Chapter 4

Isola danced every dance. She hardly knew who her partners were. She had only a sense of floating in a vortex of light and colour, to some swinging melody. Everything was dream-like—but not horrible, as in her dream by the fireside at home. This was a happy dream, as of a creature with wings, who knew not of care in the present or a soul to be saved in the future. And then came her waltz with Lostwithiel, and that strong arm was round her, bearing her up as a flower is borne upon a rushing tide, so that she had no consciousness of movement on her own part, only of floating, floating, floating, to that languid three-time melody.It was the last popular waltz they were playing—a waltz that had been last summer’s delight in the arid gardens of South Kensington—“Il n’y a que toi;” a waltz with a chorus which the band trolled out merrily, at intervals, in the French of Stratford atte Bow.“Il n’y a que toi,” whispered Lostwithiel, with his lips close to the soft brown hair above the white forehead. “Not a bad name for a waltz when one is waltzing with just one person in the world.”Out in the cool night there was a little knot of people as merry after their homelier fashion as town and county in the ball-room. One of the windows had been opened at the top for ventilation, and this opening had been turned to advantage. A large, substantial kitchen table had been placed in front of the window, and upon this improvised platform stood Tabitha, Susan, the head chamber-maid, and the ostler’s wife—this last on sufferance, and evidently not in society—looking on at the ball. The window was under a verandah, that sloped above these spectators’ heads. They were thus in dense shadow, and unseen by the occupants of the lamp-lit room.Susan was exuberant in her delight.“I was never at a ball before,” she said. “Oh, ain’t itlovely? Don’t I wish I could dance like that? Lor, do look at that fat old party, spinning round like a teetotum! Well, I never did! Don’t she perspire!” exclaimed Susan, indulging in a running commentary which left much to be desired in the matter of refinement.This unsophisticated damsel heartily admired youth and beauty, and the smart frocks and flashing gems; but she was cruelly hard upon those dancers whose charms were on the wane, or whose frocks were inferior or ugly.“Well, I wouldn’t,” said Susan, “I wouldn’t go to a ball like this if I couldn’t have everythink nice. Look at that tall girl in yeller. Did you ever see such a scarecrow? I’d ever so much rather stay at home, or stand outside, like this. I should feel it better became me.”Tabitha made no such remarks. She was singularly silent and thoughtful, as she stood looking down at the crowded room from her point of vantage on the kitchen table. She had only eyes for one figure—the willowy form in the glistening white satin gown, with the feathery Japanese chrysanthemums, a little crushed and faded by this time; or perhaps it may be said for two figures, since one followed the other as the shadow follows the substance. She saw them waltzing together, when supper was in full progress, and the room comparatively clear. She saw the graceful head inclining towards his shoulder, the slender waist held in his firm embrace; and it seemed to her that the waltz was an invention of the Arch Enemy. She thought of it very much as people thought seventy years ago when Byron wrote his poetical denunciation of the new dance. She saw those two moving slowly towards an adjacent ante-room, where banks of flowers, and a couple of sofas and low easy-chairs made a retreat which was half boudoir, half conservatory. She saw them moving side by side, talking to each other in tones so confidential that his head bent low over hers each time she spoke; and then she watched them sitting just within the doorway, at an angle where she could see their faces, and attitudes, still in the same confidential converse, she with downcast eyes,and he leaning forward with his elbow on his knee, and looking up at her as he talked.“It is too bad of him,” muttered Tabitha, writhing at that spectacle. “Does he think what a child she is, and what harm he may be doing? It is wicked of him, and he knows it; and other people must notice them—other people must see what I see—and they will be talking of her, blighting her good name. Oh, if I could only get her away at once before people begin to notice her!”She could see her young mistress’s face distinctly in the lamplight. Isola was very pale, and her face was full of trouble; not the face of a woman amusing herself with an idle flirtation, playing with fire without the least intention of burning her fingers. There were plenty of flirtations of that order going on in the Talbot ball-room; but this was not one of them. This meant peril of some kind. This was all evil. That pale face, those heavy eyelids, shrouding eyes which dared not look up. That tremulous, uncertain movement of the snowy ostrich fan! All these were danger signals.“If I get her safe at home presently, I’ll open her eyes for her,” thought Tabitha. “I’ll talk to her as if I was her mother. God knows I should be almost as sorry as ever her mother could be if she came to any harm.”If she came to any harm. What harm was there to fear for her, as she sat there, with Lostwithiel lounging across the low chair beside the sofa where she sat, leaning forward to look into her downcast face? What harm could come to her except that which meant destruction—death to peace, and gladness, and womanly fame? If there were danger it was a desperate danger, and Tabitha shuddered at the mere thought of that peril.“But, lor, she’s little more than a child,” mused Tabitha. “She means no wrong, and she knows no wrong. She’s too innocent to come to any harm.”Yet in the landlady’s snuggery, by-and-by, seated at the comfortable round table, with its spotless damask and brightglass and silver, Tabitha was quite unable to do justice to that snack which Mr. Tinkerly had ordered in her honour—a chicken and lobster-salad from the supper-room, and three parts of a pine-apple cream. Susan and the foreman fully appreciated these dainties; but Tabitha only munched a crust and sipped a tumbler of beer.“I’m a little bit out of sorts to-night,” she said.“I hope you haven’t taken cold, Mrs. Thomas,” said the polite Tinkerly. “Perhaps we ought to have brought another rug?”“No, it isn’t that. I’ve been quite warm and comfortable. Eat your supper, Mr. Tinkerly, and don’t bother about me. I’ve been interested in looking on, and I’m too much took up with what I’ve seen to be able to eat.”“Well, it was a pretty sight,” exclaimed Tinkerly, enthusiastically; “but I don’t think I ever saw such a mort of plain women in my life.”“Lor, Mr. Tinkerly,” cried Susan, with a shocked air. “Why, look at our young mistress, and at Miss Crowther, and Miss Spenthrop from Truro, and Mrs. Pencarrow, and Lady Chanderville.”“Well, I don’t say they’re all ugly. Some of ’em are handsome enough, and there’s plenty of thorough-breds among ’em, but there’s a sight of plain-headed ones. There’s quite as much beauty in your spear as there is among the county folks, Miss Susan. I’ll answer for that.”The night was waning. Isola had ordered her carriage for half-past two: but three o’clock had struck from the church tower of Lostwithiel, and the dance was still at its height—at its best, the dancers said, now that the sensual attractions of the supper-room drew off a good many people, and left the floor so much clearer than before supper, when bulky middle-aged gentlemen, talking to the matrons seated upon the divan, had projected their ponderous persons into the orbit of the waltzers.Isola and Lostwithiel had danced only two waltzes, butsince two o’clock they had sat out several dances, Mrs. Disney having cancelled all her engagements after that hour by declaring that she would dance no more.“I am dreadfully tired,” she told her partners piteously, and her pallor gave force to the assertion. “Please get some one else for our dance, Captain Morshead,” and so on, and so on, to half a dozen disappointed suitors.Perhaps some of those who happened to be experienced in such complications may have divined which way the wind blew, for no one offered to sit out the promised dances, and Isola and Lostwithiel were left pretty much to themselves among the palms and orange-trees in the ante-room. They were not unobserved, however; and among the eyes which marked them with no friendly notice were the fine, steel-blue eyes of Miss Crowther.“Is that a flirtation?” she asked Captain Morshead, glancing in the direction of the ante-room where those two were sitting, as she and Isola’s cast-off partner waltzed past the muslin-draped doorway.“They seem rather fond of talking to each other, don’t they? Who was she? She’s uncommonly pretty.”“Oh, her people were army, I believe—as poor as church mice—buried alive in Dinan.”“At Dinan—and now she lives at Trelasco, she tells me. It seems scarcely worth while to have exhumed her in order to bury her again. Such a girl as that ought to be in London enjoying life.”“Oh, but she’s a grass widow, don’t you know. Her husband is in Burmah. I don’t think it’s quite nice in her to be here to-night; only as my too good-natured mother sent her a ticket, I suppose I oughtn’t to say anything about it. Perhaps if mother sees the way she goes on with Lord Lostwithiel she’ll rather regret that ticket.”What was Lostwithiel saying all this time in that gentle baritone, which was heard only by one listener? He was asking forgiveness for his indiscretion of the afternoon, andin that prayer for pardon was repeating his offence. Isola was less inclined to be angry, perhaps, now. The magic of the dance was still upon her senses, the dance which had brought them nearer than all the days they had met; than all their long confidential conversations on the heights above the harbour, or on the river path, or dawdling on the bridge. She had felt the beating of his heart against her own, breath mingling with breath, the thrilling touch of his encircling arm; and it was as if he had woven a spell around her which made her his. She had never danced with her husband, who had no love of that heathenish art. In all their brisk, frank courtship there had been no intoxicating hours. She hardly knew what dancing meant till she waltzed with Lostwithiel, who had something of the fiery ardour of a Pagan worshipping his gods in wild gyrations upon moonlit mountain or in secret cave. She let him talk to her to-night—let him pour out the full confession of his unhappy love. He spoke not as one who had hope; not with that implied belief in her frailty which would have startled her into prompt resistance. His accents were the accents of despair, his love was a dark fatality.ἉΝΑΓΚΗ“Why did you write that word?” she asked.“Why? Because I could not give you back that card without some token of my passion—with only commonplace entries which Jones, Brown, and Robinson might write there. I want you to feel that you belong to me, somehow, in some way, as the spirits of the dead and the souls of the living belong to each other sometimes, by links which none can see. When I am at the other end of the earth I want to feel that there is something, if it were only a word, like a masonic sign, between us; if it were only a promise that in such or such a phase of the waning moon we would each look up and breathe the other’s name.”“You are going away?”“What else can I do? Can I stay? You tell me I madeyou miserable by what I said this afternoon. That means we must meet no more. I can’t be sorry for my offence. I cannot answer for myself. My love has passed the point of sanity and self-control. I have no option. I must offend you, or I must leave you.”“You need not leave Trelasco,” she said gently. “I am going away to-morrow.”“Going away! Where?”“To London first, and then to India.”“To Burmah? Impossible!”“If not to the front, to the nearest convenient station. I am going to my husband; as nearly as I can reach him; and as quickly as I can make the journey.”“You are dreaming.”“No, I have quite made up my mind. I hated to be left behind last year; and now that his return is deferred my only chance of happiness is to go to him. Some one called me a grass widow the other day. What a detestable name!”“Give me this one waltz?” he asked, without any comment upon her intended journey.“Impossible. I told them all I shouldn’t dance any more.”“Oh, your partners are all in the supper-room, I dare say. The dancing men go in last. Hark! it’s the Myosotis. Just one turn—only one.”He had risen from his low seat, and she rose involuntarily at the sound of the opening bars. He put his arm round her gently, and drew her into the ball-room, waltzing slowly as they went, and then, with the sudden impetus of an enthusiastic dancer, he was whirling her round the room, and she know nothing, cared for nothing, in the confusion of light and melody.“Think of me sometimes when you are far away!” he whispered, with his lips almost touching her forehead.She did not resent that whisper. Already, within a dozen hours of his first offence, she had grown accustomedto his words of love. It seemed to her as if they had loved each other for years—had loved and had despaired long ago, in some dim half-remembered past. A passion of this kind is like a dream, in which an instant gives the impression of half a lifetime, of long memories and old habit.The room was much clearer now.“Is it very late?” asked Isola.“About four.”“So late—and I told the flyman half-past two. It is dreadful. Let us stop, please.”He obeyed, and went with her towards the cloak-room. The seats were nearly empty now where the matrons had sat in their velvet and brocade, a gorgeous background to the clouds of tulle and sylph-like figures of the dancers. Mrs. Baynham was nowhere to be seen, and the diminished bundles of tabby-cat cloaks and Shetland shawls in the cloak-room indicated that a good many people had left. Isola put on her soft white shawl hurriedly, and went out into the hall, where Lostwithiel had gone to look for her carriage.People were going away very fast, and through the open doorway there was a sound of voices and wheels; but, in spite of footmen, constables, and hangers-on, there seemed a prodigious difficulty in getting any particular carriage to the door.It was a mild, misty night, and the moon, which had been counted on for the return home, was hidden behind a mass of black clouds—or in the expressive phraseology of one of the foxhunters, had gone to ground. Mrs. Disney waited near the door while Lostwithiel searched for her fly. There were several departures of other muffled figures, features undistinguishable behind Shetland wraps, or furry hoods, as the men hustled their womenkind into the carriages. It seemed an age to Isola, waiting there alone in the corridor, and seeing no mortal whom she knew among those passersby, before Lostwithiel came, hurried and breathless, to say that her carriage was just coming up to the door.“Wrap your shawl round your head,” he said quickly, as he gave her his arm. “There’s a nasty damp fog—so,” muffling her, almost to blindness. “Come along.”She looked at the carriage, with its lamps shining red against the grey mistiness like great fiery eyes, and then, glancing at the horse, she cried suddenly, “I’m afraid that’s the wrong fly. I think mine had a grey horse.”“No, no, it’s all right. Pray don’t loiter in this chilling air.”The carriage door was open, the constable standing by, bull’s-eye in hand, a pair of horses snorting close behind, another carriage coming up so near that the pole threatened destruction. There was no time for loitering. Everybody was in a hurry to get home. Isola stepped lightly into the brougham, which drove slowly off.“Next carriage, Mrs. Brune Prideaux,” roared the constable. “Mrs. Prideaux’ carriage stops all the way.”CHAPTER VI.“A LOVE STILL BURNING UPWARD.”It was early summer, summer in her first youth, when she is frivolous and capricious, laughs and weeps she knows not why; smiling through her tears, and never knowing her own mind for a week together; to-day gracious-tempered and tropical; to-morrow east-windy and morose. In a word, it was June, a season of roses and rains, blue skies and thunder-clouds. It was June, and Martin Disney was looking out of the window with a keen eager face, much bronzed, and somewhat haggard, after a fatiguing campaign, looking out across the vales and woods of his native county, as the Penzance train sped along the high-level line betwixt Plymouth and Par. Those keen, grey eyes of his, accustomed to searching out far-off objects, looked as if they could pierce through the green heart of the Cornish valleys to the sheltered littleharbour of Fowey and the blue sea that opened wide to the far-off West.His labours were over, and he was going to take his rest, going to hang up his sword, that sword which had done such good work, or to transform it into a reaping-hook. He was Colonel Disney now, had given the State his best service, and now, in the very prime and vigour of his manhood, the State had done with him, and he was free to do what he listed with the maturer half of his life. He would have been very sorry to retire from active service had it not been for that tender tie which gave such sweetness to the thought of retirement and tranquil days. He was going home. The word thrilled him like music; home to his fair young wife, his chosen one, his domestic divinity. He had not left off wondering how it had ever come to pass that so young and fair a creature could care for him.“It isn’t as if I were one of your accomplished fellows,” he said to himself, “able to sing, or play the flute, or paint in water-colours. Except a very earnest love of a few good books, I have no culture. How can any girl in the present day care for a man without culture? I could never appreciate Keats, for instance; and not to appreciate Keats is to be an outsider in literature.”Yet, in spite of his seven and forty years, in spite of his deficiencies, his homeliness, that young heart had gone out to him. She loved him, and his lot was full. There was nothing more upon God’s earth that he could desire, were it not a miracle, and that the mother he had so fondly loved might be given back to him, to share his happiness, to make the third in a trinity of trusting love. Since that could not be, there was nothing left for him to yearn for.The beating of his heart quickened almost unbearably, as the train drew near Par. Isola would meet him at the Junction, perhaps. He had not announced the actual hour of his arrival, for matters had been a little uncertain when he wrote yesterday, and he had not cared to telegraph this morning before he left Paddington. Yet she would knowthat this was the only likely train for him to choose; and she would be at the Junction, he thought, smiling her glad welcome, a fair young face, rosy in the sunset; for it was evening as he drew near the end of his journey.No; there was nobody he knew at the Junction. He walked up and down the platform, and stared about him in rather a forlorn way during the few minutes before the starting of the train for Fowey. She had not come to anticipate their meeting by an hour or so, as he had hoped, as he had felt almost certain, she would come.It was more natural that she should wait and receive him at the Angler’s Nest, he told himself, sitting in the corner of the railway carriage presently, in a train of three coaches, steaming through the pretty picturesque country between Par and Fowey. In the colder light of reason it seemed preposterous to have expected to see her at the Junction. She would like to welcome him amidst her own surroundings, in the home to which she had doubtless given those little beautifying touches in honour of his coming, which are such delight to women, and which sometimes pass altogether unobserved by that pachydermatous animal, man! How slowly the engine moved along that little bit of line! Martin Disney sat with his face to the wind, and snuffed the sea breeze as if it had been the odour of home. He thought of Ulysses, and his return from distant lands. Would Tim, the fox terrier, know him? and Shah, the Persian cat? Perhaps not. Tim was no Argus; vastly affectionate and demonstrative, but not a dog to expire at one’s feet, in the rapture of his master’s return. Penelope would know him, and welcome him. That was enough for this modern Ulysses, who had no reason to disguise himself in re-entering his home—who had no fear of rival suitors, or interlopers of any kind. Penelope would welcome him, and trusty Tabitha. He thought of the old servant’s honest face with delight. She was something left to him out of boyhood and youth. He felt like a young man when he talked to her. She was the one strong link betwixt the present and the past. Shewas his memory embodied. He could refer to her as to a dictionary of days long gone. When did we do such and such a thing—or go to such a place? What was the name of the bay horse I bought at Plympton? Where did my mother pick up the Sheraton secretaire? Tabitha could answer all such trivial questions: and Tabitha could talk to him for hours of his mother’s words and ways—of the things that were only history.At last! The train crept into the little station, nestling on the edge of a wood, and there was Fowey, homely, friendly little Fowey, so strange and yet so familiar; strange to eyes that had so lately looked upon the cities of the East; familiar to the man who had been reared in the neighbourhood, whose first impressions of God’s earth had stamped harbour and hills upon his brain, like an indelible picture. There was Masters’s fly, an eminently respectable vehicle that never touted for chance passengers, waiting for him. He was expected, evidently.“Did Mrs. Disney send you?” he asked the driver.“Yes, sir.”How thoughtful of the young wife, who might be forgiven if she had left such a small duty unfulfilled. Yet he would have liked to see her sweet self at the station—only, as he had argued with himself just now, it would have discounted the home-welcome. It would have been an anti-climax.Dearly as he loved that home river, and those fertile hills, and beautiful as they were after their kind, they could but seem small and tame to eyes that had looked upon the glories of the East. Disney contemplated the scene with a touch of sad surprise, wondering at this miniature loveliness; recalling the day when those steep hillsides, where the red cattle were grazing in the mists of eventide, had seemed grand in his sight. Now they had a kind of pitiful prettiness. His heart yearned towards them with compassion for their insignificance.For nearly two years he had been moving about with his company in the land of jungle and mountain, and inthat vast table-land through which the Salween river runs down to the Gulf of Martaban; and after those wider horizons, he found himself in a narrow road, shut in by grassy hills, and hugging the margin of a silver thread that called itself a river.There is always a tinge of melancholy in that hour after sundown; and Martin Disney’s heart saddened a little as he looked at the quiet river, and the shadows on the hillside—that pale mistiness of summer evening which gives a ghostly touch to all things, as if it were a brief revelation of a spirit world. It is an hour at which even a strong man’s heart is apt to sink with a vague sense of fear.The fly drew up at the little wooden gate between high hedges of escalonia, with glossy leaves and bright red blossom. A slender figure in a white gown was visible on the threshold, as Disney sprang out of the fly, and while the flyman was lifting down the luggage, that airy form flitted across the lawn, and Colonel Disney’s wife was standing shyly within the open gate, almost as if she had come out to receive a stranger.He could not clasp her to his breast before a flyman; but he seized both her hands, gripped them convulsively, and then led her towards the house, leaving Masters’s man to deal as he pleased with portmanteaux and hat-box, gun-case and umbrella-case, despatch-box, and other chattels; to leave them out in the lane to the dews and the night-birds, if he so listed. Martin Disney had no consciousness of anything in this world except the woman by his side.“My darling! my darling!” he ejaculated, in a choked voice, “how I have longed for this hour, with a longing that has been almost madness!”And then he saw for the first time that her face was as white as her gown. Was it the twilight that made her look so pale? Could he wonder if the emotion of this supreme moment blanched that young cheek, when he, soldier and wayfarer upon the world’s roughest roads, felt like a child, striving to hold back his tears?Lamps were burning in dining-room and drawing-room. He saw the table laid for dinner through the open door as he and Isola passed by; but the idea of eating and drinking seemed very far off just now. They went into the drawing-room together, where a solitary lamp was shining upon a table crowded with flowers, and where the scents of the garden came in through the open window. Here he satisfied the longing of his hungry heart, and took that fragile form in his arms, and kissed the pale cold lips. She lay upon his breast unresistingly; helpless, unresponsive, like a dead thing.“Isola, have you forgotten that you once loved me?”“Forgotten! No, no, no! There is no one in the world so good and true as you are. I love you with all my heart and soul.”Her face was hidden on his breast, but she lifted up her arms and clasped them round his neck. He seated himself in his accustomed chair—it was standing where it had always stood before he went away—and took her upon his knee, as if she had been a child. Then a great storm of sobs suddenly burst from throat and bosom, a flood of tears streamed upon his breast, and he felt her arms trembling as they clasped his neck.“My own dear love,” he murmured gently, “one would almost think you were sorry I have came back.”She could not answer him at first for her sobs, but she shook her head, and at last the words, “No, no, no,” came from her lips; and he kissed and calmed her with almost fatherly gentleness. And then they went into the dining-room, where the soup-tureen was waiting for them on the sideboard, with a neat little parlour-maid—not Susan, but another—ready to minister to them.The table had been decorated by Isola’s own hands. Dark crimson roses were lying on the fair white damask; one tall glass stood in the centre with three slim golden lilies, pale and heavy-headed, which filled the room with perfume. These came from one of the hothouses at Glenaveril, whencegood-natured Mrs. Crowther had sent a basket of exotics in honour of the colonel’s return. The lamplight, the flowers, the pretty old Wedgwood service of creamy white and dull brown, made up a feast for Martin Disney’s eye, after a life spent mostly under canvas. He looked from the gaily adorned table to the face beside him, pallid and pinched, despite its sweetness.“My dear one, you are looking very ill,” he said, with an anxious air.“What an ungallant speech!” she answered, smiling at him with unexpected gaiety. “I have been fretting at your long, long absence, and you reproach me for my deteriorated appearance. Never mind, Martin, you will see how rosy and bright I shall get now our parting has come to an end.”“Yes, love, we must coax the roses back to your cheeks. I must have a good mount ready for you when the cubbing begins, and a few morning gallops will soon make a change in my fragile wife’s appearance. And I’ll charter a yacht and steep you in ozone.”“Oh, one gets enough of that on shore, there is no need to go further.”“But I thought you adored yachting? It was one of our grand schemes for the future, to hire a modest little yawl and go round the coast to Clovelly. Have you forgotten?”“No, no; only I don’t want you to waste your money—and, if we start a bigger stable——”“Ah, you don’t know what a Crœsus I have become. You needn’t be afraid of ruining me. My poor lonely little wife. Why didn’t you send for Allegra?”“She wouldn’t have been of any good to me. She is all that is sweet and lovable, and she is your sister; but she wouldn’t have filled your vacant place. I should have only felt lonelier for having to talk every day, and pretend a kind of happiness. Being alone, I could bury myself in a book, and forget my troubles.”“This soup doesn’t look up to Tabitha’s old form. Do you know that among other delights of this earthly paradiseI have been looking forward to Tabitha’s little dinners. I don’t believe there is achefin Paris who can cook so well as that self-taught genius, who ripened into perfection by a process of gradual evolution, from the early days when my mother discovered that nobody could make arrowroot or cook a mutton cutlet as well as Tabitha. By-the-by, why has not that good soul shown herself? I thought she would have disputed with you for my first kiss.”While he ran on in this fashion, Isola sat looking down at the table-cloth, pallid no longer, but crimson.“Tabitha has gone!” she said abruptly.“Tabitha gone—for a holiday?”“No, she has left me, altogether.”“Left you—altogether?” exclaimed Disney, with the tone of a man who could scarcely believe in his own sense of hearing, so astounding was the statement that met his ears. “Tabitha, my mother’s faithful old servant, who was like my own flesh and blood! What in God’s name made her leave you? Did you quarrel with her?”He asked the question almost sternly. For the first time in his life he was angry with this dear fragile creature, the idol of his heart. He had loved Tabitha as servants are not often loved. He had left his young wife in her charge, desiring no better custodian, full of faith in Tabitha’s ability both to protect and counsel her girlish mistress.“No, no; we did not quarrel. I liked Tabitha very much. I was almost as fond of her as you yourself could be.”“And yet you dismissed her!” Disney retorted bitterly. “She was not smart enough for you, perhaps. Those Crowther people may have put it into your head that she was old-fashioned—that you could never have a modish household with such a humdrum old person at the head of it. Was that your motive?”“Oh, Martin, how can you think me so frivolous? I hate smartness and pretension as much as you do. No, I should never have dismissed Tabitha. She left me of her own accord.”“Why?”“She wanted rest. She was too old for service, she told me. I tried to keep her. I humiliated myself so far as to beg her to stay with me”—the tears came into her eyes at the mere memory of that humiliation—“but she had made up her mind. She would not give way.”“Where did she go?”“To Falmouth—to live with her sister, a shoemaker’s widow. They let lodgings, I believe.”“She must have gone mad! A lodging-house must be harder work than anything she had to do here.”“Yes, I think it must.”“When did she go?”“At the beginning of the year—in January.”“She left you six months ago, and in all that time you never told me she was gone.”“I did not want you to know, for fear you should be worried or vexed.”“I should have been both; but you ought to have told me. I had a right to know. I left you in her charge, Isola. You are much too young and too pretty to be living alone without some kind of dragon—and I knew Tabitha would be a very gentle dragon—a good motherly soul, able to wait upon you and look after your health, and yet grim enough to keep marauders off the premises. Indeed, my pet, you should have let me know of her departure without an hour’s delay. She was very wrong to go. It was a breach of faith I could never have expected.”“Pray don’t be angry with her, Martin.”“But I am angry. I have a right to be angry. I’ll go to Falmouth to-morrow, and have it out with her.”“No, no, pray don’t! We parted good friends. She can say nothing to you more than she said to me. Pray don’t let there be any bad blood between you. What could be gained by your going? To-morrow, too—our first day together!”“Well, it shall not be till the day after; but go I must.To-morrow I will revel in the delights of home, and my dear one’s society. To-morrow I will be drunken with joy. The day after will do for Tabitha.”“I think it is making a great deal too much of her to go to Falmouth on purpose to see her,” said Isola, with a grain of pettiness; and then, after a pause, during which the colonel had been trying to appease a sharp appetite with the muscular leg of an elderly fowl, she said nervously—“I’m afraid you are not enjoying your dinner.”“What do I care for dinner on such a night as this; but, as a matter of plain truth, I must say that your new cook is a very bad substitute for Tabitha. Her soup was watery, her fish was greasy, her poultry is hardly eatable. If she has talents in any other line she is keeping them in reserve for another day. It may be that she excels in made-dishes—a misfortune for me, as I never eat them.”“I had a splendid character with her,” said Isola, piteously, with the helpless feeling of a housewife who sees before her a dark prospect of bad dinners and marital grumblings, or the agonizing wrench involved in changing her cook.“Yes, my love, people generally give splendid characters to servants they want to get rid of,” answered Disney, dryly.These wedded lovers went out very early next morning to explore the gardens and meadows; Isola eager to point out various small improvements which she had made with the help of the old gardener, who would have plunged his hand and arm into a fiery furnace to procure plant or flower which his young mistress desired. Sweet words and sweet looks go very far in this world. They are a mighty revenue, and will often do their owner as good service as gold and silver.Isola had worked in the garden with her own hands ever since the beginning of spring, the first tender opening of Earth’s heavy eyelids, her first pale smile of snowdrops, her broad laughter of daffodils, her joyous peal of bluebells, andriotous mirth of May blossom. She had toiled in the sweat of her brow so that the garden might be beautiful at mid-summer: for early in March there had come a letter full of rejoicing from that distant hill-kingdom, and she knew that the year of absence to which she had looked so hopelessly last November was commuted to half a year.Martin Disney was full of admiration for his wife’s improvements. The old-fashioned borders were brimming over with old-world flowers; the shrubberies had grown out of knowledge; the escalonia hedge by the kitchen garden was a thing to wonder at.“I remember the hedge at Tregenna Castle before that good old place was an inn,” said Martin; and then, having admired everything, he walked up and down the grass beside the laurel hedge with his wife—while the Satan-sent cook was spoiling the food that bounteous Nature had provided for man’s enjoyment—and questioned her about the life she had been leading in his absence.“You used to write me such good letters, dearest, so full of detail, that I knew exactly how your days were spent, and could picture every hour of your life: but of late your descriptive powers have flagged. I dare say you got tired of writing long letters to a dull old fellow in India, who could never write you a clever letter in reply. It must have seemed a one-sided business?”“Indeed, no, dear. Your letters had only one fault. They were never half long enough; but I knew how busy you were, and I thought it was so good of you never to miss a mail.”“Good of me! Had there been twice as many mails I would not have willingly missed one. But there is no doubt your letters fell off after last autumn. They were sweet, and ever welcome to me—but they told me very little.”“There was very little to tell.”“Ah, but in the old days you used to make it seem so much. You had such a delightful way of describing triflingevents. I thought at one time you had the makings of a Jane Austen; but afterwards I began to fear you must be out of health. Your letters had a low-spirited tone. There were no more of those sharp little touches which used to make me laugh, no more of those tiny word-pictures, which brought the faces and figures of my old neighbours before me.”“You can hardly wonder if my spirits sank a little when you had been so long away. And then life seemed so death-like in its monotony. There were days when I felt I might just as well have been dead. There could be very little difference between lying under the earth and crawling listlessly on the top of it.”“You were too much alone, Isola,” he answered, distressed at this revelation. “You ought to have sent for Allegra. I begged you to send for her, if you felt dull.”“Do you think she could have cured my dulness?” exclaimed his wife, impatiently. “Life would have seemed still more tiresome if I had been obliged to talk when there was nothing to talk about, and to smile when I felt inclined to cry.”“Ah, you don’t know what a companion Allegra is—brimming over with fun! She knows her Dickens by heart; and I never met with anybody who appreciated him as intensely as she does.”“I don’t care about Dickens.”“Don’t—care—about Dickens!”He echoed her words as if almost paralyzed by horror.“Not as I used to care. One’s taste changes as life goes on. Lately I have read nothing but Victor Hugo, and Keats, and Shelley.”“Very well in their way, but not half cheery enough for a lonely little woman beside the Fowey river. You ought to have had Allegra. It would have been better for you and better for her. She is tired of the Art school; and the other pupils are tired of her. They are very fond of her; but she has done all the work twice over, and there is nothing more for her to do, unless we meant her to enter the RoyalAcademy and go in seriously for art, Mrs. Meynell tells me. According to that lady’s account my sister must be an Admirable Crichton in petticoats.”“I have no doubt she is very clever and very nice; but, as I could not have you, I preferred being alone,” answered Isola.She was walking slowly by his side along the closely shaven grass, and every now and then she stretched out a hand that looked semi-transparent, and gathered a flower at random, and then plucked off its petals nervously as she walked on. Her eyelids were lowered, and her lips were tightly set. Martin could but think there was a vein of obstinacy in this bewitching wife of his—a gentle resistance which would tend to make him her slave rather than her master in the days to come. He saw with pain that her cheeks were hollow and pinched, and that her complexion had a sickly whiteness. She had fretted evidently in those long months of solitude, and it would take time to bring back the colour and gaiety to her face. As for dulness, well, no doubt Fowey was ever so much duller than Dinan, where there were officers and tennis-parties and afternoon tea-drinkings, and a going and coming of tourists all the summer through, and saints’ days, and processions, andfêtesand illuminations in the market square, beneath the statue of Duguesclin.“And how did the world use you, Isola?” he asked presently. “Was everybody kind?”“Oh yes, people were very kind; especially Mrs. Baynham and Mrs. Crowther. They sent me ever so many invitations, and wanted me to go on their day every week.”“And I hope you accepted their invitations.”“I went to Mrs. Baynham’s sometimes on her day; but I didn’t care about going to Glenaveril. It is all too grand and too fine—and I don’t like Mr. Crowther.”“He was always courteous to you, I hope?”“Oh yes, he was particularly courteous. I have no reason for disliking him. He is my Dr. Fell—the reason why I cannot tell, but I would walk a mile to avoid meeting him.”“Then we will not cultivate social relations with Glenaveril. We will visit at no house where my dearest does not feel happy and at ease. And as for the finery, I agree with you, there is something too much of it. I like powder and plush when the people they serve are to the manner born, and when powder and plush seem more natural than parlour-maids; but I don’t care for the solemn stateliness of a big establishment when it has been newly set up—at least, not by such folks as the Crowthers. There are some men to whom such surroundings seem natural, even though fortune has come late in life. Is the beautiful Belinda married yet?”“No. I do not think she is as much as engaged.”“I thought Lostwithiel would have married her. She would have been a grand catch for him, and no doubt she would have snapped at a coronet, even without strawberry leaves. But I hear he is in South America orchid-hunting. He was always a capricious individual. There goes the gong for breakfast. I hope your cook can fry a rasher and boil an egg better than she can dress a dinner.”They went in together to the pretty dining-room, so bright with books and flowers, and a life-sized girlish head in water-colours, by Dobson, R.A., over the chimney-piece, and Venetian glass here and there, that all characteristics of the ordinary eating-room were effaced, and only a sense of homeliness and artistic surroundings was left. Isola had been down at six, and her own hands had given the finishing touches to the room, and the flowers were of that morning’s gathering, and had the dew and the perfume of morning upon them. The room was so pretty, and Isola was so much prettier than the room, that a husband would have been of very dull clay had he troubled himself about the handiwork of the cook. Martin Disney was not made of dull clay, and he ate an overdone rasher and a hard-boiled egg without a murmur, and then set out for a long ramble with Isola.They went up to the hill upon whose landward slope stood Lostwithiel’s old grey manor-house, with its gardens and park. Isola had not been there since that never-to-be-forgotten November evening when she met Lostwithiel in the rain. She had avoided the spot from that time forward, though she had no especial reason for avoidance, since there was no one there but Mrs. Mayne and her underlings. Lostwithiel and theVendettahad sailed away into space directly after the Hunt Ball, and little had been heard of him save that dim rumour of orchid-hunting on the shores of the Amazon, which had filtered from the society papers down to Fowey,viâtheWestern Daily Mercury.Isola and her husband lingered for a long time upon the hilltop, he revelling in the familiar beauty of that magnificent stretch of cliff and sea, out to the dim slate colour of the Dodman Point, bay beyond bay, curving away towards Falmouth and the Lizard—while between that hill and the sea lay a world of fertile meadows and bright green cornfields, of hill and hollow, wood and common, copse and garden, a rich and smiling country, a land of summer flowers and plenteous growth.“I never stand upon this hill without feeling proud of being a Cornishman,” said Disney, “and yet, after all, it is a foolish thing to be proud of an accident. My little Breton girl might as well be proud of being a countrywoman of Duguesclin’s.”“Perhaps if I had been born anywhere else I should not have been so ready to fall in love with a soldier,” answered Isola. “I was brought up to think a knight and a warrior the one ideal: and so I was fascinated by the first soldier who took any notice of me.”“But were you really fascinated, and were you really in love,” exclaimed Disney, infinitely delighted at this little speech of his wife’s, “in love with a battered campaigner—or did you just think you liked me a little bit, only because you wanted to get away from Dinan?”“I really—really—really loved you,” she answered softly, looking up at him with eyes dimmed by tears, as he drew her nearer to him in his gladness. “I was not tired of Dinan—or my life there—and my heart went out to you atonce, because you were good and noble, and seemed to care for me.”“There was no seeming in it, Isola. I was knocked over at once, like a pigeon out of a trap. I had been in love with you three weeks—three centuries it seemed—before I could screw up my courage so far as to think of proposing for you. And then if Hazelrigg hadn’t helped me with your father, I don’t suppose I should ever have broken the ice. But when he—the colonel—showed himself so frank and willing—and the way was all made smooth for me from a domestic point of view—and when I saw that kind little look in your eyes, and the shy little smile—yes, you are smiling so now—I took heart of grace, and stormed the citadel. Do you remember the evening I asked you to be my wife, Isola; that starlit night when I had been dining with your people, and you and Gwendolen, and Hazelrigg and I went out upon the terrace to look at the stars, and the river, and the twinkling lights of the boats down by the quay, and the diligence driving over the bridge, deep, deep down in the valley below us? Do you remember how I lured you away from the other two, and how we stood under the vine-leaves in the berceau, and I found the words somehow—feeblest, stupidest words, I’m afraid—to make you know that all the happiness of my life to come depended upon winning you for my wife?”“I remember as if it were last night,” she answered gravely. “But oh, how long ago it seems!”“Why do you sigh as you say that?”“Oh, one always sighs for the past! How can one help feeling sorry that it should be gone—so much of our lives and of ourselves gone for ever?”“Oh, but when the future is so fair, when the present is so happy, there should be no more sighing. It is an offence against the Great Father of all, who has been so good to us.”She did not answer, and they remained silent for some minutes, she seated on a bank covered with heather and wild flowers; he stretched on the short, sweet turf at her feet. The heather had not begun to show its purple bloom,but there was the gold of the gorse, and the brightness of innumerable wild flowers around and about them as they basked in the sunshine.“Dearest, do you believe in dreams?” Disney asked suddenly.“Sometimes—not much—dreams are often dreadful,” she answered, with a startled air.“I don’t believe in them a bit,” he said, lifting himself into a sitting position, and addressing himself to her with increasing earnestness, “not now that I have you here safe within reach of my hand—so,” taking her hand in his, and keeping it clasped in both his own; “but I had a dream about you in Burmah, which kept me in a fever of anxiety for nearly a month. I should have telegraphed to ask if all was right with you, only I told myself that if anything was wrong Tabitha would instantly telegraph to me. I made her promise that before I left England. It was almost my last injunction. And to think that she left you half a year ago, and that anything might have happened to you after that, and that there was no one—no one——”“But, you see, I am quite safe. There was no bad news to send you. Besides, if I had been ill, or anything had gone wrong, there was Mrs. Baynham. She has been like a mother to me. I am so sorry you feel vexed about Tabitha’s leaving me.”“Doubly vexed, dear, because you left me in ignorance of the fact.”“Pray don’t be angry with me, Martin, so soon,” she pleaded meekly.“Angry, no. I am not angry. I don’t know how to be angry with you, Isola; but I can’t help being distressed. However, let the past be past. I shall never leave you to the care of strangers again till I die.”Her only answer was to bend her head down to kiss the hands that clasped her own.“Tell me about your dream,” she said, after a pause, with her forehead still resting on his hands, and her face hidden. “Was it something very awful?”“It was all confusion—a wild chaos—a nightmare of strange sounds and sensations—tempest, fire, earthquake—I know not what—but it meant deadly danger for you—death perhaps. I saw you hanging in space—a white figure, with piteous, pain-wrought face. Never have I seen you look like that—your eyes staring wildly as if they were looking at death; your features drawn and rigid, and through all the confusion, and noise, and ceaseless movement, I was trying to follow you—trying, but impotently—to save you. The white figure was always before me—far off—yet visible every now and then across the darkness of a world where everything was shapeless and confused. But the worst of all was that every now and then a black wall rose up between your distant figure and the stony difficult path that I was treading—a wall against which I flung myself, mad with rage and despair, trying to tear the stones asunder with my hands, till the blood ran in streams from my fingers. It was a dream that seemed to last through a long night, holding in it the memory of a painful past; yet I suppose it was like other dreams—momentary, for I had heard three o’clock strike before I fell asleep, and when I sounded my repeater it was only a quarter past.”“Rather a meaningless dream,” she said, in a sleepy voice, without looking up. “I don’t think it ought to have alarmed you.”“Ah, it sounds meaningless to you; but to me it was full of meaning! The idea of danger to you was so intense—so real. The cold sweat of deadly fear was on my face when I awoke, and it was some minutes before I could get my senses clear of that ghastly horror, before I could realize where I was, and that the thing I had seen was a dream. That stone wall seemed still in front of me, and I had still the feeling that you were on the other side of it, in ever-increasing peril.”“It was a horrid dream, certainly; but, you see, it had no meaning.”“There were such strange things mixed up in it—thunder and lightning, a roaring wind, a sound of rushing waters;and then, amidst wind and thunder, there rose the dark barrier that shut out everything.”“Was it long ago that you dreamt this horrid dream?”“Yes, a long while. It was just before Christmas. I made a note of the dream in my journal—wrote it down in fear and trembling, lest there should be some kind of fulfilment. But then came your letter—written at the beginning of January, with your description of the ball—and I laughed at my folly in brooding so long upon that phantasmal picture. I remember, by the way, it was two or three nights after your ball that I dreamt my dream, while you no doubt were sleeping just a little sounder than usual after your gaieties.”“Dreams are very strange,” said Isola, absently. “I wonder whether there is any good in them to counterbalance so much pain?”CHAPTER VII.“LOOK THROUGH MINE EYES WITH THINE, TRUE WIFE.”There were steamers plying between Fowey and Falmouth in this summer weather, and Colonel Disney suggested next morning that Isola should go with him on his journey in search of Tabitha. They would go by water and return in the afternoon by rail. The morning was lovely, and the trip round the coast would be delightful.“I don’t want to see Tabitha,” Isola answered, with a touch of impatience. “If you are so bent upon seeing her I had rather you went alone.”“But I had rather not spend a whole day away from you. As for Tabitha, a visit of ten minutes will be quite enough for me. I have brought her a Rhampoor Chuddah—a warm red one. I have only to make her my little gift, and to say a few words—without any anger—about her breach of faith.”“It was really not a breach of faith. I gave her full permission to go. I was getting just a little tired of her fussiness. She was notmyold servant, you know, Martin. I had not been used to her all my life, as you have.”“Ah, but she is so good—such a thoroughly good woman.”“Yes, she is good, no doubt.”“Well, we’ll go to Falmouth together, and you can stop at the Green Bank, where we can lunch, while I go and find Tabitha. You know her address, I suppose?”“Yes. She lives at No. 5, Crown Terrace, overlooking the harbour.”This conversation took place in the garden, where they breakfasted, under a square striped awning, an apology for a tent, set up on the lawn by the river. A badly cooked breakfast seemed less offensive in the garden, where the summer air, and the perfume of the roses eked out the meal. After breakfast Disney called his wife to the drawing-room, where he had brought his spoil from the East, and laid his offerings, as it were, at the feet of his idol.“See, love, here is a shawl which you can use as acouvre-pied,” he said, flinging a fine cashmere over a chair, “since Fashion decrees that women shall wear shawls no more. And here are some ivory chessmen to assist you in puzzling your brains over the game of Eastern antiquity; and here are vases and things for odd corners. And I have brought you a carved Persian screen, and some Peshawur curtains for your door-ways, and a lamp from Cairo, to make your drawing-room a little more fantastically pretty. I know you love these things.”She was enraptured with his gifts. Her face lighted up like the face of a child, and she ran from one object to the other in a confused gladness, scarcely able to look at one thing at a time.“They will make the room too lovely,” she cried; “and they will tell everybody of your far-away travels. I can never thank you half enough for all these treasures.”“Love me a little, and that will be more than enough.”“A little. Ah, Martin, I love you so much.”“Then why do you sigh as you say it? There need be no sighing over our love now. I never shall leave you again.”He caught her to his breast as he spoke, and kissed the pale sweet face, with a kind of defiant rapture, as if he challenged Fate to do him any harm. The pain of separation from that fair young wife had been so keen an agony that there was a touch of savage exultancy in the joy of re-union—some such fierce gladness as a knight-crusader might have felt in days of old, coming back to his beloved after years of war and travel.God help the crusader’s wife of those rough days if she had turned from the path of virtue during his exile. There would be a short shrift and a bloody shroud for such a sinner!They walked into Fowey by that pathway which Isola had trodden so often in the year that was gone—not always alone. The pleasure steamer was waiting in the little haven, where the two rivers part under the cloven hills. Out seaward the air blew fresh and free, and the spray was dashing up against the rocks, and Polruan’s grey roofs were wrapped in morning shadows while Fowey laughed in the sunshine.That water journey to Falmouth was delicious upon such a morning, and it needed not a brass band of three men and a boy, blaring out the new and popular music-hall song of the year before last, to enliven the voyage. Those arable lands yonder, undulating with every curve of the ever-varying coast-line, the emerald green of young corn shining in the sunlight, copse and spinney here and there in the clefts and hollows, the Gribbin Head standing up stony and grim on the crest of the topmost hill, and, anon, Par harbour lying low upon the level sands, and then this point and that, till they meet the gallant fleet of fishing-boats sailing out from Mevagissey, like a peaceful Armada, and skim past the haven, and the little town and quay crowded at the foot of the hill, and the coastguard’s stronghold yonder, high up against the bright blue sky, whiter than any other mortal habitation ever was or will be. And so to Falmouth, with porpoises playing under their bows, like sportive dolphins, as if they carried Dionysius or Arion on their deck—a brief summer sail, in the keen sweet air of an English summer. To Martin Disney’s British nostrils that atmosphere seemed soul-inspiring, thevery breath of life and gladness, after the experiences of a hot-weather campaign.And here was Falmouth, with proud Pendennis on a sunny height, and bay and harbour, town and hill, terrace above terrace, tower and steeple—the town and streets all crowded and clustered in the foreground, where the river winds inward to the heart of the land.The Green Bank gave them cordial welcome, and luncheon was speedily spread in a private sitting-room, at a snug round table by a window overlooking the harbour—luncheon, and of the best, tongue and chicken, and salad, cherry pasty, junket and cream.Colonel Disney applied himself to the meal with a hearty relish.“There is just this one advantage in bad cooking at home that it makes one so thoroughly enjoy everything one gets abroad,” he said, laughing at his own prowess.“I’ll try and get a better cook, if you like, Martin,” Isola said, with rather a helpless air.To a wife of one and twenty there seems such futility in worrying about a cook.“You couldn’t possibly get a worse. How long have you put up with this one?”“Ever since Tabitha left.”“Good heavens! You have been starving upon ill-cooked food for six months. No wonder you look thin and out of health.”“I am really very well. There is nothing the matter with me.”“Yes, yes, there is a great deal the matter. A bad cook, solitude, no one to watch over you and care for you. But that is all over now. You are eating no lunch—not even that superb cherry pasty. I’ll be off to find Tabitha. I shan’t be more than half an hour, unless Crown Terrace is at the extremity of Falmouth. Have you brought a book to read while I am away? No, foolish child. Never mind. There is the county paper, and there is the harbour, with all its life, for you to look at.”He started on his voyage of discovery, with the warm, comfortable shawl which he had bought for his mother’s old servant hanging over his arm. It was a small disappointment amidst the infinite delight of his home-coming, but when he bought the shawl he had fancied himself putting it round Tabitha’s ample shoulders in the little housekeeper’s room at the Angler’s Nest, a room that was just large enough to hold a linen cupboard, a Pembroke table, a comfortable armchair, and Tabitha, who seemed bigger than all the furniture put together.He was a man of warm affections, and of that constancy of mind and temper to which forgetfulness of old ties or indifference to past associations is impossible. Tabitha’s image was associated with all the tenderest memories of his youth; with his mother’s widowhood, and with her second marriage—a foolish marriage. At seven and thirty years of age she had taken to herself a second husband, some years her junior, in the person of George Leland, a well-meaning and highly intellectual curate with weak lungs, a union entered upon while her only son was a cadet, and which left her four years later again a widow, with an infant daughter, a child born amidst sickness and sorrow, and christened at the father’s desire Allegra, as if she had entered a world of joy. Through that Indian summer of his mother’s second love, in all the cares and griefs of her second marriage, Tabitha had been trusty and devoted, nursing the frail husband through that last year of fading life which was one long illness, comforting the widow, and rearing the sickly baby until it blossomed into a fine healthy child, whose strength and beauty took every one by surprise.With all the joys and sorrows of his mother’s life Tabitha had been associated for five and thirty years of conscientious service; and to have lost the good soul now from his fireside was a positive affliction to Martin Disney. Her loss gave an air of instability to his domestic life. Who would ever care for his property as Tabitha had cared—Tabitha who had seen the china and the pictures and drawings collected pieceby piece, who had seen the old family silver drop in by way of legacy from this and that aunt or uncle, till the safe was full of treasures, every one of which had its distinct history? What would a new housekeeper care for General Disney’s coffee-pot, for the George the Second urn that had belonged to his uncle the Indian judge, for his grandmother’s decanter stands? A modern servant would scoff at decanter stands; would wonder they were not melted down. No, rejoiced as he was to be at home once more, home without Tabitha would be something less than home to Martin Disney.He found Crown Terrace, a row of neat little houses high above the harbour on the Helston road. He had no need to look at the numbers on the doors. He knew Tabitha’s house at a glance, four or five doors off. Who else would have devised such pretty window-boxes, so simple and so artistic; or who else would have hit upon so perfect a harmony of colour in the flowering plants? Who else, of that lowly status, would have chosen such curtains or draped them so gracefully? The little bow-windowed band-box of a house was as pretty as a Parisian toy.Tabitha was in the window, working with scissors and sponge at one of the flower-boxes. Never an aphid was allowed to rest on Tabitha’s roses or geraniums. She gave a little cry of mixed alarm and delight as she saw that stalwart figure come between her and the sunshine.“Lor’ sakes, Captain Martin, is it you?” she cried.“Yes, Tabby, it is I—and I want to know what you’ve got to say to me. Do you know how a deserter feels when he suddenly finds himself face to face with his commanding officer? I never had such a knock-down blow as when I came home the day before yesterday and found you had deserted your post—you whom I trusted so implicitly.”Tabitha looked at him dumbly—entreatingly—as if she were mutely supplicating him not to be angry. She took this reproof with an air of having thoroughly deserved it, of not having any plea to offer in her defence.“You’ll come in and sit down a bit, won’t you, CaptainMartin?” she said deprecatingly; and then, without waiting for an answer, she bustled out of the parlour, and anon appeared at the open door.“Yes, of course I am coming in. I have a great deal to say to you—much more than can be said in the open street.”Tabitha ushered him into the little parlour; so neat, so cool and dainty a bower, albeit the whole of its contents would scarcely have realized ten pounds at an auction. She offered him her most luxurious easy-chair—a large Madeira chair, with pale chintz cushions and artistic draping; and then, when he had seated himself, she stood before him like a prisoner at the bar, and with unmistakable guilt disturbing the broad placidity of her countenance.“Tabby, there is my offering from the Indies. May it keep you warm when you run out upon your mysterious errands on autumn evenings, as you used to do in my mother’s time. Sit down, pray; I have lots to say to you.”Tabitha received the comfortable gift with rapturous thanks. That Captain Martin should have thought of her, so far away, with his head full of fighting, and with death looking him in the face! It was too much, and the tears rolled down her honest cheeks as she thanked him.“And now, Tabitha, I want a candid answer to a straight question. Why did you leave my wife last January?”“That’s easily explained, sir. I’m getting old, and I was tired of service. Mrs. Disney was very well able to spare me. Perhaps she didn’t set the same value on me as you did. Young people like young faces about them.”“All that I can understand; but it didn’t exonerate you from your duty to me. You promised me to take care of my young wife.”“I did my best, Captain Martin, as long as I could give satisfaction,” faltered Tabitha, growing very pale under this reproof.“Had you any misunderstanding with Mrs. Disney? Did she find fault with you?”“Oh no, sir. Mrs. Disney is not one to find fault. She’stoo easy, if anything. No one could be sweeter than she was to me. God knows, if she had been my own daughter I could not have loved her better than I did.”Here Tabitha broke down altogether, and sobbed aloud.“Come, come, my good soul, don’t distress yourself,” cried Disney, touched by this emotion. “You loved her; you could not help loving her, could you? And yet you left her.”“I was getting tired and old, sir; and I had saved enough money to furnish a small house; and my sister, Mrs. David, being a widow without chick or child, wanted me to join her in a lodging-house at the seaside. She’s a beautiful cook, is my sister, much better than ever I was. So perhaps I was over-persuaded: and here I am. What’s done cannot be undone, Captain Martin; but if ever Mrs. Disney should be ill or in grief or trouble, and she should want me, I’ll go to her without an hour’s loss of time. I can never forget that she is your wife, and that she was a kind mistress to me.”Martin Disney breathed more freely after this speech. He had been curiously disturbed at the idea of a breach between his wife and the old and faithful servant.“Well, Tabby, I’m glad at least you and my wife are not ill friends,” he said. “I do not care for the loosening of old ties. And now I must be off. Mrs. Disney is waiting for me at the Green Bank.”Tabitha seemed a little startled on hearing that her late mistress was in Falmouth, but she made no remark upon the fact.“Good-bye, Tabby. Stay, there’s one favour you can do me. Get me a good cook. The woman we have at present would be a blight upon the happiest home in Christendom.”

Isola danced every dance. She hardly knew who her partners were. She had only a sense of floating in a vortex of light and colour, to some swinging melody. Everything was dream-like—but not horrible, as in her dream by the fireside at home. This was a happy dream, as of a creature with wings, who knew not of care in the present or a soul to be saved in the future. And then came her waltz with Lostwithiel, and that strong arm was round her, bearing her up as a flower is borne upon a rushing tide, so that she had no consciousness of movement on her own part, only of floating, floating, floating, to that languid three-time melody.It was the last popular waltz they were playing—a waltz that had been last summer’s delight in the arid gardens of South Kensington—“Il n’y a que toi;” a waltz with a chorus which the band trolled out merrily, at intervals, in the French of Stratford atte Bow.“Il n’y a que toi,” whispered Lostwithiel, with his lips close to the soft brown hair above the white forehead. “Not a bad name for a waltz when one is waltzing with just one person in the world.”Out in the cool night there was a little knot of people as merry after their homelier fashion as town and county in the ball-room. One of the windows had been opened at the top for ventilation, and this opening had been turned to advantage. A large, substantial kitchen table had been placed in front of the window, and upon this improvised platform stood Tabitha, Susan, the head chamber-maid, and the ostler’s wife—this last on sufferance, and evidently not in society—looking on at the ball. The window was under a verandah, that sloped above these spectators’ heads. They were thus in dense shadow, and unseen by the occupants of the lamp-lit room.Susan was exuberant in her delight.“I was never at a ball before,” she said. “Oh, ain’t itlovely? Don’t I wish I could dance like that? Lor, do look at that fat old party, spinning round like a teetotum! Well, I never did! Don’t she perspire!” exclaimed Susan, indulging in a running commentary which left much to be desired in the matter of refinement.This unsophisticated damsel heartily admired youth and beauty, and the smart frocks and flashing gems; but she was cruelly hard upon those dancers whose charms were on the wane, or whose frocks were inferior or ugly.“Well, I wouldn’t,” said Susan, “I wouldn’t go to a ball like this if I couldn’t have everythink nice. Look at that tall girl in yeller. Did you ever see such a scarecrow? I’d ever so much rather stay at home, or stand outside, like this. I should feel it better became me.”Tabitha made no such remarks. She was singularly silent and thoughtful, as she stood looking down at the crowded room from her point of vantage on the kitchen table. She had only eyes for one figure—the willowy form in the glistening white satin gown, with the feathery Japanese chrysanthemums, a little crushed and faded by this time; or perhaps it may be said for two figures, since one followed the other as the shadow follows the substance. She saw them waltzing together, when supper was in full progress, and the room comparatively clear. She saw the graceful head inclining towards his shoulder, the slender waist held in his firm embrace; and it seemed to her that the waltz was an invention of the Arch Enemy. She thought of it very much as people thought seventy years ago when Byron wrote his poetical denunciation of the new dance. She saw those two moving slowly towards an adjacent ante-room, where banks of flowers, and a couple of sofas and low easy-chairs made a retreat which was half boudoir, half conservatory. She saw them moving side by side, talking to each other in tones so confidential that his head bent low over hers each time she spoke; and then she watched them sitting just within the doorway, at an angle where she could see their faces, and attitudes, still in the same confidential converse, she with downcast eyes,and he leaning forward with his elbow on his knee, and looking up at her as he talked.“It is too bad of him,” muttered Tabitha, writhing at that spectacle. “Does he think what a child she is, and what harm he may be doing? It is wicked of him, and he knows it; and other people must notice them—other people must see what I see—and they will be talking of her, blighting her good name. Oh, if I could only get her away at once before people begin to notice her!”She could see her young mistress’s face distinctly in the lamplight. Isola was very pale, and her face was full of trouble; not the face of a woman amusing herself with an idle flirtation, playing with fire without the least intention of burning her fingers. There were plenty of flirtations of that order going on in the Talbot ball-room; but this was not one of them. This meant peril of some kind. This was all evil. That pale face, those heavy eyelids, shrouding eyes which dared not look up. That tremulous, uncertain movement of the snowy ostrich fan! All these were danger signals.“If I get her safe at home presently, I’ll open her eyes for her,” thought Tabitha. “I’ll talk to her as if I was her mother. God knows I should be almost as sorry as ever her mother could be if she came to any harm.”If she came to any harm. What harm was there to fear for her, as she sat there, with Lostwithiel lounging across the low chair beside the sofa where she sat, leaning forward to look into her downcast face? What harm could come to her except that which meant destruction—death to peace, and gladness, and womanly fame? If there were danger it was a desperate danger, and Tabitha shuddered at the mere thought of that peril.“But, lor, she’s little more than a child,” mused Tabitha. “She means no wrong, and she knows no wrong. She’s too innocent to come to any harm.”Yet in the landlady’s snuggery, by-and-by, seated at the comfortable round table, with its spotless damask and brightglass and silver, Tabitha was quite unable to do justice to that snack which Mr. Tinkerly had ordered in her honour—a chicken and lobster-salad from the supper-room, and three parts of a pine-apple cream. Susan and the foreman fully appreciated these dainties; but Tabitha only munched a crust and sipped a tumbler of beer.“I’m a little bit out of sorts to-night,” she said.“I hope you haven’t taken cold, Mrs. Thomas,” said the polite Tinkerly. “Perhaps we ought to have brought another rug?”“No, it isn’t that. I’ve been quite warm and comfortable. Eat your supper, Mr. Tinkerly, and don’t bother about me. I’ve been interested in looking on, and I’m too much took up with what I’ve seen to be able to eat.”“Well, it was a pretty sight,” exclaimed Tinkerly, enthusiastically; “but I don’t think I ever saw such a mort of plain women in my life.”“Lor, Mr. Tinkerly,” cried Susan, with a shocked air. “Why, look at our young mistress, and at Miss Crowther, and Miss Spenthrop from Truro, and Mrs. Pencarrow, and Lady Chanderville.”“Well, I don’t say they’re all ugly. Some of ’em are handsome enough, and there’s plenty of thorough-breds among ’em, but there’s a sight of plain-headed ones. There’s quite as much beauty in your spear as there is among the county folks, Miss Susan. I’ll answer for that.”The night was waning. Isola had ordered her carriage for half-past two: but three o’clock had struck from the church tower of Lostwithiel, and the dance was still at its height—at its best, the dancers said, now that the sensual attractions of the supper-room drew off a good many people, and left the floor so much clearer than before supper, when bulky middle-aged gentlemen, talking to the matrons seated upon the divan, had projected their ponderous persons into the orbit of the waltzers.Isola and Lostwithiel had danced only two waltzes, butsince two o’clock they had sat out several dances, Mrs. Disney having cancelled all her engagements after that hour by declaring that she would dance no more.“I am dreadfully tired,” she told her partners piteously, and her pallor gave force to the assertion. “Please get some one else for our dance, Captain Morshead,” and so on, and so on, to half a dozen disappointed suitors.Perhaps some of those who happened to be experienced in such complications may have divined which way the wind blew, for no one offered to sit out the promised dances, and Isola and Lostwithiel were left pretty much to themselves among the palms and orange-trees in the ante-room. They were not unobserved, however; and among the eyes which marked them with no friendly notice were the fine, steel-blue eyes of Miss Crowther.“Is that a flirtation?” she asked Captain Morshead, glancing in the direction of the ante-room where those two were sitting, as she and Isola’s cast-off partner waltzed past the muslin-draped doorway.“They seem rather fond of talking to each other, don’t they? Who was she? She’s uncommonly pretty.”“Oh, her people were army, I believe—as poor as church mice—buried alive in Dinan.”“At Dinan—and now she lives at Trelasco, she tells me. It seems scarcely worth while to have exhumed her in order to bury her again. Such a girl as that ought to be in London enjoying life.”“Oh, but she’s a grass widow, don’t you know. Her husband is in Burmah. I don’t think it’s quite nice in her to be here to-night; only as my too good-natured mother sent her a ticket, I suppose I oughtn’t to say anything about it. Perhaps if mother sees the way she goes on with Lord Lostwithiel she’ll rather regret that ticket.”What was Lostwithiel saying all this time in that gentle baritone, which was heard only by one listener? He was asking forgiveness for his indiscretion of the afternoon, andin that prayer for pardon was repeating his offence. Isola was less inclined to be angry, perhaps, now. The magic of the dance was still upon her senses, the dance which had brought them nearer than all the days they had met; than all their long confidential conversations on the heights above the harbour, or on the river path, or dawdling on the bridge. She had felt the beating of his heart against her own, breath mingling with breath, the thrilling touch of his encircling arm; and it was as if he had woven a spell around her which made her his. She had never danced with her husband, who had no love of that heathenish art. In all their brisk, frank courtship there had been no intoxicating hours. She hardly knew what dancing meant till she waltzed with Lostwithiel, who had something of the fiery ardour of a Pagan worshipping his gods in wild gyrations upon moonlit mountain or in secret cave. She let him talk to her to-night—let him pour out the full confession of his unhappy love. He spoke not as one who had hope; not with that implied belief in her frailty which would have startled her into prompt resistance. His accents were the accents of despair, his love was a dark fatality.ἉΝΑΓΚΗ“Why did you write that word?” she asked.“Why? Because I could not give you back that card without some token of my passion—with only commonplace entries which Jones, Brown, and Robinson might write there. I want you to feel that you belong to me, somehow, in some way, as the spirits of the dead and the souls of the living belong to each other sometimes, by links which none can see. When I am at the other end of the earth I want to feel that there is something, if it were only a word, like a masonic sign, between us; if it were only a promise that in such or such a phase of the waning moon we would each look up and breathe the other’s name.”“You are going away?”“What else can I do? Can I stay? You tell me I madeyou miserable by what I said this afternoon. That means we must meet no more. I can’t be sorry for my offence. I cannot answer for myself. My love has passed the point of sanity and self-control. I have no option. I must offend you, or I must leave you.”“You need not leave Trelasco,” she said gently. “I am going away to-morrow.”“Going away! Where?”“To London first, and then to India.”“To Burmah? Impossible!”“If not to the front, to the nearest convenient station. I am going to my husband; as nearly as I can reach him; and as quickly as I can make the journey.”“You are dreaming.”“No, I have quite made up my mind. I hated to be left behind last year; and now that his return is deferred my only chance of happiness is to go to him. Some one called me a grass widow the other day. What a detestable name!”“Give me this one waltz?” he asked, without any comment upon her intended journey.“Impossible. I told them all I shouldn’t dance any more.”“Oh, your partners are all in the supper-room, I dare say. The dancing men go in last. Hark! it’s the Myosotis. Just one turn—only one.”He had risen from his low seat, and she rose involuntarily at the sound of the opening bars. He put his arm round her gently, and drew her into the ball-room, waltzing slowly as they went, and then, with the sudden impetus of an enthusiastic dancer, he was whirling her round the room, and she know nothing, cared for nothing, in the confusion of light and melody.“Think of me sometimes when you are far away!” he whispered, with his lips almost touching her forehead.She did not resent that whisper. Already, within a dozen hours of his first offence, she had grown accustomedto his words of love. It seemed to her as if they had loved each other for years—had loved and had despaired long ago, in some dim half-remembered past. A passion of this kind is like a dream, in which an instant gives the impression of half a lifetime, of long memories and old habit.The room was much clearer now.“Is it very late?” asked Isola.“About four.”“So late—and I told the flyman half-past two. It is dreadful. Let us stop, please.”He obeyed, and went with her towards the cloak-room. The seats were nearly empty now where the matrons had sat in their velvet and brocade, a gorgeous background to the clouds of tulle and sylph-like figures of the dancers. Mrs. Baynham was nowhere to be seen, and the diminished bundles of tabby-cat cloaks and Shetland shawls in the cloak-room indicated that a good many people had left. Isola put on her soft white shawl hurriedly, and went out into the hall, where Lostwithiel had gone to look for her carriage.People were going away very fast, and through the open doorway there was a sound of voices and wheels; but, in spite of footmen, constables, and hangers-on, there seemed a prodigious difficulty in getting any particular carriage to the door.It was a mild, misty night, and the moon, which had been counted on for the return home, was hidden behind a mass of black clouds—or in the expressive phraseology of one of the foxhunters, had gone to ground. Mrs. Disney waited near the door while Lostwithiel searched for her fly. There were several departures of other muffled figures, features undistinguishable behind Shetland wraps, or furry hoods, as the men hustled their womenkind into the carriages. It seemed an age to Isola, waiting there alone in the corridor, and seeing no mortal whom she knew among those passersby, before Lostwithiel came, hurried and breathless, to say that her carriage was just coming up to the door.“Wrap your shawl round your head,” he said quickly, as he gave her his arm. “There’s a nasty damp fog—so,” muffling her, almost to blindness. “Come along.”She looked at the carriage, with its lamps shining red against the grey mistiness like great fiery eyes, and then, glancing at the horse, she cried suddenly, “I’m afraid that’s the wrong fly. I think mine had a grey horse.”“No, no, it’s all right. Pray don’t loiter in this chilling air.”The carriage door was open, the constable standing by, bull’s-eye in hand, a pair of horses snorting close behind, another carriage coming up so near that the pole threatened destruction. There was no time for loitering. Everybody was in a hurry to get home. Isola stepped lightly into the brougham, which drove slowly off.“Next carriage, Mrs. Brune Prideaux,” roared the constable. “Mrs. Prideaux’ carriage stops all the way.”CHAPTER VI.“A LOVE STILL BURNING UPWARD.”It was early summer, summer in her first youth, when she is frivolous and capricious, laughs and weeps she knows not why; smiling through her tears, and never knowing her own mind for a week together; to-day gracious-tempered and tropical; to-morrow east-windy and morose. In a word, it was June, a season of roses and rains, blue skies and thunder-clouds. It was June, and Martin Disney was looking out of the window with a keen eager face, much bronzed, and somewhat haggard, after a fatiguing campaign, looking out across the vales and woods of his native county, as the Penzance train sped along the high-level line betwixt Plymouth and Par. Those keen, grey eyes of his, accustomed to searching out far-off objects, looked as if they could pierce through the green heart of the Cornish valleys to the sheltered littleharbour of Fowey and the blue sea that opened wide to the far-off West.His labours were over, and he was going to take his rest, going to hang up his sword, that sword which had done such good work, or to transform it into a reaping-hook. He was Colonel Disney now, had given the State his best service, and now, in the very prime and vigour of his manhood, the State had done with him, and he was free to do what he listed with the maturer half of his life. He would have been very sorry to retire from active service had it not been for that tender tie which gave such sweetness to the thought of retirement and tranquil days. He was going home. The word thrilled him like music; home to his fair young wife, his chosen one, his domestic divinity. He had not left off wondering how it had ever come to pass that so young and fair a creature could care for him.“It isn’t as if I were one of your accomplished fellows,” he said to himself, “able to sing, or play the flute, or paint in water-colours. Except a very earnest love of a few good books, I have no culture. How can any girl in the present day care for a man without culture? I could never appreciate Keats, for instance; and not to appreciate Keats is to be an outsider in literature.”Yet, in spite of his seven and forty years, in spite of his deficiencies, his homeliness, that young heart had gone out to him. She loved him, and his lot was full. There was nothing more upon God’s earth that he could desire, were it not a miracle, and that the mother he had so fondly loved might be given back to him, to share his happiness, to make the third in a trinity of trusting love. Since that could not be, there was nothing left for him to yearn for.The beating of his heart quickened almost unbearably, as the train drew near Par. Isola would meet him at the Junction, perhaps. He had not announced the actual hour of his arrival, for matters had been a little uncertain when he wrote yesterday, and he had not cared to telegraph this morning before he left Paddington. Yet she would knowthat this was the only likely train for him to choose; and she would be at the Junction, he thought, smiling her glad welcome, a fair young face, rosy in the sunset; for it was evening as he drew near the end of his journey.No; there was nobody he knew at the Junction. He walked up and down the platform, and stared about him in rather a forlorn way during the few minutes before the starting of the train for Fowey. She had not come to anticipate their meeting by an hour or so, as he had hoped, as he had felt almost certain, she would come.It was more natural that she should wait and receive him at the Angler’s Nest, he told himself, sitting in the corner of the railway carriage presently, in a train of three coaches, steaming through the pretty picturesque country between Par and Fowey. In the colder light of reason it seemed preposterous to have expected to see her at the Junction. She would like to welcome him amidst her own surroundings, in the home to which she had doubtless given those little beautifying touches in honour of his coming, which are such delight to women, and which sometimes pass altogether unobserved by that pachydermatous animal, man! How slowly the engine moved along that little bit of line! Martin Disney sat with his face to the wind, and snuffed the sea breeze as if it had been the odour of home. He thought of Ulysses, and his return from distant lands. Would Tim, the fox terrier, know him? and Shah, the Persian cat? Perhaps not. Tim was no Argus; vastly affectionate and demonstrative, but not a dog to expire at one’s feet, in the rapture of his master’s return. Penelope would know him, and welcome him. That was enough for this modern Ulysses, who had no reason to disguise himself in re-entering his home—who had no fear of rival suitors, or interlopers of any kind. Penelope would welcome him, and trusty Tabitha. He thought of the old servant’s honest face with delight. She was something left to him out of boyhood and youth. He felt like a young man when he talked to her. She was the one strong link betwixt the present and the past. Shewas his memory embodied. He could refer to her as to a dictionary of days long gone. When did we do such and such a thing—or go to such a place? What was the name of the bay horse I bought at Plympton? Where did my mother pick up the Sheraton secretaire? Tabitha could answer all such trivial questions: and Tabitha could talk to him for hours of his mother’s words and ways—of the things that were only history.At last! The train crept into the little station, nestling on the edge of a wood, and there was Fowey, homely, friendly little Fowey, so strange and yet so familiar; strange to eyes that had so lately looked upon the cities of the East; familiar to the man who had been reared in the neighbourhood, whose first impressions of God’s earth had stamped harbour and hills upon his brain, like an indelible picture. There was Masters’s fly, an eminently respectable vehicle that never touted for chance passengers, waiting for him. He was expected, evidently.“Did Mrs. Disney send you?” he asked the driver.“Yes, sir.”How thoughtful of the young wife, who might be forgiven if she had left such a small duty unfulfilled. Yet he would have liked to see her sweet self at the station—only, as he had argued with himself just now, it would have discounted the home-welcome. It would have been an anti-climax.Dearly as he loved that home river, and those fertile hills, and beautiful as they were after their kind, they could but seem small and tame to eyes that had looked upon the glories of the East. Disney contemplated the scene with a touch of sad surprise, wondering at this miniature loveliness; recalling the day when those steep hillsides, where the red cattle were grazing in the mists of eventide, had seemed grand in his sight. Now they had a kind of pitiful prettiness. His heart yearned towards them with compassion for their insignificance.For nearly two years he had been moving about with his company in the land of jungle and mountain, and inthat vast table-land through which the Salween river runs down to the Gulf of Martaban; and after those wider horizons, he found himself in a narrow road, shut in by grassy hills, and hugging the margin of a silver thread that called itself a river.There is always a tinge of melancholy in that hour after sundown; and Martin Disney’s heart saddened a little as he looked at the quiet river, and the shadows on the hillside—that pale mistiness of summer evening which gives a ghostly touch to all things, as if it were a brief revelation of a spirit world. It is an hour at which even a strong man’s heart is apt to sink with a vague sense of fear.The fly drew up at the little wooden gate between high hedges of escalonia, with glossy leaves and bright red blossom. A slender figure in a white gown was visible on the threshold, as Disney sprang out of the fly, and while the flyman was lifting down the luggage, that airy form flitted across the lawn, and Colonel Disney’s wife was standing shyly within the open gate, almost as if she had come out to receive a stranger.He could not clasp her to his breast before a flyman; but he seized both her hands, gripped them convulsively, and then led her towards the house, leaving Masters’s man to deal as he pleased with portmanteaux and hat-box, gun-case and umbrella-case, despatch-box, and other chattels; to leave them out in the lane to the dews and the night-birds, if he so listed. Martin Disney had no consciousness of anything in this world except the woman by his side.“My darling! my darling!” he ejaculated, in a choked voice, “how I have longed for this hour, with a longing that has been almost madness!”And then he saw for the first time that her face was as white as her gown. Was it the twilight that made her look so pale? Could he wonder if the emotion of this supreme moment blanched that young cheek, when he, soldier and wayfarer upon the world’s roughest roads, felt like a child, striving to hold back his tears?Lamps were burning in dining-room and drawing-room. He saw the table laid for dinner through the open door as he and Isola passed by; but the idea of eating and drinking seemed very far off just now. They went into the drawing-room together, where a solitary lamp was shining upon a table crowded with flowers, and where the scents of the garden came in through the open window. Here he satisfied the longing of his hungry heart, and took that fragile form in his arms, and kissed the pale cold lips. She lay upon his breast unresistingly; helpless, unresponsive, like a dead thing.“Isola, have you forgotten that you once loved me?”“Forgotten! No, no, no! There is no one in the world so good and true as you are. I love you with all my heart and soul.”Her face was hidden on his breast, but she lifted up her arms and clasped them round his neck. He seated himself in his accustomed chair—it was standing where it had always stood before he went away—and took her upon his knee, as if she had been a child. Then a great storm of sobs suddenly burst from throat and bosom, a flood of tears streamed upon his breast, and he felt her arms trembling as they clasped his neck.“My own dear love,” he murmured gently, “one would almost think you were sorry I have came back.”She could not answer him at first for her sobs, but she shook her head, and at last the words, “No, no, no,” came from her lips; and he kissed and calmed her with almost fatherly gentleness. And then they went into the dining-room, where the soup-tureen was waiting for them on the sideboard, with a neat little parlour-maid—not Susan, but another—ready to minister to them.The table had been decorated by Isola’s own hands. Dark crimson roses were lying on the fair white damask; one tall glass stood in the centre with three slim golden lilies, pale and heavy-headed, which filled the room with perfume. These came from one of the hothouses at Glenaveril, whencegood-natured Mrs. Crowther had sent a basket of exotics in honour of the colonel’s return. The lamplight, the flowers, the pretty old Wedgwood service of creamy white and dull brown, made up a feast for Martin Disney’s eye, after a life spent mostly under canvas. He looked from the gaily adorned table to the face beside him, pallid and pinched, despite its sweetness.“My dear one, you are looking very ill,” he said, with an anxious air.“What an ungallant speech!” she answered, smiling at him with unexpected gaiety. “I have been fretting at your long, long absence, and you reproach me for my deteriorated appearance. Never mind, Martin, you will see how rosy and bright I shall get now our parting has come to an end.”“Yes, love, we must coax the roses back to your cheeks. I must have a good mount ready for you when the cubbing begins, and a few morning gallops will soon make a change in my fragile wife’s appearance. And I’ll charter a yacht and steep you in ozone.”“Oh, one gets enough of that on shore, there is no need to go further.”“But I thought you adored yachting? It was one of our grand schemes for the future, to hire a modest little yawl and go round the coast to Clovelly. Have you forgotten?”“No, no; only I don’t want you to waste your money—and, if we start a bigger stable——”“Ah, you don’t know what a Crœsus I have become. You needn’t be afraid of ruining me. My poor lonely little wife. Why didn’t you send for Allegra?”“She wouldn’t have been of any good to me. She is all that is sweet and lovable, and she is your sister; but she wouldn’t have filled your vacant place. I should have only felt lonelier for having to talk every day, and pretend a kind of happiness. Being alone, I could bury myself in a book, and forget my troubles.”“This soup doesn’t look up to Tabitha’s old form. Do you know that among other delights of this earthly paradiseI have been looking forward to Tabitha’s little dinners. I don’t believe there is achefin Paris who can cook so well as that self-taught genius, who ripened into perfection by a process of gradual evolution, from the early days when my mother discovered that nobody could make arrowroot or cook a mutton cutlet as well as Tabitha. By-the-by, why has not that good soul shown herself? I thought she would have disputed with you for my first kiss.”While he ran on in this fashion, Isola sat looking down at the table-cloth, pallid no longer, but crimson.“Tabitha has gone!” she said abruptly.“Tabitha gone—for a holiday?”“No, she has left me, altogether.”“Left you—altogether?” exclaimed Disney, with the tone of a man who could scarcely believe in his own sense of hearing, so astounding was the statement that met his ears. “Tabitha, my mother’s faithful old servant, who was like my own flesh and blood! What in God’s name made her leave you? Did you quarrel with her?”He asked the question almost sternly. For the first time in his life he was angry with this dear fragile creature, the idol of his heart. He had loved Tabitha as servants are not often loved. He had left his young wife in her charge, desiring no better custodian, full of faith in Tabitha’s ability both to protect and counsel her girlish mistress.“No, no; we did not quarrel. I liked Tabitha very much. I was almost as fond of her as you yourself could be.”“And yet you dismissed her!” Disney retorted bitterly. “She was not smart enough for you, perhaps. Those Crowther people may have put it into your head that she was old-fashioned—that you could never have a modish household with such a humdrum old person at the head of it. Was that your motive?”“Oh, Martin, how can you think me so frivolous? I hate smartness and pretension as much as you do. No, I should never have dismissed Tabitha. She left me of her own accord.”“Why?”“She wanted rest. She was too old for service, she told me. I tried to keep her. I humiliated myself so far as to beg her to stay with me”—the tears came into her eyes at the mere memory of that humiliation—“but she had made up her mind. She would not give way.”“Where did she go?”“To Falmouth—to live with her sister, a shoemaker’s widow. They let lodgings, I believe.”“She must have gone mad! A lodging-house must be harder work than anything she had to do here.”“Yes, I think it must.”“When did she go?”“At the beginning of the year—in January.”“She left you six months ago, and in all that time you never told me she was gone.”“I did not want you to know, for fear you should be worried or vexed.”“I should have been both; but you ought to have told me. I had a right to know. I left you in her charge, Isola. You are much too young and too pretty to be living alone without some kind of dragon—and I knew Tabitha would be a very gentle dragon—a good motherly soul, able to wait upon you and look after your health, and yet grim enough to keep marauders off the premises. Indeed, my pet, you should have let me know of her departure without an hour’s delay. She was very wrong to go. It was a breach of faith I could never have expected.”“Pray don’t be angry with her, Martin.”“But I am angry. I have a right to be angry. I’ll go to Falmouth to-morrow, and have it out with her.”“No, no, pray don’t! We parted good friends. She can say nothing to you more than she said to me. Pray don’t let there be any bad blood between you. What could be gained by your going? To-morrow, too—our first day together!”“Well, it shall not be till the day after; but go I must.To-morrow I will revel in the delights of home, and my dear one’s society. To-morrow I will be drunken with joy. The day after will do for Tabitha.”“I think it is making a great deal too much of her to go to Falmouth on purpose to see her,” said Isola, with a grain of pettiness; and then, after a pause, during which the colonel had been trying to appease a sharp appetite with the muscular leg of an elderly fowl, she said nervously—“I’m afraid you are not enjoying your dinner.”“What do I care for dinner on such a night as this; but, as a matter of plain truth, I must say that your new cook is a very bad substitute for Tabitha. Her soup was watery, her fish was greasy, her poultry is hardly eatable. If she has talents in any other line she is keeping them in reserve for another day. It may be that she excels in made-dishes—a misfortune for me, as I never eat them.”“I had a splendid character with her,” said Isola, piteously, with the helpless feeling of a housewife who sees before her a dark prospect of bad dinners and marital grumblings, or the agonizing wrench involved in changing her cook.“Yes, my love, people generally give splendid characters to servants they want to get rid of,” answered Disney, dryly.These wedded lovers went out very early next morning to explore the gardens and meadows; Isola eager to point out various small improvements which she had made with the help of the old gardener, who would have plunged his hand and arm into a fiery furnace to procure plant or flower which his young mistress desired. Sweet words and sweet looks go very far in this world. They are a mighty revenue, and will often do their owner as good service as gold and silver.Isola had worked in the garden with her own hands ever since the beginning of spring, the first tender opening of Earth’s heavy eyelids, her first pale smile of snowdrops, her broad laughter of daffodils, her joyous peal of bluebells, andriotous mirth of May blossom. She had toiled in the sweat of her brow so that the garden might be beautiful at mid-summer: for early in March there had come a letter full of rejoicing from that distant hill-kingdom, and she knew that the year of absence to which she had looked so hopelessly last November was commuted to half a year.Martin Disney was full of admiration for his wife’s improvements. The old-fashioned borders were brimming over with old-world flowers; the shrubberies had grown out of knowledge; the escalonia hedge by the kitchen garden was a thing to wonder at.“I remember the hedge at Tregenna Castle before that good old place was an inn,” said Martin; and then, having admired everything, he walked up and down the grass beside the laurel hedge with his wife—while the Satan-sent cook was spoiling the food that bounteous Nature had provided for man’s enjoyment—and questioned her about the life she had been leading in his absence.“You used to write me such good letters, dearest, so full of detail, that I knew exactly how your days were spent, and could picture every hour of your life: but of late your descriptive powers have flagged. I dare say you got tired of writing long letters to a dull old fellow in India, who could never write you a clever letter in reply. It must have seemed a one-sided business?”“Indeed, no, dear. Your letters had only one fault. They were never half long enough; but I knew how busy you were, and I thought it was so good of you never to miss a mail.”“Good of me! Had there been twice as many mails I would not have willingly missed one. But there is no doubt your letters fell off after last autumn. They were sweet, and ever welcome to me—but they told me very little.”“There was very little to tell.”“Ah, but in the old days you used to make it seem so much. You had such a delightful way of describing triflingevents. I thought at one time you had the makings of a Jane Austen; but afterwards I began to fear you must be out of health. Your letters had a low-spirited tone. There were no more of those sharp little touches which used to make me laugh, no more of those tiny word-pictures, which brought the faces and figures of my old neighbours before me.”“You can hardly wonder if my spirits sank a little when you had been so long away. And then life seemed so death-like in its monotony. There were days when I felt I might just as well have been dead. There could be very little difference between lying under the earth and crawling listlessly on the top of it.”“You were too much alone, Isola,” he answered, distressed at this revelation. “You ought to have sent for Allegra. I begged you to send for her, if you felt dull.”“Do you think she could have cured my dulness?” exclaimed his wife, impatiently. “Life would have seemed still more tiresome if I had been obliged to talk when there was nothing to talk about, and to smile when I felt inclined to cry.”“Ah, you don’t know what a companion Allegra is—brimming over with fun! She knows her Dickens by heart; and I never met with anybody who appreciated him as intensely as she does.”“I don’t care about Dickens.”“Don’t—care—about Dickens!”He echoed her words as if almost paralyzed by horror.“Not as I used to care. One’s taste changes as life goes on. Lately I have read nothing but Victor Hugo, and Keats, and Shelley.”“Very well in their way, but not half cheery enough for a lonely little woman beside the Fowey river. You ought to have had Allegra. It would have been better for you and better for her. She is tired of the Art school; and the other pupils are tired of her. They are very fond of her; but she has done all the work twice over, and there is nothing more for her to do, unless we meant her to enter the RoyalAcademy and go in seriously for art, Mrs. Meynell tells me. According to that lady’s account my sister must be an Admirable Crichton in petticoats.”“I have no doubt she is very clever and very nice; but, as I could not have you, I preferred being alone,” answered Isola.She was walking slowly by his side along the closely shaven grass, and every now and then she stretched out a hand that looked semi-transparent, and gathered a flower at random, and then plucked off its petals nervously as she walked on. Her eyelids were lowered, and her lips were tightly set. Martin could but think there was a vein of obstinacy in this bewitching wife of his—a gentle resistance which would tend to make him her slave rather than her master in the days to come. He saw with pain that her cheeks were hollow and pinched, and that her complexion had a sickly whiteness. She had fretted evidently in those long months of solitude, and it would take time to bring back the colour and gaiety to her face. As for dulness, well, no doubt Fowey was ever so much duller than Dinan, where there were officers and tennis-parties and afternoon tea-drinkings, and a going and coming of tourists all the summer through, and saints’ days, and processions, andfêtesand illuminations in the market square, beneath the statue of Duguesclin.“And how did the world use you, Isola?” he asked presently. “Was everybody kind?”“Oh yes, people were very kind; especially Mrs. Baynham and Mrs. Crowther. They sent me ever so many invitations, and wanted me to go on their day every week.”“And I hope you accepted their invitations.”“I went to Mrs. Baynham’s sometimes on her day; but I didn’t care about going to Glenaveril. It is all too grand and too fine—and I don’t like Mr. Crowther.”“He was always courteous to you, I hope?”“Oh yes, he was particularly courteous. I have no reason for disliking him. He is my Dr. Fell—the reason why I cannot tell, but I would walk a mile to avoid meeting him.”“Then we will not cultivate social relations with Glenaveril. We will visit at no house where my dearest does not feel happy and at ease. And as for the finery, I agree with you, there is something too much of it. I like powder and plush when the people they serve are to the manner born, and when powder and plush seem more natural than parlour-maids; but I don’t care for the solemn stateliness of a big establishment when it has been newly set up—at least, not by such folks as the Crowthers. There are some men to whom such surroundings seem natural, even though fortune has come late in life. Is the beautiful Belinda married yet?”“No. I do not think she is as much as engaged.”“I thought Lostwithiel would have married her. She would have been a grand catch for him, and no doubt she would have snapped at a coronet, even without strawberry leaves. But I hear he is in South America orchid-hunting. He was always a capricious individual. There goes the gong for breakfast. I hope your cook can fry a rasher and boil an egg better than she can dress a dinner.”They went in together to the pretty dining-room, so bright with books and flowers, and a life-sized girlish head in water-colours, by Dobson, R.A., over the chimney-piece, and Venetian glass here and there, that all characteristics of the ordinary eating-room were effaced, and only a sense of homeliness and artistic surroundings was left. Isola had been down at six, and her own hands had given the finishing touches to the room, and the flowers were of that morning’s gathering, and had the dew and the perfume of morning upon them. The room was so pretty, and Isola was so much prettier than the room, that a husband would have been of very dull clay had he troubled himself about the handiwork of the cook. Martin Disney was not made of dull clay, and he ate an overdone rasher and a hard-boiled egg without a murmur, and then set out for a long ramble with Isola.They went up to the hill upon whose landward slope stood Lostwithiel’s old grey manor-house, with its gardens and park. Isola had not been there since that never-to-be-forgotten November evening when she met Lostwithiel in the rain. She had avoided the spot from that time forward, though she had no especial reason for avoidance, since there was no one there but Mrs. Mayne and her underlings. Lostwithiel and theVendettahad sailed away into space directly after the Hunt Ball, and little had been heard of him save that dim rumour of orchid-hunting on the shores of the Amazon, which had filtered from the society papers down to Fowey,viâtheWestern Daily Mercury.Isola and her husband lingered for a long time upon the hilltop, he revelling in the familiar beauty of that magnificent stretch of cliff and sea, out to the dim slate colour of the Dodman Point, bay beyond bay, curving away towards Falmouth and the Lizard—while between that hill and the sea lay a world of fertile meadows and bright green cornfields, of hill and hollow, wood and common, copse and garden, a rich and smiling country, a land of summer flowers and plenteous growth.“I never stand upon this hill without feeling proud of being a Cornishman,” said Disney, “and yet, after all, it is a foolish thing to be proud of an accident. My little Breton girl might as well be proud of being a countrywoman of Duguesclin’s.”“Perhaps if I had been born anywhere else I should not have been so ready to fall in love with a soldier,” answered Isola. “I was brought up to think a knight and a warrior the one ideal: and so I was fascinated by the first soldier who took any notice of me.”“But were you really fascinated, and were you really in love,” exclaimed Disney, infinitely delighted at this little speech of his wife’s, “in love with a battered campaigner—or did you just think you liked me a little bit, only because you wanted to get away from Dinan?”“I really—really—really loved you,” she answered softly, looking up at him with eyes dimmed by tears, as he drew her nearer to him in his gladness. “I was not tired of Dinan—or my life there—and my heart went out to you atonce, because you were good and noble, and seemed to care for me.”“There was no seeming in it, Isola. I was knocked over at once, like a pigeon out of a trap. I had been in love with you three weeks—three centuries it seemed—before I could screw up my courage so far as to think of proposing for you. And then if Hazelrigg hadn’t helped me with your father, I don’t suppose I should ever have broken the ice. But when he—the colonel—showed himself so frank and willing—and the way was all made smooth for me from a domestic point of view—and when I saw that kind little look in your eyes, and the shy little smile—yes, you are smiling so now—I took heart of grace, and stormed the citadel. Do you remember the evening I asked you to be my wife, Isola; that starlit night when I had been dining with your people, and you and Gwendolen, and Hazelrigg and I went out upon the terrace to look at the stars, and the river, and the twinkling lights of the boats down by the quay, and the diligence driving over the bridge, deep, deep down in the valley below us? Do you remember how I lured you away from the other two, and how we stood under the vine-leaves in the berceau, and I found the words somehow—feeblest, stupidest words, I’m afraid—to make you know that all the happiness of my life to come depended upon winning you for my wife?”“I remember as if it were last night,” she answered gravely. “But oh, how long ago it seems!”“Why do you sigh as you say that?”“Oh, one always sighs for the past! How can one help feeling sorry that it should be gone—so much of our lives and of ourselves gone for ever?”“Oh, but when the future is so fair, when the present is so happy, there should be no more sighing. It is an offence against the Great Father of all, who has been so good to us.”She did not answer, and they remained silent for some minutes, she seated on a bank covered with heather and wild flowers; he stretched on the short, sweet turf at her feet. The heather had not begun to show its purple bloom,but there was the gold of the gorse, and the brightness of innumerable wild flowers around and about them as they basked in the sunshine.“Dearest, do you believe in dreams?” Disney asked suddenly.“Sometimes—not much—dreams are often dreadful,” she answered, with a startled air.“I don’t believe in them a bit,” he said, lifting himself into a sitting position, and addressing himself to her with increasing earnestness, “not now that I have you here safe within reach of my hand—so,” taking her hand in his, and keeping it clasped in both his own; “but I had a dream about you in Burmah, which kept me in a fever of anxiety for nearly a month. I should have telegraphed to ask if all was right with you, only I told myself that if anything was wrong Tabitha would instantly telegraph to me. I made her promise that before I left England. It was almost my last injunction. And to think that she left you half a year ago, and that anything might have happened to you after that, and that there was no one—no one——”“But, you see, I am quite safe. There was no bad news to send you. Besides, if I had been ill, or anything had gone wrong, there was Mrs. Baynham. She has been like a mother to me. I am so sorry you feel vexed about Tabitha’s leaving me.”“Doubly vexed, dear, because you left me in ignorance of the fact.”“Pray don’t be angry with me, Martin, so soon,” she pleaded meekly.“Angry, no. I am not angry. I don’t know how to be angry with you, Isola; but I can’t help being distressed. However, let the past be past. I shall never leave you to the care of strangers again till I die.”Her only answer was to bend her head down to kiss the hands that clasped her own.“Tell me about your dream,” she said, after a pause, with her forehead still resting on his hands, and her face hidden. “Was it something very awful?”“It was all confusion—a wild chaos—a nightmare of strange sounds and sensations—tempest, fire, earthquake—I know not what—but it meant deadly danger for you—death perhaps. I saw you hanging in space—a white figure, with piteous, pain-wrought face. Never have I seen you look like that—your eyes staring wildly as if they were looking at death; your features drawn and rigid, and through all the confusion, and noise, and ceaseless movement, I was trying to follow you—trying, but impotently—to save you. The white figure was always before me—far off—yet visible every now and then across the darkness of a world where everything was shapeless and confused. But the worst of all was that every now and then a black wall rose up between your distant figure and the stony difficult path that I was treading—a wall against which I flung myself, mad with rage and despair, trying to tear the stones asunder with my hands, till the blood ran in streams from my fingers. It was a dream that seemed to last through a long night, holding in it the memory of a painful past; yet I suppose it was like other dreams—momentary, for I had heard three o’clock strike before I fell asleep, and when I sounded my repeater it was only a quarter past.”“Rather a meaningless dream,” she said, in a sleepy voice, without looking up. “I don’t think it ought to have alarmed you.”“Ah, it sounds meaningless to you; but to me it was full of meaning! The idea of danger to you was so intense—so real. The cold sweat of deadly fear was on my face when I awoke, and it was some minutes before I could get my senses clear of that ghastly horror, before I could realize where I was, and that the thing I had seen was a dream. That stone wall seemed still in front of me, and I had still the feeling that you were on the other side of it, in ever-increasing peril.”“It was a horrid dream, certainly; but, you see, it had no meaning.”“There were such strange things mixed up in it—thunder and lightning, a roaring wind, a sound of rushing waters;and then, amidst wind and thunder, there rose the dark barrier that shut out everything.”“Was it long ago that you dreamt this horrid dream?”“Yes, a long while. It was just before Christmas. I made a note of the dream in my journal—wrote it down in fear and trembling, lest there should be some kind of fulfilment. But then came your letter—written at the beginning of January, with your description of the ball—and I laughed at my folly in brooding so long upon that phantasmal picture. I remember, by the way, it was two or three nights after your ball that I dreamt my dream, while you no doubt were sleeping just a little sounder than usual after your gaieties.”“Dreams are very strange,” said Isola, absently. “I wonder whether there is any good in them to counterbalance so much pain?”CHAPTER VII.“LOOK THROUGH MINE EYES WITH THINE, TRUE WIFE.”There were steamers plying between Fowey and Falmouth in this summer weather, and Colonel Disney suggested next morning that Isola should go with him on his journey in search of Tabitha. They would go by water and return in the afternoon by rail. The morning was lovely, and the trip round the coast would be delightful.“I don’t want to see Tabitha,” Isola answered, with a touch of impatience. “If you are so bent upon seeing her I had rather you went alone.”“But I had rather not spend a whole day away from you. As for Tabitha, a visit of ten minutes will be quite enough for me. I have brought her a Rhampoor Chuddah—a warm red one. I have only to make her my little gift, and to say a few words—without any anger—about her breach of faith.”“It was really not a breach of faith. I gave her full permission to go. I was getting just a little tired of her fussiness. She was notmyold servant, you know, Martin. I had not been used to her all my life, as you have.”“Ah, but she is so good—such a thoroughly good woman.”“Yes, she is good, no doubt.”“Well, we’ll go to Falmouth together, and you can stop at the Green Bank, where we can lunch, while I go and find Tabitha. You know her address, I suppose?”“Yes. She lives at No. 5, Crown Terrace, overlooking the harbour.”This conversation took place in the garden, where they breakfasted, under a square striped awning, an apology for a tent, set up on the lawn by the river. A badly cooked breakfast seemed less offensive in the garden, where the summer air, and the perfume of the roses eked out the meal. After breakfast Disney called his wife to the drawing-room, where he had brought his spoil from the East, and laid his offerings, as it were, at the feet of his idol.“See, love, here is a shawl which you can use as acouvre-pied,” he said, flinging a fine cashmere over a chair, “since Fashion decrees that women shall wear shawls no more. And here are some ivory chessmen to assist you in puzzling your brains over the game of Eastern antiquity; and here are vases and things for odd corners. And I have brought you a carved Persian screen, and some Peshawur curtains for your door-ways, and a lamp from Cairo, to make your drawing-room a little more fantastically pretty. I know you love these things.”She was enraptured with his gifts. Her face lighted up like the face of a child, and she ran from one object to the other in a confused gladness, scarcely able to look at one thing at a time.“They will make the room too lovely,” she cried; “and they will tell everybody of your far-away travels. I can never thank you half enough for all these treasures.”“Love me a little, and that will be more than enough.”“A little. Ah, Martin, I love you so much.”“Then why do you sigh as you say it? There need be no sighing over our love now. I never shall leave you again.”He caught her to his breast as he spoke, and kissed the pale sweet face, with a kind of defiant rapture, as if he challenged Fate to do him any harm. The pain of separation from that fair young wife had been so keen an agony that there was a touch of savage exultancy in the joy of re-union—some such fierce gladness as a knight-crusader might have felt in days of old, coming back to his beloved after years of war and travel.God help the crusader’s wife of those rough days if she had turned from the path of virtue during his exile. There would be a short shrift and a bloody shroud for such a sinner!They walked into Fowey by that pathway which Isola had trodden so often in the year that was gone—not always alone. The pleasure steamer was waiting in the little haven, where the two rivers part under the cloven hills. Out seaward the air blew fresh and free, and the spray was dashing up against the rocks, and Polruan’s grey roofs were wrapped in morning shadows while Fowey laughed in the sunshine.That water journey to Falmouth was delicious upon such a morning, and it needed not a brass band of three men and a boy, blaring out the new and popular music-hall song of the year before last, to enliven the voyage. Those arable lands yonder, undulating with every curve of the ever-varying coast-line, the emerald green of young corn shining in the sunlight, copse and spinney here and there in the clefts and hollows, the Gribbin Head standing up stony and grim on the crest of the topmost hill, and, anon, Par harbour lying low upon the level sands, and then this point and that, till they meet the gallant fleet of fishing-boats sailing out from Mevagissey, like a peaceful Armada, and skim past the haven, and the little town and quay crowded at the foot of the hill, and the coastguard’s stronghold yonder, high up against the bright blue sky, whiter than any other mortal habitation ever was or will be. And so to Falmouth, with porpoises playing under their bows, like sportive dolphins, as if they carried Dionysius or Arion on their deck—a brief summer sail, in the keen sweet air of an English summer. To Martin Disney’s British nostrils that atmosphere seemed soul-inspiring, thevery breath of life and gladness, after the experiences of a hot-weather campaign.And here was Falmouth, with proud Pendennis on a sunny height, and bay and harbour, town and hill, terrace above terrace, tower and steeple—the town and streets all crowded and clustered in the foreground, where the river winds inward to the heart of the land.The Green Bank gave them cordial welcome, and luncheon was speedily spread in a private sitting-room, at a snug round table by a window overlooking the harbour—luncheon, and of the best, tongue and chicken, and salad, cherry pasty, junket and cream.Colonel Disney applied himself to the meal with a hearty relish.“There is just this one advantage in bad cooking at home that it makes one so thoroughly enjoy everything one gets abroad,” he said, laughing at his own prowess.“I’ll try and get a better cook, if you like, Martin,” Isola said, with rather a helpless air.To a wife of one and twenty there seems such futility in worrying about a cook.“You couldn’t possibly get a worse. How long have you put up with this one?”“Ever since Tabitha left.”“Good heavens! You have been starving upon ill-cooked food for six months. No wonder you look thin and out of health.”“I am really very well. There is nothing the matter with me.”“Yes, yes, there is a great deal the matter. A bad cook, solitude, no one to watch over you and care for you. But that is all over now. You are eating no lunch—not even that superb cherry pasty. I’ll be off to find Tabitha. I shan’t be more than half an hour, unless Crown Terrace is at the extremity of Falmouth. Have you brought a book to read while I am away? No, foolish child. Never mind. There is the county paper, and there is the harbour, with all its life, for you to look at.”He started on his voyage of discovery, with the warm, comfortable shawl which he had bought for his mother’s old servant hanging over his arm. It was a small disappointment amidst the infinite delight of his home-coming, but when he bought the shawl he had fancied himself putting it round Tabitha’s ample shoulders in the little housekeeper’s room at the Angler’s Nest, a room that was just large enough to hold a linen cupboard, a Pembroke table, a comfortable armchair, and Tabitha, who seemed bigger than all the furniture put together.He was a man of warm affections, and of that constancy of mind and temper to which forgetfulness of old ties or indifference to past associations is impossible. Tabitha’s image was associated with all the tenderest memories of his youth; with his mother’s widowhood, and with her second marriage—a foolish marriage. At seven and thirty years of age she had taken to herself a second husband, some years her junior, in the person of George Leland, a well-meaning and highly intellectual curate with weak lungs, a union entered upon while her only son was a cadet, and which left her four years later again a widow, with an infant daughter, a child born amidst sickness and sorrow, and christened at the father’s desire Allegra, as if she had entered a world of joy. Through that Indian summer of his mother’s second love, in all the cares and griefs of her second marriage, Tabitha had been trusty and devoted, nursing the frail husband through that last year of fading life which was one long illness, comforting the widow, and rearing the sickly baby until it blossomed into a fine healthy child, whose strength and beauty took every one by surprise.With all the joys and sorrows of his mother’s life Tabitha had been associated for five and thirty years of conscientious service; and to have lost the good soul now from his fireside was a positive affliction to Martin Disney. Her loss gave an air of instability to his domestic life. Who would ever care for his property as Tabitha had cared—Tabitha who had seen the china and the pictures and drawings collected pieceby piece, who had seen the old family silver drop in by way of legacy from this and that aunt or uncle, till the safe was full of treasures, every one of which had its distinct history? What would a new housekeeper care for General Disney’s coffee-pot, for the George the Second urn that had belonged to his uncle the Indian judge, for his grandmother’s decanter stands? A modern servant would scoff at decanter stands; would wonder they were not melted down. No, rejoiced as he was to be at home once more, home without Tabitha would be something less than home to Martin Disney.He found Crown Terrace, a row of neat little houses high above the harbour on the Helston road. He had no need to look at the numbers on the doors. He knew Tabitha’s house at a glance, four or five doors off. Who else would have devised such pretty window-boxes, so simple and so artistic; or who else would have hit upon so perfect a harmony of colour in the flowering plants? Who else, of that lowly status, would have chosen such curtains or draped them so gracefully? The little bow-windowed band-box of a house was as pretty as a Parisian toy.Tabitha was in the window, working with scissors and sponge at one of the flower-boxes. Never an aphid was allowed to rest on Tabitha’s roses or geraniums. She gave a little cry of mixed alarm and delight as she saw that stalwart figure come between her and the sunshine.“Lor’ sakes, Captain Martin, is it you?” she cried.“Yes, Tabby, it is I—and I want to know what you’ve got to say to me. Do you know how a deserter feels when he suddenly finds himself face to face with his commanding officer? I never had such a knock-down blow as when I came home the day before yesterday and found you had deserted your post—you whom I trusted so implicitly.”Tabitha looked at him dumbly—entreatingly—as if she were mutely supplicating him not to be angry. She took this reproof with an air of having thoroughly deserved it, of not having any plea to offer in her defence.“You’ll come in and sit down a bit, won’t you, CaptainMartin?” she said deprecatingly; and then, without waiting for an answer, she bustled out of the parlour, and anon appeared at the open door.“Yes, of course I am coming in. I have a great deal to say to you—much more than can be said in the open street.”Tabitha ushered him into the little parlour; so neat, so cool and dainty a bower, albeit the whole of its contents would scarcely have realized ten pounds at an auction. She offered him her most luxurious easy-chair—a large Madeira chair, with pale chintz cushions and artistic draping; and then, when he had seated himself, she stood before him like a prisoner at the bar, and with unmistakable guilt disturbing the broad placidity of her countenance.“Tabby, there is my offering from the Indies. May it keep you warm when you run out upon your mysterious errands on autumn evenings, as you used to do in my mother’s time. Sit down, pray; I have lots to say to you.”Tabitha received the comfortable gift with rapturous thanks. That Captain Martin should have thought of her, so far away, with his head full of fighting, and with death looking him in the face! It was too much, and the tears rolled down her honest cheeks as she thanked him.“And now, Tabitha, I want a candid answer to a straight question. Why did you leave my wife last January?”“That’s easily explained, sir. I’m getting old, and I was tired of service. Mrs. Disney was very well able to spare me. Perhaps she didn’t set the same value on me as you did. Young people like young faces about them.”“All that I can understand; but it didn’t exonerate you from your duty to me. You promised me to take care of my young wife.”“I did my best, Captain Martin, as long as I could give satisfaction,” faltered Tabitha, growing very pale under this reproof.“Had you any misunderstanding with Mrs. Disney? Did she find fault with you?”“Oh no, sir. Mrs. Disney is not one to find fault. She’stoo easy, if anything. No one could be sweeter than she was to me. God knows, if she had been my own daughter I could not have loved her better than I did.”Here Tabitha broke down altogether, and sobbed aloud.“Come, come, my good soul, don’t distress yourself,” cried Disney, touched by this emotion. “You loved her; you could not help loving her, could you? And yet you left her.”“I was getting tired and old, sir; and I had saved enough money to furnish a small house; and my sister, Mrs. David, being a widow without chick or child, wanted me to join her in a lodging-house at the seaside. She’s a beautiful cook, is my sister, much better than ever I was. So perhaps I was over-persuaded: and here I am. What’s done cannot be undone, Captain Martin; but if ever Mrs. Disney should be ill or in grief or trouble, and she should want me, I’ll go to her without an hour’s loss of time. I can never forget that she is your wife, and that she was a kind mistress to me.”Martin Disney breathed more freely after this speech. He had been curiously disturbed at the idea of a breach between his wife and the old and faithful servant.“Well, Tabby, I’m glad at least you and my wife are not ill friends,” he said. “I do not care for the loosening of old ties. And now I must be off. Mrs. Disney is waiting for me at the Green Bank.”Tabitha seemed a little startled on hearing that her late mistress was in Falmouth, but she made no remark upon the fact.“Good-bye, Tabby. Stay, there’s one favour you can do me. Get me a good cook. The woman we have at present would be a blight upon the happiest home in Christendom.”

Isola danced every dance. She hardly knew who her partners were. She had only a sense of floating in a vortex of light and colour, to some swinging melody. Everything was dream-like—but not horrible, as in her dream by the fireside at home. This was a happy dream, as of a creature with wings, who knew not of care in the present or a soul to be saved in the future. And then came her waltz with Lostwithiel, and that strong arm was round her, bearing her up as a flower is borne upon a rushing tide, so that she had no consciousness of movement on her own part, only of floating, floating, floating, to that languid three-time melody.

It was the last popular waltz they were playing—a waltz that had been last summer’s delight in the arid gardens of South Kensington—“Il n’y a que toi;” a waltz with a chorus which the band trolled out merrily, at intervals, in the French of Stratford atte Bow.

“Il n’y a que toi,” whispered Lostwithiel, with his lips close to the soft brown hair above the white forehead. “Not a bad name for a waltz when one is waltzing with just one person in the world.”

Out in the cool night there was a little knot of people as merry after their homelier fashion as town and county in the ball-room. One of the windows had been opened at the top for ventilation, and this opening had been turned to advantage. A large, substantial kitchen table had been placed in front of the window, and upon this improvised platform stood Tabitha, Susan, the head chamber-maid, and the ostler’s wife—this last on sufferance, and evidently not in society—looking on at the ball. The window was under a verandah, that sloped above these spectators’ heads. They were thus in dense shadow, and unseen by the occupants of the lamp-lit room.

Susan was exuberant in her delight.

“I was never at a ball before,” she said. “Oh, ain’t itlovely? Don’t I wish I could dance like that? Lor, do look at that fat old party, spinning round like a teetotum! Well, I never did! Don’t she perspire!” exclaimed Susan, indulging in a running commentary which left much to be desired in the matter of refinement.

This unsophisticated damsel heartily admired youth and beauty, and the smart frocks and flashing gems; but she was cruelly hard upon those dancers whose charms were on the wane, or whose frocks were inferior or ugly.

“Well, I wouldn’t,” said Susan, “I wouldn’t go to a ball like this if I couldn’t have everythink nice. Look at that tall girl in yeller. Did you ever see such a scarecrow? I’d ever so much rather stay at home, or stand outside, like this. I should feel it better became me.”

Tabitha made no such remarks. She was singularly silent and thoughtful, as she stood looking down at the crowded room from her point of vantage on the kitchen table. She had only eyes for one figure—the willowy form in the glistening white satin gown, with the feathery Japanese chrysanthemums, a little crushed and faded by this time; or perhaps it may be said for two figures, since one followed the other as the shadow follows the substance. She saw them waltzing together, when supper was in full progress, and the room comparatively clear. She saw the graceful head inclining towards his shoulder, the slender waist held in his firm embrace; and it seemed to her that the waltz was an invention of the Arch Enemy. She thought of it very much as people thought seventy years ago when Byron wrote his poetical denunciation of the new dance. She saw those two moving slowly towards an adjacent ante-room, where banks of flowers, and a couple of sofas and low easy-chairs made a retreat which was half boudoir, half conservatory. She saw them moving side by side, talking to each other in tones so confidential that his head bent low over hers each time she spoke; and then she watched them sitting just within the doorway, at an angle where she could see their faces, and attitudes, still in the same confidential converse, she with downcast eyes,and he leaning forward with his elbow on his knee, and looking up at her as he talked.

“It is too bad of him,” muttered Tabitha, writhing at that spectacle. “Does he think what a child she is, and what harm he may be doing? It is wicked of him, and he knows it; and other people must notice them—other people must see what I see—and they will be talking of her, blighting her good name. Oh, if I could only get her away at once before people begin to notice her!”

She could see her young mistress’s face distinctly in the lamplight. Isola was very pale, and her face was full of trouble; not the face of a woman amusing herself with an idle flirtation, playing with fire without the least intention of burning her fingers. There were plenty of flirtations of that order going on in the Talbot ball-room; but this was not one of them. This meant peril of some kind. This was all evil. That pale face, those heavy eyelids, shrouding eyes which dared not look up. That tremulous, uncertain movement of the snowy ostrich fan! All these were danger signals.

“If I get her safe at home presently, I’ll open her eyes for her,” thought Tabitha. “I’ll talk to her as if I was her mother. God knows I should be almost as sorry as ever her mother could be if she came to any harm.”

If she came to any harm. What harm was there to fear for her, as she sat there, with Lostwithiel lounging across the low chair beside the sofa where she sat, leaning forward to look into her downcast face? What harm could come to her except that which meant destruction—death to peace, and gladness, and womanly fame? If there were danger it was a desperate danger, and Tabitha shuddered at the mere thought of that peril.

“But, lor, she’s little more than a child,” mused Tabitha. “She means no wrong, and she knows no wrong. She’s too innocent to come to any harm.”

Yet in the landlady’s snuggery, by-and-by, seated at the comfortable round table, with its spotless damask and brightglass and silver, Tabitha was quite unable to do justice to that snack which Mr. Tinkerly had ordered in her honour—a chicken and lobster-salad from the supper-room, and three parts of a pine-apple cream. Susan and the foreman fully appreciated these dainties; but Tabitha only munched a crust and sipped a tumbler of beer.

“I’m a little bit out of sorts to-night,” she said.

“I hope you haven’t taken cold, Mrs. Thomas,” said the polite Tinkerly. “Perhaps we ought to have brought another rug?”

“No, it isn’t that. I’ve been quite warm and comfortable. Eat your supper, Mr. Tinkerly, and don’t bother about me. I’ve been interested in looking on, and I’m too much took up with what I’ve seen to be able to eat.”

“Well, it was a pretty sight,” exclaimed Tinkerly, enthusiastically; “but I don’t think I ever saw such a mort of plain women in my life.”

“Lor, Mr. Tinkerly,” cried Susan, with a shocked air. “Why, look at our young mistress, and at Miss Crowther, and Miss Spenthrop from Truro, and Mrs. Pencarrow, and Lady Chanderville.”

“Well, I don’t say they’re all ugly. Some of ’em are handsome enough, and there’s plenty of thorough-breds among ’em, but there’s a sight of plain-headed ones. There’s quite as much beauty in your spear as there is among the county folks, Miss Susan. I’ll answer for that.”

The night was waning. Isola had ordered her carriage for half-past two: but three o’clock had struck from the church tower of Lostwithiel, and the dance was still at its height—at its best, the dancers said, now that the sensual attractions of the supper-room drew off a good many people, and left the floor so much clearer than before supper, when bulky middle-aged gentlemen, talking to the matrons seated upon the divan, had projected their ponderous persons into the orbit of the waltzers.

Isola and Lostwithiel had danced only two waltzes, butsince two o’clock they had sat out several dances, Mrs. Disney having cancelled all her engagements after that hour by declaring that she would dance no more.

“I am dreadfully tired,” she told her partners piteously, and her pallor gave force to the assertion. “Please get some one else for our dance, Captain Morshead,” and so on, and so on, to half a dozen disappointed suitors.

Perhaps some of those who happened to be experienced in such complications may have divined which way the wind blew, for no one offered to sit out the promised dances, and Isola and Lostwithiel were left pretty much to themselves among the palms and orange-trees in the ante-room. They were not unobserved, however; and among the eyes which marked them with no friendly notice were the fine, steel-blue eyes of Miss Crowther.

“Is that a flirtation?” she asked Captain Morshead, glancing in the direction of the ante-room where those two were sitting, as she and Isola’s cast-off partner waltzed past the muslin-draped doorway.

“They seem rather fond of talking to each other, don’t they? Who was she? She’s uncommonly pretty.”

“Oh, her people were army, I believe—as poor as church mice—buried alive in Dinan.”

“At Dinan—and now she lives at Trelasco, she tells me. It seems scarcely worth while to have exhumed her in order to bury her again. Such a girl as that ought to be in London enjoying life.”

“Oh, but she’s a grass widow, don’t you know. Her husband is in Burmah. I don’t think it’s quite nice in her to be here to-night; only as my too good-natured mother sent her a ticket, I suppose I oughtn’t to say anything about it. Perhaps if mother sees the way she goes on with Lord Lostwithiel she’ll rather regret that ticket.”

What was Lostwithiel saying all this time in that gentle baritone, which was heard only by one listener? He was asking forgiveness for his indiscretion of the afternoon, andin that prayer for pardon was repeating his offence. Isola was less inclined to be angry, perhaps, now. The magic of the dance was still upon her senses, the dance which had brought them nearer than all the days they had met; than all their long confidential conversations on the heights above the harbour, or on the river path, or dawdling on the bridge. She had felt the beating of his heart against her own, breath mingling with breath, the thrilling touch of his encircling arm; and it was as if he had woven a spell around her which made her his. She had never danced with her husband, who had no love of that heathenish art. In all their brisk, frank courtship there had been no intoxicating hours. She hardly knew what dancing meant till she waltzed with Lostwithiel, who had something of the fiery ardour of a Pagan worshipping his gods in wild gyrations upon moonlit mountain or in secret cave. She let him talk to her to-night—let him pour out the full confession of his unhappy love. He spoke not as one who had hope; not with that implied belief in her frailty which would have startled her into prompt resistance. His accents were the accents of despair, his love was a dark fatality.

ἉΝΑΓΚΗ

“Why did you write that word?” she asked.

“Why? Because I could not give you back that card without some token of my passion—with only commonplace entries which Jones, Brown, and Robinson might write there. I want you to feel that you belong to me, somehow, in some way, as the spirits of the dead and the souls of the living belong to each other sometimes, by links which none can see. When I am at the other end of the earth I want to feel that there is something, if it were only a word, like a masonic sign, between us; if it were only a promise that in such or such a phase of the waning moon we would each look up and breathe the other’s name.”

“You are going away?”

“What else can I do? Can I stay? You tell me I madeyou miserable by what I said this afternoon. That means we must meet no more. I can’t be sorry for my offence. I cannot answer for myself. My love has passed the point of sanity and self-control. I have no option. I must offend you, or I must leave you.”

“You need not leave Trelasco,” she said gently. “I am going away to-morrow.”

“Going away! Where?”

“To London first, and then to India.”

“To Burmah? Impossible!”

“If not to the front, to the nearest convenient station. I am going to my husband; as nearly as I can reach him; and as quickly as I can make the journey.”

“You are dreaming.”

“No, I have quite made up my mind. I hated to be left behind last year; and now that his return is deferred my only chance of happiness is to go to him. Some one called me a grass widow the other day. What a detestable name!”

“Give me this one waltz?” he asked, without any comment upon her intended journey.

“Impossible. I told them all I shouldn’t dance any more.”

“Oh, your partners are all in the supper-room, I dare say. The dancing men go in last. Hark! it’s the Myosotis. Just one turn—only one.”

He had risen from his low seat, and she rose involuntarily at the sound of the opening bars. He put his arm round her gently, and drew her into the ball-room, waltzing slowly as they went, and then, with the sudden impetus of an enthusiastic dancer, he was whirling her round the room, and she know nothing, cared for nothing, in the confusion of light and melody.

“Think of me sometimes when you are far away!” he whispered, with his lips almost touching her forehead.

She did not resent that whisper. Already, within a dozen hours of his first offence, she had grown accustomedto his words of love. It seemed to her as if they had loved each other for years—had loved and had despaired long ago, in some dim half-remembered past. A passion of this kind is like a dream, in which an instant gives the impression of half a lifetime, of long memories and old habit.

The room was much clearer now.

“Is it very late?” asked Isola.

“About four.”

“So late—and I told the flyman half-past two. It is dreadful. Let us stop, please.”

He obeyed, and went with her towards the cloak-room. The seats were nearly empty now where the matrons had sat in their velvet and brocade, a gorgeous background to the clouds of tulle and sylph-like figures of the dancers. Mrs. Baynham was nowhere to be seen, and the diminished bundles of tabby-cat cloaks and Shetland shawls in the cloak-room indicated that a good many people had left. Isola put on her soft white shawl hurriedly, and went out into the hall, where Lostwithiel had gone to look for her carriage.

People were going away very fast, and through the open doorway there was a sound of voices and wheels; but, in spite of footmen, constables, and hangers-on, there seemed a prodigious difficulty in getting any particular carriage to the door.

It was a mild, misty night, and the moon, which had been counted on for the return home, was hidden behind a mass of black clouds—or in the expressive phraseology of one of the foxhunters, had gone to ground. Mrs. Disney waited near the door while Lostwithiel searched for her fly. There were several departures of other muffled figures, features undistinguishable behind Shetland wraps, or furry hoods, as the men hustled their womenkind into the carriages. It seemed an age to Isola, waiting there alone in the corridor, and seeing no mortal whom she knew among those passersby, before Lostwithiel came, hurried and breathless, to say that her carriage was just coming up to the door.

“Wrap your shawl round your head,” he said quickly, as he gave her his arm. “There’s a nasty damp fog—so,” muffling her, almost to blindness. “Come along.”

She looked at the carriage, with its lamps shining red against the grey mistiness like great fiery eyes, and then, glancing at the horse, she cried suddenly, “I’m afraid that’s the wrong fly. I think mine had a grey horse.”

“No, no, it’s all right. Pray don’t loiter in this chilling air.”

The carriage door was open, the constable standing by, bull’s-eye in hand, a pair of horses snorting close behind, another carriage coming up so near that the pole threatened destruction. There was no time for loitering. Everybody was in a hurry to get home. Isola stepped lightly into the brougham, which drove slowly off.

“Next carriage, Mrs. Brune Prideaux,” roared the constable. “Mrs. Prideaux’ carriage stops all the way.”

CHAPTER VI.

“A LOVE STILL BURNING UPWARD.”

It was early summer, summer in her first youth, when she is frivolous and capricious, laughs and weeps she knows not why; smiling through her tears, and never knowing her own mind for a week together; to-day gracious-tempered and tropical; to-morrow east-windy and morose. In a word, it was June, a season of roses and rains, blue skies and thunder-clouds. It was June, and Martin Disney was looking out of the window with a keen eager face, much bronzed, and somewhat haggard, after a fatiguing campaign, looking out across the vales and woods of his native county, as the Penzance train sped along the high-level line betwixt Plymouth and Par. Those keen, grey eyes of his, accustomed to searching out far-off objects, looked as if they could pierce through the green heart of the Cornish valleys to the sheltered littleharbour of Fowey and the blue sea that opened wide to the far-off West.

His labours were over, and he was going to take his rest, going to hang up his sword, that sword which had done such good work, or to transform it into a reaping-hook. He was Colonel Disney now, had given the State his best service, and now, in the very prime and vigour of his manhood, the State had done with him, and he was free to do what he listed with the maturer half of his life. He would have been very sorry to retire from active service had it not been for that tender tie which gave such sweetness to the thought of retirement and tranquil days. He was going home. The word thrilled him like music; home to his fair young wife, his chosen one, his domestic divinity. He had not left off wondering how it had ever come to pass that so young and fair a creature could care for him.

“It isn’t as if I were one of your accomplished fellows,” he said to himself, “able to sing, or play the flute, or paint in water-colours. Except a very earnest love of a few good books, I have no culture. How can any girl in the present day care for a man without culture? I could never appreciate Keats, for instance; and not to appreciate Keats is to be an outsider in literature.”

Yet, in spite of his seven and forty years, in spite of his deficiencies, his homeliness, that young heart had gone out to him. She loved him, and his lot was full. There was nothing more upon God’s earth that he could desire, were it not a miracle, and that the mother he had so fondly loved might be given back to him, to share his happiness, to make the third in a trinity of trusting love. Since that could not be, there was nothing left for him to yearn for.

The beating of his heart quickened almost unbearably, as the train drew near Par. Isola would meet him at the Junction, perhaps. He had not announced the actual hour of his arrival, for matters had been a little uncertain when he wrote yesterday, and he had not cared to telegraph this morning before he left Paddington. Yet she would knowthat this was the only likely train for him to choose; and she would be at the Junction, he thought, smiling her glad welcome, a fair young face, rosy in the sunset; for it was evening as he drew near the end of his journey.

No; there was nobody he knew at the Junction. He walked up and down the platform, and stared about him in rather a forlorn way during the few minutes before the starting of the train for Fowey. She had not come to anticipate their meeting by an hour or so, as he had hoped, as he had felt almost certain, she would come.

It was more natural that she should wait and receive him at the Angler’s Nest, he told himself, sitting in the corner of the railway carriage presently, in a train of three coaches, steaming through the pretty picturesque country between Par and Fowey. In the colder light of reason it seemed preposterous to have expected to see her at the Junction. She would like to welcome him amidst her own surroundings, in the home to which she had doubtless given those little beautifying touches in honour of his coming, which are such delight to women, and which sometimes pass altogether unobserved by that pachydermatous animal, man! How slowly the engine moved along that little bit of line! Martin Disney sat with his face to the wind, and snuffed the sea breeze as if it had been the odour of home. He thought of Ulysses, and his return from distant lands. Would Tim, the fox terrier, know him? and Shah, the Persian cat? Perhaps not. Tim was no Argus; vastly affectionate and demonstrative, but not a dog to expire at one’s feet, in the rapture of his master’s return. Penelope would know him, and welcome him. That was enough for this modern Ulysses, who had no reason to disguise himself in re-entering his home—who had no fear of rival suitors, or interlopers of any kind. Penelope would welcome him, and trusty Tabitha. He thought of the old servant’s honest face with delight. She was something left to him out of boyhood and youth. He felt like a young man when he talked to her. She was the one strong link betwixt the present and the past. Shewas his memory embodied. He could refer to her as to a dictionary of days long gone. When did we do such and such a thing—or go to such a place? What was the name of the bay horse I bought at Plympton? Where did my mother pick up the Sheraton secretaire? Tabitha could answer all such trivial questions: and Tabitha could talk to him for hours of his mother’s words and ways—of the things that were only history.

At last! The train crept into the little station, nestling on the edge of a wood, and there was Fowey, homely, friendly little Fowey, so strange and yet so familiar; strange to eyes that had so lately looked upon the cities of the East; familiar to the man who had been reared in the neighbourhood, whose first impressions of God’s earth had stamped harbour and hills upon his brain, like an indelible picture. There was Masters’s fly, an eminently respectable vehicle that never touted for chance passengers, waiting for him. He was expected, evidently.

“Did Mrs. Disney send you?” he asked the driver.

“Yes, sir.”

How thoughtful of the young wife, who might be forgiven if she had left such a small duty unfulfilled. Yet he would have liked to see her sweet self at the station—only, as he had argued with himself just now, it would have discounted the home-welcome. It would have been an anti-climax.

Dearly as he loved that home river, and those fertile hills, and beautiful as they were after their kind, they could but seem small and tame to eyes that had looked upon the glories of the East. Disney contemplated the scene with a touch of sad surprise, wondering at this miniature loveliness; recalling the day when those steep hillsides, where the red cattle were grazing in the mists of eventide, had seemed grand in his sight. Now they had a kind of pitiful prettiness. His heart yearned towards them with compassion for their insignificance.

For nearly two years he had been moving about with his company in the land of jungle and mountain, and inthat vast table-land through which the Salween river runs down to the Gulf of Martaban; and after those wider horizons, he found himself in a narrow road, shut in by grassy hills, and hugging the margin of a silver thread that called itself a river.

There is always a tinge of melancholy in that hour after sundown; and Martin Disney’s heart saddened a little as he looked at the quiet river, and the shadows on the hillside—that pale mistiness of summer evening which gives a ghostly touch to all things, as if it were a brief revelation of a spirit world. It is an hour at which even a strong man’s heart is apt to sink with a vague sense of fear.

The fly drew up at the little wooden gate between high hedges of escalonia, with glossy leaves and bright red blossom. A slender figure in a white gown was visible on the threshold, as Disney sprang out of the fly, and while the flyman was lifting down the luggage, that airy form flitted across the lawn, and Colonel Disney’s wife was standing shyly within the open gate, almost as if she had come out to receive a stranger.

He could not clasp her to his breast before a flyman; but he seized both her hands, gripped them convulsively, and then led her towards the house, leaving Masters’s man to deal as he pleased with portmanteaux and hat-box, gun-case and umbrella-case, despatch-box, and other chattels; to leave them out in the lane to the dews and the night-birds, if he so listed. Martin Disney had no consciousness of anything in this world except the woman by his side.

“My darling! my darling!” he ejaculated, in a choked voice, “how I have longed for this hour, with a longing that has been almost madness!”

And then he saw for the first time that her face was as white as her gown. Was it the twilight that made her look so pale? Could he wonder if the emotion of this supreme moment blanched that young cheek, when he, soldier and wayfarer upon the world’s roughest roads, felt like a child, striving to hold back his tears?

Lamps were burning in dining-room and drawing-room. He saw the table laid for dinner through the open door as he and Isola passed by; but the idea of eating and drinking seemed very far off just now. They went into the drawing-room together, where a solitary lamp was shining upon a table crowded with flowers, and where the scents of the garden came in through the open window. Here he satisfied the longing of his hungry heart, and took that fragile form in his arms, and kissed the pale cold lips. She lay upon his breast unresistingly; helpless, unresponsive, like a dead thing.

“Isola, have you forgotten that you once loved me?”

“Forgotten! No, no, no! There is no one in the world so good and true as you are. I love you with all my heart and soul.”

Her face was hidden on his breast, but she lifted up her arms and clasped them round his neck. He seated himself in his accustomed chair—it was standing where it had always stood before he went away—and took her upon his knee, as if she had been a child. Then a great storm of sobs suddenly burst from throat and bosom, a flood of tears streamed upon his breast, and he felt her arms trembling as they clasped his neck.

“My own dear love,” he murmured gently, “one would almost think you were sorry I have came back.”

She could not answer him at first for her sobs, but she shook her head, and at last the words, “No, no, no,” came from her lips; and he kissed and calmed her with almost fatherly gentleness. And then they went into the dining-room, where the soup-tureen was waiting for them on the sideboard, with a neat little parlour-maid—not Susan, but another—ready to minister to them.

The table had been decorated by Isola’s own hands. Dark crimson roses were lying on the fair white damask; one tall glass stood in the centre with three slim golden lilies, pale and heavy-headed, which filled the room with perfume. These came from one of the hothouses at Glenaveril, whencegood-natured Mrs. Crowther had sent a basket of exotics in honour of the colonel’s return. The lamplight, the flowers, the pretty old Wedgwood service of creamy white and dull brown, made up a feast for Martin Disney’s eye, after a life spent mostly under canvas. He looked from the gaily adorned table to the face beside him, pallid and pinched, despite its sweetness.

“My dear one, you are looking very ill,” he said, with an anxious air.

“What an ungallant speech!” she answered, smiling at him with unexpected gaiety. “I have been fretting at your long, long absence, and you reproach me for my deteriorated appearance. Never mind, Martin, you will see how rosy and bright I shall get now our parting has come to an end.”

“Yes, love, we must coax the roses back to your cheeks. I must have a good mount ready for you when the cubbing begins, and a few morning gallops will soon make a change in my fragile wife’s appearance. And I’ll charter a yacht and steep you in ozone.”

“Oh, one gets enough of that on shore, there is no need to go further.”

“But I thought you adored yachting? It was one of our grand schemes for the future, to hire a modest little yawl and go round the coast to Clovelly. Have you forgotten?”

“No, no; only I don’t want you to waste your money—and, if we start a bigger stable——”

“Ah, you don’t know what a Crœsus I have become. You needn’t be afraid of ruining me. My poor lonely little wife. Why didn’t you send for Allegra?”

“She wouldn’t have been of any good to me. She is all that is sweet and lovable, and she is your sister; but she wouldn’t have filled your vacant place. I should have only felt lonelier for having to talk every day, and pretend a kind of happiness. Being alone, I could bury myself in a book, and forget my troubles.”

“This soup doesn’t look up to Tabitha’s old form. Do you know that among other delights of this earthly paradiseI have been looking forward to Tabitha’s little dinners. I don’t believe there is achefin Paris who can cook so well as that self-taught genius, who ripened into perfection by a process of gradual evolution, from the early days when my mother discovered that nobody could make arrowroot or cook a mutton cutlet as well as Tabitha. By-the-by, why has not that good soul shown herself? I thought she would have disputed with you for my first kiss.”

While he ran on in this fashion, Isola sat looking down at the table-cloth, pallid no longer, but crimson.

“Tabitha has gone!” she said abruptly.

“Tabitha gone—for a holiday?”

“No, she has left me, altogether.”

“Left you—altogether?” exclaimed Disney, with the tone of a man who could scarcely believe in his own sense of hearing, so astounding was the statement that met his ears. “Tabitha, my mother’s faithful old servant, who was like my own flesh and blood! What in God’s name made her leave you? Did you quarrel with her?”

He asked the question almost sternly. For the first time in his life he was angry with this dear fragile creature, the idol of his heart. He had loved Tabitha as servants are not often loved. He had left his young wife in her charge, desiring no better custodian, full of faith in Tabitha’s ability both to protect and counsel her girlish mistress.

“No, no; we did not quarrel. I liked Tabitha very much. I was almost as fond of her as you yourself could be.”

“And yet you dismissed her!” Disney retorted bitterly. “She was not smart enough for you, perhaps. Those Crowther people may have put it into your head that she was old-fashioned—that you could never have a modish household with such a humdrum old person at the head of it. Was that your motive?”

“Oh, Martin, how can you think me so frivolous? I hate smartness and pretension as much as you do. No, I should never have dismissed Tabitha. She left me of her own accord.”

“Why?”

“She wanted rest. She was too old for service, she told me. I tried to keep her. I humiliated myself so far as to beg her to stay with me”—the tears came into her eyes at the mere memory of that humiliation—“but she had made up her mind. She would not give way.”

“Where did she go?”

“To Falmouth—to live with her sister, a shoemaker’s widow. They let lodgings, I believe.”

“She must have gone mad! A lodging-house must be harder work than anything she had to do here.”

“Yes, I think it must.”

“When did she go?”

“At the beginning of the year—in January.”

“She left you six months ago, and in all that time you never told me she was gone.”

“I did not want you to know, for fear you should be worried or vexed.”

“I should have been both; but you ought to have told me. I had a right to know. I left you in her charge, Isola. You are much too young and too pretty to be living alone without some kind of dragon—and I knew Tabitha would be a very gentle dragon—a good motherly soul, able to wait upon you and look after your health, and yet grim enough to keep marauders off the premises. Indeed, my pet, you should have let me know of her departure without an hour’s delay. She was very wrong to go. It was a breach of faith I could never have expected.”

“Pray don’t be angry with her, Martin.”

“But I am angry. I have a right to be angry. I’ll go to Falmouth to-morrow, and have it out with her.”

“No, no, pray don’t! We parted good friends. She can say nothing to you more than she said to me. Pray don’t let there be any bad blood between you. What could be gained by your going? To-morrow, too—our first day together!”

“Well, it shall not be till the day after; but go I must.To-morrow I will revel in the delights of home, and my dear one’s society. To-morrow I will be drunken with joy. The day after will do for Tabitha.”

“I think it is making a great deal too much of her to go to Falmouth on purpose to see her,” said Isola, with a grain of pettiness; and then, after a pause, during which the colonel had been trying to appease a sharp appetite with the muscular leg of an elderly fowl, she said nervously—

“I’m afraid you are not enjoying your dinner.”

“What do I care for dinner on such a night as this; but, as a matter of plain truth, I must say that your new cook is a very bad substitute for Tabitha. Her soup was watery, her fish was greasy, her poultry is hardly eatable. If she has talents in any other line she is keeping them in reserve for another day. It may be that she excels in made-dishes—a misfortune for me, as I never eat them.”

“I had a splendid character with her,” said Isola, piteously, with the helpless feeling of a housewife who sees before her a dark prospect of bad dinners and marital grumblings, or the agonizing wrench involved in changing her cook.

“Yes, my love, people generally give splendid characters to servants they want to get rid of,” answered Disney, dryly.

These wedded lovers went out very early next morning to explore the gardens and meadows; Isola eager to point out various small improvements which she had made with the help of the old gardener, who would have plunged his hand and arm into a fiery furnace to procure plant or flower which his young mistress desired. Sweet words and sweet looks go very far in this world. They are a mighty revenue, and will often do their owner as good service as gold and silver.

Isola had worked in the garden with her own hands ever since the beginning of spring, the first tender opening of Earth’s heavy eyelids, her first pale smile of snowdrops, her broad laughter of daffodils, her joyous peal of bluebells, andriotous mirth of May blossom. She had toiled in the sweat of her brow so that the garden might be beautiful at mid-summer: for early in March there had come a letter full of rejoicing from that distant hill-kingdom, and she knew that the year of absence to which she had looked so hopelessly last November was commuted to half a year.

Martin Disney was full of admiration for his wife’s improvements. The old-fashioned borders were brimming over with old-world flowers; the shrubberies had grown out of knowledge; the escalonia hedge by the kitchen garden was a thing to wonder at.

“I remember the hedge at Tregenna Castle before that good old place was an inn,” said Martin; and then, having admired everything, he walked up and down the grass beside the laurel hedge with his wife—while the Satan-sent cook was spoiling the food that bounteous Nature had provided for man’s enjoyment—and questioned her about the life she had been leading in his absence.

“You used to write me such good letters, dearest, so full of detail, that I knew exactly how your days were spent, and could picture every hour of your life: but of late your descriptive powers have flagged. I dare say you got tired of writing long letters to a dull old fellow in India, who could never write you a clever letter in reply. It must have seemed a one-sided business?”

“Indeed, no, dear. Your letters had only one fault. They were never half long enough; but I knew how busy you were, and I thought it was so good of you never to miss a mail.”

“Good of me! Had there been twice as many mails I would not have willingly missed one. But there is no doubt your letters fell off after last autumn. They were sweet, and ever welcome to me—but they told me very little.”

“There was very little to tell.”

“Ah, but in the old days you used to make it seem so much. You had such a delightful way of describing triflingevents. I thought at one time you had the makings of a Jane Austen; but afterwards I began to fear you must be out of health. Your letters had a low-spirited tone. There were no more of those sharp little touches which used to make me laugh, no more of those tiny word-pictures, which brought the faces and figures of my old neighbours before me.”

“You can hardly wonder if my spirits sank a little when you had been so long away. And then life seemed so death-like in its monotony. There were days when I felt I might just as well have been dead. There could be very little difference between lying under the earth and crawling listlessly on the top of it.”

“You were too much alone, Isola,” he answered, distressed at this revelation. “You ought to have sent for Allegra. I begged you to send for her, if you felt dull.”

“Do you think she could have cured my dulness?” exclaimed his wife, impatiently. “Life would have seemed still more tiresome if I had been obliged to talk when there was nothing to talk about, and to smile when I felt inclined to cry.”

“Ah, you don’t know what a companion Allegra is—brimming over with fun! She knows her Dickens by heart; and I never met with anybody who appreciated him as intensely as she does.”

“I don’t care about Dickens.”

“Don’t—care—about Dickens!”

He echoed her words as if almost paralyzed by horror.

“Not as I used to care. One’s taste changes as life goes on. Lately I have read nothing but Victor Hugo, and Keats, and Shelley.”

“Very well in their way, but not half cheery enough for a lonely little woman beside the Fowey river. You ought to have had Allegra. It would have been better for you and better for her. She is tired of the Art school; and the other pupils are tired of her. They are very fond of her; but she has done all the work twice over, and there is nothing more for her to do, unless we meant her to enter the RoyalAcademy and go in seriously for art, Mrs. Meynell tells me. According to that lady’s account my sister must be an Admirable Crichton in petticoats.”

“I have no doubt she is very clever and very nice; but, as I could not have you, I preferred being alone,” answered Isola.

She was walking slowly by his side along the closely shaven grass, and every now and then she stretched out a hand that looked semi-transparent, and gathered a flower at random, and then plucked off its petals nervously as she walked on. Her eyelids were lowered, and her lips were tightly set. Martin could but think there was a vein of obstinacy in this bewitching wife of his—a gentle resistance which would tend to make him her slave rather than her master in the days to come. He saw with pain that her cheeks were hollow and pinched, and that her complexion had a sickly whiteness. She had fretted evidently in those long months of solitude, and it would take time to bring back the colour and gaiety to her face. As for dulness, well, no doubt Fowey was ever so much duller than Dinan, where there were officers and tennis-parties and afternoon tea-drinkings, and a going and coming of tourists all the summer through, and saints’ days, and processions, andfêtesand illuminations in the market square, beneath the statue of Duguesclin.

“And how did the world use you, Isola?” he asked presently. “Was everybody kind?”

“Oh yes, people were very kind; especially Mrs. Baynham and Mrs. Crowther. They sent me ever so many invitations, and wanted me to go on their day every week.”

“And I hope you accepted their invitations.”

“I went to Mrs. Baynham’s sometimes on her day; but I didn’t care about going to Glenaveril. It is all too grand and too fine—and I don’t like Mr. Crowther.”

“He was always courteous to you, I hope?”

“Oh yes, he was particularly courteous. I have no reason for disliking him. He is my Dr. Fell—the reason why I cannot tell, but I would walk a mile to avoid meeting him.”

“Then we will not cultivate social relations with Glenaveril. We will visit at no house where my dearest does not feel happy and at ease. And as for the finery, I agree with you, there is something too much of it. I like powder and plush when the people they serve are to the manner born, and when powder and plush seem more natural than parlour-maids; but I don’t care for the solemn stateliness of a big establishment when it has been newly set up—at least, not by such folks as the Crowthers. There are some men to whom such surroundings seem natural, even though fortune has come late in life. Is the beautiful Belinda married yet?”

“No. I do not think she is as much as engaged.”

“I thought Lostwithiel would have married her. She would have been a grand catch for him, and no doubt she would have snapped at a coronet, even without strawberry leaves. But I hear he is in South America orchid-hunting. He was always a capricious individual. There goes the gong for breakfast. I hope your cook can fry a rasher and boil an egg better than she can dress a dinner.”

They went in together to the pretty dining-room, so bright with books and flowers, and a life-sized girlish head in water-colours, by Dobson, R.A., over the chimney-piece, and Venetian glass here and there, that all characteristics of the ordinary eating-room were effaced, and only a sense of homeliness and artistic surroundings was left. Isola had been down at six, and her own hands had given the finishing touches to the room, and the flowers were of that morning’s gathering, and had the dew and the perfume of morning upon them. The room was so pretty, and Isola was so much prettier than the room, that a husband would have been of very dull clay had he troubled himself about the handiwork of the cook. Martin Disney was not made of dull clay, and he ate an overdone rasher and a hard-boiled egg without a murmur, and then set out for a long ramble with Isola.

They went up to the hill upon whose landward slope stood Lostwithiel’s old grey manor-house, with its gardens and park. Isola had not been there since that never-to-be-forgotten November evening when she met Lostwithiel in the rain. She had avoided the spot from that time forward, though she had no especial reason for avoidance, since there was no one there but Mrs. Mayne and her underlings. Lostwithiel and theVendettahad sailed away into space directly after the Hunt Ball, and little had been heard of him save that dim rumour of orchid-hunting on the shores of the Amazon, which had filtered from the society papers down to Fowey,viâtheWestern Daily Mercury.

Isola and her husband lingered for a long time upon the hilltop, he revelling in the familiar beauty of that magnificent stretch of cliff and sea, out to the dim slate colour of the Dodman Point, bay beyond bay, curving away towards Falmouth and the Lizard—while between that hill and the sea lay a world of fertile meadows and bright green cornfields, of hill and hollow, wood and common, copse and garden, a rich and smiling country, a land of summer flowers and plenteous growth.

“I never stand upon this hill without feeling proud of being a Cornishman,” said Disney, “and yet, after all, it is a foolish thing to be proud of an accident. My little Breton girl might as well be proud of being a countrywoman of Duguesclin’s.”

“Perhaps if I had been born anywhere else I should not have been so ready to fall in love with a soldier,” answered Isola. “I was brought up to think a knight and a warrior the one ideal: and so I was fascinated by the first soldier who took any notice of me.”

“But were you really fascinated, and were you really in love,” exclaimed Disney, infinitely delighted at this little speech of his wife’s, “in love with a battered campaigner—or did you just think you liked me a little bit, only because you wanted to get away from Dinan?”

“I really—really—really loved you,” she answered softly, looking up at him with eyes dimmed by tears, as he drew her nearer to him in his gladness. “I was not tired of Dinan—or my life there—and my heart went out to you atonce, because you were good and noble, and seemed to care for me.”

“There was no seeming in it, Isola. I was knocked over at once, like a pigeon out of a trap. I had been in love with you three weeks—three centuries it seemed—before I could screw up my courage so far as to think of proposing for you. And then if Hazelrigg hadn’t helped me with your father, I don’t suppose I should ever have broken the ice. But when he—the colonel—showed himself so frank and willing—and the way was all made smooth for me from a domestic point of view—and when I saw that kind little look in your eyes, and the shy little smile—yes, you are smiling so now—I took heart of grace, and stormed the citadel. Do you remember the evening I asked you to be my wife, Isola; that starlit night when I had been dining with your people, and you and Gwendolen, and Hazelrigg and I went out upon the terrace to look at the stars, and the river, and the twinkling lights of the boats down by the quay, and the diligence driving over the bridge, deep, deep down in the valley below us? Do you remember how I lured you away from the other two, and how we stood under the vine-leaves in the berceau, and I found the words somehow—feeblest, stupidest words, I’m afraid—to make you know that all the happiness of my life to come depended upon winning you for my wife?”

“I remember as if it were last night,” she answered gravely. “But oh, how long ago it seems!”

“Why do you sigh as you say that?”

“Oh, one always sighs for the past! How can one help feeling sorry that it should be gone—so much of our lives and of ourselves gone for ever?”

“Oh, but when the future is so fair, when the present is so happy, there should be no more sighing. It is an offence against the Great Father of all, who has been so good to us.”

She did not answer, and they remained silent for some minutes, she seated on a bank covered with heather and wild flowers; he stretched on the short, sweet turf at her feet. The heather had not begun to show its purple bloom,but there was the gold of the gorse, and the brightness of innumerable wild flowers around and about them as they basked in the sunshine.

“Dearest, do you believe in dreams?” Disney asked suddenly.

“Sometimes—not much—dreams are often dreadful,” she answered, with a startled air.

“I don’t believe in them a bit,” he said, lifting himself into a sitting position, and addressing himself to her with increasing earnestness, “not now that I have you here safe within reach of my hand—so,” taking her hand in his, and keeping it clasped in both his own; “but I had a dream about you in Burmah, which kept me in a fever of anxiety for nearly a month. I should have telegraphed to ask if all was right with you, only I told myself that if anything was wrong Tabitha would instantly telegraph to me. I made her promise that before I left England. It was almost my last injunction. And to think that she left you half a year ago, and that anything might have happened to you after that, and that there was no one—no one——”

“But, you see, I am quite safe. There was no bad news to send you. Besides, if I had been ill, or anything had gone wrong, there was Mrs. Baynham. She has been like a mother to me. I am so sorry you feel vexed about Tabitha’s leaving me.”

“Doubly vexed, dear, because you left me in ignorance of the fact.”

“Pray don’t be angry with me, Martin, so soon,” she pleaded meekly.

“Angry, no. I am not angry. I don’t know how to be angry with you, Isola; but I can’t help being distressed. However, let the past be past. I shall never leave you to the care of strangers again till I die.”

Her only answer was to bend her head down to kiss the hands that clasped her own.

“Tell me about your dream,” she said, after a pause, with her forehead still resting on his hands, and her face hidden. “Was it something very awful?”

“It was all confusion—a wild chaos—a nightmare of strange sounds and sensations—tempest, fire, earthquake—I know not what—but it meant deadly danger for you—death perhaps. I saw you hanging in space—a white figure, with piteous, pain-wrought face. Never have I seen you look like that—your eyes staring wildly as if they were looking at death; your features drawn and rigid, and through all the confusion, and noise, and ceaseless movement, I was trying to follow you—trying, but impotently—to save you. The white figure was always before me—far off—yet visible every now and then across the darkness of a world where everything was shapeless and confused. But the worst of all was that every now and then a black wall rose up between your distant figure and the stony difficult path that I was treading—a wall against which I flung myself, mad with rage and despair, trying to tear the stones asunder with my hands, till the blood ran in streams from my fingers. It was a dream that seemed to last through a long night, holding in it the memory of a painful past; yet I suppose it was like other dreams—momentary, for I had heard three o’clock strike before I fell asleep, and when I sounded my repeater it was only a quarter past.”

“Rather a meaningless dream,” she said, in a sleepy voice, without looking up. “I don’t think it ought to have alarmed you.”

“Ah, it sounds meaningless to you; but to me it was full of meaning! The idea of danger to you was so intense—so real. The cold sweat of deadly fear was on my face when I awoke, and it was some minutes before I could get my senses clear of that ghastly horror, before I could realize where I was, and that the thing I had seen was a dream. That stone wall seemed still in front of me, and I had still the feeling that you were on the other side of it, in ever-increasing peril.”

“It was a horrid dream, certainly; but, you see, it had no meaning.”

“There were such strange things mixed up in it—thunder and lightning, a roaring wind, a sound of rushing waters;and then, amidst wind and thunder, there rose the dark barrier that shut out everything.”

“Was it long ago that you dreamt this horrid dream?”

“Yes, a long while. It was just before Christmas. I made a note of the dream in my journal—wrote it down in fear and trembling, lest there should be some kind of fulfilment. But then came your letter—written at the beginning of January, with your description of the ball—and I laughed at my folly in brooding so long upon that phantasmal picture. I remember, by the way, it was two or three nights after your ball that I dreamt my dream, while you no doubt were sleeping just a little sounder than usual after your gaieties.”

“Dreams are very strange,” said Isola, absently. “I wonder whether there is any good in them to counterbalance so much pain?”

CHAPTER VII.

“LOOK THROUGH MINE EYES WITH THINE, TRUE WIFE.”

There were steamers plying between Fowey and Falmouth in this summer weather, and Colonel Disney suggested next morning that Isola should go with him on his journey in search of Tabitha. They would go by water and return in the afternoon by rail. The morning was lovely, and the trip round the coast would be delightful.

“I don’t want to see Tabitha,” Isola answered, with a touch of impatience. “If you are so bent upon seeing her I had rather you went alone.”

“But I had rather not spend a whole day away from you. As for Tabitha, a visit of ten minutes will be quite enough for me. I have brought her a Rhampoor Chuddah—a warm red one. I have only to make her my little gift, and to say a few words—without any anger—about her breach of faith.”

“It was really not a breach of faith. I gave her full permission to go. I was getting just a little tired of her fussiness. She was notmyold servant, you know, Martin. I had not been used to her all my life, as you have.”

“Ah, but she is so good—such a thoroughly good woman.”

“Yes, she is good, no doubt.”

“Well, we’ll go to Falmouth together, and you can stop at the Green Bank, where we can lunch, while I go and find Tabitha. You know her address, I suppose?”

“Yes. She lives at No. 5, Crown Terrace, overlooking the harbour.”

This conversation took place in the garden, where they breakfasted, under a square striped awning, an apology for a tent, set up on the lawn by the river. A badly cooked breakfast seemed less offensive in the garden, where the summer air, and the perfume of the roses eked out the meal. After breakfast Disney called his wife to the drawing-room, where he had brought his spoil from the East, and laid his offerings, as it were, at the feet of his idol.

“See, love, here is a shawl which you can use as acouvre-pied,” he said, flinging a fine cashmere over a chair, “since Fashion decrees that women shall wear shawls no more. And here are some ivory chessmen to assist you in puzzling your brains over the game of Eastern antiquity; and here are vases and things for odd corners. And I have brought you a carved Persian screen, and some Peshawur curtains for your door-ways, and a lamp from Cairo, to make your drawing-room a little more fantastically pretty. I know you love these things.”

She was enraptured with his gifts. Her face lighted up like the face of a child, and she ran from one object to the other in a confused gladness, scarcely able to look at one thing at a time.

“They will make the room too lovely,” she cried; “and they will tell everybody of your far-away travels. I can never thank you half enough for all these treasures.”

“Love me a little, and that will be more than enough.”

“A little. Ah, Martin, I love you so much.”

“Then why do you sigh as you say it? There need be no sighing over our love now. I never shall leave you again.”

He caught her to his breast as he spoke, and kissed the pale sweet face, with a kind of defiant rapture, as if he challenged Fate to do him any harm. The pain of separation from that fair young wife had been so keen an agony that there was a touch of savage exultancy in the joy of re-union—some such fierce gladness as a knight-crusader might have felt in days of old, coming back to his beloved after years of war and travel.

God help the crusader’s wife of those rough days if she had turned from the path of virtue during his exile. There would be a short shrift and a bloody shroud for such a sinner!

They walked into Fowey by that pathway which Isola had trodden so often in the year that was gone—not always alone. The pleasure steamer was waiting in the little haven, where the two rivers part under the cloven hills. Out seaward the air blew fresh and free, and the spray was dashing up against the rocks, and Polruan’s grey roofs were wrapped in morning shadows while Fowey laughed in the sunshine.

That water journey to Falmouth was delicious upon such a morning, and it needed not a brass band of three men and a boy, blaring out the new and popular music-hall song of the year before last, to enliven the voyage. Those arable lands yonder, undulating with every curve of the ever-varying coast-line, the emerald green of young corn shining in the sunlight, copse and spinney here and there in the clefts and hollows, the Gribbin Head standing up stony and grim on the crest of the topmost hill, and, anon, Par harbour lying low upon the level sands, and then this point and that, till they meet the gallant fleet of fishing-boats sailing out from Mevagissey, like a peaceful Armada, and skim past the haven, and the little town and quay crowded at the foot of the hill, and the coastguard’s stronghold yonder, high up against the bright blue sky, whiter than any other mortal habitation ever was or will be. And so to Falmouth, with porpoises playing under their bows, like sportive dolphins, as if they carried Dionysius or Arion on their deck—a brief summer sail, in the keen sweet air of an English summer. To Martin Disney’s British nostrils that atmosphere seemed soul-inspiring, thevery breath of life and gladness, after the experiences of a hot-weather campaign.

And here was Falmouth, with proud Pendennis on a sunny height, and bay and harbour, town and hill, terrace above terrace, tower and steeple—the town and streets all crowded and clustered in the foreground, where the river winds inward to the heart of the land.

The Green Bank gave them cordial welcome, and luncheon was speedily spread in a private sitting-room, at a snug round table by a window overlooking the harbour—luncheon, and of the best, tongue and chicken, and salad, cherry pasty, junket and cream.

Colonel Disney applied himself to the meal with a hearty relish.

“There is just this one advantage in bad cooking at home that it makes one so thoroughly enjoy everything one gets abroad,” he said, laughing at his own prowess.

“I’ll try and get a better cook, if you like, Martin,” Isola said, with rather a helpless air.

To a wife of one and twenty there seems such futility in worrying about a cook.

“You couldn’t possibly get a worse. How long have you put up with this one?”

“Ever since Tabitha left.”

“Good heavens! You have been starving upon ill-cooked food for six months. No wonder you look thin and out of health.”

“I am really very well. There is nothing the matter with me.”

“Yes, yes, there is a great deal the matter. A bad cook, solitude, no one to watch over you and care for you. But that is all over now. You are eating no lunch—not even that superb cherry pasty. I’ll be off to find Tabitha. I shan’t be more than half an hour, unless Crown Terrace is at the extremity of Falmouth. Have you brought a book to read while I am away? No, foolish child. Never mind. There is the county paper, and there is the harbour, with all its life, for you to look at.”

He started on his voyage of discovery, with the warm, comfortable shawl which he had bought for his mother’s old servant hanging over his arm. It was a small disappointment amidst the infinite delight of his home-coming, but when he bought the shawl he had fancied himself putting it round Tabitha’s ample shoulders in the little housekeeper’s room at the Angler’s Nest, a room that was just large enough to hold a linen cupboard, a Pembroke table, a comfortable armchair, and Tabitha, who seemed bigger than all the furniture put together.

He was a man of warm affections, and of that constancy of mind and temper to which forgetfulness of old ties or indifference to past associations is impossible. Tabitha’s image was associated with all the tenderest memories of his youth; with his mother’s widowhood, and with her second marriage—a foolish marriage. At seven and thirty years of age she had taken to herself a second husband, some years her junior, in the person of George Leland, a well-meaning and highly intellectual curate with weak lungs, a union entered upon while her only son was a cadet, and which left her four years later again a widow, with an infant daughter, a child born amidst sickness and sorrow, and christened at the father’s desire Allegra, as if she had entered a world of joy. Through that Indian summer of his mother’s second love, in all the cares and griefs of her second marriage, Tabitha had been trusty and devoted, nursing the frail husband through that last year of fading life which was one long illness, comforting the widow, and rearing the sickly baby until it blossomed into a fine healthy child, whose strength and beauty took every one by surprise.

With all the joys and sorrows of his mother’s life Tabitha had been associated for five and thirty years of conscientious service; and to have lost the good soul now from his fireside was a positive affliction to Martin Disney. Her loss gave an air of instability to his domestic life. Who would ever care for his property as Tabitha had cared—Tabitha who had seen the china and the pictures and drawings collected pieceby piece, who had seen the old family silver drop in by way of legacy from this and that aunt or uncle, till the safe was full of treasures, every one of which had its distinct history? What would a new housekeeper care for General Disney’s coffee-pot, for the George the Second urn that had belonged to his uncle the Indian judge, for his grandmother’s decanter stands? A modern servant would scoff at decanter stands; would wonder they were not melted down. No, rejoiced as he was to be at home once more, home without Tabitha would be something less than home to Martin Disney.

He found Crown Terrace, a row of neat little houses high above the harbour on the Helston road. He had no need to look at the numbers on the doors. He knew Tabitha’s house at a glance, four or five doors off. Who else would have devised such pretty window-boxes, so simple and so artistic; or who else would have hit upon so perfect a harmony of colour in the flowering plants? Who else, of that lowly status, would have chosen such curtains or draped them so gracefully? The little bow-windowed band-box of a house was as pretty as a Parisian toy.

Tabitha was in the window, working with scissors and sponge at one of the flower-boxes. Never an aphid was allowed to rest on Tabitha’s roses or geraniums. She gave a little cry of mixed alarm and delight as she saw that stalwart figure come between her and the sunshine.

“Lor’ sakes, Captain Martin, is it you?” she cried.

“Yes, Tabby, it is I—and I want to know what you’ve got to say to me. Do you know how a deserter feels when he suddenly finds himself face to face with his commanding officer? I never had such a knock-down blow as when I came home the day before yesterday and found you had deserted your post—you whom I trusted so implicitly.”

Tabitha looked at him dumbly—entreatingly—as if she were mutely supplicating him not to be angry. She took this reproof with an air of having thoroughly deserved it, of not having any plea to offer in her defence.

“You’ll come in and sit down a bit, won’t you, CaptainMartin?” she said deprecatingly; and then, without waiting for an answer, she bustled out of the parlour, and anon appeared at the open door.

“Yes, of course I am coming in. I have a great deal to say to you—much more than can be said in the open street.”

Tabitha ushered him into the little parlour; so neat, so cool and dainty a bower, albeit the whole of its contents would scarcely have realized ten pounds at an auction. She offered him her most luxurious easy-chair—a large Madeira chair, with pale chintz cushions and artistic draping; and then, when he had seated himself, she stood before him like a prisoner at the bar, and with unmistakable guilt disturbing the broad placidity of her countenance.

“Tabby, there is my offering from the Indies. May it keep you warm when you run out upon your mysterious errands on autumn evenings, as you used to do in my mother’s time. Sit down, pray; I have lots to say to you.”

Tabitha received the comfortable gift with rapturous thanks. That Captain Martin should have thought of her, so far away, with his head full of fighting, and with death looking him in the face! It was too much, and the tears rolled down her honest cheeks as she thanked him.

“And now, Tabitha, I want a candid answer to a straight question. Why did you leave my wife last January?”

“That’s easily explained, sir. I’m getting old, and I was tired of service. Mrs. Disney was very well able to spare me. Perhaps she didn’t set the same value on me as you did. Young people like young faces about them.”

“All that I can understand; but it didn’t exonerate you from your duty to me. You promised me to take care of my young wife.”

“I did my best, Captain Martin, as long as I could give satisfaction,” faltered Tabitha, growing very pale under this reproof.

“Had you any misunderstanding with Mrs. Disney? Did she find fault with you?”

“Oh no, sir. Mrs. Disney is not one to find fault. She’stoo easy, if anything. No one could be sweeter than she was to me. God knows, if she had been my own daughter I could not have loved her better than I did.”

Here Tabitha broke down altogether, and sobbed aloud.

“Come, come, my good soul, don’t distress yourself,” cried Disney, touched by this emotion. “You loved her; you could not help loving her, could you? And yet you left her.”

“I was getting tired and old, sir; and I had saved enough money to furnish a small house; and my sister, Mrs. David, being a widow without chick or child, wanted me to join her in a lodging-house at the seaside. She’s a beautiful cook, is my sister, much better than ever I was. So perhaps I was over-persuaded: and here I am. What’s done cannot be undone, Captain Martin; but if ever Mrs. Disney should be ill or in grief or trouble, and she should want me, I’ll go to her without an hour’s loss of time. I can never forget that she is your wife, and that she was a kind mistress to me.”

Martin Disney breathed more freely after this speech. He had been curiously disturbed at the idea of a breach between his wife and the old and faithful servant.

“Well, Tabby, I’m glad at least you and my wife are not ill friends,” he said. “I do not care for the loosening of old ties. And now I must be off. Mrs. Disney is waiting for me at the Green Bank.”

Tabitha seemed a little startled on hearing that her late mistress was in Falmouth, but she made no remark upon the fact.

“Good-bye, Tabby. Stay, there’s one favour you can do me. Get me a good cook. The woman we have at present would be a blight upon the happiest home in Christendom.”

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