He looked with a sceptical eye at the Anglican priest’s cassock and girdle. If Father Rodwell had been a Papist it would have been altogether a more satisfactory state of things; but an Anglican—a man who might preach the beauty of holy poverty and a celibate life one year and marrya rich widow the year after—a man bound only by his own wishes.Had Allegra been a thought less frank—had she been a woman whom it was possible to doubt—the sailor would have given himself over to the demon of jealousy; but there are happily some women in whom truth and purity are so transparently obvious that even an anxious lover cannot doubt them. Allegra was such an one. No suspicion of coquetry ever lessened her simple womanliness. She was a woman of whom a man might make a friend; a woman whose feelings and meanings he could by no possibility mistake.He had pleaded his hardest and pleaded in vain for a June wedding. Isola’s state of health was too critical for the contemplation of any change in the family circle.“She could not do without me, nor could Martin either,” Allegra told her lover. “It is I who keep house and manage their money, and see to everything for them. Martin has been utterly helpless since this saddening anxiety began. He thinks of nothing but Isola, and her chances of recovery. I cannot leave him while she is so ill.”“Have you any hope of her ever being better, my dear girl?”“I don’t know. It has been a long and wearing illness.”“It is not illness, Allegra. It is a gradual decay. My fear is that she will never revive. There is no marked disease—nothing for medicine to fight against. Such cases as hers are the despair of doctors. A spring has been broken somehow in the human machine. Science cannot mend it.”Allegra was very much of her sweetheart’s opinion.The English doctor in Rome was as kind and attentive as the doctor at San Remo; but although he had not yet pronounced the case hopeless, he took a by no means cheerful view of his patient’s condition. He recommended Colonel Disney to leave the city before the third week in May, and to take his wife to Switzerland, travelling by easy stages,and doing all he could to amuse and interest her. If on the other hand it were important for Colonel Disney to be in England, he might take his wife back to Cornwall in June. But in this case she must return to the south in October. Lungs and heart were both too weak for the risks of an English winter.“We will not go back to England,” decided Disney. “My wife is not fond of Cornwall. Italy has been a delight to her; and Switzerland will be new ground. God grant the summer may bring about an improvement!”The doctor said very little, and promised nothing.Closely as they watched her, with anxious loving looks, it may be that seeing her every day even their eyes did not mark the gradual decline of vitality—the inevitable advance of decay. She never complained; the cough that marked the disease which had fastened on her lungs since February was not a loud or seemingly distressing cough. It was only now and then, when she tried to walk uphill, or over-exerted herself in any way, that her malady became painfully obvious in the labouring chest, flushed cheek, and panting breath; but she made light even of these symptoms, and assured her husband that Rome was curing her.Her spirits had been less equable since Father Rodwell’s appearance. She had alternated between a feverish intensity and a profound dejection. Her changes of mood had been sudden and apparently causeless; and those who watched and cherished her could do nothing to dispel the gloom that often clouded over her. If she were questioned she could only say that she was tired. She would never admit any reason for her melancholy.CHAPTER XXV.“WE’LL BIND YOU FAST IN SILKEN CORDS.”Captain Hulbert was not selfish enough to plead for his personal happiness in the midst of a household shadowed by the foreboding of a great sorrow. Martin Disney’s face, as he looked at his wife in those moments which too plainly marked the progress of decay, was in itself enough to put a check upon a lover’s impatience. How could any man plead for his own pleasure—for the roses and sunshine of life—in the presence of that deep despair?“He knows that he is doomed to lose her,” thought Hulbert; “knows it, and yet tries to hope. I never saw such intense, unquestioning love. One asks one’s self involuntarily about any woman—Is she worth it?”And then he thought of Allegra, truthful and impulsive, strong as steel, transparent as crystal. Yes, such a woman as that was worth the whole of a man’s heart—worthy that a man should live or die for her. But it seemed to him that to compare Isola with Allegra was to liken an ash sapling to an oak.He resigned himself to his disappointment, talked no more of Venice and the starlit lagunes, the summer nights on the Lido, and quoted no more of Buskin’s rhapsodies; but he came meekly day after day to join in the family excursion, whatever it might be. He had enough and to spare of ecclesiastical architecture and of the old masters during those summer-like mornings and afternoons. He heard more than enough of the mad Cæsars and the bad Cæsars, of wicked Empresses and of low-born favourites, of despotism throned in the palace and murder waiting at the gate, of tyranny drunken with power long abused, and treason on the watch for the golden opportunity to change one profligate master for another, ready to toss up for the newCæsar, and to accept the basest slave for master, would be but open the Imperial treasury wide enough to the Prætorian’s rapacious hands.“People gloat over these hoary old walls as if they would like to have lived under Caligula,” said the sailor, with a touch of impatience, when Father Rodwell had been expatiating upon a little bit of moulding which decorated an imperial staircase.“It would have been at least a picturesque time to have lived in,” said Allegra. “Existence must have been a series of pictures by Alma Tadema.”Captain Hulbert was startled out of his state of placid submission by the intervention of a most unexpected ally.It was one of the hottest days there had been since they came to Rome. To cross the Piazza in front of St. Peter’s was like plunging into a bath of molten gold; while to enter the great Basilica itself was like going into an ice-house. Father Rodwell was not with them upon this particular morning. They were a party of four, and a roomy landau had been engaged to take them to the Church of St. Paul beyond the walls, and thence to the tomb of Cecilia Metella. Isola and Allegra had made pilgrimages to the spot before to-day. It was a drive they both loved, a glimpse of the pastoral life outside the gates of the city, and a place for ever associated with the poet whose verse was written in their hearts.They dawdled over a light luncheon of macaroni and Roman wine at acafénear the great cold white church, and then they drove through the sandy lanes in the heat of the afternoon, languid all of them, and Isola paler and more weary-looking than she had been for some time. Her husband watched her anxiously, and wanted to go back to Rome, lest the drive should be too exhausting for her.“No, no, I am not tired,” she answered impatiently. “I would much rather go on. I want to see that grim old toweragain,” and then she quoted the familiar lines, dreamily, with a faint pleasure in their music—“Perchance she died in youth: it may be bowedWith woes far heavier than the ponderous tombThat weighed upon her gentle dust.”“Besides,” she added confusedly, “I want to have a little private talk with Captain Hulbert, while Allegra is busy with her everlasting memoranda in that dirty little sketchbook which is stuffed with the pictures of the future. May I?”She looked from her husband to Captain Hulbert pleadingly. The latter was first to answer.“I am at your service, Mrs. Disney; ready to be interrogated, or lectured, or advised, whichever you like.”“I am not going to do either of the three. I am going to ask you a favour.”“Consider that to ask is to be obeyed.”They alighted in the road by the tomb a few minutes afterwards. Allegra’s note-book was out immediately, a true artist’s book, crammed with every conceivable form of artistic reminiscence.“Go and talk,” she said, waving her hand to Isola and Hulbert; and then she clambered up a bank opposite that tower of other days to get a vantage ground for her sketch.She had made a score of sketches on the same spot, but there were always new details to jot down, new effects and ideas, on that vast level which frames the grandeur of Rome. Yonder the long line of the aqueduct; here the living beauty of broad-fronted oxen moving with stately paces along the dusty way, the incarnation of strength and majesty, patience and labour.“Stay here and smoke your cigar, Martin,” said Isola, “while Captain Hulbert and I go for a stroll.”Her husband smiled at her tenderly, cheered by her unwonted cheerfulness. His days and hours alternated between hope and despair. This was a moment of hope.“My dearest, you are full of mystery to-day,” he said, “and I am as full of curiosity. But I can wait. Consider me a statue of patience standing by the way-side, and take your time.”She put her hand through Hulbert’s arm, and led him away from the other two, sauntering slowly along beside the grassy bank.“I want to talk about your wedding,” she said, as soon as they were out of hearing. “When are you and Allegra going to be married?”“My dear Mrs. Disney, you know that I pledged myself to wait a year from the time of our engagement—a year from last Christmas—you must remember. That was to be my probation.”“Yes, I remember; but that is all foolishness—idle romance. Allegra knows that you love her. I don’t think she could know it any better after another half-year’s devotion on your part.”“I don’t think she could know it better after another half century. I know I could never love her more than I do now. I know I shall never love her less.”“I believe that you are good and true,” said Isola. “As true and—almost—as good as he is”—with a backward glance at her husband. “If I did not believe that I should not have thought of saying what I am going to say.”“I am honoured by your confidence in me.”“I love Allegra too well to hazard her happiness. I know she loves you—has never cared for any one else. She was heart-whole till she saw you. She had no more thought of love, or lovers, than a child. I want you to marry her soon, Captain Hulbert—very soon, before we leave Rome. Would you not like to be married in Rome?”“I would like to be married in Kamtchatka, or Nova Zembla—or the worst of those places whose very names suggest uncomfortableness. There is no dismallest corner of the earth which Allegra could not glorify and make dear.But, as you suggest, Rome is classic—Rome is mediæval—Rome is Roman Catholic. It would be a new sensation for a plain man like me to be married in Rome. I suppose it could not be managed in St. Peter’s?”“Oh, Captain Hulbert, I want you to be serious.”“I am serious. Why, this is a matter of life or death to me. But I pleaded so hard for a June wedding—and to no purpose. I talked with the artfulness of the first Tempter—I tried to play upon her vanities as an artist. All in vain!”“Tell her that I have set my heart upon seeing her married,” said Isola, in a low voice.“Why, of course, you will see her married, whether she be married in Rome or at Trelasco. That is no argument.”“But it is; indeed it is. Tell her that, if I am to be at her wedding, it must be soon, very soon. Life is so uncertain at best—and, although I feel well and strong, sometimes—to-day, for instance—there are other times when I think the end is nearer than even my doctor suspects. And I know by his face that he does not give me a long lease of life.”“My dear Mrs. Disney, this is morbid. I am grieved to hear you talk in such a strain.”“Don’t notice that. Don’t say anything depressing to Allegra. I want her to go off to her Venetian honeymoon very happily—with not one cloud in her sky. She has been so good and dear to me. It would be hard if I could not rejoice in her happiness. I have rejoiced in it always; I shall take pleasure in it to the end of my life. It is the one unclouded spot——.” She stopped with a troubled air. “Yes, it is a happy fate—to have cared for one, and one only, and to be loved again. Will you do what I ask you, Captain Hulbert? will you hurry on the wedding—for my sake?”“I would do anything difficult and unwelcome for your sake—how much more will I hasten my own happiness—if Ican. But Allegra is a difficult personage—as firm as rock when she has once made up her mind. And she has made up her mind to stay with you till you are quite well and strong again.”“She need not leave me for ever, because she marries. She can come back to me after a long honeymoon. We can all meet in Switzerland in August—if—if I go there with Martin, as he proposes.”“Well, I will try to bend that stubborn will.”“And you don’t mind having a quiet wedding, if she consents to a much earlier date?”“Mind? The quieter the better for me! I think a smart wedding is a preventive of matrimony. That sounds like a bull. I will say I think there are many wretched bachelors living in dismal chambers, and preyed upon by landladies, who might have been happily married, but for the fear of a smart wedding. We will have as quiet a wedding as you and Disney can desire; but I should like Lostwithiel to be present. He is my only near relation, and I don’t want to cut him on the happiest day of my life. Why, Mrs. Disney, you are trembling! You have agitated yourself about this business; you have talked too much for your strength. Let me take you back to the carriage.”“Presently—yes, yes. The heat overcame me for a moment, that’s all. Would you mind not waiting for Lord Lostwithiel? I want the marriage to be at once—directly—as soon as Father Rodwell can get it arranged. And you don’t know where a telegram would reach your brother?”“Indeed, I do not; but by speculating a few messages of inquiry I could soon find out the whereabouts of theEurydice.”“Don’t wait for that. There would be delay. There must be delay if you have to consult any distant person’s convenience. We are all here—you and Allegra, and Martin and I—and Father Rodwell would like to marry you. What do you want with anybody else?”“Upon my word, I think you are right! Allegra is acreature of impulse—where principle is not at stake. If I asked her to marry me six weeks hence she would parley and make terms. If I ask her to marry me in a few days—before we leave Rome—she may consent. Have you talked to your husband? Is he of your opinion?”“I have said nothing to him; but I know he would be pleased to see you and Allegra bound together for life.”“I will talk to him this afternoon. One can get everything one wants in Rome, I believe, from a papal dispensation down to an English solicitor. If we can but rattle through some kind of marriage settlement to your husband’s satisfaction we can be married on the earliest day to which my darling will consent. God bless you, Mrs. Disney, for your unselfish thought of other people’s happiness! You are not like most invalids, who would let a sister languish in lifelong spinsterhood rather than lose her as a nurse. God grant that your unselfishness may be recompensed by speedy recovery!”“There will be a weight off my mind when you and Allegra are married,” said Isola, gravely.They walked slowly back to the spot where they had left their companions. A pair of oxen, with an empty cart, were standing in the road below the tomb, their driver lounging across the rough vehicle—man and beasts motionless as marble. Allegra sat on a hillock opposite, sketching the group. She had bribed the man to draw up for a brief halt while she made her sketch. The massive heads were drooping under the afternoon sun; the tawny and cream-hued coats were stained with dust and purpled with the sweat of patient labour. The creatures looked as gracious and as wise as if they had been gods in disguise.“Now, Allegra,” said her brother, emptying the ashes out of his pipe, “are you ready to go home?”“Yes, I have just jotted down what will serve to remind me of those splendid beasts; but I should like to have them standing there all day, so that I could paint them seriously.They are the finest models I have seen in Rome. Have you two quite finished your secrets and mysteries?” she asked, smiling at Isola, who was looking brighter than usual.“Yes; I have said all I had to say, and have been answered as I wished to be answered. I shall go home very happy.”“That’s a good hearing,” said Disney, as he helped her into the landau.Allegra had talked of wanting to revisit Caracalla’s Baths, a wish of which Isola reminded her as they drove back to the city, along the Appian Way: whereupon Captain Hulbert suggested that he and his sweetheart should stop to explore the ruins, while Disney and Isola went home.Allegra blushed and consented, always a little shy at being alone with her lover, especially since he had pleaded so earnestly for a summer honeymoon.“Mrs. Disney, your right place in Rome would be the Embassy,” murmured Hulbert as he shut the carriage door; “you are a born diplomatist.”“What makes my dearest look so pleased and happy this afternoon?” asked Disney, as he changed to the seat beside his wife.“I am glad because I think Captain Hulbert will persuade Allegra to marry him before we leave Rome. I begged him to hasten their marriage. That was my mystery, Martin. That was what he and I were talking about.”“But why wish to hasten matters, dear? They are very happy as it is—and a year is not a long engagement.”“Too long for me, Martin. I want to see her happy—I want to see them married before——”“Before what, dear love?” he asked tenderly.“Before we leave Rome.”“That would be very short work. We leave in a fortnight. The weather will be growing too hot for you if we linger later.”“Yes, but everything can be settled in less time than that. Ask Father Rodwell. He knows Rome so well that he can help you to arrange all details.”“I thought that every young woman required at least six months for the preparation of her trousseau?”“Not such a girl as Allegra. She is always well dressed, and her wardrobe is the perfection of neatness—but she is not the kind of girl to make a fuss about her clothes. I don’t think the trousseau will create any difficulty.”“And when she is gone, what will you do without your devoted companion? Who will nurse you and take care of you?”“Löttchen, or any other servant,” she answered, with a kind of weary indifference. “It would be very hard if my bad health should stand in the way of Allegra’s happiness. So long as you will stay with me and be kind to me, Martin, I need no one else.”Tears were streaming down her cheeks as she turned from him, pretending to be interested in the convent walls on the edge of the hill below which they were driving.“So long as I stay with you! My darling, do you think business or pleasure, or any claim in this world, will ever take me from you any more? All your hours are precious to me, Isola. I hardly live when I am away from you. Wherever your doctor may send you, or your own fancy may lead you, I shall go with you, unhesitatingly—without one regret for anything I leave behind.”“Don’t say these things,” she cried suddenly, with a choking sob; “you are too good to me. There are times when I can’t bear it.”CHAPTER XXVI.“SO, FULL CONTENT SHALL HENCEFORTH BE MY LOT.”Allegra was not inexorable. There, in the ruins of the Imperial baths, where Shelley dreamed the wonder-dream of his Prometheus, Captain Hulbert pleaded his cause. Could love resist the pleading of so fond a lover? Could art withstand the allurements of Venice—Titian and Tintoret, the cathedral of St. Mark and the Palace of the Doges, the birthplace of Desdemona and of Shylock, the home of Byron and of Browning?She consented to a Roman marriage.“I can’t help wishing I could be a Papist just for that one day,” she said lightly. “An Anglican marriage seems so dry and cold compared with the pomps and splendours of Rome.”“Dearest, the plainest Christian rites are enough, if they but make us one.”“I think we are that already, John,” she answered shyly; and then, nestling by his side as they sat in the wide solitude of that stupendous pile, she took his hand and held it in both her own, looking down at it wonderingly—a well-formed hand, strong and muscular, broadened a little by seafaring.“And you are to be my husband,” she said. “Mine! I shall speak of you to people as my own peculiar property. ‘My husband will do this or that.’ ‘My husband has gone out, but he will be home soon.’ Home. Husband. How strange it sounds!”“Strange and wonderful now, love. Sweet and familiar before our honeymoon is ended.”They went out of the broad spaces that were once populous with the teeming life of Imperial Rome, splendid with all that art could create of beauty and of grandeur—wraptin the glamour of their dream. They walked all the way to the Piazza di Spagna in the same happy dream, as unconscious of the ground they trod on as if they had been floating in the air.They were a very cheerful party at dinner that evening. Father Rodwell dined with them, and was delighted at the idea of having to marry these happy lovers. He took the arrangement of the ceremony into his own hands. The English chaplain was his old friend, and would let him do what he liked in his church.“It is to be a very quiet wedding,” said the colonel, when the three men were smoking together in a loggia, looking on the little garden of orange trees and oleanders, in the grey dim beginning of night, when the thin crescent moon was shining in a sky still faintly flushed with sunset. “Isa could not stand anything like bustle or excitement. Luckily we have no friends in Rome. There is no one belonging to us who could be aggrieved at not being invited.”“And there is no one except Lostwithiel on my side who has the slightest claim to be present,” said Hulbert. “I am almost as well off as the Flying Dutchman in that respect. I am not troubled with relations. All the kinsfolk I have are distant, and I allow them to remain so. My dear Disney, so far as I am concerned, our wedding cannot be too quiet a business. It is the bride I want, mark you, not the fuss and flowers, wedding-breakfast, and bridesmaids. Let us be married at half-past ten, and drive from the church to the railway station in time for the noonday train. I have given up my dream of taking Allegra round Southern Italy to the Adriatic. We shall go to Florence first, and spend a few days in the galleries, and thence to Venice, where we will have theVendettabrought to us, and anchored near the arsenal, ready to carry us away directly we are tired of the city of old memories.”Father Rodwell left them and went into the drawing-room, where Isola and her sister-in-law were sitting in thelamplight—Isola’s hands occupied with that soft, fluffy knitting which seemed to exercise a soothing influence upon her nerves; Allegra leaning over the table, idly sketching random reminiscences of the Baths, the Tomb, the grave-eyed oxen, with their great curving horns and ponderous foreheads.The priest was interested in watching Isola this evening. He saw a marked change in the expression of her countenance, a change which was perceptible to him even in her voice and manner—a brightness which might mean a lightened heart, or which might mean religious exaltation.“Has she told him?” he wondered, studying her from his place in the shadow as the lamplight shone full upon her wasted features and hectic colouring. “Has she taken courage and confessed her sin to that loyal, loving husband, and is the burden lifted from her heart?”No; he could not believe that she had lifted the veil from the sad secret of her past. Martin Disney’s unclouded brow to-night was not that of a man who had lately discovered that the wife he loved had betrayed him. There might be pardon—there might be peace between husband and wife after such a revelation; but there could not be the serenity which marked Martin Disney’s manner to his wife to-night. Such a thunder-clap must leave its brand upon the man who suffered it. No; her secret was still locked in her impenitent heart. Sorry—yes. She had drunk the cup of remorse in all its bitterness; but she knew not true penitence, the Christian’s penitence, which means self-abasement and confession. And yet she seemed happier. There was a look of almost holy resignation upon the pale and placid brow, and in the too-lustrous eyes. Something had happened—some moral transformation which made her a new being.Father Rodwell drew his chair nearer to her, and looked at her earnestly with his cordial, almost boyish smile. He was a remarkably young-looking man, a man upon whomlong years of toil in the dark places of the earth had exercised no wasting or withering influence. He had loved his work too well ever to feel the pressure of the burdens he carried. His gospel had been always a cheerful gospel, and he had helped to lighten sorrows, never to make them heavier. He was deeply interested in Isola, and had been watchful of all her changes of mood since their conversation in the shadow of the old Roman wall. He had seen her impressed by the history and traditions of the church, moved by the pathos of holy lives, touched almost to tears by sacred pictures, and he saw in her character and disposition a natural bent towards piety, exactly that receptive temperament which moves holy women to lives of self-abnegation and heroic endeavour. He had lent her some of those books which he loved best and read most himself, and he had talked with her of religion, careful not to say too much or with too strong an emphasis, and never by any word alluding to her revelation of past guilt. He wanted to win her to perfect trustfulness in him, to teach her to lean upon him in her helplessness; until the hour should come when she would let him lead her to her husband, in the self-abasement of the penitent sinner.He knew that in this desire he exceeded the teaching of churchmen; that another priest in his place might have bade her keep her sad secret to the end, lie down with it in her early grave, be remembered as a saint, yet die knowing herself a sinner. If he had thought of the husband’s peace first, he would have counselled silence. But he thought most of this stricken soul, with wings that spread themselves towards heaven, held down to earth by the burden of an unpardoned sin.He looked at her in the lamplight, and her eyes met his with a straighter outlook than he had seen in them for a long time. She looked actually happy, and that look of happiness in a face on which death has set its seal has always something which suggests a life beyond the grave.“The excitement of this marriage question has brightened you wonderfully, Mrs. Disney,” he said. “We shall have you in high health by the wedding-day.”“I am feeling better because I am so glad,” Isola answered naively, putting her hand into Allegra’s.“I consider it positively insulting to me as a sister,” exclaimed Allegra, bending down to kiss the too-transparent hand—such a hand as she had seen in many a picture of dying saint in the Roman galleries. “You are most unaffectionately rejoiced to get rid of me. I have evidently been a tyrannical nurse, and a dull companion, and you breathe more freely at the prospect of release.”“You have been all that is dear and good,” Isola answered softly, “and I shall feel dreadfully lonely without you; but it won’t be for long. And I shall be so comforted by the knowledge that nothing can come between you and your life’s happiness.”The two men came in from the loggia, bringing with them the cool breath of night. Isola went to the piano and played one of those Adagios of Mozart’s which came just within the limit of her modest powers, and which she played to perfection, all her soul in the long lingering phrases, the tender modulations, with their suggestions of shadowy cathedral aisles, and the smoke of incense in the deepening dusk of a vesper service. Those bits of Mozart, the slow movements from the Sonatas, an Agnus Dei, or an Ave Maria from one of the Masses, satisfied Captain Hulbert’s highest ideas of music. He desired nothing grander or more scientific. The new learning of the Wagnerian school had no charm for him.“If you ask me about modern composers, I am for Verdi and Gounod,” he said. “For gaiety and charm, give me Auber, Rossini, and Boieldieu—for pathos, Weber—for everything, Mozart. There you have the whole of my musical education.”The question of settlements was opened seriously between Martin Disney and his future brother-in-law, early on thefollowing morning. Hulbert wanted to settle all the money he had in the world upon Allegra.“She is ever so much wiser than I am,” he said. “So she had better be my treasurer. My property is all in stocks and shares. My grandfather was fond of stock-jobbing, and made some very lucky investments which he settled upon my mother, with strict injunctions that they should not be meddled with by her trustees. My share of her fortune comes to a little over nine hundred a year. I came into possession of it when I came of age, and it is mine to dispose of as I like, trusts expired, trustees cleared off—in point of fact, both gone over to the majority, poor old souls, after having had many an anxious hour about those South American railway bonds, and Suez Canal shares, which turned up trumps after all. I’ve telegraphed to the family lawyer for a schedule of the property, and when that comes, just tie it all up in as tight a knot as the law can tie, and let it belong to Allegra and her children after her. Consider me paid off.”Martin Disney laughed at the lover’s impetuosity—and told him that he should be allowed to bring so much and no more into settlement. Allegra’s income was less than two hundred a year, a poor little income upon which she had fancied herself rich, so modest is woman’s measure of independence as compared with man’s. It would be for the lawyer to decide what proportion the husband’s settlements should bear to the wife’s income. Father Rodwell had given Colonel Disney an introduction to a solicitor of high character, a man who had occupied an excellent position in London until damaged lungs obliged him to seek a home in the south.With this gentleman’s aid, matters were soon put in train, and while the men were in the lawyer’s office, the two women were choosing Allegra’s wedding-gown.The young lady had exhibited a rare indifference upon the great trousseau question. She was not one of those girls whose finery is all external, and who hide rags and tattersunder æsthetic colouring and Raffaelle draperies. She was too much of an artist to endure anything unseemly in her belongings, and her everyday clothes, just as they were, might have been exhibited, like a Royal trousseau, without causing any other comment than, “How nice!” “What good taste!” “What exquisite needlework!”The hands which painted such clever pictures were as skilful with the needle as with the brush, and Allegra had never considered that a vocation for art meant uselessness in every feminine industry. She had attended to her own wardrobe from the time she learnt plain sewing at her first school; and now, as she and Isola looked over the ample array of under-linen, the pretty cambric peignoirs, and neatly trimmed petticoats, they were both of one mind, that there was very little need of fuss or expenditure.“I have plenty of summer frocks,” said Allegra. “So really there is only my travelling gown to see about, that is to say, the gown I am to be married in.”“But you must have a real wedding-gown, all the same, a white satin gown, with lace and pearls,” pleaded Isola. “When you go to dinner-parties, by-and-by, you will be expected to look like a bride.”“Dinner-parties! Oh, those are a long way off. We are not likely to be asked to any parties while we are wandering about Italy. I can get a gown when I go home.”Allegra’s wedding-day had dawned—a glorious day—a day to make one drunken with the beauty of sky and earth; a day when the vetturini in the Piazza di Spagna sat and dreamt on their coach-boxes—narcotized by the sun—when the reds and blues in the garments of the flower-women were almost too dazzling for the eye to look upon, and when every garden in the city sent forth tropical odours of roses steeped in sunlight.The church in which the lovers were to be made one was a very homely temple as compared with the basilicas yonder on the hills of Rome. But what did that matter to Allegrathis morning as she stood before the altar and spoke the words which gave her to the man she loved? A flood of sunshine streamed upon the two figures of bride and bridegroom, and touched the almost spectral face of the bride’s sister-in-law, a face which attracted as much attention as the bride’s fresh bloom and happy smile. It was a face marked for death, yet beautiful in decay. The large violet eyes were luminous with the light of worlds beyond the world we know. There was something loftier than happiness in that vivid look, something akin to exaltation—the smile of the martyr at the stake—the martyr for whom Heaven’s miraculous intervention changes the flames of the death-pile into the soft fanning of seraphic wings; the martyr unconscious of earthly pains and earthly cruelties; who sees the skies opening and the glorious company of saints and angels gathered about the great white throne.Father Rodwell saw that spiritual expression in the pale, wasted face, and he told himself that a lost soul could not look out of eyes like those. If death were near, as he feared, the true repentance for which he had prayed many an earnest prayer was not far off.Bride and bridegroom were to leave Rome by the mid-day train. Colonel Disney was going to see the last of them at the station, but Isola and her sister-in-law were to say good-bye in the vestry, and to part at the church door. And now Father Rodwell’s brief, but fervent, address had been spoken, the Wedding March pealed from the organ, and the small wedding-party went into the vestry to sign the registers.Isola was called upon for her signature as one of the witnesses. She signed in a bold, clear hand, without one tremulous line, her husband looking over her shoulder as she wrote.“That doesn’t look like an invalid’s autograph, does it, Hulbert?” he asked, snatching at every token of hope, unwilling to believe what his doctors and his own convictions told him—expecting a miracle.They had warned him that he could not keep her long. They had advised him to humour her fancies, to let her be present at the wedding, even at the hazard of her suffering afterwards for that exertion and excitement. She would suffer more perhaps—physically as well as mentally—if she were thwarted in her natural wish to be by Allegra’s side on that day.All was finished. Neither Church nor law could do anything more towards making the lovers man and wife. The law might undo the bond for them in the time to come, but the part of the Church was done for ever. In the eye of the Church their union was indissoluble.Isola clung with her arms round the bride’s neck.“Think of me sometimes, dearest, in the years to come. Think that I loved you fondly. Be sure that I was grateful for all your goodness to me,” she said tearfully.“My own love, I shall think of you every day till we meet again.”“And if we never meet again on earth—will you remember me kindly?”“Isa, how can you?” cried Allegra, silencing the pale lips with kisses.“You may be glad to think how much you did towards making my life happy—happier than it ought to have been.” Isola went on in a low voice. “Dearest, I am more glad of your marriage than words can say; and, Allegra, love him with all your heart, and never let your lives be parted—remember, dearest, never, never let anything upon this earth part you from him.”Her voice was choked with sobs, and then came a worse fit of coughing than she had suffered for some time; a fit which left her exhausted and speechless. Her husband looked at her in an agony of apprehension.“Let me take you home, Isa,” he said. “You’ll be better at home, lying down by your sunny window. This vestry is horribly cold. Hulbert, if you and Allegra will excuse me, I won’t see you off at the station. Father Rodwell willgo with you, perhaps. He’ll be of more use than I could be; and we shall see each other very soon again in Switzerland, please God.”“Yes, yes, There is no need for you to go,” Hulbert answered, grasping his hand, distressed for another man’s pain in the midst of his own happiness. There death, and the end of all joy—here the new life with its promises of gladness just opening before him. Such contrasts must needs seem hard.They all went to the church door, where the carriages were waiting. Only a few idlers loitered about the pavement, faintly interested in so shabby a wedding—a poor array of one landau and one brougham, the brougham to take the travellers to the station, where their luggage had been sent by another conveyance.The two women kissed each other once more before Allegra stepped into the carriage, Isola too weak for speech, and able only to clasp the hands that had waited on her in so many a weary hour; the clever hands, the gentle hands, to which womanly instinct and womanly love had given all the skilfulness of a trained nurse.Disney lifted his wife into the landau, Father Rodwell helping him, full of sympathy.“You’ll dine with us to-night, I hope,” said the colonel. “We shall be very low if we are left to ourselves.”“I’ve an engagement for this evening—but—yes, I’ll get myself excused, and spend the evening with you, if you really want me.”“Indeed we do,” answered Disney, heartily; but Isola was dumb. Her eyes were fixed upon the distant point at which the brougham had disappeared round a corner, on its way to the station.CHAPTER XXVII“GONE DEEPER THAN ALL PLUMMETS SOUND.”Church bells are always ringing in that city of many churches, and there were bells ringing solemnly and slowly as Isola walked feebly up the two flights of stairs that led to Colonel Disney’s lodging. She walked even more slowly than usual, and her husband could hear her labouring breath as she went up, step by step, leaning on the banister rail. He had offered her his arm, but she had repulsed him, almost rudely, at the bottom of the stairs.They went into the drawing-room, which was bright with flowers in a sunlit dusk, the sun streaming in through the narrow opening between the Venetian shutters, which had been drawn together, but not fastened. All was very still in the quiet house; so still that they could hear the splash of the fountain in the Piazza, and the faint rustling of the limes in the garden.Husband and wife stood facing each other, he anxious and alarmed, she deadly pale, and with gleaming eyes.“Well, she is gone—she is Mrs. Hulbert now, and she belongs to him and not to us any more,” said Disney, talking at random, watching his wife’s face in nervous apprehension of—he knew not what. “We shall miss her sadly. Aren’t you sorry she is married, Isola, after all?”“Sorry! No! I am glad—glad with all my heart. I have waited for that.”And then, before he was aware, she had flung herself at his feet, and was kneeling there, with her head hanging down, her hands clasped—a very Magdalen.“I waited—till they were married—so that you should not refuse to let her marry—his brother—waited to tell you what I ought to have told you at once, when you came home from India. My only hope of pardon or of peace was to have told you then—to have left you for ever then—neverto have dared to clasp your hand—never to have dared to call myself your wife—never to have become the mother of your child. All my life since that day has been one long lie; and nothing that I have suffered—not all my agonies of remorse—can atone for that lie, unless God and you will accept my confession and my atonement to-day.”“Isola, for God’s sake, stop!”Again the racking cough seized her, and she sank speechless at his feet.He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the sofa, and flung open the shutters and let the light and air stream in upon her, as she lay prostrate and exhausted, wiping her white lips with a blood-stained handkerchief. He looked at her in a kind of horrified compassion. He thought that she was raving, that the excitement of the morning had culminated in fever and delirium. He was going to ring for help, meaning to send instantly for her doctor, when she stopped him, laying her thin cold hand upon his arm, and holding him by her side.“Sit down by me, Martin—don’t stop me—I must tell you—all—the truth.”Her words came slowly, in gasps; then with a great effort she gathered up the poor remnant of her strength, and went on in a low, tremulous voice, yet with the tone of one whose resolve was strong as death itself.“There was a time when I thought I could never tell you—that I must go down to my grave with my sin unrevealed, and that you would never know how worthless a woman you had loved and cherished. Then, on my knees before my God, I vowed that I would tell you all, at the last, when I was dying—and death is not far off now, Martin. I have delayed too long—too long! There is scarcely any atonement in my confession now. I have cheated you out of your love.”He looked at her horror-stricken, their two faces close to each other as he bent over her pillow.No; this was no delirium—there was a terrible reality in her words. The eyes looking up at him were not bright withfever, but with the steady resolute soul within—the soul panting for freedom from sin.“You have cheated me out of my love,” he repeated slowly. “Does that mean that you lied to me that night in London—that you perjured yourself, calling God to witness that you were pure and true?”“I was true to you then, Martin. My sin had been repented of. I was your loving, loyal wife, without one thought but of you.”“Loving, loyal!” he cried, with passionate scorn. “You had deceived and dishonoured me—you had made your name a by-word—a jest for such a man as Vansittart Crowther—and for how many more? You had lied, and lied, and lied to me—by every look, by every word that made you seem a virtuous woman and a faithful wife. My God, what misery!”“Martin, have pity!”“Pity! Yes, I pity the women in the streets! Am I to pity you, as I pity them? You, whom I worshipped—whom I thought as pure as the angels—wearing nothing of earth but your frail loveliness, which to me always seemed more of spirit than of clay. And you were false all the time—false as hell—the toy of the first idle profligate whom chance flung into your path? It was Lostwithiel! That man was right. He would hardly have dared to talk to you as he did if he had not been certain of his facts. Lostwithiel was your lover.”“Martin, have pity!” she repeated, with her hands clasped before her face.“Pity! Don’t I tell you that I pity you—pity you whom I used to revere! Great God! can you guess what pain it is to change respect for the creature one loves into pity? I told you that I would never hurt you—that I would never bring shame upon you, Isola. You have no unkindness to fear from me. But you have broken my heart, you have slain my faith in man and woman. I could have staked my life on your purity—I could have killed the man whoslandered you—and you swore a false oath—you called upon Heaven to witness a lie!”“I was a miserable creature, Martin. I could not bear to lose your love. If death had been my only penalty I could have borne it, but not the loss of your love.”“And your sister and her husband? They were as ready with their lies as you were,” he exclaimed bitterly.“Don’t blame Gwendolen. I telegraphed to her, imploring her to stand by me—to say that I was in London with her.”“And you were not in London?”“No, except to pass through, when—when I had escaped from him, and was on my way home.”“Escaped! My God! What villainy must have been used against you—so young, so helpless! Tell me all—without reserve—as freely as you want to be forgiven.”“I was not utterly wicked, Martin. I did not sin deliberately—I did not know what I was doing when I wrecked my life and destroyed my peace of mind for ever. I never meant to forget you—or to be false to you—but I was so lonely—so lonely. The days were so dreary and so long—even the short autumn days seemed long—and the evenings were so melancholy without you. And he came into my life suddenly—like a prince in a fairy tale—and at first I thought very little about him. He was nothing more to me than any one else in Trelasco—and then somehow we were always meeting by accident—in the lanes—or by the sea—and he seemed to care for all the things I cared for. The books I loved were his favourites. For a long time we talked of nothing but his travels, and of my favourite books. There was not a word spoken between us that you or any one else could blame.”“A common opening,” said Martin Disney, with scathing contempt. “One of the seducer’s favourite leads.”“And then, one evening in the twilight, he told me that he loved me. I was very angry—and I let him see that I was angry, and I did all I could to avoid him afterthat evening. I refused to go to the ball at Lostwithiel, knowing that I must meet him there. But they all persuaded me—Mrs. Crowther, Mrs. Baynham, Tabitha—they were all bent upon making me go—and I went. Oh, God, if I had but stood firm against their foolish persuasion, if I had but been true to myself! But my own heart fought against me. I wanted to see him again—if only for the last time. He had talked about starting for a long cruise to the Mediterranean. His yacht was ready to sail at an hours notice.”“You went, and you were lost.”“Yes, lost, irretrievably lost! It is all one long, wild dream when I look back upon it. He implored me to go away with him—but I told him no, no, no, not for worlds, nothing should ever make me false to my husband—nothing. I swore it—swore an oath which I had not the strength to keep. Oh, it was cruel, heartless, treacherous—the thing he did after that. When I was going away from the dance, he was there at my side—and he put me into the wrong carriage—his own carriage—and when I had been driven a little way from the hotel, the carriage stopped and he got in. I thought that he was driving me home. I asked him how he could be cruel as to be with me, in his own carriage, at the risk of my reputation—but he stopped me—shut my lips with his fatal kiss. Oh, Martin, how can I tell these things? The horse went almost at a gallop. I thought we should be killed. I was half fainting when the carriage stopped at last, after rattling up and down hill—and he lifted me out, and I felt the cold night-air on my face, the salt spray from the sea. I tried to ask him where I was,—whether this was home—but the words died on my lips—and I knew no more—knew no more till I woke from that dead, dull swoon in the cabin of theVendetta, and heard the sailors calling out to each other, and saw Lostwithiel sitting by my side—and then—and then—it was all one long dream—a dream of days and nights, and rain, and tempest. I thought the boat wasgoing down in that dreadful night in the Bay of Biscay. Would to God that she had gone down, and hidden me and my sin for ever! But she lived through the storm, and in the morning she was anchored near Arcachon, and Lostwithiel went on shore, and sent a woman in a boat, to bring me clothes, and to attend upon me; and I contrived to go on shore with the woman when she went back in the boat that had brought her, and I borrowed some money on my ring at a jeweller’s in Arcachon, and I left by the first train for Paris, and went on from Paris to London, and never stopped to rest anywhere till I got home.”“May God bring me face to face with that ruffian who imposed upon your helplessness!” cried Martin Disney.“No, no, Martin; he was not a ruffian. He betrayed me—but I loved him. He knew that I loved him. I was a great a sinner as be. I was his before he stole me from my home—his in mind and in spirit. It was our unhappy fate to love each other. And I forgave him, Martin. I forgave him on that night of tempest, when I thought we were going to die together.”“You don’t expect me to forgive him, do you? You don’t expect me to forgive the seducer who has ruined your life and mine?”“His brother is your sister’s husband, Martin?”“I am sorry for it.”“Oh, John Hulbert is good; he is frank and true. He is not like the other. But oh, Martin, pity Lostwithiel and his sin, as you pity me and my sin! It is past and done. I was mad when I cared for him—a creature under a spell. You won my heart back to you by your goodness—you made me more than ever your own. All that he had ever been to me—all that I had ever thought or felt about him—was blotted out as if I had never seen his face. Nothing remained but my love for you—and my guilty conscience, the aching misery of knowing that I was unworthy of you.”He took her hand and pressed it gently in silence. Then, after a long pause, when she had dried the tears from her streaming eyes, and was lying faint, and white, and still, caring very little what became of her poor remnant of life, he said softly—“I forgive you, Isola, as I pray God to forgive you. I have spent some happy years with you—not knowing. If it was a delusion, it was very sweet—while it lasted.”“It was not a delusion,” she cried, putting her arms round his neck, in a sudden rapture at being pardoned. “My love was real.”The door opened softly, and the kindly face of the Anglican priest looked in.“I have seen the lovers on their way to Florence,” he said, “and have come to ask how Mrs. Disney is after her fatiguing morning.”“I am happier than I have been for a long time,” answered Isola, holding out her hand to him. “I am prepared for the end, let it come when it may.”He knew what she meant, and that the sinner had confessed her sin.“Come out for a stroll with me, Disney,” he said, “and leave your wife to rest for a little while. I’m afraid she’ll miss her kind nurse.”Disney started up confusedly, like a sleeper awakened, and looked at his watch.“I believe I have a substitute ready to replace Allegra by this time,” he said, ringing the bell.“Has the person from England arrived?” he asked the servant.“Yes, sir. She came a quarter of an hour ago.”“Ask her to come here at once.”“Oh, Martin, you have not sent for a hospital nurse, I hope,” cried Isola, excitedly. “Indeed I am not so bad as that. I want very little help. I could not bear to have a stranger about me.”“This is not a stranger, Isola.”There came a modest knock at the door as he spoke.“Come in,” he said; and a familiar figure in a grey merino gown and smart white cap with pink ribbons entered quietly and came to the sofa where Isola was lying.“Tabitha!” she cried.“Don’t say you’re sorry to see an old face again, Mrs. Disney. I told Mr. Martin that if you should ever be ill and want nursing I’d come to nurse you—if you were at the other end of the world—and Mr. Martin wrote and told me you wanted an old servant’s care and experience to get you over your illness—and here I am. I’ve come every inch of the way without stopping, except at the buffets, and all I can say is Rome is a long way from everywhere, and the country I’ve come through isn’t to be compared with Cornwall.”She ran on breathlessly as she seated herself by that reclining figure with the waxen face. It may be that she talked to hide the shock she had experienced on seeing the altered looks of the young mistress whose roof she had left in the hour of shame. She had left her, refusing to hold commune with one who had sinned so deeply. The faithful servant had taken leave of her mistress in words that had eaten into Isola’s heart, as if they had been written there with a corrosive acid.“I am very sorry for you, Mrs. Disney,” she said. “You are young and pretty, and you are very much to be pitied—and God knows I have loved you as if you were my own flesh and blood. But I won’t stay under the roof of a wife who has brought shame upon herself and has dishonoured the best of husbands.”Isola had denied nothing, had acknowledged nothing, and had let Tabitha go. And now they met again for the first time after that miserable parting, and the servant’s eyes were full of pitying tears, and the servant’s lips spoke only gentlest words. What a virtue there must be in death, when so much is forgiven to the dying!Martin Disney went out with the priest, but at the corner of the Piazza he stopped abruptly.“Isola’s coughing fit has upset me more than it has her,” he said; “I’m not fit company for any one, so I think I’ll go for a tramp somewhere, and meet you later at dinner, when I’ve recovered my spirits a little.”“A riverderci,” said the priest, grasping his hand. “I felicitate you upon this day’s union; a happy one, or I am no judge of men and women.”“I don’t know,” Disney answered gloomily. “The woman is true as steel—the man comes of a bad stock. You know what the Scripture says about the tree and the fruit.”“There never was a race yet that was altogether bad,” said the priest. “Virtues may descend from remote ancestors as well as vices,—I think you told me moreover that Captain Hulbert’s mother was a good woman.”“She was. She was one of my mother’s earliest and dearest friends.”“Then you should have a better opinion of her son. If ever I met a thoroughly good fellow in my life, I believe I met one the day I made Captain Hulbert’s acquaintance.”“Pray God you may be right,” said Disney, with a sigh. “I am no judge of character.”He turned abruptly, and skirted the hill on his way to the gardens of the Villa Borghese, where he found shade and seclusion in the early afternoon. The carriages of fashionable Rome had not yet begun to drive in at the gate. The cypress avenues, the groves of immemorial ilex, the verdant lawns where the fountains leapt sunward, were peopled only by creatures of fable, fixed in marble, faun and dryad, hero and god. Martin Disney plunged into the shadow of one of those funereal avenues, and—while the sun blazed in almost tropical splendour upon the open lawn in the far distance—he walked as it were in the deep of night, a night whose gloom harmonized with that darker night in his despairing heart.Great God, how he had loved her! How he had looked up to her, revering even her weakness as the expression of a childlike purity. And while he had been praying for her, and dreaming of her, and longing for her, and thinking of her as the very type of womanly chastity, unapproachable by temptation, unassailable, secure in her innocence and simplicity as Athene or Artemis with all their armour of defence; while he had so loved and trusted her, she had flung herself into the arms of a profligate—as easily won as the lightest wanton. She had done this thing, and then she had welcomed him, with wan, sweet smiles, to his dishonoured home. She had made him drink the cup of shame—a by-word it might be for the whole parish, as well as for that one man who had dared to hint at evil. And yet he had forgiven her—forgiven one to whom pardon meant only a peaceful ending; forgiven as a man holds himself forgiven by an all-merciful God, as he hears words of pity and promise murmured into his ear by the priest upon the scaffold, when the rope is round his neck and the drop is ready to fall. How could he withhold such pardon when he had been taught that God forgives the repentant murderer?CHAPTER XXVIII.“THOUGH LOVE AND LIFE AND DEATH SHOULD COME AND GO.”Isola was alone in the spacious Roman drawing-room, its wide windows open to the soft, warm air. The sun was off that side of the house now, and the Venetian shutters had been pushed back; and between the heavy stone pillars of the loggia she saw the orange and magnolia trees in the garden, and the pale gold of the mimosas beyond. The sun was shining full upon the Hill of Gardens, that hill at whosefoot Nero was buried in secret at dead of night by his faithful freedman and the devoted woman who loved him to the shameful end of the shameful life; that hill whose antique groves the wicked Cæsar’s ghost had once made a place of terror. The wicked ghost was laid now. Modern civilization had sent Nero the way of all phantoms; and fashionable Rome made holiday on the Hill of Gardens. A military band was playing there this afternoon in the golden light, and the familiar melodies in Don Giovanni were wafted ever and anon in little gusts of sweetness to the loggia where the vivid crimson of waxen camelias and the softer rose of oleander blossoms gave brightness and colour to the dark foliage and the cold white stone.Isola heard those far-off melodies faint in the distance—heard without heeding. The notes were beyond measure familiar, interwoven with the very fabric of her life, for those were the airs Martin Disney loved, and she had played them to him nearly every evening in their quiet, monotonous life. She heard, unheeding, for her thoughts had wandered back to the night of the ball at Lostwithiel and all that went after it—the fatal night that struck the death-knell of peace and innocence.How vividly she remembered every detail—her fluttering apprehensions during the long drive on the dark road, up hill and down hill; her eagerness for the delight of the dance, as an unaccustomed pleasure—a scene to which young beauty flies as the moth to the flame; her remorseful consciousness that she had done wrong in yielding to the temptation which drew her there; the longing to see Lostwithiel once more—Lostwithiel, whom she had vowed to herself never to meet again of her own free will. She had gone home that afternoon resolved to forego the ball, to make any social sacrifice rather than look upon that man whose burning words of love, breathed in her ear before she had enough of nerve or calmness to silence him, had left her scathed and geared as if the lightning had blasted her. She had heard his avowal. There was no room now to doubt the meaningof all that had gone before, no ground now for believing in a tender, platonic admiration, lapping her round with its soft radiance—a light, but not a fire. That which had burnt into her soul to-day was the fierce flame of a dishonouring love, the bold avowal of a lover who wanted to steal her from her husband, and make her a sinner before her God.She knew this much—had brooded upon it all the evening—and yet she was going to a place where she must inevitably meet the Tempter.She was going because it was expedient to go; because her persistent refusal to be there might give rise to guesses and suspicions that would lead to a discovery of the real reason of her absence. She had often seen the subtle process, the society search-light by which Trelasco and Fowey could arrive at the innermost working of a neighbour’s heart, the deepest mysteries of motive.She was going to the ball after all, fevered, anxious, full of dim forebodings; and yet with an eager expectancy; and yet with a strange over-mastering joy. How should she meet him? How could she avoid him, without ostentatious avoidance, knowing how many eyes would be quick to mark any deviation from conventional behaviour? Somehow or other she was resolved to avoid all association with him; to get her programme filled before he could ask her to dance; or to refuse in any case if he asked her. He would scarcely venture to approach her after what had been said in the lane, when her indignation had been plainly expressed with angry tears. No, he would hardly dare. And so—in a vague bewilderment at finding she was at her journey’s end—she saw the lights of the little town close upon her, and in the next few minutes her carriage was moving slowly in the rank of carriages setting down their freight at the door of the inn.Vaguely, as in a dream, she saw the lights and the flowers, the satin gowns and the diamonds, the scarlet and white upon the walls, brush and vizard, vizard and brush. Hewas not there. She looked along the crowd, and that tall figure and that dark head were absent. She ought to have been glad at this respite, and yet her heart grew heavy as lead.Later he was there, and she was waltzing with him. At the last moment when he was standing before her, cool, self-possessed, as it were unconscious of that burning past, she had no more power to refuse to be his partner than the bird has to escape from the snake. She had given him her hand, and they were moving slowly, softly to the music of the soft, slow waltz. Myosotis, myosotis—mystic flower which means everlasting remembrance! Would she ever forget this night? Their last meeting—safest possible meeting-place here in the shine of the lamps—in the sight of the multitude. Here she could so easily hold him at a distance. Here she might speak to him lightly, as if she too were unconscious of the past. Here she was safe against his madness and her own weak unstable heart, which fluttered at his smallest word.And so the night wore on, and she danced with him more times than she could count, forgetting, or pretending to forget, other engagements; going through an occasional waltz with another partner just for propriety’s sake, and hardly knowing who that partner was; knowing so well that there was some one else standing against the wall, watching her every movement, with the love-light in his eyes.Then came the period after supper when they sat in the ante-room and let the dances go by, hearing the music of waltzes which they were to have danced together, hearing and heeding not. And then came a sudden scare at the thought of the hour. Was it late?Late, very late!The discovery fluttered and unnerved her, and she was scarcely able to collect her thoughts as he handed her into the carriage and shut the door.“Surely it was a grey horse that brought me!” sheexclaimed, and in the next minute she recognized Lostwithiel’s brougham, the same carriage in which she had been driven home through the rain upon that unforgotten night when his house sheltered her, when she saw his face for the first time.Yes, it was his carriage. She knew the colour of the lining, the little brass clock, the reading-lamp, the black panther rug. She pulled at the check-string, but without effect. The carriage drove on, slowly, but steadily, to the end of the town. She let down the window and called to the coachman. There was only one man on the box, and he took no notice of her call.Yes, he had heard, perhaps, for he drew up his horse suddenly by the road-side, a little way beyond the town. A man opened the door and sprang in, breathless after running. It was Lostwithiel.“You put me into your carriage!” she cried distractedly. “How could you make such a mistake? Pray tell him to go back to the inn directly.”They were driving along the country road at a rapid pace, and he had seated himself by her side, clasping her hand. He pulled up the window nearest her, and prevented her calling to the coachman.“Why should you go back? You will be home sooner with my horse than with the screw that brought you.”“But the fly will be waiting for me—the man will wonder.”“Let him wonder. He won’t wait very long, you may be assured. He will guess what has happened. In the confusion of carriages you took the wrong one. Isola, I am going to leave Cornwall to-night—to leave England—perhaps never to return. Give me the last few moments of my life here. Be merciful to me. I am going away—perhaps for ever.”“Take me home,” she said. “Are you really taking me home? Is this the right way?”“Of course it is the right way. Do you suppose I am going to drive you to London?”He let down the glass suddenly, and pointed into the night.
He looked with a sceptical eye at the Anglican priest’s cassock and girdle. If Father Rodwell had been a Papist it would have been altogether a more satisfactory state of things; but an Anglican—a man who might preach the beauty of holy poverty and a celibate life one year and marrya rich widow the year after—a man bound only by his own wishes.Had Allegra been a thought less frank—had she been a woman whom it was possible to doubt—the sailor would have given himself over to the demon of jealousy; but there are happily some women in whom truth and purity are so transparently obvious that even an anxious lover cannot doubt them. Allegra was such an one. No suspicion of coquetry ever lessened her simple womanliness. She was a woman of whom a man might make a friend; a woman whose feelings and meanings he could by no possibility mistake.He had pleaded his hardest and pleaded in vain for a June wedding. Isola’s state of health was too critical for the contemplation of any change in the family circle.“She could not do without me, nor could Martin either,” Allegra told her lover. “It is I who keep house and manage their money, and see to everything for them. Martin has been utterly helpless since this saddening anxiety began. He thinks of nothing but Isola, and her chances of recovery. I cannot leave him while she is so ill.”“Have you any hope of her ever being better, my dear girl?”“I don’t know. It has been a long and wearing illness.”“It is not illness, Allegra. It is a gradual decay. My fear is that she will never revive. There is no marked disease—nothing for medicine to fight against. Such cases as hers are the despair of doctors. A spring has been broken somehow in the human machine. Science cannot mend it.”Allegra was very much of her sweetheart’s opinion.The English doctor in Rome was as kind and attentive as the doctor at San Remo; but although he had not yet pronounced the case hopeless, he took a by no means cheerful view of his patient’s condition. He recommended Colonel Disney to leave the city before the third week in May, and to take his wife to Switzerland, travelling by easy stages,and doing all he could to amuse and interest her. If on the other hand it were important for Colonel Disney to be in England, he might take his wife back to Cornwall in June. But in this case she must return to the south in October. Lungs and heart were both too weak for the risks of an English winter.“We will not go back to England,” decided Disney. “My wife is not fond of Cornwall. Italy has been a delight to her; and Switzerland will be new ground. God grant the summer may bring about an improvement!”The doctor said very little, and promised nothing.Closely as they watched her, with anxious loving looks, it may be that seeing her every day even their eyes did not mark the gradual decline of vitality—the inevitable advance of decay. She never complained; the cough that marked the disease which had fastened on her lungs since February was not a loud or seemingly distressing cough. It was only now and then, when she tried to walk uphill, or over-exerted herself in any way, that her malady became painfully obvious in the labouring chest, flushed cheek, and panting breath; but she made light even of these symptoms, and assured her husband that Rome was curing her.Her spirits had been less equable since Father Rodwell’s appearance. She had alternated between a feverish intensity and a profound dejection. Her changes of mood had been sudden and apparently causeless; and those who watched and cherished her could do nothing to dispel the gloom that often clouded over her. If she were questioned she could only say that she was tired. She would never admit any reason for her melancholy.CHAPTER XXV.“WE’LL BIND YOU FAST IN SILKEN CORDS.”Captain Hulbert was not selfish enough to plead for his personal happiness in the midst of a household shadowed by the foreboding of a great sorrow. Martin Disney’s face, as he looked at his wife in those moments which too plainly marked the progress of decay, was in itself enough to put a check upon a lover’s impatience. How could any man plead for his own pleasure—for the roses and sunshine of life—in the presence of that deep despair?“He knows that he is doomed to lose her,” thought Hulbert; “knows it, and yet tries to hope. I never saw such intense, unquestioning love. One asks one’s self involuntarily about any woman—Is she worth it?”And then he thought of Allegra, truthful and impulsive, strong as steel, transparent as crystal. Yes, such a woman as that was worth the whole of a man’s heart—worthy that a man should live or die for her. But it seemed to him that to compare Isola with Allegra was to liken an ash sapling to an oak.He resigned himself to his disappointment, talked no more of Venice and the starlit lagunes, the summer nights on the Lido, and quoted no more of Buskin’s rhapsodies; but he came meekly day after day to join in the family excursion, whatever it might be. He had enough and to spare of ecclesiastical architecture and of the old masters during those summer-like mornings and afternoons. He heard more than enough of the mad Cæsars and the bad Cæsars, of wicked Empresses and of low-born favourites, of despotism throned in the palace and murder waiting at the gate, of tyranny drunken with power long abused, and treason on the watch for the golden opportunity to change one profligate master for another, ready to toss up for the newCæsar, and to accept the basest slave for master, would be but open the Imperial treasury wide enough to the Prætorian’s rapacious hands.“People gloat over these hoary old walls as if they would like to have lived under Caligula,” said the sailor, with a touch of impatience, when Father Rodwell had been expatiating upon a little bit of moulding which decorated an imperial staircase.“It would have been at least a picturesque time to have lived in,” said Allegra. “Existence must have been a series of pictures by Alma Tadema.”Captain Hulbert was startled out of his state of placid submission by the intervention of a most unexpected ally.It was one of the hottest days there had been since they came to Rome. To cross the Piazza in front of St. Peter’s was like plunging into a bath of molten gold; while to enter the great Basilica itself was like going into an ice-house. Father Rodwell was not with them upon this particular morning. They were a party of four, and a roomy landau had been engaged to take them to the Church of St. Paul beyond the walls, and thence to the tomb of Cecilia Metella. Isola and Allegra had made pilgrimages to the spot before to-day. It was a drive they both loved, a glimpse of the pastoral life outside the gates of the city, and a place for ever associated with the poet whose verse was written in their hearts.They dawdled over a light luncheon of macaroni and Roman wine at acafénear the great cold white church, and then they drove through the sandy lanes in the heat of the afternoon, languid all of them, and Isola paler and more weary-looking than she had been for some time. Her husband watched her anxiously, and wanted to go back to Rome, lest the drive should be too exhausting for her.“No, no, I am not tired,” she answered impatiently. “I would much rather go on. I want to see that grim old toweragain,” and then she quoted the familiar lines, dreamily, with a faint pleasure in their music—“Perchance she died in youth: it may be bowedWith woes far heavier than the ponderous tombThat weighed upon her gentle dust.”“Besides,” she added confusedly, “I want to have a little private talk with Captain Hulbert, while Allegra is busy with her everlasting memoranda in that dirty little sketchbook which is stuffed with the pictures of the future. May I?”She looked from her husband to Captain Hulbert pleadingly. The latter was first to answer.“I am at your service, Mrs. Disney; ready to be interrogated, or lectured, or advised, whichever you like.”“I am not going to do either of the three. I am going to ask you a favour.”“Consider that to ask is to be obeyed.”They alighted in the road by the tomb a few minutes afterwards. Allegra’s note-book was out immediately, a true artist’s book, crammed with every conceivable form of artistic reminiscence.“Go and talk,” she said, waving her hand to Isola and Hulbert; and then she clambered up a bank opposite that tower of other days to get a vantage ground for her sketch.She had made a score of sketches on the same spot, but there were always new details to jot down, new effects and ideas, on that vast level which frames the grandeur of Rome. Yonder the long line of the aqueduct; here the living beauty of broad-fronted oxen moving with stately paces along the dusty way, the incarnation of strength and majesty, patience and labour.“Stay here and smoke your cigar, Martin,” said Isola, “while Captain Hulbert and I go for a stroll.”Her husband smiled at her tenderly, cheered by her unwonted cheerfulness. His days and hours alternated between hope and despair. This was a moment of hope.“My dearest, you are full of mystery to-day,” he said, “and I am as full of curiosity. But I can wait. Consider me a statue of patience standing by the way-side, and take your time.”She put her hand through Hulbert’s arm, and led him away from the other two, sauntering slowly along beside the grassy bank.“I want to talk about your wedding,” she said, as soon as they were out of hearing. “When are you and Allegra going to be married?”“My dear Mrs. Disney, you know that I pledged myself to wait a year from the time of our engagement—a year from last Christmas—you must remember. That was to be my probation.”“Yes, I remember; but that is all foolishness—idle romance. Allegra knows that you love her. I don’t think she could know it any better after another half-year’s devotion on your part.”“I don’t think she could know it better after another half century. I know I could never love her more than I do now. I know I shall never love her less.”“I believe that you are good and true,” said Isola. “As true and—almost—as good as he is”—with a backward glance at her husband. “If I did not believe that I should not have thought of saying what I am going to say.”“I am honoured by your confidence in me.”“I love Allegra too well to hazard her happiness. I know she loves you—has never cared for any one else. She was heart-whole till she saw you. She had no more thought of love, or lovers, than a child. I want you to marry her soon, Captain Hulbert—very soon, before we leave Rome. Would you not like to be married in Rome?”“I would like to be married in Kamtchatka, or Nova Zembla—or the worst of those places whose very names suggest uncomfortableness. There is no dismallest corner of the earth which Allegra could not glorify and make dear.But, as you suggest, Rome is classic—Rome is mediæval—Rome is Roman Catholic. It would be a new sensation for a plain man like me to be married in Rome. I suppose it could not be managed in St. Peter’s?”“Oh, Captain Hulbert, I want you to be serious.”“I am serious. Why, this is a matter of life or death to me. But I pleaded so hard for a June wedding—and to no purpose. I talked with the artfulness of the first Tempter—I tried to play upon her vanities as an artist. All in vain!”“Tell her that I have set my heart upon seeing her married,” said Isola, in a low voice.“Why, of course, you will see her married, whether she be married in Rome or at Trelasco. That is no argument.”“But it is; indeed it is. Tell her that, if I am to be at her wedding, it must be soon, very soon. Life is so uncertain at best—and, although I feel well and strong, sometimes—to-day, for instance—there are other times when I think the end is nearer than even my doctor suspects. And I know by his face that he does not give me a long lease of life.”“My dear Mrs. Disney, this is morbid. I am grieved to hear you talk in such a strain.”“Don’t notice that. Don’t say anything depressing to Allegra. I want her to go off to her Venetian honeymoon very happily—with not one cloud in her sky. She has been so good and dear to me. It would be hard if I could not rejoice in her happiness. I have rejoiced in it always; I shall take pleasure in it to the end of my life. It is the one unclouded spot——.” She stopped with a troubled air. “Yes, it is a happy fate—to have cared for one, and one only, and to be loved again. Will you do what I ask you, Captain Hulbert? will you hurry on the wedding—for my sake?”“I would do anything difficult and unwelcome for your sake—how much more will I hasten my own happiness—if Ican. But Allegra is a difficult personage—as firm as rock when she has once made up her mind. And she has made up her mind to stay with you till you are quite well and strong again.”“She need not leave me for ever, because she marries. She can come back to me after a long honeymoon. We can all meet in Switzerland in August—if—if I go there with Martin, as he proposes.”“Well, I will try to bend that stubborn will.”“And you don’t mind having a quiet wedding, if she consents to a much earlier date?”“Mind? The quieter the better for me! I think a smart wedding is a preventive of matrimony. That sounds like a bull. I will say I think there are many wretched bachelors living in dismal chambers, and preyed upon by landladies, who might have been happily married, but for the fear of a smart wedding. We will have as quiet a wedding as you and Disney can desire; but I should like Lostwithiel to be present. He is my only near relation, and I don’t want to cut him on the happiest day of my life. Why, Mrs. Disney, you are trembling! You have agitated yourself about this business; you have talked too much for your strength. Let me take you back to the carriage.”“Presently—yes, yes. The heat overcame me for a moment, that’s all. Would you mind not waiting for Lord Lostwithiel? I want the marriage to be at once—directly—as soon as Father Rodwell can get it arranged. And you don’t know where a telegram would reach your brother?”“Indeed, I do not; but by speculating a few messages of inquiry I could soon find out the whereabouts of theEurydice.”“Don’t wait for that. There would be delay. There must be delay if you have to consult any distant person’s convenience. We are all here—you and Allegra, and Martin and I—and Father Rodwell would like to marry you. What do you want with anybody else?”“Upon my word, I think you are right! Allegra is acreature of impulse—where principle is not at stake. If I asked her to marry me six weeks hence she would parley and make terms. If I ask her to marry me in a few days—before we leave Rome—she may consent. Have you talked to your husband? Is he of your opinion?”“I have said nothing to him; but I know he would be pleased to see you and Allegra bound together for life.”“I will talk to him this afternoon. One can get everything one wants in Rome, I believe, from a papal dispensation down to an English solicitor. If we can but rattle through some kind of marriage settlement to your husband’s satisfaction we can be married on the earliest day to which my darling will consent. God bless you, Mrs. Disney, for your unselfish thought of other people’s happiness! You are not like most invalids, who would let a sister languish in lifelong spinsterhood rather than lose her as a nurse. God grant that your unselfishness may be recompensed by speedy recovery!”“There will be a weight off my mind when you and Allegra are married,” said Isola, gravely.They walked slowly back to the spot where they had left their companions. A pair of oxen, with an empty cart, were standing in the road below the tomb, their driver lounging across the rough vehicle—man and beasts motionless as marble. Allegra sat on a hillock opposite, sketching the group. She had bribed the man to draw up for a brief halt while she made her sketch. The massive heads were drooping under the afternoon sun; the tawny and cream-hued coats were stained with dust and purpled with the sweat of patient labour. The creatures looked as gracious and as wise as if they had been gods in disguise.“Now, Allegra,” said her brother, emptying the ashes out of his pipe, “are you ready to go home?”“Yes, I have just jotted down what will serve to remind me of those splendid beasts; but I should like to have them standing there all day, so that I could paint them seriously.They are the finest models I have seen in Rome. Have you two quite finished your secrets and mysteries?” she asked, smiling at Isola, who was looking brighter than usual.“Yes; I have said all I had to say, and have been answered as I wished to be answered. I shall go home very happy.”“That’s a good hearing,” said Disney, as he helped her into the landau.Allegra had talked of wanting to revisit Caracalla’s Baths, a wish of which Isola reminded her as they drove back to the city, along the Appian Way: whereupon Captain Hulbert suggested that he and his sweetheart should stop to explore the ruins, while Disney and Isola went home.Allegra blushed and consented, always a little shy at being alone with her lover, especially since he had pleaded so earnestly for a summer honeymoon.“Mrs. Disney, your right place in Rome would be the Embassy,” murmured Hulbert as he shut the carriage door; “you are a born diplomatist.”“What makes my dearest look so pleased and happy this afternoon?” asked Disney, as he changed to the seat beside his wife.“I am glad because I think Captain Hulbert will persuade Allegra to marry him before we leave Rome. I begged him to hasten their marriage. That was my mystery, Martin. That was what he and I were talking about.”“But why wish to hasten matters, dear? They are very happy as it is—and a year is not a long engagement.”“Too long for me, Martin. I want to see her happy—I want to see them married before——”“Before what, dear love?” he asked tenderly.“Before we leave Rome.”“That would be very short work. We leave in a fortnight. The weather will be growing too hot for you if we linger later.”“Yes, but everything can be settled in less time than that. Ask Father Rodwell. He knows Rome so well that he can help you to arrange all details.”“I thought that every young woman required at least six months for the preparation of her trousseau?”“Not such a girl as Allegra. She is always well dressed, and her wardrobe is the perfection of neatness—but she is not the kind of girl to make a fuss about her clothes. I don’t think the trousseau will create any difficulty.”“And when she is gone, what will you do without your devoted companion? Who will nurse you and take care of you?”“Löttchen, or any other servant,” she answered, with a kind of weary indifference. “It would be very hard if my bad health should stand in the way of Allegra’s happiness. So long as you will stay with me and be kind to me, Martin, I need no one else.”Tears were streaming down her cheeks as she turned from him, pretending to be interested in the convent walls on the edge of the hill below which they were driving.“So long as I stay with you! My darling, do you think business or pleasure, or any claim in this world, will ever take me from you any more? All your hours are precious to me, Isola. I hardly live when I am away from you. Wherever your doctor may send you, or your own fancy may lead you, I shall go with you, unhesitatingly—without one regret for anything I leave behind.”“Don’t say these things,” she cried suddenly, with a choking sob; “you are too good to me. There are times when I can’t bear it.”CHAPTER XXVI.“SO, FULL CONTENT SHALL HENCEFORTH BE MY LOT.”Allegra was not inexorable. There, in the ruins of the Imperial baths, where Shelley dreamed the wonder-dream of his Prometheus, Captain Hulbert pleaded his cause. Could love resist the pleading of so fond a lover? Could art withstand the allurements of Venice—Titian and Tintoret, the cathedral of St. Mark and the Palace of the Doges, the birthplace of Desdemona and of Shylock, the home of Byron and of Browning?She consented to a Roman marriage.“I can’t help wishing I could be a Papist just for that one day,” she said lightly. “An Anglican marriage seems so dry and cold compared with the pomps and splendours of Rome.”“Dearest, the plainest Christian rites are enough, if they but make us one.”“I think we are that already, John,” she answered shyly; and then, nestling by his side as they sat in the wide solitude of that stupendous pile, she took his hand and held it in both her own, looking down at it wonderingly—a well-formed hand, strong and muscular, broadened a little by seafaring.“And you are to be my husband,” she said. “Mine! I shall speak of you to people as my own peculiar property. ‘My husband will do this or that.’ ‘My husband has gone out, but he will be home soon.’ Home. Husband. How strange it sounds!”“Strange and wonderful now, love. Sweet and familiar before our honeymoon is ended.”They went out of the broad spaces that were once populous with the teeming life of Imperial Rome, splendid with all that art could create of beauty and of grandeur—wraptin the glamour of their dream. They walked all the way to the Piazza di Spagna in the same happy dream, as unconscious of the ground they trod on as if they had been floating in the air.They were a very cheerful party at dinner that evening. Father Rodwell dined with them, and was delighted at the idea of having to marry these happy lovers. He took the arrangement of the ceremony into his own hands. The English chaplain was his old friend, and would let him do what he liked in his church.“It is to be a very quiet wedding,” said the colonel, when the three men were smoking together in a loggia, looking on the little garden of orange trees and oleanders, in the grey dim beginning of night, when the thin crescent moon was shining in a sky still faintly flushed with sunset. “Isa could not stand anything like bustle or excitement. Luckily we have no friends in Rome. There is no one belonging to us who could be aggrieved at not being invited.”“And there is no one except Lostwithiel on my side who has the slightest claim to be present,” said Hulbert. “I am almost as well off as the Flying Dutchman in that respect. I am not troubled with relations. All the kinsfolk I have are distant, and I allow them to remain so. My dear Disney, so far as I am concerned, our wedding cannot be too quiet a business. It is the bride I want, mark you, not the fuss and flowers, wedding-breakfast, and bridesmaids. Let us be married at half-past ten, and drive from the church to the railway station in time for the noonday train. I have given up my dream of taking Allegra round Southern Italy to the Adriatic. We shall go to Florence first, and spend a few days in the galleries, and thence to Venice, where we will have theVendettabrought to us, and anchored near the arsenal, ready to carry us away directly we are tired of the city of old memories.”Father Rodwell left them and went into the drawing-room, where Isola and her sister-in-law were sitting in thelamplight—Isola’s hands occupied with that soft, fluffy knitting which seemed to exercise a soothing influence upon her nerves; Allegra leaning over the table, idly sketching random reminiscences of the Baths, the Tomb, the grave-eyed oxen, with their great curving horns and ponderous foreheads.The priest was interested in watching Isola this evening. He saw a marked change in the expression of her countenance, a change which was perceptible to him even in her voice and manner—a brightness which might mean a lightened heart, or which might mean religious exaltation.“Has she told him?” he wondered, studying her from his place in the shadow as the lamplight shone full upon her wasted features and hectic colouring. “Has she taken courage and confessed her sin to that loyal, loving husband, and is the burden lifted from her heart?”No; he could not believe that she had lifted the veil from the sad secret of her past. Martin Disney’s unclouded brow to-night was not that of a man who had lately discovered that the wife he loved had betrayed him. There might be pardon—there might be peace between husband and wife after such a revelation; but there could not be the serenity which marked Martin Disney’s manner to his wife to-night. Such a thunder-clap must leave its brand upon the man who suffered it. No; her secret was still locked in her impenitent heart. Sorry—yes. She had drunk the cup of remorse in all its bitterness; but she knew not true penitence, the Christian’s penitence, which means self-abasement and confession. And yet she seemed happier. There was a look of almost holy resignation upon the pale and placid brow, and in the too-lustrous eyes. Something had happened—some moral transformation which made her a new being.Father Rodwell drew his chair nearer to her, and looked at her earnestly with his cordial, almost boyish smile. He was a remarkably young-looking man, a man upon whomlong years of toil in the dark places of the earth had exercised no wasting or withering influence. He had loved his work too well ever to feel the pressure of the burdens he carried. His gospel had been always a cheerful gospel, and he had helped to lighten sorrows, never to make them heavier. He was deeply interested in Isola, and had been watchful of all her changes of mood since their conversation in the shadow of the old Roman wall. He had seen her impressed by the history and traditions of the church, moved by the pathos of holy lives, touched almost to tears by sacred pictures, and he saw in her character and disposition a natural bent towards piety, exactly that receptive temperament which moves holy women to lives of self-abnegation and heroic endeavour. He had lent her some of those books which he loved best and read most himself, and he had talked with her of religion, careful not to say too much or with too strong an emphasis, and never by any word alluding to her revelation of past guilt. He wanted to win her to perfect trustfulness in him, to teach her to lean upon him in her helplessness; until the hour should come when she would let him lead her to her husband, in the self-abasement of the penitent sinner.He knew that in this desire he exceeded the teaching of churchmen; that another priest in his place might have bade her keep her sad secret to the end, lie down with it in her early grave, be remembered as a saint, yet die knowing herself a sinner. If he had thought of the husband’s peace first, he would have counselled silence. But he thought most of this stricken soul, with wings that spread themselves towards heaven, held down to earth by the burden of an unpardoned sin.He looked at her in the lamplight, and her eyes met his with a straighter outlook than he had seen in them for a long time. She looked actually happy, and that look of happiness in a face on which death has set its seal has always something which suggests a life beyond the grave.“The excitement of this marriage question has brightened you wonderfully, Mrs. Disney,” he said. “We shall have you in high health by the wedding-day.”“I am feeling better because I am so glad,” Isola answered naively, putting her hand into Allegra’s.“I consider it positively insulting to me as a sister,” exclaimed Allegra, bending down to kiss the too-transparent hand—such a hand as she had seen in many a picture of dying saint in the Roman galleries. “You are most unaffectionately rejoiced to get rid of me. I have evidently been a tyrannical nurse, and a dull companion, and you breathe more freely at the prospect of release.”“You have been all that is dear and good,” Isola answered softly, “and I shall feel dreadfully lonely without you; but it won’t be for long. And I shall be so comforted by the knowledge that nothing can come between you and your life’s happiness.”The two men came in from the loggia, bringing with them the cool breath of night. Isola went to the piano and played one of those Adagios of Mozart’s which came just within the limit of her modest powers, and which she played to perfection, all her soul in the long lingering phrases, the tender modulations, with their suggestions of shadowy cathedral aisles, and the smoke of incense in the deepening dusk of a vesper service. Those bits of Mozart, the slow movements from the Sonatas, an Agnus Dei, or an Ave Maria from one of the Masses, satisfied Captain Hulbert’s highest ideas of music. He desired nothing grander or more scientific. The new learning of the Wagnerian school had no charm for him.“If you ask me about modern composers, I am for Verdi and Gounod,” he said. “For gaiety and charm, give me Auber, Rossini, and Boieldieu—for pathos, Weber—for everything, Mozart. There you have the whole of my musical education.”The question of settlements was opened seriously between Martin Disney and his future brother-in-law, early on thefollowing morning. Hulbert wanted to settle all the money he had in the world upon Allegra.“She is ever so much wiser than I am,” he said. “So she had better be my treasurer. My property is all in stocks and shares. My grandfather was fond of stock-jobbing, and made some very lucky investments which he settled upon my mother, with strict injunctions that they should not be meddled with by her trustees. My share of her fortune comes to a little over nine hundred a year. I came into possession of it when I came of age, and it is mine to dispose of as I like, trusts expired, trustees cleared off—in point of fact, both gone over to the majority, poor old souls, after having had many an anxious hour about those South American railway bonds, and Suez Canal shares, which turned up trumps after all. I’ve telegraphed to the family lawyer for a schedule of the property, and when that comes, just tie it all up in as tight a knot as the law can tie, and let it belong to Allegra and her children after her. Consider me paid off.”Martin Disney laughed at the lover’s impetuosity—and told him that he should be allowed to bring so much and no more into settlement. Allegra’s income was less than two hundred a year, a poor little income upon which she had fancied herself rich, so modest is woman’s measure of independence as compared with man’s. It would be for the lawyer to decide what proportion the husband’s settlements should bear to the wife’s income. Father Rodwell had given Colonel Disney an introduction to a solicitor of high character, a man who had occupied an excellent position in London until damaged lungs obliged him to seek a home in the south.With this gentleman’s aid, matters were soon put in train, and while the men were in the lawyer’s office, the two women were choosing Allegra’s wedding-gown.The young lady had exhibited a rare indifference upon the great trousseau question. She was not one of those girls whose finery is all external, and who hide rags and tattersunder æsthetic colouring and Raffaelle draperies. She was too much of an artist to endure anything unseemly in her belongings, and her everyday clothes, just as they were, might have been exhibited, like a Royal trousseau, without causing any other comment than, “How nice!” “What good taste!” “What exquisite needlework!”The hands which painted such clever pictures were as skilful with the needle as with the brush, and Allegra had never considered that a vocation for art meant uselessness in every feminine industry. She had attended to her own wardrobe from the time she learnt plain sewing at her first school; and now, as she and Isola looked over the ample array of under-linen, the pretty cambric peignoirs, and neatly trimmed petticoats, they were both of one mind, that there was very little need of fuss or expenditure.“I have plenty of summer frocks,” said Allegra. “So really there is only my travelling gown to see about, that is to say, the gown I am to be married in.”“But you must have a real wedding-gown, all the same, a white satin gown, with lace and pearls,” pleaded Isola. “When you go to dinner-parties, by-and-by, you will be expected to look like a bride.”“Dinner-parties! Oh, those are a long way off. We are not likely to be asked to any parties while we are wandering about Italy. I can get a gown when I go home.”Allegra’s wedding-day had dawned—a glorious day—a day to make one drunken with the beauty of sky and earth; a day when the vetturini in the Piazza di Spagna sat and dreamt on their coach-boxes—narcotized by the sun—when the reds and blues in the garments of the flower-women were almost too dazzling for the eye to look upon, and when every garden in the city sent forth tropical odours of roses steeped in sunlight.The church in which the lovers were to be made one was a very homely temple as compared with the basilicas yonder on the hills of Rome. But what did that matter to Allegrathis morning as she stood before the altar and spoke the words which gave her to the man she loved? A flood of sunshine streamed upon the two figures of bride and bridegroom, and touched the almost spectral face of the bride’s sister-in-law, a face which attracted as much attention as the bride’s fresh bloom and happy smile. It was a face marked for death, yet beautiful in decay. The large violet eyes were luminous with the light of worlds beyond the world we know. There was something loftier than happiness in that vivid look, something akin to exaltation—the smile of the martyr at the stake—the martyr for whom Heaven’s miraculous intervention changes the flames of the death-pile into the soft fanning of seraphic wings; the martyr unconscious of earthly pains and earthly cruelties; who sees the skies opening and the glorious company of saints and angels gathered about the great white throne.Father Rodwell saw that spiritual expression in the pale, wasted face, and he told himself that a lost soul could not look out of eyes like those. If death were near, as he feared, the true repentance for which he had prayed many an earnest prayer was not far off.Bride and bridegroom were to leave Rome by the mid-day train. Colonel Disney was going to see the last of them at the station, but Isola and her sister-in-law were to say good-bye in the vestry, and to part at the church door. And now Father Rodwell’s brief, but fervent, address had been spoken, the Wedding March pealed from the organ, and the small wedding-party went into the vestry to sign the registers.Isola was called upon for her signature as one of the witnesses. She signed in a bold, clear hand, without one tremulous line, her husband looking over her shoulder as she wrote.“That doesn’t look like an invalid’s autograph, does it, Hulbert?” he asked, snatching at every token of hope, unwilling to believe what his doctors and his own convictions told him—expecting a miracle.They had warned him that he could not keep her long. They had advised him to humour her fancies, to let her be present at the wedding, even at the hazard of her suffering afterwards for that exertion and excitement. She would suffer more perhaps—physically as well as mentally—if she were thwarted in her natural wish to be by Allegra’s side on that day.All was finished. Neither Church nor law could do anything more towards making the lovers man and wife. The law might undo the bond for them in the time to come, but the part of the Church was done for ever. In the eye of the Church their union was indissoluble.Isola clung with her arms round the bride’s neck.“Think of me sometimes, dearest, in the years to come. Think that I loved you fondly. Be sure that I was grateful for all your goodness to me,” she said tearfully.“My own love, I shall think of you every day till we meet again.”“And if we never meet again on earth—will you remember me kindly?”“Isa, how can you?” cried Allegra, silencing the pale lips with kisses.“You may be glad to think how much you did towards making my life happy—happier than it ought to have been.” Isola went on in a low voice. “Dearest, I am more glad of your marriage than words can say; and, Allegra, love him with all your heart, and never let your lives be parted—remember, dearest, never, never let anything upon this earth part you from him.”Her voice was choked with sobs, and then came a worse fit of coughing than she had suffered for some time; a fit which left her exhausted and speechless. Her husband looked at her in an agony of apprehension.“Let me take you home, Isa,” he said. “You’ll be better at home, lying down by your sunny window. This vestry is horribly cold. Hulbert, if you and Allegra will excuse me, I won’t see you off at the station. Father Rodwell willgo with you, perhaps. He’ll be of more use than I could be; and we shall see each other very soon again in Switzerland, please God.”“Yes, yes, There is no need for you to go,” Hulbert answered, grasping his hand, distressed for another man’s pain in the midst of his own happiness. There death, and the end of all joy—here the new life with its promises of gladness just opening before him. Such contrasts must needs seem hard.They all went to the church door, where the carriages were waiting. Only a few idlers loitered about the pavement, faintly interested in so shabby a wedding—a poor array of one landau and one brougham, the brougham to take the travellers to the station, where their luggage had been sent by another conveyance.The two women kissed each other once more before Allegra stepped into the carriage, Isola too weak for speech, and able only to clasp the hands that had waited on her in so many a weary hour; the clever hands, the gentle hands, to which womanly instinct and womanly love had given all the skilfulness of a trained nurse.Disney lifted his wife into the landau, Father Rodwell helping him, full of sympathy.“You’ll dine with us to-night, I hope,” said the colonel. “We shall be very low if we are left to ourselves.”“I’ve an engagement for this evening—but—yes, I’ll get myself excused, and spend the evening with you, if you really want me.”“Indeed we do,” answered Disney, heartily; but Isola was dumb. Her eyes were fixed upon the distant point at which the brougham had disappeared round a corner, on its way to the station.CHAPTER XXVII“GONE DEEPER THAN ALL PLUMMETS SOUND.”Church bells are always ringing in that city of many churches, and there were bells ringing solemnly and slowly as Isola walked feebly up the two flights of stairs that led to Colonel Disney’s lodging. She walked even more slowly than usual, and her husband could hear her labouring breath as she went up, step by step, leaning on the banister rail. He had offered her his arm, but she had repulsed him, almost rudely, at the bottom of the stairs.They went into the drawing-room, which was bright with flowers in a sunlit dusk, the sun streaming in through the narrow opening between the Venetian shutters, which had been drawn together, but not fastened. All was very still in the quiet house; so still that they could hear the splash of the fountain in the Piazza, and the faint rustling of the limes in the garden.Husband and wife stood facing each other, he anxious and alarmed, she deadly pale, and with gleaming eyes.“Well, she is gone—she is Mrs. Hulbert now, and she belongs to him and not to us any more,” said Disney, talking at random, watching his wife’s face in nervous apprehension of—he knew not what. “We shall miss her sadly. Aren’t you sorry she is married, Isola, after all?”“Sorry! No! I am glad—glad with all my heart. I have waited for that.”And then, before he was aware, she had flung herself at his feet, and was kneeling there, with her head hanging down, her hands clasped—a very Magdalen.“I waited—till they were married—so that you should not refuse to let her marry—his brother—waited to tell you what I ought to have told you at once, when you came home from India. My only hope of pardon or of peace was to have told you then—to have left you for ever then—neverto have dared to clasp your hand—never to have dared to call myself your wife—never to have become the mother of your child. All my life since that day has been one long lie; and nothing that I have suffered—not all my agonies of remorse—can atone for that lie, unless God and you will accept my confession and my atonement to-day.”“Isola, for God’s sake, stop!”Again the racking cough seized her, and she sank speechless at his feet.He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the sofa, and flung open the shutters and let the light and air stream in upon her, as she lay prostrate and exhausted, wiping her white lips with a blood-stained handkerchief. He looked at her in a kind of horrified compassion. He thought that she was raving, that the excitement of the morning had culminated in fever and delirium. He was going to ring for help, meaning to send instantly for her doctor, when she stopped him, laying her thin cold hand upon his arm, and holding him by her side.“Sit down by me, Martin—don’t stop me—I must tell you—all—the truth.”Her words came slowly, in gasps; then with a great effort she gathered up the poor remnant of her strength, and went on in a low, tremulous voice, yet with the tone of one whose resolve was strong as death itself.“There was a time when I thought I could never tell you—that I must go down to my grave with my sin unrevealed, and that you would never know how worthless a woman you had loved and cherished. Then, on my knees before my God, I vowed that I would tell you all, at the last, when I was dying—and death is not far off now, Martin. I have delayed too long—too long! There is scarcely any atonement in my confession now. I have cheated you out of your love.”He looked at her horror-stricken, their two faces close to each other as he bent over her pillow.No; this was no delirium—there was a terrible reality in her words. The eyes looking up at him were not bright withfever, but with the steady resolute soul within—the soul panting for freedom from sin.“You have cheated me out of my love,” he repeated slowly. “Does that mean that you lied to me that night in London—that you perjured yourself, calling God to witness that you were pure and true?”“I was true to you then, Martin. My sin had been repented of. I was your loving, loyal wife, without one thought but of you.”“Loving, loyal!” he cried, with passionate scorn. “You had deceived and dishonoured me—you had made your name a by-word—a jest for such a man as Vansittart Crowther—and for how many more? You had lied, and lied, and lied to me—by every look, by every word that made you seem a virtuous woman and a faithful wife. My God, what misery!”“Martin, have pity!”“Pity! Yes, I pity the women in the streets! Am I to pity you, as I pity them? You, whom I worshipped—whom I thought as pure as the angels—wearing nothing of earth but your frail loveliness, which to me always seemed more of spirit than of clay. And you were false all the time—false as hell—the toy of the first idle profligate whom chance flung into your path? It was Lostwithiel! That man was right. He would hardly have dared to talk to you as he did if he had not been certain of his facts. Lostwithiel was your lover.”“Martin, have pity!” she repeated, with her hands clasped before her face.“Pity! Don’t I tell you that I pity you—pity you whom I used to revere! Great God! can you guess what pain it is to change respect for the creature one loves into pity? I told you that I would never hurt you—that I would never bring shame upon you, Isola. You have no unkindness to fear from me. But you have broken my heart, you have slain my faith in man and woman. I could have staked my life on your purity—I could have killed the man whoslandered you—and you swore a false oath—you called upon Heaven to witness a lie!”“I was a miserable creature, Martin. I could not bear to lose your love. If death had been my only penalty I could have borne it, but not the loss of your love.”“And your sister and her husband? They were as ready with their lies as you were,” he exclaimed bitterly.“Don’t blame Gwendolen. I telegraphed to her, imploring her to stand by me—to say that I was in London with her.”“And you were not in London?”“No, except to pass through, when—when I had escaped from him, and was on my way home.”“Escaped! My God! What villainy must have been used against you—so young, so helpless! Tell me all—without reserve—as freely as you want to be forgiven.”“I was not utterly wicked, Martin. I did not sin deliberately—I did not know what I was doing when I wrecked my life and destroyed my peace of mind for ever. I never meant to forget you—or to be false to you—but I was so lonely—so lonely. The days were so dreary and so long—even the short autumn days seemed long—and the evenings were so melancholy without you. And he came into my life suddenly—like a prince in a fairy tale—and at first I thought very little about him. He was nothing more to me than any one else in Trelasco—and then somehow we were always meeting by accident—in the lanes—or by the sea—and he seemed to care for all the things I cared for. The books I loved were his favourites. For a long time we talked of nothing but his travels, and of my favourite books. There was not a word spoken between us that you or any one else could blame.”“A common opening,” said Martin Disney, with scathing contempt. “One of the seducer’s favourite leads.”“And then, one evening in the twilight, he told me that he loved me. I was very angry—and I let him see that I was angry, and I did all I could to avoid him afterthat evening. I refused to go to the ball at Lostwithiel, knowing that I must meet him there. But they all persuaded me—Mrs. Crowther, Mrs. Baynham, Tabitha—they were all bent upon making me go—and I went. Oh, God, if I had but stood firm against their foolish persuasion, if I had but been true to myself! But my own heart fought against me. I wanted to see him again—if only for the last time. He had talked about starting for a long cruise to the Mediterranean. His yacht was ready to sail at an hours notice.”“You went, and you were lost.”“Yes, lost, irretrievably lost! It is all one long, wild dream when I look back upon it. He implored me to go away with him—but I told him no, no, no, not for worlds, nothing should ever make me false to my husband—nothing. I swore it—swore an oath which I had not the strength to keep. Oh, it was cruel, heartless, treacherous—the thing he did after that. When I was going away from the dance, he was there at my side—and he put me into the wrong carriage—his own carriage—and when I had been driven a little way from the hotel, the carriage stopped and he got in. I thought that he was driving me home. I asked him how he could be cruel as to be with me, in his own carriage, at the risk of my reputation—but he stopped me—shut my lips with his fatal kiss. Oh, Martin, how can I tell these things? The horse went almost at a gallop. I thought we should be killed. I was half fainting when the carriage stopped at last, after rattling up and down hill—and he lifted me out, and I felt the cold night-air on my face, the salt spray from the sea. I tried to ask him where I was,—whether this was home—but the words died on my lips—and I knew no more—knew no more till I woke from that dead, dull swoon in the cabin of theVendetta, and heard the sailors calling out to each other, and saw Lostwithiel sitting by my side—and then—and then—it was all one long dream—a dream of days and nights, and rain, and tempest. I thought the boat wasgoing down in that dreadful night in the Bay of Biscay. Would to God that she had gone down, and hidden me and my sin for ever! But she lived through the storm, and in the morning she was anchored near Arcachon, and Lostwithiel went on shore, and sent a woman in a boat, to bring me clothes, and to attend upon me; and I contrived to go on shore with the woman when she went back in the boat that had brought her, and I borrowed some money on my ring at a jeweller’s in Arcachon, and I left by the first train for Paris, and went on from Paris to London, and never stopped to rest anywhere till I got home.”“May God bring me face to face with that ruffian who imposed upon your helplessness!” cried Martin Disney.“No, no, Martin; he was not a ruffian. He betrayed me—but I loved him. He knew that I loved him. I was a great a sinner as be. I was his before he stole me from my home—his in mind and in spirit. It was our unhappy fate to love each other. And I forgave him, Martin. I forgave him on that night of tempest, when I thought we were going to die together.”“You don’t expect me to forgive him, do you? You don’t expect me to forgive the seducer who has ruined your life and mine?”“His brother is your sister’s husband, Martin?”“I am sorry for it.”“Oh, John Hulbert is good; he is frank and true. He is not like the other. But oh, Martin, pity Lostwithiel and his sin, as you pity me and my sin! It is past and done. I was mad when I cared for him—a creature under a spell. You won my heart back to you by your goodness—you made me more than ever your own. All that he had ever been to me—all that I had ever thought or felt about him—was blotted out as if I had never seen his face. Nothing remained but my love for you—and my guilty conscience, the aching misery of knowing that I was unworthy of you.”He took her hand and pressed it gently in silence. Then, after a long pause, when she had dried the tears from her streaming eyes, and was lying faint, and white, and still, caring very little what became of her poor remnant of life, he said softly—“I forgive you, Isola, as I pray God to forgive you. I have spent some happy years with you—not knowing. If it was a delusion, it was very sweet—while it lasted.”“It was not a delusion,” she cried, putting her arms round his neck, in a sudden rapture at being pardoned. “My love was real.”The door opened softly, and the kindly face of the Anglican priest looked in.“I have seen the lovers on their way to Florence,” he said, “and have come to ask how Mrs. Disney is after her fatiguing morning.”“I am happier than I have been for a long time,” answered Isola, holding out her hand to him. “I am prepared for the end, let it come when it may.”He knew what she meant, and that the sinner had confessed her sin.“Come out for a stroll with me, Disney,” he said, “and leave your wife to rest for a little while. I’m afraid she’ll miss her kind nurse.”Disney started up confusedly, like a sleeper awakened, and looked at his watch.“I believe I have a substitute ready to replace Allegra by this time,” he said, ringing the bell.“Has the person from England arrived?” he asked the servant.“Yes, sir. She came a quarter of an hour ago.”“Ask her to come here at once.”“Oh, Martin, you have not sent for a hospital nurse, I hope,” cried Isola, excitedly. “Indeed I am not so bad as that. I want very little help. I could not bear to have a stranger about me.”“This is not a stranger, Isola.”There came a modest knock at the door as he spoke.“Come in,” he said; and a familiar figure in a grey merino gown and smart white cap with pink ribbons entered quietly and came to the sofa where Isola was lying.“Tabitha!” she cried.“Don’t say you’re sorry to see an old face again, Mrs. Disney. I told Mr. Martin that if you should ever be ill and want nursing I’d come to nurse you—if you were at the other end of the world—and Mr. Martin wrote and told me you wanted an old servant’s care and experience to get you over your illness—and here I am. I’ve come every inch of the way without stopping, except at the buffets, and all I can say is Rome is a long way from everywhere, and the country I’ve come through isn’t to be compared with Cornwall.”She ran on breathlessly as she seated herself by that reclining figure with the waxen face. It may be that she talked to hide the shock she had experienced on seeing the altered looks of the young mistress whose roof she had left in the hour of shame. She had left her, refusing to hold commune with one who had sinned so deeply. The faithful servant had taken leave of her mistress in words that had eaten into Isola’s heart, as if they had been written there with a corrosive acid.“I am very sorry for you, Mrs. Disney,” she said. “You are young and pretty, and you are very much to be pitied—and God knows I have loved you as if you were my own flesh and blood. But I won’t stay under the roof of a wife who has brought shame upon herself and has dishonoured the best of husbands.”Isola had denied nothing, had acknowledged nothing, and had let Tabitha go. And now they met again for the first time after that miserable parting, and the servant’s eyes were full of pitying tears, and the servant’s lips spoke only gentlest words. What a virtue there must be in death, when so much is forgiven to the dying!Martin Disney went out with the priest, but at the corner of the Piazza he stopped abruptly.“Isola’s coughing fit has upset me more than it has her,” he said; “I’m not fit company for any one, so I think I’ll go for a tramp somewhere, and meet you later at dinner, when I’ve recovered my spirits a little.”“A riverderci,” said the priest, grasping his hand. “I felicitate you upon this day’s union; a happy one, or I am no judge of men and women.”“I don’t know,” Disney answered gloomily. “The woman is true as steel—the man comes of a bad stock. You know what the Scripture says about the tree and the fruit.”“There never was a race yet that was altogether bad,” said the priest. “Virtues may descend from remote ancestors as well as vices,—I think you told me moreover that Captain Hulbert’s mother was a good woman.”“She was. She was one of my mother’s earliest and dearest friends.”“Then you should have a better opinion of her son. If ever I met a thoroughly good fellow in my life, I believe I met one the day I made Captain Hulbert’s acquaintance.”“Pray God you may be right,” said Disney, with a sigh. “I am no judge of character.”He turned abruptly, and skirted the hill on his way to the gardens of the Villa Borghese, where he found shade and seclusion in the early afternoon. The carriages of fashionable Rome had not yet begun to drive in at the gate. The cypress avenues, the groves of immemorial ilex, the verdant lawns where the fountains leapt sunward, were peopled only by creatures of fable, fixed in marble, faun and dryad, hero and god. Martin Disney plunged into the shadow of one of those funereal avenues, and—while the sun blazed in almost tropical splendour upon the open lawn in the far distance—he walked as it were in the deep of night, a night whose gloom harmonized with that darker night in his despairing heart.Great God, how he had loved her! How he had looked up to her, revering even her weakness as the expression of a childlike purity. And while he had been praying for her, and dreaming of her, and longing for her, and thinking of her as the very type of womanly chastity, unapproachable by temptation, unassailable, secure in her innocence and simplicity as Athene or Artemis with all their armour of defence; while he had so loved and trusted her, she had flung herself into the arms of a profligate—as easily won as the lightest wanton. She had done this thing, and then she had welcomed him, with wan, sweet smiles, to his dishonoured home. She had made him drink the cup of shame—a by-word it might be for the whole parish, as well as for that one man who had dared to hint at evil. And yet he had forgiven her—forgiven one to whom pardon meant only a peaceful ending; forgiven as a man holds himself forgiven by an all-merciful God, as he hears words of pity and promise murmured into his ear by the priest upon the scaffold, when the rope is round his neck and the drop is ready to fall. How could he withhold such pardon when he had been taught that God forgives the repentant murderer?CHAPTER XXVIII.“THOUGH LOVE AND LIFE AND DEATH SHOULD COME AND GO.”Isola was alone in the spacious Roman drawing-room, its wide windows open to the soft, warm air. The sun was off that side of the house now, and the Venetian shutters had been pushed back; and between the heavy stone pillars of the loggia she saw the orange and magnolia trees in the garden, and the pale gold of the mimosas beyond. The sun was shining full upon the Hill of Gardens, that hill at whosefoot Nero was buried in secret at dead of night by his faithful freedman and the devoted woman who loved him to the shameful end of the shameful life; that hill whose antique groves the wicked Cæsar’s ghost had once made a place of terror. The wicked ghost was laid now. Modern civilization had sent Nero the way of all phantoms; and fashionable Rome made holiday on the Hill of Gardens. A military band was playing there this afternoon in the golden light, and the familiar melodies in Don Giovanni were wafted ever and anon in little gusts of sweetness to the loggia where the vivid crimson of waxen camelias and the softer rose of oleander blossoms gave brightness and colour to the dark foliage and the cold white stone.Isola heard those far-off melodies faint in the distance—heard without heeding. The notes were beyond measure familiar, interwoven with the very fabric of her life, for those were the airs Martin Disney loved, and she had played them to him nearly every evening in their quiet, monotonous life. She heard, unheeding, for her thoughts had wandered back to the night of the ball at Lostwithiel and all that went after it—the fatal night that struck the death-knell of peace and innocence.How vividly she remembered every detail—her fluttering apprehensions during the long drive on the dark road, up hill and down hill; her eagerness for the delight of the dance, as an unaccustomed pleasure—a scene to which young beauty flies as the moth to the flame; her remorseful consciousness that she had done wrong in yielding to the temptation which drew her there; the longing to see Lostwithiel once more—Lostwithiel, whom she had vowed to herself never to meet again of her own free will. She had gone home that afternoon resolved to forego the ball, to make any social sacrifice rather than look upon that man whose burning words of love, breathed in her ear before she had enough of nerve or calmness to silence him, had left her scathed and geared as if the lightning had blasted her. She had heard his avowal. There was no room now to doubt the meaningof all that had gone before, no ground now for believing in a tender, platonic admiration, lapping her round with its soft radiance—a light, but not a fire. That which had burnt into her soul to-day was the fierce flame of a dishonouring love, the bold avowal of a lover who wanted to steal her from her husband, and make her a sinner before her God.She knew this much—had brooded upon it all the evening—and yet she was going to a place where she must inevitably meet the Tempter.She was going because it was expedient to go; because her persistent refusal to be there might give rise to guesses and suspicions that would lead to a discovery of the real reason of her absence. She had often seen the subtle process, the society search-light by which Trelasco and Fowey could arrive at the innermost working of a neighbour’s heart, the deepest mysteries of motive.She was going to the ball after all, fevered, anxious, full of dim forebodings; and yet with an eager expectancy; and yet with a strange over-mastering joy. How should she meet him? How could she avoid him, without ostentatious avoidance, knowing how many eyes would be quick to mark any deviation from conventional behaviour? Somehow or other she was resolved to avoid all association with him; to get her programme filled before he could ask her to dance; or to refuse in any case if he asked her. He would scarcely venture to approach her after what had been said in the lane, when her indignation had been plainly expressed with angry tears. No, he would hardly dare. And so—in a vague bewilderment at finding she was at her journey’s end—she saw the lights of the little town close upon her, and in the next few minutes her carriage was moving slowly in the rank of carriages setting down their freight at the door of the inn.Vaguely, as in a dream, she saw the lights and the flowers, the satin gowns and the diamonds, the scarlet and white upon the walls, brush and vizard, vizard and brush. Hewas not there. She looked along the crowd, and that tall figure and that dark head were absent. She ought to have been glad at this respite, and yet her heart grew heavy as lead.Later he was there, and she was waltzing with him. At the last moment when he was standing before her, cool, self-possessed, as it were unconscious of that burning past, she had no more power to refuse to be his partner than the bird has to escape from the snake. She had given him her hand, and they were moving slowly, softly to the music of the soft, slow waltz. Myosotis, myosotis—mystic flower which means everlasting remembrance! Would she ever forget this night? Their last meeting—safest possible meeting-place here in the shine of the lamps—in the sight of the multitude. Here she could so easily hold him at a distance. Here she might speak to him lightly, as if she too were unconscious of the past. Here she was safe against his madness and her own weak unstable heart, which fluttered at his smallest word.And so the night wore on, and she danced with him more times than she could count, forgetting, or pretending to forget, other engagements; going through an occasional waltz with another partner just for propriety’s sake, and hardly knowing who that partner was; knowing so well that there was some one else standing against the wall, watching her every movement, with the love-light in his eyes.Then came the period after supper when they sat in the ante-room and let the dances go by, hearing the music of waltzes which they were to have danced together, hearing and heeding not. And then came a sudden scare at the thought of the hour. Was it late?Late, very late!The discovery fluttered and unnerved her, and she was scarcely able to collect her thoughts as he handed her into the carriage and shut the door.“Surely it was a grey horse that brought me!” sheexclaimed, and in the next minute she recognized Lostwithiel’s brougham, the same carriage in which she had been driven home through the rain upon that unforgotten night when his house sheltered her, when she saw his face for the first time.Yes, it was his carriage. She knew the colour of the lining, the little brass clock, the reading-lamp, the black panther rug. She pulled at the check-string, but without effect. The carriage drove on, slowly, but steadily, to the end of the town. She let down the window and called to the coachman. There was only one man on the box, and he took no notice of her call.Yes, he had heard, perhaps, for he drew up his horse suddenly by the road-side, a little way beyond the town. A man opened the door and sprang in, breathless after running. It was Lostwithiel.“You put me into your carriage!” she cried distractedly. “How could you make such a mistake? Pray tell him to go back to the inn directly.”They were driving along the country road at a rapid pace, and he had seated himself by her side, clasping her hand. He pulled up the window nearest her, and prevented her calling to the coachman.“Why should you go back? You will be home sooner with my horse than with the screw that brought you.”“But the fly will be waiting for me—the man will wonder.”“Let him wonder. He won’t wait very long, you may be assured. He will guess what has happened. In the confusion of carriages you took the wrong one. Isola, I am going to leave Cornwall to-night—to leave England—perhaps never to return. Give me the last few moments of my life here. Be merciful to me. I am going away—perhaps for ever.”“Take me home,” she said. “Are you really taking me home? Is this the right way?”“Of course it is the right way. Do you suppose I am going to drive you to London?”He let down the glass suddenly, and pointed into the night.
He looked with a sceptical eye at the Anglican priest’s cassock and girdle. If Father Rodwell had been a Papist it would have been altogether a more satisfactory state of things; but an Anglican—a man who might preach the beauty of holy poverty and a celibate life one year and marrya rich widow the year after—a man bound only by his own wishes.
Had Allegra been a thought less frank—had she been a woman whom it was possible to doubt—the sailor would have given himself over to the demon of jealousy; but there are happily some women in whom truth and purity are so transparently obvious that even an anxious lover cannot doubt them. Allegra was such an one. No suspicion of coquetry ever lessened her simple womanliness. She was a woman of whom a man might make a friend; a woman whose feelings and meanings he could by no possibility mistake.
He had pleaded his hardest and pleaded in vain for a June wedding. Isola’s state of health was too critical for the contemplation of any change in the family circle.
“She could not do without me, nor could Martin either,” Allegra told her lover. “It is I who keep house and manage their money, and see to everything for them. Martin has been utterly helpless since this saddening anxiety began. He thinks of nothing but Isola, and her chances of recovery. I cannot leave him while she is so ill.”
“Have you any hope of her ever being better, my dear girl?”
“I don’t know. It has been a long and wearing illness.”
“It is not illness, Allegra. It is a gradual decay. My fear is that she will never revive. There is no marked disease—nothing for medicine to fight against. Such cases as hers are the despair of doctors. A spring has been broken somehow in the human machine. Science cannot mend it.”
Allegra was very much of her sweetheart’s opinion.
The English doctor in Rome was as kind and attentive as the doctor at San Remo; but although he had not yet pronounced the case hopeless, he took a by no means cheerful view of his patient’s condition. He recommended Colonel Disney to leave the city before the third week in May, and to take his wife to Switzerland, travelling by easy stages,and doing all he could to amuse and interest her. If on the other hand it were important for Colonel Disney to be in England, he might take his wife back to Cornwall in June. But in this case she must return to the south in October. Lungs and heart were both too weak for the risks of an English winter.
“We will not go back to England,” decided Disney. “My wife is not fond of Cornwall. Italy has been a delight to her; and Switzerland will be new ground. God grant the summer may bring about an improvement!”
The doctor said very little, and promised nothing.
Closely as they watched her, with anxious loving looks, it may be that seeing her every day even their eyes did not mark the gradual decline of vitality—the inevitable advance of decay. She never complained; the cough that marked the disease which had fastened on her lungs since February was not a loud or seemingly distressing cough. It was only now and then, when she tried to walk uphill, or over-exerted herself in any way, that her malady became painfully obvious in the labouring chest, flushed cheek, and panting breath; but she made light even of these symptoms, and assured her husband that Rome was curing her.
Her spirits had been less equable since Father Rodwell’s appearance. She had alternated between a feverish intensity and a profound dejection. Her changes of mood had been sudden and apparently causeless; and those who watched and cherished her could do nothing to dispel the gloom that often clouded over her. If she were questioned she could only say that she was tired. She would never admit any reason for her melancholy.
CHAPTER XXV.
“WE’LL BIND YOU FAST IN SILKEN CORDS.”
Captain Hulbert was not selfish enough to plead for his personal happiness in the midst of a household shadowed by the foreboding of a great sorrow. Martin Disney’s face, as he looked at his wife in those moments which too plainly marked the progress of decay, was in itself enough to put a check upon a lover’s impatience. How could any man plead for his own pleasure—for the roses and sunshine of life—in the presence of that deep despair?
“He knows that he is doomed to lose her,” thought Hulbert; “knows it, and yet tries to hope. I never saw such intense, unquestioning love. One asks one’s self involuntarily about any woman—Is she worth it?”
And then he thought of Allegra, truthful and impulsive, strong as steel, transparent as crystal. Yes, such a woman as that was worth the whole of a man’s heart—worthy that a man should live or die for her. But it seemed to him that to compare Isola with Allegra was to liken an ash sapling to an oak.
He resigned himself to his disappointment, talked no more of Venice and the starlit lagunes, the summer nights on the Lido, and quoted no more of Buskin’s rhapsodies; but he came meekly day after day to join in the family excursion, whatever it might be. He had enough and to spare of ecclesiastical architecture and of the old masters during those summer-like mornings and afternoons. He heard more than enough of the mad Cæsars and the bad Cæsars, of wicked Empresses and of low-born favourites, of despotism throned in the palace and murder waiting at the gate, of tyranny drunken with power long abused, and treason on the watch for the golden opportunity to change one profligate master for another, ready to toss up for the newCæsar, and to accept the basest slave for master, would be but open the Imperial treasury wide enough to the Prætorian’s rapacious hands.
“People gloat over these hoary old walls as if they would like to have lived under Caligula,” said the sailor, with a touch of impatience, when Father Rodwell had been expatiating upon a little bit of moulding which decorated an imperial staircase.
“It would have been at least a picturesque time to have lived in,” said Allegra. “Existence must have been a series of pictures by Alma Tadema.”
Captain Hulbert was startled out of his state of placid submission by the intervention of a most unexpected ally.
It was one of the hottest days there had been since they came to Rome. To cross the Piazza in front of St. Peter’s was like plunging into a bath of molten gold; while to enter the great Basilica itself was like going into an ice-house. Father Rodwell was not with them upon this particular morning. They were a party of four, and a roomy landau had been engaged to take them to the Church of St. Paul beyond the walls, and thence to the tomb of Cecilia Metella. Isola and Allegra had made pilgrimages to the spot before to-day. It was a drive they both loved, a glimpse of the pastoral life outside the gates of the city, and a place for ever associated with the poet whose verse was written in their hearts.
They dawdled over a light luncheon of macaroni and Roman wine at acafénear the great cold white church, and then they drove through the sandy lanes in the heat of the afternoon, languid all of them, and Isola paler and more weary-looking than she had been for some time. Her husband watched her anxiously, and wanted to go back to Rome, lest the drive should be too exhausting for her.
“No, no, I am not tired,” she answered impatiently. “I would much rather go on. I want to see that grim old toweragain,” and then she quoted the familiar lines, dreamily, with a faint pleasure in their music—
“Perchance she died in youth: it may be bowedWith woes far heavier than the ponderous tombThat weighed upon her gentle dust.”
“Besides,” she added confusedly, “I want to have a little private talk with Captain Hulbert, while Allegra is busy with her everlasting memoranda in that dirty little sketchbook which is stuffed with the pictures of the future. May I?”
She looked from her husband to Captain Hulbert pleadingly. The latter was first to answer.
“I am at your service, Mrs. Disney; ready to be interrogated, or lectured, or advised, whichever you like.”
“I am not going to do either of the three. I am going to ask you a favour.”
“Consider that to ask is to be obeyed.”
They alighted in the road by the tomb a few minutes afterwards. Allegra’s note-book was out immediately, a true artist’s book, crammed with every conceivable form of artistic reminiscence.
“Go and talk,” she said, waving her hand to Isola and Hulbert; and then she clambered up a bank opposite that tower of other days to get a vantage ground for her sketch.
She had made a score of sketches on the same spot, but there were always new details to jot down, new effects and ideas, on that vast level which frames the grandeur of Rome. Yonder the long line of the aqueduct; here the living beauty of broad-fronted oxen moving with stately paces along the dusty way, the incarnation of strength and majesty, patience and labour.
“Stay here and smoke your cigar, Martin,” said Isola, “while Captain Hulbert and I go for a stroll.”
Her husband smiled at her tenderly, cheered by her unwonted cheerfulness. His days and hours alternated between hope and despair. This was a moment of hope.
“My dearest, you are full of mystery to-day,” he said, “and I am as full of curiosity. But I can wait. Consider me a statue of patience standing by the way-side, and take your time.”
She put her hand through Hulbert’s arm, and led him away from the other two, sauntering slowly along beside the grassy bank.
“I want to talk about your wedding,” she said, as soon as they were out of hearing. “When are you and Allegra going to be married?”
“My dear Mrs. Disney, you know that I pledged myself to wait a year from the time of our engagement—a year from last Christmas—you must remember. That was to be my probation.”
“Yes, I remember; but that is all foolishness—idle romance. Allegra knows that you love her. I don’t think she could know it any better after another half-year’s devotion on your part.”
“I don’t think she could know it better after another half century. I know I could never love her more than I do now. I know I shall never love her less.”
“I believe that you are good and true,” said Isola. “As true and—almost—as good as he is”—with a backward glance at her husband. “If I did not believe that I should not have thought of saying what I am going to say.”
“I am honoured by your confidence in me.”
“I love Allegra too well to hazard her happiness. I know she loves you—has never cared for any one else. She was heart-whole till she saw you. She had no more thought of love, or lovers, than a child. I want you to marry her soon, Captain Hulbert—very soon, before we leave Rome. Would you not like to be married in Rome?”
“I would like to be married in Kamtchatka, or Nova Zembla—or the worst of those places whose very names suggest uncomfortableness. There is no dismallest corner of the earth which Allegra could not glorify and make dear.But, as you suggest, Rome is classic—Rome is mediæval—Rome is Roman Catholic. It would be a new sensation for a plain man like me to be married in Rome. I suppose it could not be managed in St. Peter’s?”
“Oh, Captain Hulbert, I want you to be serious.”
“I am serious. Why, this is a matter of life or death to me. But I pleaded so hard for a June wedding—and to no purpose. I talked with the artfulness of the first Tempter—I tried to play upon her vanities as an artist. All in vain!”
“Tell her that I have set my heart upon seeing her married,” said Isola, in a low voice.
“Why, of course, you will see her married, whether she be married in Rome or at Trelasco. That is no argument.”
“But it is; indeed it is. Tell her that, if I am to be at her wedding, it must be soon, very soon. Life is so uncertain at best—and, although I feel well and strong, sometimes—to-day, for instance—there are other times when I think the end is nearer than even my doctor suspects. And I know by his face that he does not give me a long lease of life.”
“My dear Mrs. Disney, this is morbid. I am grieved to hear you talk in such a strain.”
“Don’t notice that. Don’t say anything depressing to Allegra. I want her to go off to her Venetian honeymoon very happily—with not one cloud in her sky. She has been so good and dear to me. It would be hard if I could not rejoice in her happiness. I have rejoiced in it always; I shall take pleasure in it to the end of my life. It is the one unclouded spot——.” She stopped with a troubled air. “Yes, it is a happy fate—to have cared for one, and one only, and to be loved again. Will you do what I ask you, Captain Hulbert? will you hurry on the wedding—for my sake?”
“I would do anything difficult and unwelcome for your sake—how much more will I hasten my own happiness—if Ican. But Allegra is a difficult personage—as firm as rock when she has once made up her mind. And she has made up her mind to stay with you till you are quite well and strong again.”
“She need not leave me for ever, because she marries. She can come back to me after a long honeymoon. We can all meet in Switzerland in August—if—if I go there with Martin, as he proposes.”
“Well, I will try to bend that stubborn will.”
“And you don’t mind having a quiet wedding, if she consents to a much earlier date?”
“Mind? The quieter the better for me! I think a smart wedding is a preventive of matrimony. That sounds like a bull. I will say I think there are many wretched bachelors living in dismal chambers, and preyed upon by landladies, who might have been happily married, but for the fear of a smart wedding. We will have as quiet a wedding as you and Disney can desire; but I should like Lostwithiel to be present. He is my only near relation, and I don’t want to cut him on the happiest day of my life. Why, Mrs. Disney, you are trembling! You have agitated yourself about this business; you have talked too much for your strength. Let me take you back to the carriage.”
“Presently—yes, yes. The heat overcame me for a moment, that’s all. Would you mind not waiting for Lord Lostwithiel? I want the marriage to be at once—directly—as soon as Father Rodwell can get it arranged. And you don’t know where a telegram would reach your brother?”
“Indeed, I do not; but by speculating a few messages of inquiry I could soon find out the whereabouts of theEurydice.”
“Don’t wait for that. There would be delay. There must be delay if you have to consult any distant person’s convenience. We are all here—you and Allegra, and Martin and I—and Father Rodwell would like to marry you. What do you want with anybody else?”
“Upon my word, I think you are right! Allegra is acreature of impulse—where principle is not at stake. If I asked her to marry me six weeks hence she would parley and make terms. If I ask her to marry me in a few days—before we leave Rome—she may consent. Have you talked to your husband? Is he of your opinion?”
“I have said nothing to him; but I know he would be pleased to see you and Allegra bound together for life.”
“I will talk to him this afternoon. One can get everything one wants in Rome, I believe, from a papal dispensation down to an English solicitor. If we can but rattle through some kind of marriage settlement to your husband’s satisfaction we can be married on the earliest day to which my darling will consent. God bless you, Mrs. Disney, for your unselfish thought of other people’s happiness! You are not like most invalids, who would let a sister languish in lifelong spinsterhood rather than lose her as a nurse. God grant that your unselfishness may be recompensed by speedy recovery!”
“There will be a weight off my mind when you and Allegra are married,” said Isola, gravely.
They walked slowly back to the spot where they had left their companions. A pair of oxen, with an empty cart, were standing in the road below the tomb, their driver lounging across the rough vehicle—man and beasts motionless as marble. Allegra sat on a hillock opposite, sketching the group. She had bribed the man to draw up for a brief halt while she made her sketch. The massive heads were drooping under the afternoon sun; the tawny and cream-hued coats were stained with dust and purpled with the sweat of patient labour. The creatures looked as gracious and as wise as if they had been gods in disguise.
“Now, Allegra,” said her brother, emptying the ashes out of his pipe, “are you ready to go home?”
“Yes, I have just jotted down what will serve to remind me of those splendid beasts; but I should like to have them standing there all day, so that I could paint them seriously.They are the finest models I have seen in Rome. Have you two quite finished your secrets and mysteries?” she asked, smiling at Isola, who was looking brighter than usual.
“Yes; I have said all I had to say, and have been answered as I wished to be answered. I shall go home very happy.”
“That’s a good hearing,” said Disney, as he helped her into the landau.
Allegra had talked of wanting to revisit Caracalla’s Baths, a wish of which Isola reminded her as they drove back to the city, along the Appian Way: whereupon Captain Hulbert suggested that he and his sweetheart should stop to explore the ruins, while Disney and Isola went home.
Allegra blushed and consented, always a little shy at being alone with her lover, especially since he had pleaded so earnestly for a summer honeymoon.
“Mrs. Disney, your right place in Rome would be the Embassy,” murmured Hulbert as he shut the carriage door; “you are a born diplomatist.”
“What makes my dearest look so pleased and happy this afternoon?” asked Disney, as he changed to the seat beside his wife.
“I am glad because I think Captain Hulbert will persuade Allegra to marry him before we leave Rome. I begged him to hasten their marriage. That was my mystery, Martin. That was what he and I were talking about.”
“But why wish to hasten matters, dear? They are very happy as it is—and a year is not a long engagement.”
“Too long for me, Martin. I want to see her happy—I want to see them married before——”
“Before what, dear love?” he asked tenderly.
“Before we leave Rome.”
“That would be very short work. We leave in a fortnight. The weather will be growing too hot for you if we linger later.”
“Yes, but everything can be settled in less time than that. Ask Father Rodwell. He knows Rome so well that he can help you to arrange all details.”
“I thought that every young woman required at least six months for the preparation of her trousseau?”
“Not such a girl as Allegra. She is always well dressed, and her wardrobe is the perfection of neatness—but she is not the kind of girl to make a fuss about her clothes. I don’t think the trousseau will create any difficulty.”
“And when she is gone, what will you do without your devoted companion? Who will nurse you and take care of you?”
“Löttchen, or any other servant,” she answered, with a kind of weary indifference. “It would be very hard if my bad health should stand in the way of Allegra’s happiness. So long as you will stay with me and be kind to me, Martin, I need no one else.”
Tears were streaming down her cheeks as she turned from him, pretending to be interested in the convent walls on the edge of the hill below which they were driving.
“So long as I stay with you! My darling, do you think business or pleasure, or any claim in this world, will ever take me from you any more? All your hours are precious to me, Isola. I hardly live when I am away from you. Wherever your doctor may send you, or your own fancy may lead you, I shall go with you, unhesitatingly—without one regret for anything I leave behind.”
“Don’t say these things,” she cried suddenly, with a choking sob; “you are too good to me. There are times when I can’t bear it.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
“SO, FULL CONTENT SHALL HENCEFORTH BE MY LOT.”
Allegra was not inexorable. There, in the ruins of the Imperial baths, where Shelley dreamed the wonder-dream of his Prometheus, Captain Hulbert pleaded his cause. Could love resist the pleading of so fond a lover? Could art withstand the allurements of Venice—Titian and Tintoret, the cathedral of St. Mark and the Palace of the Doges, the birthplace of Desdemona and of Shylock, the home of Byron and of Browning?
She consented to a Roman marriage.
“I can’t help wishing I could be a Papist just for that one day,” she said lightly. “An Anglican marriage seems so dry and cold compared with the pomps and splendours of Rome.”
“Dearest, the plainest Christian rites are enough, if they but make us one.”
“I think we are that already, John,” she answered shyly; and then, nestling by his side as they sat in the wide solitude of that stupendous pile, she took his hand and held it in both her own, looking down at it wonderingly—a well-formed hand, strong and muscular, broadened a little by seafaring.
“And you are to be my husband,” she said. “Mine! I shall speak of you to people as my own peculiar property. ‘My husband will do this or that.’ ‘My husband has gone out, but he will be home soon.’ Home. Husband. How strange it sounds!”
“Strange and wonderful now, love. Sweet and familiar before our honeymoon is ended.”
They went out of the broad spaces that were once populous with the teeming life of Imperial Rome, splendid with all that art could create of beauty and of grandeur—wraptin the glamour of their dream. They walked all the way to the Piazza di Spagna in the same happy dream, as unconscious of the ground they trod on as if they had been floating in the air.
They were a very cheerful party at dinner that evening. Father Rodwell dined with them, and was delighted at the idea of having to marry these happy lovers. He took the arrangement of the ceremony into his own hands. The English chaplain was his old friend, and would let him do what he liked in his church.
“It is to be a very quiet wedding,” said the colonel, when the three men were smoking together in a loggia, looking on the little garden of orange trees and oleanders, in the grey dim beginning of night, when the thin crescent moon was shining in a sky still faintly flushed with sunset. “Isa could not stand anything like bustle or excitement. Luckily we have no friends in Rome. There is no one belonging to us who could be aggrieved at not being invited.”
“And there is no one except Lostwithiel on my side who has the slightest claim to be present,” said Hulbert. “I am almost as well off as the Flying Dutchman in that respect. I am not troubled with relations. All the kinsfolk I have are distant, and I allow them to remain so. My dear Disney, so far as I am concerned, our wedding cannot be too quiet a business. It is the bride I want, mark you, not the fuss and flowers, wedding-breakfast, and bridesmaids. Let us be married at half-past ten, and drive from the church to the railway station in time for the noonday train. I have given up my dream of taking Allegra round Southern Italy to the Adriatic. We shall go to Florence first, and spend a few days in the galleries, and thence to Venice, where we will have theVendettabrought to us, and anchored near the arsenal, ready to carry us away directly we are tired of the city of old memories.”
Father Rodwell left them and went into the drawing-room, where Isola and her sister-in-law were sitting in thelamplight—Isola’s hands occupied with that soft, fluffy knitting which seemed to exercise a soothing influence upon her nerves; Allegra leaning over the table, idly sketching random reminiscences of the Baths, the Tomb, the grave-eyed oxen, with their great curving horns and ponderous foreheads.
The priest was interested in watching Isola this evening. He saw a marked change in the expression of her countenance, a change which was perceptible to him even in her voice and manner—a brightness which might mean a lightened heart, or which might mean religious exaltation.
“Has she told him?” he wondered, studying her from his place in the shadow as the lamplight shone full upon her wasted features and hectic colouring. “Has she taken courage and confessed her sin to that loyal, loving husband, and is the burden lifted from her heart?”
No; he could not believe that she had lifted the veil from the sad secret of her past. Martin Disney’s unclouded brow to-night was not that of a man who had lately discovered that the wife he loved had betrayed him. There might be pardon—there might be peace between husband and wife after such a revelation; but there could not be the serenity which marked Martin Disney’s manner to his wife to-night. Such a thunder-clap must leave its brand upon the man who suffered it. No; her secret was still locked in her impenitent heart. Sorry—yes. She had drunk the cup of remorse in all its bitterness; but she knew not true penitence, the Christian’s penitence, which means self-abasement and confession. And yet she seemed happier. There was a look of almost holy resignation upon the pale and placid brow, and in the too-lustrous eyes. Something had happened—some moral transformation which made her a new being.
Father Rodwell drew his chair nearer to her, and looked at her earnestly with his cordial, almost boyish smile. He was a remarkably young-looking man, a man upon whomlong years of toil in the dark places of the earth had exercised no wasting or withering influence. He had loved his work too well ever to feel the pressure of the burdens he carried. His gospel had been always a cheerful gospel, and he had helped to lighten sorrows, never to make them heavier. He was deeply interested in Isola, and had been watchful of all her changes of mood since their conversation in the shadow of the old Roman wall. He had seen her impressed by the history and traditions of the church, moved by the pathos of holy lives, touched almost to tears by sacred pictures, and he saw in her character and disposition a natural bent towards piety, exactly that receptive temperament which moves holy women to lives of self-abnegation and heroic endeavour. He had lent her some of those books which he loved best and read most himself, and he had talked with her of religion, careful not to say too much or with too strong an emphasis, and never by any word alluding to her revelation of past guilt. He wanted to win her to perfect trustfulness in him, to teach her to lean upon him in her helplessness; until the hour should come when she would let him lead her to her husband, in the self-abasement of the penitent sinner.
He knew that in this desire he exceeded the teaching of churchmen; that another priest in his place might have bade her keep her sad secret to the end, lie down with it in her early grave, be remembered as a saint, yet die knowing herself a sinner. If he had thought of the husband’s peace first, he would have counselled silence. But he thought most of this stricken soul, with wings that spread themselves towards heaven, held down to earth by the burden of an unpardoned sin.
He looked at her in the lamplight, and her eyes met his with a straighter outlook than he had seen in them for a long time. She looked actually happy, and that look of happiness in a face on which death has set its seal has always something which suggests a life beyond the grave.
“The excitement of this marriage question has brightened you wonderfully, Mrs. Disney,” he said. “We shall have you in high health by the wedding-day.”
“I am feeling better because I am so glad,” Isola answered naively, putting her hand into Allegra’s.
“I consider it positively insulting to me as a sister,” exclaimed Allegra, bending down to kiss the too-transparent hand—such a hand as she had seen in many a picture of dying saint in the Roman galleries. “You are most unaffectionately rejoiced to get rid of me. I have evidently been a tyrannical nurse, and a dull companion, and you breathe more freely at the prospect of release.”
“You have been all that is dear and good,” Isola answered softly, “and I shall feel dreadfully lonely without you; but it won’t be for long. And I shall be so comforted by the knowledge that nothing can come between you and your life’s happiness.”
The two men came in from the loggia, bringing with them the cool breath of night. Isola went to the piano and played one of those Adagios of Mozart’s which came just within the limit of her modest powers, and which she played to perfection, all her soul in the long lingering phrases, the tender modulations, with their suggestions of shadowy cathedral aisles, and the smoke of incense in the deepening dusk of a vesper service. Those bits of Mozart, the slow movements from the Sonatas, an Agnus Dei, or an Ave Maria from one of the Masses, satisfied Captain Hulbert’s highest ideas of music. He desired nothing grander or more scientific. The new learning of the Wagnerian school had no charm for him.
“If you ask me about modern composers, I am for Verdi and Gounod,” he said. “For gaiety and charm, give me Auber, Rossini, and Boieldieu—for pathos, Weber—for everything, Mozart. There you have the whole of my musical education.”
The question of settlements was opened seriously between Martin Disney and his future brother-in-law, early on thefollowing morning. Hulbert wanted to settle all the money he had in the world upon Allegra.
“She is ever so much wiser than I am,” he said. “So she had better be my treasurer. My property is all in stocks and shares. My grandfather was fond of stock-jobbing, and made some very lucky investments which he settled upon my mother, with strict injunctions that they should not be meddled with by her trustees. My share of her fortune comes to a little over nine hundred a year. I came into possession of it when I came of age, and it is mine to dispose of as I like, trusts expired, trustees cleared off—in point of fact, both gone over to the majority, poor old souls, after having had many an anxious hour about those South American railway bonds, and Suez Canal shares, which turned up trumps after all. I’ve telegraphed to the family lawyer for a schedule of the property, and when that comes, just tie it all up in as tight a knot as the law can tie, and let it belong to Allegra and her children after her. Consider me paid off.”
Martin Disney laughed at the lover’s impetuosity—and told him that he should be allowed to bring so much and no more into settlement. Allegra’s income was less than two hundred a year, a poor little income upon which she had fancied herself rich, so modest is woman’s measure of independence as compared with man’s. It would be for the lawyer to decide what proportion the husband’s settlements should bear to the wife’s income. Father Rodwell had given Colonel Disney an introduction to a solicitor of high character, a man who had occupied an excellent position in London until damaged lungs obliged him to seek a home in the south.
With this gentleman’s aid, matters were soon put in train, and while the men were in the lawyer’s office, the two women were choosing Allegra’s wedding-gown.
The young lady had exhibited a rare indifference upon the great trousseau question. She was not one of those girls whose finery is all external, and who hide rags and tattersunder æsthetic colouring and Raffaelle draperies. She was too much of an artist to endure anything unseemly in her belongings, and her everyday clothes, just as they were, might have been exhibited, like a Royal trousseau, without causing any other comment than, “How nice!” “What good taste!” “What exquisite needlework!”
The hands which painted such clever pictures were as skilful with the needle as with the brush, and Allegra had never considered that a vocation for art meant uselessness in every feminine industry. She had attended to her own wardrobe from the time she learnt plain sewing at her first school; and now, as she and Isola looked over the ample array of under-linen, the pretty cambric peignoirs, and neatly trimmed petticoats, they were both of one mind, that there was very little need of fuss or expenditure.
“I have plenty of summer frocks,” said Allegra. “So really there is only my travelling gown to see about, that is to say, the gown I am to be married in.”
“But you must have a real wedding-gown, all the same, a white satin gown, with lace and pearls,” pleaded Isola. “When you go to dinner-parties, by-and-by, you will be expected to look like a bride.”
“Dinner-parties! Oh, those are a long way off. We are not likely to be asked to any parties while we are wandering about Italy. I can get a gown when I go home.”
Allegra’s wedding-day had dawned—a glorious day—a day to make one drunken with the beauty of sky and earth; a day when the vetturini in the Piazza di Spagna sat and dreamt on their coach-boxes—narcotized by the sun—when the reds and blues in the garments of the flower-women were almost too dazzling for the eye to look upon, and when every garden in the city sent forth tropical odours of roses steeped in sunlight.
The church in which the lovers were to be made one was a very homely temple as compared with the basilicas yonder on the hills of Rome. But what did that matter to Allegrathis morning as she stood before the altar and spoke the words which gave her to the man she loved? A flood of sunshine streamed upon the two figures of bride and bridegroom, and touched the almost spectral face of the bride’s sister-in-law, a face which attracted as much attention as the bride’s fresh bloom and happy smile. It was a face marked for death, yet beautiful in decay. The large violet eyes were luminous with the light of worlds beyond the world we know. There was something loftier than happiness in that vivid look, something akin to exaltation—the smile of the martyr at the stake—the martyr for whom Heaven’s miraculous intervention changes the flames of the death-pile into the soft fanning of seraphic wings; the martyr unconscious of earthly pains and earthly cruelties; who sees the skies opening and the glorious company of saints and angels gathered about the great white throne.
Father Rodwell saw that spiritual expression in the pale, wasted face, and he told himself that a lost soul could not look out of eyes like those. If death were near, as he feared, the true repentance for which he had prayed many an earnest prayer was not far off.
Bride and bridegroom were to leave Rome by the mid-day train. Colonel Disney was going to see the last of them at the station, but Isola and her sister-in-law were to say good-bye in the vestry, and to part at the church door. And now Father Rodwell’s brief, but fervent, address had been spoken, the Wedding March pealed from the organ, and the small wedding-party went into the vestry to sign the registers.
Isola was called upon for her signature as one of the witnesses. She signed in a bold, clear hand, without one tremulous line, her husband looking over her shoulder as she wrote.
“That doesn’t look like an invalid’s autograph, does it, Hulbert?” he asked, snatching at every token of hope, unwilling to believe what his doctors and his own convictions told him—expecting a miracle.
They had warned him that he could not keep her long. They had advised him to humour her fancies, to let her be present at the wedding, even at the hazard of her suffering afterwards for that exertion and excitement. She would suffer more perhaps—physically as well as mentally—if she were thwarted in her natural wish to be by Allegra’s side on that day.
All was finished. Neither Church nor law could do anything more towards making the lovers man and wife. The law might undo the bond for them in the time to come, but the part of the Church was done for ever. In the eye of the Church their union was indissoluble.
Isola clung with her arms round the bride’s neck.
“Think of me sometimes, dearest, in the years to come. Think that I loved you fondly. Be sure that I was grateful for all your goodness to me,” she said tearfully.
“My own love, I shall think of you every day till we meet again.”
“And if we never meet again on earth—will you remember me kindly?”
“Isa, how can you?” cried Allegra, silencing the pale lips with kisses.
“You may be glad to think how much you did towards making my life happy—happier than it ought to have been.” Isola went on in a low voice. “Dearest, I am more glad of your marriage than words can say; and, Allegra, love him with all your heart, and never let your lives be parted—remember, dearest, never, never let anything upon this earth part you from him.”
Her voice was choked with sobs, and then came a worse fit of coughing than she had suffered for some time; a fit which left her exhausted and speechless. Her husband looked at her in an agony of apprehension.
“Let me take you home, Isa,” he said. “You’ll be better at home, lying down by your sunny window. This vestry is horribly cold. Hulbert, if you and Allegra will excuse me, I won’t see you off at the station. Father Rodwell willgo with you, perhaps. He’ll be of more use than I could be; and we shall see each other very soon again in Switzerland, please God.”
“Yes, yes, There is no need for you to go,” Hulbert answered, grasping his hand, distressed for another man’s pain in the midst of his own happiness. There death, and the end of all joy—here the new life with its promises of gladness just opening before him. Such contrasts must needs seem hard.
They all went to the church door, where the carriages were waiting. Only a few idlers loitered about the pavement, faintly interested in so shabby a wedding—a poor array of one landau and one brougham, the brougham to take the travellers to the station, where their luggage had been sent by another conveyance.
The two women kissed each other once more before Allegra stepped into the carriage, Isola too weak for speech, and able only to clasp the hands that had waited on her in so many a weary hour; the clever hands, the gentle hands, to which womanly instinct and womanly love had given all the skilfulness of a trained nurse.
Disney lifted his wife into the landau, Father Rodwell helping him, full of sympathy.
“You’ll dine with us to-night, I hope,” said the colonel. “We shall be very low if we are left to ourselves.”
“I’ve an engagement for this evening—but—yes, I’ll get myself excused, and spend the evening with you, if you really want me.”
“Indeed we do,” answered Disney, heartily; but Isola was dumb. Her eyes were fixed upon the distant point at which the brougham had disappeared round a corner, on its way to the station.
CHAPTER XXVII
“GONE DEEPER THAN ALL PLUMMETS SOUND.”
Church bells are always ringing in that city of many churches, and there were bells ringing solemnly and slowly as Isola walked feebly up the two flights of stairs that led to Colonel Disney’s lodging. She walked even more slowly than usual, and her husband could hear her labouring breath as she went up, step by step, leaning on the banister rail. He had offered her his arm, but she had repulsed him, almost rudely, at the bottom of the stairs.
They went into the drawing-room, which was bright with flowers in a sunlit dusk, the sun streaming in through the narrow opening between the Venetian shutters, which had been drawn together, but not fastened. All was very still in the quiet house; so still that they could hear the splash of the fountain in the Piazza, and the faint rustling of the limes in the garden.
Husband and wife stood facing each other, he anxious and alarmed, she deadly pale, and with gleaming eyes.
“Well, she is gone—she is Mrs. Hulbert now, and she belongs to him and not to us any more,” said Disney, talking at random, watching his wife’s face in nervous apprehension of—he knew not what. “We shall miss her sadly. Aren’t you sorry she is married, Isola, after all?”
“Sorry! No! I am glad—glad with all my heart. I have waited for that.”
And then, before he was aware, she had flung herself at his feet, and was kneeling there, with her head hanging down, her hands clasped—a very Magdalen.
“I waited—till they were married—so that you should not refuse to let her marry—his brother—waited to tell you what I ought to have told you at once, when you came home from India. My only hope of pardon or of peace was to have told you then—to have left you for ever then—neverto have dared to clasp your hand—never to have dared to call myself your wife—never to have become the mother of your child. All my life since that day has been one long lie; and nothing that I have suffered—not all my agonies of remorse—can atone for that lie, unless God and you will accept my confession and my atonement to-day.”
“Isola, for God’s sake, stop!”
Again the racking cough seized her, and she sank speechless at his feet.
He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the sofa, and flung open the shutters and let the light and air stream in upon her, as she lay prostrate and exhausted, wiping her white lips with a blood-stained handkerchief. He looked at her in a kind of horrified compassion. He thought that she was raving, that the excitement of the morning had culminated in fever and delirium. He was going to ring for help, meaning to send instantly for her doctor, when she stopped him, laying her thin cold hand upon his arm, and holding him by her side.
“Sit down by me, Martin—don’t stop me—I must tell you—all—the truth.”
Her words came slowly, in gasps; then with a great effort she gathered up the poor remnant of her strength, and went on in a low, tremulous voice, yet with the tone of one whose resolve was strong as death itself.
“There was a time when I thought I could never tell you—that I must go down to my grave with my sin unrevealed, and that you would never know how worthless a woman you had loved and cherished. Then, on my knees before my God, I vowed that I would tell you all, at the last, when I was dying—and death is not far off now, Martin. I have delayed too long—too long! There is scarcely any atonement in my confession now. I have cheated you out of your love.”
He looked at her horror-stricken, their two faces close to each other as he bent over her pillow.
No; this was no delirium—there was a terrible reality in her words. The eyes looking up at him were not bright withfever, but with the steady resolute soul within—the soul panting for freedom from sin.
“You have cheated me out of my love,” he repeated slowly. “Does that mean that you lied to me that night in London—that you perjured yourself, calling God to witness that you were pure and true?”
“I was true to you then, Martin. My sin had been repented of. I was your loving, loyal wife, without one thought but of you.”
“Loving, loyal!” he cried, with passionate scorn. “You had deceived and dishonoured me—you had made your name a by-word—a jest for such a man as Vansittart Crowther—and for how many more? You had lied, and lied, and lied to me—by every look, by every word that made you seem a virtuous woman and a faithful wife. My God, what misery!”
“Martin, have pity!”
“Pity! Yes, I pity the women in the streets! Am I to pity you, as I pity them? You, whom I worshipped—whom I thought as pure as the angels—wearing nothing of earth but your frail loveliness, which to me always seemed more of spirit than of clay. And you were false all the time—false as hell—the toy of the first idle profligate whom chance flung into your path? It was Lostwithiel! That man was right. He would hardly have dared to talk to you as he did if he had not been certain of his facts. Lostwithiel was your lover.”
“Martin, have pity!” she repeated, with her hands clasped before her face.
“Pity! Don’t I tell you that I pity you—pity you whom I used to revere! Great God! can you guess what pain it is to change respect for the creature one loves into pity? I told you that I would never hurt you—that I would never bring shame upon you, Isola. You have no unkindness to fear from me. But you have broken my heart, you have slain my faith in man and woman. I could have staked my life on your purity—I could have killed the man whoslandered you—and you swore a false oath—you called upon Heaven to witness a lie!”
“I was a miserable creature, Martin. I could not bear to lose your love. If death had been my only penalty I could have borne it, but not the loss of your love.”
“And your sister and her husband? They were as ready with their lies as you were,” he exclaimed bitterly.
“Don’t blame Gwendolen. I telegraphed to her, imploring her to stand by me—to say that I was in London with her.”
“And you were not in London?”
“No, except to pass through, when—when I had escaped from him, and was on my way home.”
“Escaped! My God! What villainy must have been used against you—so young, so helpless! Tell me all—without reserve—as freely as you want to be forgiven.”
“I was not utterly wicked, Martin. I did not sin deliberately—I did not know what I was doing when I wrecked my life and destroyed my peace of mind for ever. I never meant to forget you—or to be false to you—but I was so lonely—so lonely. The days were so dreary and so long—even the short autumn days seemed long—and the evenings were so melancholy without you. And he came into my life suddenly—like a prince in a fairy tale—and at first I thought very little about him. He was nothing more to me than any one else in Trelasco—and then somehow we were always meeting by accident—in the lanes—or by the sea—and he seemed to care for all the things I cared for. The books I loved were his favourites. For a long time we talked of nothing but his travels, and of my favourite books. There was not a word spoken between us that you or any one else could blame.”
“A common opening,” said Martin Disney, with scathing contempt. “One of the seducer’s favourite leads.”
“And then, one evening in the twilight, he told me that he loved me. I was very angry—and I let him see that I was angry, and I did all I could to avoid him afterthat evening. I refused to go to the ball at Lostwithiel, knowing that I must meet him there. But they all persuaded me—Mrs. Crowther, Mrs. Baynham, Tabitha—they were all bent upon making me go—and I went. Oh, God, if I had but stood firm against their foolish persuasion, if I had but been true to myself! But my own heart fought against me. I wanted to see him again—if only for the last time. He had talked about starting for a long cruise to the Mediterranean. His yacht was ready to sail at an hours notice.”
“You went, and you were lost.”
“Yes, lost, irretrievably lost! It is all one long, wild dream when I look back upon it. He implored me to go away with him—but I told him no, no, no, not for worlds, nothing should ever make me false to my husband—nothing. I swore it—swore an oath which I had not the strength to keep. Oh, it was cruel, heartless, treacherous—the thing he did after that. When I was going away from the dance, he was there at my side—and he put me into the wrong carriage—his own carriage—and when I had been driven a little way from the hotel, the carriage stopped and he got in. I thought that he was driving me home. I asked him how he could be cruel as to be with me, in his own carriage, at the risk of my reputation—but he stopped me—shut my lips with his fatal kiss. Oh, Martin, how can I tell these things? The horse went almost at a gallop. I thought we should be killed. I was half fainting when the carriage stopped at last, after rattling up and down hill—and he lifted me out, and I felt the cold night-air on my face, the salt spray from the sea. I tried to ask him where I was,—whether this was home—but the words died on my lips—and I knew no more—knew no more till I woke from that dead, dull swoon in the cabin of theVendetta, and heard the sailors calling out to each other, and saw Lostwithiel sitting by my side—and then—and then—it was all one long dream—a dream of days and nights, and rain, and tempest. I thought the boat wasgoing down in that dreadful night in the Bay of Biscay. Would to God that she had gone down, and hidden me and my sin for ever! But she lived through the storm, and in the morning she was anchored near Arcachon, and Lostwithiel went on shore, and sent a woman in a boat, to bring me clothes, and to attend upon me; and I contrived to go on shore with the woman when she went back in the boat that had brought her, and I borrowed some money on my ring at a jeweller’s in Arcachon, and I left by the first train for Paris, and went on from Paris to London, and never stopped to rest anywhere till I got home.”
“May God bring me face to face with that ruffian who imposed upon your helplessness!” cried Martin Disney.
“No, no, Martin; he was not a ruffian. He betrayed me—but I loved him. He knew that I loved him. I was a great a sinner as be. I was his before he stole me from my home—his in mind and in spirit. It was our unhappy fate to love each other. And I forgave him, Martin. I forgave him on that night of tempest, when I thought we were going to die together.”
“You don’t expect me to forgive him, do you? You don’t expect me to forgive the seducer who has ruined your life and mine?”
“His brother is your sister’s husband, Martin?”
“I am sorry for it.”
“Oh, John Hulbert is good; he is frank and true. He is not like the other. But oh, Martin, pity Lostwithiel and his sin, as you pity me and my sin! It is past and done. I was mad when I cared for him—a creature under a spell. You won my heart back to you by your goodness—you made me more than ever your own. All that he had ever been to me—all that I had ever thought or felt about him—was blotted out as if I had never seen his face. Nothing remained but my love for you—and my guilty conscience, the aching misery of knowing that I was unworthy of you.”
He took her hand and pressed it gently in silence. Then, after a long pause, when she had dried the tears from her streaming eyes, and was lying faint, and white, and still, caring very little what became of her poor remnant of life, he said softly—
“I forgive you, Isola, as I pray God to forgive you. I have spent some happy years with you—not knowing. If it was a delusion, it was very sweet—while it lasted.”
“It was not a delusion,” she cried, putting her arms round his neck, in a sudden rapture at being pardoned. “My love was real.”
The door opened softly, and the kindly face of the Anglican priest looked in.
“I have seen the lovers on their way to Florence,” he said, “and have come to ask how Mrs. Disney is after her fatiguing morning.”
“I am happier than I have been for a long time,” answered Isola, holding out her hand to him. “I am prepared for the end, let it come when it may.”
He knew what she meant, and that the sinner had confessed her sin.
“Come out for a stroll with me, Disney,” he said, “and leave your wife to rest for a little while. I’m afraid she’ll miss her kind nurse.”
Disney started up confusedly, like a sleeper awakened, and looked at his watch.
“I believe I have a substitute ready to replace Allegra by this time,” he said, ringing the bell.
“Has the person from England arrived?” he asked the servant.
“Yes, sir. She came a quarter of an hour ago.”
“Ask her to come here at once.”
“Oh, Martin, you have not sent for a hospital nurse, I hope,” cried Isola, excitedly. “Indeed I am not so bad as that. I want very little help. I could not bear to have a stranger about me.”
“This is not a stranger, Isola.”
There came a modest knock at the door as he spoke.
“Come in,” he said; and a familiar figure in a grey merino gown and smart white cap with pink ribbons entered quietly and came to the sofa where Isola was lying.
“Tabitha!” she cried.
“Don’t say you’re sorry to see an old face again, Mrs. Disney. I told Mr. Martin that if you should ever be ill and want nursing I’d come to nurse you—if you were at the other end of the world—and Mr. Martin wrote and told me you wanted an old servant’s care and experience to get you over your illness—and here I am. I’ve come every inch of the way without stopping, except at the buffets, and all I can say is Rome is a long way from everywhere, and the country I’ve come through isn’t to be compared with Cornwall.”
She ran on breathlessly as she seated herself by that reclining figure with the waxen face. It may be that she talked to hide the shock she had experienced on seeing the altered looks of the young mistress whose roof she had left in the hour of shame. She had left her, refusing to hold commune with one who had sinned so deeply. The faithful servant had taken leave of her mistress in words that had eaten into Isola’s heart, as if they had been written there with a corrosive acid.
“I am very sorry for you, Mrs. Disney,” she said. “You are young and pretty, and you are very much to be pitied—and God knows I have loved you as if you were my own flesh and blood. But I won’t stay under the roof of a wife who has brought shame upon herself and has dishonoured the best of husbands.”
Isola had denied nothing, had acknowledged nothing, and had let Tabitha go. And now they met again for the first time after that miserable parting, and the servant’s eyes were full of pitying tears, and the servant’s lips spoke only gentlest words. What a virtue there must be in death, when so much is forgiven to the dying!
Martin Disney went out with the priest, but at the corner of the Piazza he stopped abruptly.
“Isola’s coughing fit has upset me more than it has her,” he said; “I’m not fit company for any one, so I think I’ll go for a tramp somewhere, and meet you later at dinner, when I’ve recovered my spirits a little.”
“A riverderci,” said the priest, grasping his hand. “I felicitate you upon this day’s union; a happy one, or I am no judge of men and women.”
“I don’t know,” Disney answered gloomily. “The woman is true as steel—the man comes of a bad stock. You know what the Scripture says about the tree and the fruit.”
“There never was a race yet that was altogether bad,” said the priest. “Virtues may descend from remote ancestors as well as vices,—I think you told me moreover that Captain Hulbert’s mother was a good woman.”
“She was. She was one of my mother’s earliest and dearest friends.”
“Then you should have a better opinion of her son. If ever I met a thoroughly good fellow in my life, I believe I met one the day I made Captain Hulbert’s acquaintance.”
“Pray God you may be right,” said Disney, with a sigh. “I am no judge of character.”
He turned abruptly, and skirted the hill on his way to the gardens of the Villa Borghese, where he found shade and seclusion in the early afternoon. The carriages of fashionable Rome had not yet begun to drive in at the gate. The cypress avenues, the groves of immemorial ilex, the verdant lawns where the fountains leapt sunward, were peopled only by creatures of fable, fixed in marble, faun and dryad, hero and god. Martin Disney plunged into the shadow of one of those funereal avenues, and—while the sun blazed in almost tropical splendour upon the open lawn in the far distance—he walked as it were in the deep of night, a night whose gloom harmonized with that darker night in his despairing heart.
Great God, how he had loved her! How he had looked up to her, revering even her weakness as the expression of a childlike purity. And while he had been praying for her, and dreaming of her, and longing for her, and thinking of her as the very type of womanly chastity, unapproachable by temptation, unassailable, secure in her innocence and simplicity as Athene or Artemis with all their armour of defence; while he had so loved and trusted her, she had flung herself into the arms of a profligate—as easily won as the lightest wanton. She had done this thing, and then she had welcomed him, with wan, sweet smiles, to his dishonoured home. She had made him drink the cup of shame—a by-word it might be for the whole parish, as well as for that one man who had dared to hint at evil. And yet he had forgiven her—forgiven one to whom pardon meant only a peaceful ending; forgiven as a man holds himself forgiven by an all-merciful God, as he hears words of pity and promise murmured into his ear by the priest upon the scaffold, when the rope is round his neck and the drop is ready to fall. How could he withhold such pardon when he had been taught that God forgives the repentant murderer?
CHAPTER XXVIII.
“THOUGH LOVE AND LIFE AND DEATH SHOULD COME AND GO.”
Isola was alone in the spacious Roman drawing-room, its wide windows open to the soft, warm air. The sun was off that side of the house now, and the Venetian shutters had been pushed back; and between the heavy stone pillars of the loggia she saw the orange and magnolia trees in the garden, and the pale gold of the mimosas beyond. The sun was shining full upon the Hill of Gardens, that hill at whosefoot Nero was buried in secret at dead of night by his faithful freedman and the devoted woman who loved him to the shameful end of the shameful life; that hill whose antique groves the wicked Cæsar’s ghost had once made a place of terror. The wicked ghost was laid now. Modern civilization had sent Nero the way of all phantoms; and fashionable Rome made holiday on the Hill of Gardens. A military band was playing there this afternoon in the golden light, and the familiar melodies in Don Giovanni were wafted ever and anon in little gusts of sweetness to the loggia where the vivid crimson of waxen camelias and the softer rose of oleander blossoms gave brightness and colour to the dark foliage and the cold white stone.
Isola heard those far-off melodies faint in the distance—heard without heeding. The notes were beyond measure familiar, interwoven with the very fabric of her life, for those were the airs Martin Disney loved, and she had played them to him nearly every evening in their quiet, monotonous life. She heard, unheeding, for her thoughts had wandered back to the night of the ball at Lostwithiel and all that went after it—the fatal night that struck the death-knell of peace and innocence.
How vividly she remembered every detail—her fluttering apprehensions during the long drive on the dark road, up hill and down hill; her eagerness for the delight of the dance, as an unaccustomed pleasure—a scene to which young beauty flies as the moth to the flame; her remorseful consciousness that she had done wrong in yielding to the temptation which drew her there; the longing to see Lostwithiel once more—Lostwithiel, whom she had vowed to herself never to meet again of her own free will. She had gone home that afternoon resolved to forego the ball, to make any social sacrifice rather than look upon that man whose burning words of love, breathed in her ear before she had enough of nerve or calmness to silence him, had left her scathed and geared as if the lightning had blasted her. She had heard his avowal. There was no room now to doubt the meaningof all that had gone before, no ground now for believing in a tender, platonic admiration, lapping her round with its soft radiance—a light, but not a fire. That which had burnt into her soul to-day was the fierce flame of a dishonouring love, the bold avowal of a lover who wanted to steal her from her husband, and make her a sinner before her God.
She knew this much—had brooded upon it all the evening—and yet she was going to a place where she must inevitably meet the Tempter.
She was going because it was expedient to go; because her persistent refusal to be there might give rise to guesses and suspicions that would lead to a discovery of the real reason of her absence. She had often seen the subtle process, the society search-light by which Trelasco and Fowey could arrive at the innermost working of a neighbour’s heart, the deepest mysteries of motive.
She was going to the ball after all, fevered, anxious, full of dim forebodings; and yet with an eager expectancy; and yet with a strange over-mastering joy. How should she meet him? How could she avoid him, without ostentatious avoidance, knowing how many eyes would be quick to mark any deviation from conventional behaviour? Somehow or other she was resolved to avoid all association with him; to get her programme filled before he could ask her to dance; or to refuse in any case if he asked her. He would scarcely venture to approach her after what had been said in the lane, when her indignation had been plainly expressed with angry tears. No, he would hardly dare. And so—in a vague bewilderment at finding she was at her journey’s end—she saw the lights of the little town close upon her, and in the next few minutes her carriage was moving slowly in the rank of carriages setting down their freight at the door of the inn.
Vaguely, as in a dream, she saw the lights and the flowers, the satin gowns and the diamonds, the scarlet and white upon the walls, brush and vizard, vizard and brush. Hewas not there. She looked along the crowd, and that tall figure and that dark head were absent. She ought to have been glad at this respite, and yet her heart grew heavy as lead.
Later he was there, and she was waltzing with him. At the last moment when he was standing before her, cool, self-possessed, as it were unconscious of that burning past, she had no more power to refuse to be his partner than the bird has to escape from the snake. She had given him her hand, and they were moving slowly, softly to the music of the soft, slow waltz. Myosotis, myosotis—mystic flower which means everlasting remembrance! Would she ever forget this night? Their last meeting—safest possible meeting-place here in the shine of the lamps—in the sight of the multitude. Here she could so easily hold him at a distance. Here she might speak to him lightly, as if she too were unconscious of the past. Here she was safe against his madness and her own weak unstable heart, which fluttered at his smallest word.
And so the night wore on, and she danced with him more times than she could count, forgetting, or pretending to forget, other engagements; going through an occasional waltz with another partner just for propriety’s sake, and hardly knowing who that partner was; knowing so well that there was some one else standing against the wall, watching her every movement, with the love-light in his eyes.
Then came the period after supper when they sat in the ante-room and let the dances go by, hearing the music of waltzes which they were to have danced together, hearing and heeding not. And then came a sudden scare at the thought of the hour. Was it late?
Late, very late!
The discovery fluttered and unnerved her, and she was scarcely able to collect her thoughts as he handed her into the carriage and shut the door.
“Surely it was a grey horse that brought me!” sheexclaimed, and in the next minute she recognized Lostwithiel’s brougham, the same carriage in which she had been driven home through the rain upon that unforgotten night when his house sheltered her, when she saw his face for the first time.
Yes, it was his carriage. She knew the colour of the lining, the little brass clock, the reading-lamp, the black panther rug. She pulled at the check-string, but without effect. The carriage drove on, slowly, but steadily, to the end of the town. She let down the window and called to the coachman. There was only one man on the box, and he took no notice of her call.
Yes, he had heard, perhaps, for he drew up his horse suddenly by the road-side, a little way beyond the town. A man opened the door and sprang in, breathless after running. It was Lostwithiel.
“You put me into your carriage!” she cried distractedly. “How could you make such a mistake? Pray tell him to go back to the inn directly.”
They were driving along the country road at a rapid pace, and he had seated himself by her side, clasping her hand. He pulled up the window nearest her, and prevented her calling to the coachman.
“Why should you go back? You will be home sooner with my horse than with the screw that brought you.”
“But the fly will be waiting for me—the man will wonder.”
“Let him wonder. He won’t wait very long, you may be assured. He will guess what has happened. In the confusion of carriages you took the wrong one. Isola, I am going to leave Cornwall to-night—to leave England—perhaps never to return. Give me the last few moments of my life here. Be merciful to me. I am going away—perhaps for ever.”
“Take me home,” she said. “Are you really taking me home? Is this the right way?”
“Of course it is the right way. Do you suppose I am going to drive you to London?”
He let down the glass suddenly, and pointed into the night.