Far-away Stories

by William John Locke

STUDIES IN BLINDNESS

I

AN OLD-WORLD EPISODE

I

I have often thought of editing the diary (which is in my possession) of one Jeremy Wendover, of Bullingford, in the county of Berkshire, England, Gent., who departed this life in the year of grace 1758, and giving to the world a document as human as the record of Pepys and as deeply imbued with the piety of a devout Christian as the Confessions of Saint Augustine. A little emendation of an occasional ungrammatical and disjointed text—though in the main the diary is written in the scholarly, florid style of the eighteenth century; a little intelligent conjecture as to certain dates; a footnote now and then elucidating an obscure reference—and the thing would be done. It has been a great temptation, but I have resisted it. The truth is that to the casual reader the human side would seem to be so meagre, the pietistic so full. One has to seek so carefully for a few flowers of fact among a wilderness of religious and philosophical fancy—nay, more: to be so much in sympathy with the diarist as to translate the pious rhetoric into terms of mundane incident, that only to the curious student can the real life history of the man be revealed. And who in these hurrying days would give weeks of patient toil to a task so barren of immediate profit? I myself certainly would not do it; and it is a good working philosophy of life (though it has its drawbacks) not to expect others to do what you would not do yourself. It is only because the study of these yellow pages, covered with the brown, almost microscopic, pointed handwriting, has amused the odd moments of years that I have arrived at something like a comprehension of the things that mattered so much to Jeremy Wendover, and so pathetically little to any other of the sons and daughters of Adam.

How did the diary, you ask, come into my possession? I picked it up, years ago, for a franc, at a second-hand bookseller's in Geneva. It had the bookplate of a long-forgotten Bishop of Sodor and Man, and an inscription on the flyleaf: "John Henderson, Calcutta, 1835." How it came into the hands of the Bishop, into those of John Henderson, how it passed thence and eventually found its way to Geneva, Heaven alone knows.

I have said that Jeremy Wendover departed this life in 1758. My authority for the statement is a lichen-covered gravestone in the churchyard of Bullingford, whither I have made many pious pilgrimages in the hope of finding more records of my obscure hero. But I have been unsuccessful. The house, however, in which he lived, described at some length in his diary, is still standing—an Early Tudor building, the residence of the maltster who owned the adjoining long, gabled malthouse, and from whom he rented it for a considerable term of years. It is situated on the river fringe of the little town, at the end of a lane running at right angles to the main street just before this loses itself in the market square.

I have stood at the front gate of the house and watched the Thames, some thirty yards away, flow between its alder-grown banks; the wide, lush meadows and cornfields beyond dotted here and there with the red roofs of farms and spreading amid the quiet greenery of oaks and chestnuts to the low-lying Oxfordshire hills; I have breathed in the peace of the evening air and I have found myself very near in spirit to Jeremy Wendover, who stood, as he notes, many and many a summer afternoon at that self-same gate, watching the selfsame scene, far away from the fever and the fret of life.

I have thought, therefore, that instead of publishing his diary I might with some degree of sympathy set forth in brief the one dramatic episode in his inglorious career.

II

The overwhelming factor in Jeremy Wendover's life was the appalling, inconceivable hideousness of his face. The refined, cultivated, pious gentleman was cursed with a visage which it would have pleased Dante to ascribe to a White Guelph whom he particularly disliked, and would have made Orcagna shudder in the midst of his dreams of shapes of hell. As a child of six, in a successful effort to rescue a baby sister, he had fallen headforemost into a great wood fire, and when they picked him up his face "was like unto a charred log that had long smouldered." Almost the semblance of humanity had been wiped from him, and to all beholders he became a thing of horror. Men turned their heads away, women shivered and children screamed at his approach. He was a pariah, condemned from early boyhood to an awful loneliness. His parents, a certain Sir Julius Wendover, Baronet, and his wife, his elder brother and his sisters—they must have been a compassionless family—turned from him as from an evil and pestilential thing. Love never touched him with its consoling feather, and for love the poor wretch pined his whole youth long. Human companionship, even, was denied him. He seems to have lived alone in a wing of a great house, seldom straying beyond the bounds of the park, under the tutorship of a reverend but scholarly sot who was too drunken and obese and unbuttoned to be admitted into the family circle. This fellow, one Doctor Tubbs, of St. Catherine's College, Cambridge, seems to have shown Jeremy some semblance of affection, but chiefly while in his cups, "when," as Jeremy puts it bitterly, "he was too much like unto the beasts that perish to distinguish between me and a human being." When sober he railed at the boy for a monster, and frequently chastised him for his lack of beauty. But, in some strange way, in alternate fits of slobbering and castigating, he managed to lay the groundwork of a fine education, teaching Jeremy the classics, Italian and French, some mathematics, and the elements of philosophy and theology; he also discoursed much to him on the great world, of which, till his misfortunes came upon him, he boasted of having been a distinguished ornament; and when he had three bottles of wine inside him he told his charge very curious and instructive things indeed.

So Jeremy grew to man's estate, sensitive, shy, living in the world of books and knowing little, save at second-hand, of the ways of men and women. But with all the secrets of the birds and beasts in the far-stretching Warwickshire park he was intimately acquainted. He became part of the woodland life. Squirrels would come to him and munch their acorns on his shoulder.

"So intimate was I in this innocent community," says he, not without quiet humour, "that I have been a wet-nurse to weasels and called in as physician to a family of moles."

When Sir Julius died, Jeremy received his younger son's portion (fortunately, it was a goodly one) and was turned neck and crop out of the house by his ill-conditioned brother. Tubbs, having also suffered ignominious expulsion, persuaded him to go on the grand tour. They started. But they only got as far as Abbeville on the road to Paris, where Tubbs was struck down by an apoplexy of which he died. Up to that point the sot's company had enabled Jeremy to endure the insult, ribaldry and terror that attended his unspeakable deformity; but, left alone, he lost heart; mankind rejected him as a pack of wolves rejects a maimed cub. Stricken with shame and humiliation he crept back to England and established himself in the maltster's house at Bullingford, guided thither by no other consideration than that it had been the birthplace of the dissolute Tubbs. He took up his lonely abode there as a boy of three-and-twenty, and there he spent the long remainder of his life.

III

The great event happened in his thirty-fourth year. You may picture him as a solitary, scholarly figure living in the little Tudor house, with its mullioned windows, set in the midst of an old-world garden bright with stocks and phlox and hollyhocks and great pink roses, its southern wall generously glowing with purple plums. Indoors, the house was somewhat dark. The casement window of the main living-room was small and overshadowed by the heavy ivy outside. The furniture, of plain dark oak, mainly consisted of bookcases, in which were ranged the solemn, leather-covered volumes that were Jeremy's world. A great table in front of the window contained the books of the moment, the latest news-sheets from London, and the great brass-clasped volume in which he wrote his diary. In front of it stood a great straight-backed chair.

You may picture him on a late August afternoon, sitting in this chair, writing his diary by the fading light. His wig lay on the table, for the weather was close. He paused, pen in hand, and looked wistfully at the mellow eastern sky, lost in thought. Then he wrote these words:

O Lord Jesus, fill me plentifully with Thy love, which passeth the love of woman; for love of woman never will be mine, and therefore, O Lord, I require Thy love bountifully: I yearn for love even as a weaned child. Even as a weaned child yearns for the breast of its mother, so yearn I for love.

He closed and clasped the book with a sigh, put on his wig, rose and, going into the tiny hall, opened the kitchen door and announced to his household, one ancient and incompetent crone, his intention of taking the air. Then he clapped on his old three-cornered hat and, stick in hand, went out of the front gate into the light of the sunset. He stood for a while watching the deep reflections of the alders and willows in the river and the golden peace of the meadows beyond, and his heart was uplifted in thankfulness for the beauty of the earth. He was a tall, thin man, with the stoop of the scholar and, despite his rough, country-made clothes, the unmistakable air of the eighteenth-century gentleman. The setting sun shone full on the piteous medley of marred features that served him for a face.

A woman, sickle on arm, leading a toddling child, passed by with averted head. But she curtsied and said respectfully: "Good evening, your honour." The child looked at him and with a cry of fear shrank into the mother's skirts. Jeremy touched his hat.

"Good evening, Mistress Blackacre. I trust your husband is recovered from his fever."

"Thanks to your honour's kindness," said the woman, her eyes always turned from him, "he is well-nigh recovered. For shame of yourself!" she added, shaking the child.

"Nay, nay," said Jeremy kindly. "'Tis not the urchin's fault that he met a bogey in broad daylight."

He strolled along the river bank, pleased at his encounter. In that little backwater of the world where he had lived secluded for ten years folks had learned to suffer him—nay, more, to respect him: and though they seldom looked him in the face their words were gentle and friendly. He could even jest at his own misfortune.

"God is good," he murmured as he walked with head bent down and hands behind his back, "and the earth is full of His goodness. Yet if He in His mercy could only give me a companion in my loneliness, as He gives to every peasant, bird and beast——"

A sigh ended the sentence. He was young and not always able to control the squabble between sex and piety. The words had scarcely passed his lips, however, when he discerned a female figure seated on the bank, some fifty yards away. His first impulse—an impulse which the habit of years would, on ordinary occasions, have rendered imperative—was to make a wide detour round the meadows; but this evening the spirit of mild revolt took possession of him and guided his steps in the direction of the lady—for lady he perceived her to be when he drew a little nearer.

She wore a flowered muslin dress cut open at the neck, and her arms, bare to the elbows, were white and shapely. A peach-blossom of a face appeared below the mob-cap bound by a cherry-coloured ribbon, and as Jeremy came within speaking distance her dark-blue eyes were fixed on him fearlessly. Jeremy halted and looked at her, while she looked at Jeremy. His heart beat wildly. The miracle of miracles had happened—the hopeless, impossible thing that he had prayed for in rebellious hours for so many years, ever since he had realised that the world held such a thing as the joy and the blessing of woman's love. A girl looked at him smilingly, frankly in the face, without a quiver of repulsion—and a girl more dainty and beautiful than any he had seen before. Then, as he stared, transfixed like a person in a beatitude, into her eyes, something magical occurred to Jeremy. The air was filled with the sound of fairy harps of which his own tingling nerves from head to foot were the vibrating strings. Jeremy fell instantaneously in love.

"Will you tell me, sir," she said in a musical voice—the music of the spheres to Jeremy—"will you tell me how I can reach the house of Mistress Wotherspoon?"

Jeremy took off his three-cornered hat and made a sweeping bow.

"Why, surely, madam," said he, pointing with his stick; "'tis yonder red roof peeping through the trees only three hundred yards distant."

"You are a gentleman," said the girl quickly.

"My name is Jeremy Wendover, younger son of the late Sir Julius Wendover, Baronet, and now and always, madam, your very humble servant."

She smiled. Her rosy lips and pearly teeth (Jeremy's own description) filled Jeremy's head with lunatic imaginings.

"And I, sir," said she, "am Mistress Barbara Seaforth, and I came but yesterday to stay with my aunt, Mistress Wotherspoon. If I could trespass so far on your courtesy as to pray you to conduct me thither I should be vastly beholden to you."

His sudden delight at the proposition was mingled with some astonishment. She only had to walk across the open meadow to the clump of trees. He assisted her to rise and with elaborate politeness offered his arm. She made no motion, however, to take it.

"I thought I was walking in my aunt's little railed enclosure," she remarked; "but I must have passed through the gate into the open fields, and when I came to the river I was frightened and sat down and waited for someone to pass."

"Pray pardon me, madam," said Jeremy, "but I don't quite understand——"

"La, sir! how very thoughtless of me," she laughed. "I never told you. I am blind."

"Blind!" he echoed. The leaden weight of a piteous dismay fell upon him. That was why she had gazed at him so fearlessly. She had not seen him. The miracle had not happened. For a moment he lost count of the girl's sad affliction in the stress of his own bitterness. But the lifelong habit of resignation prevailed.

"Madam, I crave your pardon for not having noticed it," he said in an unsteady voice. "And I admire the fortitude wherewith you bear so grievous a burden."

"Just because I can't see is no reason for my drowning the world in my tears. We must make the best of things. And there are compensations, too," she added lightly, allowing her hand to be placed on his arm and led away. "I refer to an adventure with a young gentleman which, were I not blind, my Aunt Wotherspoon would esteem mightily unbecoming."

"Alas, madam," said he with a sigh, "there you are wrong. I am not young. I am thirty-three."

He thought it was a great age. Mistress Barbara turned up her face saucily and laughed. Evidently, she did not share his opinion. Jeremy bent a wistful gaze into the beautiful, sightless eyes, and then saw what had hitherto escaped his notice: a thin; grey film over the pupils.

"How did you know," he asked, "that I was a man, when I came up to you?"

"First by your aged, tottering footsteps, sir," she said with a pretty air of mockery, "which were not those of a young girl. And then you were standing 'twixt me and the sun, and one of my poor eyes can still distinguish light from shadow."

"How long have you suffered from this great affliction?" he asked.

"I have been going blind for two years. It is now two months since I have lost sight altogether. But please don't talk of it," she added hastily. "If you pity me I shall cry, which I hate, for I want to laugh as much as I can. I can also walk faster, sir, if it would not tire your aged limbs."

Jeremy started guiltily. She had divined his evil purpose. But who will blame him for not wishing to relinquish oversoon the delicious pressure of her little hand on his arm and to give over this blind flower of womanhood into another's charge? He replied disingenuously, without quickening his pace:

"'Tis for your sake, madam, I am walking slowly. The afternoon is warm."

"I am vastly sensible of your gallantry, sir," she retorted. "But I fear you must have practised it much on others to have arrived at this perfection."

"By heavens, madam," he cried, cut to the heart by her innocent raillery, "'tis not so. Could you but see me you would know it was not. I am a recluse, a student, a poor creature set apart from the ways of men. You are the first woman that has walked arm-in-arm with me in all my life—except in dreams. And now my dream has come true."

His voice vibrated, and when she answered hers was responsive.

"You, too, have your burden?"

"Could you but know how your touch lightens it!" said he.

She blushed to the brown hair that was visible beneath the mob-cap.

"Are we very far now from my Aunt Wotherspoon's?" she asked. Whereupon Jeremy, abashed, took refuge in the commonplace.

The open gate through which she had strayed was reached all too quickly. When she had passed through she made him a curtsey and held out her hand. He touched it with his lips as if it were sacramental bread. She avowed herself much beholden to his kindness.

"Shall I ever see you again, Mistress Barbara?" he asked in a low voice, for an old servant was hobbling down from the house to meet her.

"My Aunt Wotherspoon is bed-ridden and receives no visitors."

"But I could be of no further service to you?" pleaded Jeremy.

She hesitated and then she said demurely:

"It would be a humane action, sir, to see sometimes that this gate is shut, lest I stray through it again and drown myself in the river."

Jeremy could scarce believe his ears.

IV

This was the beginning of Jeremy's love-story. He guarded the gate like Cerberus or Saint Peter. Sometimes at dawn he would creep out of his house and tramp through the dew-filled meadows to see that it was safely shut. During the day he would do sentry-go within sight of the sacred portal, and when the flutter of a mob-cap and a flowered muslin met his eye he would advance merely to report that the owner ran no danger. And then, one day, she bade him open it, and she came forth and they walked arm-in-arm in the meadows; and this grew to be a daily custom, to the no small scandal of the neighbourhood. Very soon, Jeremy learned her simple history. She was an orphan, with a small competence of her own. Till recently she had lived in Somersetshire with her guardian; but now he was dead, and the only home she could turn to was that of her bed-ridden Aunt Wotherspoon, her sole surviving relative.

Jeremy, with a lamentable lack of universality, thanked God on his knees for His great mercy. If Mistress Wotherspoon had not been confined to her bed she would not have allowed her niece to wander at will with a notorious scarecrow over the Bullingford meadows, and if Barbara had not been blind she could not have walked happily in his company and hung trustfully on his arm. For days she was but a wonder and a wild desire. Her beauty, her laughter, her wit, her simplicity, her bravery, bewildered him. It was enough to hear the music of her voice, to feel the fragrance of her presence, to thrill at her light touch. He, Jeremy Wendover, from whose distortion all human beings, his life long, had turned shuddering away, to have this ineffable companionship! It transcended thought. At last—it was one night, as he lay awake, remembering how they had walked that afternoon, not arm-in-arm, but hand-in-hand—the amazing, dazzling glory of a possibility enveloped him. She was blind. She could never see his deformity. Had God listened to his prayer and delivered this fair and beloved woman into his keeping? He shivered all night long in an ecstasy of happiness, rose at dawn and mounted guard at Barbara's gate. But as he waited, foodless, for the thrilling sight of her, depression came and sat heavy on his shoulders until he felt that in daring to think of her in the way of marriage he was committing an abominable crime.

When she came, fresh as the morning, bareheaded, her beautiful hair done up in a club behind, into the little field, and he tried to call to her, his tongue was dry and he could utter no sound. Accidentally he dropped his stick, which clattered down the bars of the gate. She laughed. He entered the enclosure.

"I knew I should find you there," she cried, and sped toward him.

"How did you know?" he asked.

"'By the pricking of my thumb,'" she quoted gaily; and then, as he took both her outstretched hands, she drew near him and whispered: "and by the beating of my heart."

His arms folded around her and he held her tight against him, stupefied, dazed, throbbing, vainly trying to find words. At last he said huskily:

"God has sent you to be the joy and comfort of a sorely stricken man. I accept it because it is His will. I will cherish you as no man has ever cherished woman before. My love for you, my dear, is as infinite—as infinite—oh, God!"

Speech failed him. He tore his arms away from her and fell sobbing at her feet and kissed the skirts of her gown.

V

The Divine Mercy, as Jeremy puts it, thought fit to remove Aunt Wotherspoon to a happier world before the week was out; and so, within a month, Jeremy led his blind bride into the little Tudor house. And then began for him a happiness so exquisite that sometimes he was afraid to breathe lest he should disturb the enchanted air. Every germ of love and tenderness that had lain undeveloped in his nature sprang into flower. Sometimes he grew afraid lest, in loving her, he was forgetting God. But he reassured himself by a pretty sophistry. "O Lord," says he, "it is Thou only that I worship—through Thine own great gift." And indeed what more could be desired by a reasonable Deity?

Barbara, responsive, gave him her love in full. From the first she would hear nothing of his maimed visage.

"My dear," she said as they wandered one golden autumn day by the riverside, "I have made a picture of you out of your voice, the plash of water, the sunset and the summer air. 'Twas thus that my heart saw you the first evening we met. And that is more than sufficing for a poor, blind creature whom a gallant gentleman married out of charity."

"Charity!" His voice rose in indignant repudiation.

She laughed and laid her head on her shoulder.

"Ah, dear, I did but jest. I know you fell in love with my pretty doll's face. And also with a little mocking spirit of my own."

"But what made you fall in love with me?"

"Faith, Mr. Wendover," she replied, "a woman with eyes in her head has but to go whither she is driven. And so much the more a blind female like me. You led me plump into the middle of the morass; and when you came and rescued me I was silly enough to be grateful."

Under Jeremy's love her rich nature expanded day by day. She set her joyous courage and her wit to work to laugh at blindness, and to make her the practical, serviceable housewife as well as the gay companion. The ancient crone was replaced by a brisk servant and a gardener, and Jeremy enjoyed creature comforts undreamed of. And the months sped happily by. Autumn darkened into winter and winter cleared into spring, and daffodils and crocuses and primroses began to show themselves in corners of the old-world garden, and tiny gossamer garments in corners of the dark old house. Then a newer, deeper happiness enfolded them.

But there came a twilight hour when, whispering of the wonder that was to come, she suddenly began to cry softly.

"But why, why, dear?" he asked in tender astonishment.

"Only—only to think, Jeremy, that I shall never see it."

VI

One evening in April, while Jeremy was reading and Barbara sewing in the little candle-lit parlour, almost simultaneously with a sudden downpour of rain came a knock at the front door. Jeremy, startled by this unwonted occurrence, went himself to answer the summons, and, opening the door, was confronted by a stout, youngish man dressed in black with elegant ruffles and a gold-headed cane.

"Your pardon, sir," said the new-comer, "but may I crave a moment's shelter during this shower? I am scarce equipped for the elements."

"Pray enter," said Jeremy hospitably.

"I am from London, and lodging at the 'White Hart' at Bullingford for the night," the stranger explained, shaking the raindrops from his hat. "During a stroll before supper I lost my way, and this storm has surprised me at your gate. I make a thousand apologies for deranging you."

"If you are wet the parlour fire will dry you. I beg you, sir, to follow me," said Jeremy. He led the way through the dark passage and, pausing with his hand on the door-knob, turned to the stranger and said with his grave courtesy:

"I think it right to warn you, sir, that I am afflicted with a certain personal disfigurement which not all persons can look upon with equanimity."

"Sir," replied the other, "my name is John Hattaway, surgeon at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, and I am used to regard with equanimity all forms of human affliction."

Mr. Hattaway was shown into the parlour and introduced in due form to Barbara. A chair was set for him near the fire. In the talk that followed he showed himself to be a man of parts and education. He was on his way, he said, to Oxford to perform an operation on the Warden of Merton College.

"What kind of operation?" asked Barbara.

His quick, keen eyes swept her like a searchlight.

"Madam," said he, not committing himself, "'tis but a slight one."

But when Barbara had left the room to mull some claret for her guest, Mr. Hattaway turned to Jeremy.

"'Tis a cataract," said he, "I am about to remove from the eye of the Warden of Merton by the new operation invented by my revered master, Mr. William Cheselden, my immediate predecessor at St. Thomas's. I did not tell your wife, for certain reasons; but I noticed that she is blinded by the same disease."

Jeremy rose from his chair.

"Do you mean that you will restore the Warden's sight?"

"I have every hope of doing so."

"But if his sight can be restored—then my wife's——"

"Can be restored also," said the surgeon complacently.

Jeremy sat down feeling faint and dizzy.

"Did you not know that cataract was curable?"

"I am scholar enough," answered Jeremy, "to have read that King John of Aragon was so cured by the Jew, Abiathar of Lerida, by means of a needle thrust through the eyeball——"

"Barbarous, my dear sir, barbarous!" cried the surgeon, raising a white, protesting hand. "One in a million may be so cured. There is even now a pestilential fellow of a quack, calling himself the Chevalier Taylor, who is prodding folks' eyes with a six-inch skewer. Have you never heard of him?"

"Alas, sir," said Jeremy, "I live so out of the world, and my daily converse is limited to my dear wife and the parson hard by, who is as recluse a scholar as I am myself."

"If you wish your wife to regain her sight," said Mr. Hattaway, "avoid this Chevalier Taylor like the very devil. But if you will intrust her to my care, Mr. Hattaway, surgeon of St. Thomas' Hospital, London, pupil of the great Cheselden——"

He waved his hand by way of completing the unfinished sentence.

"When?" asked Jeremy, greatly agitated.

"After her child is born."

"Shall I tell her?" Jeremy trembled.

"As you will. No—perhaps you had better wait a while."

Then Barbara entered, bearing a silver tray, with the mulled claret and glasses, proud of her blind surety of movement. Mr. Hattaway sprang to assist her and, unknown to her, took the opportunity of scrutinising her eyes. Then he nodded confidently at Jeremy.

VII

From that evening Jeremy's martyrdom began. Hitherto he had regarded the blindness of his wife as a special dispensation of Divine Providence. She had not seen him save on that first afternoon as a shadowy mass, and had formed no conception of his disfigurement beyond the vague impression conveyed to her by loving fingers touching his face. She had made her own mental picture of him, as she had said, and whatever it was, so far from repelling her, it pleased her mightily. Her ignorance indeed was bliss—for both of them. And now, thought poor Jeremy, knowledge would come with the restored vision, and, like our too-wise first parents, they would be driven out of Eden. Sometimes the devil entered his heart and prompted cowardly concealment. Why tell Barbara of Mr. Hattaway's proposal? Why disturb a happiness already so perfect? All her other senses were eyes to her. She had grown almost unconscious of her affliction. She was happier loving him with blinded eyes than recoiling from him in horror with seeing ones. It was, in sooth, for her own dear happiness that she should remain in darkness. But then Jeremy remembered the only cry her brave soul had ever uttered, and after wrestling long in prayer he knew that the Evil One had spoken, and in the good, old-fashioned way he bade Satan get behind him. "Retro me, Satanas." The words are in his diary, printed in capital letters.

But one day, when she repeated her cry, his heart ached for her and he comforted her with the golden hope. She wept tears of joy and flung her arms around his neck and kissed him, and from that day forth filled the house with song and laughter and the mirth of unbounded happiness. But Jeremy, though he bespoke her tenderly and hopefully, felt that he had signed his death-warrant. Now and then, when her gay spirit danced through the glowing future, he was tempted to say: "When you see me as I am your love will turn to loathing and our heaven to hell." But he could not find it in his heart to dash her joy. And she never spoke of seeing him—only of seeing the child and the sun and the flowers and the buttons of his shirts, which she vowed must seem to be sewed on by a drunken cobbler.

VIII

The child was born, a boy, strong and lusty—to Jeremy the incarnation of miraculous wonder. That the thing was alive, with legs and arms and feet and hands, and could utter sounds, which it did with much vigour, made demands almost too great on his credulity.

"What is he like?" asked Barbara.

This was a poser for Jeremy. For the pink brat was like nothing on earth—save any other newborn infant.

"I think," he said hesitatingly, "I think he may be said to resemble Cupid. He has a mouth like Cupid's bow."

"And Cupid's wings?" she laughed. "Fie, Jeremy, I thought we had born to us a Christian child."

"But that he has a body," said Jeremy, "I should say he was a cherub. He has eyes of a celestial blue, and his nose——"

"Yes, yes, his nose?" came breathlessly from Barbara.

"I'm afraid, my dear, there is so little of it to judge by," said Jeremy.

"Before the summer's out I shall be able to judge for myself," said Barbara, and terror gripped the man's heart.

The days passed, and Barbara rose from her bed and again sang and laughed.

"See, I am strong enough to withstand any operation," she declared one day, holding out the babe at arm's length.

"Not yet," said Jeremy, "not yet. The child needs you."

The child was asleep. She felt with her foot for its cradle, and with marvellous certainty deposited him gently in the nest and covered him with the tiny coverlet. Then she turned to Jeremy.

"My husband, don't you wish me to have my sight restored?"

"How can you doubt it?" he cried. "I would have you undergo this operation were my life the fee."

She came close to him and put her hands about his maimed face. "Dear," she said, "do you think anything could change my love for you?"

It was the first hint that she had divined his fears; but he remained silent, every fibre of his being shrinking from the monstrous argument. For answer, he kissed her hands as she withdrew them.

At last the time came for the great adventure. Letters passed between Jeremy and Mr. Hattaway of St. Thomas' Hospital, who engaged lodgings in Cork Street, so that they should be near his own residence in Bond Street hard by. A great travelling chariot and post-horses were hired from Bullingford, two great horse-pistols, which Jeremy had never fired off in his life, were loaded and primed and put in the holsters, and one morning in early August Jeremy and Barbara and the nurse and the baby started on their perilous journey. They lay at Reading that night and arrived without misadventure at Cork Street on the following afternoon. Mr. Hattaway called in the evening with two lean and solemn young men, his apprentices—for even the great Mr. Hattaway was but a barber-surgeon practising a trade under the control of a City Guild—and made his preparations for the morrow.

In these days of anæsthetics and cocaine, sterilised instruments, trained nurses and scientific ventilation it is almost impossible to realise the conditions under which surgical operations were conducted in the first half of the eighteenth century. Yet they occasionally were successful, and patients sometimes did survive, and nobody complained, thinking, like Barbara Wendover, that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds. For, as she lay in the close, darkened room the next day, after the operation was over, tended by a chattering beldame of a midwife, she took the burning pain in her bandaged eyes—after the dare-devil fashion of the time Mr. Hattaway had operated on both at once—as part of the cure, and thanked God she was born into so marvellous an epoch. Then Jeremy came and sat by her bed and held her hand, and she was very happy.

But Jeremy then, and in the slow, torturing days that followed, went about shrunken like a man doomed to worse than death. London increased his agony. At first a natural curiosity (for he had passed through the town but twice before, once as he set out for the grand tour with Doctor Tubbs, and once on his return thence) and a countryman's craving for air took him out into the busy streets. But he found the behaviour of the populace far different from that of the inhabitants of Bullingford, who passed him by respectfully, though with averted faces. Porters and lackeys openly jeered at him, ragged children summoned their congeners and followed hooting in his train; it was a cruel age, and elegant gentlemen in flowered silk coats and lace ruffles had no compunction in holding their cambric handkerchiefs before their eyes and vowing within his hearing that, stab their vitals, such a fellow should wear a mask or be put into the Royal Society's Museum; and in St. James's Street one fine lady, stepping out of her sedan-chair almost into his arms, fell back shrieking that she had seen a monster, and pretended to faint as the obsequious staymaker ran out of his shop to her assistance.

He ceased to go abroad in daylight and only crept about the streets at night, even then nervously avoiding the glare of a chance-met linkboy's torch. Desperate thoughts came to him during these gloomy rambles. Fear of God alone, as is evident from the diary, prevented him from taking his life. And the poor wretch prayed for he knew not what.

IX

One morning Mr. Hattaway, after his examination of the patient, entered the parlour where Jeremy was reading Tillotson's Sermons (there were the fourteen volumes of them in the room's unlively bookcase) and closed the door behind him with an air of importance.

"Sir," said he, "I bring you good news."

Jeremy closed his book.

"She sees?"

"On removing the bandages just now," replied Mr. Hattaway, "I perceived to my great regret that with the left eye my skill has been unavailing. The failure is due, I believe, to an injury to the retina which I have been unable to discover." He paused and took snuff. "But I rejoice to inform you that sight is restored to the right eye. I admitted light into the room, and though the vision is diffused, which a lens will rectify, she saw me distinctly."

"Thank God she has the blessing of sight," said Jeremy reverently.

"Amen," said the surgeon. He took another pinch. "Also, perhaps, thank your humble servant for restoring it."

"I owe you an unpayable debt," replied Jeremy.

"She is crying out for the baby," said Mr. Hattaway. "If you will kindly send it in to her I can allow her a fleeting glimpse of it before I complete the rebandaging for the day."

Jeremy rang the bell and gave the order. "And I?" he inquired bravely.

The surgeon hesitated and scratched his plump cheek.

"You know that my wife has never seen me."

"To-morrow, then," said Hattaway.

The nurse and child appeared at the doorway, and the surgeon followed them into Barbara's room.

When the surgeon had left the house Jeremy went to Barbara and found her crooning over the babe, which lay in her arms.

"I've seen him, dear, I've seen him!" she cried joyously. "He is the most wonderfully beautiful thing on the earth. His eyes are light blue, and mine are dark, so he must have yours. And his mouth is made for kisses, and his expression is that of a babe born in Paradise."

Jeremy bent over and looked at the boy, who sniggered at him in a most unparadisiacal fashion, and they talked parentwise over his perfections.

"Before we go back to Bullingford you will let me take a coach, Jeremy, and drive about the streets and show him to the town? I will hold him up and cry: 'Ladies and gentlemen, look! 'Tis the tenth wonder of the world. You only have this one chance of seeing him.'"

She rattled on in the gayest of moods, making him laugh in spite of the terror. The failure of the operation in the left eye she put aside as of no account. One eye was a necessity, but two were a mere luxury.

"And it is the little rogue that will reap the benefit," she cried, cuddling the child. "For, when he is naughty mammy will turn the blind side of her face to him."

"And will you turn the blind side of your face to me?" asked Jeremy with a quiver of the lips.

She took his hand and pressed it against her cheek.

"You have no faults, my beloved husband, for me to be blind to," she said, wilfully or not misunderstanding him.

Such rapture had the sight of the child given her that she insisted on its lying with her that night, a truckle-bed being placed in the room for the child's nurse. When Jeremy took leave of her before going to his own room he bent over her and whispered:

"To-morrow."

Her sweet lips—pathetically sweet below the bandage—parted in a smile—and they never seemed sweeter to the anguished man—and she also whispered, "To-morrow!" and kissed him.

He went away, and as he closed the door he felt that it was the gate of Paradise shut against him for ever.

He did not sleep that night, but spent it as a brave man spends the night before his execution. For, after all, Jeremy Wendover was a gallant gentlemen.

In the morning he went into Barbara's room before breakfast, as his custom was, and found her still gay and bubbling over with the joy of life. And when he was leaving her she stretched out her hands and clasped his maimed face, as she had done once before, and said the same reassuring words. Nothing could shake her immense, her steadfast love. But Jeremy, entering the parlour and catching sight of himself in the Queen Anne mirror over the mantle-piece, shuddered to the inmost roots of his being. She had no conception of what she vowed.

He was scarce through breakfast when Mr. Hattaway entered, a full hour before his usual time.

"I am in a prodigious hurry," said he, "for I must go post-haste into Norfolk, to operate on my Lord Winteringham for the stone. I have not a moment to lose, so I pray you to accompany me to your wife's bedchamber."

The awful moment had come. Jeremy courteously opened doors for the surgeon to pass through, and followed with death in his heart. When they entered the room he noticed that Barbara had caused the nurse's truckle-bed to be removed and that she was lying, demure as a nun, in a newly made bed. The surgeon flung the black curtains from the window and let the summer light filter through the linen blinds.

"We will have a longer exposure this morning," said he, "and to-morrow a little longer still, and so on until we can face the daylight altogether. Now, madam, if you please."

He busied himself with the bandages. Jeremy, on the other side of the bed, stood clasping Barbara's hand: stood stock-still, with thumping heart, holding his breath, setting his teeth, nerving himself for the sharp, instinctive gasp, the reflex recoil, that he knew would be the death sentence of their love. And at that supreme moment he cursed himself bitterly for a fool for not having told her of his terror, for not having sufficiently prepared her for the devastating revelation. But now it was too late.

The bandages were removed. The surgeon bent down and peered into the eyes. He started back in dismay. Before her right eye he rapidly waved his finger.

"Do you see that?"

"No," said Barbara.

"My God, madam!" cried he, with a stricken look on his plump face, "what in the devil's name have you been doing with yourself?"

Great drops of sweat stood on Jeremy's brow.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"She can't see. The eye is injured. Yesterday, save for the crystalline lens which I extracted, it was as sound as mine or yours."

"I was afraid something had happened," said Barbara in a matter-of-fact tone. "Baby was restive in the night and pushed his little fist into my eye."

"Good heavens, madam!" exclaimed the angry surgeon, "you don't mean to say that you took a young baby to sleep with you in your condition?"

Barbara nodded, as if found out in a trifling peccadillo. "I suppose I'm blind for ever?" she asked casually.

He examined the eye again. There was a moment's dead silence. Jeremy, white-lipped and haggard, hung on the verdict. Then Hattaway rose, extended his arms and let them drop helplessly against his sides.

"Yes," said he. "The sight is gone."

Jeremy put his hands to his head, staggered, and, overcome by the reaction from the terror and the shock of the unlooked-for calamity, fell in a faint on the floor.

After he had recovered and the surgeon had gone, promising to send his apprentice the next day to dress the eyes, which, for fear of inflammation, still needed tending, Jeremy sat by his wife's bedside with an aching heart.

"'Tis the will of God," said he gloomily. "We must not rebel against His decrees."

"But, you dear, foolish husband," she cried, half laughing, "who wants to rebel against them? Not I, of a certainty. I am the happiest woman in the world."

"'Tis but to comfort me that you say it," said Jeremy.

"'Tis the truth. Listen." She sought for his hand and continued with sweet seriousness: "I was selfish to want to regain my sight; but my soul hungered to see my babe. And now that I have seen him I care not. Just that one little peep into the heaven of his face was all I wanted. And 'twas the darling wretch himself who settled that I should not have more." After a little she said, "Come nearer to me," and she drew his ear to her lips and whispered:

"Although I have not regained my sight, on the other hand I have not lost a thing far dearer—the face that I love which I made up of your voice and the plash of water and the sunset and the summer air." She kissed him. "My poor husband, how you must have suffered!"

And then Jeremy knew the great, brave soul of that woman whom the Almighty had given him to wife, and, as he puts it in his diary, he did glorify God exceedingly.

So when Barbara was able to travel again Jeremy sent for the great, roomy chariot and the horse-pistols and the post-horses, and they went back to Bullingford, where they spent the remainder of their lives in unclouded felicity.

II
THE CONQUEROR

Miss Winifred Goode sat in her garden in the shade of a clipped yew, an unopened novel on her lap, and looked at the gabled front of the Tudor house that was hers and had been her family's for many generations. In that house, Duns Hall, in that room beneath the southernmost gable, she had been born. From that house, save for casual absences rarely exceeding a month in duration, she had never stirred. All the drama, such as it was, of her life had been played in that house, in that garden. Up and down the parapeted stone terrace walked the ghosts of all those who had been dear to her—her father, a vague but cherished memory; a brother and a sister who had died during her childhood; her mother, dead three years since, to whose invalid and somewhat selfish needs she had devoted all her full young womanhood. Another ghost walked there, too; but that was the ghost of the living—a young man who had kissed and ridden away, twenty years ago. He had kissed her over there, under the old wistaria arbour at the end of the terrace. What particular meaning he had put into the kiss, loverly, brotherly, cousinly, friendly—for they had played together all their young lives, and were distantly connected—she had never been able to determine. In spite of his joy at leaving the lethargic country town of Dunsfield for America, their parting had been sad and sentimental. The kiss, at any rate, had been, on his side, one of sincere affection—an affection proven afterwards by a correspondence of twenty years. To her the kiss had been—well, the one and only kiss of her life, and she had treasured it in a neat little sacred casket in her heart. Since that far-off day no man had ever showed an inclination to kiss her, which, in one way, was strange, as she had been pretty and gentle and laughter-loving, qualities attractive to youths in search of a mate. But in another way it was not strange, as mate-seeking youths are rare as angels in Dunsfield, beyond whose limits Miss Goode had seldom strayed. Her romance had been one kiss, the girlish dreams of one man. At first, when he had gone fortune-hunting in America, she had fancied herself broken-hearted; but Time had soon touched her with healing fingers. Of late, freed from the slavery of a querulous bedside, she had grown in love with her unruffled and delicately ordered existence, in which the only irregular things were her herbaceous borders, between which she walked like a prim school-mistress among a crowd of bright but unruly children. She had asked nothing more from life than what she had—her little duties in the parish, her little pleasures in the neighbourhood, her good health, her old house, her trim lawns, her old-fashioned garden, her black cocker spaniels. As it was at forty, she thought, so should it be till the day of her death.

But a month ago had come turmoil. Roger Orme announced his return. Fortune-making in America had tired him. He was coming home to settle down for good in Dunsfield, in the house of his fathers. This was Duns Lodge, whose forty acres marched with the two hundred acres of Duns Hall. The two places were known in the district as "The Lodge" and "The Hall." About a century since, a younger son of The Hall had married a daughter of The Lodge, whence the remote tie of consanguinity between Winifred Goode and Roger Orme. The Lodge had been let on lease for many years, but now the lease had fallen in and the tenants gone. Roger had arrived in England yesterday. A telegram had bidden her expect him that afternoon. She sat in the garden expecting him, and stared wistfully at the old grey house, a curious fear in her eyes.

Perhaps, if freakish chance had not brought Mrs. Donovan to Dunsfield on a visit to the Rector, a day or two after Roger's letter, fear—foolish, shameful, sickening fear—might not have had so dominant a place in her anticipation of his homecoming. Mrs. Donovan was a contemporary, a Dunsfield girl, who had married at nineteen and gone out with her husband to India. Winifred Goode remembered a gipsy beauty riotous in the bloom of youth. In the Rector's drawing-room she met a grey-haired, yellow-skinned, shrivelled caricature, and she looked in the woman's face as in a mirror of awful truth in which she herself was reflected. From that moment she had known no peace. Gone was her placid acceptance of the footprints of the years, gone her old-maidish pride in dainty, old-maidish dress. She had mixed little with the modern world, and held to old-fashioned prejudices which prescribed the outward demeanour appropriate to each decade. One of her earliest memories was a homely saying of her father's—which had puzzled her childish mind considerably—as to the absurdity of sheep being dressed lamb fashion. Later she understood and cordially agreed with the dictum. The Countess of Ingleswood, the personage of those latitudes, at the age of fifty showed the fluffy golden hair and peach-bloom cheeks and supple figure of twenty; she wore bright colours and dashing hats, and danced and flirted and kept a tame-cattery of adoring young men. Winifred visited with Lady Ingleswood because she believed that, in these democratic days, it was the duty of county families to outmatch the proletariat in solidarity; but, with every protest of her gentlewoman's soul, she disapproved of Lady Ingleswood. Yet now, to her appalling dismay, she saw that, with the aid of paint, powder, and peroxide, Lady Ingleswood had managed to keep young. For thirty years, to Winifred's certain knowledge, she had not altered. The blasting hand that had swept over Madge Donovan's face had passed her by.

Winifred envied the woman's power of attraction. She read, with a curious interest, hitherto disregarded advertisements. They were so alluring, they seemed so convincing. Such a cosmetic used by queens of song and beauty restored the roses of girlhood; under such a treatment, wrinkles disappeared within a week—there were the photographs to prove it. All over London bubbled fountains of youth, at a mere guinea or so a dip. She sent for a little battery of washes and powders, and, when it arrived, she locked herself in her bedroom. But the sight of the first unaccustomed—and unskilfully applied—dab of rouge on her cheek terrified her. She realised what she was doing. No! Ten thousand times no! Her old-maidishness, her puritanism revolted. She flew to her hand-basin and vigorously washed the offending bloom away with soap and water. She would appear before the man she loved just as she was—if need be, in the withered truth of a Madge Donovan.... And, after all, had her beauty faded so utterly? Her glass said "No." But her glass mocked her, for how could she conjure up the young face of twenty which Roger Orme carried in his mind, and compare it with the present image?

She sat in the garden, this blazing July afternoon, waiting for him, her heart beating with the love of years ago, and the shrinking fear in her eyes. Presently she heard the sound of wheels, and she saw the open fly of "The Red Lion"—Dunsfield's chief hotel—crawling up the drive, and in it was a man wearing a straw hat. She fluttered a timid handkerchief, but the man, not looking in her direction, did not respond. She crossed the lawn to the terrace, feeling hurt, and entered the drawing-room by the open French window and stood there, her back to the light. Soon he was announced. She went forward to meet him.

"My dear Roger, welcome home."

He laughed and shook her hand in a hearty grip.

"It's you, Winifred. How good! Are you glad to see me back?"

"Very glad."

"And I."

"Do you find things changed?"

"Nothing," he declared with a smile; "the house is just the same." He ran his fingers over the corner of a Louis XVI table near which he was standing. "I remember this table, in this exact spot, twenty years ago."

"And you have scarcely altered. I should have known you anywhere."

"I should just hope so," said he.

She realised, with a queer little pang, that time had improved the appearance of the man of forty-five. He was tall, strong, erect; few accusing lines marked his clean-shaven, florid, clear-cut face; in his curly brown hair she could not detect a touch of grey. He had a new air of mastery and success which expressed itself in the corners of his firm lips and the steady, humorous gleam in his eyes.

"You must be tired after your hot train journey," she said.

He laughed again. "Tired? After a couple of hours? Now, if it had been a couple of days, as we are accustomed to on the other side—— But go on talking, just to let me keep on hearing your voice. It's yours—I could have recognised it over a long-distance telephone—and it's English. You've no idea how delicious it is. And the smell of the room"—he drew in a deep breath—"is you and the English country. I tell you, it's good to be back!"

She flushed, his pleasure was so sincere, and she smiled.

"But why should we stand? Let me take your hat and stick."

"Why shouldn't we sit in the garden—after my hot and tiring journey?" They both laughed. "Is the old wistaria still there, at the end of the terrace?"

She turned her face away. "Yes, still there. Do you remember it?" she asked in a low voice.

"Do you think I could forget it? I remember every turn of the house."

"Let us go outside, then."

She led the way, and he followed, to the trellis arbour, a few steps from the drawing-room door. The long lilac blooms had gone with the spring, but the luxuriant summer leafage cast a grateful shade. Roger Orme sat in a wicker chair and fanned himself with his straw hat.

"Delightful!" he said. "And I smell stocks! It does carry me back. I wonder if I have been away at all."

"I'm afraid you have," said Winifred—"for twenty years."

"Well, I'm not going away again. I've had my share of work. And what's the good of work just to make money? I've made enough. I sold out before I left."

"But in your letters you always said you liked America."

"So I did. It's the only country in the world for the young and eager. If I had been born there, I should have no use for Dunsfield. But a man born and bred among old, sleepy things has the nostalgia of old, sleepy things in his blood. Now tell me about the sleepy old things. I want to hear."

"I think I have written to you about everything that ever happened in Dunsfield," she said.

But still there were gaps to be bridged in the tale of births and marriages and deaths, the main chronicles of the neighbourhood. He had a surprising memory, and plucked obscure creatures from the past whom even Winifred had forgotten.

"It's almost miraculous how you remember."

"It's a faculty I've had to cultivate," said he.

They talked about his immediate plans. He was going to put The Lodge into thorough repair, bring everything up-to-date, lay in electric light and a central heating installation, fix bathrooms wherever bathrooms would go, and find a place somewhere for a billiard-room. His surveyor had already made his report, and was to meet him at the house the following morning. As for decorations, curtaining, carpeting, and such-like æsthetic aspects, he was counting on Winifred's assistance. He thought that blues and browns would harmonise with the oak-panelling in the dining-room. Until the house was ready, his headquarters would be "The Red Lion."

"You see, I'm going to begin right now," said he.

She admired his vitality, his certainty of accomplishment. The Hall was still lit by lamps and candles; and although, on her return from a visit, she had often deplored the absence of electric light, she had shrunk from the strain and worry of an innovation. And here was Roger turning the whole house inside out more cheerfully than she would turn out a drawer.

"You'll help me, won't you?" he asked. "I want a home with a touch of the woman in it; I've lived so long in masculine stiffness."

"You know that I should love to do anything I could, Roger," she replied happily.

He remarked again that it was good to be back. No more letters—they were unsatisfactory, after all. He hoped she had not resented his business man's habit of typewriting. This was in the year of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-two, and, save for Roger's letters, typewritten documents came as seldom as judgment summonses to Duns Hall.

"We go ahead in America," said he.

"'The old order changeth, yielding place to new.' I accept it," she said with a smile.

"What I've longed for in Dunsfield," he said, "is the old order that doesn't change. I don't believe anything has changed."

She plucked up her courage. Now she would challenge him—get it over at once. She would watch his lips as he answered.

"I'm afraid I must have changed, Roger."

"In what way?"

"I am no longer twenty."

"Your voice is just the same."

Shocked, she put up her delicate hands. "Don't—it hurts!"

"What?"

"You needn't have put it that way—you might have told a polite lie."

He rose, turned aside, holding the back of the wicker chair.

"I've got something to tell you," he said abruptly. "You would have to find out soon, so you may as well know now. But don't be alarmed or concerned. I can't see your face."

"What do you mean?"

"I've been stone blind for fifteen years."

"Blind?"

She sat for some moments paralysed. It was inconceivable. This man was so strong, so alive, so masterful, with the bright face and keen, humorous eyes—and blind! A trivial undercurrent of thought ran subconsciously beneath her horror. She had wondered why he had insisted on sounds and scents, why he had kept his stick in his hand, why he had touched things—tables, window jambs, chairs—now she knew. Roger went on talking, and she heard him in a dream. He had not informed her when he was stricken, because he had wished to spare her unnecessary anxiety. Also, he was proud, perhaps hard, and resented sympathy. He had made up his mind to win through in spite of his affliction. For some years it had been the absorbing passion of his life. He had won through like many another, and, as the irreparable detachment of the retina had not disfigured his eyes, it was his joy to go through the world like a seeing man, hiding his blindness from the casual observer. By dictated letter he could never have made her understand how trifling a matter it was.

"And I've deceived even you!" he laughed.

Tears had been rolling down her cheeks. At his laugh she gave way. An answering choke, hysterical, filled her throat, and she burst into a fit of sobbing. He laid his hand tenderly on her head.

"My dear, don't. I am the happiest man alive. And, as for eyes, I'm rich enough to buy a hundred pairs. I'm a perfect Argus!"

But Winifred Goode wept uncontrollably. There was deep pity for him in her heart, but—never to be revealed to mortal—there was also horrible, terrifying joy. She gripped her hands and sobbed frantically to keep herself from laughter. A woman's sense of humour is often cruel, only to be awakened by tragic incongruities. She had passed through her month's agony and shame for a blind man.

At last she mastered herself. "Forgive me, dear Roger. It was a dreadful shock. Blindness has always been to me too awful for thought—like being buried alive."

"Not a bit of it," he said cheerily. "I've run a successful business in the dark—real estate—buying and selling and developing land, you know—a thing which requires a man to keep a sharp look-out, and which he couldn't do if he were buried alive. It's a confounded nuisance, I admit, but so is gout. Not half as irritating as the position of a man I once knew who had both hands cut off."

She shivered. "That's horrible."

"It is," said he, "but blindness isn't."

The maid appeared with the tea-tray, which she put on a rustic table. It was then that Winifred noticed the little proud awkwardness of the blind man. There was pathos in his insistent disregard of his affliction. The imperfectly cut lower half of a watercress sandwich fell on his coat and stayed there. She longed to pick it off, but did not dare, for fear of hurting him. He began to talk again of the house—the scheme of decoration.

"Oh, it all seems so sad!" she cried.

"What?"

"You'll not be able to see the beautiful things."

"Good Heavens," he retorted, "do you think I am quite devoid of imagination? And do you suppose no one will enter the house but myself?"

"I never thought of that," she admitted.

"As for the interior, I've got the plan in my head, and could walk about it now blindfold, only that's unnecessary; and when it's all fixed up, I'll have a ground model made of every room, showing every piece of furniture, so that, when I get in, I'll know the size, shape, colour, quality of every blessed thing in the house. You see if I don't."

"These gifts are a merciful dispensation of Providence."

"Maybe," said he drily. "Only they were about the size of bacteria when I started, and it took me years of incessant toil to develop them."

He asked to be shown around the garden. She took him up the gravelled walks beside her gay borders and her roses, telling him the names and varieties of the flowers. Once he stopped and frowned.

"I've lost my bearings. We ought to be passing under the shade of the old walnut tree."

"You are quite right," she said, marvelling at his accuracy. "It stood a few steps back, but it was blown clean down three years ago. It had been dead for a long time."

He chuckled as he strolled on. "There's nothing makes me so mad as to be mistaken."

Some time later, on their return to the terrace, he held out his hand.

"But you'll stay for dinner, Roger," she exclaimed. "I can't bear to think of you spending your first evening at home in that awful 'Red Lion.'"

"That's very dear of you, Winnie," he said, evidently touched by the softness in her voice. "I'll dine with pleasure, but I must get off some letters first. I'll come back. You've no objection to my bringing my man with me?"

"Why, of course not." She laid her hand lightly on his arm. "Oh, Roger, dear, I wish I could tell you how sorry I am, how my heart aches for you!"

"Don't worry," he said—"don't worry a little bit, and, if you really want to help me, never let me feel that you notice I'm blind. Forget it, as I do."

"I'll try," she said.

"That's right." He held her hand for a second or two, kissed it, and dropped it, abruptly. "God bless you!" said he. "It's good to be with you again."

When he was gone, Winifred Goode returned to her seat by the clipped yew and cried a little, after the manner of women. And, after the manner of women, she dreamed dreams oblivious of the flight of time till her maid came out and hurried her indoors.

She dressed with elaborate care, in her best and costliest, and wore more jewels than she would have done had her guest been of normal sight, feeling oddly shaken by the thought of his intense imaginative vision. In trying to fasten the diamond clasp of a velvet band round her neck, her fingers trembled so much that the maid came to her assistance. Her mind was in a whirl. Roger had left her a headstrong, dissatisfied boy. He had returned, the romantic figure of a conqueror, all the more romantic and conquering by reason of his triumph over the powers of darkness. In his deep affection she knew her place was secure. The few hours she had passed with him had shown her that he was a man trained in the significance not only of words, but also of his attitude towards individual men and women. He would not have said "God bless you!" unless he meant it. She appreciated to the full his masculine strength; she took to her heart his masculine tenderness; she had a woman's pity for his affliction; she felt unregenerate exultancy at the undetected crime of lost beauty, and yet she feared him on account of the vanished sense. She loved him with a passionate recrudescence of girlish sentiment; but the very thing that might have, that ought to have, that she felt it indecent not to have, inflamed all her woman's soul and thrown her reckless into his arms, raised between them an impalpable barrier against which she dreaded lest she might be dashed and bruised.

At dinner this feeling was intensified. Roger made little or no allusion to his blindness; he talked with the ease of the cultivated man of the world. He had humour, gaiety, charm. As a mere companion, she had rarely met, during her long seclusion, a man so instinctive in sympathy, so quick in diverting talk into a channel of interest. In a few flashing yet subtle questions, he learned what she wore. The diamond clasp to the black velvet band he recognized as having been her mother's. He complimented her delicately on her appearance, as though he saw her clearly, in the adorable twilight beauty that was really hers. There were moments when it seemed impossible that he should be blind. But behind his chair, silent, impassive, arresting, freezing, hovered his Chinese body-servant, capped, pig-tailed, loosely clad in white, a creature as unreal in Dunsfield as gnome or merman, who, with the unobtrusiveness of a shadow from another world, served, in the mechanics of the meal, as an accepted, disregarded, and unnoticed pair of eyes for his master. The noble Tudor dining-room, with its great carved oak chimney-piece, its stately gilt-framed portraits, its Jacobean sideboards and presses, all in the gloom of the spent illumination of the candles on the daintily-set table, familiar to her from her earliest childhood, part of her conception of the cosmos, part of her very self, seemed metamorphosed into the unreal, the phantasmagoric, by the presence of this white-clad, exotic figure—not a man, but an eerie embodiment of the sense of sight.

Her reason told her that the Chinese servant was but an ordinary serving-man, performing minutely specified duties for a generous wage. But the duties were performed magically, like conjuror's tricks. It was practically impossible to say who cut up Roger's meat, who helped him to salt or to vegetables, who guided his hand unerringly to the wine glass. So abnormally exquisite was the co-ordination between the two, that Roger seemed to have the man under mesmeric control. The idea bordered on the monstrous. Winifred shivered through the dinner, in spite of Roger's bright talk, and gratefully welcomed the change of the drawing-room, whither the white-vestured automaton did not follow.

"Will you do me a favour, Winnie?" he asked during the evening. "Meet me at The Lodge tomorrow at eleven, and help me interview these building people. Then you can have a finger in the pie from the very start."

She said somewhat tremulously: "Why do you want me to have a finger in the pie?"

"Good Heavens," he cried, "aren't you the only human creature in this country I care a straw about?"

"Is that true, Roger?"

"Sure," said he. After a little span of silence he laughed. "People on this side don't say 'sure.' That's sheer American."

"I like it," said Winifred.

When he parted from her, he again kissed her hand and again said: "God bless you!" She accompanied him to the hall, where the Chinaman, ghostly in the dimness, was awaiting him with hat and coat. Suddenly she felt that she abhorred the Chinaman.

That night she slept but little, striving to analyse her feelings. Of one fact only did the dawn bring certainty—that, for all her love of him, for all his charm, for all his tenderness towards her, during dinner she had feared him horribly.

She saw him the next morning in a new and yet oddly familiar phase. He was attended by his secretary, a pallid man with a pencil, note-book, and documents, for ever at his elbow, ghostly, automatic, during their wanderings with the surveyor through the bare and desolate old house.

She saw the master of men at work, accurate in every detail of a comprehensive scheme, abrupt, imperious, denying difficulties with harsh impatience. He leaned over his secretary and pointed to portions of the report just as though he could read them, and ordered their modification.

"Mr. Withers," he said once to the surveyor, who was raising objections, "I always get what I want because I make dead sure that what I want is attainable. I'm not an idealist. If I say a thing is to be done, it has got to be done, and it's up to you or to someone else to do it."

They went through the house from furnace to garret, the pallid secretary ever at Roger's elbow, ever rendering him imperceptible services, ever identifying himself with the sightless man, mysteriously following his thoughts, co-ordinating his individuality with that of his master. He was less a man than a trained faculty, like the Chinese servant. And again Winifred shivered and felt afraid.

More and more during the weeks that followed, did she realize the iron will and irresistible force of the man she loved. He seemed to lay a relentless grip on all those with whom he came in contact and compel them to the expression of himself. Only towards her was he gentle and considerate. Many times she accompanied him to London to the great shops, the self-effacing secretary shadow-like at his elbow, and discussed with him colours and materials, and he listened to her with affectionate deference. She often noticed that the secretary translated into other terms her description of things. This irritated her, and once she suggested leaving the secretary behind. Surely, she urged, she could do all that was necessary. He shook his head.

"No, my dear," he said very kindly. "Jukes sees for me. I shouldn't like you to see for me in the way Jukes does."

She was the only person from whom he would take advice or suggestion, and she rendered him great service in the tasteful equipment of the house and in the engagement of a staff of servants. So free a hand did he allow her in certain directions, so obviously and deliberately did he withdraw from her sphere of operations, that she was puzzled. It was not until later, when she knew him better, that the picture vaguely occurred to her of him caressing her tenderly with one hand, and holding the rest of the world by the throat with the other.

On the day when he took up his residence in the new home, they walked together through the rooms. In high spirits, boyishly elated, he gave her an exhibition of his marvellous gifts of memory, minutely describing each bit of furniture and its position in every room, the colour scheme, the texture of curtains, the pictures on the walls, the knick-knacks on mantlepieces and tables. And when he had done, he put his arm round her shoulders.

"But for you, Winnie," said he, "this would be the dreariest possible kind of place; but the spirit of you pervades it and makes it a fragrant paradise."

The words and tone were lover-like, and so was his clasp. She felt very near him, very happy, and her heart throbbed quickly. She was ready to give her life to him.

"You are making me a proud woman," she murmured.

He patted her shoulder and laughed as he released her.

"I only say what's true, my dear," he replied, and then abruptly skipped from sentiment to practical talk.

Winifred had a touch of dismay and disappointment. Tears started, which she wiped away furtively. She had made up her mind to accept him, in spite of Wang Fu and Mr. Jukes, if he should make her a proposal of marriage. She had been certain that the moment had come. But he made no proposal.

She waited. She waited a long time. In the meanwhile, she continued to be Roger's intimate friend and eagerly-sought companion. One day his highly-paid and efficient housekeeper came to consult her. The woman desired to give notice. Her place was too difficult. She could scarcely believe the master was blind. He saw too much, he demanded too much. She could say nothing explicit, save that she was frightened. She wept, after the nature of upset housekeepers. Winifred soothed her and advised her not to throw up so lucrative a post, and, as soon as she had an opportunity, she spoke to Roger. He laughed his usual careless laugh.

"They all begin that way with me, but after a while they're broken in. You did quite right to tell Mrs. Strode to stay."

And after a few months Winifred saw a change in Mrs. Strode, and not only in Mrs. Strode, but in all the servants whom she had engaged. They worked the household like parts of a flawless machine. They grew to be imperceptible, shadowy, automatic, like Wang Fu and Mr. Jukes.

*****

The months passed and melted into years. Roger Orme became a great personage in the neighbourhood. He interested himself in local affairs, served on the urban district council and on boards innumerable. They made him Mayor of Dunsfield. He subscribed largely to charities and entertained on a sumptuous scale. He ruled the little world, setting a ruthless heel on proud necks and making the humble his instruments. Mr. Jukes died, and other secretaries came, and those who were not instantly dismissed grew to be like Mr. Jukes. In the course of time Roger entered Parliament as member for the division. He became a force in politics, in public affairs. In the appointment of Royal Commissions, committees of inquiry, his name was the first to occur to ministers, and he was invariably respected, dreaded, and hated by his colleagues.

"Why do you work so hard, Roger?" Winifred would ask.

He would say, with one of his laughs: "Because there's a dynamo in me that I can't stop."

And all these years Miss Winifred Goode stayed at Duns Hall, leading her secluded, lavender-scented life when Roger was in London, and playing hostess for him, with diffident graciousness, when he entertained at The Lodge. His attitude towards her never varied, his need of her never lessened.

He never asked her to be his wife. At first she wondered, pined a little, and then, like a brave, proud woman, put the matter behind her. But she knew that she counted for much in his strange existence, and the knowledge comforted her. And as the years went on, and all the lingering shreds of youth left her, and she grew gracefully into the old lady, she came to regard her association with him as a spiritual marriage.

Then, after twenty years, the dynamo wore out the fragile tenement of flesh. Roger Orme, at sixty-five, broke down and lay on his death-bed. One day he sent for Miss Winifred Goode.

She entered the sick-room, a woman of sixty, white-haired, wrinkled, with only the beauty of a serene step across the threshold of old age. He bade the nurse leave them alone, and put out his hand and held hers as she sat beside the bed.

"What kind of a day is it, Winnie?"

"As if you didn't know! You've been told, I'm sure, twenty times."

"What does it matter what other people say? I want to get at the day through you."

"It's bright and sunny—a perfect day of early summer."

"What things are out?"

"The may and the laburnum and the lilac——"

"And the wistaria?"

"Yes, the wistaria."

"It's forty years ago, dear, and your voice is just the same. And to me you have always been the same. I can see you as you sit there, with your dear, sensitive face, the creamy cheek, in which the blood comes and goes—oh, Heavens, so different from the blowsy, hard-featured girls nowadays, who could not blush if—well—well——I know 'em, although I'm blind—I'm Argus, you know, dear. Yes, I can see you, with your soft, brown eyes and pale brown hair waved over your pure brow. There is a fascinating little kink on the left-hand side. Let me feel it."

She drew her head away, frightened. Then suddenly she remembered, with a pang of thankfulness, that the queer little kink had defied the years, though the pale brown hair was white. She guided his hand and he felt the kink, and he laughed in his old, exultant way.

"Don't you think I'm a miracle, Winnie?"

"You're the most wonderful man living," she said.

"I shan't be living long. No, my dear, don't talk platitudes. I know. I'm busted. And I'm glad I'm going before I begin to dodder. A seeing dodderer is bad enough, but a blind dodderer's only fit for the grave. I've lived my life. I've proved to this stupendous clot of ignorance that is humanity that a blind man can guide them wherever he likes. You know I refused a knighthood. Any tradesman can buy a knighthood—the only knighthoods that count are those that are given to artists and writers and men of science—and, if I could live, I'd raise hell over the matter, and make a differentiation in the titles of honour between the great man and the rascally cheesemonger——"

"My dear," said Miss Winifred Goode, "don't get so excited."

"I'm only saying, Winnie, that I refused a knighthood. But—what I haven't told you, what I'm supposed to keep a dead secret—if I could live a few weeks longer, and I shan't, I should be a Privy Councillor—a thing worth being. I've had the official intimation—a thing that can't be bought. Heavens, if I were a younger man, and there were the life in me, I should be the Prime Minister of this country—the first great blind ruler that ever was in the world. Think of it! But I don't want anything now. I'm done. I'm glad. The whole caboodle is but leather and prunella. There is only one thing in the world that is of any importance."

"What is that, dear?" she asked quite innocently, accustomed to, but never familiar with, his vehement paradox.

"Love," said he.

He gripped her hand hard. There passed a few seconds of tense silence.

"Winnie, dear," he said at last, "will you kiss me?"

She bent forward, and he put his arm round her neck and drew her to him. They kissed each other on the lips.

"It's forty years since I kissed you, dear—that day under the wistaria. And, now I'm dying, I can tell you. I've loved you all the time, Winnie. I'm a tough nut, as you know, and whatever I do I do intensely. I've loved you intensely, furiously."

She turned her head away, unable to bear the living look in the sightless eyes.

"Why did you never tell me?" she asked in a low voice.

"Would you have married me?"

"You know I would, Roger."

"At first I vowed I would say nothing," he said, after a pause, "until I had a fit home to offer you. Then the blindness came, and I vowed I wouldn't speak until I had conquered the helplessness of my affliction. Do you understand?"

"Yes, but when you came home a conqueror——"

"I loved you too much to marry you. You were far too dear and precious to come into the intimacy of my life. Haven't you seen what happened to all those who did?" He raised his old knotted hands, clenched tightly. "I squeezed them dry. I couldn't help it. My blindness made me a coward. It has been hell. The darkness never ceased to frighten me. I lied when I said it didn't matter. I stretched out my hands like tentacles and gripped everyone within reach in a kind of madness of self-preservation. I made them give up their souls and senses to me. It was some ghastly hypnotic power I seemed to have. When I had got them, they lost volition, individuality. They were about as much living creatures to me as my arm or my foot. Don't you see?"

The white-haired woman looked at the old face working passionately, and she felt once more the deadly fear of him.

"But with me it would have been different," she faltered. "You say you loved me."

"That's the devil of it, my sweet, beautiful Winnie—it wouldn't have been different. I should have squeezed you, too, reduced you to the helpless thing that did my bidding, sucked your life's blood from you. I couldn't have resisted. So I kept you away. Have I ever asked you to use your eyes for me?"

Her memory travelled down the years, and she was amazed. She remembered Mr. Jukes at the great shops and many similar incidents that had puzzled her.

"No," she said.

There was a short silence. The muscles of his face relaxed, and the old, sweet smile came over it. He reached again for her hand and caressed it tenderly.

"By putting you out of my life, I kept you, dear. I kept you as the one beautiful human thing I had. Every hour of happiness I have had for the last twenty years has come through you."

She said tearfully: "You have been very good to me, Roger."

"It's a queer mix-up, isn't it?" he said, after a pause. "Most people would say that I've ruined your life. If it hadn't been for me, you might have married."

"No, dear," she replied. "I've had a very full and happy life."

The nurse came into the room to signify the end of the visit, and found them hand in hand like lovers. He laughed.

"Nurse," said he, "you see a dying but a jolly happy old man!"

Two days afterwards Roger Orme died. On the afternoon of the funeral, Miss Winifred Goode sat in the old garden in the shade of the clipped yew, and looked at the house in which she had been born, and in which she had passed her sixty years of life, and at the old wistaria beneath which he had kissed her forty years ago. She smiled and murmured aloud:

"No, I would not have had a single thing different."

III
A LOVER'S DILEMMA

"How are you feeling now?"

Words could not express the music of these six liquid syllables that fell through the stillness and the blackness on my ears.

"Not very bright, I'm afraid, nurse," said I.

Think of something to do with streams and moonlight, and you may have an idea of the mellow ripple of the laugh I heard.

"I'm not the nurse. Can't you tell the difference? I'm Miss Deane—Dr. Deane's daughter."

"Deane?" I echoed.

"Don't you know where you are?"

"Every thing is still confused," said I.

I had an idea that they had carried me somewhere by train and put me into a bed, and that soft-fingered people had tended my eyes; but where I was I neither knew nor cared. Torture and blindness had been quite enough to occupy my mind.

"You are at Dr. Deane's house," said the voice, "and Dr. Deane is the twin brother of Mr. Deane, the great oculist of Grandchester, who was summoned to Shepton-Marling when you met with your accident. Perhaps you know you had a gun accident?"

"I suppose it was only that after all," said I, "but it felt like the disruption of the solar system."

"Are you still in great pain?" my unseen hostess asked sympathetically.

"Not since you have been in the room. I mean," I added, chilled by a span of silence, "I mean—I am just stating what happens to be a fact."

"Oh!" she said shortly. "Well, my uncle found that you couldn't be properly treated at your friend's little place at Shepton-Marling, so he brought you to Grandchester—and here you are."

"But I don't understand," said I, "why I should be a guest in your house."

"You are not a guest," she laughed. "You are here on the most sordid and commercial footing. Your friend—I forget his name——"

"Mobray," said I.

"Mr. Mobray settled it with my uncle. You see the house is large and father's practice small, as we keep a nursing home for my uncle's patients. Of course we have trained nurses."

"Are you one?" I asked.

"Not exactly. I do the housekeeping. But I can settle those uncomfortable pillows."

I felt her dexterous cool hands about my head and neck. For a moment or two my eyes ceased to ache, and I wished I could see her. In tendering my thanks, I expressed the wish. She laughed her delicious laugh.

"If you could see you wouldn't be here, and therefore you couldn't see me anyhow."

"Shall I ever see you?" I asked dismally.

"Why, of course! Don't you know that Henry Deane is one of the greatest oculists in England?"

We discussed my case and the miraculous skill of Henry Deane. Presently she left me, promising to return. The tones of her voice seemed to linger, as perfume would, in the darkness.

That was the beginning of it. It was love, not at first sight, but at first sound. Pain and anxiety stood like abashed goblins at the back of my mind. Valerie Deane's voice danced in front like a triumphant fairy. When she came and talked sick-room platitudes I had sooner listened to her than to the music of the spheres. At that early stage what she said mattered so little. I would have given rapturous heed to her reading of logarithmic tables. I asked her silly questions merely to elicit the witchery of her voice. When Melba sings, do you take count of the idiot words? You close eyes and intellect and just let the divine notes melt into your soul. And when you are lying on your back, blind and helpless, as I was, your soul is a very sponge for anything beautiful that can reach it. After a while she gave me glimpses of herself, sweet and womanly; and we drifted from commonplace into deeper things. She was the perfect companion. We discussed all topics, from chiffons to Schopenhauer. Like most women, she execrated Schopenhauer. She must have devoted much of her time to me; yet I ungratefully complained of the long intervals between her visits. But oh! those interminable idle hours of darkness, in which all the thoughts that had ever been thought were rethought over and over again until the mind became a worn-out rag-bag! Only those who have been through the valley of this shadow can know its desolation. Only they can understand the magic of the unbeheld Valerie Deane.

"What is the meaning of this?" she asked one morning. "Nurse says you are fretful and fractious."

"She insisted on soaping the soles of my feet and tickling me into torments, which made me fractious, and I'm dying to see your face, which makes me fretful."

"Since when have you been dying?" she asked.

"From the first moment I heard your voice saying, 'How are you feeling now?' It's irritating to have a friend and not in the least know what she is like. Besides," I added, "your voice is so beautiful that your face must be the same."

She laughed.

"Your face is like your laugh," I declared.

"If my face were my fortune I should come off badly," she said in a light tone. I think she was leaning over the foot-rail, and I longed for her nearer presence.

"Nurse has tied this bandage a little too tightly," I said mendaciously.

I heard her move, and in a moment her fingers were busy about my eyes. I put up my hand and touched them. She patted my hand away.

"Please don't be foolish," she remarked. "When you recover your sight and find what an exceedingly plain girl I am, you'll go away like the others, and never want to see me again."

"What others?" I exclaimed.

"Do you suppose you're the only patient I have had to manage?"

I loathed "the others" with a horrible detestation; but I said, after reflection:

"Tell me about yourself. I know you are called Valerie from Dr. Deane. How old are you?"

She pinned the bandage in front of my forehead.

"Oh, I'm young enough," she answered with a laugh. "Three-and-twenty. And I'm five-foot-four, and I haven't a bad figure. But I haven't any good looks at all, at all."

"Tell me," said I impatiently, "exactly how you do look. I must know."

"I have a sallow complexion. Not very good skin. And a low forehead."

"An excellent thing," said I.

"But my eyebrows and hair run in straight parallel lines, so it isn't," she retorted. "It is very ugly. I have thin black hair."

"Let me feel."

"Certainly not. And my eyes are a sort of watery china blue and much too small. And my nose isn't a bad nose altogether, but it's fleshy. One of those nondescript, unaristocratic noses that always looks as if it has got a cold. My mouth is large—I am looking at myself in the glass—my my teeth are white. Yes, they are nice and white. But they are large and protrude—you know the French caricature of an Englishwoman's teeth. Really, now I consider the question, I am the image of the English mees in a French comic paper."

"I don't believe it," I declared.

"It is true. I know I have a pretty voice—but that is all. It deceives blind people. They think I must be pretty too, and when they see me—bon soir, la compagnie! And I've such a thin, miserable face, coming to the chin in a point, like a kite. There! Have you a clear idea of me now?"

"No," said I, "for I believe you are wilfully misrepresenting yourself. Besides, beauty does not depend upon features regular in themselves, but the way those features are put together."

"Oh, mine are arranged in an amiable sort of way. I don't look cross."

"You must look sweetness itself," said I.

She sighed and said meditatively:

"It is a great misfortune for a girl to be so desperately plain. The consciousness of it comes upon her like a cold shower-bath when she is out with other girls. Now there is my cousin——"

"Which cousin?"

"My Uncle Henry's daughter. Shall I tell you about her?"

"I am not in the least interested in your cousin," I replied.

She laughed, and the entrance of the nurse put an end to the conversation.

Now I must make a confession. I was grievously disappointed. Her detailed description of herself as a sallow, ill-featured young woman awoke me with a shock from my dreams of a radiant goddess. It arrested my infatuation in mid-course. My dismay was painful. I began to pity her for being so unattractive. For the next day or two even her beautiful voice failed in its seduction.

But soon a face began to dawn before me, elusive at first, and then gradually gaining in definition. At last the picture flashed upon my mental vision with sudden vividness, and it has never left me to this day. Its steadfastness convinced me of its accuracy. It was so real that I could see its expression vary, as she spoke, according to her mood. The plainness, almost ugliness, of the face repelled me. I thought ruefully of having dreamed of kisses from the lips that barely closed in front of the great white teeth. Yet, after a while, its higher qualities exercised a peculiar attraction. A brave, tender spirit shone through. An intellectual alertness redeemed the heavy features—the low ugly brow, the coarse nose, the large mouth; and as I lay thinking and picturing there was revealed in an illuminating flash the secret of the harmony between face and voice. Thenceforward Valerie Deane was invested with a beauty all her own. I loved the dear plain face as I loved the beautiful voice, and the touch of her fingers, and the tender, laughing womanliness, and all that went with the concept of Valerie Deane.

Had I possessed the daring of Young Lochinvar, I should, on several occasions, have declared my passion. But by temperament I am a diffident procrastinator. I habitually lose golden moments as some people habitually lose umbrellas. Alas! There is no Lost Property Office for golden moments!

Still I vow, although nothing definite was said, that when the unanticipated end drew near, our intercourse was arrant love-making.

All pain had gone from my eyes. I was up and dressed and permitted to grope my way about the blackness. To-morrow I was to have my first brief glimpse of things for three weeks, in the darkened room. I was in high spirits. Valerie, paying her morning visit, seemed depressed.

"But think of it!" I cried in pardonable egotism. "To-morrow I shall be able to see you. I've longed for it as much as for the sight of the blue sky."

"There isn't any blue sky," said Valerie. "It's an inverted tureen that has held pea-soup."

Her voice had all the melancholy notes of the woodwind in the unseen shepherd's lament in "Tristan und Isolde."

"I don't know how to tell you," she exclaimed tragically, after a pause. "I shan't be here to-morrow. It's a bitter disappointment. My aunt in Wales is dying. I have been telegraphed for, and I must go."

She sat on the end of the couch where I was lounging, and took my hands.

"It isn't my fault."

My spirits fell headlong.

"I would just as soon keep blind," said I blankly.

"I thought you would say that."

A tear dropped on my hand. I felt that it was brutal of her aunt to make Valerie cry. Why could she not postpone her demise to a more suitable opportunity? I murmured, however, a few decent words of condolence.

"Thank you, Mr. Winter," said Valerie. "I am fond of my aunt; but I had set my heart on your seeing me. And she may not die for weeks and weeks! She was dying for ever so long last year, and got round again."

I ventured an arm about her shoulders, and spoke consolingly. The day would come when our eyes would meet. I called her Valerie and bade her address me as Harold.

I have come to the conclusion that the man who strikes out a new line in love-making is a genius.

"If I don't hurry I shall miss my train," she sighed at last.

She rose; I felt her bend over me. Her hands closed on my cheeks, and a kiss fluttered on my lips. I heard the light swish of her skirts and the quick opening and shutting of the door, and she was gone.

Valerie's aunt, like King Charles II, was an unconscionable time a-dying. When a note from Valerie announced her return to Grandchester, I had already gone blue-spectacled away. For some time I was not allowed to read or write, and during this period of probation urgent affairs summoned me to Vienna. Such letters as I wrote to Valerie had to be of the most elementary nature. If you have a heart of any capacity worth troubling about, you cannot empty it on one side of a sheet of notepaper. For mine reams would have been inadequate. I also longed to empty it in her presence, my eyes meeting hers for the first time. Thus, ever haunted by the beloved plain face and the memorable voice, I remained inarticulate.

As soon as my business was so far adjusted that I could leave Vienna, I started on a flying visit, post-haste, to England. The morning after my arrival beheld me in a railway carriage at Euston waiting for the train to carry me to Grandchester. I had telegraphed to Valerie; also to Mr. Deane, the oculist, for an appointment which might give colour to my visit. I was alone in the compartment. My thoughts, far away from the long platform, leaped the four hours that separated me from Grandchester. For the thousandth time I pictured our meeting. I foreshadowed speeches of burning eloquence. I saw the homely features transfigured. I closed my eyes the better to retain the beatific vision. The train began to move. Suddenly the door was opened, a girlish figure sprang into the compartment, and a porter running by the side of the train, threw in a bag and a bundle of wraps, and slammed the door violently. The young lady stood with her back to me, panting for breath. The luggage lay on the floor. I stooped to pick up the bag; so did the young lady. Our hands met as I lifted it to the rack.

"Oh, please, don't trouble!" she cried in a voice whose familiarity made my heart beat.

I caught sight of her face, for the first time, and my heart beat faster than ever. It was her face—the face that had dawned upon my blindness—the face I had grown to worship. I looked at her, transfixed with wonder. She settled herself unconcerned in the farther corner of the carriage. I took the opposite seat and leaned forward.

"You are Miss Deane?" I asked tremulously.

She drew herself up, on the defensive.

"That is my name," she said.

"Valerie!" I cried in exultation.

She half rose. "What right have you to address me?"

"I am Harold Winter," said I, taken aback by her outraged demeanour. "Is it possible that you don't recognize me?"

"I have never seen or heard of you before in my life," replied the young lady tartly, "and I hope you won't force me to take measures to protect myself against your impertinence."

I lay back against the cushions, gasping with dismay.

"I beg your pardon," said I, recovering; "I am neither going to molest you nor be intentionally impertinent. But, as your face has never been out of my mind for three months, and as I am travelling straight through from Vienna to Grandchester to see it for the first time, I may be excused for addressing you."

She glanced hurriedly at the communication-cord and then back at me, as if I were a lunatic.

"You are Miss Deane of Grandchester—daughter of Dr. Deane?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Valerie Deane, then?"

"I have told you so."

"Then all I can say is," I cried, losing my temper at her stony heartlessness, "that your conduct in turning an honest, decent man into a besotted fool, and then disclaiming all knowledge of him, is outrageous. It's damnable. The language hasn't a word to express it!"

She stood with her hand on the cord.

"I shall really have to call the guard," she said, regarding me coolly.

"You are quite free to do so," I answered. "But if you do, I shall have to show your letters, in sheer self-defence. I am not going to spend the day in a police-station."

She let go the cord and sat down again.

"What on earth do you mean?" she asked.

I took a bundle of letters from my pocket and tossed one over to her. She glanced at it quickly, started, as if in great surprise, and handed it back with a smile.

"I did not write that."

I thought I had never seen her equal for unblushing impudence. Her mellow tones made the mockery appear all the more diabolical.

"If you didn't write it," said I, "I should like to know who did."

"My Cousin Valerie."

"I don't understand," said I.

"My name is Valerie Deane and my cousin's name is Valerie Deane, and this is her handwriting."

Bewildered, I passed my hand over my eyes. What feline trick was she playing? Her treachery was incomprehensible.

"I suppose it was your Cousin Valerie who tended me during my blindness at your father's house, who shed tears because she had to leave me, who——"

"Quite possibly," she interrupted. "Only it would have been at her father's house and not mine. She does tend blind people, my father's patients."

I looked at her open-mouthed. "In the name of Heaven," I exclaimed, "who are you, if not the daughter of Dr. Deane of Stavaton Street?"

"My father is Mr. Henry Deane, the oculist. You asked if I were the daughter of Dr. Deane. So many people give him the wrong title I didn't trouble to correct you."

It took me a few moments to recover. I had been making a pretty fool of myself. I stammered out pleas for a thousand pardons. I confused myself, and her, in explanation. Then I remembered that the fathers were twin brothers and bore a strong resemblance one to the other. What more natural than that the daughters should also be alike?

"What I can't understand," said Miss Deane, "is how you mistook me for my cousin."

"Your voices are identical."

"But our outer semblances——"

"I have never seen your cousin—she left me before I recovered my sight."

"How then could you say you had my face before you for three months?"

"I am afraid, Miss Deane, I was wrong in that as in everything else. It was her face. I had a mental picture of it."

She put on a puzzled expression. "And you used the mental picture for the purpose of recognition?"

"Yes," said I.

"I give it up," said Miss Deane.

She did not press me further. Her Cousin Valerie's love affairs were grounds too delicate for her to tread upon. She turned the conversation by politely asking me how I had come to consult her father. I mentioned my friend Mobray and the gun accident. She remembered the case and claimed a slight acquaintance with Mobray, whom she had met at various houses in Grandchester. My credit as a sane and reputable person being established, we began to chat most amicably. I found Miss Deane an accomplished woman. We talked books, art, travel. She had the swift wit which delights in bridging the trivial and the great. She had a playful fancy. Never have I found a personality so immediately sympathetic. I told her a sad little Viennese story in which I happened to have played a minor part, and her tenderness was as spontaneous as Valerie's—my Valerie's. She had Valerie's woodland laugh. Were it not that her personal note, her touch on the strings of life differed essentially from my beloved's, I should have held it grotesquely impossible for any human being but Valerie to be sitting in the opposite corner of that railway carriage. Indeed there were moments when she was Valerie, when the girl waiting for me at Grandchester faded into the limbo of unreal things. A kiss from those lips had fluttered on mine. It were lunacy to doubt it.

During intervals of non-illusion I examined her face critically. There was no question of its unattractiveness to the casual observer. The nose was too large and fleshy, the teeth too prominent, the eyes too small. But my love had pierced to its underlying spirituality, and it was the face above all others that I desired.

Toward the end of a remarkably short four hours' journey, Miss Deane graciously expressed the hope that we might meet again.

"I shall ask Valerie," said I, "to present me in due form."

She smiled maliciously. "Are you quite sure you will be able to distinguish one from the other when my cousin and I are together?"

"Are you, then, so identically alike?"

"That's a woman's way of answering a question—by another question," she laughed.

"Well, but are you?" I persisted.

"How otherwise could you have mistaken me for her?" She had drawn off her gloves, so as to give a tidying touch to her hair. I noticed her hands, small, long, and deft. I wondered whether they resembled Valerie's.

"Would you do me the great favour of letting me touch your hand while I shut my eyes, as if I were blind?"

She held out her hand frankly. My fingers ran over it for a few seconds, as they had done many times over Valerie's. "Well?" she asked.

"Not the same," said I.

She flushed, it seemed angrily, and glanced down at her hand, on which she immediately proceeded to draw a glove.

"Yours are stronger. And finer," I added, when I saw that the tribute of strength did not please.

"It's the one little personal thing I am proud of," she remarked.

"You have made my four hours pass like four minutes," said I. "A service to a fellow-creature which you might take some pride in having performed."

"When I was a child I could have said the same of performing elephants."

"I am no longer a child, Miss Deane," said I with a bow.

What there was in this to make the blood rush to her pale cheeks I do not know. The ways of women have often surprised me. I have heard other men make a similar confession.

"I think most men are children," she said shortly.

"In what way?"

"Their sweet irresponsibility," said Miss Deane.

And then the train entered Grandchester Station.

I deposited my bag at the station hotel and drove straight to Stavaton Street. I forgot Miss Deane. My thoughts and longings centred in her beloved counterpart, with her tender, caressing ways, and just a subtle inflection in the voice that made it more exquisite than the voice to which I had been listening.

The servant who opened the door recognized me and smiled a welcome. Miss Valerie was in the drawing-room.

"I know the way," said I.

Impetuous, I ran up the stairs, burst into the drawing-room, and stopped short on the threshold in presence of a strange and exceedingly beautiful young woman. She was stately and slender. She had masses of bright brown hair waving over a beautiful brow. She had deep sapphire eyes, like stars. She had the complexion of a Greuze child. She had that air of fairy diaphaneity combined with the glow of superb health which makes the typical loveliness of the Englishwoman. I gaped for a second or two at this gracious apparition.

"I beg your pardon," said I; "I was told—"

The apparition who was standing by the fireplace smiled and came forward with extended hands.

"Why, Harold! Of course you were told. It is all right. I am Valerie."

I blinked; the world seemed upside down; the enchanting voice rang in my ears, but it harmonized in no way with the equally enchanting face. I put out my hand. "How do you do?" I said stupidly.

"But aren't you glad to see me?" asked the lovely young woman.

"Of course," said I; "I came from Vienna to see you."

"But you look disappointed."

"The fact is," I stammered, "I expected to see some one different—quite different. The face you described has been haunting me for three months."

She had the effrontery to laugh. Her eyes danced mischief.

"Did you really think me such a hideous fright?"

"You were not a fright at all," said I, remembering my late travelling companion.

And then in a flash I realised what she had done.

"Why on earth did you describe your cousin instead of yourself?"

"My cousin! How do you know that?"

"Never mind," I answered. "You did. During your description you had her face vividly before your mind. The picture was in some telepathic way transferred from your brain to mine, and there it remained. The proof is that when I saw a certain lady to-day I recognised her at once and greeted her effusively as Valerie. Her name did happen to be Valerie, and Valerie Deane too, and I ran the risk of a police-station—and I don't think it was fair of you. What prompted you to deceive me?"

I was hurt and angry, and I spoke with some acerbity. Valerie drew herself up with dignity.

"If you claim an explanation, I will give it to you. We have had young men patients in the house before, and, as they had nothing to do, they have amused themselves and annoyed me by falling in love with me. I was tired of it, and decided that it shouldn't happen in your case. So I gave a false description of myself. To make it consistent, I took a real person for a model."

"So you were fooling me all the time?" said I, gathering hat and stick.

Her face softened adorably. Her voice had the tones of the wood-wind.

"Not all the time, Harold," she said.

I laid down hat and stick.

"Then why did you not undeceive me afterward?"

"I thought," she said, blushing and giving me a fleeting glance, "well, I thought you—you wouldn't be sorry to find I wasn't—bad looking."

"I am sorry, Valerie," said I, "and that's the mischief of it."

"I was so looking forward to your seeing me," she said tearfully. And then, with sudden petulance, she stamped her small foot. "It is horrid of you—perfectly horrid—and I never want to speak to you again." The last word ended in a sob. She rushed to the door, pushed me aside, as I endeavoured to stop her, and fled in a passion of tears. Spretæ injuria formæ! Women have remained much the same since the days of Juno.

A miserable, remorseful being, I wandered through the Grandchester streets, to keep my appointment with Mr. Henry Deane. After a short interview he dismissed me with a good report of my eyes. Miss Deane, dressed for walking, met me in the hall as the servant was showing me out, and we went together into the street.

"Well," she said with a touch of irony, "have you seen my cousin?"

"Yes," said I.

"Do you think her like me?"

"I wish to Heaven she were!" I exclaimed fervently. "I shouldn't be swirling round in a sort of maelstrom."

She looked steadily at me—I like her downrightness.

"Do you mind telling me what you mean?"

"I am in love with the personality of one woman and the face of another. And I never shall fall out of love with the face."

"And the personality?"

"God knows," I groaned.

"I never conceived it possible for any man to fall in love with a face so hopelessly unattractive," she said with a smile.

"It is beautiful," I cried.

She looked at me queerly for a few seconds, during which I had the sensation of something odd, uncanny having happened. I was fascinated. I found myself saying: "What did you mean by the 'sweet irresponsibility of man'?"

She put out her hand abruptly and said good-bye. I watched her disappear swiftly round a near corner, and I went, my head buzzing with her, back to my hotel. In the evening I dined with Dr. Deane. I had no opportunity of seeing Valerie alone. In a whisper she begged forgiveness. I relented. Her beauty and charm would have mollified a cross rhinoceros. The love in her splendid eyes would have warmed a snow image. The pressure of her hand at parting brought back the old Valerie, and I knew I loved her desperately. But inwardly I groaned, because she had not the face of my dreams. I hated her beauty. As soon as the front door closed behind me, my head began to buzz again with the other Valerie.

I lay awake all night. The two Valeries wove themselves inextricably together in my hopes and longings. I worshipped a composite chimera. When the grey dawn stole through my bedroom window, the chimera vanished, but a grey dubiety dawned upon my soul. Day invested it with a ghastly light. I rose a shivering wreck and fled from Grandchester by the first train.

I have not been back to Grandchester. I am in Vienna, whither I returned as fast as the Orient Express could carry me. I go to bed praying that night will dispel my doubt. I wake every morning to my adamantine indecision. That I am consuming away with love for one of the two Valeries is the only certain fact in my uncertain existence. But which of the Valeries it is I cannot for the life of me decide.

If any woman (it is beyond the wit of man) could solve my problem and save me from a hopeless and lifelong celibacy she would earn my undying gratitude.

IV
A WOMAN OF THE WAR

It was a tiny room at the top of what used to be a princely London mansion, the home of a great noble—a tiny room, eight feet by five, the sleeping-receptacle, in the good old days, for some unconsidered scullery-maid or under-footman. The walls were distempered and bare; the furniture consisted of a camp-bed, a chair, a deal chest of drawers, and a wash-stand—everything spotless. There was no fireplace. An aerial cell of a room, yet the woman in nurse's uniform who sat on the bed pressing her hands to burning eyes and aching brows thanked God for it. She thanked God for the privacy of it. Had she been a mere nurse, she would have had the third share of a large, comfortable bedroom, with a fire on bitter winter nights. But, as a Sister, she had a room to herself. Thank God she was alone! Coldly, stonily, silently alone.

The expected convoy of wounded officers had been late, and she had remained on duty beyond her hour, so as to lend a hand. Besides, she was not on the regular staff of the private hospital. She had broken a much needed rest from France to give temporary relief from pressure; so an extra hour or two did not matter.

The ambulances at length arrived. Some stretcher-cases, some walking. Among the latter was one, strongly knit, athletic, bandaged over the entire head and eyes, and led like a blind man by orderlies. When she first saw him in the vestibule, his humorous lips and resolute chin, which were all of his face unhidden, seemed curiously familiar; but during the bustle of installation, the half-flash of memory became extinct. It was only later, when she found that this head-bandaged man was assigned to her care, that she again took particular notice of him. Now that his overcoat had been taken off, she saw a major's crown on the sleeve of his tunic, and on the breast the ribbons of the D.S.O. and the M.C. He was talking to the matron.

"They did us proud all the way. Had an excellent dinner. It's awfully kind of you; but I want nothing more, I assure you, save just to get into bed and sleep like a dog."

And then she knew, in a sudden electric shock of certainty.

Half dazed, she heard the matron say,

"Sister, this is Major Shileto, of the Canadian army."

Half dazed, too, she took his gropingly outstretched hand. The gesture, wide of the mark, struck her with terror. She controlled herself. The matron consulted her typed return-sheet and ran off the medical statement of his injuries.

Major Shileto laughed.

"My hat! If I've got all that the matter with me, why didn't they bury me decently in France?"

She was rent by the gay laughter. When the matron turned away, she followed her.

"He isn't blind, is he?"

The matron, to whose naturally thin, pinched face worry and anxiety had added a touch of shrewishness, swung round on her.

"I thought you were a medical student. Is there anything about blindness here?" She smote the typed pages. "Of course not!"

The night staff being on duty, she had then fled the ward and mounted up the many stairs to the little room where she now sat, her hands to her eyes. Thank God he was not blind, and thank God she was alone!

But it had all happened a hundred years ago. Well, twenty years at least. In some vague period of folly before the war. Yet, after all, she was only five and twenty. When did it happen? She began an agonized calculation of dates——

She had striven almost successfully to put the miserable episode out of her mind, to regard that period of her life as a phase of a previous existence. Since the war began, carried on the flood-tide of absorbing work, she had had no time to moralize on the past. When it came before her in odd moments, she had sent it packing into the limbo of deformed and hateful things. And now the man with the gay laughter and the distinguished soldier's record had brought it all back, horribly vivid. For the scared moments, it was as though the revolutionary war-years had never been. She saw herself again the Camilla Warrington whom she had sought contemptuously to bury.

Had there been but a musk grain of beauty in that Camilla's story, she would have cherished the fragrance; but it had all been so ignoble and stupid. It had begun with her clever girlhood. The London University matriculation. The first bachelor-of-science degree. John Donovan, the great surgeon, a friend of her parents, had encouraged her ambitions toward a medical career. She became a student at the Royal Free Hospital, of the consulting staff of which John Donovan was a member. For the first few months, all went well. She boarded near by, in Bloomsbury, with a vague sort of aunt and distant cousins, folks of unimpeachable repute. Then, fired by the independent theories and habits of a couple of fellow students, she left the home of dull respectability and joined them in the slatternly bohemia of a Chelsea slum.

Oh, there was excuse for her youthful ardency to know all that there was to be known in the world at once! But if she had used her excellent brains, she would have realized that all that is to be known in the world could not be learned in her new environment. The unholy crew—they called it "The Brotherhood"—into which she plunged consisted of the dregs of a decadent art-world, unclean in person and in ethics. At first, she revolted. But the specious intellectuality of the crew fascinated her. Hitherto, she had seen life purely from the scientific angle. Material cause, material effect. On material life, art but an excrescence. She had been carelessly content to regard it merely as an interpretation of Beauty—to her, almost synonymous with prettiness.

At the various meeting-places of the crew, who talked with the interminability of a Russian Bolshevik, she learned a surprising lot of things about art that had never entered into her philosophy. She learned, or tried to learn—though her intelligence boggled fearfully at it—that the most vital thing in existence was the decomposition of phenomena, into interesting planes. All things in nature were in motion—as a scientific truth, she was inclined to accept the proposition; but the proclaimed fact that the representation of the Lucretian theory of fluidity by pictorial diagrams of intersecting planes was destined to revolutionize human society was beyond her comprehension. Still, it was vastly interesting. They got their plane-system into sculpture, into poetry, in some queer way into sociology.

A dingy young painter, meagerly hirsute, and a pallid young woman of anarchical politics assembled the crew one evening and, taking hands, announced the fact of their temporary marriage. The temporary bridegroom made a speech which was enthusiastically acclaimed. Their association was connected (so Camilla understood) with some sublime quality inherent in the intersecting planes. In these various pairings gleamed none of the old Latin Quarter joyousness. Their immorality was most austere.

To Camilla, it was all new and startling—a phantasmagorical world. Free love the merest commonplace. And, after a short while, into this poisonous atmosphere wherein she dwelt there came two influences. One was the vigilancy of the Women's Social and Political Union; the other, Harry Shileto, a young architect, a healthy man in the midst of an unhealthy tribe.

First, young Shileto. It is not that he differed much from the rest of the crew in crazy theory. He maintained, like everyone else, that Raphael and Brunelleschi had retarded the progress of the world for a thousand years; he despised Debussy for a half-hearted anarchist; he lamented the failure of the architectural iconoclasts of the late 'Nineties; his professed contempt for all human activities outside the pale of the slum was colossal; on the slum marriage-theory he was sound, nay, enthusiastic. But he was physically clean, physically good-looking, a man. And as Camilla, too, practised cleanliness of person, they were drawn together.

And, at the same time, the cold, relentless hand of the great feminist organization got her in its grip. Blindly acting under orders, she interrupted meetings, broke windows, went to prison, shrieked at street-corners the independence of her sex. And then she came down on the bed-rock of a sex by no means so independent—on the contrary, imperiously, tyrannically dependent on hers. The theories of the slum, uncompromisingly suffragist, were all very well; they might be practised with impunity by the anemic and slatternly; but when Harry Shileto entered into the quasi-marriage bond with Camilla, the instinct of the honest Briton clamored for the comforts of a home. As all the time that she could spare from the neglect of her studies at the hospital was devoted to feminist rioting, and a mere rag of a thing came back at night to the uncared-for flat, the young man rebelled.

"You can't love and look after me and fool about in prison at the same time. The two things don't hold together."

And Camilla, her nerves a jangle,

"I am neither your odalisk nor your housekeeper; so your remark does not apply."

Oh, the squalid squabbles! And then, at last,

"Camilla"—he gave her a letter to read—"I'm fed up with all this rot."

She glanced over the letter.

"Are you going to accept this post in Canada?" she asked sourly.

"Not if you promise to chuck the militant business and also these epicene freaks in Chelsea. I should like you to carry on at the hospital until you're qualified."

"You seem to forget," she said, "that I'm like a soldier under orders. If necessary, I must sacrifice my medical career. I also think your remarks about The Brotherhood simply beastly. I'll do no such thing."

Eventually it came to this:

"I don't care whether women get the vote or not. I think our Chelsea friends are the most pestilential set of rotters on the face of the earth. I've got my way to make in the world. Help me to do it. Let us get married in decent fashion and go out together."

"I being just the appanage of the rising young architect? Thank you for the insult."

And so the argument went on until he delivered his ultimatum:

"If I don't get a sensible message by twelve o'clock to-morrow at the club, I'll never see or hear of you as long as I live."

He went out of the flat. She sent no message. He did not return. After a while, a lawyer came and equitably adjusted joint financial responsibilities. And that was the end of the romance—if romance it could be termed. From that day to this, Harry Shileto had vanished from her ken.

His exit had been the end of the romance; but it had marked the beginning of tragedy. A man can love and, however justifiably, ride away—gloriously free. But the woman, for all her clamoring insistence, has to pay the debt from which man is physically exempt. Harry Shileto had already arrived in Canada when Camilla discovered the dismaying fact of her sex's disability. But her pride kept her silent, and of the child born in secret and dead within a fortnight, Harry Shileto never heard. Then, after a few months of dejection and loss of bearings and lassitude, the war thundered on the world. Her friend, John Donovan, the surgeon, was going out to France. She went to him and said: "I've wasted my time. It will take years for me to qualify. Let me go out and nurse." So, through his influence, she had stepped into the midst of the suffering of the war, and there she still remained and found great happiness in great work.

At length she drew her hands from her brow and went and poured out some water, for her throat was parched. On catching sight of herself in the mirror, she paused. She was pale and worn, and there were hollows beneath her eyes, catching shadows, but the war had not altogether marred her face. She took off her uniform-cap and revealed dark hair, full and glossy. She half wondered why the passage of a hundred years had not turned it white. Then she sat again on the bed and gripped her hands together.

"My God, what am I going to do?"

Had she loved him? She did not know. Her association with him could not have been entirely the callous execution of a social theory. There must have been irradiating gleams. Or had she wilfully excluded them from her soul? Once she had needed him and cried for him; but that was in an hour of weakness which she had conquered. And now, how could she face him? Still less, live in that terrible intimacy of patient and nurse? Oh, the miserable shame of it! All her womanhood shivered. Yet she must go through the ordeal. His bandaged eyes promised a short time of probation.

In the morning, after a restless night, she pulled herself together. After all, what need for such a commotion? If the three and a half years of war had not taught her dignity and self-reliance, she had learned but little.

There were four beds in the ward. Two on the right were occupied by officers, one with an arm-wound, another with a hole through his body. The third on the left by a pathetic-looking boy with a shattered knee, which, as the night Sister told her, gave him unceasing pain. The fourth by Major Shileto. To him she went first and whispered:

"I'm the day Sister. What kind of a night have you had?"

"Splendid!" His lips curled in a pleasant smile. "Just one long, beautiful blank."

"And the head?"

"Jammy. That's what it feels like. How it looks, I don't know."

"We'll see later when I do the dressings."

She went off to the boy. He also was a Canadian officer, and his name was Robin McKay. She lingered awhile in talk.

"Strikes me my military career is over, and I'll just have to hump round real estate in Winnipeg on a wooden leg."

"They aren't going to cut your leg off, you silly boy!" she laughed. "And what do you mean by 'humping round real estate?'"

"I'm a land surveyor. That's to say, my father is. See here: When are they going to send me back? I'm afraid of this country."

"Why?"

"It's so lonesome. I don't know a soul."

"We'll fix that up all right for you," she said cheerily. "Don't worry."

The morning routine of the hospital began. In its appointed course came the time for dressings. Camilla, her nerves under control, went to Shileto.

"I've got to worry you, but I'll try to hurt as little as I can."

"Go ahead. Never mind me."

A probationer stood by, serving the laden wheel-table. At first, the symmetrically bandaged head seemed that of a thousand cases with which she had dealt. But when the crisp brown hair came to view, her hand trembled ever so little. She avoided touching it as far as was possible, for she remembered its feel. Dead, forgotten words rose lambent in her memory: "It crackles like a cat's back. Let me see if there are sparks."

But in the midst of a great shaven patch there was a horrible scalp-wound which claimed her deftest skill. And she worked with steady fingers and uncovered the maimed brows and eyelids and cheekbones. How the sight had been preserved was a miracle. She cleansed the wounds with antiseptics and freed the eyelashes. She bent over him with deliberate intent.

"You can open your eyes for a second or two. You can see all right?"

"Rather. I can see your belt."

"Hold on, then."

With her swift craft, she blindfolded him anew, completed the bandaging, laid him back on his pillow, and went off with the probationer, wheeling the table to the other cases.

Later in the day, she was doing him some trivial service.

"What's the good of lying in bed all day?" he asked. "I want to get up and walk about."

"You've got a bit of a temperature."

"How much?"

"Ninety-nine point eight."

"Call that a temperature? I've gone about with a hundred and three."

"When was that?"

"When I first went out to Canada. I'm English, you know—only left the Old Country in Nineteen thirteen. But, when the war broke out, I joined up with the first batch of Canadians—lucky to start with a commission. Lord, it was hell's delight!"

"So I've been given to understand," said Camilla. "But what about your temperature of a hundred and three?"

"I was a young fool," said he, "and I didn't care what happened to me."

"Why?" she asked.

For a while he did not answer. He bit his lower lip, showing just a fine line of white teeth. Memory again clutched her. She was also struck by his unconscious realization of the aging quality of the war in that he spoke of his Nineteen-thirteen self as "a young fool." So far as that went, they thought in common.

Presently he said,

"Your voice reminds me of some one I used to know."

"Where?"

"Oh, here, in London."

She lied instinctively, with a laugh.

"It couldn't have been me. I've only just come to London—and I've never met Major Shileto before in my life."

"Of course not," he asserted readily. "But I had no idea two human voices could be so nearly identical."

"Still," she remarked, "you haven't told me of the temperature of a hundred and three."

"Oh, it is no story. Your voice brought it all back. You've heard of a man's own angry pride being cap and bells for a fool? Well"—he laughed apologetically—"it's idiotic. There's no point in it. I just went about for a week in a Canadian winter with that temperature—that's all."

"Because you couldn't bear to lie alone and think?"

"That's about it."

"Sister!" cried the boy, Robin McKay, from the next bed.

She obeyed the summons. What was the matter?

"Everything seems to have got mixed up, and my knee's hurting like fury."

She attended to his crumpled bedclothes, cracked a little joke which made him laugh. Then the two other men claimed her notice. She carried on her work outwardly calm, smiling, self-reliant, the perfectly trained woman of the war. But her heart was beating in an unaccustomed way.

Her ministrations over, she left the ward for duty elsewhere.

At tea-time she returned, and aided the blindfolded man to get through the meal. The dread of the morning had given place to mingled mind-racking wonder and timidity. He had gone off, on the hot speed of their last quarrel, out of her life. Save for a short, anguished period, during which she had lost self-control, she had never reproached him. She had asserted her freedom. He had asserted his. Nay; more—he had held the door open for a way out from an impossible situation, and she had slammed the door in his face. Self-centered in those days, centered since the beginning of the war in human suffering, she had thought little of the man's feelings. He had gone away and forgotten, or done his best to forget, an ugly memory. Her last night's review of ghosts had proved the non-existence of any illusions among them. But now, now that the chances of war had brought them again together, the sound of her voice had conjured up in him, too, the ghosts of the past. She had been responsible for his going-about with a temperature of a hundred and three, and for his not caring what happened to him. He had lifted the corner of a curtain, revealing the possibility of undreamed-of happenings.

"You were quoting Tennyson just now," she remarked.

"Was I?"

"Your cap-and-bells speech."

"Oh, yes. What about it?"

"I was only wondering."

"Like a woman, you resent a half-confidence."

She drew in a sharp little breath. The words, the tone, stabbed her. She might have been talking to him in one of their pleasanter hours in the Chelsea flat. In spite of her burning curiosity, she said, "I'm not a woman; I'm a nurse."

"Since when?"

"As far as you people are concerned, since September, '14, when I went out to France. I've been through everything—from the firing-line field-ambulances, casualty clearing-stations, base hospitals—and now I'm here having a rest-cure. Hundreds and hundreds of men have told me their troubles—so I've got to regard myself as a sort of mother confessor."

He smiled.

"Then, like a mother confessor, you resent a half-confidence?"

She put a cigarette between his lips and lit it for him.

"It all depends," she said lightly, "whether you want absolution or not. I suppose it's the same old story." She held her voice in command. "Every man thinks it's original. What kind of a woman was she?"

He parried the thrust.

"Isn't that rather too direct a question, even for a mother confessor?"

"You'll be spilling ash all over the bed. Here's an ash-tray." She guided his hand. "Then you don't want absolution?"

"Oh, yes, I do! But, you see, I'm not yet in articulo mortis, so I'll put off my confession."

"Anyhow, you loved the woman you treated badly?" The question was as casual as she could make it, while she settled the tea-things on the tray.

"It was a girl, not a woman."

"What has become of her?"

"That's what I should like to know."

"But you loved her?"

"Of course I did! I'm not a blackguard. Of course I loved her." Her pulses quickened. "But much water has run under London Bridge since then."

"And much blood has flowed in France."

"Everything—lives, habits, modes of thought have been revolutionized. Yes"—he reflected for a moment—"it's odd how you have brought back old days. I fell in with a pestilential, so-called artistic crowd—I am an architect by profession—you know, men with long greasy hair and dirty finger nails and anarchical views. There was one chap especially, who I thought was decadent to the bone. Aloysius Eglington, he called himself." The man sprang vivid to her memory; he had once tried to make love to her. "Well, I came across him the other day with a couple of wound-stripes and the military-cross ribbon. For a man like that, what an upheaval!" He laughed again. "I suppose I've been a bit upheaved myself."

"I'm beginning to piece together your story of the temperature," she said pleasantly. "I suppose the girl was one of the young females of this anarchical crowd?"

Obviously the phrase jarred.

"I could never regard her in that light," he said coldly.

"The war has got hold of her, too, I suppose."

"No doubt. She was a medical student. May I have another cigarette?"

His tone signified the end of the topic. She smiled, for her putting-down was a triumph.

The probationer came up and took away the tea-tray. Camilla left her patient and went to the other beds.

That night again, she sat alone in her little white room and thought and thought. She had started the day with half-formed plans of flight before her identity could be discovered. She was there voluntarily, purely as an act of grace. She could walk out, without reproach, at a moment's notice. But now—had not the situation changed? To her, as to a stranger, he had confessed his love. She had not dared probe deeper—but might not a deeper probing have brought to light something abiding and beautiful? In the war, she had accomplished her womanhood. Proudly and rightly she recognized her development. He, too, had accomplished his manhood. And his dear face would be maimed and scarred for the rest of his life. Then, with the suddenness of a tropical storm, a wave of intolerable emotion surged through her. She uttered a little cry and broke into a passion of tears. And so her love was reborn.

Professional to the tips of her cool fingers, she dressed his wounds the next morning. But she did not lure him back across the years. The present held its own happiness, tremulous in its delicacy. It was he who questioned. Whereabouts in France had she been? She replied with scraps of anecdote. There was little of war's horror and peril through which she had not passed. She explained her present position in the hospital.

"By George, you're splendid!" he cried. "I wish I could have a look at you."

"You've lost your chance for to-day," she answered gaily. For she had completed the bandaging.

After dinner, she went out and walked the streets in a day-dream, a soft light in her eyes. The moment of recognition—and it was bound soon to come—could not fail in its touch of sanctification, its touch of beauty. He and she had passed through fires of hell and had emerged purified and tempered. They were clear-eyed, clear-souled. The greatest gift of God, miraculously regiven, they could not again despise. On that dreary afternoon, Oxford Street hummed with joy.

Only a freak of chance had hitherto preserved her anonymity. A reference by matron or probationer to Sister Warrington would betray her instantly. Should she await or anticipate betrayal?

In a fluttering tumult of indecision, she returned to the hospital. The visiting-hour had begun. When she had taken off her outdoor things, she looked into the ward. Around the two beds on the right, little groups of friends were stationed. The boy, Robin McKay, in the bed nearest the door on the left, caught sight of her and summoned her.

"Sister, come and pretend to be a visitor. There's not a soul in this country who could possibly come to see me. You don't know what it is to be homesick."

She sat by his side.

"All right. Imagine I'm an elderly maiden aunt from the country."

"You?" he cried, with overseas frankness. "You're only a kid yourself."

Major Shileto overheard and laughed. She blushed and half rose.

"That's not the way to treat visitors, Mr. McKay."

The boy stretched out his hand.

"I'm awfully sorry if I was rude. Don't go."

She yielded.

"All the same," she said, "you'll have to get used to a bit of loneliness. It can't be helped. Besides, you're not the only tiger that hasn't got a Christian. There's Major Shileto. And you can read and he can't."

The voice came from the next bed.

"Don't worry about me. Talk to the boy. I'll have some one to see me to-morrow. He won't, poor old chap!"

"Have a game of chess?" said the boy.

"With pleasure."

She fetched the board and chessmen from the long table running down the center of the ward, and they set out the pieces.

"I reckon to be rather good," said he. "Perhaps I might give you something."

"I'm rather good myself," she replied. "I was taught by—" She stopped short, on the brink of pronouncing the name of the young Polish master who lived (in a very material sense) on the fringe of the Chelsea crew. "We'll start even, at any rate."

They began. She realized that the boy had not boasted, and soon she became absorbed in the game. So intent was she on the problem presented by a brilliant and unexpected move on his part that she did not notice the opening of the door and the swift passage of a fur-coated figure behind her chair. It was a cry that startled her. A cry of surprise and joy, a cry of the heart.

"Marjorie!"

She looked up and saw the fur-coated figure—that of a girl with fair hair—on her knees by the bedside, and Harry Shileto's arms were round her and his lips to hers. She stared, frozen. She heard:

"I didn't expect you till to-morrow."

"I just had time to catch the train at Inverness. I've not brought an ounce of luggage. Oh, my poor, poor, old Harry!"

It was horrible.

The boy said:

"Never mind, Sister; he's got his Christian all right. Let's get on with the game."

Mechanically obeying a professional instinct, she looked at the swimming chess-board and made a move haphazard.

"I say—that won't do!" cried the boy. "It's mate for me in two moves. Buck up!"

With a great effort, she caught the vanishing tail of her previous calculation and made a move which happened to be correct.

"That's better," he said. "I hoped you wouldn't spot it. But I couldn't let you play the ass with your knight and spoil the game. Now, this demands deep consideration."

He lingered a while over his move. She looked across. The pair at the next bed were talking in whispers. The girl was now sitting on the chair by the bedside, and her back hid the face of the man, though her head was near his.

"There!" cried the boy triumphantly.

"I beg your pardon; I didn't see it."

"Oh, I say!" His finger indicated the move.

With half her brain at work, she moved a pawn a cautious step. The boy's whole heart was in his offensive. He swooped a bishop triumphantly athwart the board.

"There's only one thing can save you for mate in five moves. I know it isn't the proper thing to be chatting over chess, but I like it. I'm chatty by nature."

"Only one course open to save me from destruction?" she murmured.

"Just one."

And she heard, from the next bed:

"Are you sure, darling, you're only saying it to break the shock gently? Are you sure your eyes are all right?"

"Perfectly certain."

"I wish I could have real proof."

Camilla stared at the blankness of her vanished dream.

"Come along, Sister; put your back into it," chuckled Robin McKay.

She held her brows tight with her hands and strove to concentrate her tortured mind on the board. Her heart was in agony of desolation. The soft murmurings she could not but overhear pierced her brain. The poignant shame of her disillusionment burned her from head to foot. Again she heard the girl's pleading voice:

"Only for a minute. It couldn't hurt."

The boy said:

"Buck up. Just one tiny brain-wave."

At the end of her tether, she cried: "The only way out! I give it up!" and swept the pieces over the board.

She rose, stood transfixed with horror and sense of outrage. Harry Shileto, propped on pillows, was unwinding the bandages from his mangled head. Devils within her clamored for hysterical outcry. But something physical happened and checked the breath that was about to utter his Christian name. The boy had gripped her arm with all his young strength in passionate remonstrance.

"Oh, dear old thing—do play the game!"

"I'm sorry," she said, and he released her.

So she passed swiftly round the boy's bed to that of the foolish patient and arrested his hand.

"Major Shileto, what on earth are you doing?"

The girl, who was very pretty, turned on her an alarmed and tearful face.

"It was my fault, Sister. Oh, can I believe him?"

"You can believe me, at any rate," she replied with asperity, swiftly readjusting the bandage. "Major Shileto's sight is unaffected. But if I had not been here and he had succeeded in taking off his dressings, God knows what would have happened. Major Shileto, I put you on your honor not to do such a silly thing again."

"All right, Sister," he said, with a little shame-faced twitch of the lips. "Parole d'officier."

The girl rose and drew her a step aside.

"Do forgive me, Sister. We have only been married five months—when he was last home on leave—and, you understand, don't you, what it would have meant to me if——"

"Of course I do. Anyhow, you can be perfectly reassured. But I must warn you," she whispered, and looked through narrowed eyelids into the girl's eyes; "he may be dreadfully disfigured."

The girl shrank terrified, but she cried,

"I hope I shall love him all the more for it!"

"I hope so, too," replied Camilla soberly. "I'll say good-by," she added, in a louder tone, holding out her hand.

"I'll see you again to-morrow?" the girl asked politely.

"I'm afraid not."

"What's that?" cried Shileto.

"I told you I was only here as a bird of passage. My time's up to-day. Good-by."

"I'm awfully sorry. Good-by."

They shook hands. Camilla went to Robin McKay and bent over him.

"You're quite right, my dear boy. One ought to play the game to the bitter end. It's the thing most worth doing in life. God bless you!"

The boy stared wonderingly at her as she disappeared.

"I'm glad she's not going to be here any more," said the girl.

Her husband's lips smiled.

"Why?"

"She's a most heartless, overbearing woman."

"Oh, they all seem like that when they're upset," he laughed. "And I was really playing the most outrageous fool."

She put her head close to him and whispered,

"Don't you guess why I was so madly anxious to know that you could see?"

She told him. And, from that moment, the possessor of the remembered voice faded from his memory.

Camilla went to the matron.

"I'm sorry, but I've bitten off more than I can chew. If I go on an hour longer, I'll break down. I'm due in France in a fortnight, and I must have my rest."

"I can only thank you for your self-sacrificing help," said the matron.

But, four days later, ten days before her leave had expired, Camilla appeared at the casualty clearing-station in France of which she was a Sister-in-charge.

"What the devil are you here for?" asked the amazed commanding medical officer.

"England's too full of ghosts. They scared me back to realities."

The M.O. laughed to hide his inability to understand.

"Well, if you like 'em, it's all the same to me. I'm delighted to have you. But give me the good old ghosts of blighty all the time!"

The piercing of the line at Cambrai was a surprise no less to the Germans than to the British. The great tent of the casualty clearing-station was crammed with wounded. Doctors and nurses, with tense, burning eyes and bodies aching from strain, worked and worked, and thought nothing of that which might be passing outside. No one knew that the German wave had passed over. And the German wave itself, at that part of the line, was but a set of straggling and mystified groups.

Camilla Warrington, head of the heroic host of women working in the dimly lit reek of blood and agony, had not slept for two nights and two days. The last convoy of wounded had poured in a couple of hours before. She stood by the surgeon, aiding him, the perfect machine. At last, in the terrible rota, they came to a man swathed round the middle in the rough bandages of the field dressing-station. He was unconscious. They unwound him, and revealed a sight of unimaginable horror.

"He's no good, poor chap!" said the surgeon.

"Can't you try?" she asked, and put repressing hands on the wounded man.

"Not the slightest good," said the medical officer.

No one in the great tent of agony knew that they were isolated from the British army. From the outside, it looked solitary, lighted, and secure. Two German soldiers, casual stragglers, looked in at the door of the great tent. In the kindly German way, they each threw in a bomb, and ran off laughing. Seven men were killed outright and many rewounded. And Camilla Warrington was killed.[[1]]

[[1]] The bloody and hideous incident related here is not an invention. It is true. It happened when and where I have indicated.—W.J.L.

The guards, in their memorable sweep, cleared the ground. The casualty clearing-station again came into British hands.

There is a grave in that region whose head-board states that it is consecrated "to the Heroic Memory of Camilla Warrington, one of the Great Women of the War."

And Marjorie Shileto, to her husband healed and sound, searching like a foolish woman deep into his past history:

"It's awfully decent of you, darling, to hide nothing from me and to tell me about that girl in Chelsea. But what was she like?"

"My sweetheart," said he, like a foolish man, "she wasn't worth your little finger."