she had done, and repent and all that; but she never got up her heart again like, and the poor soul took fever from grievin’, the doctor says, and raved on dreadful, accusin’ of somebody, and sayin’ he’d sent her to hell; and then Wensday morning, ten o’clock, she died. Didn’t you hear the passing bell a-tolling, mum?”

“Yes, the wind brought it down the valley; but I did not know whom it was tolling for.”

“That’s who it was,” said Dodge.

“This is an awfully sad story,” cried Mrs. Temperley.

Dodge ran his fingers through his hair judicially. “I don’t hold with them sort o’ goings on for young women,” he observed.

“Do you hold with them for young men?”

Dodge puckered up his face into an odd expression of mingled reflection and worldly wisdom. “You can’t prevent young fellers bein’ young fellers,” he at length observed.

“It seems almost a pity that being young fellows should also mean being blackguards,” observed Mrs. Temperley calmly.

“Well, there’s somethin’ to be said for that way o’ lookin’ at it,” Dodge was startled into agreeing.

“I suppose she gets all the blame of the thing,” the lady went on, with quiet exasperation. Dodge seemed thrown off his bearings.

“Everybody in Craddock was a-talking about it, as was only to be expected,” said the gravedigger. “Well, well, we’re all sinners. Don’t do to be too hard on folks. ’Pears sad like after keepin’ ’spectable for all them years too—sort o’ waste.”

Mrs. Temperley gave a little laugh, which seemed to Dodge rather eccentric.

“Who is looking after the baby?” she asked.

“One of the neighbours, name o’ Gullick, as her husband works for Lord Engleton, which she takes in washing,” Dodge comprehensively explained.

“Had its mother no relatives?”

“Well, she had an aunt down at Southampton, I’ve heard tell, but she didn’t take much notice of her, not she didn’t. Her mother only died last year, took off sudden before her daughter could get to her.”

“Your schoolmistress has known trouble,” observed Mrs. Temperley. “Had she no one, no sister, no friend, during all this time that she could turn to for help or counsel?”

“Not as I knows of,” Dodge replied.

There was a long pause, during which the stillness seemed to weigh upon the air, as if the pressure of Fate were hanging there with ruthless immobility.

“She ain’t got no more to suffer now,” Dodge remarked, nodding with an aspect of half apology towards the grave. “They sleeps soft as sleeps here.”

“Good heavens, I hope so!” Mrs. Temperley exclaimed.

The grave had made considerable progress before she descended from the stile and prepared to take her homeward way. On leaving, she made Dodge come with her to the gate, and point out the red-roofed cottage covered with monthly roses and flaming creeper, where the schoolmistress had passed so many years, and where she now lay with her work and her days all over, in the tiny upper room, at whose latticed window the sun used to wake her on summer mornings, or the winter rain pattered dreary prophecies of the tears that she would one day shed.

---

CHAPTER XVII.

“IF you please, ma’am, the cook says as the meat hasn’t come for lunch, and what is she to do?”

“Without,” replied Mrs. Temperley automatically.

The maid waited for more discreet directions. She had given a month’s notice that very morning, because she found Craddock Dene too dull.

“Thank goodness, that barbarian is going!” Hubert had exclaimed.

“We shall but exchange a Goth for a Vandal,” his wife replied.

Mrs. Temperley gazed intently at her maid, the light of intelligence gradually dawning in her countenance. “Is there anything else in the house, Sapph—Sophia?”

“No, ma’am,” replied Sophia.

“Oh, tell the cook to make it into a fricassee, and be sure it is well flavoured.” The maid hesitated, but seeing from the wandering expression of her employer’s eye that her intellect was again clouded over, she retired to give the message to the cook—with comments.

The library at the Red House was the only room that had been radically altered since the days of the former tenants, whose taste had leant towards the florid rather than the classic. The general effect had been toned down, but it was impossible to disguise the leading motive; or what Mrs. Temperley passionately described as its brutal vulgarity. The library alone had been subjected to peine forte et dure. Mrs. Temperley said that it had been purified by suffering. By dint of tearing down and dragging out offending objects (“such a pity!” cried the neighbours) its prosperous and complacent absurdity had been humbled. Mrs. Temperley retired to this refuge after her encounter with Sophia. That perennially aggrieved young person entered almost immediately afterwards and announced a visitor, with an air that implied—“She’ll stay to lunch; see if she don’t, and what’ll you do then? Yah!”

The pronunciation of the visitor’s name was such, that, for the moment, Mrs. Temperley did not recognize it as that of Miss Valeria Du Prel.

She jumped up joyfully. “Ah, Valeria, this is delightful!”

The visit was explained after a characteristic fashion. Miss Du Prel realized that over two years had passed since she had seen Hadria, and moreover she had been seized with an overwhelming longing for a sight of country fields and a whiff of country air, so she had put a few things together in a handbag, which she had left at Craddock station by accident, and come down. Was there anyone who could go and fetch her handbag? It was such a nuisance; she laid it down for a moment to get at her ticket—she never could find her pocket, dressmakers always hid them in such an absurd way; could Hadria recommend any dressmaker who did not hide pockets? Wasn’t it tiresome? She had no time-table, and so she had gone to the station that morning and waited till a Craddock train started, and by this arrangement it had come to pass that she had spent an hour and a half on the platform: she did not think she ever had such an unpleasant time; why didn’t they have trains oftener? They did to Putney.

Mrs. Temperley sat down and laughed. Whereupon the other’s face lightened and she joined in the laugh at her own expense, settling into the easy chair that her hostess had prepared for her, with a gesture of helplessness and comfort.

“Well, in spite of that time at the station, I’m glad I came. It seems so long since I have seen you, dear Hadria, and the last time you know you were very unhappy, almost mad——”

“Yes, yes; never mind about that,” interposed Mrs. Temperley hastily, setting her teeth together.

“You take things too hard, too hard,” said Miss Du Prel. “I used to think I was bad in that way, but I am phlegmatic compared with you. One would suppose that——”

“Valeria, don’t, don’t, don’t,” cried Mrs. Temperley. “I can’t stand it.” Her teeth were still set tight and hard, her hands were clenched.

“Very well, very well. Tell me what you have been making of this ridiculous old world, where everything goes wrong and everybody is stupid or wicked, or both.”

Mrs. Temperley’s face relaxed a little, though the signs of some strong emotion were still visible.

“Well, to answer the general by the particular, I have spent the morning, accompanied by a nice young brood of Cochin-China fowls, in Craddock churchyard.”

“Oh, I hate a churchyard,” exclaimed Miss Du Prel, with a shudder. “It makes one think of the hideous mockery of life, and the more one would like to die, the worse seems the brutality of death and his hideous accompaniments. It is such a savage denial of all human aspirations and affections and hopes. Ah, it is horrible!” The sharply-outlined face grew haggard and white, as its owner crouched over the fire.

“Heaven knows! but it was very serene and very lovely up there this morning.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Valeria with a burst of strange enthusiasm and sadness, that revealed all the fire and yearning and power that had raised her above her fellows in the scale of consciousness, with the penalty of a life of solitude and of sorrow.

“Surely it is not without meaning that the places of the dead are the serenest spots on earth,” said Mrs. Temperley. “If I could keep myself in the mood that the place induces, I think I should not mind anything very much any more. The sunshine seems to rest more tenderly there than elsewhere, and the winds have a reverence for the graves, as if they felt it time that the dead were left in peace—the ‘happier dead,’ as poor immortal Tithonius calls them, who has not the gift of death. And the grey old tower and the weather stains on the stones; there is a conspiracy of beauty in the place, that holds one as one is held by music.”

“Ah! I know the magic of these things; it tempts one to believe at times that Nature is not all blind and unpitying. But that is a delusion: if there were any pity in Nature, the human spirit would not be dowered with such infinite and terrible longings and such capacities and dreams and prayers and then—then insulted with the mockery of death and annihilation.”

“If there should be no Beyond,” muttered Mrs. Temperley.

“That to me is inconceivable. When we die we fall into an eternal sleep. Moreover, I can see no creed that does not add the fear of future torments to the certainties of these.”

Mrs. Temperley was seized with a bitter mood. “You should cultivate faith,” she said; “it acts the part of the heading ‘Sundries omitted’ in one’s weekly accounts; one can put down under it everything that can’t be understood—but you don’t keep weekly accounts, so it’s no use pointing out to you the peace that comes of that device.”

The entrance of Sophia with firewood turned the current of conversation. “Good heavens! I don’t think we have anything for lunch!” Mrs. Temperley exclaimed. “Are you very hungry? What is to be done? It was the faithlessness of our butcher that disturbed the serenity of my mood this morning. Perhaps the poor beast whose carcase we were intending to devour will feel serene instead of me: but, alas! I fear he has been slaughtered quand même. That is one of the unsatisfactory things about life: that all its worst miseries bring good to no one. One may deny oneself, but not a living thing is necessarily the better for it—generally many are the worse. The wheels of pain go turning day by day, and the gods stand aloof—they will not help us, nor will they stay the ‘wild world’ in its course. No, no,” added Mrs. Temperley with a laugh, “I am not tired of life, but I am tired with it; it won’t give me what I want. That is perhaps because I want so much.”

The sound of male footsteps in the hall broke up the colloquy.

“Good heavens! Hubert has brought home a crowd of people to lunch,” exclaimed Hadria, “a thing he scarcely ever does. What fatality can have induced him to choose to-day of all others for this orgy of hospitality?”

“Does the day matter?” enquired Valeria, astonished at so much emotion.

“Does the day matter! Oh irresponsible question of the unwedded! When I tell you the butcher has not sent the meat.”

“Oh ... can’t one eat fish?” suggested Miss Du Prel.

Hadria laughed and opened the door.

“My dear, I have brought Fleming home to lunch.”

“Thank heaven, only one!”

Temperley stared.

“I could not conveniently have brought home several,” he said.

“I thought you would be at least seven,” cried the mistress of the house, “and with all the pertinacity of Wordsworth’s little girl.”

“What do you mean, if one may ask for simple English?”

“Merely that that intolerable Sanders has broken his word—hinc illæ lacrimæ.”

Hubert Temperley turned away in annoyance. He used to be amused by his wife’s flippancy before her marriage, but he had long since grown to dislike it. He retired to get out some wine, while Hadria went forward to welcome the guest, who now came in from the garden, where he had lingered to talk to the children.

“I am delighted to see you, Mr. Fleming; but I am grieved to say that we have unluckily only a wretched luncheon to give you, and after your long walk over the fields too! I am so sorry. The fact is we are left, this morning, with a gaping larder, at the mercy of a haughty and inconstant butcher, who grinds down his helpless dependents without mercy, overbearing creature that he is! We must ask you to be very tolerant.”

“Oh! please don’t trouble about that; it doesn’t matter in the least,” cried Mr. Fleming, pulling at his yellowish whiskers. He was a man of about five-and-thirty, of medium height, dressed in knickerbockers and Norfolk jacket that had seen some service.

“What is the difficulty?” asked Hubert.

“I was explaining to Mr. Fleming how inhospitably we are forced to treat him, on account of that traitor Sanders.”

Hubert gave a gesture of annoyance.

“I suppose there is something cold in the house.”

“Pudding, perhaps,” said his wife hopelessly. “It is most unlucky.”

“My dear, surely there must be something cold that isn’t pudding.”

“I fear, very little; but I will go and see the cook, though, alas! she is not easy to inspire as regards her particular business. She is extremely entertaining as a conversationalist, but I think she was meant for society rather than the kitchen. I am sure society would be more diverting if she were in it.”

Hadria was just turning to seek this misplaced genius, when she paused in the doorway.

“By the way, I suppose Sapphira has——”

“Do try and cure yourself of the habit of calling the girl by that absurd name, Hadria.”

“Oh, yes; but the name is so descriptive. She has told you of Miss Du Prel’s arrival?”

“She has told me nothing of the sort.”

Temperley did not look overjoyed. There had never been much cordiality between him and Valeria since the afternoon when they had met at Dunaghee, and found their sentiments in hopeless opposition.

Miss Du Prel took no interest in Hubert, though she admired his character. She had every wish to make herself agreeable to him, but her efforts in that direction were somewhat neutralized by an incurable absence of mind. If she was not interested, as Hadria said, she was seldom affable.

Possibly Hubert’s request to her, years ago at Dunaghee, to “think for a moment” had not been forgiven.

“Where is she? Oh!——”

The exclamation was in consequence of Miss Du Prel’s appearing at the door of the library, whence she surveyed the group with absent-minded intentness.

Valeria woke up with a start, and responded to Hubert’s greeting in an erratic fashion, replying tragically, to a casual enquiry as to her health, that she had been frightfully ill.

“I thought I was dying. But one never dies,” she added in a disgusted tone, whereat Hadria heartlessly laughed, and hurried the visitor upstairs to help her to unpack.

“Valeria,” said Mrs. Temperley, while that lady was confusedly trying to disentangle hat and hair, hat-pin and head, without involving the entire system in a common ruin—“Valeria, we are not a remarkable people at Craddock Dene. We may be worthy, we may have our good points, but we are not brilliant (except the cook). Should Mr. Fleming fail to impress you as a person of striking personality, I ask you, as a favour, not to emblazon that impression on every feature: should he address to you a remark that you do not find interesting, and it is quite conceivable that he may—do not glare at him scornfully for a moment, and——”

Hadria was not allowed to finish the sentence.

“As if I ever did any such thing—and people are so dull,” said Miss Du Prel.

A few “curried details,” as the hostess dejectedly described the fare, had been supplemented with vegetables, fruit, and impromptu preparations of eggs, and the luncheon was pronounced excellent and ample.

Miss Du Prel said that she hoped the butcher would always forget to send the meat. She liked these imaginative meals.

Temperley purposely misunderstood her to say “imaginary meals,” and hoped that next time she came, Hadria would not have an oratorio in course of composition. Miss Du Prel expressed a fiery interest in the oratorio.

“I judge the presence of oratorio by the absence of food,” Temperley explained suavely.

Hadria watched the encounter with a mingled sense of amusement and discomfort.

Valeria was in no danger. To be morally crushed by an adversary, it is necessary that one should be at least aware that the adversary is engaged in crushing one: a consciousness that was plainly denied to Miss Du Prel. Many a man far less able than Hubert had power to interest her, while he could not even hold her attention. She used to complain to Professor Fortescue that Temperley’s ideas never seemed to have originated in his own brain: they had been imported ready-made. Hubert was among the many who shrink and harden into mental furrows as time passes. What he had thought at twenty, at thirty-five had acquired sanctity and certainty, from having been the opinion of Hubert Temperley for all those favoured years. He had no suspicion that the views which he cherished in so dainty and scholarly a fashion were simply an edition de luxe of the views of everybody else. But his wife had made that discovery long ago. He smiled at the views of everybody else: his own were put forth as something choice and superior. He had the happy knack of being bourgeois with the air of an artist. If one could picture one’s grocer weighing out sugar in a Spanish cloak and brigand’s hat, it would afford an excellent symbol of his spiritual estate. To be perfectly commonplace in a brilliantly original way, is to be notable after all.

Mr. Fleming seemed puzzled by Miss Du Prel, at whom he glanced uneasily from time to time, wondering what she would say next. At Craddock Dene, ladies usually listened with a more or less breathless deference when Temperley spoke. This new-comer seemed recklessly independent.

Mrs. Temperley endeavoured to lead the conversation in ways of peace, but Valeria was evidently on the war-path. Temperley was polite and ironical, with under-meanings for Hadria’s benefit.

“If one asks impossible things of life, one is apt to be disappointed, I fear,” he said serenely. “Ask for the possible and natural harvest of a woman’s career, and see if you don’t get it.”

“Let a canary plead for its cage, in short, and its commendable prayer will be answered!”

“If you like to put it thus ungraciously. I should say that one who makes the most of his opportunities, as they stand, fares better than he who sighs for other worlds to conquer.”

“I suppose that is what his relatives said to Columbus,” observed Miss Du Prel.

“And how do you know they were not right?” he retorted.

Mrs. Temperley gave the signal to rise. “Let’s go for a walk,” she suggested, “the afternoon invites us. Look at it.”

The brilliant sunshine and the exercise brought about a more genial mood. Only once was there anything approaching friction, and then it was Hadria herself who caused it.

“Yes, we all flatter ourselves that we are observing life, when we are merely noting the occasions when some musty old notion of ours happens, by chance, to get fulfilled.”

Hubert Temperley at once roused Miss Du Prel’s interest by the large stores of information that he had to pour forth on the history of the district, from its earliest times to the present. He recalled the days when these lands that looked so smooth and tended had been mere wastes of marsh and forest.

How quickly these great changes were accomplished! Valeria stood on the brow of a wide corn-field, looking out over the sleeping country. A century, after all, was not much more than one person’s lifetime, yet in scarcely nine of these—nine little troubled lifetimes—what incredible things had occurred in this island of ours! How did it all come about? “Not assuredly,” Valeria remarked with sudden malice, “by taking things as they stood, and making the best of them with imbecile impatience. If everyone had done that, what sort of an England should I have had stretching before my eyes at this moment?”

“You would not have been here to see,” said Hadria, lazily rolling stones down the hill with her foot. “We should all of us have been dancing round some huge log-fire on the borders of a primeval forest, and instead of browsing on salads, as we did to-day, we should be sustaining ourselves on the unholy nourishment of boiled parent or grilled aunt.”

Mr. Temperley’s refined appearance and manner seemed to raise an incarnate protest against this revolting picture. For some occult reason, the imagination of all was at work especially and exclusively on the figure of that polished gentleman in war-paint and feathers, sporting round the cauldron that contained the boiled earthly remains of his relations.

Mr. Fleming betrayed the common thought by remarking that it would be very becoming to him.

“Ah! I wish we were all savages in feathers and war-paint, dancing on the edge of some wild forest, with nothing but the sea and the sky for limits!”

Miss Du Prel surprised her audience by this earnest aspiration.

“Do you feel inclined to revert?” Hadria enquired. “Because if so, I shall be glad to join you.”

“I think there is a slight touch of the savage about Mrs. Temperley,” observed Fleming pensively. “I mean, don’t you know—of course——.”

“You are quite right!” cried Valeria. “I have often noticed a sort of wildness that crops up now and then through a very smooth surface. Hadria may sigh for the woodlands, yet——!”

---

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE first break in the unity of the Fullerton family had occurred on the occasion of Hadria’s marriage. The short period that elapsed between that memorable New-Year’s-Eve and the wedding had been a painful experience for Dunaghee. Hadria’s conduct had shaken her brothers’ faith in her and in all womankind. Ernest especially had suffered disillusion. He had supposed her above the ordinary, pettier weaknesses of humanity. Other fellows’ sisters had seemed to him miserable travesties of their sex compared with her. (There was one exception only, to this rule.) But now, what was he to think? She had shattered his faith. If she hadn’t been “so cocksure of herself,” he wouldn’t have minded so much; but after all she had professed, to go and marry, and marry a starched specimen like that!

Fred was equally emphatic. For a long time he had regarded it all as a joke. He shook his head knowingly, and said that sort of thing wouldn’t go down. When he was at length convinced, he danced with rage. He became cynical. He had no patience with girls. They talked for talking’s sake. It meant nothing.

Algitha understood, better than her brothers could understand, how Hadria’s emotional nature had been caught in some strange mood, how the eloquent assurances of her lover might have half convinced her. Algitha’s own experience of proposals set her on the track of the mystery.

“It is most misleading,” she pointed out, to her scoffing brothers. “One would suppose that marrying was the simplest thing in the world—nothing perilous, nothing to object to about it. A man proposes to you as if he were asking you for the sixth waltz, only his manner is perfervid. And my belief is that half the girls who accept don’t realize that they are agreeing to anything much more serious.”

“The more fools they!”

“True; but it really is most bewildering. Claims, obligations, all the ugly sides of the affair are hidden away; the man is at his best, full of refinement and courtesy and unselfishness. And if he persuades the girl that he really does care for her, how can she suppose that she cannot trust her future to him—if he loves her? And yet she can’t!”

“How can a man suppose that one girl is going to be different from every other girl?” asked Fred.

“Different, you mean, from what he supposes every other girl to be,” Algitha corrected. “It’s his own look-out if he’s such a fool.”

“I believe Hadria married because she was sick of being the family consolation,” said Ernest.

“Well, of course, the hope of escape was very tempting. You boys don’t know what she went through. We all regret her marriage to Hubert Temperley—though between ourselves, not more than he regrets it, if I am not much mistaken—but it is very certain that she could not have gone on living at home much longer, as things were.”

Fred said that she ought to have broken out after Algitha’s fashion, if it was so bad as all that.

“I think mother would have died if she had,” said the sister.

“Hadria was awkwardly placed,” Fred admitted.

“Do you remember that evening in the garret when we all told her what we thought?” asked Ernest.

Nobody had forgotten that painful occasion.

“She said then that if the worst came to the worst, she would simply run away. What could prevent her?”

“That wretched sister of his!” cried Algitha. “If it hadn’t been for her, the marriage would never have taken place. She got the ear of mother after the engagement, and I am certain it was through her influence that mother hurried the wedding on so. If only there had been a little more time, it could have been prevented. And Henriette knew that. She is as knowing——!”

“I wish we had strangled her.”

“I shall never forget,” Algitha went on, “that night when Hadria was taken with a fit of terror—it was nothing less—and wrote to break off the engagement, and that woman undertook to deliver the letter and lost it, on purpose I am always convinced, and then the favourable moment was over.”

“What made her so anxious for the marriage beats me,” cried Ernest. “It was not a particularly good match from a mercenary point of view.”

“She thought us an interesting family to marry into,” suggested Fred, “which is undeniable.”

“Then she must be greatly disappointed at seeing so little of us!” cried Ernest.

In the early days, Miss Temperley had stayed frequently at the Red House, and Hadria had been cut off from her own family, who detested Henriette.

For a year or more, there had been a fair promise of a successful adjustment of the two incongruous natures in the new conditions. They both tried to keep off dangerous ground and to avoid collisions of will. They made the most of their one common interest, although even here they soon found themselves out of sympathy. Hubert’s instincts were scholastic and lawful, Hadria was disposed to daring innovation. Her bizarre compositions shocked him painfully. The two jarred on one another, in great things and in small. The halcyon period was short-lived. The dream, such as it was, came to an end. Hubert turned to his sister, in his bewilderment and disappointment. They had both counted so securely on the effect of experience and the pressure of events to teach Hadria the desirable lesson, and they were dismayed to find that, unlike other women, she had failed to learn it. Henriette was in despair. It was she who had brought about the ill-starred union. How could she ever forgive herself? How repair the error she had made? Only by devoting herself to her brother, and trying patiently to bring his wife to a wiser frame of mind.

A considerable time had elapsed, during which Hadria saw her brothers and sister only at long intervals. Ernest had become estranged from her, to her great grief. He was as courteous and tender in his manner to her as of yore, but there was a change, not to be mistaken. She had lost the brother of her girlhood for ever. While it bitterly grieved, it did not surprise her. She acknowledged in dismay the inconsistency of her conduct. She must have been mad! The universal similarity in the behaviour of girls, herself included, alarmed her. Was there some external will that drove them all, in hordes, to their fate? Were all the intricacies of event and circumstance, of their very emotion, merely the workings of that ruthless cosmic will by which the individual was hypnotised and ruled?

As usual at critical moments, Hadria had been solitary in her encounter with the elements of Fate. There were conflicts that even her sister knew nothing about, the bewilderments and temptations of a nature hampered in its action by its own voluminous qualities and its caprice.

Her brothers supposed that in a short time Hadria would be “wearing bonnets and a card-case, and going the rounds with an elegant expression like the rest of them.”

How different were the little local facts of life—the little chopped-up life that accumulates in odds and ends from moment to moment—from the sun-and-smoke vision of early irresponsible days!

Mrs. Fullerton was pleased with the marriage, not merely because Hubert’s father, Judge Temperley, could secure for his son a prosperous career, but because she was so thankful to see a strange, unaccountable girl like Hadria settling quietly down, with a couple of children to keep her out of mischief.

That was what it had come to! Perhaps they calculated a little too surely. Possibly even two children might not keep her entirely out of mischief. Out of what impulse of malice had Fate pitched upon the most essentially mutinous and erratic of the whole brood, for the sedatest rôle? But perhaps Fate, too, had calculated unscientifically. Mischief was always possible, if one gave one’s mind to it. Or was she growing too old to have the spirit for thorough-going devilry? Youth seemed rather an affair of mental outlook than of years. She felt twenty years older since her marriage. She wondered why it was that marriage did not make all women wicked,—openly and actively so. If ever there was an arrangement by which every evil instinct and every spark of the devil was likely to be aroused and infuriated, surely the customs and traditions that clustered round this estate constituted that dangerous combination! Hardship, difficulty, tragedy could be faced, but not the humiliating, the degrading, the contemptible. Hadria had her own particular ideas as to what ought to be set down under these headings. Most women, she found, ranked certain elements very differently, with lavish use of halos and gilding in their honour, feeling perhaps, she hinted, the dire need of such external decoration.

Good heavens! Did no other woman realize the insult of it all? Hadria knew so few women intimately; none intimately enough to be convinced that no such revolt lay smouldering beneath their smiles. She had a lonely assurance that she had never met the sister-soul (for such there must be by the score, as silent as she), who shared her rage and her detestations. Valeria, with all her native pride, regarded these as proof of a big flaw in an otherwise sound nature. Yet how deep, how passionately strong, these feelings were, how gigantic the flaw!

What possessed people that they did not see what was so brutally clear? As young girls led forth unconscious into the battle, with a bandage over their eyes, and cotton-wool in their ears—yes, then it was inevitable that they should see and hear nothing. Had they been newly imported from the moon they could scarcely have less acquaintance with terrestrial conditions; but afterwards, when ruthlessly, with the grinning assistance of the onlookers, the facts of the social scheme were cynically revealed, and the rôle imperiously allotted—with much admonition and moving appeals to conscience and religion, and all the other aides-de-camp at command—after all that, how in the name of heaven could they continue to “babble of green fields”? Was it conceivable that among the thousands of women to whom year after year the facts were disclosed, not one understood and not one—hated?

A flame sprang up in Hadria’s eyes. There must be other women somewhere at this very moment, whose whole being was burning up with this bitter, this sickening and futile hatred! But how few, how few! How vast was the meek majority, fattening on indignity, proud of their humiliation! Yet how wise they were after all. It hurt so to hate—to hate like this. Submission was an affair of temperament, a gift of birth. Nature endowed with a serviceable meekness those whom she designed for insult. Yet it might not be meekness so much as mere brutal necessity that held them all in thrall—the inexorable logic of conditions. Fate knew better than to assail the victim point blank, and so put her on her guard. No; she lured her on gently, cunningly, closing behind her, one by one, the doors of escape, persuading her, forcing her to fasten on her own tethers, appealing to a thousand qualities, good and bad; now to a moment’s weakness or pity, now to her eternal fear of grieving others (that was a well-worked vein!), now to her instinct of self-sacrifice, now to grim necessity itself, profiting too by the increasing discouragements, the vain efforts, the physical pain and horrible weariness, the crowding of little difficulties, harassments, the troubles of others—ah! how infinite were these! so that there was no interval for breathing, and scarcely time or space to cope with the legions of the moment; the horizon was black with their advancing hosts!

And this assuredly was no unique experience. Hadria remembered how she had once said that if the worst came to the worst, it would be easy to run away. To her inexperience desperate remedies had seemed so simple, so feasible—the factors of life so few and unentwined. She had not understood how prolific are our deeds, how an act brings with it a large and unexpected progeny, which surround us with new influences and force upon us unforeseen conditions. Yet frequent had been the impulse to adopt that girlish solution of the difficulty. She had no picturesque grievances of the kind that would excite sympathy. On the contrary, popular feeling would set dead against her; she would be acting on an idea that nobody shared, not even her most intimate friend.

Miss Du Prel had arrived at the conclusion that she did not understand Hadria. She had attributed many of her peculiarities to her unique education and her inexperience. Hadria had indeed changed greatly since her marriage, but not in the manner that might have been expected. On the contrary, a closer intimacy with popular social ideals had fired her with a more angry spirit of rebellion. Miss Du Prel had met examples of every kind of eccentricity, but she had never before come upon so marked an instance of this particular type. Hadria’s attitude towards life had suggested to Miss Du Prel the idea of her heroine, Caterina. She remonstrated with Hadria, assuring her that no insult towards women was intended in the general scheme of society, and that it was a mistake to regard it in so resentful a spirit.

“But that is just the most insulting thing about it,” Hadria exclaimed. “Insult is so much a matter of course that people are surprised if one takes umbrage at it. Read this passage from Aristotle that I came upon the other day. He is perfectly calm and amiable, entirely unconscious of offence, when he says that ‘a wife ought to shew herself even more obedient to the rein than if she entered the house as a purchased slave. For she has been bought at a high price, for the sake of sharing life and bearing children, than which no higher or holier tie can possibly exist.’ (Henriette to the very life!)”

Miss Du Prel laughed, and re-read the passage from the Politics, in some surprise.

“Do you suppose insult is deliberately intended in that graceful sentiment?” asked Hadria. “Obviously not. If any woman of that time had blazed up in anger at the well-meant speech, she would have astonished and grieved her contemporaries. Aristotle doubtless professed a high respect for women who followed his precepts—as men do now when we are obedient.”

“Of course, our society in this particular has not wandered far from the Greek idea,” Miss Du Prel observed pensively.

Hadria pronounced the paradox, “The sharpness of the insult lies in its not being intended.”

Miss Du Prel could not prevail upon her to modify the assertion. Hadria pointed out that the Greeks also meant no offence in regarding their respectable women as simple reproductive agents of inferior human quality.

“And though our well-brought-up girls shrink from the frank speech, they do not appear to shrink from the ideas of the old Greeks. They don’t mind playing the part of cows so long as one doesn’t mention it.”

About eighteen months ago, the village had been full of talk and excitement in consequence of the birth of an heir to the house of Engleton, Lady Engleton’s mission in life being frankly regarded as unfulfilled during the previous three or four years, when she had disappointed the hopes of the family. Hadria listened scornfully. In her eyes, the crowning indignity of the whole affair was Lady Engleton’s own smiling acceptance of the position, and her complacent eagerness to produce the tardy inheritor of the property and honours. This expression of sentiment had, by some means, reached the Vicarage and created much consternation.

Mrs. Walker asserted that it was right and Christian of the lady to desire that which gave every one so much pleasure. “A climax of feminine abjectness!” Hadria had exclaimed in Henriette’s presence.

Miss Temperley, after endeavouring to goad her sister-in-law into the expression of jubilant congratulations, was met by the passionate declaration that she felt more disposed to weep than to rejoice, and more disposed to curse than to weep.

Obviously, Miss Temperley had reason to be uneasy about her part in bringing about her brother’s marriage.

These sudden overflows of exasperated feeling had become less frequent as time went on, but the neighbours looked askance at Mrs. Temperley. Though a powder-magazine may not always blow up, one passes it with a grave consciousness of vast stores of inflammable material lying somewhere within, and who knows what spark might set the thing spouting to the skies?

When the occasional visitors had left, life in the village settled down to its normal level, or more accurately, to its normal flatness as regarded general contours, and its petty inequalities in respect to local detail. It reminded Hadria of the landscape which stretched in quiet long lines to the low horizon, while close at hand, the ground fussed and fretted itself into minor ups and downs of no character, but with all the trouble of a mountain district in its complexities of slope and hollow. Hadria suffered from a gnawing home-sickness; a longing for the rougher, bleaker scenery of the North.

The tired spirit translated the homely English country, so deeply reposeful in its spirit, into an image of dull unrest. If only those broken, stupid lines could have been smoothed out into the grandeur of a plain, Hadria thought that it would have comforted her, as if a song had moved across it with the long-stretching winds. As it was, to look from her window only meant to find repeated the trivialities of life, more picturesque indeed, but still trivialities. It was the estimable and domestic qualities of Nature that presented themselves: Nature in her most maternal and uninspired mood—Mother earth submissive to the dictatorship of man, permitting herself to be torn, and wounded, and furrowed, and harrowed at his pleasure, yielding her substance and her life to sustain the produce of his choosing, her body and her soul abandoned supine to his caprice. The sight had an exasperating effect upon Hadria. Its symbolism haunted her. The calm, sweet English landscape affected her at times with a sort of disgust. It was, perhaps, the same in kind as the far stronger sensation of disgust that she felt when she first saw Lady Engleton with her new-born child, full of pride and exultation. It was as much as she could do to shake hands with the happy mother.

When Valeria expressed dismay at so strange a feeling Hadria had refused to be treated as a solitary sinner. There were plenty of fellow-culprits, she said, only they did not dare to speak out. Let Valeria study girls and judge for herself.

Hadria was challenged to name a girl.

Well, Algitha for one. Hadria also suspected Marion Jordan, well-drilled though she was by her dragoon of a mother.

Valeria would not hear of it. Marion Jordan! the gentlest, timidest, most typical of young English girls! Impossible!

“I am almost sure of it, nevertheless,” said Hadria. “Oh, believe me, it is common enough! Few grasp it intellectually perhaps, but thousands feel the insult; of that I am morally certain.”

“What leads you to think so in Marion’s case?”

“Some look, or tone, or word; something slight, but to my mind conclusive. Fellow-sinners detect one another, you know.”

“Well, I don’t understand what the world is coming to!” exclaimed Miss Du Prel. “Where are the natural instincts?”

“Sprouting up for the first time perhaps,” Hadria suggested.

“They seem to be disappearing, if what you say has the slightest foundation.”

“Oh, you are speaking of only one kind of instinct. The others have all been suppressed. Perhaps women are not altogether animals after all. The thought is startling, I know. Try to face it.”

“I never supposed they were,” cried Valeria, a little annoyed.

“But you never made allowance for the suppressed instincts,” said Hadria.

“I don’t believe they can be suppressed.”

“I believe they can be not merely suppressed, but killed past hope of recovery. And I also believe that there may be, that there must be, ideas and emotions fermenting in people’s brains, quite different from those that they are supposed and ordered to cherish, and that these heresies go on working in secret for years before they become even suspected, and then suddenly the population exchange confessions.”

“After that the Deluge!” exclaimed Miss Du Prel. “You describe the features of a great revolution.”

“So much the better,” said Hadria; “and when the waters sink again, a nice fresh clean world!”

---

CHAPTER XIX.

ON the lawn of the Red House, a little group was collected under the big walnut tree. The sunlight fell through the leaves on the singing tea-kettle and the cups and saucers, and made bright patches on the figures and the faces assembled round the tea-table.

Hubert Temperley had again brought his friend Joseph Fleming, in the forlorn hope, he said, of being able to give him something to eat and drink. Ernest and Algitha and Fred were of the party. They had come down from Saturday till Monday. Ernest was studying for the Bar. Fred had entered a merchant’s office in the city, and hated his work cordially. Miss Du Prel was still at the Red House.

Lady Engleton had called by chance this afternoon, and Mrs. Walker, the vicar’s wife, with two of her countless daughters, had come by invitation. Mrs. Walker was a middle-aged, careworn, rather prim-looking woman. Lady Engleton was handsome. Bright auburn hair waved back in picturesque fashion from a piquant face, and constituted more than half her claim to beauty. The brown eyes were bright and vivacious. The mouth was seldom quite shut. It scarcely seemed worth while, the loquacious lady had confessed. She showed a delicate taste in dress. Shades of brown and russet made a fine harmony with her auburn hair, and the ivory white and fresh red of her skin.

She and Temperley always enjoyed a sprightly interchange of epigrams. Lady Engleton had the qualities that Hubert had admired in Hadria before their marriage, and she was entirely free from the other characteristics that had exasperated him so desperately since that hideous mistake that he had made. Lady Engleton had originality and brilliancy, but she knew how to combine these qualities with perfect obedience to the necessary conventions of life. She had the sparkle of champagne, without the troublesome tendency of that delicate beverage to break bounds, and brim over in iridescent, swelling, joyous foam, the discreet edges of such goblets as custom might decree for the sunny vintage. Lady Engleton sparkled, glowed, nipped even at times, was of excellent dry quality, but she never frothed over. She always knew where to stop; she had the genius of moderation. She stood to Hadria as a correct rendering of a cherished idea stands to a faulty one. She made Hubert acutely feel his misfortune, and shewed him his lost hope, his shattered ideal.

“Is the picture finished?” he enquired, as he handed Lady Engleton her tea.

“What, the view from your field? Not quite. I was working at it when Claude Moreton and Mrs. Jordan and Marion arrived, and I have been rather interrupted. That’s the worst of visitors. One’s little immortal works do get put aside, poor things.”

Lady Engleton broke into the light laugh that had become almost mechanical with her.

“Your friends grudge the hours you spend in your studio,” said Temperley.

“Oh, they don’t mind, so long as I give them as much time as they want,” she said. “I have to apologise and compromise, don’t you know, but, with a little management, one can get on. Of course, society does ask a good deal of attention, doesn’t it? and one has to be so careful.”

“Just a little tact and thought,” said Temperley with a sigh.

Lady Engleton admired Algitha, who was standing with Ernest a little apart from the group.

“She is like your wife, and yet there is a singular difference in the expression.”

Lady Engleton was too discreet to say that Mrs. Temperley lacked the look of contentment and serenity that was so marked in her sister’s face.

“Algitha is a thoroughly sensible girl,” said the brother-in-law.

“I hear you have not long returned from a visit to Mr. Fullerton’s place in Scotland, Mr. Temperley,” observed the vicar’s wife when her host turned to address her.

“Yes,” he said, “we have been there half the summer. The boys thoroughly enjoyed the freedom and the novelty. The river, of course, was a source of great joy to them, and of hideous anxiety to the rest of us.”

“Of course, of course,” assented Mrs. Walker. “Ah, there are the dear little boys. Won’t you come and give me a kiss, darling?”

“Darling” did what was required in a business-like manner, and stood by, while the lady discovered in him a speaking likeness to his parents, to his Aunt Algitha and his Uncle Fred, not to mention the portrait of his great-grandfather, the Solicitor-General, that hung in the dining-room. The child seemed thoroughly accustomed to be thought the living image of various relations, and he waited indifferently till the list was ended.

“Do you know, we are half hoping that Professor Fortescue may be able to come to us for a week or ten days?” said Lady Engleton. “We are so looking forward to it.”

“Professor Fortescue is always a favourite,” remarked Mrs. Walker. “It is such a pity he does not return to the Priory, is it not?—a great house like that standing empty. Of course it is very natural after the dreadful event that happened there”—Mrs. Walker lowered her voice discreetly—“but it seems a sin to leave the place untenanted.”

Lady Engleton explained that there was some prospect of the house being let at last to a friend and colleague of the Professor. Mrs. Walker doubtless would remember Professor Theobald, who used to come and stay at Craddock Place rather frequently some years ago, a big man with beard and moustache, very learned and very amusing.

Mrs. Walker remembered him perfectly. Her husband had been so much interested in his descriptions of a tour in Palestine, all through the scenes of the New Testament. He was a great archæologist. Was he really coming to the Priory? How very delightful. John would be so glad to hear it.

“Oh, it is not settled yet, but the two Professors are coming to us some time soon, I believe, and Professor Theobald will look over the house and see if he thinks it would be too unmanageably big for himself and his old mother and sister. I hope he will take the place. He would bring a new and interesting element into the village. What do you think of it, Mrs. Temperley?”

“Oh, I hope the learned and amusing Professor will come,” she said. “The worst of it is, from my point of view, that I shall have to give up my practices there. Professor Fortescue allows me to wake the old piano from its long slumbers in the drawing-room.”

“Oh, of course. Marion Jordan was telling me that she was quite startled the other day, in crossing the Priory garden, to hear music stealing out of the apparently deserted house. She had heard the country people say that the ghost of poor Mrs. Fortescue walks along the terrace in the twilight, and Marion looked quite scared when she came in, for the music seemed to come from the drawing-room, where its mistress used to play so much after she was first married. I almost wonder you can sit alone there in the dusk, considering the dreadful associations of the place.”

“I am used to it now,” Mrs. Temperley replied, “and it is so nice and quiet in the empty house. One knows one can’t be interrupted—unless by ghosts.”

“Well, that is certainly a blessing,” cried Lady Engleton. “I think I shall ask Professor Fortescue to allow me also to go to the Priory to pursue my art in peace and quietness; a truly hyperborean state, beyond the region of visitors!”

“There would be plenty of room for a dozen unsociable monomaniacs like ourselves,” said Mrs. Temperley.

“I imagine you are a God-send to poor Mrs. Williams, the caretaker,” said Joseph Fleming. “She is my gamekeeper’s sister, and I hear that she finds the solitude in that vast house almost more than she can stand.”

“Poor woman!” said Lady Engleton. “Well, Mr. Fleming, what are the sporting prospects this autumn?”

He pulled himself together, and his face lighted up. On that subject he could speak for hours.

Of Joseph Fleming his friends all said: The best fellow in the world. A kinder heart had no man. He lived on his little property from year’s end to year’s end, for the sole and single end of depriving the pheasants and partridges which he bred upon the estate, of their existence. He was a confirmed bachelor, living quietly, and taking the world as he found it (seeing that there was a sufficiency of partridges in good seasons); trusting that there was a God above who would not let the supply run short, if one honestly tried to do one’s duty and lived an upright life, harming no man, and women only so much as was strictly honourable and necessary. He spoke ill of no one. He was diffident of his own powers, except about sport, wherein he knew himself princely, and cherished that sort of respect for woman, thoroughly sincere, which assigns to her a pedestal in a sheltered niche, and offers her homage on condition of her staying where she is put, even though she starve there, solitary and esteemed.

“Do tell me, Mr. Fleming, if you know, who is that very handsome woman with the white hair?” said Lady Engleton. “She is talking to Mrs. Walker. I seem to know the face.”

“Oh, that is Miss Valeria Du Prel, the authoress of those books that Mrs. Walker is so shocked at.”

“Oh, of course; how stupid of me. I should like to have some conversation with her.”

“That’s easily managed. I don’t think she and Mrs. Walker quite appreciate each other.”

Lady Engleton laughed.

Mrs. Walker was anxiously watching her daughters, and endeavouring to keep them at a distance from Miss Du Prel, who looked tragically bored.

Joseph Fleming found means to release her, and Lady Engleton’s desire was gratified. “I admire your books so much, Miss Du Prel, and I have so often wished to see more of you; but you have been abroad for the last two years, I hear.”

Lady Engleton, after asking the authoress to explain exactly what she meant by her last book, enquired if she had the latest news of Professor Fortescue. Lady Engleton had heard, with regret, that he had been greatly worried about that troublesome nephew whom he had educated and sent to Oxford.

“The young fellow had been behaving very badly,” Miss Du Prel said.

“Ungrateful creature,” cried Lady Engleton. “Running into debt I suppose.”

Miss Du Prel feared that the Professor was suffering in health. He had been working very hard.

“Oh, yes; what was that about some method of killing animals instantaneously to avoid the horrors of the slaughter-house? Professor Theobald has been saying what a pity it is that a man so able should waste his time over these fads. It would never bring him fame or profit, only ridicule. Every man had his little weakness, but this idea of saving pain to animals, Professor Theobald said, was becoming a sort of mania with poor Fortescue, and one feared that it might injure his career. He was greatly looked up to in the scientific world, but this sort of thing of course——

“Though it is nice of him in a way,” added Lady Engleton.

“His weaknesses are nobler than most people’s virtues,” said Miss Du Prel.

“Then you number this among his weaknesses?”

Algitha, who had joined the group, put this question.

“I would rather see him working in the cause of humanity,” Miss Du Prel answered.

Ernest surprised everyone by suggesting that possibly humanity was well served, in the long run, by reminding it of the responsibility that goes with power, and by giving it an object lesson in the decent treatment of those who can’t defend themselves.

“You must have sat at the Professor’s feet,” cried Miss Du Prel, raising her eyebrows.

“I have,” said Ernest, with a little gesture of pride.

Lady Engleton shook her head. “I fear he flies too high for ordinary mortals,” she said; “and I doubt if even he can be quite consistent at that altitude.”

“Better perhaps fly fairly high, and come down now and again to rest, if one must, than grovel consistently and always,” observed Ernest.

Lady Engleton gave a little scream. “Mrs. Temperley, come to the rescue. Your brother is calling us names. He says we grovel consistently and always.”

Ernest laughed, and protested. Lady Engleton pretended to be mortally offended. Mrs. Temperley was sorry she could give no redress. She had suffered from Ernest’s painful frankness from her youth upwards.

The conversation grew discursive. Lady Engleton enjoyed the pastime of lightly touching the edges of what she called “advanced” thought. She sought the society of people like the two Professors and Miss Du Prel in order to hear what dreadful and delightful things they really would say. She read all the new books, and went to the courageous plays that Mrs. Walker wouldn’t mention.

“Your last book, Caterina, is a mine of suggestion, Miss Du Prel,” she said. “It raises one most interesting point that has puzzled me greatly. I don’t know if you have all read the book? The heroine finds herself differing in her view of life from everyone round her. She is married, but she has made no secret of her scorn for the old ideals, and has announced that she has no intention of being bound by them.”

Mrs. Temperley glanced uneasily at Miss Du Prel.

“Accordingly she does even as she had said,” continued Lady Engleton. “She will not brook that interference with her liberty which marriage among us old-fashioned people generally implies. She refuses to submit to the attempt that is of course made (in spite of a pre-nuptial understanding) to bring her under the yoke, and so off she goes and lives independently, leaving husband and relatives lamenting.”

The vicar’s wife said she thought she must be going home. Her husband would be expecting her.

“Oh, won’t you wait a little, Mrs. Walker? Your daughters would perhaps like a game of tennis with my brothers presently.”

Mrs. Walker yielded uneasily.

“But before Caterina takes the law into her own hands, in this way,” Lady Engleton continued, “she is troubled with doubts. She sometimes wonders whether she ought not, after all, to respect the popular standards (notwithstanding the compact), instead of disturbing everybody by clinging to her own. Now was it strength of character or obstinate egotism that induced her to stick to her original colours, come what might? That is the question which the book has stated but left unanswered.”

Miss Du Prel said that the book showed, if it showed anything, that one must be true to one’s own standard, and not attempt to respect an ideal in practice that one despises in theory. We are bound, she asserted, to produce that which is most individual within us; to be ourselves, and not a poor imitation of someone else; to dare even apparent wrong-doing, rather than submit to live a life of devotion to that which we cannot believe.

Mrs. Walker suggested to her daughters that they might go and have a look at the rose-garden, but the daughters preferred to listen to the conversation.

“In real life,” said the practical Algitha, “Caterina would not have been able to follow her idea so simply. Supposing she had had children and complicated circumstances, what could she have done?”

Miss Du Prel thought that a compromise might have been made.

“A compromise by which she could act according to two opposite standards?”

Valeria was impatient of difficulties. It was not necessary that a woman should leave her home in order to be true to her conscience. It was the best method in Caterina’s case, but not in all.

Miss Du Prel did not explain very clearly what she meant. Women made too much of difficulties, she thought. Somehow people had managed to overcome obstacles. Look at—and then followed a list of shining examples.

“I believe you would blame a modern woman who imitated them,” said Mrs. Temperley. “These women have the inestimable advantage of being dead.”

“Ah, yes,” Lady Engleton agreed, with a laugh, “we women may be anything we like—in the last century.”

“The tides of a hundred years or so sweeping over one’s audacious deed, soften the raw edges. Then it is tolerated in the landscape; indeed, it grows mossy and picturesque.” Mrs. Temperley made this comparison.

“And then think how useful it becomes to prove that a daring deed can be done, given only the necessary stuff in brain and heart.”

Mrs. Walker looked at Algitha in dismay.

“One can throw it in the teeth of one’s contemporaries,” added Algitha, “if they fail to produce a dramatic climax of the same kind.”

“Only,” said Mrs. Temperley, “if they do venture upon their own dreadful deed—the deed demanded by their particular modern predicament—then we all shriek vigorously.”

“Oh, we shriek less than we used to,” said Lady Engleton. “It is quite a relief to be able to retain one’s respectability on easier terms.”

“In such a case as Miss Du Prel depicts? I doubt it. Caterina, in real life, would have a lively story to tell. How selfish we should think her! How we should point to the festoons of bleeding hearts that she had wounded—a dripping cordon round the deserted home! No; I believe Miss Du Prel herself would be horrified at her own Caterina if she came upon her unexpectedly in somebody’s drawing-room.”

There was a laugh.

“Of course, a great deal is to be said for the popular way of looking at the matter,” Lady Engleton observed. “This fascinating heroine must have caused a great deal of real sorrow, or at least she would have caused it, were it not that her creator had considerably removed all relatives, except a devoted couple of unorthodox parents, who are charmed at her decision to scandalize society, and wonder why she doesn’t do it sooner. Parents like that don’t grow on every bush.”

Mrs. Walker glanced nervously at her astonished girls.

Lady Engleton pointed out that had Caterina been situated in a more ordinary manner, she would have certainly broken her parents’ hearts and embittered their last years, to say nothing of the husband and perhaps the children, who would have suffered for want of a mother’s care.

“But why should the husband suffer?” asked Algitha. “Caterina’s husband cordially detested her.”

“It is customary to regard the occasion as one proper for suffering,” said Mrs. Temperley, “and every well-regulated husband would suffer accordingly.”

“Clearly,” assented Lady Engleton. “When the world congratulates us we rejoice, when it condoles with us we weep.”

“That at least, would not affect the children,” said Algitha. “I don’t see why of necessity they should suffer.”

“Their share of the woe would be least of all, I think,” Mrs. Temperley observed. “What ogre is going to ill-treat them? And since few of us know how to bring up so much as an earth-worm reasonably, I can’t see that it matters so very much which particular woman looks after the children. Any average fool would do.”

Mrs. Walker was stiffening in every limb.

“The children would have the usual chances of their class; neither more nor less, as it seems to me, for lack of a maternal burnt-offering.”

Mrs. Walker rose, gathered her daughters about her, and came forward to say good-bye. She was sure her husband would be annoyed if she did not return. She retired with nervous precipitation.

“Really you will depopulate this village, Mrs. Temperley,” cried Lady Engleton with a laugh; “it is quite dangerous to bring up a family within your reach. There will be a general exodus. I must be going myself, or I shan’t have an orthodox sentiment left.”

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CHAPTER XX.

HENRIETTE had secured Mrs. Fullerton for an ally, from the beginning. When Hadria’s parents visited the Red House, Miss Temperley was asked to meet them, by special request. Henriette employed tact on a grand scale, and achieved results in proportion. She was sorry that dear Hadria did not more quickly recover her strength. Her health was not what it ought to be. Mrs. Fullerton sighed. She was ready to play into Miss Temperley’s hands on every occasion.

The latter had less success in her dealings with Miss Du Prel. She tried to discover Hadria’s more intimate feelings by talking her over with Valeria, ignoring the snubs that were copiously administered by that indignant lady. Valeria spoke with sublime scorn of this attempt.

“To try and pump information out of a friend! Why not listen at the key-hole, and be done with it!”

Henriette’s neat hair would have stood on end, had she heard Miss Du Prel fit adjectives to her conduct.

“I have learnt not to expect a nice sense of honour from superior persons with unimpeachable sentiments,” said Hadria.

“You are certainly a good hater!” cried Valeria, with a laugh.

“Oh, I don’t hate Henriette; I only hate unimpeachable sentiments.”

The sentiments that Henriette represented had become, to Hadria, as the walls of a prison from which she could see no means of escape.

She had found that life took no heed either of her ambitions or of her revolts. “And so I growl,” she said. She might hate and chafe in secret to her heart’s content; external conformity was the one thing needful.

“Hadria will be so different when she has children,” everyone had said. And so she was; but the difference was alarmingly in the wrong direction. Throughout history, she reflected, children had been the unfailing means of bringing women into line with tradition. Who could stand against them? They had been able to force the most rebellious to their knees. An appeal to the maternal instinct had quenched the hardiest spirit of revolt. No wonder the instinct had been so trumpeted and exalted! Women might harbour dreams and plan insurrections; but their children—little ambassadors of the established and expected—were argument enough to convince the most hardened sceptics. Their helplessness was more powerful to suppress revolt than regiments of armed soldiers.

Such were the thoughts that wandered through Hadria’s mind as she bent her steps towards the cottage near Craddock Church, where, according to the gravedigger’s account, the baby of the unhappy schoolmistress was being looked after by Mrs. Gullick.

It would have puzzled the keenest observer to detect the unorthodox nature of Mrs. Temperley’s reflections, as she leant over the child, and made enquiries as to its health and temperament.

Mrs. Gullick seemed more disposed to indulge in remarks on its mother’s conduct than to give the desired information; but she finally admitted that Ellen Jervis had an aunt at Southampton who was sending a little money for the support of the child. Ellen Jervis had stayed with the aunt during the summer holidays. Mrs. Gullick did not know what was to be done. She had a large family of her own, and the cottage was small.

Mrs. Temperley asked for the address of the aunt.

“I suppose no one knows who the father is? He has not acknowledged the child!”

No; that was a mystery still.

About a week later, Craddock Dene was amazed by the news that Mrs. Temperley had taken the child of Ellen Jervis under her protection. A cottage had been secured on the road to Craddock, a trustworthy nurse engaged, and here the babe was established, with the consent and blessing of the aunt.

“You are the most inconsistent woman I ever met!” exclaimed Miss Du Prel.

“Why inconsistent?”

“You say that children have been the means, from time immemorial, of enslaving women, and here you go and adopt one of your enslavers!”

“But this child is not legitimate.”

Valeria stared.

“Whatever the wrongs of Ellen Jervis, at least there were no laws written, and unwritten, which demanded of her as a duty that she should become the mother of this child. In that respect she escapes the ignominy reserved for the married mother who produces children that are not even hers.”

“You do manage to ferret out the unpleasant aspects of our position!” Miss Du Prel exclaimed. “But I want to know why you do this, Hadria. It is good of you, but totally unlike you.”

“You are very polite!” cried Hadria. “Why should I not lay up store for myself in heaven, as well as Mrs. Walker and the rest?”

“You were not thinking of heaven when you did this deed, Hadria.”

“No; I was thinking of the other place.”

“And do you hope to get any satisfaction out of your protégée?”

Hadria shrugged her shoulders.

“I don’t know. The child is the result of great sorrow and suffering; it is the price of a woman’s life; a woman who offended the world, having lived for nearly forty weary obedient years, in circumstances dreary enough to have turned twenty saints into as many sinners. No; I am no Lady Bountiful. I feel in defending this child—a sorry defence I know—that I am, in so far, opposing the world and the system of things that I hate——. Ah! how I hate it!”

“Is it then hatred that prompts the deed?”

Hadria looked thoughtfully towards the church tower, in whose shadow the mother of the babe lay sleeping.

“Can you ever quite unravel your own motives, Valeria? Hatred? Yes; there is a large ingredient of hatred. Without it, probably this poor infant would have been left to struggle through life alone, with a mill-stone round its neck, and a miserable constitution into the bargain. I hope to rescue its constitution. But that poor woman’s story touched me closely. It is so hard, so outrageous! The emptiness of her existence; the lack of outlet for her affections; the endless monotony; and then the sudden new interest and food for the starved emotions; the hero-worship that is latent in us all; and then—good heavens!—for a touch of poetry, of romance in her life, she would have been ready to believe in the professions of the devil himself—and this man was a very good understudy for the devil! Ah! If ever I should meet him!”

“What would you do?” Valeria asked curiously.

“Avenge her,” said Hadria with set lips.

“Easier said than done, my dear!”

Gossip asserted that the father of the child was a man of some standing, the bolder spirits even accusing Lord Engleton himself. But this was conjecture run wild, and nobody seriously listened to it.

Mrs. Walker was particularly scandalized with Mrs. Temperley’s ill-advised charity. Hadria had the habit of regarding the clergyman’s wife as another of society’s victims. She placed side by side the schoolmistress in her sorrow and disgrace, and the careworn woman at the Vicarage, with her eleven children, and her shrivelled nature, poor and dead as an autumn leaf that shivers before the wind. They had both suffered—so Mrs. Temperley dared to assert—in the same cause. They were both victims of the same creed. It was a terrible cultus, a savage idol that had devoured them both, as cruel and insatiable as the brazen god of old, with his internal fires, which the faithful fed devoutly, with shrinking girls and screaming children.

“I still fail to understand why you adopt this child,” said Valeria. “My Caterina would never have done it.”

“The little creature interests me,” said Hadria. “It is a tiny field for the exercise of the creative forces. Every one has some form of active amusement. Some like golf, others flirtation. I prefer this sort of diversion.”

“But you have your own children to interest you, surely far more than this one.”

Hadria’s face grew set and defiant.

“They represent to me the insult of society—my own private and particular insult, the tribute exacted of my womanhood. It is through them that I am to be subdued and humbled. Just once in a way, however, the thing does not quite ‘come off.’”

“What has set you on edge so, I wonder.”

“People, traditions, unimpeachable sentiments.”

“Yours are not unimpeachable at any rate!” Valeria cried laughing. “Caterina is an angel compared with you, and yet my publisher has his doubts about her.”

“Caterina would do as I do, I know,” said Hadria. “Those who are looked at askance by the world appeal to my instincts. I shall be able to teach this child, perhaps, to strike a blow at the system which sent her mother to a dishonoured grave, while it leaves the man for whose sake she risked all this, in peace and the odour of sanctity.”

Time seemed to be marked, in the sleepy village, by the baby’s growth. Valeria, who thought she was fond of babies, used to accompany Hadria on her visits to the cottage, but she treated the infant so much as if it had been a guinea-pig or a rabbit that the nurse was indignant.

The weeks passed in rapid monotony, filled with detail and leaving no mark behind them, no sign of movement or progress. The cares of the house, the children, left only limited time for walking, reading, correspondence, and such music as could be wrung out of a crowded day. An effort on Hadria’s part, to make serious use of her musical talent had been frustrated. But a pathetic, unquenchable hope always survived that presently, when this or that corner had been turned, this or that difficulty overcome, conditions would be conquered and opportunity arrive. Not yet had she resigned her belief that the most harassing and wearying and unceasing business that a human being can undertake, is compatible with the stupendous labour and the unbounded claims of an artist’s career. The details of practical life and petty duties sprouted up at every step. If they were put aside, even for a moment, the wheels of daily existence became clogged and then all opportunity was over. Hope had begun to alternate with a fear lest that evasive corner should never be turned, that little crop of interruptions never cease to turn up. And yet it was so foolish. Each obstacle in itself was paltry. It was their number that overcame one, as the tiny arrows of the Lilliputs overcame Gulliver.

One of Hadria’s best friends in Craddock Dene was Joseph Fleming, who had become very intimate at the Red House during the last year or two. Hadria used to tire of the necessity to be apparently rational (such was her own version), and found it a relief to talk nonsense, just as she pleased, to Joseph Fleming, who never objected or took offence, if he occasionally looked surprised. Other men might have thought she was laughing at them, but Joseph made no such mistake when Mrs. Temperley broke out, as she did now and then, in fantastic fashion.

She was standing, one morning, on the little bridge over the stream that ran at a distance of a few hundred yards from the Red House. The two boys were bespattering themselves in the meadow below, by the water’s verge. They called up at intervals to their mother the announcement of some new discovery of flower or insect.

Watching the stream sweeping through the bridge, she seemed the centre of a charming domestic scene to Joseph Fleming, who chanced to pass by with his dogs. He addressed himself to her maternal feelings by remarking what handsome and clever boys they were.

“Handsome and clever?” she repeated. “Is that all you can say, Mr. Fleming? When you set about it, I think you might provide a little better food for one’s parental sentiment. I suppose you will go and tell Mrs. Walker that her dozen and a half are all handsome and clever too!”

“Not so handsome and clever as yours,” replied Mr. Fleming, a little aghast at this ravenous maternal vanity.

“What wretched poverty of expression!” Hadria complained. “I ask for bread, and truly you give me a stone.”

Joseph Fleming eyed his companion askance. “I—I admire your boys immensely, as you know,” he said.

“Not enough, not enough.”

“What can I say more?”

“A mother has to find in her children all that she can hope to find in life, and she naturally desires to make the most of them, don’t you see?”

“Ah! yes, quite so,” said Joseph dubiously.

“Nobody, I suppose, likes to be commonplace all round; one must have some poetry somewhere—so most women idealize their children, and if other people won’t help them in the effort, don’t you see? it is most discouraging.”

“Are you chaffing, or what?” Joseph enquired.

“No, indeed; I am perilously serious.”

“I can well understand how a mother must get absorbed in her children,” said Joseph. “I suppose it’s a sort of natural provision.”

“Think of Mrs. Allan with her outrageous eight—all making mud-pies!” cried Hadria; “a magnificent ‘natural provision!’ A small income, a small house, with those pervasive eight. You know the stampede when one goes to call; the aroma of bread and butter (there are few things more inspiring); the cook always about to leave; Mrs. Allan with a racking headache. It is indeed not difficult to understand how a mother would get absorbed in her children. Why, their pinafores alone would become absorbing.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Fleming. Then a little anxious to change the subject: “Oh, by the way, have you heard that the Priory is really to be inhabited at last? Professor Theobald has almost decided to take it.”

“Really? that will be exciting for Craddock Dene. We shall have another household to dissect and denounce. Providence watches over us all, I verily believe.”

“I hope so,” Joseph replied gravely.

“Truly I hope so too,” Hadria said, no less seriously, “for indeed we need it.”

Joseph was too simple to be greatly surprised at anything that Mrs. Temperley might say. He had decided that she was a little eccentric, and that explained everything; just as he explained instances of extraordinary reasoning power in a dog by calling it “instinct.” Whatever Mrs. Temperley might do was slightly eccentric, and had she suddenly taken it into her head to dance a fandango on the public road, it would have merely put a little extra strain on that word.

By dint of not understanding her, Joseph Fleming had grown to feel towards Mrs. Temperley a genuine liking, conscious, in his vague way, that she was kind at heart, however bitter or strange she might sometimes be in her speech. Moreover, she was not always eccentric or unexpected. There would come periods when she would say and do very much as her neighbours said and did; looking then pale and lifeless, but absolutely beyond the reach of hostile criticism, as her champion would suggest to carping neighbours.

Not the most respected of the ladies who turned up their disapproving noses, was more dull or more depressing than Hadria could be, on occasion, as she had herself pointed out; and would not this soften stony hearts?

When she discovered that her kindly neighbour had been fighting her battles for her, she was touched; but she asked him not to expend his strength on her behalf. She tried in vain to convince him that she did not care to be invited too often to submit to the devitalizing processes of social intercourse, to which the families of the district shrank not from subjecting themselves. If Joseph Fleming chanced to call at the Red House after her return from one of these entertainments, he was sure to find Mrs. Temperley in one of her least comprehensible moods. But whatever she might say, he stood up for her among the neighbours with persistent loyalty. He decked her with virtues that she did not possess, and represented her to the sceptical district, radiant in domestic glory. Hadria thus found herself in an awkwardly uncertain position; either she was looked at askance, as eccentric, or she found herself called upon to make good expectations of saintliness, such as never were on land or sea.

Saintly? Hadria shook her head. She could imagine no one further from such a condition than she was at present, and she felt it in her, to swing down and down to the very opposite pole from that serene altitude. She admitted that, from a utilitarian point of view, she was making a vast mistake. As things were, Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Allan, laboriously spinning their ponderous families on their own axes, in a reverent spirit, had chosen the better part. But Hadria did not care. She would not settle down to make the best of things, as even Algitha now recommended, “since there she was, and there was no helping it.”

“I will never make the best of things,” she said. “I know nothing that gives such opportunities to the Devil.”

Hadria had characteristically left the paradox unjustified.

“What do you mean?” asked Algitha. “Surely the enemy of good has most hold over the discontented spirit.”

Hadria likened the contented to stagnant pools, wherein corruptions grow apace. “It is only the discontented ocean that remains, for all its storms, fresh and sane to the end.”

But though she said this, for opposition’s sake perhaps, she had her doubts about her own theory. Discontent was certainly the initiator of all movement; but there was a kind of sullen discontent that stagnated and ate inwards, like a disease. Better a cheerful sin or two than allow that to take hold!

“But then there is this sickly feminine conscience to deal with!” she exclaimed. “It clings to the worst of us still, and prevents the wholesome big catastrophes that might bring salvation.”

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CHAPTER XXI.

ANOTHER year had blundered itself away, leaving little trace behind it, in Craddock Dene. The schoolmistress’s grave was greener and her child rosier than of yore. Little Martha had now begun to talk, and promised to be pretty and fair-haired like her mother.

The boys and Algitha had come to spend Saturday and Sunday at the Red House. Hadria hunted out a stupendous card-case (a wedding gift from Mrs. Gordon), erected on her head a majestic bonnet, and announced to the company that she was going for a round of visits.

There was a yell of laughter. Hadria advanced across the lawn with quiet dignity, bearing her card-case as one who takes part in a solemn ceremony.

“Where did you fall in with that casket?” enquired Fred.

“And who was the architect of the cathedral?” asked Ernest.

“This casket, as you call it, was presented to me by Mrs. Gordon. The cathedral I designed myself.”

They all crowded round to examine the structure. There were many derisive comments.

“Gothic,” said Ernest, “pure Gothic.”

“I should have described it as ‘Early Perpendicular,’” objected Fred.

“Don’t display your neglected education; it’s beyond all question Gothic. Look at the steeple and the gargoyles and the handsome vegetation. Ruskin would revel in it!”

“Are you really going about in that thing?” asked Algitha.

Hadria wished to know what was the use of designing a Gothic cathedral if one couldn’t go about in it.

The bonnet was, in truth, a daring caricature of the prevailing fashion, just sufficiently serious in expression to be wearable.

“Well, I never before met a woman who would deliberately flout her neighbours by wearing preposterous millinery!” Ernest exclaimed.

Hadria went her round of calls, and all eyes fixed themselves on her bonnet. Mrs. Allan, who had small opportunity of seeing the fashions, seemed impressed if slightly puzzled by it. Mrs. Jordan evidently thought it “loud.” Mrs. Walker supposed it fashionable, but regretted that this sort of thing was going to be worn this season. She hoped the girls would modify the style in adopting it.

Mrs. Walker had heard that the two Professors had arrived at Craddock Place yesterday afternoon, and the Engletons expected them to make a visit of some weeks. Hadria’s face brightened.

“And so at last we may hope that the Priory will be inhabited,” said the vicar’s wife.

“Of course you know,” she added in the pained voice that she always reserved for anecdotes of local ill-doing, “that Mrs. Fortescue committed suicide there.”

Madame Bertaux, the English wife of a French official, had chanced to call, and Mrs. Walker gave the details of the story for the benefit of the new-comer.

Madame Bertaux was a brisk, clever, good-looking woman, with a profound knowledge of the world and a corresponding contempt for it.

It appeared that the Professor’s wife, whom Madame Bertaux had happened to meet in Paris, was a young, beautiful, and self-willed girl, passionately devoted to her husband. She was piqued at his lack of jealousy, and doubted or pretended to doubt his love for her. In order to put him to the test, she determined to rouse his jealousy by violent and systematic flirtation. This led to an entanglement, and finally, in a fit of reckless anger, to an elopement with a Captain Bolton who was staying at the Priory at the time. Seized with remorse, she had returned home to kill herself. This was the tragedy that had kept the old house for so many years tenantless. Hadria’s music was the only sound that had disturbed its silence, since the day when the dead body of its mistress was found in the drawing-room, which she was supposed to have entered unknown to anyone, by the window that gave on to the terrace.

Valeria Du Prel was able to throw more light on the strange story. She had difficulty in speaking without rancour of the woman who had thrown away the love of such a man. She admitted that the girl was extremely fascinating, and had seemed to Valeria to have the faults of an impetuous rather than of a bad nature. She cherished that singular desire of many strong-willed women, to be ruled and mastered by the man she loved, and she had entirely failed to understand her husband’s attitude towards her. She resented it as a sign of indifference. She was like the Chinese wives, who complain bitterly of a husband’s neglect when he omits to beat them. She taunted the Professor for failing to assert his “rights.”

“Morally, I have no rights, except such as you choose to give me of your own free will,” he replied. “I am not your gaoler.”

“And even that did not penetrate to her better nature till it was too late,” Valeria continued. “But after the mischief was done, that phrase seems to have stung her to torment. Her training had blinded her, as one is blinded in coming out of darkness into a bright light. She was used to narrower hearts and smaller brains. Her last letter—a terrible record of the miseries of remorse—shews that she recognized at last what sort of a man he was whose heart she had broken. But even in her repentance, she was unable to conquer her egotism. She could not face the horrors of self-accusation; she preferred to kill herself.”

“What a shocking story!” cried Hadria.

“And all the more so because the Professor clings to her memory so faithfully. He blames himself for everything. He ought, he says, to have realized better the influence of her training; he ought to have made her understand that he could not assert what she called his ‘rights’ without insulting her and himself.”

“Whenever one hears anything new about the Professor, it is always something that makes one admire and love him more than ever!” cried Hadria.

Her first meeting with him was in the old Yew Avenue in the Priory garden. He was on his way to call at the Red House. She stood on a patch of grass by a rustic seat commanding the vista of yews, and above them, a wilderness of lilacs and laburnums, in full flower. It looked to her like a pathway that led to some exquisite fairy palace of one’s childhood.

Almost with the first word that the Professor uttered, Hadria felt a sense of relief and hope. The very air seemed to grow lighter, the scent of the swaying flowers sweeter. She always afterwards associated this moment of meeting with the image of that avenue of mourning yews, crowned with the sunlit magnificence of an upper world of blossom.

What had she been thinking of to run so close to despair during these years? A word, a smile, and the dead weight swerved, swung into balance, and life lifted up its head once more. She remembered now, not her limitations, but the good things of her lot; the cruelties that Fate had spared her, the miseries that the ruthless goddess had apportioned to others. But the Professor’s presence did not banish, but rather emphasized, the craving to take part in the enriching of that general life which was so poor and sad. He strengthened her disposition to revolt against the further impoverishment of it, through the starving of her own nature. He would not blame her simply on account of difference from others. She felt sure of that. He would not be shocked if she had not answered to the stimulus of surroundings as faithfully as most women seemed to answer to them. Circumstance had done its usual utmost to excite her instinct to beat down the claims of her other self, but for once, circumstance had failed. It was a solitary failure among a creditable multitude of victories. But if instinct had not responded to the imperious summons, the other self had been suffering the terrors of a siege, and the garrison had grown starved and weakly. What would be the end of it? And the little cynical imp that peeped among her thoughts, as a monkey among forest boughs, gibbered his customary “What matters it? One woman’s destiny is but a small affair. If I were you I would make less fuss about it.” The Professor would understand that she did not wish to make a fuss. He would not be hard upon any human being. He knew that existence was not such an easy affair to manage. She wished that she could tell him everything in her life—its struggle, its desperate longing and ambition, its hatred, its love: only he would understand all the contradictions and all the pain. She would not mind his blame, because he would understand, and the blame would be just.

They walked together down the avenue towards the beautiful old Tudor house, which stood on the further side of a broad lawn.

The Professor looked worn and thin. He owned to being very tired of the hurry and struggle of town. He was sick of the conflict of jealousies and ambitions. It seemed so little worth while, this din of voices that would so soon be silenced.

“I starve for the sight of a true and simple face, for the grasp of a brotherly hand.”

“You?” exclaimed Hadria.

“There are so few, so very few, where the throng is thick and the battle fierce. It saddens me to see good fellows trampling one another down, growing hard and ungenerous. And then the vulgarity, the irreverence: they are almost identical, I think. One grows very sick and sorry at times amidst the cruelty and the baseness that threaten to destroy one’s courage and one’s hope. I know that human nature has in it a germ of nobility that will save it, in the long run, but meanwhile things seem sadly out of joint.”

“Is that the order of the universe?” asked Hadria.

“No, I think it is rather the disorder of man’s nature,” he replied.

Hadria asked if he would return to tea at the Red House. The Professor said he would like to call and see Hubert, but proposed a rest on the terrace, as it was still early in the afternoon.

“I used to avoid the place,” he said, “but I made a mistake. I have resolved to face the memories: it is better.”

It was the first time that he had ever referred, in Hadria’s presence, to the tragedy of the Priory.

“I have often wished to speak to you about my wife,” he said slowly, as they sat down on the old seat, on the terrace. “I have felt that you would understand the whole sad story, and I hoped that some day you would know it.” He paused and then added, “It has often been a comfort to me to remember that you were in the world, for it made me feel less lonely. I felt in you some new—what can I call it? instinct, impulse, inspiration, which ran you straight against all the hardest stone walls that intersect the pathways of this ridiculous old world. And, strange to say, it is the very element in you that sets you at loggerheads with others, that enabled me to understand you.”

Hadria looked bewildered.

“To tell you the truth, I have always wondered why women have never felt as I am sure you feel towards life. You remember that day at Dunaghee when you were so annoyed at my guessing your thoughts. They were unmistakeable to one who shared them. Your sex has always been a riddle to me; there seemed to be something abject in their nature, even among the noblest of them. But you are no riddle. While I think you are the least simple woman I ever met, you are to me the easiest to understand.”

“And yet I remember your telling me the exact contrary,” said Hadria.

“That was before I had caught the connecting thread. Had I been a woman, I believe that life and my place in it would have affected me exactly as it affects you.”

Hadria coloured over cheek and brow. It was so strange, so startling, so delicious to find, for the first time in her life, this intimate sympathy.

“I wish my wife had possessed your friendship,” he said. “I believe you would have saved us.” He passed his hands over his brow, looking round at the closed windows of the drawing-room. “I almost feel as if she were near us now on this old terrace that she loved so. She planted these roses herself—how they have grown!” They were white cluster roses and yellow banksias, which had strayed far along the balustrade, clambering among the stone pillars.

“You doubtless know the bare facts of her life, but nothing is so misleading as bare fact. My wife was one of the positive natures, capable of great nobility, but liable to glaring error and sin! She held ideas passionately. She had the old barbaric notion that a husband was a sort of master, and must assert his authority and rights. It was the result of her training. I saw that a great development was before her. I pleased myself with the thought of watching and helping it. She was built on a grand scale. To set her free from prejudice, from her injustice to herself, from her dependence on me; to teach her to breathe deep with those big lungs of hers and think bravely with that capacious brain: that was my dream. I hoped to hear her say to me some day, what I fear no woman has yet been able to say to her husband, ‘The day of our marriage was the birthday of my freedom.’”

Hadria drew a long breath. It seemed to overwhelm her that a man, even the Professor, could utter such a sentiment. All the old hereditary instincts of conquest and ownership appeared to be utterly dead in him.

No wonder he had found life a lonely pilgrimage! He lived before his time. His wife had taunted him because he would not treat her as his legal property, or rule her through the claims and opportunities that popular sentiment assigned to him.

When a woman as generous as himself, as just, as gentle-hearted, had appeared on the horizon of the world, the advent of a nobler social order might be hoped for. The two were necessary for the new era.

Then, not only imagination, but cold reason herself grew eloquent with promises.

“It was in there, in the old drawing-room, where we had sat together evening after evening, that they found her dead, the very type of all that is brilliant and exquisite and living. To me she was everything. All my personal happiness was centred in her. I cared for nothing so long as she was in the same world as myself, and I might love her. In the darkness that followed, I was brought face to face with the most terrible problems of human fate. I had troubled myself but little about the question of the survival of the personality after death; I had been pre-occupied with life. Now I realized out of what human longings and what human desperation our religions are built. For one gleam of hope that we should meet again—what would I not have given? But it never came. The trend of my thought made all such hopes impossible. I have grown charier of the word ‘impossible’ now. We know so infinitesimally little. I had to learn to live on comfortless. All that was strongly personal in me died. All care about myself went out suddenly, as in other cases I think it goes out slowly, beaten down by the continued buffetings of life. I gave myself to my work, and then a curious decentralizing process took place. I ceased to be the point round which the world revolved, in my own consciousness. We all start our career as pivots, if I am not mistaken. The world span, and I, in my capacity of atomic part, span with it. I mean that this was a continuous, not an occasional state of consciousness. After that came an unexpected peace.”

“You have travelled a long and hard road to find it!” cried Hadria.

“Not a unique fate,” he said with a smile.

“It must be a terrible process that quite kills the personal in one, it is so strong. With me the element is clamorous.”

“It has its part to play.”

“Surely the gods must be jealous of human beings. Why did they destroy the germ of such happiness as you might have had?”

“The stern old law holds for ever; wrong and error have to be expiated.”

The Professor traced the history of his wife’s family, shewing the gradual gathering of Fate to its culmination in the tragedy of her short life. Her father and grandfather had both been men of violent and tyrannical temper, and tradition gave the same character to their forefathers. Eleanor’s mother was one of the meek and saintly women who almost invariably fall to the lot of overbearing men. She had made a virtue of submitting to tyranny, and even to downright cruelty, thus almost repeating the story of her equally meek predecessor, of whose ill-treatment stories were still current in the district.

“When death put an end to their wretchedness, one would suppose that the evil of their lives was worked out and over, but it was not so. The Erinnys were still unsatisfied. My poor wife became the victim of their fury. And every new light that science throws upon human life shews that this must be so. The old Greeks saw that unconscious evil-doing is punished as well as that which is conscious. These poor unselfish women, piling up their own supposed merit, at the expense of the character of their tyrants, laid up a store of misery for their descendant, my unhappy wife. Imagine the sort of training and tradition that she had to contend with; her mother ignorant and supine, her father violent, bigoted, almost brutal. Eleanor’s nature was obscured and distorted by it. Having inherited the finer and stronger qualities of her father’s race, with much of its violence, she was going through a struggle at the time of our marriage: training, native vigour and nobility all embroiled in a desperate civil war. It was too much. There is no doubt as to the ultimate issue, but the struggle killed her. It is a common story: a character militant which meets destruction in the struggle for life. The past evil pursues and throttles the present good.”

“This takes away the last consolation from women who have been forced to submit to evil conditions,” said Hadria.

“It is the truth,” said the Professor. “The Erinnys are no mere fancy of the Greek mind. They are symbols of an awful fact of life that no one can afford to ignore.”

“What insensate fools we all are!” Hadria exclaimed. “I mean women.”

The Professor made no polite objection to the statement.

As they were wending their way towards the Red House, the Professor reminded his companion of the old friendship that had existed between them, ever since Hadria was a little girl. He had always cherished towards her that sentiment of affectionate good-fellowship. She must check him if he seemed to presume upon it, in seeking sympathy or offering it. He watched her career with the deepest interest and anxiety. He always believed that she would give some good gift to the world. And he still believed it. Like the rest of us, she needed sympathy at the right moment.

“We need to feel that there is someone who believes in us, in our good faith, in our good will, one who will not judge according to outward success or failure. Remember,” he said, “that I have that unbounded faith in you. Nothing can move it. Whatever happens and wherever you may be led by the strange chances of life, don’t forget the existence of one old friend, or imagine that anything can shake his friendship or his desire to be of service.”

---

CHAPTER XXII.

“THE worst thing about the life of you married people,” said Valeria, “is its ridiculous rigidity. It takes more energy to get the dinner delayed for a quarter of an hour in most well-regulated houses, or some slight change in routine, than to alter a frontier, or pass an Act of Parliament.”

Hadria laughed. “Until you discovered this by personal inconvenience, you always scolded me for my disposition to jeer at the domestic scheme.”

“It is a little geometrical,” Valeria admitted.

“Geometrical! It is like a gigantic ordnance map palmed off on one instead of a real landscape.”

“Come now, to be just, say an Italian garden.”

“That flatters it, but the simile will do. The eye sees to the end of every path, and knows that it leads to nothing.”

“Ah! dear Hadria, but all the pathways of the world have that very same goal.”

“At least some of them have the good taste to wind a little, and thus disguise the fact. And think of the wild flowers one may gather by the wayside in some forest track, or among the mountain passes; but in these prim alleys what natural thing can one know? Brain and heart grow tame and clipped to match the hedges, or take on grotesque shapes——”

“That one must guard against.”

“Oh, I am sick of guarding against things. To be always warding off evil, is an evil in itself. Better let it come.”

Valeria looked at her companion anxiously.

“One knows how twirling round in a circle makes one giddy, or following the same path stupefies. How does the polar bear feel, I wonder, after he has walked up and down in his cage for years and years?”

“Used to it, I imagine,” said Valeria.

“But before he gets used to it, that is the bad time. And then it is all so confusing——”

Hadria sat on the low parapet of the terrace at the Priory. Valeria had a place on the topmost step, where the sun had been beating all the morning. Hadria had taken off her hat to enjoy the warmth. The long sprays of the roses were blown across her now and then. Once, a thorn had left a mark of blood upon her hand.

Valeria gathered a spray, and nodded slowly.

“I don’t want to allow emotion to get the better of me, Valeria. I don’t want to run rank like some overgrown weed, and so I dread the accumulation of emotion—emotion that has never had a good explosive utterance. One has to be so discreet in these Italian gardens; no one shouts or says ‘damn.’”

“Ah! you naturally feel out of your element.”

Hadria laughed. “It’s all very well to take that superior tone. You don’t reside on an ordnance map.”

There was a pause. Miss Du Prel seemed lost in thought.

“It is this dead silence that oppresses one, this hushed endurance of the travail of life. How do these women stand it?”

Valeria presently woke up, and admitted that to live in an English village would drive her out of her mind in a week. “And yet, Valeria, you have often professed to envy me, because I had what you called a place in life—as if a place in Craddock Dene were the same thing!”

“It is well that you do not mean all you say.”

“Or say all I mean.”

Valeria laid her hand on Hadria’s with wistful tenderness.

“I don’t think anyone will ever quite understand you, Hadria.”

“Including perhaps myself. I sometimes fancy that when it became necessary to provide me with a disposition, the material had run out, for the moment, nothing being left but a few remnants of other people’s characters; so a living handful of these was taken up, roughly welded together, and then the mixture was sent whirling into space, to boil and sputter itself out as best it might.”

Miss Du Prel turned to her companion.

“I see that you are incongruously situated, but don’t you think that you may be wrong yourself? Don’t you think you may be making a mistake?”

Hadria was emphatic in assent.

“Not only do I think I may be wrong, but I don’t see how—unless by pure chance—I can be anything else. For I can’t discover what is right. I see women all round me actuated by this frenzied sense of duty; I see them toiling submissively at their eternal treadmill; occupying their best years in the business of filling their nurseries; losing their youth, narrowing their intelligence, ruining their husbands, and clouding their very moral sense at last. Well, I know that such conduct is supposed to be right and virtuous. But I can’t see it. It impresses me simply as stupid and degrading. And from my narrow little point of observation, the more I see of life, the more hopelessly involved become all questions of right and wrong where our confounded sex is concerned.”

“Why? Because the standards are changing,” asserted Miss Du Prel.

“Because—look, Valeria, our present relation to life is in itself an injury, an insult—you have never seriously denied that—and how can one make for oneself a moral code that has to lay its foundation-stone in that very injury? And if one lays one’s foundation-stone in open ground beyond, then one’s code is out of touch with present fact, and one’s morality consists in sheer revolt all along the line. The whole matter is in confusion. You have to accept Mrs. Walker’s and Mrs. Gordon’s view of the case, plainly and simply, or you get off into a sort of morass and blunder into quicksands.”

“Then what happens?”

“That’s just what I don’t know. That’s just why I say that I am probably wrong, because, in this transition period, there seems to be no clear right.”

“To cease to believe in right and wrong would be to founder morally, altogether,” Valeria warned.

“I know, and yet I begin to realize how true it is that there is no such thing as absolute right or wrong. It is related to the case and the moment.”

“This leads up to some desperate deed or other, Hadria,” cried her friend, “I have feared it, or hoped it, I scarcely know which, for some time. But you alarm me to-day.”

“If I believed in the efficacy of a desperate deed, Valeria, I should not chafe as I do, against the conditions of the present scheme of things. If individuals could find a remedy for themselves, with a little courage and will, there would be less occasion to growl.”

“But can they not?”

“Can they?” asked Hadria. “A woman without means of livelihood, breaks away from her moorings—well, it is as if a child were to fall into the midst of some gigantic machinery that is going at full speed. Let her try the feat, and the cracking of her bones by the big wheels will attest its hopelessness. And yet I long to try!” Hadria added beneath her breath.

Miss Du Prel admitted that success was rare in the present delirious state of competition. Individuals here and there pulled through.

“I told you years ago that Nature had chosen our sex for ill-usage. Try what we may, defeat and suffering await us, in one form or another. You are dissatisfied with your form of suffering, I with mine. A creature in pain always thinks it would be more bearable if only it were on the other side.”

“Ah, I know you won’t admit it,” said Hadria, “but some day we shall all see that this is the result of human cruelty and ignorance, and that it is no more ‘intended’ or inherently necessary than that children should be born with curvature of the spine, or rickets. Some day it will be as clear as noon, that heartless ‘some day’ which can never help you or me, or any of us who live now. It is we, I suppose, who are required to help the ‘some day.’ Only how, when we are ourselves in extremis?”

“The poor are helpers of the poor,” said Valeria.

“But if they grow too poor, to starvation point, then they can help no more; they can only perish slowly.”

“I hoped,” said Valeria, “that Professor Fortescue would have poured oil upon the troubled waters.”

“He does in one sense. But in another, he makes me feel more than ever what I am missing.”

Miss Du Prel’s impulsive instincts could be kept at bay no longer.

“There is really nothing for it, but some deed of daring,” she cried. “I believe, if only your husband could get over his horror of the scandal and talk, that a separation would be best for you both. It is not as if he cared for you. One can see he does not. You are such a strange, inconsequent being, Hadria, that I believe you would feel the parting far more than he would (conventions apart).”

“No question of it,” said Hadria. “Our disharmony, radical and hopeless as it is, does not prevent my having a strong regard for Hubert. I can’t help seeing the admirable sides of his character. He is too irritated and aggrieved to feel anything but rancour against me. It is natural. I understand.”

“Ah, it will only end in some disaster, if you try to reconcile the irreconcilable. Of course I think it is a great pity that you have not more of the instincts on which homes are founded, but since you have not——”

Hadria turned sharply round. “Do you really regret that just for once the old, old game has been played unsuccessfully? Therein I can’t agree with you, though I am the loser by it.” Hadria grasped a swaying spray that the wind blew towards her, and clasped it hard in her hand, regardless of the thorns. “It gives me a keen, fierce pleasure to know that for all their training and constraining and incitement and starvation, I have not developed masses of treacly instinct in which mind and will and every human faculty struggle, in vain, to move leg or wing, like some poor fly doomed to a sweet and sticky death. At least the powers of the world shall not prevail with me by that old device. Mind and will and every human faculty may die, but they shall not drown, in the usual applauded fashion, in seas of tepid, bubbling, up-swelling instinct. I will dare anything rather than endure that. They must take the trouble to provide instruments of death from without; they must lay siege and starve me; they must attack in soldierly fashion; I will not save them the exertion by developing the means of destruction from within. There I stand at bay. They shall knock down the citadel of my mind and will, stone by stone.”

“That is a terrible challenge!” exclaimed Miss Du Prel.

A light laugh sounded across the lawn.

The afternoon sunshine threw four long shadows over the grass: of a slightly-built woman, of a very tall man, and of two smaller men.

The figures themselves were hidden by a group of shrubs, and only the shadows were visible. They paused, for a moment, as if in consultation; the lady standing, with her weight half leaning on her parasol. The tall man seemed to be talking to her vivaciously. His long, shadow-arms shot across the grass, his head wagged.

“The shadows of Fate!” cried Valeria fantastically.

Then they moved into sight, advancing towards the terrace.

“Who are they I wonder? Oh, Professor Fortescue, for one!”

“Lady Engleton and Joseph Fleming. The other I don’t know.”

He was very broad and tall, having a slight stoop, and a curious way of carrying his head, craned forward. The attitude suggested a keen observer. He was attired in knickerbockers and rough tweed Norfolk jacket, and he looked robust and powerful, almost to excess. The chin and mouth were concealed by the thick growth of dark hair, but one suspected unpleasant things of the latter. As far as one could judge his age, he seemed a man of about five-and-thirty, with vigour enough to last for another fifty years.

“That,” said Valeria, “must be Professor Theobald. He has probably come to see the house.”

“I am sure I shall hate that man,” exclaimed Hadria. “He is not to be trusted; what nonsense he is talking to Lady Engleton!”

“You can’t hear, can you?”

“No; I can see. And she laughs and smiles and bandies words with him. He is amusing certainly; there is that excuse for her; but I wonder how she can do it.”

“What an extraordinary creature you are! To take a prejudice against a man before you have spoken to him.”

“He is cruel, he is cruel!” exclaimed Hadria in a low, excited voice. “He is like some cunning wild animal. Look at Professor Fortescue! his opposite pole—why it is all clearer, at this distance, than if we were under the confusing influence of their speech. See the contrast between that quiet, firm walk, and the insinuating, conceited tread of the other man. Joseph Fleming comes out well too, honest soul!”

“He is carrying a fishing-rod. They have been fishing,” said Valeria.

“Not Professor Fortescue, I am certain. He does not find his pleasure in causing pain.”

“This hero-worship blinds you. Depend upon it, he is not without the primitive instinct to kill.”

“There are individual exceptions to all savage instincts, or the world would never move.”

“Instinct rules the world,” said Miss Du Prel. “At least it is obviously neither reason nor the moral sense that rules it.”

“Then why does it produce a Professor Fortescue now and then?”

“Possibly as a corrective.”

“Or perhaps for fun,” said Hadria.

---

CHAPTER XXIII.

“PROFESSOR THEOBALD, if you are able to resist the fascinations of this old house you are made of sterner stuff than I thought.”

“I can never resist fascinations, Lady Engleton.”

“Do you ever try?”

“My life is spent in the endeavour.”

“How foolish!” Whether this applied to the endeavour or to the remark, did not quite appear. Lady Engleton’s graceful figure leant over the parapet.

“Do you know, Mrs. Temperley,” she said in her incessantly vivacious manner, “I have scarcely heard a serious word since our two Professors came to us. Isn’t it disgraceful? I naturally expected to be improved and enlightened, but they are both so frivolous, I can’t keep them for a moment to any important subject. They refuse to be profound. It is I who have to be profound.”

“While we endeavour to be charming,” said Professor Theobald.

“You may think that flattering, but I confess it seems to me a beggarly compliment (as men’s to women usually are).”

“You expect too much of finite intelligence, Lady Engleton.”

“This is how I am always put off! If it were not that you are both such old friends—you are a sort of cousin I think, Professor Fortescue—I should really feel aggrieved. One has to endure so much more from relations. No, but really; I appeal to Mrs. Temperley. When one is hungering for erudition, to be offered compliments! Not that I can accuse Professor Fortescue of compliments,” she added with a laugh; “wild horses would not drag one from him. I angle vainly. But he is so ridiculously young. He enjoys things as if he were a schoolboy. Does one look for that in one’s Professors? He talks of the country as if it were Paradise Regained.”

“So it is to me,” he said with a smile.

“But that is not your rôle. You have to think, not to enjoy.”

“Then you must not invite us to Craddock Place,” Professor Theobald stipulated.

“As usual, a halting compliment.”

“To take you seriously, Lady Engleton,” said Professor Fortescue, “(though I know it is a dangerous practice) one of the great advantages of an occasional think is to enable one to relish the joys of mental vacuity, just as the pleasure of idleness is never fully known till one has worked.”

“Ah,” sighed Lady Engleton, “I know I don’t extract the full flavour out of that!”

“It is a neglected art,” said the Professor. “After worrying himself with the problems of existence, as the human being is prone to do, as soon as existence is more or less secure and peaceful, a man can experience few things more enjoyable than to leave aside all problems and go out into the fields, into the sun, to feel the life in his veins, the world at the threshold of his five senses.”

“Ah, now you really are profound at last, Professor!”

“I thought it was risky to take you seriously.”

“No, no, I am delighted. The world at the threshold of one’s five senses. One has but to look and to listen and the beauty of things displays itself for our benefit. Yes, but that is what the artists say, not the Professors.”

“Even a Professor is human,” pleaded Theobald.

Valeria quoted some lines that she said expressed Professor Fortescue’s idea.

“Carry me out into the wind and the sunshine,
Into the beautiful world!”

Lady Engleton’s artistic instinct seemed to occupy itself less with the interpretation of Nature than with the appreciation of the handiwork of man. The lines did not stir her. Professor Theobald shared her indifference for the poetic expression, but not for the reality expressed.

“I quarrel with you about art,” said Lady Engleton. “Art is art, and nature is nature, both charming in their way, though I prefer art.”

“Our old quarrel!” said the Professor.

“Because a wild glade is beautiful in its quality of wild glade, you can’t see the beauty in a trim bit of garden, with its delightful suggestion of human thought and care.”

“I object to stiffness,” said Professor Theobald.

His proposals to improve the stately old gardens at the Priory by adding what Lady Engleton called “fatuous wriggles to all the walks, for mere wrigglings’ sake,” had led to hot discussions on the principles of art and the relation of symmetry to the sensibilities of mankind. Lady Engleton thought the Professor crude in taste, and shallow in knowledge, on this point.

“And yet you appreciate so keenly my old enamels, and your eye seeks out, in a minute, a picturesque roof or gable.”

“Perhaps Theobald leans to the picturesque and does not care for the classic,” suggested his colleague; “a fundamental distinction in mental bias.”

“Then why does he enjoy so much of the Renaissance work on caskets and goblets? He was raving about them last night in the choicest English.”

Lady Engleton crossed over to speak to Miss Du Prel. Professor Theobald approached Mrs. Temperley and Joseph Fleming. Hadria knew by some instinct that the Professor had been waiting for an opportunity to speak to her. As he drew near, a feeling of intense enmity arose within her, which reached its highest pitch when he addressed her in a fine, low-toned voice of peculiarly fascinating quality. Every instinct rose up as if in warning. He sat down beside her, and began to talk about the Priory and its history. His ability was obvious, even in his choice of words and his selection of incidents. He had the power of making dry archæological facts almost dramatic. His speech differed from that of most men, in the indefinable manner wherein excellence differs from mediocrity. Yet Hadria was glad to notice some equally indefinable lack, corresponding perhaps to the gap in his consciousness that Lady Engleton had come upon in their discussions on the general principles of art. What was it? A certain stilted, unreal quality? Scarcely. Words refused to fit themselves to the evasive form. Something that suggested the term “second class,” though whether it were the manner or the substance that was responsible for the impression, was difficult to say.

Sometimes his words allowed two possible interpretations to be put upon a sentence. He was a master of the ambiguous. Obviously it was not lack of skill that produced the double-faced phrases.

He did not leave his listeners long in doubt as to his personal history. He enjoyed talking about himself. He was a Professor of archæology, and had written various learned books on the subject. But his studies had by no means been confined to the one theme. History had also interested him profoundly. He had published a work on the old houses of England. The Priory figured among them. It was not difficult to discover from the conversation of this singular man, whose subtle and secretive instincts were contradicted, at times, by a strange inconsequent frankness, that his genuine feeling for the picturesque was accompanied by an equally strong predilection for the appurtenances of wealth and splendour; his love of great names and estates being almost of the calibre of the housemaid’s passion for lofty personages in her penny periodical. He seemed to be a man of keen and cunning ability, who studied and played upon the passions and weaknesses of his fellows, possibly for their good, but always as a magician might deal with the beings subject to his power. By what strange lapse did he thus naïvely lay himself open to their smiles?

Hadria was amused at his occasional impulse of egotistic frankness (or what appeared to be such), when he would solemnly analyse his own character, admitting his instinct to deceive with an engaging and scholarly candour.

His penetrating eyes kept a watch upon his audience. His very simplicity seemed to be guarded by his keenness.

Hadria chafed under his persistent effort to attract and interest her. She gave a little inward shiver on finding that there was a vague, unaccountable, and unpleasant fascination in the personality of the man.

It was not charm, it was nothing that inspired admiration; it rather inspired curiosity and stirred the spirit of research, a spirit which evidently animated himself. She felt that, in order to investigate the workings of her mind and her heart, the Professor would have coolly pursued the most ruthless psychical experiments, no matter at what cost of anguish to herself. In the interests of science and humanity, the learned Professor would certainly not hesitate to make one wretched individual agonize.

His appeal to the intellect was stimulatingly strong; it was like a stinging wind, that made one walk at a reckless pace, and brought the blood tingling through every vein. That intellectual force could alone explain the fact of his being counted by Professor Fortescue as a friend. Even then it was a puzzling friendship. Could it be that to Professor Fortescue, he shewed only his best side? His manner was more respectful towards his colleague than towards other men, but even with him he was irreverent in his heart, as towards mankind in general.

To Hadria he spoke of Professor Fortescue with enthusiasm—praising his great power, his generosity, his genial qualities, and his uprightness; then he laughed at him as a modern Don Quixote, and sneered at his efforts to save animal suffering when he might have made a name that would never be forgotten, if he pursued a more fruitful branch of research.

Hadria remarked that Professor Theobald’s last sentence had added the crowning dignity to his eulogium.

He glanced at her, as if taking her measure.

“Fortescue,” he called out, “I envy you your champion. You point, Mrs. Temperley, to lofty altitudes. I, as a mere man, cannot pretend to scale them.”

Then he proceeded to bring down feminine loftiness with virile reason.

“In this world, where there are so many other evils to combat, one feels that it is more rational to attack the more important first.”

“Ah! there is nothing like an evil to bolster up an evil,” cried Professor Fortescue; “the argument never fails. Every abuse may find shelter behind it. The slave trade, for instance; have we not white slavery in our midst? How inconsistent to trouble about negroes till our own people are truly free! Wife-beating? Sad; but then children are often shamefully ill-used. Wait till they are fully protected before fussing about wives. Protect children? Foolish knight-errant, when you ought to know that drunkenness is at the root of these crimes! Sweep away this curse, before thinking of the children. As for animals, how can any rational person consider their sufferings, when there are men, women, and children with wrongs to be redressed?”

Professor Theobald laughed.

“My dear Fortescue, I knew you would have some ingenious excuse for your amiable weaknesses.”

“It is easier to find epithets than answers, Theobald,” said the Professor with a smile. “I confess I wonder at a man of your logical power being taken in with this cheap argument, if argument it can be called.”

“It is my attachment to logic that makes me crave for consistency,” said Theobald, not over pleased at his friend’s attack.

Professor Fortescue stared in surprise.

“But do you really mean to tell me that you think it logical to excuse one abuse by pointing to another?”

“I think that while there are ill-used women and children, it is certainly inconsistent to consider animals,” said Theobald.

“It does not occur to you that the spirit in man that permits abuse of power over animals is precisely the same devil-inspired spirit that expresses itself in cruelty towards children. Ah,” continued Professor Fortescue, shaking his head, “then you really are one of the many who help wrong to breed wrong, and suffering to foster suffering, all the world over. It is you and those who reason as you reason, who give to our miseries their terrible vitality. What arguments has evil ever given to evil! What shelter and succour cruelty offers eternally to cruelty!”

“I can’t attempt to combat this hobby of yours, Fortescue.”

“Again a be-littling epithet in place of an argument! But I know of old that on this subject your intellectual acumen deserts you, as it deserts nearly all men. You sink suddenly to lower spiritual rank, and employ reasoning that you would laugh to scorn in connection with every other topic.”

“You seem bent on crushing me,” exclaimed Theobald. “And Mrs. Temperley enjoys seeing me mangled. Talk about cruelty to animals! I call this cold-blooded devilry! Mrs. Temperley, come to my rescue!”

“So long as other forms of cruelty can be instanced, Professor Theobald, I don’t see how, on your own shewing, you can expect any consistent person to raise a finger to help you,” Hadria returned. Theobald laughed.

“But I consider myself too important and valuable to be made the subject of this harsh treatment.”

“That is for others to decide. If it affords us amusement to torment you, and amusement benefits our nerves and digestion, how can you justly object? We must consider the greatest good of the greatest number; and we are twice as numerous as you.”

“You are delicious!” he exclaimed. Mrs. Temperley’s manner stiffened.

Acute as the Professor was in many directions, he did not appear to notice the change.

His own manner was not above criticism.

“It is strange,” said Lady Engleton, in speaking of him afterwards to Hadria, “it is strange that his cleverness does not come to the rescue; but so far from that, I think it leads him a wild dance over boggy ground, like some will-o’-the-wisp, but for whose freakish allurements the good man might have trodden a quiet and inoffensive way.”

The only means of procuring the indispensable afternoon tea was to go on to the Red House, which Mrs. Temperley proposed that they should all do.

“And is there no shaking your decision about the Priory, Professor Theobald?” Lady Engleton asked as they descended the steps.

The Professor’s quick glance sought Mrs. Temperley’s before he answered. “I confess to feeling less heroic this afternoon.”

“Oh, good! We may perhaps have you for a neighbour after all.”

---

CHAPTER XXIV.

HADRIA tried to avoid Professor Theobald, but he was not easily avoided. She frequently met him in her walks. The return of spring had tempted her to resume her old habit of rising with the sun. But she found, what she had feared, that her strength had departed, and she was fatigued instead of invigorated, as of yore. She did not regard this loss in a resigned spirit. Resignation was certainly not her strong point. The vicar’s wife and the doctor’s wife and the rest of the neighbours compared their woes and weariness over five o’clock tea, and these appeared so many and so severe that Hadria felt half ashamed to count hers at all. Yet why lower the altars of the sane goddess because her shrine was deserted? Health was health, though all the women of England were confirmed invalids. And with nothing less ought reasonable creatures to be satisfied. As for taking enfeeblement as a natural dispensation, she would as soon regard delirium tremens in that light.

She chafed fiercely against the loss of that blessed sense of well-being and overflowing health, that she used to have, in the old days. She resented the nerve-weariness, the fatigue that she was now more conscious of than ever, with the coming of the spring. The impulse of creative energy broke forth in her. The pearly mornings and the birds’ songs stirred every instinct of expression. The outburst did not receive its usual check. The influences of disenchantment were counteracted by Professor Fortescue’s presence. His sympathy was marvellous in its penetration, brimming the cold hollows of her spirit, as a flooded river fills the tiniest chinks and corners about its arid banks. He called forth all her natural buoyancy and her exulting sense of life, which was precisely the element which charged her sadness with such a fierce electric quality, when she became possessed by it, as a cloud by storm.

Valeria too was roused by the season.

“What a parable it all is, as old as the earth, and as fresh, each new year, as if a messenger-angel had come straight from heaven, in his home-spun of young green, to tell us that all is well.”

If Hadria met Professor Theobald in her rambles, she always cut short her intended walk. She and Valeria with Professor Fortescue wandered together, far and wide. They watched the daily budding greenery, the gleams of daffodils among their sword-blades of leaves, the pushing of sheaths and heads through the teeming soil, the bursts of sunshine and the absurd childish little gushes of rain, skimming the green country like a frown.

“Truly a time for joy and idleness.”

“If only,” said Hadria, when Professor Theobald thus grew enthusiastic on the subject, “if only my cook had not given a month’s notice.”

She would not second his mood, be it what it might. Each day, as they passed along the lanes, the pale green had spread, like fire, on the hedges, caught the chestnuts, with their fat buds shining in the sun, which already was releasing the close-packed leaflets.

Hadria (apparently out of sheer devilry, said Professor Theobald) kept up a running commentary on the season, and on her hapless position, bound to be off on the chase for a cook at this moment of festival. Nor was this all. Crockery, pots and pans, clothes for the children, clothes for herself, were urgently needed, and no experienced person, she declared, could afford to regard the matter as simple because it was trivial.

“One of the ghastliest mistakes in this trivial and laborious world.”

Valeria thought that cooks had simply to be advertised for, and they came.

“What naïveté!” exclaimed Hadria. “Helen was persuaded to cross the seas from her Spartan home to set Troy ablaze, and tarnish her fair fame, but it would take twenty sons of Priam to induce a damsel to come over dry land to Craddock Dene, to cook our dinners and retain her character.”

“You would almost imply that women don’t so very much care about their characters,” said Valeria.

“Oh, they do! but sometimes the dulness that an intelligent society has ordained as the classic accompaniment to social smiles, gets the better of a select few—Helen par exemple.”

It frequently happened that Hadria and Miss Du Prel came across Lady Engleton and her guests, in the Priory garden. From being accidental, the meetings had become intentional.

“I like to fancy we are fugitives—like Boccaccio’s merry company—from the plague of our daily prose, to this garden of sweet poetry!” cried Miss Du Prel.

They all kindled at the idea. Valeria made some fanciful laws that she said were to govern the little realm. Everyone might express himself freely, and all that he said would be held as sacred, as if it were in confidence. To speak ill or slightingly of anyone, was forbidden. All local and practical topics were to be dropped, as soon as the moss-grown griffins who guarded the Garden of Forgetfulness were passed.

Hadria was incorrigibly flippant about the banishment of important local subjects. She said that the kitchen-boiler was out of order, and yet she had to take part in these highly-cultivated conversations and smile, as she complained, with that kitchen-boiler gnawing at her vitals. She claimed to be set on a level with the Spartan boy, if not above him. Valeria might scoff, as those proverbially did who never felt a wound. Hadria found a certain lack of tender feeling among the happy few who had no such tragic burdens to sustain.

Not only were these prosaic subjects banished from within the cincture of the gentle griffins, but also the suspicions, spites, petty jealousies, vulgar curiosities, and all the indefinable little darts and daggers that fly in the social air, destroying human sympathy and good-will. Each mind could expand freely, no longer on the defensive against the rain of small stabs. There grew up a delicate, and chivalrous code among the little group who met within the griffins’ territory.

“It is not for us to say that, individually, we transcend the average of educated mortals,” said Professor Theobald, “but I do assert that collectively we soar high above that depressing standard.”

Professor Fortescue observed that whatever might be said about their own little band, it was a strange fact that bodies of human beings were able to produce, by union, a condition far above or far below the average of their separate values. “There is something chemical and explosive in human relationships,” he said.

These meetings stood out as a unique experience in the memory of all who took part in them. Chance had brought them to pass, and they refused to answer to the call of a less learned magician.

Lady Engleton and Mrs. Temperley alternately sent tea and fruit to the terrace, on the days of meeting, and there the little company would spend the afternoon serenely, surrounded by the beauties of the garden with its enticing avenues, its chaunting birds, its flushes of bloom, and its rich delicious scents.

“Why do we, in the nineteenth century, starve ourselves of these delicate joys?” cried Valeria. “Why do we so seldom leave our stupid pre-occupations and open our souls to the sun, to the spring, to the gentle invitations of gardens, to the charm of conversation? We seem to know nothing of the serenities, the urbanities of life.”

“We live too fast; we are too much troubled about outward things—cooks and dressmakers, Mrs. Temperley,” said Professor Theobald.

“Poor cooks and dressmakers!” murmured Professor Fortescue, “where are their serenities and urbanities?”

“I would not deprive any person of the good things of life,” cried Valeria; “but at present, it is only a few who can appreciate and contribute to the delicate essence that I speak of. I don’t think one could expect it of one’s cook, after all.”

“One is mad to expect anything of those who have had no chance,” said Professor Fortescue. “That nevertheless we consistently do,—or what amounts to the same thing: we plume ourselves on what chance has enabled us to be and to achieve, as if between us and the less fortunate there were some great difference of calibre and merit. Nine times in ten, there is nothing between us but luck.”

“Oh, dear, you are democratic, Professor!” cried Lady Engleton.

“No; I am merely trying to be just.”

“To be just you must apply your theory to men and women, as well as to class and class,” Valeria suggested.

“Mon Dieu! but so I do; so I always have done, as soon as I was intellectually short-coated.”

“And would you excuse all our weaknesses on that ground?” asked Lady Engleton, with a somewhat ingratiating upward gaze of her blue eyes.

“I would account for them as I would account for the weaknesses of my own sex. As for excusing, the question of moral responsibility is too involved to be decided off-hand.”

The atmosphere of Griffin-land, as Professor Theobald called it, while becoming to his character, made him a little recklessly frank at times.

He admitted that throughout his varied experience of life, he had found flattery the most powerful weapon in a skilled hand, and that he had never known it fail. He related instances of the signal success which had followed its application with the trowel. He reminded his listeners of Lord Beaconsfield’s famous saying, and chuckled over the unfortunate woman, “plain as a pike-staff,” who had become his benefactress, in consequence of a discreet allusion to the “power of beauty” and a well-placed sigh.

“The woman must have been a fool!” said Joseph Fleming.

“By no means; she was of brilliant intellect. But praises of that were tame to her; she knew her force, and was perhaps tired of the solitude it induced.” Professor Theobald laughed mightily at his own sarcasm. “But when the whisper of ‘beauty’ came stealing to her ear (which was by no means like a shell) it was surpassing sweet to her. I think there is no yearning more intense than that of a clever woman for the triumphs of mere beauty. She would give all her powers of intellect for the smallest tribute to personal and feminine charm. What is your verdict, Mrs. Temperley?”

Mrs. Temperley supposed that clever women had something of human nature in them, and valued overmuch what they did not possess.

Professor Theobald had perhaps looked for an answer that would have betrayed more of the speaker’s secret feelings.

“It is the fashion, I know,” he said, “to regard woman as an enigma. Now, without professing any unusual acuteness, I believe that this is a mistake. Woman is an enigma certainly, because she is human, but that ends it. Her conditions have tended to cultivate in her the power of dissimulation, and the histrionic quality, just as the peaceful ilex learns to put forth thorns if you expose it to the attacks of devouring cattle. It is this instinct to develop thorns in self-defence, and yet to live a little behind the prickly outposts, that leads to our notion of mystery in woman’s nature. Let a man’s subsistence and career be subject to the same powers and chances as the success of a woman’s life now hangs on, and see whether he too does not become a histrionic enigma.”

Professor Fortescue observed that the clergy, at times, developed qualities called feminine, because in some respects their conditions resembled those of women.

Theobald assented enthusiastically to this view. He had himself entered the church as a young fellow (let not Mrs. Temperley look so inconsiderately astonished), and had left it on account of being unable to conscientiously subscribe to its tenets.

“But not before I had acquired some severe training in that sort of strategy which is incumbent upon women, in the conduct of their lives. Whatever I might privately think or feel, my office required that I should only express that which would be more or less grateful to my hearers. (Is not this the woman’s case, in almost every position in life?) Even orthodoxy must trip it on tiptoe; there was always some prejudice, some susceptibility to consider. What was frankness in others was imprudence in me; other men’s minds might roam at large; mine was tethered, if not in its secret movements, at least in its utterance; and it is a curious and somewhat sinister law of Nature, that perpetual denial of utterance ends by killing the power or the feeling so held in durance.”

Hadria coloured.

“That experience and its effect upon my own nature, which has lasted to this day,” added Theobald, “served to increase my interest in the fascinating study of character in its relation to environment.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Hadria, “then you don’t believe in the independent power of the human will?”

“Certainly not. To talk of character overcoming circumstance is to talk of an effect without a cause. Yet this phrase is a mere commonplace in our speech. A man no more overcomes his circumstance than oxygen overcomes nitrogen when it combines with it to form the air we breathe. If the nitrogen is present, the combination takes place; but if there is no nitrogen to be had, all the oxygen in the world will not produce our blessed atmosphere!”

Joseph Fleming caused a sort of anti-climax by mentioning simply that he didn’t know that any nitrogen was required in the atmosphere. One always heard about the oxygen.

Professor Theobald remarked, with a chuckle, that this was one of the uses of polite conversation; one picked up information by the wayside. Joseph agreed that it was wonderfully instructive, if the speakers were intelligent.

“That helps,” said the Professor, tapping Joseph familiarly on the shoulder.

“When shall we have our next meeting?” enquired Lady Engleton, when the moment came for parting.

“The sooner the better,” said Valeria. “English skies have Puritan moods, and we may as well profit by their present jocund temper. I never saw a bluer sky in all Italy.”

“I certainly shall not be absent from the next meeting,” announced Theobald, with a glance at Hadria.

“Nor I,” said Lady Engleton. “Such opportunities come none too often.”

“I,” Hadria observed, “shall be cook-hunting.”

Professor Theobald’s jaw shut with a snap, and he turned and left the group almost rudely.

---

CHAPTER XXV.

HADRIA thought that Professor Theobald had not spoken at random, when he said that the sweetest tribute a woman can receive is that paid to her personal charm. This unwilling admission was dragged out of her by the sight of Valeria Du Prel, as the central figure of an admiring group, in the large drawing-room at Craddock Place.

She was looking handsome and animated, her white hair drawn proudly off her brow, and placed as if with intention beside the silken curtains, whose tint of misty pale green was so becoming to her beauty.

Valeria was holding her little court, and thoroughly enjoying the admiration.

“If we have had to live by our looks for all these centuries, surely the instinct that Professor Theobald thinks himself so penetrating to have discovered in clever women, is accounted for simply enough by heredity,” Hadria said to herself, resentfully.

Professor Theobald was bending over Miss Du Prel with an air of devotion. Hadria wished that she would not take his compliments so smilingly. Valeria would not be proof against his flattery. She kindled with a child’s frankness at praise. It stung Hadria to think of her friend being carelessly classed by the Professor among women whose weakness he understood and could play upon. He would imagine that he had discovered the mystery of the sun, because he had observed a spot upon it, not understanding the nature of the very spot. Granted that a little salve to one’s battered and scarified self-love was soft and grateful, what did that prove of the woman who welcomed it, beyond a human craving to keep the inner picture of herself as bright and fine as might be? The man who, out of contempt or irreverence, set a bait for the universal appetite proved himself, rather than his intended victim, of meagre quality. Valeria complimented him generously by supposing him sincere.

Occasional bursts of laughter came from her court. Professor Theobald looked furtively round, as if seeking some one, or watching the effect of his conduct on Mrs. Temperley.

Could he be trying to make her jealous of Valeria?

Hadria gave a sudden little laugh while Lord Engleton—a shy, rather taciturn man—was shewing her his wife’s last picture. Hadria had to explain the apparent discourtesy as best she could.

The picture was of English meadows at sunset.

“They are the meadows you see from your windows,” said Lord Engleton. “That village is Masham, with the spire shewing through the trees. I daresay you know the view pretty well.”

“I doubt,” she answered, with the instinct of extravagance that annoyed Hubert, “I doubt if I know anything else.”

Lord Engleton brought a portfolio full of sketches for her to see.

“Lady Engleton has been busy.”

As Hadria laid down the last sketch, her eyes wandered round the softly-lighted, dimly beautiful room, and suddenly she was seized with a swift, reasonless, overpowering sense of happiness that she felt to be atmospheric and parenthetical in character, but all the more keen for that reason, while it lasted. The second black inexorable semicircle was ready to enclose the little moment, but its contents had the condensed character of that which stands within limits, and reminded her, with a little sting, as of spur to horse, of her sharp, terrible aptitude for delight and her hunger for it. Why not, why not? What pinched, ungenerous philosophy was it that insisted on voluntary starvation? One saw its offspring in the troops of thin white souls that hurry, like ghosts, down the avenues of Life.

Again Professor Theobald’s stealthy glance was directed towards Mrs. Temperley.

“He is as determined to analyse me as if I were a chemical compound,” she said to herself.

“Perhaps we may as well join the group,” suggested Lord Engleton.

It opened to admit the new comers, disclosing Miss Du Prel, in a gown of pale amber brocade, enthroned upon a straight-backed antique sofa. The exquisiteness of the surroundings which Lady Engleton had a peculiar gift in arranging, the mellow candle-light, the flowers and colours, seem to have satisfied in Valeria an inborn love of splendour that often opened hungry and unsatisfied jaws.

She had never looked so brilliant or so handsome.

Professor Theobald’s face cleared. He explained to Mrs. Temperley that they had been discussing the complexity of human character, and had come to the conclusion that it was impossible to really understand even the simplest man or woman alive. Professor Theobald said that it was a dispensation of Providence which intended the human race for social life. Lady Engleton upbraided the author of the cynical utterance.

“Which of us can dare to face his own basest self?” the culprit demanded. “If any one is so bold, I fear I must accuse him (or even her) of lack of self-knowledge rather than give praise for spotlessness.”

“Oh, I don’t believe all these dreadful things about my fellows!” cried Miss Du Prel, flinging up her fine head defiantly; “one is likely to find in them more or less what one expects. It’s the same everywhere. If you go seeking mole-hills and worms, and put nose to ground on the scent for carrion, you will find them all, with the range of snow-capped Alps in full view, and the infinite of blue above your blind head!”

Hadria, in justice, could not refuse to acknowledge that Professor Theobald was open-minded.

“True,” he said, “it is dangerous to seek for evil, unless you naturally love it, and then——”

“You are past praying for,” said Professor Fortescue.

“Or at least you never pray,” added Hadria.

Both Professors looked at her, each with an expression of enquiry. It was difficult to understand from exactly what sources of experience or intuition the singular remark could have sprung.

The conversation took a slight swerve.

Professor Theobald contended that all our fond distinctions of vice and virtue, right and wrong, were mere praise and blame of conditions and events.

“We like to fancy the qualities of character inherent, while really they are laid on by slow degrees, like paint, and we name our acquaintance by the colour of his last coat.”

This view offended Miss Du Prel. Joseph Fleming and Lord Engleton rallied round her. Hubert Temperley joined them. Man, the sublime, the summit of the creation, the end and object of the long and painful processes of nature; sin-spotted perhaps, weak and stumbling, but still the masterpiece of the centuries—was this great and mysterious creature to be thought of irreverently as a mere plain surface for paint? Only consider it! Professor Theobald’s head went down between his shoulders as he laughed.

“The sublime creature would not look well unpainted, believe me.”

“He dare not appear in that plight even to himself, if Theobald be right in what he stated just now,” said Professor Fortescue.

“Life to a character is like varnish to wood,” asserted Miss Du Prel; “it brings out the grain.”

“Ah!” cried Professor Theobald, “Then you insist on varnish, I on paint.”

“There is a difference.”

“And it affects your respective views throughout,” added Professor Fortescue, “for if the paint theory be correct, then it is true that to know one’s fellows is impossible, you can only know the upper coat; whereas if the truth lies in varnish, the substance of the nature is revealed to you frankly, if you have eyes to trace the delicacies of the markings, which tell the secrets of sap and fibre, of impetus and check: all the inner marvels of life and growth that go forward in that most botanic thing, the human soul.”

“Professor Fortescue is eloquent, but he makes one feel distressingly vegetable,” said Temperley.

“Oh! not unless one has a human soul,” Lady Engleton reassured him.

“Am I to understand that you would deprive me of mine?” he asked, with a courtly bow.

“Not at all; souls are private property, or ought to be.”

“I wish one could persuade the majority of that!” cried Professor Fortescue.

“Impossible,” said Theobald. “The chief interest of man is the condition of his neighbour’s soul.”

“Could he not be induced to look after his own?” Hadria demanded.

“All fun would be over,” said Professor Fortescue.

“I wish one could have an Act of Parliament, obliging every man to leave his neighbour’s soul in peace.”

“You would sap the very source of human happiness and enterprise,” Professor Fortescue asserted, fantastically.

“I should be glad if I could think the average human being had the energy to look after any business; even other people’s!” cried Lady Engleton.

“I believe that, as a matter of fact, the soul is a hibernating creature,” said Theobald, with a chuckle.

“It certainly has its drowsy winters,” observed Hadria.

“Ah! but its spring awakenings!” cried Miss Du Prel.

The chime of a clock startled them with its accusation of lingering too long. The hostess remonstrated at the breaking up the party. Why should they hurry away?

“The time when we could lay claim to have ‘hurried’ has long since passed, Lady Engleton,” said Hubert, “we can only plead forgiveness by blaming you for making us too happy.”

Professor Theobald went to the window. “What splendid moonlight! Lady Engleton, don’t you feel tempted to walk with your guests to the end of the avenue?”

The idea was eagerly adopted, and the whole party sallied forth together into the brilliant night. Long black shadows of their forms stalked on before them, as if, said Valeria, they were messengers from Hades come to conduct each his victim to the abode of the shades.

Professor Theobald shuddered.

“I hate that dreadful chill idea of the Greeks. I have much too strong a hold on this pleasant earth to relish the notion of that gloomy under-world yet a while. What do you say, Mrs. Temperley?”

She made some intentionally trite answer.

Professor Theobald’s quick eyes discovered a glow-worm, and he shouted to the ladies to come and see the little green lantern of the spring. The mysterious light was bright enough to irradiate the blades of grass around it, and even to cast a wizard-like gleam on the strange face of the Professor as he bent down close to the ground.

“Fancy being a lamp to oneself!” cried Lady Engleton.

“It’s as much as most of us can do to be a lamp to others,” commented Hadria.

“Some one has compared the glow-worm’s light to Hero’s, when she waited, with trimmed lamp, for her Leander,” said Professor Theobald. “Look here, Mr. Fleming, if you stoop down just here, you will be able to see the little animal.” The Professor resigned his place to him. When Joseph rose from his somewhat indifferent survey of the insect, Professor Theobald had established himself at Mrs. Temperley’s right hand, and the rest of the party were left behind.

“Talking of Greek ideas,” said the Professor, “that wonderful people perceived more clearly than we Christians have ever done, with all our science, the natural forces of Nature. What we call superstitions were really great scientific intuitions or prophecies. Of course I should not dare to speak in this frank fashion to the good people of Craddock Dene, but to you I need not be on my guard.”

“I appreciate your confidence.”

“Ah, now, Mrs. Temperley, you are unkind. It is of no use for you to try to persuade me that you are of as well as in the village of Craddock Dene.”

“I have never set out upon that task.”

“Again I offend!”

Hadria, dropping the subject, enquired whether the Professor was well acquainted with this part of the country.

He knew it by heart. A charming country; warm, luxuriant, picturesque, the pick of England to his mind. What could beat its woodlands, its hills, its relics of the old world, its barns and churches and smiling villages?

“Then it is not only Tudor mansions that attract you?” Hadria could not resist asking.

Tudor mansions? There was no cottage so humble, provided it were picturesque, that did not charm him.

“Really!” exclaimed Hadria, with a faintly emphasized surprise.

“Have I put my luckless foot into it again?”

“May I not be impressed by magnanimity?”

The Professor’s mouth shut sharply.

“Mrs. Temperley is pleased to deride me. Craddock Dene must shrivel under destroying blasts like these.”

“Not so much as one might think.”

The sound of their steps on the broad avenue smote sharply on their ears. Their absurd-looking shadows stretched always in front of them. “A splendid night,” Hadria observed, to break the silence.

“Glorious!” returned her companion, as if waking from thought.

“Spring is our best season here, the time of blossoming.”

“I am horribly tempted to take root in the lovely district, in the hope of also blossoming. Can you imagine me a sort of patriarchal apple-tree laden with snowy blooms?”

“You somewhat burden my imagination.”

“I have had to work hard all my life, until an unexpected legacy from an admirable distant relation put me at the end of a longer tether. I still have to work, but less hard. I have always tried not to ossify, keeping in view a possible serene time to come, when I might put forth blossoms in this vernal fashion that tempts my middle-aged fancy. And where could I choose a sweeter spot for these late efforts to be young and green, than here in this perfect south of England home?”

“It seems large,” said Hadria.

Professor Theobald grinned. “You don’t appear to take a keen interest in my blossoming.”

Why in heaven’s name should she?

“I cannot naturally expect it,” Professor Theobald continued, reading her silence aright, “but I should be really obliged by your counsel on this matter. You know the village; you know from your own experience whether it is a place to live in always. Advise me, I beg.”

“Really, Professor Theobald, it is impossible for me to advise you in a matter so entirely depending on your own taste and your own affairs.”

“You can at least tell me how you like the district yourself; whether it satisfies you as to society, easy access of town, influence on the mind and the spirits, and so forth.”

“We are considered well off as to society. There are a good many neighbours within a radius of five miles; the trains to town are not all that could be wished. There are only two in the day worth calling such.”

“And as to its effect upon the general aspect of life; is it rousing, cheering, inspiring, invigorating?”

Hadria gave a little laugh. “I must refer you to other inhabitants on this point. I think Lady Engleton finds it fairly inspiring.”

“Lady Engleton is not Mrs. Temperley.”

“I doubt not that same speech has already done duty as a compliment to Lady Engleton.”

“You are incorrigible!”

“I wish you would make it when she is present,” said Hadria, “and see us both bow!” The Professor laughed delightedly.

“I don’t know what social treasures may be buried within your radius of five miles, but the mines need not be worked. An inhabitant of the Priory would not need them. Mrs. Temperley is a society in herself.”

“An inhabitant of the Priory might risk disappointment, in supposing that Mrs. Temperley had nothing else to do than to supply her neighbours with society.”

The big jaw closed, with a snap.

“I don’t think, on the whole, that I will take the Priory,” he said, after a considerable pause; “it is, as you say, large.”

Mrs. Temperley made no comment.

“I suppose I should be an unwelcome neighbour,” he said, with a sigh.

“I fear any polite assurance, after such a challenge, would be a poor compliment. As for entreating you to take the Priory, I really do not feel equal to the responsibility.”

“I accept in all humility,” said the Professor, as he opened the gate of the Red House, “a deserved reproof.”

---

CHAPTER XXVI.

“A SINGULAR character!” said Professor Theobald.

“There is a lot of good in her,” Lady Engleton asserted.

Lord Engleton observed that people were always speaking ill of Mrs. Temperley, but he never could see that she was worse than her neighbours. She was cleverer; that might be her offence.

Madame Bertaux observed in her short, decisive way that Craddock Dene might have settled down with Mrs. Temperley peaceably enough, if it hadn’t been for her action about the schoolmistress’s child.

“Yes; that has offended everybody,” said Lady Engleton.

“What action was that?” asked Theobald, turning slowly towards his hostess.

“Oh, haven’t you heard? That really speaks well for this house. You can’t accuse us of gossip.”

Lady Engleton related the incident. “By the way, you must remember that poor woman, Professor. Don’t you know you were here at the school-feast that we gave one summer in the park, when all the children came and had tea and games, and you helped us so amiably to look after them?”

The Professor remembered the occasion perfectly.

“And don’t you recollect a very pretty, rather timid, fair-haired woman who brought the children? We all used to admire her. She was a particularly graceful, refined-looking creature. She had read a great deal and was quite cultivated. I often used to think she must feel very solitary at Craddock, with not a soul to sympathize with her tastes. Mr. and Mrs. Walker used to preach to her, poor soul, reproving her love of reading, which took her thoughts away from her duties and her sphere.”

Madame Bertaux snorted significantly. Lady Engleton had remarked a strange, sad look in Ellen Jervis’s eyes, and owned to having done her best to circumvent the respected pastor and his wife, by lending her books occasionally, and encouraging her to think her own thoughts, and get what happiness she could out of her communings with larger spirits than she was likely to find in Craddock. Of course Mrs. Walker now gave Lady Engleton to understand that she was partly responsible for the poor woman’s misfortune. She attributed it to Ellen’s having had “all sorts of ideas in her head!”

“I admit that if not having all sorts of ideas in one’s head is a safeguard, the unimpeachable virtue of a district is amply accounted for.”

Professor Theobald chuckled. He enquired if Lady Engleton knew Mrs. Temperley’s motive in adopting the child.

“Oh, partly real kindness; but I think, between ourselves, that Mrs. Temperley likes to be a little eccentric. Most people have the instinct to go with the crowd. Hadria Temperley has the opposite fault. She loves to run counter to it, even when it is pursuing a harmless course.”

Some weeks had now passed since the arrival of the two Professors. The meetings in the Priory garden had been frequent. They had affected for the better Professor Theobald’s manner. Valeria’s laws had curbed the worst side of him, or prevented it from shewing itself so freely. He felt the atmosphere of the little society, and acknowledged that it was “taming the savage beast.” As for his intellect it took to blazing, as if, he said, without false modesty, a torch had been placed in pure oxygen.

“My brain takes fire here and flames. I should make a very creditable beacon if the burning of brains and the burning of faggots were only of equal value.”

The little feud between him and Mrs. Temperley had been patched up. She felt that she had been rude to him, on one occasion at any rate, and desired to make amends. He had become more cautious in his conduct towards her.

During this period of the Renaissance, as Hadria afterwards called the short-lived epoch, little Martha was visited frequently. Her protectress had expected to have to do battle with hereditary weakness on account of her mother’s sufferings, but the child shewed no signs of this. Either the common belief that mental trouble in the mother is reflected in the child, was unfounded, or the evil could be overcome by the simple beneficence of pure air, good food, and warm clothing.

Hadria had begun to feel a more personal interest in her charge. She had taken it under her care of her own choice, without the pressure of any social law or sentiment, and in these circumstances of freedom, its helplessness appealed to her protective instincts. She felt the relationship to be a true one, in contradistinction to the more usual form of protectorate of woman to child.

“There is nothing in it that gives offence to one’s dignity as a human being,” she asserted, “which is more than can be said of the ordinary relation, especially if it be legal.”

She was issuing from little Martha’s cottage on one splendid morning, when she saw Professor Theobald coming up the road from Craddock Dene. He caught sight of Hadria, hesitated, coloured, glanced furtively up the road, and then, seeing he was observed, came forward, raising his cap.

“You can’t imagine what a charming picture you make; the English cottage creeper-covered and smiling; the nurse and child at the threshold equally smiling, yourself a very emblem of spring in your fresh gown, and a domestic tabby to complete the scene.”

“I wish I could come and see it,” said Hadria. She was waving a twig of lavender, and little Martha was making grabs at it, and laughing her gurgling laugh of babyish glee. Professor Theobald stood in the road facing up hill towards Craddock, whose church tower was visible from here, just peeping through the spring foliage of the vicarage garden. He only now and again looked round at the picture that he professed to admire.

“Do you want to see a really pretty child, Professor Theobald? Because if so, come here.”

He hesitated, and a wave of dark colour flooded his face up to the roots of his close-clipped hair.

He paused a moment, and then bent down to open the little gate. His stalwart figure, in the diminutive enclosure, reduced it to the appearance of a doll’s garden.

“Step carefully or you will crush the young ménage,” Hadria advised. The rosy-cheeked nurse looked with proud expectancy at the face of the strange gentleman, to note the admiration that he could not but feel.

His lips were set.

The Professor evidently knew his duty and proceeded to admire with due energy. Little Martha shrank away a little from the bearded face, and her lower lip worked threateningly, but the perilous moment was staved over by means of the Professor’s watch, hastily claimed by Hannah, who dispensed with ceremony in the emergency.

Martha’s eyes opened wide, and the little hands came out to grasp the treasure. Hadria stood and laughed at the sight of the gigantic Professor, helplessly tethered by his own chain to the imperious baby, in whose fingers the watch was tightly clasped. The child was in high delight at the loquacious new toy—so superior to foolish fluffy rabbits that could not tick to save their skins. Martha had no notion of relinquishing her hold, so they need not tug in that feeble way; if they pulled too hard, she would yell!

She evidently meant business, said her captive. So long as they left her the watch, they might do as they pleased; she was perfectly indifferent to the accidental human accompaniments of the new treasure, but on that one point she was firm. She proceeded to stuff the watch into her mouth as far as it would go. The Professor was dismayed.

“It’s all right,” Hadria reassured him. “You have hold of the chain.”

“Did you entice me into this truly ridiculous position in order to laugh at me?” enquired the prisoner.

“I would not laugh at you for the world.”

“Really this young person has the most astonishing grip! How long does her fancy generally remain faithful to a new toy?”

“Well—I hope you are not pressed for time,” said Hadria maliciously.

The Professor groaned, and struggled in the toils.

“Come, little one, open the fingers. Oh no, no, we mustn’t cry.” Martha kept her features ready for that purpose at a moment’s notice, should any nonsense be attempted.

The victim looked round miserably.

“Is there nothing that will set me free from these tender moorings?”

Hadria shook her head and laughed. “You are chained by the most inflexible of all chains,” she said: “your own compunction.”

“Oh, you little tyrant!” exclaimed the Professor, shaking his fist in the baby’s face, at which she laughed a taunting and triumphant laugh. Then, once more, the object of dispute went into her mouth. Martha gurgled with joy.

“What am I to do?” cried her victim helplessly.

“Nothing. She has you securely because you fear to hurt her.”

“Little imp! Come now, let me go please. Oh, please, Miss Baby—your Majesty: will nothing soften you? She is beginning early to take advantage of the chivalry of the stronger sex, and I doubt not she will know how to pursue her opportunity later on.”

“Oh! is that your parable? Into my head came quite a different one—à propos of what we were talking of yesterday in Griffin-land.”

“Ah, the eternal feminine!” cried the Professor. “Yes, you were very brilliant, Mrs. Temperley.”

“You now stand for an excellent type of woman, Professor: strong, but chained.”

“Oh, thank you! (Infant, I implore!)”

“The baby ably impersonates Society with all its sentiments and laws, written and unwritten.”

“Ah!—and my impounded property?”

“Woman’s life and freedom.”

“Ingenious! And the chain? (Oh, inexorable babe, have mercy on the sufferings of imprisoned vigour!)”

“Her affections, her pity, her compunction, which forbid her to wrench away her rightful property, because ignorant and tender hands are grasping it. The analogy is a little mixed, but no matter.”

“I should enjoy the intellectual treat that is spread before me better, in happier circumstances, Mrs. Temperley.”

“Apply your remark to your prototype—intelligently,” she added.

“My intelligence is rapidly waning; I am benumbed. I fail to follow the intricacies of analogy, in this constrained position.”

“Ah, so does she!”

“Oh, pitiless cherub, my muscles ache with this monotony.”

“And hers,” said Hadria.

“Come, come, life is passing; I have but one; relax these fetters, or I die.”

Martha frowned and fretted. She even looked shocked, according to Hadria, who stood by laughing. The baby, she pointed out, failed to understand how her captive could so far forget himself as to desire to regain his liberty.

“She reminds you, sternly, that this is your proper sphere.”

“Perdition!” he exclaimed.

“As a general rule,” she assented.

The Professor laughed, and said he was tired of being a Type.

At length a little gentle force had to be used, in spite of furious resentment on the part of the baby. A more injured and ill-treated mortal could not have been imagined. She set up a heaven-piercing wail, evidently overcome with indignation and surprise at the cruel treatment that she had received. What horrid selfishness to take oneself and one’s property away, when an engaging innocent enjoys grasping it and stuffing it into its mouth!

“Don’t you feel a guilty monster?” Hadria enquired, as the lament of the offended infant followed them up the road.

“I feel as if I were slinking off after a murder!” he exclaimed ruefully. “I wonder if we oughtn’t to go back and try again to soothe the child.” He paused irresolutely.

Hadria laughed. “You do make a lovely allegory!” she exclaimed. “This sense of guilt, this disposition to go back—this attitude of apology—it is speaking, inimitable!”

“But meanwhile that wretched child is shrieking itself into a fit!” cried the allegory, with the air of a repentant criminal.

“Whenever you open your mouth, out falls a symbol,” exclaimed Hadria. “Be calm; Hannah will soon comfort her, and it is truer kindness not to remind her again of her grievance, poor little soul. But we will go back if you like (you are indeed a true woman!), and you can say you are sorry you made so free with your own possessions, and you wish you had done your duty better, and are eager to return and let Her Majesty hold you captive. Your prototype always does, you know, and she is nearly always pardoned, on condition that she never does anything of that kind again.”

Professor Theobald seemed too much concerned about the child, who was still wailing, to pay much attention to any other topic. He turned to retrace his steps.

“I think you make a mistake,” said Hadria. “As soon as she sees you she will want the watch, and then you will be placed between the awful alternatives of voluntarily surrendering your freedom, and heartlessly refusing to present yourself to her as a big plaything. In one respect you have not yet achieved a thorough fidelity to your model; you don’t seem to enjoy sacrifice for its own sake. That will come with practice.”

“I wish that child would leave off crying.”

Hadria stopped in the road to laugh at the perturbed Professor.

“She will presently. That is only a cry of anger, not of distress. I would not leave her, if it were. Yes; your vocation is clearly allegorical. Feminine to your finger-tips, in this truly feminine predicament. We are all—nous autres femmes—like the hero of the White Ship, who is described by some delightful boy in an examination paper as being ‘melted by the shrieks of a near relation.’”

The Professor stumbled over a stone in the road, and looked back at it vindictively.

“The near relation does so want to hold one’s watch and to stuff it into his mouth, and he shrieks so movingly if one brutally removes one’s property and person!”

“Alas! I am still a little bewildered by my late captivity. I can’t see the bearings of things.”

“As allegory, you are as perfect as ever.”

“I seem to be a sort of involuntary Pilgrim’s Progress!” he exclaimed.

“Ah, indeed!” cried Hadria, “and how the symbolism of that old allegory would fit this subject!”

“With me for wretched hero, I suppose!”

“Your archetype;—with a little adaptation—yes, and wonderfully little—the Slough of Despond, Doubting Castle, the Valley of the Shadow of Death—they all fall into place. Ah! the modern Pilgrim’s Progress would read strangely and significantly with woman as the pilgrim! But the end—that would be a difficulty.”

“One for your sex to solve,” said the Professor.

When they arrived at the cottage the wails were dying away, and Hadria advised that they should leave well alone. So the baby’s victim somewhat reluctantly retired.

“After all, you see, if one has strength of purpose, one can achieve freedom,” he observed.

“At the expense of the affections, it would seem,” said Hadria.

The walk was pursued towards Craddock. Hadria said she had to ask Dodge, the old gravedigger, if he could give a few days’ work in the garden at the Red House.

The Professor was walking for walking’s sake.

“She is a pretty child, isn’t she?” said Hadria.

“Very; an attractive mite; but she has a will of her own.”

“Yes; I confess I have a moment of exultation when that child sets up one of her passionate screams—the thrilling shriek of a near relation!”

“Really, why?”

“She has to make her way in the world. She must not be too meek. Her mother was a victim to the general selfishness and stupidity. She was too gentle and obedient; too apt to defer to others, to be able to protect herself. I want her child to be strengthened for the battle by a good long draught of happiness, and to be armed with that stoutest of all weapons—perfect health.”

“You are very wise, Mrs. Temperley,” murmured the Professor.

“Mon Dieu! if one had always to judge for others and never for oneself, what Solons we should all be!”

“I hear that you have taken the child under your protection. She may think herself fortunate. It is an act of real charity.”

Hadria winced. “I fear not. I have grown very much attached to Martha now, poor little soul; but when I decided to adopt her, I was in a state of red-hot fury.”

“Against whom, may I ask?”

“Against the child’s father,” Hadria replied shortly.

---

CHAPTER XXVII.

“YES, mum, I see un go up to the churchyard. He’s tidyin’ up the place a bit for the weddin’.”

“The wedding?” repeated Hadria vaguely. Mrs. Gullick looked at her as at one whose claims to complete possession of the faculties there seems sad reason to doubt.

“Oh, Miss Jordan’s, yes. When is it?”

“Why, it’s this mornin’, ma’am!” cried Mrs. Gullick.

“Dear me, of course. I thought the village looked rather excited.”

People were all standing at their doors, and the children had gathered at the gate of the church, with hands full of flowers. The wedding party was, it appeared, to arrive almost immediately. The children set up a shout as the first carriage was heard coming up the hill.

The bride appeared to be a popular character in Craddock. “Dear, dear, she will be missed, she will, she was a real lady, she was; did her duty too to rich and poor.”

The Professor asked his companion if she remarked that the amiable lady was spoken of universally in the past tense, as some one who had passed from the light of day.

Hadria laughed. “Whenever I am in a cynical mood I come to Craddock and talk to the villagers.”

Dodge was found resting on a broom-handle, with a flower in his button-hole. Marion Jordan had supplied him with port wine when he was “took bad” in the winter. Dodge found it of excellent quality. He approved of the institution of landed property, and had a genuine regard for the fair-haired, sweet-voiced girl who used to come in her pony-cart to distribute her bounty to the villagers. Her class in the Sunday-school, as he remarked, was always the best behaved.

The new schoolmistress, a sour and uncompromising looking person, had issued from her cottage in her Sunday best to see the ceremony.

“That’s where little Martha’s mother used to live,” said Hadria, “and that is where she died.”

“Indeed, yes. I think Mr. Walker pointed it out to me.”

“Ah! of course, and then you know the village of old.”

“’Ere they comes!” announced a chorus of children’s voices, as the first carriage drove up. The excitement was breathless. The occupants alighted and made their way to the church. After that, the carriages came in fairly quick succession. The bridegroom was criticised freely by the crowd. They did not think him worthy of his bride. “They du say as it was a made up thing,” Dodge observed, “and that it wasn’t ’im as she’d like to go up to the altar with.”

“Well, I don’t sort o’ take to ’im neither,” Mrs. Gullick observed, sympathizing with the bride’s feeling. “I do hope he’ll be kind to the pore young thing; that I do.”

“She wouldn’t never give it ’im back; she’s that good,” another woman remarked.

“Who’s the gentleman as she had set her heart on?” a romantic young woman enquired.

“Oh, it’s only wot they say,” said Dodge judicially; “it’s no use a listening to all one hears—not by a long way.”

“You ’ad it from Lord Engleton’s coachman, didn’t you?” prompted Mrs. Gullick.

“Which he heard it said by the gardener at Mr. Jordan’s, as Miss Marion was always about with Mr. Fleming.”

The murmur of interest at this announcement was drowned by the sound of carriage wheels. The bride had come.

“See the ideal and ethereal being whom you have been so faithfully impersonating all the afternoon!” exclaimed Hadria.

A fair, faint, admirably gentle creature, floating in a mist of tulle, was wafted out of the brougham, the spring sunshine burnishing the pale hair, and flashing a dazzling sword-like glance on the string of diamonds at her throat.

It seemed too emphatic, too keen a greeting for the faint ambiguous being, about to put the teaching of her girlhood, and her pretty hopes and faiths, to the test.

She gave a start and shiver as she stepped out into the brilliant day, turning with a half-scared look to the crowd of faces. It seemed almost as if she were seeking help in a blind, bewildered fashion.

Hadria had an impulse. “What would she think if I were to run down those steps and drag her away?” Professor Theobald shook his head.

Within the church, the procession moved up the aisle, to the sound of the organ. Hadria compared the whole ceremony to some savage rite of sacrifice: priest and people with the victim, chosen for her fairness, decked as is meet for victims.

“But she may be happy,” Lady Engleton suggested when the ceremony was over, and the organ was pealing out the wedding march.

“That does not prevent the analogy. What a magnificent hideous thing the marriage-service is! and how exactly it expresses the extraordinary mixture of the noble and the brutal that is characteristic of our notions about these things!”

“The bride is certainly allowed to remain under no misapprehension as to her function,” Lady Engleton admitted, with a laugh that grated on Hadria. Professor Theobald had fallen behind with Joseph Fleming, who had turned up among the crowd.

“But, after all, why mince matters?”

“Why indeed?” said Hadria. Lady Engleton seemed to have expected dissent.

“I think,” she said, “that we are getting too squeamish nowadays as to speech. Women are so frightened to call a spade a spade.”

“It is the spade that is ugly, not the name.”

“But, my dear?”

“Oh, it is not a question of squeamishness, it is the insult of the thing. One insult after another, and everyone stands round, looking respectable.”

Lady Engleton laughed and said something to lead her companion on.

She liked to listen to Mrs. Temperley when she was thoroughly roused.

“It is the hideous mixture of the delicately civilized with the brutally savage that makes one sick. A frankly barbarous ceremony, where there was no pretence of refinement and propriety and so forth, would be infinitely less revolting.”

“Which your language is plain,” observed Lady Engleton, much amused.

“I hope so. Didn’t you see how it all hurt that poor girl? One of her training too—suspended in mid air—not an earthward glance. You know Mrs. Jordan’s views on the education of girls. Poor girls. They are morally skinned, in such a way as to make contact with Fact a veritable torture, and then suddenly they are sent forth defenceless into Life to be literally curry-combed.”

“They adjust themselves,” said Lady Engleton.

“Adjust themselves!” Hadria vindictively flicked off the head of a dandelion with her parasol. “They awake to find they have been living in a Fool’s Paradise—a little upholstered corner with stained glass windows and rose-coloured light. They find that suddenly they are expected to place in the centre of their life everything that up to that moment they have scarcely been allowed even to know about; they find that they must obediently veer round, with the amiable adaptability of a well-oiled weather-cock. Every instinct, every prejudice must be thrown over. All the effects of their training must be instantly overcome. And all this with perfect subjection and cheerfulness, on pain of moral avalanches and deluges, and heaven knows what convulsions of conventional nature!”

“There certainly is some curious incongruity in our training,” Lady Engleton admitted.

“Incongruity! Think what it means for a girl to have been taught to connect the idea of something low and evil with that which nevertheless is to lie at the foundation of all her after life. That is what it amounts to, and people complain that women are not logical.”

Lady Engleton laughed. “Fortunately things work better in practice than might be expected, judging them in the abstract. How bashful Professor Theobald seems suddenly to have become! Why doesn’t he join us, I wonder? However, so much the better; I do like to hear you talk heresy.”

“I do more than talk it, I mean it,” said Hadria. “I fail utterly to get at the popular point of view.”

“But you misrepresent it—there are modifying facts in the case.”

“I don’t see them. Girls are told: ‘So and so is not a nice thing for you to talk about. Wait, however, until the proper signal is given, and then woe betide you if you don’t cheerfully accept it as your bounden duty.’ If that does not enjoin abject slavishness and deliberate immorality of the most cold-blooded kind, I simply don’t know what does.”

Lady Engleton seemed to ponder somewhat seriously, as she stood looking down at the grave beside her.

“How we ever came to have tied ourselves into such an extraordinary mental knot is what bewilders me,” Hadria continued, “and still more, why it is that we all, by common consent, go on acting and talking as if the tangled skein ran smooth and straight through one’s fingers.”

“Chiefly, perhaps, because women won’t speak out,” suggested Lady Engleton.

“They have been so drilled,” cried Hadria, “so gagged, so deafened, by ‘the shrieks of near relations.’”

Lady Engleton was asking for an explanation, when the wedding-bells began to clang out from the belfry, merry and roughly rejoicing. “Tom-boy bells,” Hadria called them. They seemed to tumble over one another and pick themselves up again, and give chase, and roll over in a heap, and then peal firmly out once more, laughing at their romping digression, joyous and thoughtless and simple-hearted. “Evidently without the least notion what they are celebrating,” said Hadria.

The bride came out of church on her husband’s arm. The children set up a shout. Hadria and Lady Engleton, and, farther back, Professor Theobald and Joseph Fleming, could see the two figures pass down to the carriage and hear the carriage drive away. Hadria drew a long breath.

“I am afraid she was in love with Joseph Fleming,” remarked Lady Engleton. “I hoped at one time that he cared for her, but that Irish friend of Marion’s, Katie O’Halloran, came on the scene and spoilt my little romance.”

“I wonder why she married this man? I wonder why the wind blows?” was added in self-derision at the question.

The rest of the party were now departing. “O sleek wedding guests,” Hadria apostrophized them, “how solemnly they sat there, like all-knowing sphinxes, watching, watching, and that child so helpless—handcuffed, manacled! How many prayers will be offered at the shrine of the goddess of Duty within the next twelve months!”

Mrs. Jordan, a British matron of solid proportions, passed down the path on the arm of a comparatively puny cavalier. The sight seemed to stir up some demon in Hadria’s bosom. Fantastic, derisive were her comments on that excellent lady’s most cherished principles, and on her well-known and much-vaunted mode of training her large family of daughters.

“Only the traditional ideas carried out by a woman of narrow mind and strong will,” said Lady Engleton.

“Oh those traditional ideas! They might have issued fresh and hot from an asylum for criminal lunatics.”

“You are deliciously absurd, Hadria.”

“It is the criminal lunatics who are absurd,” she retorted. “Do you remember how those poor girls used to bewail the restrictions to their reading?”

“Yes, it was really a reductio ad absurdum of our system. The girls seemed afraid to face anything. They would rather die than think. (I wonder why Professor Theobald lingers so up there by the chancel? The time must be getting on.)”

Hadria glanced towards him and made no comment. She was thinking of Mrs. Jordan’s daughters.

“What became of their personality all that time I cannot imagine: their woman’s nature that one hears so much about, and from which such prodigious feats were to be looked for, in the future.”

“Yes, that is where the inconsistency of a girl’s education strikes me most,” said Lady Engleton. “If she were intended for the cloister one could understand it. But since she is brought up for the express purpose of being married, it does seem a little absurd not to prepare her a little more for her future life.”

“Exactly,” cried Hadria, “if the orthodox are really sincere in declaring that life to be so sacred and desirable, why on earth don’t they treat it frankly and reverently and teach their girls to understand and respect it, instead of allowing a furtive, sneaky, detestable spirit to hover over it?”

“Yes, I agree with you there,” said Lady Engleton.

“And if they don’t really in their hearts think it sacred and so on (and how they can, under our present conditions, I fail to see), why do they deliberately bring up their girls to be married, as they bring up their sons to a profession? It is inconceivable, and yet good people do it, without a suspicion of the real nature of their conduct, which it wouldn’t be polite to describe.”

Mrs. Jordan—her face irradiated with satisfaction—was acknowledging the plaudits of the villagers, who shouted more or less in proportion to the eye-filling properties of the departing guests.

Hadria was seized with a fit of laughter. It was an awkward fact, that she never could see Mrs. Jordan’s majestic form and noble bonnet without feeling the same overwhelming impulse to laugh.

“This is disgraceful conduct!” cried Lady Engleton.

Hadria was clearly in one of her most reckless moods to-day.

“You have led me on, and must take the consequences!” she cried. “Imagine,” she continued with diabolical deliberation, “if Marion, on any day previous to this, had gone to her mother and expressed an overpowering maternal instinct—a deep desire to have a child!”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Lady Engleton.

“Why so shocked, since it is so holy?”

“But that is different.”

“Ah! then it is holy only when the social edict goes forth, and proclaims the previous evil good and the previous good evil.”

“Come, come; the inconsistency is not quite so bad as that. (How that man does dawdle!)”

Hadria shrugged her shoulders. “It seems to me so; for now suppose, on the other hand, that this same Marion, on any day subsequent to this, should go to that same mother, and announce an exactly opposite feeling—a profound objection to the maternal function—how would she be received? Heavens, with what pained looks, with what platitudes and proverbs, with what reproofs and axioms and sentiments! She would issue forth from that interview like another St. Sebastian, stuck all over with wounds and arrows. ‘Sacred mission,’ ‘tenderest joy,’ ‘holiest mission,’ ‘highest vocation’—one knows the mellifluous phrases.”

“But after all she would be wrong in her objection. The instinct is a true one,” said Lady Engleton.

“Oh, then why should she be pelted for expressing it previously, if the question is not indiscreet?”

“Well, it would seem rather gruesome, if girls were to be overpowered with that passion.”

“So we are all to be horribly shocked at the presence of an instinct to-day, and then equally shocked and indignant at its absence to-morrow; our sentiment being determined by the performance or otherwise of the ceremony we have just witnessed. It really shows a touching confidence in the swift adaptability of the woman’s sentimental organization!”

Lady Engleton gave an uneasy laugh, and seemed lost in uncomfortable thought. She enjoyed playing with unorthodox speculations, but she objected to have her customary feelings interfered with, by a reasoning which she did not see her way to reduce to a condition of uncertainty. She liked to leave a question delicately balanced, enjoying all the fun of “advanced” thought without endangering her favourite sentiments. Like many women of talent, she was intensely maternal, in the instinctive sense; and for that reason had a vague desire to insist on all other women being equally so; but the notion of the instinct becoming importunate in a girl revolted her; a state of mind that struggled to justify itself without conscious entrenchment behind mere tradition. Lady Engleton sincerely tried to shake off prejudice.

“You are in a mixed condition of feeling, I see,” Hadria said. “I am not surprised. Our whole scheme of things indeed is so mixed, that the wonder only is we are not all in a state of chronic lunacy. I believe, as a matter of fact, that we are; but as we are all lunatics together, there is no one left to put us into asylums.”

Lady Engleton laughed.

“The present age is truly a strange one,” she exclaimed.

“Do you think so? It always seems to me that the present age is finding out for the first time how very strange all the other ages have been.”

“However that may be, it seems to me, that a sort of shiver is going through all Society, as if it had suddenly become very much aware of things and couldn’t make them out—nor itself.”

“Like a creature beginning to struggle through a bad illness. I do think it is all extremely remarkable, especially the bad illness.”

“You are as strange as your epoch,” cried Lady Engleton.

“It is a sorry sign when one remarks health instead of disease.”

“Upon my word, you have a wholesome confidence in yourself!”

“I do not, in that respect, differ from my kind,” Hadria returned calmly.

“It is that which was that seems to you astonishing, not that which is to be,” Lady Engleton commented, pensively. “For my part I confess I am frightened, almost terrified at times, at that which is to be.”

“I am frightened, terrified, so that the thought becomes unbearable, at that which is,” said Hadria.

There was a long silence. Lady Engleton appeared to be again plunged in thought.

“The maternal instinct—yes; it seems to be round that unacknowledged centre that the whole storm is raging.”

“A desperate question that Society shrinks from in terror: whether women shall be expected to conduct themselves as if the instinct had been weighed out accurately, like weekly stores, and given to all alike, or whether choice and individual feeling is to be held lawful in this matter—there is the red-hot heart of the battle.”

“Remember men of science are against freedom in this respect. (I do wish our man of science would make haste.)”

“They rush to the rescue when they see the sentimental defences giving way,” said Hadria. “If the ‘sacred privilege’ and ‘noblest vocation’ safeguards won’t hold, science must throw up entrenchments.”

“I prefer the more romantic and sentimental presentment of the matter,” said Lady Engleton.

“Naturally. Ah! it is pathetic, the way we have tried to make things decorative; but it won’t hold out much longer. Women are driving their masters to plain speaking—the ornaments are being dragged down. And what do we find? Bare and very ugly fact. And if we venture to hint that this unsatisfactory skeleton may be modified in form, science becomes stern. She wishes things, in this department, left as they are. Women are made for purposes of reproduction; let them clearly understand that. No picking and choosing.”

“Men pick and choose, it is true,” observed Lady Engleton in a musing tone, as if thinking aloud.

“Ah, but that’s different—a real scientific argument, though a superficial observer might not credit it. At any rate, it is quite sufficiently scientific for this particular subject. Our leaders of thought don’t bring out their Sunday-best logic on this question. They lounge in dressing-gown and slippers. One gets to know the oriental pattern of that dressing-gown and the worn-down heels of those old slippers.”

“They may be right though, notwithstanding their logic,” said Lady Engleton.

“By good luck, not good guidance. I wonder what her Serene Highness Science would say if she heard us?”

“That we two ignorant creatures are very presumptuous.”

“Yes, people always fall back on that, when they can’t refute you.”

Lady Engleton smiled.

“I should like to hear the question discussed by really competent persons. (Well, if luncheon is dead cold it will be his own fault.)”

“Oh, really competent persons will tell us all about the possibilities of woman: her feelings, desires, capabilities, and limitations, now and for all time to come. And the wildly funny thing is that women are ready, with open mouths, to reverently swallow this male verdict on their inherent nature, as if it were gospel divinely inspired. I may appear a little inconsistent,” Hadria added with a laugh, “but I do think women are fools!”

They had strolled on along the path till they came to the schoolmistress’s grave, which was green and daisy-covered, as if many years had passed since her burial. Hadria stood, for a moment, looking down at it.

“Fools, fools, unutterable, irredeemable fools!” she burst out.

“My dear, my dear, we are in a churchyard,” remonstrated Lady Engleton, half laughing.

“We are at this grave,” said Hadria.

“The poor woman would have been among the first to approve of the whole scheme, though it places her here beneath the daisies.”

“Exactly. Am I not justified then in crying ‘fool’? Don’t imagine that I exclude myself,” she added.

“I think you might be less liable to error if you were rather more of a fool, if I may say so,” observed Lady Engleton.

“Oh error! I daresay. One can guard against that, after a fashion, by never making a stretch after truth. And the reward comes, of its kind. How green the grave is. The grass grows so fast on graves.”

Lady Engleton could not bear a churchyard. It made one think too seriously.

“Oh, you needn’t unless you like!” said Hadria with a laugh. “Indeed a churchyard might rather teach us what nonsense it is to take things seriously—our little affairs. This poor woman, a short while ago, was dying of grief and shame and agony, and the village was stirred with excitement, as if the solar system had come to grief. It all seemed so stupendous and important, yet now—look at that tall grass waving in the wind!”

---

CHAPTER XXVIII.

PROFESSOR THEOBALD had been engaged, for the last ten minutes, in instructing Joseph Fleming and a few stragglers, among whom was Dodge, in the characteristics of ancient architecture. He was pointing out the fine Norman window of the south transept, Joseph nodding wearily, Dodge leaning judicially on his broom and listening with attention. Joseph, as Lady Engleton remarked, was evidently bearing the Normans a bitter grudge for making interesting arches. The Professor seemed to have no notion of tempering the wind of his instruction to the shorn lambs of his audience.

“I can’t understand why he does not join us,” said Lady Engleton. “It must be nearly luncheon time. However, it doesn’t much matter, as everyone seems to be up here. I wonder,” she went on after a pause, “what the bride would think if she had heard our conversation this morning!”

“Probably she would recognize many a half-thought of her own,” said Hadria.

Lady Engleton shook her head.

“They alarm me, all these ideas. For myself, I feel bound to accept the decision of wise and good men, who have studied social questions deeply.”

Personal feeling had finally overcome her desire to fight off the influence of tradition.

“I do not feel competent to judge in a matter so complex, and must be content to abide by the opinions of those who have knowledge and experience.”

Lady Engleton thus retreated hastily behind cover. That was a strategic movement always available in difficulties, and it left one’s companion in speculation alone in the open, arrogantly sustaining an eagle-gaze in the sun’s face. The advantages of feminine humility were obvious. One could come out for a skirmish and then run for shelter, in awkward moments. No woman ought to venture out on the bare plain without a provision of the kind.

Hadria had a curious sensation of being so exposed, when Lady Engleton retreated behind her “good and wise men,” and she had the usual feminine sense of discomfort in the feeling of presumption that it produced. Heredity asserted itself, as it will do, in the midst of the fray, just when its victim seems to have shaken himself free from the mysterious obsession. But Hadria did not visibly flinch. Lady Engleton received the impression that Mrs. Temperley was too sure of her own judgment to defer even to the wisest.

She experienced a pleasant little glow of humility, wrapping herself in it, as in a protecting garment, and unconsciously comparing her more moderate and modest attitude favourably with her companion’s self-confidence. Just at that moment, Hadria’s self-confidence was gasping for breath. But her sense of the comic in her companion’s tactics survived, and set her off in an apparently inconsequent laugh, which goaded Lady Engleton into retreating further, to an encampment of pure orthodoxy.

“I fear there is an element of the morbid, in all this fretful revolt against the old-established destiny of our sex,” she said.

The advance-guard of Professor Theobald’s party was coming up. The Professor himself still hung back, playing the Ancient Mariner to Joseph Fleming’s Wedding Guest. Most unwilling was that guest, most pertinacious that mariner.

Hadria had turned to speak to Dodge, who had approached, broom in hand. “Seems only yesterday as we was a diggin’ o’ that there grave, don’t it, mum?” he remarked pleasantly, including Hadria in the credit of the affair, with native generosity.

“It does indeed, Dodge. I see you have been tidying it up and clearing away the moss from the name. I can read it now. Ellen Jervis.—Requiescat in pace.”

“We was a wonderin’ wot that meant, me and my missus.”

Hadria explained.

“Oh indeed, mum. She didn’t die in peace, whatever she be a doin’ now, not she didn’t, pore thing. I was jest a tellin’ the gentleman” (Dodge indicated Professor Theobald with a backward movement of the thumb), “about the schoolmarm. He was talkin’ like a sermon—beautiful—about the times wen the church was built; and about them as come over from France and beat the English—shameful thing for our soldiers, ’pears to me, not as I believes all them tales. Mr. Walker says as learnin’ is a pitfall, wich I don’t swaller everything as Mr. Walker says neither. Seems to me as it don’t do to be always believin’ wot’s told yer, or there’s no sayin’ wot sort o’ things you wouldn’t come to find inside o’ yer, before you’d done.”

Hadria admitted the danger of indiscriminate absorption, but pointed out that if caution were carried too far, one might end by finding nothing inside of one at all, which also threatened to be attended with inconvenience.

Dodge seemed to feel that the désagréments in this last case were trivial as compared with those of the former.

“Dodge is a born sceptic,” said Lady Engleton. “What would you say, Dodge, if some tiresome, reasonable person were to come and point out something to you that you couldn’t honestly deny, and yet that seemed to upset all the ideas that you had felt were truest and best?”

Dodge scratched his head. “I should say as what he said wasn’t true,” replied Dodge.

“But if you couldn’t help seeing that it was true?”

“That ud be arkard,” Dodge admitted.

“Then what would you do?”

Dodge leant upon the broom-handle, apparently in profound thought. His words were waited for.

“I think,” he announced at last, “as I shouldn’t do nothin’ partic’lar.”

“Dodge, you really are an oracle!” Hadria exclaimed. “What could more simply describe the action of our Great Majority?”

“You are positively impish in your mood to-day!” exclaimed Lady Engleton. “What should we do without our Great Majority, as you call it? It is absolutely necessary to put some curb on the wild impulses of pure reason”—a sentiment that Hadria greeted with chuckles of derision.

Joseph Fleming was looking longingly towards the grave, but his face was resigned, for the Ancient Mariner had him button-holed securely.

“What are they lingering for so long, I wonder?” cried Lady Engleton impatiently. “Professor Theobald is really too instructive to-day. I will go and hurry him.”

Joseph welcomed her as his deliverer.

“I was merely waiting for you two ladies to move; I would have come on with Mr. Fleming. I am extremely sorry,” said the Professor.

He followed Lady Engleton down the path between the graves, with something of the same set expression that had been on his face when he came up the path of the cottage garden to admire the baby.

“It appears that we were all waiting for each other,” said Lady Engleton.

“This ’ere’s the young woman’s grave, sir—Ellen Jervis—’er as I was a tellin’ you of,” said Dodge, pointing an earth-stained finger at the mound.

“Oh, yes; very nice,” said the Professor vaguely. Hadria’s laugh disconcerted him. “I mean—pretty spot—well chosen—well made.”

Hadria continued to laugh. “I never heard less skilled comment on a grave!” she exclaimed. “It might be a pagoda!”

“It’s not so easy as you seem to imagine to find distinctive epithets. I challenge you. Begin with the pagoda.”

“One of the first canons of criticism is never to attempt the feat yourself; jeer rather at others.”

“The children don’t like the new schoolmarm near so well as this ’un,” observed Dodge, touching the grave with his broom. “Lord, it was an unfort’nate thing, for there wasn’t a better girl nor she were in all Craddock (as I was a tellin’ of you, sir), not when she fust come as pupil teacher. It was all along of her havin’ no friends, and her mother far away. She used to say to me at times of an afternoon wen she was a passin’ through the churchyard—‘Dodge,’ says she, ‘do you know I have no one to care for, or to care for me, in all the world?’ I used to comfort her like, and say as there was plenty in Craddock as cared for her, but she always shook her head, sort o’ sad.”

“Poor thing!” Lady Engleton exclaimed.

“And one mornin’ a good time after, I found her a cryin’ bitter, just there by her own grave, much about where the gentleman ’as his foot at this moment” (the Professor quickly withdrew it). “It was in the dusk o’ the evenin’, and she was a settin’ on the rail of old Squire Jordan’s grave, jes’ where you are now, sir. We were sort o’ friendly, and wen I heard ’er a taking on so bad, I jes’ went and stood alongside, and I sez, ‘Wy Ellen Jervis,’ I sez, ‘wot be you a cryin’ for?’ But she kep’ on sobbin’ and wouldn’t answer nothin’. So I waited, and jes’ went on with my work a bit, and then I sez again, ‘Ellen Jervis, wot be you a cryin’ for?’ And then she took her hands from her face and she sez, ‘Because I am that miserable,’ sez she, and she broke out cryin’ wuss than ever. ‘Dear, dear,’ I sez, ‘wot is it? Can’t somebody do nothin’ for you?’

“‘No; nobody in the world can help me, and nobody wants to; it would be better if I was under there.’ And she points to the ground just where she lies now—I give you my word she did—and sure enough, before another six months had gone by, there she lay under the sod, ’xacly on the spot as she had pointed to. She was a sinner, there’s no denyin’, but she ’ad to suffer for it more nor most.”

“Very sad,” observed Professor Theobald nervously, with a glance at Hadria, as if expecting derision.

“It is a hard case,” said Lady Engleton, “but I suppose error has to be paid for.”

“Well, I don’t know ’xacly,” said Dodge, “it depends.”

“On the sex,” said Hadria.

“I have known them as spent all their lives a’ injurin’ of others, and no harm seemed to come to ’em. And I’ve seed them as wouldn’t touch a fly and always doin’ their neighbours a kind turn, wot never ’ad a day’s luck.”

“Let us hope it will be made up in the next world,” said Lady Engleton. Dodge hoped it would, but there was something in the turn of his head that seemed to denote a disposition to base his calculations on this, rather than on the other world. He was expected home by his wife, at this hour, so wishing the company good day, and pocketing the Professor’s gratuity with a gleam of satisfaction in his shrewd and honest face, he trudged off with his broom down the path, and out by the wicket-gate into the village street.

“I never heard that part of the story before,” said Lady Engleton, when the gravedigger had left.

It was new to everybody. “It brings her nearer, makes one realize her suffering more painfully.”

Hadria was silent.

Professor Theobald cast a quick, scrutinizing glance at her.

“I can understand better now how you were induced to take the poor child, Mrs. Temperley,” Lady Engleton remarked.

They were strolling down the path, and Professor Theobald was holding open the gate for his companions to pass through. His hand seemed to shake slightly.

“I don’t enjoy probing my motives on that subject,” said Hadria.

“Why? I am sure they were good.”

“I can’t help hoping that that child may live to avenge her mother; to make some man know what it is to be horribly miserable—but, oh, I suppose it’s like trying to reach the feelings of a rhinoceros!”

“There you are much mistaken, Mrs. Temperley,” said the Professor. “Men are as sensitive, in some respects, as women.”

“So much the better.”

“Then do you think it quite just to punish one man for the sin of another?”

“No; but there is a deadly feud between the sexes: it is a hereditary vendetta: the duty of vengeance is passed on from generation to generation.”

“Oh, Mrs. Temperley!” Lady Engleton’s tone was one of reproach.

“Yes, it is vindictive, I know; one does not grow tender towards the enemy at the grave of Ellen Jervis.”

“At least, there were two sinners, not only one.”

“Only one dies of a broken heart.”

“But why attempt revenge?”

“Oh, a primitive instinct. And anything is better than this meek endurance, this persistent heaping of penalties on the scapegoat.”

“No good ever came of mere revenge, however,” said Professor Theobald.

“Sometimes that is the only form of remonstrance that is listened to,” said Hadria. “When people have the law in their own hands and Society at their back, they can afford to be deaf to mere verbal protest.”

“As for the child,” said Lady Engleton, “she will be in no little danger of a fate like her mother’s.”

Hadria’s face darkened.

“At least then, she shall have some free and happy hours first; at least she shall not be driven to it by the misery of moral starvation, starvation of the affections. She shall be protected from the solemn fools—with sawdust for brains and a mechanical squeaker for heart—who, on principle, cut off from her mother all joy and all savour in life, and then punished her for falling a victim to the starved emotional condition to which they had reduced her.”

“The matter seems complex,” said Lady Engleton, “and I don’t see how revenge comes in.”

“It is a passion that has never been eradicated. Oh, if I could but find that man!”

“A man is a hard thing to punish,—unless he is in love with one.”

“Well, let him be in love!” cried Hadria fiercely.

---

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE sound of music stole over the gardens of the Priory, at sunset. It was the close of one of the most exquisite days of Spring. A calm had settled over the country with the passing away of the sun-god. His attendant winds and voices had been sacrificed on his funeral pyre.

Two figures sat on the terrace by the open window of the drawing-room, listening to the utterance, in music, of a tumultuous, insurgent spirit. In Professor Fortescue, the musical passion was deeply rooted, as it is in most profoundly sympathetic and tender natures. Algitha anxiously watched the effect of her sister’s playing on her companion.

The wild power of the composer was not merely obvious, it was overwhelming. It was like “a sudden storm among mountains,” “the wind-swept heavens at midnight,” “the lonely sea”: he struggled for the exactly-fitting simile. There was none, because of its many-sidedness. Loneliness remained as an ever-abiding quality. There were moon-glimpses and sun-bursts over the scenery of the music; there was sweetness, and a vernal touch that thrilled the listeners as with the breath of flowers and the fragrance of earth after rain, but always, behind all fancy and grace and tenderness, and even passion, lurked that spectral loneliness. The performer would cease for some minutes, and presently begin again in a new mood. The music was always characteristic, often wild and strange, yet essentially sane.

“There is a strong Celtic element in it,” said the Professor. “This is a very wonderful gift. I suppose one never does really know one’s fellows: her music to-night reveals to me new sides of Hadria’s character.”

“I confess they alarm me,” said Algitha.

“Truly, this is not the sort of power that can be safely shut up and stifled. It is the sort of power for which everything ought to be set aside. That is my impression of it.”

“I am worried about Hadria,” Algitha said. “I know her better than most people, and I know how hard she takes things and what explosive force that musical instinct of hers has. Yet, it is impossible, as things are, for her to give it real utterance. She can only open the furnace door now and then.”

The Professor shook his head gravely. “It won’t do: it isn’t safe. And why should such a gift be lost?”

“That’s what I say! Yet what is to be done? There is no one really to blame. As for Hubert, I am sorry for him. He had not the faintest idea of Hadria’s character, though she did her best to enlighten him. It is hard for him (since he feels it so) and it is desperate for her. You are such an old friend, that I feel I may speak to you about it. You see what is going on, and I know it is troubling you as it does me.”

“It is indeed. If I am not very greatly mistaken, here is real musical genius of the first order, going to waste: strong forces being turned in upon the nature, to its own destruction; and, as you say, it seems as if nothing could be done. It is the more ironically cruel, since Hubert is himself musical.”

“Oh, yes, but in quite a different way. His fetish is good taste, or what he thinks such. Hadria’s compositions set his teeth on edge. His nature is conventional through and through. He fears adverse comment more than any earthly thing. And yet the individual opinions that compose the general ‘talk’ that he so dreads, are nothing to him. He despises them heartily. But he would give his soul (and particularly Hadria’s) rather than incur a whisper from people collectively.”

“That is a very common trait. If we feared only the opinions that we respect, our fear would cover but a small area.”

The music stole out again through the window. The thoughts of the listeners were busy. It was not until quite lately that Professor Fortescue had fully realised the nature of Hadria’s present surroundings. It had taken all his acuteness and his sympathy to enable him to perceive the number and strength of the little threads that hampered her spontaneity. As she said, they were made of heart-strings. A vast spider’s web seemed to spread its tender cordage round each household, for the crippling of every winged creature within its radius. Fragments of torn wings attested the struggles that had taken place among the treacherous gossamer.

“And the maddening thing is,” cried Algitha, “that there is nobody to swear at. Swearing at systems and ideas, as Hadria says, is a Barmecide feast to one’s vindictiveness.”

“It is the tyranny of affection that has done so much to ruin the lives of women,” the Professor observed, in a musing tone.

Then after a pause: “I fear your poor mother has never got over your little revolt, Algitha.”

“Never, I am sorry to say. If I had married and settled in Hongkong, she would scarcely have minded, but as it is, she feels deserted. Of course the boys are away from home more than I am, yet she is not grieved at that. You see how vast these claims are. Nothing less than one’s entire life and personality will suffice.”

“Your mother feels that you are throwing your life away, remember. But truly it seems, sometimes, as if people were determined to turn affection into a curse instead of a blessing!”

“I never think of it in any other light,” Algitha announced serenely.

The Professor laughed. “Oh, there are exceptions, I hope,” he said. “Love, like everything else that is great, is very, very rare. We call the disposition to usurp and absorb another person by that name, but woe betide him or her who is the object of such a sentiment. Yet happily, the real thing is to be found now and again. And from that arises freedom.”

Hadria was playing some joyous impromptu, which seemed to express the very spirit of Freedom herself.

“I think Hadria has something of the gipsy in her,” said Algitha. “She is so utterly and hopelessly unfitted to be the wife of a prim, measured, elegant creature like Hubert—good fellow though he is—and to settle down for life at Craddock Dene.”

“Yes,” returned the Professor, “it has occurred to me, more than once, that there must be a drop of nomad blood somewhere among the ancestry.”

“Hadria always says herself, that she is a vagabond in disguise.”

He laughed. Then, as he drew out a tobacco-pouch from his pocket and proceeded to light his pipe, he went on, in quiet meditative fashion, as if thinking aloud: “The fact of the matter is, that in this world, the dead weight of the mass bears heavily upon the exceptional natures. It comes home to one vividly, in cases like this. The stupidity and blindness of each individual goes to build up the dead wall, the impassable obstacle, for some other spirit. The burden that we have cast upon the world has to be borne by our fellow man or woman, and perhaps is doomed to crush a human soul.”

“It seems to me that most people are engaged in that crushing industry,” said Algitha with a shrug. “Don’t I know their bonnets, and their frock-coats and their sneers!”

The Professor smiled. He thought that most of us were apt to take that attitude at times. The same spirit assumed different forms. “While we are sneering at our fellow mortal, and assuring him loftily that he can certainly prevail, if only he is strong enough, it may be our particular dulness or our hardness that is dragging him down to a tragic failure, before our eyes.”

The sun was low when the player came out to the terrace and took her favourite seat on the parapet. The gardens were steeped in profound peace. One could hear no sound for miles round. The broad country made itself closely felt by its stirring silence. The stretches of fields beyond fields, the woodlands in their tender green, the long, long sweep of the quiet land, formed a benign circle round the garden, and led the sense of peace out and out to the horizon, where the liquid light of the sky touched the hills.

The face of the Professor had a transparent look and a singular beauty of expression, such as is seen on the faces of the dead, or on the faces of those who are carried beyond themselves by some generous enthusiasm.

They watched, in silence, the changes creeping over the heavens, the subtle transmutations of tint; the fairylands of cloud, growing like dreams, and melting in golden annihilation; the more delicate and exquisite, the sooner the end.

The first pale hints of splendour had spread, till the whole West was throbbing with the radiance. But it was short-lived. The soul of the light, with its vital vibrating quality, seemed to die, and then slowly the glow faded, till every sparkle was gone, and the amphitheatre of the sky lay cold, and dusk, and empty. It was not till the last gleam had melted away that a word was spoken.

“It is like a prophecy,” said Hadria.

“To-morrow the dawn, remember.”

Hadria’s thoughts ran on in the silence.

The dawn? Yes; but all that lost splendour, those winged islands, those wild ranges of mountain where the dreams dwell; to-morrow’s dawn brings no resurrection for them. Other pageants there will be, other cloud-castles, but never again just those.

Had the Professor been following her thoughts?

“Life,” he said, “offers her gifts as the Sibyl her books; they grow fewer as we refuse them.”

“Ah! that is the truth that clamours in my brain, warning and pointing to an empty temple, like the deserted sky, a little while ahead.”

“Be warned then.”

“Ah! but what to do? I am out of myself now with the spring; there are so many benign influences. I too have winged islands, and wild ranges where the dreams dwell; life is a fairy-tale; but there is always that terror of the departure of the sun.”

“Carpe diem.”

Hadria turned a startled and eager face towards the Professor, who was leaning back in his chair, thoughtfully smoking. The smoke curled away serenely through the calm air of the evening.

“You have a great gift,” he said.

“One is afraid of taking a thing too seriously because it is one’s own.”

The Professor turned almost angrily.

“Good heavens, what does it matter whose it is? There may be a sort of inverted vanity in refusing fair play to a power, on that ground. Alas! here is one of the first morbid signs of the evil at work upon you. If you had been wholesomely moving and striving in the right direction, do you think you would have been guilty of that piece of egotism?”

“Vanity pursues one into hidden corners of the mind. I am so used to that sort of spirit among women. Apparently I have caught the infection.”

“I would not let it go farther,” advised the Professor.

“To do myself justice, I think it is superficial,” said Hadria with a laugh. “I would dare anything, anything for a chance of freedom, for——,” she broke off, hesitating. “I remember once—years ago, when I was quite a girl—seeing a young ash-tree that had got jammed into a chink so that it couldn’t grow straight, or spread, as its inner soul, poor stripling, evidently inspired it to grow. Outside, there were hundreds of upright, vigorous, healthful young trees, fulfilling that innate idea in apparent gladness, and with obvious general advantage, since they were growing into sound, valuable trees, straight of trunk, nobly developed. I felt like the poor sapling in the cranny, that had just the same natural impetus of healthy growth as all the others, but was forced to become twisted, and crooked, and stunted and wretched. I think most women have to grow in a cranny. It is generally known as their Sphere.” Algitha gave an approving chuckle. “I noticed,” Hadria added, “that the desperate struggle to grow of that young tree had begun to loosen the masonry of the edifice that cramped it. There was a great dangerous-looking crack right across the building. The tree was not saved from deformity, but it had its revenge! Some day that noble institution would come down by the run.”

“Yes. Well, the thing to do is to get out of it,” said the Professor.

“You really advise that?”

“Advise? One dare not advise. It is too perilous. No general theories will hold in all instances.”

“Tell me,” said Hadria, “what are the qualities in a human being that make him most serviceable, or least harmful?”

“What qualities?” Professor Fortescue watched the smoke of his pipe curling away, as if he expected to find the answer in its coils. He answered slowly, and with an air of reflection.

“Mental integrity, and mercy. A resolute following of reason (in which I should include insight) to its conclusion, though the heavens fall, and an unfailing fellow-feeling for the pain and struggle and heart-ache and sin that life is so full of. But one must add the quality of imagination. Without imagination and its fruits, the world would be a howling wilderness.”

“I wish you would come down with me, some day, to the East End and hold out the hand of fellowship to some of the sufferers there,” cried Algitha. “I am, at times, almost in despair at the mass of evil to be fought against, but somehow you always make me feel, Professor, that the race has all the qualities necessary for redemption enfolded within itself.”

“But assuredly it has!” cried the Professor. “And assuredly those redeeming qualities will germinate. Otherwise the race would extinguish itself in cruelty and corruption. Let people talk as they please about the struggle for existence, it is through the development of the human mind and the widening of human mercy that better things will come.”

“One sees, now and then, in a flash, what the world may some day be,” said Hadria. “The vision comes, perhaps, with the splendour of a spring morning, or opens, scroll-like, in a flood of noble music. It sounds unreal, yet it brings a sense of conviction that is irresistible.”

“I think it was Pythagoras who declared that the woes of men are the work of their own hands,” said the Professor. “So are their joys. Nothing ever shakes my belief that what the mind of man can imagine, that it can achieve.”

“But there are so many pulling the wrong way,” said Algitha sadly.

“Ah, one man may be miserable through the deeds of others; the race can only be miserable through its own.”

After a pause, Algitha put a question: How far was it justifiable to give pain to others in following one’s own idea of right and reasonable? How far might one attempt to live a life of intellectual integrity and of the widest mercy that one’s nature would stretch to?

Professor Fortescue saw no limits but those of one’s own courage and ability. Algitha pointed out that in most lives the limit occurred much sooner. If “others”—those tyrannical and absorbent “others”—had intricately bound up their notions of happiness with the prevention of any such endeavour, and if those notions were of the usual negative, home-comfort-and-affection order, narrowly personal, fruitful in nothing except a sort of sentimental egotism that spread over a whole family—what Hadria called an egotism à douze—how far ought these ideas to be respected, and at what cost?

Professor Fortescue was unqualified in his condemnation of the sentiment which erected sacrificial altars in the family circle. He spoke scornfully of the doctrine of renunciation, so applied, and held the victims who brought their gifts of power and liberty more culpable than those who demanded them, since the duty of resistance to recognised wrong was obvious, while great enlightenment was needed to teach one to forego an unfair privilege or power that all the world concurred in pressing upon one.

“Then you think a person—even a feminine person—justified in giving pain by resisting unjust demands?”

“I certainly think that all attempts to usurp another person’s life on the plea of affection should be stoutly resisted. But I recognise that cases must often occur when resistance is practically impossible.”

“One ought not to be too easily melted by the ‘shrieks of a near relation,’” said Hadria. “Ah, I have a good mind to try. I don’t fear any risk for myself, nor any work; the stake is worth it. I don’t want to grow cramped and crooked, like my poor ash-tree. Perhaps this may be a form of vanity too; I don’t know, I was going to say I don’t care.”

The scent of young leaves and of flowers came up, soft and rich from the garden, and as Hadria leant over the parapet, a gust of passionate conviction of power swept over her; not merely of her own personal power, but of some vast, flooding, beneficent well-spring from which her own was fed. And with the inrush, came a glimpse as of heaven itself.

“I wonder,” she said after a long silence, “why it is that when we know for dead certain, we call it faith.”

“Because, I suppose, our certainty is certainty only for ourselves. If you have found some such conviction to guide you in this wild world, you are very fortunate. We need all our courage and our strength——”

“And just a little more,” Hadria added.

“Yes; sometimes just a little more, to save us from its worst pitfalls.”

It struck both Hadria and her sister that the Professor was looking very ill and worn this evening.

“You are always giving help and sympathy to others, and you never get any yourself!” Hadria exclaimed.

But the Professor laughed, and asserted that he was being spoilt at Craddock Dene. They had risen, and were strolling down the yew avenue. A little star had twinkled out.

“I am very glad to have Professor Fortescue’s opinion of your composition, Hadria. I was talking to him about you, and he quite agrees with me.”

“What? that I ought to——?”

“That you ought not to go on as you are going on at present.”

“But that is so vague.”

“I suppose you have long ago tried all the devices of self-discipline?” said the Professor. “There are ways, of course, of arming oneself against minor difficulties, of living within a sort of citadel. Naturally much force has to go in keeping up the defences, but it is better than having none to keep up.”

Hadria gave a quiet smile. “There is not a method, mental or other, that I have not tried, and tried hard. If it had not been for the sternest self-discipline, my mind at this moment, would be so honeycombed with small pre-occupations (pleasant and otherwise), that it would be incapable of consecutive ideas of any kind. As it is, I feel a miserable number of holes here”—she touched her brow—“a loss of absorbing power, at times, and a mental slackness that is really alarming. What remains of me has been dragged ashore as from a wreck, amidst a rush of wind and wave. But just now, thanks greatly to your sympathy and Algitha’s, I seem restored to myself. I can never describe the rapture of that sensation to one who has never felt himself sinking down and down into darkness, to a dim hell, where the doom is a slow decay instead of the fiery pains of burning.”

“This is all wrong, wrong!” cried the Professor anxiously.

“Ah! but I feel now, such certainty, such courage. It seems as if Fate were giving me one more chance. I have often run very close to making a definite decision—to dare everything rather than await this fool’s disaster. But then comes that everlasting feminine humility, sneaking up with its simper: ‘Is not this presumptuous, selfish, mistaken, wrong? What business have you, one out of so many, to break roughly through the delicate web that has been spun for your kindly detention?’ Of course my retort is: ‘What business have they to spin the web?’ But one can never get up a real sense of injured innocence. It is always the spiders who seem injured and innocent. However, this time I am going to try, though the heavens fall!”

A figure appeared, in the dusk, at the further end of the avenue. It proved to be Miss Du Prel, who had come to find Hadria. Henriette had arrived unexpectedly by the late afternoon train, and Valeria had volunteered to announce her arrival to her sister-in-law.

“Ah!” exclaimed Hadria, “heaven helps him who helps himself! This will fit in neatly with my plans.”

---

CHAPTER XXX.

VALERIA DU PREL, finding that Miss Temperley proposed a visit of some length, returned to town by the early morning train.

“Valeria, do you know anyone in Paris to whom you could give me a letter of introduction?” Hadria asked, at the last moment, when there was just time to write the letter, and no more.

“Are you going to Paris?” Valeria asked, startled.

“Please write the letter and I will tell you some day what I want it for.”

“Nothing very mad, I hope?”

“No, only a little—judiciously mad.”

“Well, there is Madame Bertaux, in the Avenue Kleber, but her you know already. Let me see. Oh yes, Madame Vauchelet, a charming woman; very kind and very fond of young people. She is about sixty; a widow; her husband was in the diplomatic service.”

Valeria made these hurried comments while writing the letter.

“She is musical too, and will introduce you, perhaps, to the great Joubert, and others of that set. You will like her, I am sure. She is one of the truly good people of this world. If you really are going to Paris, I shall feel happier if I know that Madame Vauchelet is your friend.”

Sophia’s successor announced that the pony-cart was at the door.

Miss Du Prel looked rather anxiously at Hadria and her sister-in-law, as they stood on the steps to bid her good-bye. There was a look of elation mixed with devilry, in Hadria’s face. The two figures turned and entered the house together, as the pony-cart passed through the gate.

Hadria always gave Miss Temperley much opportunity for the employment of tact, finding this tact more elucidating than otherwise to the designs that it was intended to conceal; it affected them in the manner of a magnifying-glass. About a couple of years ago, the death of her mother had thrown Henriette on her own resources, and set free a large amount of energy that craved a legitimate outlet. The family with whom she was now living in London, not being related to her, offered but limited opportunities.

Henriette’s eye was fixed, with increasing fondness, upon the Red House. There lay the callow brood marked out by Nature and man, for her ministrations. With infinite adroitness, Miss Temperley questioned her sister-in-law, by inference and suggestion, about the affairs of the household. Hadria evaded the attempt, but rejoiced, for reasons of her own, that it was made. She began to find the occupation diverting, and characteristically did not hesitate to allow her critic to form most alarming conclusions as to the state of matters at the Red House. She was pensive, and mild, and a little surprised when Miss Temperley, with a suppressed gasp, urged that the question was deeply serious. It amused Hadria to reproduce, for Henriette’s benefit, the theories regarding the treatment and training of children that she had found current among the mothers of the district.

Madame Bertaux happened to call during the afternoon, and that outspoken lady scoffed openly at these theories, declaring that women made idiots of themselves on behalf of their children, whom they preposterously ill-used with unflagging devotion.

“The moral training of young minds is such a problem,” said Henriette, after the visitor had left, “it must cause you many an anxious thought.”

Hadria arranged herself comfortably among cushions, and let every muscle relax.

“The boys are so young yet,” she said drowsily. “I have no doubt that will all come, later on.”

“But, my dear Hadria, unless they are trained now——”

“Oh, there is plenty of time!”

“Do you mean to say——?”

“Only what other people say. Nothing in the least original, I assure you. I see the folly and the inconvenience of that now. I have consulted hoary experience. I have sat reverently at the feet of old nurses. I have talked with mothers in the spirit of a disciple, and I have learnt, oh, so much!”

“Mothers are most anxious about the moral training of their little ones,” said Henriette, in some bewilderment.

“Of course, but they don’t worry about it so early. One can’t expect accomplished morality from poor little dots of five and six. The charm of infancy would be gone.”

Miss Temperley explained, remonstrated. Hadria was limp, docile, unemphatic. Perhaps Henriette was right, she didn’t know. A sense of honour? (Hadria suppressed a smile.) Could one, after all, expect of six what one did not always get at six and twenty? Morals altogether seemed a good deal to ask of irresponsible youth. Henriette could not overrate the importance of early familiarity with the difference between right and wrong. Certainly it was important, but Hadria shrank from an extreme view. One must not rush into it without careful thought.

“But meanwhile the children are growing up!” cried Henriette, in despair.

Hadria had not found that experienced mothers laid much stress on that fact. Besides, there was considerable difficulty in the matter. Henriette did not see it. The difference between right and wrong could easily be taught to a child.

Perhaps so, but it seemed to be thought expedient to defer the lesson till the distant future; at least, if one might judge from the literature especially designed for growing minds, wherein clever villainy was exalted, and deeds of ferocious cruelty and revenge occurred as a daily commonplace among heroes. The same policy was indicated by the practice of allowing children to become familiar with the sight of slaughter, and of violence of every kind towards animals, from earliest infancy. Hadria concluded from all this, that it was thought wise to postpone the moral training of the young till a more convenient season.

Henriette looked at her sister-in-law, with a sad and baffled mien. Hadria’s expression was solemn, and as much like that of Mrs. Walker as she could make it, without descending to obvious caricature.

“Do you think it quite wise, Henriette, to run dead against the customs of ages? Do you think it safe to ignore the opinion of countless generations of those who were older and wiser than ourselves?”

“Dear me, how you have changed!” cried Miss Temperley.

“Advancing years; the sobering effects of experience,” Hadria explained. She was grieved to find Henriette at variance with those who had practical knowledge of education. As the child grew up, one could easily explain to him that the ideas and impressions that he might have acquired, in early years, were mostly wrong, and had to be reversed. That was quite simple. Besides, unless he were a born idiot of criminal tendencies, he was bound to find it out for himself.

“But, my dear Hadria, it is just the early years that are the impressionable years. Nothing can quite erase those first impressions.”

“Oh, do you think so?” said Hadria mildly.

“Yes, indeed, I think so,” cried Henriette, losing her temper.

“Oh, well of course you may be right.”

Hadria had brought out a piece of embroidery (about ten years old), and was working peacefully.

On questions of hygiene, she was equally troublesome. She had taken hints, she said, from mothers of large families. Henriette laid stress upon fresh air, even in the house. Hadria believed in fresh air; but was it not going a little far to have it in the house?

Henriette shook her head.

Fresh air was always necessary. In moderation, perhaps, Hadria admitted. But the utmost care was called for, to avoid taking cold. She laid great stress upon that. Children were naturally so susceptible. In all the nurseries that she had visited, where every possible precaution was taken against draughts, the children were incessantly taking cold.

“Perhaps the precautions made them delicate,” Henriette suggested. But this paradox Hadria could not entertain. “Take care of the colds, and the fresh air will take care of itself,” was her general maxim.

“But, my dear Hadria, do you mean to tell me that the people about here are so benighted as really not to understand the importance to the system of a constant supply of pure air?”

Hadria puckered up her brow, as if in thought. “Well,” she said, “several mothers have mentioned it, but they take more interest in fluid magnesia and tonics.”

Henriette looked dispirited.

At any rate, there was no reason why Hadria should not be more enlightened than her neighbours, on these points. Hadria shook her head deprecatingly. She hoped Henriette would not mind if she quoted the opinion of old Mr. Jordan, whose language was sometimes a little strong. He said that he didn’t believe all that “damned nonsense about fresh air and drains!” Henriette coughed.

“It is certainly not safe to trust entirely to nurses, however devoted and experienced,” she insisted. Hadria shrugged her shoulders. If the nurse did constitutionally enjoy a certain stuffiness in her nurseries—well the children were out half the day, and it couldn’t do them much harm. (Hadria bent low over her embroidery.)

The night?

“Oh! then one must, of course, expect to be a little stuffy.”

“But,” cried Miss Temperley, almost hopeless, “impure air breathed, night after night, is an incessant drain on the strength, even if each time it only does a little harm.”

Hadria smiled over her silken arabesques. “Oh, nobody ever objects to things that only do a little harm.” There was a moment of silence.

Henriette thought that Hadria must indeed have changed very much during the last years. Well, of course, when very young, Hadria said, one had extravagant notions: one imagined all sorts of wild things about the purposes of the human brain: not till later did one realize that the average brain was merely an instrument of adjustment, a sort of spirit-level which enabled its owner to keep accurately in line with other people. Henriette ought to rejoice that Hadria had thus come to bow to the superiority of the collective wisdom.

But Henriette had her doubts.

Hadria carefully selected a shade of silk, went to the light to reassure herself of its correctness, and returned to her easy chair by the fire. Henriette resumed her knitting. She was making stockings for her nephews.

“Henriette, don’t you think it would be rather a good plan if you were to come and live here and manage affairs—morals, manners, hygiene, and everything?”

Henriette’s needles stopped abruptly, and a wave of colour came into her face, and a gleam of sudden joy to her eyes.

“My dear, what do you mean?”

“Hubert, of course, would be only too delighted to have you here, and I want to go away.”

“For heaven’s sake——”

“Not exactly for heaven’s sake. For my own sake, I suppose: frankly selfish. It is, perhaps, the particular form that my selfishness takes—an unfortunately conspicuous form. So many of us can have a nice cosy pocket edition that doesn’t show. However, that’s not the point. I know you would be happier doing this than anything else, and that you would do it perfectly. You have the kind of talent, if I may say so, that makes an admirable ruler. When it has a large political field we call it ‘administrative ability’; when it has a small domestic one, we speak of it as ‘good housekeeping.’ It is a precious quality, wherever it appears. You have no scope for it at present.”

Henriette was bewildered, horrified, yet secretly thrilled with joy on her own account. Was there a quarrel? Had any cloud come over the happiness of the home? Hadria laughed and assured her to the contrary. But where was she going, and for how long? What did she intend to do? Did Hubert approve? And could she bear to be away from her children? Hadria thought this was all beside the point, especially as the boys were shortly going to school. The question was, whether Henriette would take the charge.

Certainly, if Hadria came to any such mad decision, but that, Henriette hoped, might be averted. What would people say? Further discussion was checked by a call from Mrs. Walker, whom Hadria had the audacity to consult on questions of education and hygiene, leading her, by dexterous generalship, almost over the same ground that she had traversed herself, inducing the unconscious lady to repeat, with amazing accuracy, Hadria’s own reproduction of local views.

“Now am I without authority in my ideas?” she asked, after Mrs. Walker had departed. Henriette had to admit that she had at least one supporter.

“But I believe,” she added, “that your practice is better than your preaching.”

“It seems to be an ordinance of Nature,” said Hadria, “that these things shall never correspond.”

---

CHAPTER XXXI.

HADRIA said nothing more about her project, and when Henriette alluded to it, answered that it was still unfurnished with detail. She merely wished to know, for certain, Henriette’s views. She admitted that there had been some conversation on the subject between Hubert and herself, but would give no particulars. Henriette had to draw her own conclusions from Hadria’s haggard looks, and the suppressed excitement of her manner.

Henriette always made a point of being present when Professor Fortescue called, as she did not approve of his frequent visits. She noticed that he gave a slight start when Hadria entered. In a few days, she had grown perceptibly thinner. Her manner was restless. A day or two of rain had prevented the usual walks. When it cleared up again, the season had taken a stride. Still more glorious was the array of tree and flower, and their indescribable freshness suggested the idea that they were bathed in the mysterious elixir of life, and that if one touched them, eternal youth would be the reward. Professor Theobald gazed at Hadria with startled and enquiring eyes, when they met again.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I am, rather. The spring is always a little trying.”

“Especially this spring, I find.”

The gardens of the Priory were now at the very perfection of their beauty. The supreme moment had come of flowing wealth of foliage and delicate splendour of blossom, yet the paleness of green and tenderness of texture were still there.

Professor Theobald said suddenly, that Hadria looked as if she were turning over some project very anxiously in her mind—a project on which much depended.

“You are very penetrating,” she replied, after a moment’s hesitation, “that is exactly what I am doing. When I was a girl, my brothers and sisters and I used to discuss the question of the sovereignty of the will. Most of us believed in it devoutly. We regarded circumstance as an annoying trifle, that no person who respected himself would allow to stand in his way. I want to try that theory and see what comes of it.”

“You alarm me, Mrs. Temperley.”

“Yes, people always do seem to get alarmed when one attempts to put their favourite theories in practice.”

“But really—for a woman——”

“The sovereignty of the will is a dangerous doctrine?”

“Well, as things are; a young woman, a beautiful woman.”

“You recall an interesting memory,” she said.

“Ah, that is unkind.”

Her smile checked him.

“When you fall into a mocking humour, you are quite impracticable.”

“I merely smiled,” she said, “sweetly, as I thought.”

“It is really cruel; I have not had a word with you for days, and the universe has become a wilderness.”

“A pleasant wilderness,” she observed, looking round.

“Nature is a delightful background, but a poor subject.”

“Do you think so? I often fancy one’s general outlook would be nicer, if one had an indistinct human background and a clear foreground of unspoiled Nature. But that may be a jaundiced view.”

Hadria went off to meet Lady Engleton, who was coming down the avenue with Madame Bertaux. Professor Theobald instinctively began to follow and then stopped, reddening, as he met the glance of Miss Temperley. He flung himself into conversation with her, and became especially animated when he was passing Hadria, who did not appear to notice him. As both Professors were to leave Craddock Dene at the end of the week, this was the last meeting in the Priory gardens.

Miss Temperley found Professor Theobald entertaining, but at times a little incoherent.

“Why, there is Miss Du Prel!” exclaimed Henriette. “What an erratic person she is. She went to London the day before yesterday, and now she turns up suddenly without a word of warning.”

This confirmed Professor Theobald’s suspicions that something serious was going on at the Red House.

Valeria explained her return to Hadria, by saying that she had felt so nervous about what the latter might be going to attempt, that she had come back to see if she could be of help, or able to ward off any rash adventure.

There was a pleasant open space among the shrubberies, where several seats had been placed to command a dainty view of the garden and lawns, with the house in the distance, and here the party gradually converged, in desultory fashion, coming up and strolling off again, as the fancy inspired them.

Cigars were lighted, and a sense of sociability and enjoyment suffused itself, like a perfume, among the group.

Lady Engleton was delighted to see Miss Du Prel again. She did so want to continue the hot discussion they were having at the Red House that afternoon, when Mr. Temperley would be so horridly logical. He smiled and twisted his moustache.

“We were interrupted by some caller, and had to leave the argument at a most exciting moment.”

“An eternally interesting subject!” said Temperley; “what woman is, what she is not.”

“My dread is that presently, the need for dissimulation being over, all the delightful mystery will have vanished,” said Professor Theobald. “I should tire, in a day, of a woman I could understand.”

“You tempt one to enquire the length of the reign of a satisfactory enigma,” cried Lady Engleton.

“Precisely the length of her ability to mystify me,” he replied.

“Your future wife ought to be given a hint.”

“Oh! a wife, in no case, could hold me: the mere fact that it was my duty to adore her, would be chilling. And when added to that, I knew that she had placed it among the list of her obligations to adore me—well, that would be the climax of disenchantment.”

Hubert commended his wisdom in not marrying.

“The only person I could conceivably marry would be my cook; in that case there would be no romance to spoil, no vision to destroy.”

“I fear this is a cloak for a poor opinion of our sex, Professor.”

“On the contrary. I admire your sex too much to think of subjecting them to such an ordeal. I could not endure to regard a woman I had once admired, as a matter of course, a commonplace in my existence.”

Henriette plunged headlong into the fray, in opposition to the Professor’s heresy. The conversation became general.

Professor Theobald fell out of it. He was furtively watching Hadria, whose eyes were strangely bright. She was sitting on the arm of a seat, listening to the talk, with a little smile on her lips. Her hand clasped the back of the seat rigidly, as if she were holding something down.

The qualities and defects of the female character were frankly canvassed, each view being held with fervour, but expressed with urbanity. Women were always so and so; women were absolutely never so and so: women felt, without exception, thus and thus; on the contrary, they were entirely devoid of such sentiments. A large experience and wide observation always supported each opinion, and eminent authorities swarmed to the standard.

“I do think that women want breadth of view,” said Lady Engleton.

“They sometimes want accuracy of statement,” observed Professor Theobald, with a possible second meaning in his words.

“It seems to me they lack concentration. They are too versatile,” was Hubert’s comment.

“They want a sense of honour,” was asserted.

“And a sense of humour,” some one added.

“They want a feeling of public duty.”

“They want a spice of the Devil!” exclaimed Hadria.

There was a laugh.

Hubert thought this was a lack not likely to be felt for very long. It was under rapid process of cultivation.

“Why, it is a commonplace, that if a woman is bad, she is always very bad,” cried Lady Engleton.

“A new and intoxicating experience,” said Professor Fortescue. “I sympathize.”

“New?” his colleague murmured, with a faint chuckle.

“You distress me,” said Henriette.

Professor Fortescue held that woman’s “goodness” had done as much harm in the world as men’s badness. The one was merely the obverse of the other.

“This is strange teaching!” cried Lady Engleton.

The Professor reminded her that truth was always stranger than fiction.

“To the best men,” observed Valeria, “women show all their meanest qualities. It is the fatality of their training.”

Professor Theobald had noted the same trait in other subject races.

“Pray, don’t call us a subject race!” remonstrated Lady Engleton.

“Ah, yes, the truth,” cried Hadria, “we starve for the truth.”

“You are courageous, Mrs. Temperley.”

“Like the Lady of Shallott, I am sick of shadows.”

“The bare truth, on this subject, is hard for a woman to face.”

“It is harder, in the long run, to waltz eternally round it with averted eyes.”

“But, dear me, why is the truth about ourselves hard to face?” demanded Valeria.

“I am placed between the horns of a dilemma: one lady clamours for the bare truth: another forbids me to say anything unpleasing.”

“I withdraw my objection,” Valeria offered.

“The ungracious task shall not be forced upon unwilling chivalry,” said Hadria. “If our conditions have been evil, some scars must be left and may as well be confessed. Among the faults of women, I should place a tendency to trade upon and abuse real chivalry and generosity when they meet them: a survival perhaps from the Stone Age, when the fittest to bully were the surviving elect of society.”

Hadria’s eyes sparkled with suppressed excitement.

“Freedom alone teaches us to meet generosity, generously,” said Professor Fortescue; “you can’t get the perpendicular virtues out of any but the really free-born.”

“Then do you describe women’s virtues as horizontal?” enquired Miss Du Prel, half resentfully.

“In so far as they follow the prevailing models. Women’s love, friendship, duty, the conduct of life as a whole, speaking very roughly, has been lacking in the quality that I call perpendicular; a quality implying something more than upright.”

“You seem to value but lightly the woman’s acknowledged readiness for self-sacrifice,” said Lady Engleton. “That, I suppose, is only a despised horizontal virtue.”

“Very frequently.”

“Because it is generally more or less abject,” Hadria put in. “The sacrifice is made because the woman is a woman. It is the obeisance of sex; the acknowledgment of servility; not a simple desire of service.”

“The adorable creature is not always precisely obeisant,” observed Theobald.

“No; as I say, she may be capricious and cruel enough to those who treat her justly and generously” (Hadria’s eyes instinctively turned towards the distant Priory, and Valeria’s followed them); “but ask her to sacrifice herself for nothing; ask her to cherish the selfishness of some bully or fool; assure her that it is her duty to waste her youth, lose her health, and stultify her mind, for the sake of somebody’s whim, or somebody’s fears, or somebody’s absurdity, then she needs no persuasion. She goes to the stake smiling. She swears the flames are comfortably warm, no more. Are they diminishing her in size? Oh no—not at all—besides she was rather large, for a woman. She smiles encouragement to the other chained figures, at the other stakes. Her reward? The sense of exalted worth, of humility; the belief that she has been sublimely virtuous, while the others whom she serves have been—well the less said about them the better. She has done her duty, and sent half a dozen souls to hell!”

Henriette uttered a little cry.

“Where one expects to meet her!” Hadria added.

Professor Theobald was chuckling gleefully.

Lady Engleton laughed. “Then, Mrs. Temperley, you do feel rather wicked yourself, although you don’t admire our nice, well-behaved, average woman.”

“Oh, the mere opposite of an error isn’t always truth,” said Hadria.

“The weather has run to your head!” cried Henriette.

Hadria’s eyes kindled. “Yes, it is like wine; clear, intoxicating sparkling wine, and its fumes are mounting! Why does civilisation never provide for these moments?”

“What would you have? A modified feast of Dionysius?”

“Why not? The whole earth joins in the festival and sings, except mankind. Some frolic of music and a stirring dance!—But ah! I suppose, in this tamed England of ours, we should feel it artificial; we should fear to let ourselves go. But in Greece—if we could fancy ourselves there, shorn of our little local personalities—in some classic grove, on sunlit slopes, all bubbling with the re-birth of flowers and alive with the light, the broad all-flooding light of Greece that her children dreaded to leave more than any other earthly thing, when death threatened—could one not imagine the loveliness of some garlanded dance, and fancy the naïads, and the dryads, and all the hosts of Pan gambolling at one’s heels?”

“Really, Mrs. Temperley, you were not born for an English village. I should like Mrs. Walker to hear you!”

“Mrs. Walker knows better than to listen to me. She too hides somewhere, deep down, a poor fettered thing that would gladly join the revel, if it dared. We all do.”

Lady Engleton dwelt joyously on the image of Mrs. Walker, cavorting, garlanded, on a Greek slope, with the nymphs and water-sprites for familiar company.

Lady Engleton had risen laughing, and proposed a stroll to Hadria.

Henriette, who did not like the tone the conversation was taking, desired to join them.

“I never quite know how far you are serious, and how far you are just amusing yourself, Hadria,” said Lady Engleton. “Our talking of Greece reminds me of some remark you made the other day, about Helen. You seemed to me almost to sympathize with her.”

Hadria’s eyes seemed to be looking across miles of sea to the sunny Grecian land.

“If a slave breaks his chains and runs, I am always glad,” she said.

“I was talking about Helen.”

“So was I. If a Spartan wife throws off her bondage and defies the laws that insult her, I am still more glad.”

“But not if she sins?” Henriette coughed, warningly.

“Yes; if she sins.”

“Oh, Hadria,” remonstrated Henriette, in despair.

“I don’t see that it follows that Helen did sin, however; one does not know much about her sentiments. She revolted against the tyranny that held her shut in, enslaved, body and soul, in that wonderful Greek world of hers. I am charmed to think that she gave her countrymen so much trouble to assert her husband’s right of ownership. It was at his door that the siege of Troy ought to be laid. I only wish elopements always caused as much commotion!” Lady Engleton laughed, and Miss Temperley tried to catch Hadria’s eye.

“Well, that is a strange idea! And do you really think Helen did not sin? Seriously now.”

“I don’t know. There is no evidence on that point.” Lady Engleton laughed again.

“You do amuse me. Assuming that Helen did not sin, I suppose you would (if only for the sake of paradox) accuse the virtuous Greek matrons—who sat at home, and wove, and span, and bore children—of sinning against the State!”

“Certainly,” said Hadria, undismayed. “It was they who insidiously prepared the doom for their country, as they wove and span and bore children, with stupid docility. As surely as an enemy might undermine the foundations of a city till it fell in with a crash, so surely they brought ruin upon Greece.”

“Oh, Hadria, you are quite beside yourself to-day!” cried Henriette.

“A love of paradox will lead you far!” said Lady Engleton. “We have always been taught to think a nation sound and safe whose women were docile and domestic.”

“What nation, under those conditions, has ever failed to fall in with a mighty crash, like my undermined city? Greece herself could not hold out. Ah, yes; we have our revenge! a sweet, sweet revenge!”

Lady Engleton was looking much amused and a little dismayed, when she and her companions rejoined the party.

“I never heard anyone say so many dreadful things in so short a space of time,” she cried. “You are distinctly shocking.”

“I am frank,” said Hadria. “I fancy we should all go about with our hair permanently on end, if we spoke out in chorus.”

“I don’t quite like to hear you say that, Hadria.”

“I mean no harm—merely that every one thinks thoughts and feels impulses that would be startling if expressed in speech. Don’t we all know how terrifying a thing speech is, and thought? a chartered libertine.”

“Why, you are saying almost exactly what Professor Theobald said the other day, and we were so shocked.”

“And yet my meaning has scarcely any relation to his,” Hadria hastened to say. “He meant to drag down all belief in goodness by reminding us of dark moments and hours; by placarding the whole soul with the name of some shadow that moves across it, I sometimes think from another world, some deep under-world that yawns beneath us and sends up blackness and fumes and strange cries.” Hadria’s eyes had wandered far away. “Are you never tormented by an idea, an impression that you know does not belong to you?”

Lady Engleton gave a startled negative. “Professor Fortescue, come and tell me what you think of this strange doctrine?”

“If we had to be judged by our freedom from rushes of evil impulse, rather than by our general balance of good and evil wishing, I think those would come out best, who had fewest thoughts and feelings of any kind to record.” The subject attracted a small group.

“Unless goodness is only a negative quality,” Valeria pointed out, “a mere absence, it must imply a soul that lives and struggles, and if it lives and struggles, it is open to the assaults of the devil.”

“Yes, and it is liable to go under too sometimes, one must not forget,” said Hadria, “although most people profess to believe so firmly in the triumph of the best—how I can’t conceive, since the common life of every day is an incessant harping on the moral: the smallest, meanest, poorest, thinnest, vulgarest qualities in man and woman are those selected for survival, in the struggle for existence.”

There was a cry of remonstrance from idealists.

“But what else do we mean when we talk by common consent of the world’s baseness, harshness, vulgarity, injustice? It means surely—and think of it!—that it is composed of men and women with the best of them killed out, as a nerve burnt away by acid; a heart won over to meaner things than it set out beating for; a mind persuaded to nibble at edges of dry crust that might have grown stout and serviceable on generous diet, and mellow and inspired with noble vintage.”

“You really are shockingly Bacchanalian to-day,” cried Lady Engleton.

Hadria laughed. “Metaphorically, I am a toper. The wonderful clear sparkle, the subtle flavour, the brilliancy of wine, has for me a strange fascination; it seems to signify so much in life that women lose.”

“True. What beverage should one take as a type of what they gain by the surrender?” asked Lady Engleton, who was disposed to hang back towards orthodoxy, in the presence of her uncompromising neighbour.

“Oh, toast and water!” replied Hadria.

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Part III.

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