Captain Hulbert went by the church-path that morning, although it took him ever so far out of his way. He wanted to walk to church with the Disney family, in order to talk over their victory; and the Disneys seemed to-day to resolve themselves into one; and that one was Allegra Leland; for she and the captain walked ahead and discoursed gaily, perhaps in too exultant and worldly a vein for pious church people; but at worst their exultation was in a good cause; for the horn of the lowly was exalted, and the pride of the rich man was brought low.“Do you think he will be at church?” asked Allegra, the pronoun standing for Mr. Crowther.“Of course he will. He must brazen out the position. He will be there, no doubt, gnashing his teeth behind his prayer-book. If angry looks could kill, you and I would be as dead as Ananias and Sapphira before the end of the service.”“Poor, silly man, why did he want to shut up the footpath?” speculated Allegra.“Only to show his importance—to make himself felt in the neighbourhood. They wouldn’t have him for their representative, in spite of his money, and his grand Church and State principles, and all the Primrose Leaguing of his womankind; and so he turns savage and wants to make himself disagreeable.”Yes, it was true that Mr. Crowther had stood for Lostwithiel on three separate occasions, and with equal unsuccess on each. This may have embittered him. If the anger of slighted beauty is a furious thing, no less bitter is the sting of wounded vanity in the rejected candidate.And then the parson and the doctor had told Mr. Crowtherthat he could not close his wood against the public; an all-sufficient reason why he should make the attempt.The Crowther family were in the chancel pew in full force. Allegra thought she detected signs of distress in Mrs. Crowther’s countenance; but the daughters went through the service with their noses in the air, and were more than usually vivacious and conversational among their friends between the church-porch and the landau which bore them away to Glenaveril, and the sumptuous boredom of Sunday luncheon.Merrily went the short autumn days on board theVendetta, and merrily went the tea-drinkings and talk in the drawing-room at the Angler’s Nest. Mrs. Disney did not often join the yachting expeditions east or west. The sea made her head ache, she told them; but Mrs. Baynham, who loved pleasure of any kind, was always ready to chaperon Allegra, and Isola welcomed the wanderers to the cheery fireside and the friendly five-o’clock tea. She spent her own days mostly in the society of her baby, with whom she seemed to hold a kind of mysterious commune. She had no idea of amusing him as the nurse had, none of those conventional tricks and movements which are offered to generation after generation of infants; but the child would lie in her lap for hours while she sang to him in her low sweet voice the songs she had learnt in her early girlhood—songs that the peasants of Brittany sing, some of them—and others of a somewhat loftier strain. She would sing him little bits of Mozart, those immortal melodies, of inexhaustible sweetness and ineffable pathos, music mixed with smiles and tears, melody interwoven with such melting tenderness as thrills the coldest heart. There was a gentle happiness in these solitary hours which the young mother spent with her child; and Martin Disney, coming into the room unawares, sometimes stood for a minute or so in loving contemplation of that domestic picture—the young fair face with its long oval form and delicate features; the pensive gravity of the large violet eyes, and mournful droop of the thin, flower-like lips. He hadseen such a face on canvas, the ideal Madonna of Raffaelle, with just that subdued blonde colouring and pale auburn hair, and just that thoughtful expression.His heart swelled with gladness and gratitude as he contemplated mother and son. Yes, the child had made all things well in his home.Those aching doubts which he felt as he watched beside his wife’s sick-bed had vanished like clouds before the sun. Who could doubt the happiness of the mother, absorbed in her firstborn? Who could doubt the love of the wife, looking up at her husband with such tender welcome as he bent over her shoulder to take the little curled-up fist in his, unfold the crumpled fingers, and press them to his lips?“You are very fond of him, Martin?” she asked, with an often repeated inquiry, knowing what the answer would be.“Fond of him! After you he is all that I have in this world—except Allegra, who will float away into a world of her own by-and-by, and belong to us no more.”“After me! He ought to be first, Martin—your son, your heir, your second self in the days to come. He ought to have the first place in your heart, Martin, for he is your future.”“No one is first but you.”He dropped the baby hand, and took his wife’s head between his hands, and lifted the fair young forehead, looking down at it fondly before he stooped to kiss the soft clustering hair and pencilled brows and ivory temples, with more than a lover’s passion.CHAPTER XIV.“SAY THE FALSE CHARGE WAS TRUE.”The Baynhams’ dinner-party was a function to be anticipated with horror, and undergone with resignation. For the first week after the acceptance of the invitation the ceremony had seemed so far off that it could be talked aboutlightly, and even made an occasion for mirth—Allegra giving her own little sketch of what a dinner at Myrtle Lodge would be like—the drawing-room with its wealth of chair-backs and photograph albums, and the water-colour landscapes which Mrs. Baynham had painted while she was at a finishing school at Plymouth, never having touched brush or pencil since—and Mrs. Baynham’s rosy-cheeked nieces from Truro, who always appeared on the scene of any festivity. Yes, one could tell beforehand what the entertainment would be like.One thing they did not know, however, Mrs. Baynham having been discreetly silent on the subject. They did not know that they were to meet the Glenaveril family in full force, the doctor’s wife being of opinion that a friendly dinner-party was the panacea for all parish quarrels and small antagonisms, and that by judiciously bringing the Crowthers and the Disneys together at a well-spread board, and in the genial atmosphere of her unspacious drawing-room, she could bring about an end of the feud, or tacit coldness, which had divided the Angler’s Nest and Glenaveril since Colonel Disney’s home-coming. It was a disappointment to this worthy woman to see Vansittart Crowther, when Colonel and Mrs. Disney were announced, start and glare as if a mad dog had been brought into the room; but she was relieved at seeing the easy nod which the colonel bestowed upon his vanquished foe, and the friendly hand which good Mrs. Crowther held out to Isola, who paled and blushed, and all but wept at meeting with that cordial matron.“I don’t know why you never come to see me,” said Mrs. Crowther, confidentially, having made room for Isola upon a very pretentious and uncomfortable sofa of the cabriole period, a sofa with a sloping seat and a stately back in three oval divisions, heavily framed in carved walnut, a back against which it was agony to lean, a seat upon which it was martyrdom to sit. “But I don’t see why we shouldn’t be friends when we do happen to meet.”“Dear Mrs. Crowther, we are always friends. I shall never forget your kindness to me.”“There, there; you’re a tender-hearted soul, I know. It grieved me so not to go and see you when you were ill; and not to pay attention to your baby. Such a sweet little fellow, too. I’ve given him many a kiss on the sly when I’ve met him and his nurse in the lanes. I suppose Mr. Crowther and the colonel don’t hitch their horses very well together. That’s at the bottom of it all, no doubt. But as for you and me, Isola, I hope we shall always be good friends.”This confidential talk between the two women, observed by Mrs. Baynham out of the corner of her eye, augured well; but Mr. Crowther had not left off glaring, and a glare in those protruding eyeballs was awful. He usurped the hearthrug, as he laid down the law about the political situation and the impending ruin of the country.“A feeble policy never maintained the prestige of any country, sir,” he told Captain Pentreath, the half-pay bachelor, who was devoted to fishing, and cared very little whether his country had prestige or shuffled on without it—so long as fish would bite. “We lost our prestige when we lost Beaconsfield, and with our prestige we are losing our influence. The Continental powers leave us out of their calculations. The neutral policy of the last ten years has stultified the triumph of British arms from Marlborough to Wellington. The day will come, sir, when the world will cease to believe in the history of those magnificent campaigns. People will say, ‘These are idle traditions. England could never have been a warlike nation.’”Captain Pentreath tried to look interested, but was obviously indifferent to the opinion of future ages, and intent upon watching Allegra, looking her handsomest in a yellow silk gown, and deep in talk with Captain Hulbert, who leant his tall form against Mrs. Baynham’s cottage piano, which, with a view to artistic effect, had been disguised in Algerian drapery, and wheeled into a position that made the room more difficult of navigation.One only of the rosy-cheeked nieces was allowed to appear at the dinner-table; firstly because the table was a tight fit for twelve, and secondly because a thirteenth would have excited superstitious fears. The younger sister, whom people asked about with tender solicitude, was to be on view afterwards, when she would perform the bass to her sister’s treble in the famous overture to Zampa, which, although not exactly a novelty, may be relied upon to open a musical evening withéclat.Every one bad arrived, and after a chilling delay, Potts, the local fishmonger, who had been a butler, and who went out to wait at dinner-parties, and was as familiar a figure as a saddle of mutton or a cod’s head and shoulders, made his solemn announcement, and with an anxious mind, Mrs. Baynham saw her guests parade across the narrow hall somewhat overfurnished with stags’ heads, barometers, gig-whips and umbrella-stands, to the dining-room, while a hot blast of roast meat burst fiercely from the adjacent kitchen.Mrs. Baynham had allotted Isola to Mr. Crowther, determined to carry out her idea of bringing about a friendly feeling. Mr. Baynham took Mrs. Crowther, and Captain Pentreath had the privilege of escorting Belinda, whose sentiments and airs and graces of every kind he knew by heart. There was no more excitement in such companionship than in going in to dinner with his grandmother. What is the use of being brought in continual association with a handsome heiress if you know yourself a detrimental?“She would no more look at me as a lover than she would at a Pariah dog,” said the captain, when some officious boon companion at the club suggested that he should enter himself for the Crowther Stakes.Captain Hulbert was made happy with Allegra, and Colonel Disney was honoured by his hostess, to whom strict etiquette would have prescribed the peer’s son. There was surplus female population in the persons of Alicia Crowther and Mary Baynham, who agreeably adorned each side ofthe table with a little extra sweetness and light; Miss Baynham, buxom and rosy in a white cashmere frock which she had grown out of since her last dinner-party; Miss Crowther, square shouldered and bony, in a black confection by Worth, with a bloated diamond heart making a mirage upon a desert waste of chest, it being a point of honour with thin girls to be moredécoletéesthan their plumper sisters.Mrs. Baynham’s conversation at one of her own dinners was apt to be somewhat distracted and inconsecutive in substance, although she maintained a smiling and delighted air all the time, whatever anxieties might be wearing her spirit—anxieties about the cooking and the attendance—angry wonder at the prolonged absence of the parlour-maid—distress at seeing the lobster sauce dragging its slow length along when people had nearly finished the turbot—agonizing fears lest thevol au ventshould not last out after that enormous help taken by Captain Pentreath, in sheer absence of mind, perhaps, since he only messed it about on his plate, while he bored Miss Crowther with a prosy account of his latest victory over an obstinate demon of the Jack family—“such a devil of a fellow, three feet long, and with jaws like a crocodile.”Colonel Disney was almost as inconsecutive and fragmentary in his conversation as his hostess, and did not imitate her smiling aspect. He was silent and moody, as he had been at the Glenaveril dinner, more than a year ago. That Silenus face bending towards his wife’s ear—that confidential air assumed in every look and tone—made him furious. He could scarcely sit through the dinner. He wounded Mrs. Baynham in her pride of heart as a housekeeper by hardly touching her choicest dishes.“Oh, come now, Colonel Disney,” she pleaded, “you must take one of my lobster cromskys. I don’t mind owning that I made them myself. It is anentréeI learnt from the cook at my own home. My father was always particular about his table, and we had a professed cook. Please don’t refuse a cromsky.”Colonel Disney took the thing on his plate, and sat frowning at it, while a bustle at the door and a marked rise in the temperature indicated the entrance of thepièce de resistance, in the shape of a well-kept saddle of mutton.“Oh, but you had seen theVendettabefore, hadn’t you?” asked the oily voice on the other side of the table. “You knew all about her. Really, now, Mrs. Disney, was that your first visit to Lostwithiel’s yacht?”Isola looked at the speaker as if he had struck her. Great God, how pale she was! Or was it the reflection of the apple-green shade upon the candle in front of her which gave her that ghastly look?“Yes,” she said. “I saw the yacht from the harbour years ago.”“But you were never on board her? How odd, now. I had a notion that you must have seen that pretty cabin, and all Lostwithiel’s finical arrangements. He was so proud of theVendettawhen he was here. He was always asking my girls on board. You remember, Alicia, how Lord Lostwithiel used to ask you two girls to tea?”“Yes,” answered his daughter, in her hard voice. “He asked us often enough, but mother would not let us go.”“How very severe!” said Captain Hulbert, attracted by the sound of his brother’s name. “Why do you object to a tea-party on theVendetta, Mrs. Crowther? Have you a prejudice against yachts? Do you think they are likely to go down in harbour, like the poor oldRoyal George?”“Oh no, I am not afraid of that. Only I liked Lord Lostwithiel to come to tea with us at Glenaveril; and I did not think it would be quite the thing for my girls to visit a bachelor’s yacht, even if I went with them. People at Trelasco are only too ready to make unpleasant remarks. They would have said we were running after Lord Lostwithiel.”“Oh, but it isn’t the single girls who run after the men nowadays,” said Mr. Crowther, with his Silenus grin; “it’s the young married women. They are the sirens.”Nobody took any notice of this remark; and the conversation which had become general for a minute or two resumed its duologue form.Captain Hulbert and Allegra went on with their animated discussion as to the author of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet;” and Captain Pentreath took up the thread of his story about the obstinate pike; Alicia talked to the doctor about her last day with the hounds; and Mary Baynham told Mrs. Crowther about a church bazaar, which had electrified Truro, and at which she had “helped” at somebody else’s stall.“It was hard work standing about and trying to sell things all day, and persuading stingy old gentlemen to put into raffles for talking dolls,” said Miss Baynham. “I have pitied shop-girls ever since.”Mrs. Baynham gave the signal for departure, feeling that her dinner, from a material point of view, had been a success. The lobster sauce had been backward, and the three last people to whom thevol au ventwas offered had got very little except pie-crust and white sauce, but those were small blemishes. The mutton and the pheasants had been unimpeachable; and on those substantial elements Mrs. Baynham took her stand. She had spared neither pains nor money. Her Italian cream was cream, and not cornflour. Her cabinet-pudding was a work of art. She felt satisfied with herself, and knew that the doctor would approve; and yet she felt somehow that the moral atmosphere had not been altogether free from storm-cloud. Colonel Disney had looked on at the feast with a gloomy countenance; Mr. Crowther had talked in an unpleasant tone.“I am afraid those two will never forget the church path,” she thought, as she set her nieces down to Zampa, and then went to inspect the card-table in a snug corner near the fire, with its freshly lighted wax candles, and new cards placed ready for the good old English game which our ancestors called whist.Zampa once started meant a noisy evening. CaptainPentreath would sing “The Maid of Llangollen,” and “Drink, puppy, drink.” Mary Baynham would murder “It was a dream,” and scream the higher notes in “Ruby.” Duet would follow solo, and fantasia succeed ballad, Mrs. Baynham’s idea of a social gathering being the nearest attainable approach to a penny reading. She would have had recitations, and imitations of popular actors, had there been any one capable of providing that form of amusement.This evening, however, she failed in getting a quartette for whist. Neither Mr. Crowther nor his wife was disposed for cards; Colonel Disney coldly declined; and it was useless to ask the young people to leave the attractions of that woody piano. While she was lamenting this state of things, the whist-table being usually a feature in her drawing-room, the Disneys and Allegra bade her good night, and were gone before she had time to remonstrate with them for so early a departure.It seemed earlier than it really was, for the dinner had been late. Disney’s quick ear had heard the step of his favourite horse, punctual as the church clock. He had ordered his carriage at half-past ten, and at half-past ten he and his party left the drawing-room, the doctor following to hand the ladies to their carriage, while the colonel lighted a cigar on the door-step, preparatory to walking home.“It’s a fine night; I’d rather walk,” he said.He walked further than the Angler’s Nest. He walked up to the hill where he and Isola had sat in the summer sunshine on the day after his home-coming. He roamed about that wild height for two hours, and the church clock struck one while he was in the lane leading down to Trelasco.“If that man has any motive for his insolence—if there is any secret between him and my wife, I’ll wring the truth out of him before he is a day older,” the colonel said to himself, as he tramped homewards.He wrote to Mr. Crowther next morning, requesting the favour of half an hour’s private conversation upon a very serious matter. He proposed to call upon Mr. Crowther at twelve o’clock, if that hour would be convenient. The bearer of the note would wait for an answer.Mr. Crowther replied that he would be happy to see Colonel Disney at the hour named.The colonel arrived at Glenaveril with military punctuality, and was forthwith shown into that grandiose apartment, where all those time-honoured works which the respectable family bookseller considers needful to the culture of the country gentleman were arranged in old oak bookcases, newly carved out of soft chestnut wood in the workshops of Venice. It was an imposing apartment, with panelled dado, gilded Japanese paper, heavy cornice and ceiling, incarton pierre—such a room as makes the joy of architect, builder, and furniture-maker. So far as dignity and social position can be bought for money, those attributes had been bought by Vansittart Crowther; and yet this morning, standing before his mediæval fireplace, with his hands in the pockets of his velvet lounge coat, he looked a craven. He advanced a step or two to meet his visitor, and offered his hand, which the colonel overlooked, fixing him at once with a gaze that went straight to the heart of his mystery. He felt that an accuser was before him—that he, Vansittart Crowther, was called to account.“Mr. Crowther, I have come to ask what you mean by your insolent manner to my wife?”“Insolent! My dear Colonel Disney, I admire the lady in question more than any other woman within twenty miles. Surely it is not insolent to admire a pretty woman?”“It is insolent to adopt the tone you have adopted to Mrs. Disney—first in your own house—on the solitary occasion when my wife and I were your guests—and next at the dinner-table last night. I took no notice of your manner on the first occasion—for though I considered your conduct offensive, I thought it might be your ordinarymanner to a pretty woman, and I considered I did enough in forbidding my wife ever to re-enter your house. But last night the offence was repeated—was grosser—and more distinctly marked. What do you mean by talking to my wife of Lord Lostwithiel with a peculiar emphasis? What do you mean by your affectation of a secret understanding with my wife whenever you pronounce Lord Lostwithiel’s name?”“I am not aware that there has been anything peculiar in my pronunciation of that name—or in my manner to Mrs. Disney,” said Mr. Crowther, looking at his boots, but with a malignant smile lurking at the corners of his heavy lips.“Oh, but you are aware of both facts. You meant to be insolent, and meant other people to notice your insolence. It was your way of being even with me for defying you to shut up the wood yonder, and cut off the people’s favourite walk to church. You dared not attack me; but you thought you could wreak your petty spite upon my wife—and you thought I should be too dull to observe, or too much of a poltroon to resent your impertinence. That’s what you thought, Mr. Crowther: and I am here to undeceive you, and to tell you that you are a coward and a liar, and that if you don’t like those words you may send any friend you please to my friend, Captain Hulbert, to arrange a meeting in the nearest and most convenient place on the other side of the channel.”Mr. Crowther turned very red, and then very pale. It was the first time he had been invited to venture his life in defence of his honour; and for the moment it seemed to him that honour was a small thing, a shadowy possession exaggerated into importance by the out-at-elbows and penniless among mankind, who had nothing else to boast of. As if a man who always kept fifty thousand pounds at his bankers, and who had money invested all over the world, would go and risk his life upon the sands of Blankenburgh against a soldier whose retiring allowance was something less thanthree hundred a year, and who was perhaps a dead shot. The idea was preposterous!No, Mr. Crowther was not going to fight; and though he quailed before those steady eyes of Martin Disney’s, calm in their deep indignation, this explanation was not unwelcome to him. He had a dagger ready to plunge into his enemy’s heart, and he did not mean to hold his hand.“I’m not a fighting man, Colonel Disney,” he said; “and if I were I should hardly care to fight for a grass widow who made herself common talk by her flirtation with a man of most notorious antecedents. We will say that it never was any more than a flirtation—in spite of Mrs. Disney’s mysterious disappearance after the Hunt Ball, which happened to correspond with Lord Lostwithiel’s sudden departure. The two events might have no connection—more especially as Mrs. Disney came back ten days after, and Lord Lostwithiel hasn’t come back yet.”“I can answer for my wife’s conduct, sir, under all circumstances, and amidst all surroundings. You are the first person who has ever dared to cast a slur upon her, and it shall not be my fault if you are not the last. I tell you again, to your face, that you are a coward and a liar—a coward because you are insolent to a young and lovely woman, and a liar because you insinuate evil against her which you are not able to substantiate.”“Ask your wife where she was at the end of December, the year before last—the year you were in India. Ask her what she had been doing in London when she came back to Fowey on the last day of the year, and travelled in the same train with my lawyer, Mr. MacAllister, who was struck by her appearance, first because she was so pretty, and next because she looked the picture of misery—got into conversation with her, and found out who she was. If you think that is a lie you can go to MacAllister, in the Old Jewry, and ask him to convince you that it is a fact.”“There is no occasion. My wife has no secrets from me.”“I am glad to hear it. Then there is really nothing tofight about except a good deal of vulgar abuse on your part, which I am willing to overlook. A man of your mature age, married to a beautiful girl, has some excuse for being jealous.”“More excuse, perhaps, than a man of your age has for acting like a cad,” said the colonel, turning upon his heel, and leaving Mr. Crowther to his reflections.Those reflections were not altogether bitter. Mr. Crowther felt assured that he had sown the seeds of future misery. He did not believe in the colonel’s assertion that there were no secrets between him and his wife. He had cherished the knowledge of that mysterious journey from London on the last day of the year. He had warned his confidential friend and solicitor to mention the fact to no one else. He had pried and questioned, and by various crooked ways had found out that Isola had been absent from the Angler’s Nest for some days after the Hunt Ball, and he had told himself that she was a false wife, and that Martin Disney was a fool to trust her.As for being called by harsh names, he was too much a man of the world to attach any importance to an angry husband’s abuse. It made him not a sixpence the poorer; and as there had been no witness to the interview it scarcely diminished his dignity. The thing rested between him and his enemy.“He took down my gates, but I think I have given him something to think about that will spoil his rest for many a night, before he has thought it out,” mused Mr. Crowther.It was after the usual luncheon hour before Martin Disney went back to the Angler’s Nest. He had been for a long walk by the river, trying to walk down the devil that raged within him, before he could trust himself to go home. His wife was alone in the drawing-room, sitting by the fire with her baby in her lap; but this time he did not pause on the threshold to contemplate that domestic picture. There was no tenderness in the eyes which looked at his wife—only a stern determination. Every feature in the familiar facelooked strange and rigid, as in the face of an accuser and judge.“Send the child away, Isola. I want some serious talk with you.”She stretched out a faltering hand to the bell, looking at him, pale and scared, but saying no word. She gave the baby to his nurse presently in the same pallid dumbness, never taking her eyes from her husband’s face.“Martin,” she gasped at last, frozen by his angry gaze, “is there anything wrong?”“Yes, there is something horribly wrong—something that means destruction. What were you doing in London the winter before last, while I was away? What was the motive of your secret departure—your stealthy return? What were you doing on the last day of the year? Where had you been? With whom?”She looked at him breathless with horror; whether at the accusation implied in his words, or at his withering manner, it would have been difficult for the looker-on to decide. His manner was terrible enough to have scared any woman, as he stood before her, waiting for her answer.“Where had you been—with whom?” he repeated, while her lips moved mutely, quivering as in abject fear. “Great God! why can’t you answer? Why do you look such a miserable, degraded creature—self-convicted—not able to speak one word in your own defence?”“On the last day of the year?” she faltered, with those tremulous lips.“On the last day of the year before last—the winter I spent in Burmah. What were you doing—where were you—where had you been? Is it so difficult to remember?”“No, no; of course not,” she cried, with a half-hysterical laugh. “You frighten me out of my senses, Martin. I don’t know what you are aiming at. I was coming home from London on that day—of course—the 31st of Jan—no, December. Coming home from Hans Place, where I had been spending a few days with Gwendolen.”“You never told me of that visit to Gwendolen.”“Oh yes; I’m sure I told you all about it in one of my letters. Perhaps you did not get that letter—I remember you never noticed it in yours. Martin, for God’s sake, don’t look at me like that!”“I am looking at you to see if you are the woman I have loved and believed in, or if you are as false as hell,” he said, with his strong hand grasping her shoulder, her face turned to his, so that those frightened eyes of hers could not escape his scrutiny.“Who has put this nonsense in your head?”“Your neighbour—your good Mrs. Crowther’s husband—told me that his lawyer travelled with you from Paddington—on the 31st of December—the year before last. He got into conversation with you—you remember, perhaps?”“No,” she cried, with a sudden piteous change in her face, “I can’t remember.”“But you came from London on that day. You remember that?”“Yes, yes. I came from Gwendolen’s house on that day. I told you so in my letter.”“That letter which I never received—telling me of that visit to which you made no allusion in any of your later letters. It was about that time, I think, that you fell off as a correspondent—left off telling me all the little details of your life—which in your earlier letters seemed to shorten the distance between us.”She was silent, listening to his reproaches with a sullen dumbness, as it seemed to him, while he stood there in his agony of doubt—in his despairing love. He turned from her with a heart-broken sigh, and slowly left the room, going away he scarce knew whither, only to put himself beyond the possibility of saying hard things to her, of letting burning, branding words flash out of the devouring fire in his heart.She stood for a few moments after he had gone, hesitating, breathless, and frightened, like a hunted animal at bay—then ran to the door, opened it softly, and listened. She could hear him pacing the room above. Again she stood still and hesitated, her lips tightly set, her hands clenched, her brow bent in painful thought. Then she snatched hat and jacket from a corner of the hall where such things were kept, and put them on hurriedly, with trembling hands, as if her fate depended upon the speed with which she got herself ready to go out, looking up at the great, dim, brazen face of the eight-day clock all the while. And then she let herself out at a half-glass door into the garden, and walked quickly to a side gate that opened in to the lane—the gate at which the baker and the butcher stopped to gossip with the maids on fine mornings.There was a cold bracing wind, and the sun was declining in a sky barred with dense black clouds—an ominous sky, prophetic of storm or rain. Isola walked up the hill towards Tywardreath as if she were going on an errand of deadliest moment, skirted and passed the village, with no slackening of her pace, and so by hill and valley to Par, a long and weary walk under ordinary circumstances for a delicate young woman, although accustomed to long country walks. But Isola went upon her lonely journey with a feverish determination which seemed to make her unconscious of distance. Her steps never faltered upon the hard, dusty road. The autumn wind that swept the dead leaves round her feet seemed to hold her up and carry her along without effort upon her part. Past copse and meadow, common land and stubble, she walked steadily onward, looking neither to right nor left of her path, only straight forward to the signal lights that showed fiery red in the grey dusk at Par Junction. She watched the lights growing larger and more distinct as she neared the end of her journey. She saw the fainter lights of the village scattered thinly beyond the station lamps, low down towards the sandy shore. She heard the distant rush of a train, and the dull sob of the sea creeping up along the level shore, between the great cliffs that screened the bay. A clock struck six as shewaited at the level crossing, in an agony of impatience, while truck after truck of china clay crept slowly by, in a procession that seemed endless; and then for the first time she felt that the wind was cold, and that her thin serge jacket did not protect her from that biting blast. Finally the line was clear, and she was able to cross and make her way to the village post-office.Her business at the post-office occupied about a quarter of an hour, and when she came out into the village street the sky had darkened, and there were heavy rain-drops making black spots upon the grey dust of the road; but she hurried back by the way she had come, recrossed the line, and set out on the long journey home. The shower did not last long, but it was not the only one she encountered on her way back, and the poor little jacket was wet through when she re-entered by the servant’s gate, and by the half-glass door, creeping stealthily into her own house and running upstairs to her own room to get rid of her wet garments before any one could surprise her with questions and sympathy. It was past eight o’clock, though she had walked so fast all the way as to feel neither cold nor damp. She took off her wet clothes and dressed herself for dinner in fear and trembling, imagining that her absence would have been wondered at, and her errand would be questioned. It was an infinite relief when she went down to the drawing-room to find only Allegra sitting at her easel, working at a sepia sketch by lamplight.“Martin is very late,” she said, looking up as Isola entered, “and he is generally a model of punctuality. I hope there is nothing wrong. Where have you been hiding yourself since lunch, Isa? Have you been lying down?”“Yes, part of the time”—hesitatingly. “It is very late.”“Twenty minutes to nine. Dale has been in twice in the last quarter of an hour to say that the dinner is being spoilt. Hark! There’s the door, and Martin’s step. Thank God, there is nothing wrong!” cried Allegra, getting up and going out to meet her brother.Colonel Disney’s countenance as he stood in the lamplight was not so reassuring as the substantial fact of his return. It was something to know that he was not dead, or hurt in any desperate way—victim of any of those various accidents which the morbid mind of woman can imagine if husband or kinsman be unusually late for dinner; but that things were all right with him was open to question. He was ghastly pale, and had a troubled, half-distracted expression which seared Allegra almost as much as his prolonged absence had done.“I am sure there is something wrong!” she said, when they were seated at dinner, and the parlour-maid had withdrawn for a minute or two in pursuance of her duties, having started them fairly with the fish.“Oh no, there is nothing particularly amiss; I have been worried a little, that’s all. I am very sorry to be so unconscionably late for dinner, and to sit down in this unkempt condition. But I loitered at the club looking at the London papers. I shall have to go to London to-morrow, Isola—on business—and I want you to go with me. Have you any objection?”She started at the word London, and looked at him curiously—surprised, yet resolute—as if she were not altogether unprepared for some startling proposition on his part.“Of course not. I would rather go with you if you really have occasion to go.”“I really have. It is very important. You won’t mind our deserting you for two or three days, will you, Allegra?” asked Disney, turning to his sister. “Mrs. Baynham will be at your service as chaperon if you want to go out anywhere while we are away. It is an office in which she delights.”“I won’t trouble her. I shall stay at home, and paint all the time. I have a good deal of work to do to my pictures before they will be ready for the winter exhibition, and the time for sending in is drawing dreadfully near.You need have no anxiety as to my gadding about, Martin. You will find me shut up in my painting-room, come home when you will.”Later, when she and her brother were alone in the drawing-room, she went up to him softly and put her arms around his neck.“Martin, dearest, I know you have some great trouble. Why don’t you tell me? Is it anything very bad? Does it mean loss of fortune; poverty to be faced; this pretty home to be given up, perhaps?”“No, no, no, my dear. The home is safe enough; the house will stand firm as long as you and I live. I am not a shilling poorer than I was yesterday. There is nothing the matter—nothing worth speaking about; blue devils, vapours if you like. That’s all.”“You are ill, Martin. You have found out that there is something wrong with you—heart, lungs, something—and you are going to London to consult a physician. Oh, my dear, dear brother,” she cried, with a look of agony, her arms still clasped about his neck, “don’t keep me in the dark; let me know the worst.”“There is no worst, Allegra. I am out of sorts, that’s all. I am going to town to see my lawyer.”CHAPTER XV.“MY LIFE CONTINUES YOURS, AND YOUR LIFE MINE.”They started by the eleven-o’clock train from Fowey next morning, husband and wife, in a strangely silent companionship—Isola very pale and still as she sat in a corner of the railway carriage, with her back to the rivers and the sea. Naturally, in a place of that kind, they could not get away without being seen by some of their neighbours. Captain Pentreath was going to Bodmin, and insisted upon throwing away a half-finished cigar in order to enjoy the privilege of Colonel and Mrs. Disney’s society, being one of those unmeditative animals who hate solitude. He talked all the way to Par, lit a fresh cigar during the wait at the junction, and reappeared just as the colonel and his wife were taking their seats in the up-train.“Have you room for me in there?” he asked, sacrificing more than half of his second cigar. “I’ve got theMercury—Jepps is in for Stokumpton—a great triumph for our side.”He spread out the paper, and made believe to begin to read with a great show of application, as if he meant to devour every syllable of Jepps’s long exposition of the political situation; but after two minutes he dropped theMercuryon his knees and began to talk. There were people in Fowey who doubted whether Captain Pentreath could read. He had been able once, of course, or he could hardly have squeezed himself into the Army; but there was an idea that he had forgotten the accomplishment, except in its most elementary form upon sign-boards, and in the headings of newspaper articles, printed large. It was supposed that the intensity of effort by which he had taken in the cramming that enabled him to pass the ordeal of the Examiners had left his brain a blank.“You’re not going further than Plymouth, I suppose?” he asked.“We are going to London.”“Are you really, now? A bad time of year for London—fogs and thaws, and all kinds of beastly weather.”And then he asked a string of questions—futile, trivial, vexing as summer flies buzzing round the head of an afternoon sleeper; and then came the welcome cry of Bodmin Road, and he reluctantly left them.The rest of the journey was passed almost in silence. They had the compartment to themselves for the greater part of the time, and they sat in opposite corners, pretending to read—Isola apparently absorbed in a book that she had taken up at random just before she started, when the carriage was at the door, and while Allegra was calling to her to make haste.It was Carlyle’s “Hero Worship.” The big words, the magnificent sentences, passed before her eyes like lines in an unknown language. She had not the faintest idea what she was reading; but she followed the lines and turned the leaf at the bottom of a page mechanically.Martin Disney applied himself to the newspapers which he had accumulated on the way—some at Par, some at Plymouth, some at Exeter, till the compartment was littered all over with them. He turned and tossed them about one after the other. Never had they seemed so empty—the leaders such mere beating the air; the hard facts so few and insignificant. He glanced at Isola as she sat in her corner, motionless and composed. He watched the slender, white hands turning the leaves of her book at regular intervals.“Is your book very interesting?” he asked, at last, exasperated by her calmness.He had been attentive and polite to her, offering her the papers, ordering tea for her at Exeter, doing all that a courteous husband ought to do; but he had made no attempt at conversation—nor had she. This question about the book was wrung from him by the intensity of his irritation.“It is a book you gave me years ago at Dinan,” she answered, looking at him piteously. “‘Hero Worship.’ Don’t you remember? I had never read anything of Carlyle’s before then. You taught me to like him.”“Did I? Yes, I remember—a little Tauchnitz volume bound in morocco—contraband in England. A cheat—like many things in this life.”He turned his face resolutely to the window, as if to end the conversation, and he did not speak again till they were moving slowly into the great station, in the azure brightness of the electric light.“I have telegraphed for rooms at Whitley’s,” he said, naming a small private hotel near Cavendish Square, where they had stayed for a few days before he started for the East.“Do you think it would be too late for us to call at Hans Place before we go to our hotel?”She started at the question. He saw her cheeks crimson in the lamplight.“I don’t think the lateness of hour will matter,” she said, “unless Gwendolen is dining out. She dines out very often.”“I hope to-night may be an exception.”“Do you want very much to see her?” asked Isola.“Very much.”“You are going to question her about me, I suppose?”“Yes, Isola, that is what I am going to do.”“It is treating me rather like a criminal; or, at any rate, like a person whose word cannot be believed.”“I can’t help myself, Isola. The agony of doubt that I have gone through can only be set at rest in one way. It is so strange a thing, so impossible as it seems to me, that you should have visited your sister while I was away, although no letter I received from you contained the slightest allusion to that visit—an important event in such a monotonous life as yours—and although no word you have ever spoken since my return has touched upon it; till all at once, at a moment’s notice, when I tell you of your journey from London and the slander to which it gave occasion—all at once you spring this visit upon me, as if I ought to have known all about it.”“You can ask Gwendolen as many questions as you like,” answered Isola, with an offended air, “and you will see if she denies that I was with her in the December you were away.”Colonel Disney handed his wife into a station brougham. The two portmanteaux were put upon the roof, and the order was given—99, Hans Place—for albeit Mr. Hazelrigg’s splendid mansion was described on his cards and his writing-paper as The Towers, it is always as well to have a number for common people to know us by.No word was spoken during the long drive from Paddington; no word when the neat little brougham drew up infront of a lofty flight of steps leading up to a Heidelberg doorway, set in the midst of a florid red-brick house, somewhat narrow in proportion to its height, and with over much ornament in the way of terra cotta panelling, bay and oriel, balcony and pediment.A footman in dark green livery and rice powder opened the door. Mrs. Hazelrigg was at home. He led the way to one of those dismal rooms which are to be found in most fine houses—a room rarely used by the family—a kind of pound for casual visitors. Sometimes the pound is as cold and cheerless as a vestry in a new Anglican church; sometimes it affects a learned air, lines its walls with books that no one ever reads, and calls itself a library. Whatever form or phase it may take, it never fails to chill the visitor.There was naturally no fire in this apartment. Isola sank shivering into a slippery leather chair, near the Early English fender; her husband walked up and down the narrow floor space. This lasted for nearly ten minutes, when Gwendolen came bursting in, a vision of splendour, in a grey satin tea-gown, frothed with much foam of creamy lace and pale pink ribbon, making a cascade of fluffiness from chin to slippered toes.“What a most astonishing thing!” she cried, after kissing Isola, and holding out both her plump, white hands to the colonel. “Have you dear, good people dropped from the clouds? I thought you were nearly three hundred miles away when the man came to say you were waiting to see me. It is a miracle we are dining at home to-night. We are so seldom at home. Of course you will stay and dine with us. Come up to my room and take off your hat, Isa. No, you needn’t worry about dress,” anticipating Disney’s refusal; “we are quite alone. I am going to dine in my tea-gown, and Daniel is only just home from the city.”“You are very kind; no, my dear Mrs. Hazelrigg, we won’t dine with you to-night,” answered Disney. “We have only just come up to town. We drove across the park to see you before going to our hotel. Our portmanteaux are waiting atthe door. We are in town for so short a time that I wanted to see you at once—particularly as I have—a rather foolish question to ask you.”His voice grew husky, though he tried his uttermost to maintain a lightness of tone.“Ask away,” said Gwendolen, straightening herself in her glistening grey gown, a splendid example of modern elegance in dress and demeanour, and altogether a more brilliant and imposing beauty than the pale, fragile figure sitting in a drooping attitude beside the fireless hearth. “Ask away,” repeated Gwendolen, gaily, glancing at her sister’s mournful face as she spoke. “If I can answer you I will—but please to consider that I have a wretched memory.”“You are not likely to forget the fact I want to ascertain. My wife and I have had an argument about dates—we are at variance about the date of her last visit to you—while I was away—and I should like to settle our little dispute, though it did not go so far as a wager. When was she with you? On what date did she leave you?”All hesitation and huskiness were gone from manner and voice. He stood like a pillar, with his face turned towards his sister-in-law, his eyes resolute and inquiring.“Oh, don’t ask me about dates,” cried Gwendolen, “I never know dates. I buy Letts in every form, year after year—but I never can keep up my diary. Nothing but a self-acting diary would be of any use to me. It was in December she came to me—and in December she left—after a short visit. Come, Isa. You must remember the dates of your arrival and departure, better than I. You don’t live in the London whirl. You don’t have your brains addled by hearing about Buenos Ayres, Reading and Philadelphias, Berthas, Brighton A’s, and things.”Martin Disney looked at her searchingly. Her manner was perfectly easy and natural, of a childlike transparency. Her large, bright, blue eyes looked at him—fearless and candid as the eyes of a child.“You ought to remember that it was on the last day ofthe year I left this house,” said Isola, in her low, depressed voice, as of one weary unto death. “You said enough about it at the time.”“Did I? Oh, I am such a feather-head,tête de linotte, as they used to call me at Dinan. So it was—New Year’s Eve—and I was vexed with you for not staying to see the New Year in. That was it. I remember everything about it now.”“Thank you, Mrs. Hazelrigg,” said Martin Disney, and then going over to his wife, he said gravely, “Forgive me, Isola, I was wrong.”He held out his hands to her with a pleading look, and she rose slowly from her chair, and let her head fall upon his breast as he put his arms round her, soothing and caressing her.“My poor girl, I was wrong—wrong—wrong—a sinner against your truth and purity,” he murmured low in her ear; and then he added laughingly, to Gwendolen, “Were we not fools to dispute about such a trifle?”“All married people are fools on occasion,” answered Mrs. Hazelrigg. “I have often quarrelled desperately with Daniel about a mere nothing—not because he was wrong, but because I wanted to quarrel. That kind of thing clears the air—like a thunderstorm. One feels so dutiful and affectionate afterwards. Dan gave me this sapphire ring after one of our biggest rows,” she added, holding up a sparkling finger.Daniel Hazelrigg came into the room while she was talking of him, a large man, with a bald head and sandy beard, a genial-looking man, pleased with a world in which he had been permitted always to foresee the rise and fall of stocks. The Hazelriggs were the very type of a comfortable couple, so steeped in prosperity and the good things of this world as to be hardly aware of any keener air outside the gardenia-scented atmosphere of their own house; hardly aware of men who dined badly or women who made their own gowns; much less of men who never dined at all, orwomen who flung themselves despairing from the parapets of the London bridges.Mr. Hazelrigg came into the room beaming, looked at his wife and smiled, as he held out his hand to Colonel Disney, looked at his sister-in-law and smiled again, and held out his hand to her, the smile broadening a little, as if with really affectionate interest.“I’m very glad to see you, my dear Mrs. Disney; but I can’t compliment you upon looking as well as you did when we last met.”“She is tired after her long journey,” said Gwendolen, quickly. “That’s all there is amiss.”“The sooner we get to our hotel the better for both of us,” said Disney. “We are dusty and weather-beaten, and altogether bad company. Good night, Mrs. Hazelrigg.”“But surely you’ll stop and dine; it’s close upon eight,” remonstrated Hazelrigg, who was the essence of hospitality. “You can send on your luggage, and go to your hotel later.”“You are very good, but we are not fit for dining out. Isola looks half dead with fatigue,” answered Disney. “Once more, good night.”He shook hands with husband and wife and hurried Isola to the door.“Be sure you come to me the first thing to-morrow,” said Gwendolen to her sister. “I shall stay in till you come, and I can drive you anywhere you want to go for your shopping—Stores, Lewis and Allanby’s—anywhere. I want to show you my drawing-room. I have changed everything in it. You’ll hardly know it again.”She and her husband followed the departing guests to the hall, saw them get into the little brougham and drive off into the night; and then Gwendolen put her arm through her husband’s with a soft clinging affectionateness, as of a Persian cat, that knew when it was well housed and taken good care of.“Poor Isa! how awfully ill she looks,” sighed Gwendolen.“Ghastly. Are all women alike, I wonder, Gwen?”“I think you ought to know what kind of woman I am by this time,” retorted his wife, tossing up her head.Martin Disney and his wife were alone in their sitting-room at the hotel, somewhat bare and unhomelike, as hotel rooms must always be, despite the march of civilization which has introduced certain improvements. He had made a pretence of dining in the coffee-room below, and she had taken some tea and toast beside the fire; and now at ten o’clock they were sitting on each side of the hearth, face to face, pale and thoughtful, and strangely silent.“Isola, have you forgiven me?” he asked at last.“With all my heart. Oh, Martin, I could never be angry with you—never. You have been so good to me. How could I be angry?”“But you have the right to be angry. I ought not to have doubted. I ought to have believed your word against all the world; but that man raised a doubting devil in me. I was mad with fears and suspicions, wild and unreasonable—as I suppose jealousy generally is. I had never been jealous before. Great God! what a fearful passion it is when a man gives himself up to it. I frightened you by my vehemence, and then your scared looks frightened me. I mistook fear for guilt. Isola, my beloved, let me hear the truth from your own lips—the assurance—the certainty,” he cried with impassioned fervour, getting up and going over to her, looking down into the pale, upturned face with those dark, earnest eyes which always seemed to search the mysteries of her heart. “Let there be no shadow of uncertainty or distrust between us. I have heard from your sister that you were with her when you said you were. That is much. It settles for that vile cad’s insinuated slander; but it is not enough. Let the assurance come to me from your lips—from yours alone. Tell me—by the God who will judge us both some day—Are you my own true wife?”“I am, Martin—I am your own true wife,” she answered,with an earnestness that thrilled him. “I have not a thought that is not of you. I love you with all my heart and mind. Is not that enough?”“And you have never wronged me? You have been true and pure always? I call upon God to hear your words, Isola. Is that true?”“Yes, yes; it is true.”“God bless you, darling! I will never speak of doubt again. You are my own sweet wife, and shall be honoured and trusted to the end of my days. Thank God, the cloud is past, and we can be happy again!”She rose from her low seat by the fire, and put her arms round his neck, and hid her face upon his breast, sobbing hysterically.“My own dear girl, I have been cruel to you—brutal and unkind; but you would forgive me if you knew what I have suffered since noon yesterday; and, indeed, my suffering began before then. That man’s harping on Lostwithiel’s name in all his talk with you—his air of meaning more than he said—and your embarrassment, awakened suspicions that had to be set at rest somehow. Remember the disadvantages under which I labour—the difference in our ages; my unattractiveness as compared with younger men. These things predisposed me to doubt your love. I have not had a moment’s peace since the night of that odious dinner-party. Yes; I have felt a new sensation. I know what jealousy means. But it is past. Praise be to God, it is past. I have come out of the cloud again. Oh, my love, had it been otherwise! Had we been doomed to part!”“What would you have done, Martin?” she asked, in a low voice, with her face still hidden against his breast, his arms still round her.“What would I have done, love? Nothing to bring shame on you. Nothing to add to your dishonour or sharpen the agony of remorse. I should have taken my son—my son could not be left under the shadow of a mother’s shame. He and I would have vanished out of your life. You wouldhave heard no more of us. The world would have known nothing. You would have been cared for and protected from further evil—protected from your own frailty. So far, I would have done my duty as your husband to the last day of my life; but you and I would never have looked upon each other again.”Colonel Disney and his wife stayed in London two days; perhaps to give a colour to their sudden and in somewise unexplained journey; but Isola refused all her sister’s invitations, to lunch, to drive, to dine, to go to an afternoon concert at the Albert Hall, or to see the last Shakespearean revival at the Lyceum. She pleaded various excuses; and Gwendolen had to be satisfied with one visit, at afternoon teatime, when husband and wife appeared together, on the eve of their return to Cornwall.“It was too bad of you not to come to me yesterday morning, as you promised,” Gwendolen said to her sister. “I stayed indoors till after luncheon on your account; and the days are so short at this time of year. I couldn’t do any shopping.”Mrs. Hazelrigg was one of those young women for whom life is flavourless when they have nothing to buy. She was so well supplied with everything that women desire or care for that she had to invent wants for herself. She had to watch the advertisements in order to tempt herself with some new wish; were it only for a patent toast-rack, or a new design in ivory paper-knives. The stationers helped to keep life in her by their new departures in writing-paper. Papyrus, Mandarin, Telegraphic, Good Form, Casual, mauve, orange, scarlet, verdigris green. So long as the thing was new it made an excuse for sitting in front of a counter and turning over the contents of a show-case.“You never came to look at my drawing-room by daylight,” she went on complainingly. “You can’t possibly judge the tints by lamplight. Every chair is of a different shade. I think you have treated me shamefully. I havesent you more telegrams than I could count. And I had such lots to talk about. Have you heard from Dinan lately?”“Not since August, when mother wrote in answer to our invitation for her and father to spend a month with us. I felt it was hopeless when I wrote to her.”“Utterly hopeless! Nothing will tempt her to cross the sea. She writes about it as if it were the Atlantic. And Lucy Folkestone tells me she is getting stouter.”“You mean mother?”“Yes, naturally. There’s no fear of Lucy ever being anything but bones. Mother is stouter and more sedentary than ever, Lucy says. It’s really dreadful. One doesn’t know where it will end,” added Gwendolen, looking down at her own somewhat portly figure, as if fearing hereditary evil.“I shall have to take Isa and the boy to Dinan next summer,” said Disney. “It is no use asking the father and mother to cross the channel; though I think they would both like to see their grandson.”“Mother raved about him in her last letter to me,” replied Gwendolen. “She was quite overcome by the photograph you sent her, only she has got into such a groove—her knitting, her novel, her little walk on the terrace, her long consultations with Toinette about the smallest domestic details—whether the mattresses shall be unpicked to-day or to-morrow, or whether thelessiveshall be a week earlier or a week later. It is dreadful to think of such a life,” added Gwendolen, as if her own existence were one of loftiest aims.CHAPTER XVI.“SORROW THAT’S DEEPER THAN WE DREAM, PERCHANCE.”Life flowed on its monotonous course, like the Fowey river gliding down from Lostwithiel to the sea; and there seemed nothing in this world that could again disturb Martin Disney’s domestic peace. Vansittart Crowther made nofurther attempt to avenge himself for the night attack upon his gates; nor did he demand any apology for the vulgar abuse which he had suffered in the sanctuary of his own library. This he endured, and even further outrage, in the shape of the following letter from Colonel Disney:—“Sir,“As you have been pleased to take a certain old-womanish interest in my domestic affairs, I think it may be as well to satisfy your curiosity so far as to inform you that when your solicitor travelled in the same train with my wife, she was returning from a visit to her married sister’s house, a visit which had my sanction and approval. I can only regret that her husband’s modest means constrained her to travel alone, and subjected her to the impertinent attentions of one cad and to the slanderous aspersions of another.“I have the honour to be,“Yours, etc.,“Martin Disney.”Mr. Crowther treated this letter with the silent contempt which he told himself it merited. What could he say to a man so possessed by uxorious hallucinations, so steeped in the poppy and mandragora of a blind affection, that reason had lost all power over his mind.“I spoke plain enough—as plain as I dared,” said Mr. Crowther. “He may ride the high horse and bluster as much as he likes. I don’t think he’ll ever feel quite happy again.”Yet in spite of hints and insinuations from the enemy at his gates, Martin Disney was happy—utterly happy in the love of his young wife, and in the growing graces of his infant son. He no longer doubted Isola’s affection. Her tender regard for him showed itself in every act of her life; in every look of the watchful face that was always on the alert to divine his pleasure, to forestall his wishes. Mrs. Baynham went about everywhere expatiating on the domestic happiness of the Disney family, to whom she was more thanever devoted, now that she felt herself in a manner related to them, having been elevated to the position of godmother to the firstborn—a very different thing to being godmother to some sixth or seventh link in the family-chain, when all thought of selection has been abandoned, and the only question mooted by the parents has been, “What good-natured friendcanwe ask this time?”Captain Hulbert took his yacht to other waters in November, only to come sailing back again in December, when he finally laid up theVendettain winter quarters, and took up his abode at the Mount, where he availed himself of his brother’s stud, which had been reduced to two old hunters and a pair of carriage-horses of mediocre quality. And so the shortening days drew on towards Christmas; baby’s first Christmas, as that small person’s adorers remarked—as if it were a wonderful thing for any young Christian to make a beginning of life—and all was happiness at the Angler’s Nest. All was happiness without a cloud, till one morning—Allegra and her brother being alone in the library, where she sometimes painted at her little table-easel, while he read—she put down her palette and went over to him, laying her hand upon his shoulder as he sat in his accustomed place in the old-fashioned bow-window.“Martin, I want to speak to you about Isola,” she said, rather tremulously.“What about her? Why, she was here this minute,” he exclaimed. “Is there anything amiss?”“I do not think she is so strong as she ought to be. You may not notice, perhaps. A woman is quicker to see these things than a man—and she and I used to walk and row together—I am able to see the difference in her since last year. She seems to me to have been going back in her health for the last month or two, since her wonderful recovery from her illness. Don’t be anxious, Martin!” she said, answering his agonized look. “I feel sure there is nothing that a little care cannot cure; but I want to put you on your guard. I asked her to let me send for Mr. Baynham, and she refused.”“Why, he sees her two or three times a week—he is in and out like one of ourselves.”“But he doesn’t see her professionally. He comes in hurriedly late in the evening—or between the lights—to fetch his wife. He is tired, and we all talk to him, and Isa is bright and lively. He is not likely to notice the change in her in that casual way.”“Is there a change?”“Yes, I am sure there is. Although I see her every day, I am conscious of the change.”“Baynham shall talk to her this afternoon.”“That’s right, Martin—and if I were you I’d have the doctor from Plymouth again.”Life had been so full of bliss lately, and yet he had not been afraid. Yes, it was the old story. “Metuit secundis.” That is what the wise man does. Fools do otherwise—hug themselves in their short-lived gladness, and say in their hearts, “There is no death.”Mr. Baynham came in the afternoon, in answer to a little note from Martin Disney, and he and Isola were closeted together in the library for some time, with baby’s nurse in attendance to assist her mistress in preparing for the ordeal by stethoscope. Happily that little instrument which thrills us all with the aching pain of fear when we see it in the doctor’s hand, told no evil tidings of Isola’s lungs or heart. Thero was nothing organically wrong—but the patient was in a very weak state.“You really are uncommonly low,” said Mr. Baynham, looking at her intently as she stood before him in the wintry sunlight. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing to yourself to bring yourself down so much since last summer—after all the trouble I took to build you up, too. I’m afraid you’ve been worrying yourself about the youngster—a regular young Hercules. I don’t know whether he’d be up to strangling a pair of prize pythons; but I’m sure he could strangle you. I shall send you a tonic; and you’ll have totake a good deal more care of yourself than you seem to have been taking lately.”And then he laid down severe rules as to diet, until it seemed to Isola that he wished her to be eating and drinking all day—new-laid eggs, cream, old port, beef-tea—all the things which she had loathed in the dreary days of her long illness.Mr. Baynham had a serious talk with the colonel after he left Isola, and it was agreed between them that she should be taken to Plymouth next day to see the great authority.“You are giving yourself a great deal too much trouble about me, Martin,” she said. “There is nothing wrong. I am only a little weak and tired sometimes.”Her husband looked at her heart-brokenly. Weak and tired. Yes; there were all the signs of failing life in those languid movements of the long, slender limbs, in the transparent pallor of the ethereal countenance. Decay was lovely in this fair young form; but he felt that it was decay. There must be something done to stop Misfortune’s hastening feet.
Captain Hulbert went by the church-path that morning, although it took him ever so far out of his way. He wanted to walk to church with the Disney family, in order to talk over their victory; and the Disneys seemed to-day to resolve themselves into one; and that one was Allegra Leland; for she and the captain walked ahead and discoursed gaily, perhaps in too exultant and worldly a vein for pious church people; but at worst their exultation was in a good cause; for the horn of the lowly was exalted, and the pride of the rich man was brought low.“Do you think he will be at church?” asked Allegra, the pronoun standing for Mr. Crowther.“Of course he will. He must brazen out the position. He will be there, no doubt, gnashing his teeth behind his prayer-book. If angry looks could kill, you and I would be as dead as Ananias and Sapphira before the end of the service.”“Poor, silly man, why did he want to shut up the footpath?” speculated Allegra.“Only to show his importance—to make himself felt in the neighbourhood. They wouldn’t have him for their representative, in spite of his money, and his grand Church and State principles, and all the Primrose Leaguing of his womankind; and so he turns savage and wants to make himself disagreeable.”Yes, it was true that Mr. Crowther had stood for Lostwithiel on three separate occasions, and with equal unsuccess on each. This may have embittered him. If the anger of slighted beauty is a furious thing, no less bitter is the sting of wounded vanity in the rejected candidate.And then the parson and the doctor had told Mr. Crowtherthat he could not close his wood against the public; an all-sufficient reason why he should make the attempt.The Crowther family were in the chancel pew in full force. Allegra thought she detected signs of distress in Mrs. Crowther’s countenance; but the daughters went through the service with their noses in the air, and were more than usually vivacious and conversational among their friends between the church-porch and the landau which bore them away to Glenaveril, and the sumptuous boredom of Sunday luncheon.Merrily went the short autumn days on board theVendetta, and merrily went the tea-drinkings and talk in the drawing-room at the Angler’s Nest. Mrs. Disney did not often join the yachting expeditions east or west. The sea made her head ache, she told them; but Mrs. Baynham, who loved pleasure of any kind, was always ready to chaperon Allegra, and Isola welcomed the wanderers to the cheery fireside and the friendly five-o’clock tea. She spent her own days mostly in the society of her baby, with whom she seemed to hold a kind of mysterious commune. She had no idea of amusing him as the nurse had, none of those conventional tricks and movements which are offered to generation after generation of infants; but the child would lie in her lap for hours while she sang to him in her low sweet voice the songs she had learnt in her early girlhood—songs that the peasants of Brittany sing, some of them—and others of a somewhat loftier strain. She would sing him little bits of Mozart, those immortal melodies, of inexhaustible sweetness and ineffable pathos, music mixed with smiles and tears, melody interwoven with such melting tenderness as thrills the coldest heart. There was a gentle happiness in these solitary hours which the young mother spent with her child; and Martin Disney, coming into the room unawares, sometimes stood for a minute or so in loving contemplation of that domestic picture—the young fair face with its long oval form and delicate features; the pensive gravity of the large violet eyes, and mournful droop of the thin, flower-like lips. He hadseen such a face on canvas, the ideal Madonna of Raffaelle, with just that subdued blonde colouring and pale auburn hair, and just that thoughtful expression.His heart swelled with gladness and gratitude as he contemplated mother and son. Yes, the child had made all things well in his home.Those aching doubts which he felt as he watched beside his wife’s sick-bed had vanished like clouds before the sun. Who could doubt the happiness of the mother, absorbed in her firstborn? Who could doubt the love of the wife, looking up at her husband with such tender welcome as he bent over her shoulder to take the little curled-up fist in his, unfold the crumpled fingers, and press them to his lips?“You are very fond of him, Martin?” she asked, with an often repeated inquiry, knowing what the answer would be.“Fond of him! After you he is all that I have in this world—except Allegra, who will float away into a world of her own by-and-by, and belong to us no more.”“After me! He ought to be first, Martin—your son, your heir, your second self in the days to come. He ought to have the first place in your heart, Martin, for he is your future.”“No one is first but you.”He dropped the baby hand, and took his wife’s head between his hands, and lifted the fair young forehead, looking down at it fondly before he stooped to kiss the soft clustering hair and pencilled brows and ivory temples, with more than a lover’s passion.CHAPTER XIV.“SAY THE FALSE CHARGE WAS TRUE.”The Baynhams’ dinner-party was a function to be anticipated with horror, and undergone with resignation. For the first week after the acceptance of the invitation the ceremony had seemed so far off that it could be talked aboutlightly, and even made an occasion for mirth—Allegra giving her own little sketch of what a dinner at Myrtle Lodge would be like—the drawing-room with its wealth of chair-backs and photograph albums, and the water-colour landscapes which Mrs. Baynham had painted while she was at a finishing school at Plymouth, never having touched brush or pencil since—and Mrs. Baynham’s rosy-cheeked nieces from Truro, who always appeared on the scene of any festivity. Yes, one could tell beforehand what the entertainment would be like.One thing they did not know, however, Mrs. Baynham having been discreetly silent on the subject. They did not know that they were to meet the Glenaveril family in full force, the doctor’s wife being of opinion that a friendly dinner-party was the panacea for all parish quarrels and small antagonisms, and that by judiciously bringing the Crowthers and the Disneys together at a well-spread board, and in the genial atmosphere of her unspacious drawing-room, she could bring about an end of the feud, or tacit coldness, which had divided the Angler’s Nest and Glenaveril since Colonel Disney’s home-coming. It was a disappointment to this worthy woman to see Vansittart Crowther, when Colonel and Mrs. Disney were announced, start and glare as if a mad dog had been brought into the room; but she was relieved at seeing the easy nod which the colonel bestowed upon his vanquished foe, and the friendly hand which good Mrs. Crowther held out to Isola, who paled and blushed, and all but wept at meeting with that cordial matron.“I don’t know why you never come to see me,” said Mrs. Crowther, confidentially, having made room for Isola upon a very pretentious and uncomfortable sofa of the cabriole period, a sofa with a sloping seat and a stately back in three oval divisions, heavily framed in carved walnut, a back against which it was agony to lean, a seat upon which it was martyrdom to sit. “But I don’t see why we shouldn’t be friends when we do happen to meet.”“Dear Mrs. Crowther, we are always friends. I shall never forget your kindness to me.”“There, there; you’re a tender-hearted soul, I know. It grieved me so not to go and see you when you were ill; and not to pay attention to your baby. Such a sweet little fellow, too. I’ve given him many a kiss on the sly when I’ve met him and his nurse in the lanes. I suppose Mr. Crowther and the colonel don’t hitch their horses very well together. That’s at the bottom of it all, no doubt. But as for you and me, Isola, I hope we shall always be good friends.”This confidential talk between the two women, observed by Mrs. Baynham out of the corner of her eye, augured well; but Mr. Crowther had not left off glaring, and a glare in those protruding eyeballs was awful. He usurped the hearthrug, as he laid down the law about the political situation and the impending ruin of the country.“A feeble policy never maintained the prestige of any country, sir,” he told Captain Pentreath, the half-pay bachelor, who was devoted to fishing, and cared very little whether his country had prestige or shuffled on without it—so long as fish would bite. “We lost our prestige when we lost Beaconsfield, and with our prestige we are losing our influence. The Continental powers leave us out of their calculations. The neutral policy of the last ten years has stultified the triumph of British arms from Marlborough to Wellington. The day will come, sir, when the world will cease to believe in the history of those magnificent campaigns. People will say, ‘These are idle traditions. England could never have been a warlike nation.’”Captain Pentreath tried to look interested, but was obviously indifferent to the opinion of future ages, and intent upon watching Allegra, looking her handsomest in a yellow silk gown, and deep in talk with Captain Hulbert, who leant his tall form against Mrs. Baynham’s cottage piano, which, with a view to artistic effect, had been disguised in Algerian drapery, and wheeled into a position that made the room more difficult of navigation.One only of the rosy-cheeked nieces was allowed to appear at the dinner-table; firstly because the table was a tight fit for twelve, and secondly because a thirteenth would have excited superstitious fears. The younger sister, whom people asked about with tender solicitude, was to be on view afterwards, when she would perform the bass to her sister’s treble in the famous overture to Zampa, which, although not exactly a novelty, may be relied upon to open a musical evening withéclat.Every one bad arrived, and after a chilling delay, Potts, the local fishmonger, who had been a butler, and who went out to wait at dinner-parties, and was as familiar a figure as a saddle of mutton or a cod’s head and shoulders, made his solemn announcement, and with an anxious mind, Mrs. Baynham saw her guests parade across the narrow hall somewhat overfurnished with stags’ heads, barometers, gig-whips and umbrella-stands, to the dining-room, while a hot blast of roast meat burst fiercely from the adjacent kitchen.Mrs. Baynham had allotted Isola to Mr. Crowther, determined to carry out her idea of bringing about a friendly feeling. Mr. Baynham took Mrs. Crowther, and Captain Pentreath had the privilege of escorting Belinda, whose sentiments and airs and graces of every kind he knew by heart. There was no more excitement in such companionship than in going in to dinner with his grandmother. What is the use of being brought in continual association with a handsome heiress if you know yourself a detrimental?“She would no more look at me as a lover than she would at a Pariah dog,” said the captain, when some officious boon companion at the club suggested that he should enter himself for the Crowther Stakes.Captain Hulbert was made happy with Allegra, and Colonel Disney was honoured by his hostess, to whom strict etiquette would have prescribed the peer’s son. There was surplus female population in the persons of Alicia Crowther and Mary Baynham, who agreeably adorned each side ofthe table with a little extra sweetness and light; Miss Baynham, buxom and rosy in a white cashmere frock which she had grown out of since her last dinner-party; Miss Crowther, square shouldered and bony, in a black confection by Worth, with a bloated diamond heart making a mirage upon a desert waste of chest, it being a point of honour with thin girls to be moredécoletéesthan their plumper sisters.Mrs. Baynham’s conversation at one of her own dinners was apt to be somewhat distracted and inconsecutive in substance, although she maintained a smiling and delighted air all the time, whatever anxieties might be wearing her spirit—anxieties about the cooking and the attendance—angry wonder at the prolonged absence of the parlour-maid—distress at seeing the lobster sauce dragging its slow length along when people had nearly finished the turbot—agonizing fears lest thevol au ventshould not last out after that enormous help taken by Captain Pentreath, in sheer absence of mind, perhaps, since he only messed it about on his plate, while he bored Miss Crowther with a prosy account of his latest victory over an obstinate demon of the Jack family—“such a devil of a fellow, three feet long, and with jaws like a crocodile.”Colonel Disney was almost as inconsecutive and fragmentary in his conversation as his hostess, and did not imitate her smiling aspect. He was silent and moody, as he had been at the Glenaveril dinner, more than a year ago. That Silenus face bending towards his wife’s ear—that confidential air assumed in every look and tone—made him furious. He could scarcely sit through the dinner. He wounded Mrs. Baynham in her pride of heart as a housekeeper by hardly touching her choicest dishes.“Oh, come now, Colonel Disney,” she pleaded, “you must take one of my lobster cromskys. I don’t mind owning that I made them myself. It is anentréeI learnt from the cook at my own home. My father was always particular about his table, and we had a professed cook. Please don’t refuse a cromsky.”Colonel Disney took the thing on his plate, and sat frowning at it, while a bustle at the door and a marked rise in the temperature indicated the entrance of thepièce de resistance, in the shape of a well-kept saddle of mutton.“Oh, but you had seen theVendettabefore, hadn’t you?” asked the oily voice on the other side of the table. “You knew all about her. Really, now, Mrs. Disney, was that your first visit to Lostwithiel’s yacht?”Isola looked at the speaker as if he had struck her. Great God, how pale she was! Or was it the reflection of the apple-green shade upon the candle in front of her which gave her that ghastly look?“Yes,” she said. “I saw the yacht from the harbour years ago.”“But you were never on board her? How odd, now. I had a notion that you must have seen that pretty cabin, and all Lostwithiel’s finical arrangements. He was so proud of theVendettawhen he was here. He was always asking my girls on board. You remember, Alicia, how Lord Lostwithiel used to ask you two girls to tea?”“Yes,” answered his daughter, in her hard voice. “He asked us often enough, but mother would not let us go.”“How very severe!” said Captain Hulbert, attracted by the sound of his brother’s name. “Why do you object to a tea-party on theVendetta, Mrs. Crowther? Have you a prejudice against yachts? Do you think they are likely to go down in harbour, like the poor oldRoyal George?”“Oh no, I am not afraid of that. Only I liked Lord Lostwithiel to come to tea with us at Glenaveril; and I did not think it would be quite the thing for my girls to visit a bachelor’s yacht, even if I went with them. People at Trelasco are only too ready to make unpleasant remarks. They would have said we were running after Lord Lostwithiel.”“Oh, but it isn’t the single girls who run after the men nowadays,” said Mr. Crowther, with his Silenus grin; “it’s the young married women. They are the sirens.”Nobody took any notice of this remark; and the conversation which had become general for a minute or two resumed its duologue form.Captain Hulbert and Allegra went on with their animated discussion as to the author of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet;” and Captain Pentreath took up the thread of his story about the obstinate pike; Alicia talked to the doctor about her last day with the hounds; and Mary Baynham told Mrs. Crowther about a church bazaar, which had electrified Truro, and at which she had “helped” at somebody else’s stall.“It was hard work standing about and trying to sell things all day, and persuading stingy old gentlemen to put into raffles for talking dolls,” said Miss Baynham. “I have pitied shop-girls ever since.”Mrs. Baynham gave the signal for departure, feeling that her dinner, from a material point of view, had been a success. The lobster sauce had been backward, and the three last people to whom thevol au ventwas offered had got very little except pie-crust and white sauce, but those were small blemishes. The mutton and the pheasants had been unimpeachable; and on those substantial elements Mrs. Baynham took her stand. She had spared neither pains nor money. Her Italian cream was cream, and not cornflour. Her cabinet-pudding was a work of art. She felt satisfied with herself, and knew that the doctor would approve; and yet she felt somehow that the moral atmosphere had not been altogether free from storm-cloud. Colonel Disney had looked on at the feast with a gloomy countenance; Mr. Crowther had talked in an unpleasant tone.“I am afraid those two will never forget the church path,” she thought, as she set her nieces down to Zampa, and then went to inspect the card-table in a snug corner near the fire, with its freshly lighted wax candles, and new cards placed ready for the good old English game which our ancestors called whist.Zampa once started meant a noisy evening. CaptainPentreath would sing “The Maid of Llangollen,” and “Drink, puppy, drink.” Mary Baynham would murder “It was a dream,” and scream the higher notes in “Ruby.” Duet would follow solo, and fantasia succeed ballad, Mrs. Baynham’s idea of a social gathering being the nearest attainable approach to a penny reading. She would have had recitations, and imitations of popular actors, had there been any one capable of providing that form of amusement.This evening, however, she failed in getting a quartette for whist. Neither Mr. Crowther nor his wife was disposed for cards; Colonel Disney coldly declined; and it was useless to ask the young people to leave the attractions of that woody piano. While she was lamenting this state of things, the whist-table being usually a feature in her drawing-room, the Disneys and Allegra bade her good night, and were gone before she had time to remonstrate with them for so early a departure.It seemed earlier than it really was, for the dinner had been late. Disney’s quick ear had heard the step of his favourite horse, punctual as the church clock. He had ordered his carriage at half-past ten, and at half-past ten he and his party left the drawing-room, the doctor following to hand the ladies to their carriage, while the colonel lighted a cigar on the door-step, preparatory to walking home.“It’s a fine night; I’d rather walk,” he said.He walked further than the Angler’s Nest. He walked up to the hill where he and Isola had sat in the summer sunshine on the day after his home-coming. He roamed about that wild height for two hours, and the church clock struck one while he was in the lane leading down to Trelasco.“If that man has any motive for his insolence—if there is any secret between him and my wife, I’ll wring the truth out of him before he is a day older,” the colonel said to himself, as he tramped homewards.He wrote to Mr. Crowther next morning, requesting the favour of half an hour’s private conversation upon a very serious matter. He proposed to call upon Mr. Crowther at twelve o’clock, if that hour would be convenient. The bearer of the note would wait for an answer.Mr. Crowther replied that he would be happy to see Colonel Disney at the hour named.The colonel arrived at Glenaveril with military punctuality, and was forthwith shown into that grandiose apartment, where all those time-honoured works which the respectable family bookseller considers needful to the culture of the country gentleman were arranged in old oak bookcases, newly carved out of soft chestnut wood in the workshops of Venice. It was an imposing apartment, with panelled dado, gilded Japanese paper, heavy cornice and ceiling, incarton pierre—such a room as makes the joy of architect, builder, and furniture-maker. So far as dignity and social position can be bought for money, those attributes had been bought by Vansittart Crowther; and yet this morning, standing before his mediæval fireplace, with his hands in the pockets of his velvet lounge coat, he looked a craven. He advanced a step or two to meet his visitor, and offered his hand, which the colonel overlooked, fixing him at once with a gaze that went straight to the heart of his mystery. He felt that an accuser was before him—that he, Vansittart Crowther, was called to account.“Mr. Crowther, I have come to ask what you mean by your insolent manner to my wife?”“Insolent! My dear Colonel Disney, I admire the lady in question more than any other woman within twenty miles. Surely it is not insolent to admire a pretty woman?”“It is insolent to adopt the tone you have adopted to Mrs. Disney—first in your own house—on the solitary occasion when my wife and I were your guests—and next at the dinner-table last night. I took no notice of your manner on the first occasion—for though I considered your conduct offensive, I thought it might be your ordinarymanner to a pretty woman, and I considered I did enough in forbidding my wife ever to re-enter your house. But last night the offence was repeated—was grosser—and more distinctly marked. What do you mean by talking to my wife of Lord Lostwithiel with a peculiar emphasis? What do you mean by your affectation of a secret understanding with my wife whenever you pronounce Lord Lostwithiel’s name?”“I am not aware that there has been anything peculiar in my pronunciation of that name—or in my manner to Mrs. Disney,” said Mr. Crowther, looking at his boots, but with a malignant smile lurking at the corners of his heavy lips.“Oh, but you are aware of both facts. You meant to be insolent, and meant other people to notice your insolence. It was your way of being even with me for defying you to shut up the wood yonder, and cut off the people’s favourite walk to church. You dared not attack me; but you thought you could wreak your petty spite upon my wife—and you thought I should be too dull to observe, or too much of a poltroon to resent your impertinence. That’s what you thought, Mr. Crowther: and I am here to undeceive you, and to tell you that you are a coward and a liar, and that if you don’t like those words you may send any friend you please to my friend, Captain Hulbert, to arrange a meeting in the nearest and most convenient place on the other side of the channel.”Mr. Crowther turned very red, and then very pale. It was the first time he had been invited to venture his life in defence of his honour; and for the moment it seemed to him that honour was a small thing, a shadowy possession exaggerated into importance by the out-at-elbows and penniless among mankind, who had nothing else to boast of. As if a man who always kept fifty thousand pounds at his bankers, and who had money invested all over the world, would go and risk his life upon the sands of Blankenburgh against a soldier whose retiring allowance was something less thanthree hundred a year, and who was perhaps a dead shot. The idea was preposterous!No, Mr. Crowther was not going to fight; and though he quailed before those steady eyes of Martin Disney’s, calm in their deep indignation, this explanation was not unwelcome to him. He had a dagger ready to plunge into his enemy’s heart, and he did not mean to hold his hand.“I’m not a fighting man, Colonel Disney,” he said; “and if I were I should hardly care to fight for a grass widow who made herself common talk by her flirtation with a man of most notorious antecedents. We will say that it never was any more than a flirtation—in spite of Mrs. Disney’s mysterious disappearance after the Hunt Ball, which happened to correspond with Lord Lostwithiel’s sudden departure. The two events might have no connection—more especially as Mrs. Disney came back ten days after, and Lord Lostwithiel hasn’t come back yet.”“I can answer for my wife’s conduct, sir, under all circumstances, and amidst all surroundings. You are the first person who has ever dared to cast a slur upon her, and it shall not be my fault if you are not the last. I tell you again, to your face, that you are a coward and a liar—a coward because you are insolent to a young and lovely woman, and a liar because you insinuate evil against her which you are not able to substantiate.”“Ask your wife where she was at the end of December, the year before last—the year you were in India. Ask her what she had been doing in London when she came back to Fowey on the last day of the year, and travelled in the same train with my lawyer, Mr. MacAllister, who was struck by her appearance, first because she was so pretty, and next because she looked the picture of misery—got into conversation with her, and found out who she was. If you think that is a lie you can go to MacAllister, in the Old Jewry, and ask him to convince you that it is a fact.”“There is no occasion. My wife has no secrets from me.”“I am glad to hear it. Then there is really nothing tofight about except a good deal of vulgar abuse on your part, which I am willing to overlook. A man of your mature age, married to a beautiful girl, has some excuse for being jealous.”“More excuse, perhaps, than a man of your age has for acting like a cad,” said the colonel, turning upon his heel, and leaving Mr. Crowther to his reflections.Those reflections were not altogether bitter. Mr. Crowther felt assured that he had sown the seeds of future misery. He did not believe in the colonel’s assertion that there were no secrets between him and his wife. He had cherished the knowledge of that mysterious journey from London on the last day of the year. He had warned his confidential friend and solicitor to mention the fact to no one else. He had pried and questioned, and by various crooked ways had found out that Isola had been absent from the Angler’s Nest for some days after the Hunt Ball, and he had told himself that she was a false wife, and that Martin Disney was a fool to trust her.As for being called by harsh names, he was too much a man of the world to attach any importance to an angry husband’s abuse. It made him not a sixpence the poorer; and as there had been no witness to the interview it scarcely diminished his dignity. The thing rested between him and his enemy.“He took down my gates, but I think I have given him something to think about that will spoil his rest for many a night, before he has thought it out,” mused Mr. Crowther.It was after the usual luncheon hour before Martin Disney went back to the Angler’s Nest. He had been for a long walk by the river, trying to walk down the devil that raged within him, before he could trust himself to go home. His wife was alone in the drawing-room, sitting by the fire with her baby in her lap; but this time he did not pause on the threshold to contemplate that domestic picture. There was no tenderness in the eyes which looked at his wife—only a stern determination. Every feature in the familiar facelooked strange and rigid, as in the face of an accuser and judge.“Send the child away, Isola. I want some serious talk with you.”She stretched out a faltering hand to the bell, looking at him, pale and scared, but saying no word. She gave the baby to his nurse presently in the same pallid dumbness, never taking her eyes from her husband’s face.“Martin,” she gasped at last, frozen by his angry gaze, “is there anything wrong?”“Yes, there is something horribly wrong—something that means destruction. What were you doing in London the winter before last, while I was away? What was the motive of your secret departure—your stealthy return? What were you doing on the last day of the year? Where had you been? With whom?”She looked at him breathless with horror; whether at the accusation implied in his words, or at his withering manner, it would have been difficult for the looker-on to decide. His manner was terrible enough to have scared any woman, as he stood before her, waiting for her answer.“Where had you been—with whom?” he repeated, while her lips moved mutely, quivering as in abject fear. “Great God! why can’t you answer? Why do you look such a miserable, degraded creature—self-convicted—not able to speak one word in your own defence?”“On the last day of the year?” she faltered, with those tremulous lips.“On the last day of the year before last—the winter I spent in Burmah. What were you doing—where were you—where had you been? Is it so difficult to remember?”“No, no; of course not,” she cried, with a half-hysterical laugh. “You frighten me out of my senses, Martin. I don’t know what you are aiming at. I was coming home from London on that day—of course—the 31st of Jan—no, December. Coming home from Hans Place, where I had been spending a few days with Gwendolen.”“You never told me of that visit to Gwendolen.”“Oh yes; I’m sure I told you all about it in one of my letters. Perhaps you did not get that letter—I remember you never noticed it in yours. Martin, for God’s sake, don’t look at me like that!”“I am looking at you to see if you are the woman I have loved and believed in, or if you are as false as hell,” he said, with his strong hand grasping her shoulder, her face turned to his, so that those frightened eyes of hers could not escape his scrutiny.“Who has put this nonsense in your head?”“Your neighbour—your good Mrs. Crowther’s husband—told me that his lawyer travelled with you from Paddington—on the 31st of December—the year before last. He got into conversation with you—you remember, perhaps?”“No,” she cried, with a sudden piteous change in her face, “I can’t remember.”“But you came from London on that day. You remember that?”“Yes, yes. I came from Gwendolen’s house on that day. I told you so in my letter.”“That letter which I never received—telling me of that visit to which you made no allusion in any of your later letters. It was about that time, I think, that you fell off as a correspondent—left off telling me all the little details of your life—which in your earlier letters seemed to shorten the distance between us.”She was silent, listening to his reproaches with a sullen dumbness, as it seemed to him, while he stood there in his agony of doubt—in his despairing love. He turned from her with a heart-broken sigh, and slowly left the room, going away he scarce knew whither, only to put himself beyond the possibility of saying hard things to her, of letting burning, branding words flash out of the devouring fire in his heart.She stood for a few moments after he had gone, hesitating, breathless, and frightened, like a hunted animal at bay—then ran to the door, opened it softly, and listened. She could hear him pacing the room above. Again she stood still and hesitated, her lips tightly set, her hands clenched, her brow bent in painful thought. Then she snatched hat and jacket from a corner of the hall where such things were kept, and put them on hurriedly, with trembling hands, as if her fate depended upon the speed with which she got herself ready to go out, looking up at the great, dim, brazen face of the eight-day clock all the while. And then she let herself out at a half-glass door into the garden, and walked quickly to a side gate that opened in to the lane—the gate at which the baker and the butcher stopped to gossip with the maids on fine mornings.There was a cold bracing wind, and the sun was declining in a sky barred with dense black clouds—an ominous sky, prophetic of storm or rain. Isola walked up the hill towards Tywardreath as if she were going on an errand of deadliest moment, skirted and passed the village, with no slackening of her pace, and so by hill and valley to Par, a long and weary walk under ordinary circumstances for a delicate young woman, although accustomed to long country walks. But Isola went upon her lonely journey with a feverish determination which seemed to make her unconscious of distance. Her steps never faltered upon the hard, dusty road. The autumn wind that swept the dead leaves round her feet seemed to hold her up and carry her along without effort upon her part. Past copse and meadow, common land and stubble, she walked steadily onward, looking neither to right nor left of her path, only straight forward to the signal lights that showed fiery red in the grey dusk at Par Junction. She watched the lights growing larger and more distinct as she neared the end of her journey. She saw the fainter lights of the village scattered thinly beyond the station lamps, low down towards the sandy shore. She heard the distant rush of a train, and the dull sob of the sea creeping up along the level shore, between the great cliffs that screened the bay. A clock struck six as shewaited at the level crossing, in an agony of impatience, while truck after truck of china clay crept slowly by, in a procession that seemed endless; and then for the first time she felt that the wind was cold, and that her thin serge jacket did not protect her from that biting blast. Finally the line was clear, and she was able to cross and make her way to the village post-office.Her business at the post-office occupied about a quarter of an hour, and when she came out into the village street the sky had darkened, and there were heavy rain-drops making black spots upon the grey dust of the road; but she hurried back by the way she had come, recrossed the line, and set out on the long journey home. The shower did not last long, but it was not the only one she encountered on her way back, and the poor little jacket was wet through when she re-entered by the servant’s gate, and by the half-glass door, creeping stealthily into her own house and running upstairs to her own room to get rid of her wet garments before any one could surprise her with questions and sympathy. It was past eight o’clock, though she had walked so fast all the way as to feel neither cold nor damp. She took off her wet clothes and dressed herself for dinner in fear and trembling, imagining that her absence would have been wondered at, and her errand would be questioned. It was an infinite relief when she went down to the drawing-room to find only Allegra sitting at her easel, working at a sepia sketch by lamplight.“Martin is very late,” she said, looking up as Isola entered, “and he is generally a model of punctuality. I hope there is nothing wrong. Where have you been hiding yourself since lunch, Isa? Have you been lying down?”“Yes, part of the time”—hesitatingly. “It is very late.”“Twenty minutes to nine. Dale has been in twice in the last quarter of an hour to say that the dinner is being spoilt. Hark! There’s the door, and Martin’s step. Thank God, there is nothing wrong!” cried Allegra, getting up and going out to meet her brother.Colonel Disney’s countenance as he stood in the lamplight was not so reassuring as the substantial fact of his return. It was something to know that he was not dead, or hurt in any desperate way—victim of any of those various accidents which the morbid mind of woman can imagine if husband or kinsman be unusually late for dinner; but that things were all right with him was open to question. He was ghastly pale, and had a troubled, half-distracted expression which seared Allegra almost as much as his prolonged absence had done.“I am sure there is something wrong!” she said, when they were seated at dinner, and the parlour-maid had withdrawn for a minute or two in pursuance of her duties, having started them fairly with the fish.“Oh no, there is nothing particularly amiss; I have been worried a little, that’s all. I am very sorry to be so unconscionably late for dinner, and to sit down in this unkempt condition. But I loitered at the club looking at the London papers. I shall have to go to London to-morrow, Isola—on business—and I want you to go with me. Have you any objection?”She started at the word London, and looked at him curiously—surprised, yet resolute—as if she were not altogether unprepared for some startling proposition on his part.“Of course not. I would rather go with you if you really have occasion to go.”“I really have. It is very important. You won’t mind our deserting you for two or three days, will you, Allegra?” asked Disney, turning to his sister. “Mrs. Baynham will be at your service as chaperon if you want to go out anywhere while we are away. It is an office in which she delights.”“I won’t trouble her. I shall stay at home, and paint all the time. I have a good deal of work to do to my pictures before they will be ready for the winter exhibition, and the time for sending in is drawing dreadfully near.You need have no anxiety as to my gadding about, Martin. You will find me shut up in my painting-room, come home when you will.”Later, when she and her brother were alone in the drawing-room, she went up to him softly and put her arms around his neck.“Martin, dearest, I know you have some great trouble. Why don’t you tell me? Is it anything very bad? Does it mean loss of fortune; poverty to be faced; this pretty home to be given up, perhaps?”“No, no, no, my dear. The home is safe enough; the house will stand firm as long as you and I live. I am not a shilling poorer than I was yesterday. There is nothing the matter—nothing worth speaking about; blue devils, vapours if you like. That’s all.”“You are ill, Martin. You have found out that there is something wrong with you—heart, lungs, something—and you are going to London to consult a physician. Oh, my dear, dear brother,” she cried, with a look of agony, her arms still clasped about his neck, “don’t keep me in the dark; let me know the worst.”“There is no worst, Allegra. I am out of sorts, that’s all. I am going to town to see my lawyer.”CHAPTER XV.“MY LIFE CONTINUES YOURS, AND YOUR LIFE MINE.”They started by the eleven-o’clock train from Fowey next morning, husband and wife, in a strangely silent companionship—Isola very pale and still as she sat in a corner of the railway carriage, with her back to the rivers and the sea. Naturally, in a place of that kind, they could not get away without being seen by some of their neighbours. Captain Pentreath was going to Bodmin, and insisted upon throwing away a half-finished cigar in order to enjoy the privilege of Colonel and Mrs. Disney’s society, being one of those unmeditative animals who hate solitude. He talked all the way to Par, lit a fresh cigar during the wait at the junction, and reappeared just as the colonel and his wife were taking their seats in the up-train.“Have you room for me in there?” he asked, sacrificing more than half of his second cigar. “I’ve got theMercury—Jepps is in for Stokumpton—a great triumph for our side.”He spread out the paper, and made believe to begin to read with a great show of application, as if he meant to devour every syllable of Jepps’s long exposition of the political situation; but after two minutes he dropped theMercuryon his knees and began to talk. There were people in Fowey who doubted whether Captain Pentreath could read. He had been able once, of course, or he could hardly have squeezed himself into the Army; but there was an idea that he had forgotten the accomplishment, except in its most elementary form upon sign-boards, and in the headings of newspaper articles, printed large. It was supposed that the intensity of effort by which he had taken in the cramming that enabled him to pass the ordeal of the Examiners had left his brain a blank.“You’re not going further than Plymouth, I suppose?” he asked.“We are going to London.”“Are you really, now? A bad time of year for London—fogs and thaws, and all kinds of beastly weather.”And then he asked a string of questions—futile, trivial, vexing as summer flies buzzing round the head of an afternoon sleeper; and then came the welcome cry of Bodmin Road, and he reluctantly left them.The rest of the journey was passed almost in silence. They had the compartment to themselves for the greater part of the time, and they sat in opposite corners, pretending to read—Isola apparently absorbed in a book that she had taken up at random just before she started, when the carriage was at the door, and while Allegra was calling to her to make haste.It was Carlyle’s “Hero Worship.” The big words, the magnificent sentences, passed before her eyes like lines in an unknown language. She had not the faintest idea what she was reading; but she followed the lines and turned the leaf at the bottom of a page mechanically.Martin Disney applied himself to the newspapers which he had accumulated on the way—some at Par, some at Plymouth, some at Exeter, till the compartment was littered all over with them. He turned and tossed them about one after the other. Never had they seemed so empty—the leaders such mere beating the air; the hard facts so few and insignificant. He glanced at Isola as she sat in her corner, motionless and composed. He watched the slender, white hands turning the leaves of her book at regular intervals.“Is your book very interesting?” he asked, at last, exasperated by her calmness.He had been attentive and polite to her, offering her the papers, ordering tea for her at Exeter, doing all that a courteous husband ought to do; but he had made no attempt at conversation—nor had she. This question about the book was wrung from him by the intensity of his irritation.“It is a book you gave me years ago at Dinan,” she answered, looking at him piteously. “‘Hero Worship.’ Don’t you remember? I had never read anything of Carlyle’s before then. You taught me to like him.”“Did I? Yes, I remember—a little Tauchnitz volume bound in morocco—contraband in England. A cheat—like many things in this life.”He turned his face resolutely to the window, as if to end the conversation, and he did not speak again till they were moving slowly into the great station, in the azure brightness of the electric light.“I have telegraphed for rooms at Whitley’s,” he said, naming a small private hotel near Cavendish Square, where they had stayed for a few days before he started for the East.“Do you think it would be too late for us to call at Hans Place before we go to our hotel?”She started at the question. He saw her cheeks crimson in the lamplight.“I don’t think the lateness of hour will matter,” she said, “unless Gwendolen is dining out. She dines out very often.”“I hope to-night may be an exception.”“Do you want very much to see her?” asked Isola.“Very much.”“You are going to question her about me, I suppose?”“Yes, Isola, that is what I am going to do.”“It is treating me rather like a criminal; or, at any rate, like a person whose word cannot be believed.”“I can’t help myself, Isola. The agony of doubt that I have gone through can only be set at rest in one way. It is so strange a thing, so impossible as it seems to me, that you should have visited your sister while I was away, although no letter I received from you contained the slightest allusion to that visit—an important event in such a monotonous life as yours—and although no word you have ever spoken since my return has touched upon it; till all at once, at a moment’s notice, when I tell you of your journey from London and the slander to which it gave occasion—all at once you spring this visit upon me, as if I ought to have known all about it.”“You can ask Gwendolen as many questions as you like,” answered Isola, with an offended air, “and you will see if she denies that I was with her in the December you were away.”Colonel Disney handed his wife into a station brougham. The two portmanteaux were put upon the roof, and the order was given—99, Hans Place—for albeit Mr. Hazelrigg’s splendid mansion was described on his cards and his writing-paper as The Towers, it is always as well to have a number for common people to know us by.No word was spoken during the long drive from Paddington; no word when the neat little brougham drew up infront of a lofty flight of steps leading up to a Heidelberg doorway, set in the midst of a florid red-brick house, somewhat narrow in proportion to its height, and with over much ornament in the way of terra cotta panelling, bay and oriel, balcony and pediment.A footman in dark green livery and rice powder opened the door. Mrs. Hazelrigg was at home. He led the way to one of those dismal rooms which are to be found in most fine houses—a room rarely used by the family—a kind of pound for casual visitors. Sometimes the pound is as cold and cheerless as a vestry in a new Anglican church; sometimes it affects a learned air, lines its walls with books that no one ever reads, and calls itself a library. Whatever form or phase it may take, it never fails to chill the visitor.There was naturally no fire in this apartment. Isola sank shivering into a slippery leather chair, near the Early English fender; her husband walked up and down the narrow floor space. This lasted for nearly ten minutes, when Gwendolen came bursting in, a vision of splendour, in a grey satin tea-gown, frothed with much foam of creamy lace and pale pink ribbon, making a cascade of fluffiness from chin to slippered toes.“What a most astonishing thing!” she cried, after kissing Isola, and holding out both her plump, white hands to the colonel. “Have you dear, good people dropped from the clouds? I thought you were nearly three hundred miles away when the man came to say you were waiting to see me. It is a miracle we are dining at home to-night. We are so seldom at home. Of course you will stay and dine with us. Come up to my room and take off your hat, Isa. No, you needn’t worry about dress,” anticipating Disney’s refusal; “we are quite alone. I am going to dine in my tea-gown, and Daniel is only just home from the city.”“You are very kind; no, my dear Mrs. Hazelrigg, we won’t dine with you to-night,” answered Disney. “We have only just come up to town. We drove across the park to see you before going to our hotel. Our portmanteaux are waiting atthe door. We are in town for so short a time that I wanted to see you at once—particularly as I have—a rather foolish question to ask you.”His voice grew husky, though he tried his uttermost to maintain a lightness of tone.“Ask away,” said Gwendolen, straightening herself in her glistening grey gown, a splendid example of modern elegance in dress and demeanour, and altogether a more brilliant and imposing beauty than the pale, fragile figure sitting in a drooping attitude beside the fireless hearth. “Ask away,” repeated Gwendolen, gaily, glancing at her sister’s mournful face as she spoke. “If I can answer you I will—but please to consider that I have a wretched memory.”“You are not likely to forget the fact I want to ascertain. My wife and I have had an argument about dates—we are at variance about the date of her last visit to you—while I was away—and I should like to settle our little dispute, though it did not go so far as a wager. When was she with you? On what date did she leave you?”All hesitation and huskiness were gone from manner and voice. He stood like a pillar, with his face turned towards his sister-in-law, his eyes resolute and inquiring.“Oh, don’t ask me about dates,” cried Gwendolen, “I never know dates. I buy Letts in every form, year after year—but I never can keep up my diary. Nothing but a self-acting diary would be of any use to me. It was in December she came to me—and in December she left—after a short visit. Come, Isa. You must remember the dates of your arrival and departure, better than I. You don’t live in the London whirl. You don’t have your brains addled by hearing about Buenos Ayres, Reading and Philadelphias, Berthas, Brighton A’s, and things.”Martin Disney looked at her searchingly. Her manner was perfectly easy and natural, of a childlike transparency. Her large, bright, blue eyes looked at him—fearless and candid as the eyes of a child.“You ought to remember that it was on the last day ofthe year I left this house,” said Isola, in her low, depressed voice, as of one weary unto death. “You said enough about it at the time.”“Did I? Oh, I am such a feather-head,tête de linotte, as they used to call me at Dinan. So it was—New Year’s Eve—and I was vexed with you for not staying to see the New Year in. That was it. I remember everything about it now.”“Thank you, Mrs. Hazelrigg,” said Martin Disney, and then going over to his wife, he said gravely, “Forgive me, Isola, I was wrong.”He held out his hands to her with a pleading look, and she rose slowly from her chair, and let her head fall upon his breast as he put his arms round her, soothing and caressing her.“My poor girl, I was wrong—wrong—wrong—a sinner against your truth and purity,” he murmured low in her ear; and then he added laughingly, to Gwendolen, “Were we not fools to dispute about such a trifle?”“All married people are fools on occasion,” answered Mrs. Hazelrigg. “I have often quarrelled desperately with Daniel about a mere nothing—not because he was wrong, but because I wanted to quarrel. That kind of thing clears the air—like a thunderstorm. One feels so dutiful and affectionate afterwards. Dan gave me this sapphire ring after one of our biggest rows,” she added, holding up a sparkling finger.Daniel Hazelrigg came into the room while she was talking of him, a large man, with a bald head and sandy beard, a genial-looking man, pleased with a world in which he had been permitted always to foresee the rise and fall of stocks. The Hazelriggs were the very type of a comfortable couple, so steeped in prosperity and the good things of this world as to be hardly aware of any keener air outside the gardenia-scented atmosphere of their own house; hardly aware of men who dined badly or women who made their own gowns; much less of men who never dined at all, orwomen who flung themselves despairing from the parapets of the London bridges.Mr. Hazelrigg came into the room beaming, looked at his wife and smiled, as he held out his hand to Colonel Disney, looked at his sister-in-law and smiled again, and held out his hand to her, the smile broadening a little, as if with really affectionate interest.“I’m very glad to see you, my dear Mrs. Disney; but I can’t compliment you upon looking as well as you did when we last met.”“She is tired after her long journey,” said Gwendolen, quickly. “That’s all there is amiss.”“The sooner we get to our hotel the better for both of us,” said Disney. “We are dusty and weather-beaten, and altogether bad company. Good night, Mrs. Hazelrigg.”“But surely you’ll stop and dine; it’s close upon eight,” remonstrated Hazelrigg, who was the essence of hospitality. “You can send on your luggage, and go to your hotel later.”“You are very good, but we are not fit for dining out. Isola looks half dead with fatigue,” answered Disney. “Once more, good night.”He shook hands with husband and wife and hurried Isola to the door.“Be sure you come to me the first thing to-morrow,” said Gwendolen to her sister. “I shall stay in till you come, and I can drive you anywhere you want to go for your shopping—Stores, Lewis and Allanby’s—anywhere. I want to show you my drawing-room. I have changed everything in it. You’ll hardly know it again.”She and her husband followed the departing guests to the hall, saw them get into the little brougham and drive off into the night; and then Gwendolen put her arm through her husband’s with a soft clinging affectionateness, as of a Persian cat, that knew when it was well housed and taken good care of.“Poor Isa! how awfully ill she looks,” sighed Gwendolen.“Ghastly. Are all women alike, I wonder, Gwen?”“I think you ought to know what kind of woman I am by this time,” retorted his wife, tossing up her head.Martin Disney and his wife were alone in their sitting-room at the hotel, somewhat bare and unhomelike, as hotel rooms must always be, despite the march of civilization which has introduced certain improvements. He had made a pretence of dining in the coffee-room below, and she had taken some tea and toast beside the fire; and now at ten o’clock they were sitting on each side of the hearth, face to face, pale and thoughtful, and strangely silent.“Isola, have you forgiven me?” he asked at last.“With all my heart. Oh, Martin, I could never be angry with you—never. You have been so good to me. How could I be angry?”“But you have the right to be angry. I ought not to have doubted. I ought to have believed your word against all the world; but that man raised a doubting devil in me. I was mad with fears and suspicions, wild and unreasonable—as I suppose jealousy generally is. I had never been jealous before. Great God! what a fearful passion it is when a man gives himself up to it. I frightened you by my vehemence, and then your scared looks frightened me. I mistook fear for guilt. Isola, my beloved, let me hear the truth from your own lips—the assurance—the certainty,” he cried with impassioned fervour, getting up and going over to her, looking down into the pale, upturned face with those dark, earnest eyes which always seemed to search the mysteries of her heart. “Let there be no shadow of uncertainty or distrust between us. I have heard from your sister that you were with her when you said you were. That is much. It settles for that vile cad’s insinuated slander; but it is not enough. Let the assurance come to me from your lips—from yours alone. Tell me—by the God who will judge us both some day—Are you my own true wife?”“I am, Martin—I am your own true wife,” she answered,with an earnestness that thrilled him. “I have not a thought that is not of you. I love you with all my heart and mind. Is not that enough?”“And you have never wronged me? You have been true and pure always? I call upon God to hear your words, Isola. Is that true?”“Yes, yes; it is true.”“God bless you, darling! I will never speak of doubt again. You are my own sweet wife, and shall be honoured and trusted to the end of my days. Thank God, the cloud is past, and we can be happy again!”She rose from her low seat by the fire, and put her arms round his neck, and hid her face upon his breast, sobbing hysterically.“My own dear girl, I have been cruel to you—brutal and unkind; but you would forgive me if you knew what I have suffered since noon yesterday; and, indeed, my suffering began before then. That man’s harping on Lostwithiel’s name in all his talk with you—his air of meaning more than he said—and your embarrassment, awakened suspicions that had to be set at rest somehow. Remember the disadvantages under which I labour—the difference in our ages; my unattractiveness as compared with younger men. These things predisposed me to doubt your love. I have not had a moment’s peace since the night of that odious dinner-party. Yes; I have felt a new sensation. I know what jealousy means. But it is past. Praise be to God, it is past. I have come out of the cloud again. Oh, my love, had it been otherwise! Had we been doomed to part!”“What would you have done, Martin?” she asked, in a low voice, with her face still hidden against his breast, his arms still round her.“What would I have done, love? Nothing to bring shame on you. Nothing to add to your dishonour or sharpen the agony of remorse. I should have taken my son—my son could not be left under the shadow of a mother’s shame. He and I would have vanished out of your life. You wouldhave heard no more of us. The world would have known nothing. You would have been cared for and protected from further evil—protected from your own frailty. So far, I would have done my duty as your husband to the last day of my life; but you and I would never have looked upon each other again.”Colonel Disney and his wife stayed in London two days; perhaps to give a colour to their sudden and in somewise unexplained journey; but Isola refused all her sister’s invitations, to lunch, to drive, to dine, to go to an afternoon concert at the Albert Hall, or to see the last Shakespearean revival at the Lyceum. She pleaded various excuses; and Gwendolen had to be satisfied with one visit, at afternoon teatime, when husband and wife appeared together, on the eve of their return to Cornwall.“It was too bad of you not to come to me yesterday morning, as you promised,” Gwendolen said to her sister. “I stayed indoors till after luncheon on your account; and the days are so short at this time of year. I couldn’t do any shopping.”Mrs. Hazelrigg was one of those young women for whom life is flavourless when they have nothing to buy. She was so well supplied with everything that women desire or care for that she had to invent wants for herself. She had to watch the advertisements in order to tempt herself with some new wish; were it only for a patent toast-rack, or a new design in ivory paper-knives. The stationers helped to keep life in her by their new departures in writing-paper. Papyrus, Mandarin, Telegraphic, Good Form, Casual, mauve, orange, scarlet, verdigris green. So long as the thing was new it made an excuse for sitting in front of a counter and turning over the contents of a show-case.“You never came to look at my drawing-room by daylight,” she went on complainingly. “You can’t possibly judge the tints by lamplight. Every chair is of a different shade. I think you have treated me shamefully. I havesent you more telegrams than I could count. And I had such lots to talk about. Have you heard from Dinan lately?”“Not since August, when mother wrote in answer to our invitation for her and father to spend a month with us. I felt it was hopeless when I wrote to her.”“Utterly hopeless! Nothing will tempt her to cross the sea. She writes about it as if it were the Atlantic. And Lucy Folkestone tells me she is getting stouter.”“You mean mother?”“Yes, naturally. There’s no fear of Lucy ever being anything but bones. Mother is stouter and more sedentary than ever, Lucy says. It’s really dreadful. One doesn’t know where it will end,” added Gwendolen, looking down at her own somewhat portly figure, as if fearing hereditary evil.“I shall have to take Isa and the boy to Dinan next summer,” said Disney. “It is no use asking the father and mother to cross the channel; though I think they would both like to see their grandson.”“Mother raved about him in her last letter to me,” replied Gwendolen. “She was quite overcome by the photograph you sent her, only she has got into such a groove—her knitting, her novel, her little walk on the terrace, her long consultations with Toinette about the smallest domestic details—whether the mattresses shall be unpicked to-day or to-morrow, or whether thelessiveshall be a week earlier or a week later. It is dreadful to think of such a life,” added Gwendolen, as if her own existence were one of loftiest aims.CHAPTER XVI.“SORROW THAT’S DEEPER THAN WE DREAM, PERCHANCE.”Life flowed on its monotonous course, like the Fowey river gliding down from Lostwithiel to the sea; and there seemed nothing in this world that could again disturb Martin Disney’s domestic peace. Vansittart Crowther made nofurther attempt to avenge himself for the night attack upon his gates; nor did he demand any apology for the vulgar abuse which he had suffered in the sanctuary of his own library. This he endured, and even further outrage, in the shape of the following letter from Colonel Disney:—“Sir,“As you have been pleased to take a certain old-womanish interest in my domestic affairs, I think it may be as well to satisfy your curiosity so far as to inform you that when your solicitor travelled in the same train with my wife, she was returning from a visit to her married sister’s house, a visit which had my sanction and approval. I can only regret that her husband’s modest means constrained her to travel alone, and subjected her to the impertinent attentions of one cad and to the slanderous aspersions of another.“I have the honour to be,“Yours, etc.,“Martin Disney.”Mr. Crowther treated this letter with the silent contempt which he told himself it merited. What could he say to a man so possessed by uxorious hallucinations, so steeped in the poppy and mandragora of a blind affection, that reason had lost all power over his mind.“I spoke plain enough—as plain as I dared,” said Mr. Crowther. “He may ride the high horse and bluster as much as he likes. I don’t think he’ll ever feel quite happy again.”Yet in spite of hints and insinuations from the enemy at his gates, Martin Disney was happy—utterly happy in the love of his young wife, and in the growing graces of his infant son. He no longer doubted Isola’s affection. Her tender regard for him showed itself in every act of her life; in every look of the watchful face that was always on the alert to divine his pleasure, to forestall his wishes. Mrs. Baynham went about everywhere expatiating on the domestic happiness of the Disney family, to whom she was more thanever devoted, now that she felt herself in a manner related to them, having been elevated to the position of godmother to the firstborn—a very different thing to being godmother to some sixth or seventh link in the family-chain, when all thought of selection has been abandoned, and the only question mooted by the parents has been, “What good-natured friendcanwe ask this time?”Captain Hulbert took his yacht to other waters in November, only to come sailing back again in December, when he finally laid up theVendettain winter quarters, and took up his abode at the Mount, where he availed himself of his brother’s stud, which had been reduced to two old hunters and a pair of carriage-horses of mediocre quality. And so the shortening days drew on towards Christmas; baby’s first Christmas, as that small person’s adorers remarked—as if it were a wonderful thing for any young Christian to make a beginning of life—and all was happiness at the Angler’s Nest. All was happiness without a cloud, till one morning—Allegra and her brother being alone in the library, where she sometimes painted at her little table-easel, while he read—she put down her palette and went over to him, laying her hand upon his shoulder as he sat in his accustomed place in the old-fashioned bow-window.“Martin, I want to speak to you about Isola,” she said, rather tremulously.“What about her? Why, she was here this minute,” he exclaimed. “Is there anything amiss?”“I do not think she is so strong as she ought to be. You may not notice, perhaps. A woman is quicker to see these things than a man—and she and I used to walk and row together—I am able to see the difference in her since last year. She seems to me to have been going back in her health for the last month or two, since her wonderful recovery from her illness. Don’t be anxious, Martin!” she said, answering his agonized look. “I feel sure there is nothing that a little care cannot cure; but I want to put you on your guard. I asked her to let me send for Mr. Baynham, and she refused.”“Why, he sees her two or three times a week—he is in and out like one of ourselves.”“But he doesn’t see her professionally. He comes in hurriedly late in the evening—or between the lights—to fetch his wife. He is tired, and we all talk to him, and Isa is bright and lively. He is not likely to notice the change in her in that casual way.”“Is there a change?”“Yes, I am sure there is. Although I see her every day, I am conscious of the change.”“Baynham shall talk to her this afternoon.”“That’s right, Martin—and if I were you I’d have the doctor from Plymouth again.”Life had been so full of bliss lately, and yet he had not been afraid. Yes, it was the old story. “Metuit secundis.” That is what the wise man does. Fools do otherwise—hug themselves in their short-lived gladness, and say in their hearts, “There is no death.”Mr. Baynham came in the afternoon, in answer to a little note from Martin Disney, and he and Isola were closeted together in the library for some time, with baby’s nurse in attendance to assist her mistress in preparing for the ordeal by stethoscope. Happily that little instrument which thrills us all with the aching pain of fear when we see it in the doctor’s hand, told no evil tidings of Isola’s lungs or heart. Thero was nothing organically wrong—but the patient was in a very weak state.“You really are uncommonly low,” said Mr. Baynham, looking at her intently as she stood before him in the wintry sunlight. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing to yourself to bring yourself down so much since last summer—after all the trouble I took to build you up, too. I’m afraid you’ve been worrying yourself about the youngster—a regular young Hercules. I don’t know whether he’d be up to strangling a pair of prize pythons; but I’m sure he could strangle you. I shall send you a tonic; and you’ll have totake a good deal more care of yourself than you seem to have been taking lately.”And then he laid down severe rules as to diet, until it seemed to Isola that he wished her to be eating and drinking all day—new-laid eggs, cream, old port, beef-tea—all the things which she had loathed in the dreary days of her long illness.Mr. Baynham had a serious talk with the colonel after he left Isola, and it was agreed between them that she should be taken to Plymouth next day to see the great authority.“You are giving yourself a great deal too much trouble about me, Martin,” she said. “There is nothing wrong. I am only a little weak and tired sometimes.”Her husband looked at her heart-brokenly. Weak and tired. Yes; there were all the signs of failing life in those languid movements of the long, slender limbs, in the transparent pallor of the ethereal countenance. Decay was lovely in this fair young form; but he felt that it was decay. There must be something done to stop Misfortune’s hastening feet.
Captain Hulbert went by the church-path that morning, although it took him ever so far out of his way. He wanted to walk to church with the Disney family, in order to talk over their victory; and the Disneys seemed to-day to resolve themselves into one; and that one was Allegra Leland; for she and the captain walked ahead and discoursed gaily, perhaps in too exultant and worldly a vein for pious church people; but at worst their exultation was in a good cause; for the horn of the lowly was exalted, and the pride of the rich man was brought low.
“Do you think he will be at church?” asked Allegra, the pronoun standing for Mr. Crowther.
“Of course he will. He must brazen out the position. He will be there, no doubt, gnashing his teeth behind his prayer-book. If angry looks could kill, you and I would be as dead as Ananias and Sapphira before the end of the service.”
“Poor, silly man, why did he want to shut up the footpath?” speculated Allegra.
“Only to show his importance—to make himself felt in the neighbourhood. They wouldn’t have him for their representative, in spite of his money, and his grand Church and State principles, and all the Primrose Leaguing of his womankind; and so he turns savage and wants to make himself disagreeable.”
Yes, it was true that Mr. Crowther had stood for Lostwithiel on three separate occasions, and with equal unsuccess on each. This may have embittered him. If the anger of slighted beauty is a furious thing, no less bitter is the sting of wounded vanity in the rejected candidate.
And then the parson and the doctor had told Mr. Crowtherthat he could not close his wood against the public; an all-sufficient reason why he should make the attempt.
The Crowther family were in the chancel pew in full force. Allegra thought she detected signs of distress in Mrs. Crowther’s countenance; but the daughters went through the service with their noses in the air, and were more than usually vivacious and conversational among their friends between the church-porch and the landau which bore them away to Glenaveril, and the sumptuous boredom of Sunday luncheon.
Merrily went the short autumn days on board theVendetta, and merrily went the tea-drinkings and talk in the drawing-room at the Angler’s Nest. Mrs. Disney did not often join the yachting expeditions east or west. The sea made her head ache, she told them; but Mrs. Baynham, who loved pleasure of any kind, was always ready to chaperon Allegra, and Isola welcomed the wanderers to the cheery fireside and the friendly five-o’clock tea. She spent her own days mostly in the society of her baby, with whom she seemed to hold a kind of mysterious commune. She had no idea of amusing him as the nurse had, none of those conventional tricks and movements which are offered to generation after generation of infants; but the child would lie in her lap for hours while she sang to him in her low sweet voice the songs she had learnt in her early girlhood—songs that the peasants of Brittany sing, some of them—and others of a somewhat loftier strain. She would sing him little bits of Mozart, those immortal melodies, of inexhaustible sweetness and ineffable pathos, music mixed with smiles and tears, melody interwoven with such melting tenderness as thrills the coldest heart. There was a gentle happiness in these solitary hours which the young mother spent with her child; and Martin Disney, coming into the room unawares, sometimes stood for a minute or so in loving contemplation of that domestic picture—the young fair face with its long oval form and delicate features; the pensive gravity of the large violet eyes, and mournful droop of the thin, flower-like lips. He hadseen such a face on canvas, the ideal Madonna of Raffaelle, with just that subdued blonde colouring and pale auburn hair, and just that thoughtful expression.
His heart swelled with gladness and gratitude as he contemplated mother and son. Yes, the child had made all things well in his home.
Those aching doubts which he felt as he watched beside his wife’s sick-bed had vanished like clouds before the sun. Who could doubt the happiness of the mother, absorbed in her firstborn? Who could doubt the love of the wife, looking up at her husband with such tender welcome as he bent over her shoulder to take the little curled-up fist in his, unfold the crumpled fingers, and press them to his lips?
“You are very fond of him, Martin?” she asked, with an often repeated inquiry, knowing what the answer would be.
“Fond of him! After you he is all that I have in this world—except Allegra, who will float away into a world of her own by-and-by, and belong to us no more.”
“After me! He ought to be first, Martin—your son, your heir, your second self in the days to come. He ought to have the first place in your heart, Martin, for he is your future.”
“No one is first but you.”
He dropped the baby hand, and took his wife’s head between his hands, and lifted the fair young forehead, looking down at it fondly before he stooped to kiss the soft clustering hair and pencilled brows and ivory temples, with more than a lover’s passion.
CHAPTER XIV.
“SAY THE FALSE CHARGE WAS TRUE.”
The Baynhams’ dinner-party was a function to be anticipated with horror, and undergone with resignation. For the first week after the acceptance of the invitation the ceremony had seemed so far off that it could be talked aboutlightly, and even made an occasion for mirth—Allegra giving her own little sketch of what a dinner at Myrtle Lodge would be like—the drawing-room with its wealth of chair-backs and photograph albums, and the water-colour landscapes which Mrs. Baynham had painted while she was at a finishing school at Plymouth, never having touched brush or pencil since—and Mrs. Baynham’s rosy-cheeked nieces from Truro, who always appeared on the scene of any festivity. Yes, one could tell beforehand what the entertainment would be like.
One thing they did not know, however, Mrs. Baynham having been discreetly silent on the subject. They did not know that they were to meet the Glenaveril family in full force, the doctor’s wife being of opinion that a friendly dinner-party was the panacea for all parish quarrels and small antagonisms, and that by judiciously bringing the Crowthers and the Disneys together at a well-spread board, and in the genial atmosphere of her unspacious drawing-room, she could bring about an end of the feud, or tacit coldness, which had divided the Angler’s Nest and Glenaveril since Colonel Disney’s home-coming. It was a disappointment to this worthy woman to see Vansittart Crowther, when Colonel and Mrs. Disney were announced, start and glare as if a mad dog had been brought into the room; but she was relieved at seeing the easy nod which the colonel bestowed upon his vanquished foe, and the friendly hand which good Mrs. Crowther held out to Isola, who paled and blushed, and all but wept at meeting with that cordial matron.
“I don’t know why you never come to see me,” said Mrs. Crowther, confidentially, having made room for Isola upon a very pretentious and uncomfortable sofa of the cabriole period, a sofa with a sloping seat and a stately back in three oval divisions, heavily framed in carved walnut, a back against which it was agony to lean, a seat upon which it was martyrdom to sit. “But I don’t see why we shouldn’t be friends when we do happen to meet.”
“Dear Mrs. Crowther, we are always friends. I shall never forget your kindness to me.”
“There, there; you’re a tender-hearted soul, I know. It grieved me so not to go and see you when you were ill; and not to pay attention to your baby. Such a sweet little fellow, too. I’ve given him many a kiss on the sly when I’ve met him and his nurse in the lanes. I suppose Mr. Crowther and the colonel don’t hitch their horses very well together. That’s at the bottom of it all, no doubt. But as for you and me, Isola, I hope we shall always be good friends.”
This confidential talk between the two women, observed by Mrs. Baynham out of the corner of her eye, augured well; but Mr. Crowther had not left off glaring, and a glare in those protruding eyeballs was awful. He usurped the hearthrug, as he laid down the law about the political situation and the impending ruin of the country.
“A feeble policy never maintained the prestige of any country, sir,” he told Captain Pentreath, the half-pay bachelor, who was devoted to fishing, and cared very little whether his country had prestige or shuffled on without it—so long as fish would bite. “We lost our prestige when we lost Beaconsfield, and with our prestige we are losing our influence. The Continental powers leave us out of their calculations. The neutral policy of the last ten years has stultified the triumph of British arms from Marlborough to Wellington. The day will come, sir, when the world will cease to believe in the history of those magnificent campaigns. People will say, ‘These are idle traditions. England could never have been a warlike nation.’”
Captain Pentreath tried to look interested, but was obviously indifferent to the opinion of future ages, and intent upon watching Allegra, looking her handsomest in a yellow silk gown, and deep in talk with Captain Hulbert, who leant his tall form against Mrs. Baynham’s cottage piano, which, with a view to artistic effect, had been disguised in Algerian drapery, and wheeled into a position that made the room more difficult of navigation.
One only of the rosy-cheeked nieces was allowed to appear at the dinner-table; firstly because the table was a tight fit for twelve, and secondly because a thirteenth would have excited superstitious fears. The younger sister, whom people asked about with tender solicitude, was to be on view afterwards, when she would perform the bass to her sister’s treble in the famous overture to Zampa, which, although not exactly a novelty, may be relied upon to open a musical evening withéclat.
Every one bad arrived, and after a chilling delay, Potts, the local fishmonger, who had been a butler, and who went out to wait at dinner-parties, and was as familiar a figure as a saddle of mutton or a cod’s head and shoulders, made his solemn announcement, and with an anxious mind, Mrs. Baynham saw her guests parade across the narrow hall somewhat overfurnished with stags’ heads, barometers, gig-whips and umbrella-stands, to the dining-room, while a hot blast of roast meat burst fiercely from the adjacent kitchen.
Mrs. Baynham had allotted Isola to Mr. Crowther, determined to carry out her idea of bringing about a friendly feeling. Mr. Baynham took Mrs. Crowther, and Captain Pentreath had the privilege of escorting Belinda, whose sentiments and airs and graces of every kind he knew by heart. There was no more excitement in such companionship than in going in to dinner with his grandmother. What is the use of being brought in continual association with a handsome heiress if you know yourself a detrimental?
“She would no more look at me as a lover than she would at a Pariah dog,” said the captain, when some officious boon companion at the club suggested that he should enter himself for the Crowther Stakes.
Captain Hulbert was made happy with Allegra, and Colonel Disney was honoured by his hostess, to whom strict etiquette would have prescribed the peer’s son. There was surplus female population in the persons of Alicia Crowther and Mary Baynham, who agreeably adorned each side ofthe table with a little extra sweetness and light; Miss Baynham, buxom and rosy in a white cashmere frock which she had grown out of since her last dinner-party; Miss Crowther, square shouldered and bony, in a black confection by Worth, with a bloated diamond heart making a mirage upon a desert waste of chest, it being a point of honour with thin girls to be moredécoletéesthan their plumper sisters.
Mrs. Baynham’s conversation at one of her own dinners was apt to be somewhat distracted and inconsecutive in substance, although she maintained a smiling and delighted air all the time, whatever anxieties might be wearing her spirit—anxieties about the cooking and the attendance—angry wonder at the prolonged absence of the parlour-maid—distress at seeing the lobster sauce dragging its slow length along when people had nearly finished the turbot—agonizing fears lest thevol au ventshould not last out after that enormous help taken by Captain Pentreath, in sheer absence of mind, perhaps, since he only messed it about on his plate, while he bored Miss Crowther with a prosy account of his latest victory over an obstinate demon of the Jack family—“such a devil of a fellow, three feet long, and with jaws like a crocodile.”
Colonel Disney was almost as inconsecutive and fragmentary in his conversation as his hostess, and did not imitate her smiling aspect. He was silent and moody, as he had been at the Glenaveril dinner, more than a year ago. That Silenus face bending towards his wife’s ear—that confidential air assumed in every look and tone—made him furious. He could scarcely sit through the dinner. He wounded Mrs. Baynham in her pride of heart as a housekeeper by hardly touching her choicest dishes.
“Oh, come now, Colonel Disney,” she pleaded, “you must take one of my lobster cromskys. I don’t mind owning that I made them myself. It is anentréeI learnt from the cook at my own home. My father was always particular about his table, and we had a professed cook. Please don’t refuse a cromsky.”
Colonel Disney took the thing on his plate, and sat frowning at it, while a bustle at the door and a marked rise in the temperature indicated the entrance of thepièce de resistance, in the shape of a well-kept saddle of mutton.
“Oh, but you had seen theVendettabefore, hadn’t you?” asked the oily voice on the other side of the table. “You knew all about her. Really, now, Mrs. Disney, was that your first visit to Lostwithiel’s yacht?”
Isola looked at the speaker as if he had struck her. Great God, how pale she was! Or was it the reflection of the apple-green shade upon the candle in front of her which gave her that ghastly look?
“Yes,” she said. “I saw the yacht from the harbour years ago.”
“But you were never on board her? How odd, now. I had a notion that you must have seen that pretty cabin, and all Lostwithiel’s finical arrangements. He was so proud of theVendettawhen he was here. He was always asking my girls on board. You remember, Alicia, how Lord Lostwithiel used to ask you two girls to tea?”
“Yes,” answered his daughter, in her hard voice. “He asked us often enough, but mother would not let us go.”
“How very severe!” said Captain Hulbert, attracted by the sound of his brother’s name. “Why do you object to a tea-party on theVendetta, Mrs. Crowther? Have you a prejudice against yachts? Do you think they are likely to go down in harbour, like the poor oldRoyal George?”
“Oh no, I am not afraid of that. Only I liked Lord Lostwithiel to come to tea with us at Glenaveril; and I did not think it would be quite the thing for my girls to visit a bachelor’s yacht, even if I went with them. People at Trelasco are only too ready to make unpleasant remarks. They would have said we were running after Lord Lostwithiel.”
“Oh, but it isn’t the single girls who run after the men nowadays,” said Mr. Crowther, with his Silenus grin; “it’s the young married women. They are the sirens.”
Nobody took any notice of this remark; and the conversation which had become general for a minute or two resumed its duologue form.
Captain Hulbert and Allegra went on with their animated discussion as to the author of “Macbeth” and “Hamlet;” and Captain Pentreath took up the thread of his story about the obstinate pike; Alicia talked to the doctor about her last day with the hounds; and Mary Baynham told Mrs. Crowther about a church bazaar, which had electrified Truro, and at which she had “helped” at somebody else’s stall.
“It was hard work standing about and trying to sell things all day, and persuading stingy old gentlemen to put into raffles for talking dolls,” said Miss Baynham. “I have pitied shop-girls ever since.”
Mrs. Baynham gave the signal for departure, feeling that her dinner, from a material point of view, had been a success. The lobster sauce had been backward, and the three last people to whom thevol au ventwas offered had got very little except pie-crust and white sauce, but those were small blemishes. The mutton and the pheasants had been unimpeachable; and on those substantial elements Mrs. Baynham took her stand. She had spared neither pains nor money. Her Italian cream was cream, and not cornflour. Her cabinet-pudding was a work of art. She felt satisfied with herself, and knew that the doctor would approve; and yet she felt somehow that the moral atmosphere had not been altogether free from storm-cloud. Colonel Disney had looked on at the feast with a gloomy countenance; Mr. Crowther had talked in an unpleasant tone.
“I am afraid those two will never forget the church path,” she thought, as she set her nieces down to Zampa, and then went to inspect the card-table in a snug corner near the fire, with its freshly lighted wax candles, and new cards placed ready for the good old English game which our ancestors called whist.
Zampa once started meant a noisy evening. CaptainPentreath would sing “The Maid of Llangollen,” and “Drink, puppy, drink.” Mary Baynham would murder “It was a dream,” and scream the higher notes in “Ruby.” Duet would follow solo, and fantasia succeed ballad, Mrs. Baynham’s idea of a social gathering being the nearest attainable approach to a penny reading. She would have had recitations, and imitations of popular actors, had there been any one capable of providing that form of amusement.
This evening, however, she failed in getting a quartette for whist. Neither Mr. Crowther nor his wife was disposed for cards; Colonel Disney coldly declined; and it was useless to ask the young people to leave the attractions of that woody piano. While she was lamenting this state of things, the whist-table being usually a feature in her drawing-room, the Disneys and Allegra bade her good night, and were gone before she had time to remonstrate with them for so early a departure.
It seemed earlier than it really was, for the dinner had been late. Disney’s quick ear had heard the step of his favourite horse, punctual as the church clock. He had ordered his carriage at half-past ten, and at half-past ten he and his party left the drawing-room, the doctor following to hand the ladies to their carriage, while the colonel lighted a cigar on the door-step, preparatory to walking home.
“It’s a fine night; I’d rather walk,” he said.
He walked further than the Angler’s Nest. He walked up to the hill where he and Isola had sat in the summer sunshine on the day after his home-coming. He roamed about that wild height for two hours, and the church clock struck one while he was in the lane leading down to Trelasco.
“If that man has any motive for his insolence—if there is any secret between him and my wife, I’ll wring the truth out of him before he is a day older,” the colonel said to himself, as he tramped homewards.
He wrote to Mr. Crowther next morning, requesting the favour of half an hour’s private conversation upon a very serious matter. He proposed to call upon Mr. Crowther at twelve o’clock, if that hour would be convenient. The bearer of the note would wait for an answer.
Mr. Crowther replied that he would be happy to see Colonel Disney at the hour named.
The colonel arrived at Glenaveril with military punctuality, and was forthwith shown into that grandiose apartment, where all those time-honoured works which the respectable family bookseller considers needful to the culture of the country gentleman were arranged in old oak bookcases, newly carved out of soft chestnut wood in the workshops of Venice. It was an imposing apartment, with panelled dado, gilded Japanese paper, heavy cornice and ceiling, incarton pierre—such a room as makes the joy of architect, builder, and furniture-maker. So far as dignity and social position can be bought for money, those attributes had been bought by Vansittart Crowther; and yet this morning, standing before his mediæval fireplace, with his hands in the pockets of his velvet lounge coat, he looked a craven. He advanced a step or two to meet his visitor, and offered his hand, which the colonel overlooked, fixing him at once with a gaze that went straight to the heart of his mystery. He felt that an accuser was before him—that he, Vansittart Crowther, was called to account.
“Mr. Crowther, I have come to ask what you mean by your insolent manner to my wife?”
“Insolent! My dear Colonel Disney, I admire the lady in question more than any other woman within twenty miles. Surely it is not insolent to admire a pretty woman?”
“It is insolent to adopt the tone you have adopted to Mrs. Disney—first in your own house—on the solitary occasion when my wife and I were your guests—and next at the dinner-table last night. I took no notice of your manner on the first occasion—for though I considered your conduct offensive, I thought it might be your ordinarymanner to a pretty woman, and I considered I did enough in forbidding my wife ever to re-enter your house. But last night the offence was repeated—was grosser—and more distinctly marked. What do you mean by talking to my wife of Lord Lostwithiel with a peculiar emphasis? What do you mean by your affectation of a secret understanding with my wife whenever you pronounce Lord Lostwithiel’s name?”
“I am not aware that there has been anything peculiar in my pronunciation of that name—or in my manner to Mrs. Disney,” said Mr. Crowther, looking at his boots, but with a malignant smile lurking at the corners of his heavy lips.
“Oh, but you are aware of both facts. You meant to be insolent, and meant other people to notice your insolence. It was your way of being even with me for defying you to shut up the wood yonder, and cut off the people’s favourite walk to church. You dared not attack me; but you thought you could wreak your petty spite upon my wife—and you thought I should be too dull to observe, or too much of a poltroon to resent your impertinence. That’s what you thought, Mr. Crowther: and I am here to undeceive you, and to tell you that you are a coward and a liar, and that if you don’t like those words you may send any friend you please to my friend, Captain Hulbert, to arrange a meeting in the nearest and most convenient place on the other side of the channel.”
Mr. Crowther turned very red, and then very pale. It was the first time he had been invited to venture his life in defence of his honour; and for the moment it seemed to him that honour was a small thing, a shadowy possession exaggerated into importance by the out-at-elbows and penniless among mankind, who had nothing else to boast of. As if a man who always kept fifty thousand pounds at his bankers, and who had money invested all over the world, would go and risk his life upon the sands of Blankenburgh against a soldier whose retiring allowance was something less thanthree hundred a year, and who was perhaps a dead shot. The idea was preposterous!
No, Mr. Crowther was not going to fight; and though he quailed before those steady eyes of Martin Disney’s, calm in their deep indignation, this explanation was not unwelcome to him. He had a dagger ready to plunge into his enemy’s heart, and he did not mean to hold his hand.
“I’m not a fighting man, Colonel Disney,” he said; “and if I were I should hardly care to fight for a grass widow who made herself common talk by her flirtation with a man of most notorious antecedents. We will say that it never was any more than a flirtation—in spite of Mrs. Disney’s mysterious disappearance after the Hunt Ball, which happened to correspond with Lord Lostwithiel’s sudden departure. The two events might have no connection—more especially as Mrs. Disney came back ten days after, and Lord Lostwithiel hasn’t come back yet.”
“I can answer for my wife’s conduct, sir, under all circumstances, and amidst all surroundings. You are the first person who has ever dared to cast a slur upon her, and it shall not be my fault if you are not the last. I tell you again, to your face, that you are a coward and a liar—a coward because you are insolent to a young and lovely woman, and a liar because you insinuate evil against her which you are not able to substantiate.”
“Ask your wife where she was at the end of December, the year before last—the year you were in India. Ask her what she had been doing in London when she came back to Fowey on the last day of the year, and travelled in the same train with my lawyer, Mr. MacAllister, who was struck by her appearance, first because she was so pretty, and next because she looked the picture of misery—got into conversation with her, and found out who she was. If you think that is a lie you can go to MacAllister, in the Old Jewry, and ask him to convince you that it is a fact.”
“There is no occasion. My wife has no secrets from me.”
“I am glad to hear it. Then there is really nothing tofight about except a good deal of vulgar abuse on your part, which I am willing to overlook. A man of your mature age, married to a beautiful girl, has some excuse for being jealous.”
“More excuse, perhaps, than a man of your age has for acting like a cad,” said the colonel, turning upon his heel, and leaving Mr. Crowther to his reflections.
Those reflections were not altogether bitter. Mr. Crowther felt assured that he had sown the seeds of future misery. He did not believe in the colonel’s assertion that there were no secrets between him and his wife. He had cherished the knowledge of that mysterious journey from London on the last day of the year. He had warned his confidential friend and solicitor to mention the fact to no one else. He had pried and questioned, and by various crooked ways had found out that Isola had been absent from the Angler’s Nest for some days after the Hunt Ball, and he had told himself that she was a false wife, and that Martin Disney was a fool to trust her.
As for being called by harsh names, he was too much a man of the world to attach any importance to an angry husband’s abuse. It made him not a sixpence the poorer; and as there had been no witness to the interview it scarcely diminished his dignity. The thing rested between him and his enemy.
“He took down my gates, but I think I have given him something to think about that will spoil his rest for many a night, before he has thought it out,” mused Mr. Crowther.
It was after the usual luncheon hour before Martin Disney went back to the Angler’s Nest. He had been for a long walk by the river, trying to walk down the devil that raged within him, before he could trust himself to go home. His wife was alone in the drawing-room, sitting by the fire with her baby in her lap; but this time he did not pause on the threshold to contemplate that domestic picture. There was no tenderness in the eyes which looked at his wife—only a stern determination. Every feature in the familiar facelooked strange and rigid, as in the face of an accuser and judge.
“Send the child away, Isola. I want some serious talk with you.”
She stretched out a faltering hand to the bell, looking at him, pale and scared, but saying no word. She gave the baby to his nurse presently in the same pallid dumbness, never taking her eyes from her husband’s face.
“Martin,” she gasped at last, frozen by his angry gaze, “is there anything wrong?”
“Yes, there is something horribly wrong—something that means destruction. What were you doing in London the winter before last, while I was away? What was the motive of your secret departure—your stealthy return? What were you doing on the last day of the year? Where had you been? With whom?”
She looked at him breathless with horror; whether at the accusation implied in his words, or at his withering manner, it would have been difficult for the looker-on to decide. His manner was terrible enough to have scared any woman, as he stood before her, waiting for her answer.
“Where had you been—with whom?” he repeated, while her lips moved mutely, quivering as in abject fear. “Great God! why can’t you answer? Why do you look such a miserable, degraded creature—self-convicted—not able to speak one word in your own defence?”
“On the last day of the year?” she faltered, with those tremulous lips.
“On the last day of the year before last—the winter I spent in Burmah. What were you doing—where were you—where had you been? Is it so difficult to remember?”
“No, no; of course not,” she cried, with a half-hysterical laugh. “You frighten me out of my senses, Martin. I don’t know what you are aiming at. I was coming home from London on that day—of course—the 31st of Jan—no, December. Coming home from Hans Place, where I had been spending a few days with Gwendolen.”
“You never told me of that visit to Gwendolen.”
“Oh yes; I’m sure I told you all about it in one of my letters. Perhaps you did not get that letter—I remember you never noticed it in yours. Martin, for God’s sake, don’t look at me like that!”
“I am looking at you to see if you are the woman I have loved and believed in, or if you are as false as hell,” he said, with his strong hand grasping her shoulder, her face turned to his, so that those frightened eyes of hers could not escape his scrutiny.
“Who has put this nonsense in your head?”
“Your neighbour—your good Mrs. Crowther’s husband—told me that his lawyer travelled with you from Paddington—on the 31st of December—the year before last. He got into conversation with you—you remember, perhaps?”
“No,” she cried, with a sudden piteous change in her face, “I can’t remember.”
“But you came from London on that day. You remember that?”
“Yes, yes. I came from Gwendolen’s house on that day. I told you so in my letter.”
“That letter which I never received—telling me of that visit to which you made no allusion in any of your later letters. It was about that time, I think, that you fell off as a correspondent—left off telling me all the little details of your life—which in your earlier letters seemed to shorten the distance between us.”
She was silent, listening to his reproaches with a sullen dumbness, as it seemed to him, while he stood there in his agony of doubt—in his despairing love. He turned from her with a heart-broken sigh, and slowly left the room, going away he scarce knew whither, only to put himself beyond the possibility of saying hard things to her, of letting burning, branding words flash out of the devouring fire in his heart.
She stood for a few moments after he had gone, hesitating, breathless, and frightened, like a hunted animal at bay—then ran to the door, opened it softly, and listened. She could hear him pacing the room above. Again she stood still and hesitated, her lips tightly set, her hands clenched, her brow bent in painful thought. Then she snatched hat and jacket from a corner of the hall where such things were kept, and put them on hurriedly, with trembling hands, as if her fate depended upon the speed with which she got herself ready to go out, looking up at the great, dim, brazen face of the eight-day clock all the while. And then she let herself out at a half-glass door into the garden, and walked quickly to a side gate that opened in to the lane—the gate at which the baker and the butcher stopped to gossip with the maids on fine mornings.
There was a cold bracing wind, and the sun was declining in a sky barred with dense black clouds—an ominous sky, prophetic of storm or rain. Isola walked up the hill towards Tywardreath as if she were going on an errand of deadliest moment, skirted and passed the village, with no slackening of her pace, and so by hill and valley to Par, a long and weary walk under ordinary circumstances for a delicate young woman, although accustomed to long country walks. But Isola went upon her lonely journey with a feverish determination which seemed to make her unconscious of distance. Her steps never faltered upon the hard, dusty road. The autumn wind that swept the dead leaves round her feet seemed to hold her up and carry her along without effort upon her part. Past copse and meadow, common land and stubble, she walked steadily onward, looking neither to right nor left of her path, only straight forward to the signal lights that showed fiery red in the grey dusk at Par Junction. She watched the lights growing larger and more distinct as she neared the end of her journey. She saw the fainter lights of the village scattered thinly beyond the station lamps, low down towards the sandy shore. She heard the distant rush of a train, and the dull sob of the sea creeping up along the level shore, between the great cliffs that screened the bay. A clock struck six as shewaited at the level crossing, in an agony of impatience, while truck after truck of china clay crept slowly by, in a procession that seemed endless; and then for the first time she felt that the wind was cold, and that her thin serge jacket did not protect her from that biting blast. Finally the line was clear, and she was able to cross and make her way to the village post-office.
Her business at the post-office occupied about a quarter of an hour, and when she came out into the village street the sky had darkened, and there were heavy rain-drops making black spots upon the grey dust of the road; but she hurried back by the way she had come, recrossed the line, and set out on the long journey home. The shower did not last long, but it was not the only one she encountered on her way back, and the poor little jacket was wet through when she re-entered by the servant’s gate, and by the half-glass door, creeping stealthily into her own house and running upstairs to her own room to get rid of her wet garments before any one could surprise her with questions and sympathy. It was past eight o’clock, though she had walked so fast all the way as to feel neither cold nor damp. She took off her wet clothes and dressed herself for dinner in fear and trembling, imagining that her absence would have been wondered at, and her errand would be questioned. It was an infinite relief when she went down to the drawing-room to find only Allegra sitting at her easel, working at a sepia sketch by lamplight.
“Martin is very late,” she said, looking up as Isola entered, “and he is generally a model of punctuality. I hope there is nothing wrong. Where have you been hiding yourself since lunch, Isa? Have you been lying down?”
“Yes, part of the time”—hesitatingly. “It is very late.”
“Twenty minutes to nine. Dale has been in twice in the last quarter of an hour to say that the dinner is being spoilt. Hark! There’s the door, and Martin’s step. Thank God, there is nothing wrong!” cried Allegra, getting up and going out to meet her brother.
Colonel Disney’s countenance as he stood in the lamplight was not so reassuring as the substantial fact of his return. It was something to know that he was not dead, or hurt in any desperate way—victim of any of those various accidents which the morbid mind of woman can imagine if husband or kinsman be unusually late for dinner; but that things were all right with him was open to question. He was ghastly pale, and had a troubled, half-distracted expression which seared Allegra almost as much as his prolonged absence had done.
“I am sure there is something wrong!” she said, when they were seated at dinner, and the parlour-maid had withdrawn for a minute or two in pursuance of her duties, having started them fairly with the fish.
“Oh no, there is nothing particularly amiss; I have been worried a little, that’s all. I am very sorry to be so unconscionably late for dinner, and to sit down in this unkempt condition. But I loitered at the club looking at the London papers. I shall have to go to London to-morrow, Isola—on business—and I want you to go with me. Have you any objection?”
She started at the word London, and looked at him curiously—surprised, yet resolute—as if she were not altogether unprepared for some startling proposition on his part.
“Of course not. I would rather go with you if you really have occasion to go.”
“I really have. It is very important. You won’t mind our deserting you for two or three days, will you, Allegra?” asked Disney, turning to his sister. “Mrs. Baynham will be at your service as chaperon if you want to go out anywhere while we are away. It is an office in which she delights.”
“I won’t trouble her. I shall stay at home, and paint all the time. I have a good deal of work to do to my pictures before they will be ready for the winter exhibition, and the time for sending in is drawing dreadfully near.You need have no anxiety as to my gadding about, Martin. You will find me shut up in my painting-room, come home when you will.”
Later, when she and her brother were alone in the drawing-room, she went up to him softly and put her arms around his neck.
“Martin, dearest, I know you have some great trouble. Why don’t you tell me? Is it anything very bad? Does it mean loss of fortune; poverty to be faced; this pretty home to be given up, perhaps?”
“No, no, no, my dear. The home is safe enough; the house will stand firm as long as you and I live. I am not a shilling poorer than I was yesterday. There is nothing the matter—nothing worth speaking about; blue devils, vapours if you like. That’s all.”
“You are ill, Martin. You have found out that there is something wrong with you—heart, lungs, something—and you are going to London to consult a physician. Oh, my dear, dear brother,” she cried, with a look of agony, her arms still clasped about his neck, “don’t keep me in the dark; let me know the worst.”
“There is no worst, Allegra. I am out of sorts, that’s all. I am going to town to see my lawyer.”
CHAPTER XV.
“MY LIFE CONTINUES YOURS, AND YOUR LIFE MINE.”
They started by the eleven-o’clock train from Fowey next morning, husband and wife, in a strangely silent companionship—Isola very pale and still as she sat in a corner of the railway carriage, with her back to the rivers and the sea. Naturally, in a place of that kind, they could not get away without being seen by some of their neighbours. Captain Pentreath was going to Bodmin, and insisted upon throwing away a half-finished cigar in order to enjoy the privilege of Colonel and Mrs. Disney’s society, being one of those unmeditative animals who hate solitude. He talked all the way to Par, lit a fresh cigar during the wait at the junction, and reappeared just as the colonel and his wife were taking their seats in the up-train.
“Have you room for me in there?” he asked, sacrificing more than half of his second cigar. “I’ve got theMercury—Jepps is in for Stokumpton—a great triumph for our side.”
He spread out the paper, and made believe to begin to read with a great show of application, as if he meant to devour every syllable of Jepps’s long exposition of the political situation; but after two minutes he dropped theMercuryon his knees and began to talk. There were people in Fowey who doubted whether Captain Pentreath could read. He had been able once, of course, or he could hardly have squeezed himself into the Army; but there was an idea that he had forgotten the accomplishment, except in its most elementary form upon sign-boards, and in the headings of newspaper articles, printed large. It was supposed that the intensity of effort by which he had taken in the cramming that enabled him to pass the ordeal of the Examiners had left his brain a blank.
“You’re not going further than Plymouth, I suppose?” he asked.
“We are going to London.”
“Are you really, now? A bad time of year for London—fogs and thaws, and all kinds of beastly weather.”
And then he asked a string of questions—futile, trivial, vexing as summer flies buzzing round the head of an afternoon sleeper; and then came the welcome cry of Bodmin Road, and he reluctantly left them.
The rest of the journey was passed almost in silence. They had the compartment to themselves for the greater part of the time, and they sat in opposite corners, pretending to read—Isola apparently absorbed in a book that she had taken up at random just before she started, when the carriage was at the door, and while Allegra was calling to her to make haste.
It was Carlyle’s “Hero Worship.” The big words, the magnificent sentences, passed before her eyes like lines in an unknown language. She had not the faintest idea what she was reading; but she followed the lines and turned the leaf at the bottom of a page mechanically.
Martin Disney applied himself to the newspapers which he had accumulated on the way—some at Par, some at Plymouth, some at Exeter, till the compartment was littered all over with them. He turned and tossed them about one after the other. Never had they seemed so empty—the leaders such mere beating the air; the hard facts so few and insignificant. He glanced at Isola as she sat in her corner, motionless and composed. He watched the slender, white hands turning the leaves of her book at regular intervals.
“Is your book very interesting?” he asked, at last, exasperated by her calmness.
He had been attentive and polite to her, offering her the papers, ordering tea for her at Exeter, doing all that a courteous husband ought to do; but he had made no attempt at conversation—nor had she. This question about the book was wrung from him by the intensity of his irritation.
“It is a book you gave me years ago at Dinan,” she answered, looking at him piteously. “‘Hero Worship.’ Don’t you remember? I had never read anything of Carlyle’s before then. You taught me to like him.”
“Did I? Yes, I remember—a little Tauchnitz volume bound in morocco—contraband in England. A cheat—like many things in this life.”
He turned his face resolutely to the window, as if to end the conversation, and he did not speak again till they were moving slowly into the great station, in the azure brightness of the electric light.
“I have telegraphed for rooms at Whitley’s,” he said, naming a small private hotel near Cavendish Square, where they had stayed for a few days before he started for the East.
“Do you think it would be too late for us to call at Hans Place before we go to our hotel?”
She started at the question. He saw her cheeks crimson in the lamplight.
“I don’t think the lateness of hour will matter,” she said, “unless Gwendolen is dining out. She dines out very often.”
“I hope to-night may be an exception.”
“Do you want very much to see her?” asked Isola.
“Very much.”
“You are going to question her about me, I suppose?”
“Yes, Isola, that is what I am going to do.”
“It is treating me rather like a criminal; or, at any rate, like a person whose word cannot be believed.”
“I can’t help myself, Isola. The agony of doubt that I have gone through can only be set at rest in one way. It is so strange a thing, so impossible as it seems to me, that you should have visited your sister while I was away, although no letter I received from you contained the slightest allusion to that visit—an important event in such a monotonous life as yours—and although no word you have ever spoken since my return has touched upon it; till all at once, at a moment’s notice, when I tell you of your journey from London and the slander to which it gave occasion—all at once you spring this visit upon me, as if I ought to have known all about it.”
“You can ask Gwendolen as many questions as you like,” answered Isola, with an offended air, “and you will see if she denies that I was with her in the December you were away.”
Colonel Disney handed his wife into a station brougham. The two portmanteaux were put upon the roof, and the order was given—99, Hans Place—for albeit Mr. Hazelrigg’s splendid mansion was described on his cards and his writing-paper as The Towers, it is always as well to have a number for common people to know us by.
No word was spoken during the long drive from Paddington; no word when the neat little brougham drew up infront of a lofty flight of steps leading up to a Heidelberg doorway, set in the midst of a florid red-brick house, somewhat narrow in proportion to its height, and with over much ornament in the way of terra cotta panelling, bay and oriel, balcony and pediment.
A footman in dark green livery and rice powder opened the door. Mrs. Hazelrigg was at home. He led the way to one of those dismal rooms which are to be found in most fine houses—a room rarely used by the family—a kind of pound for casual visitors. Sometimes the pound is as cold and cheerless as a vestry in a new Anglican church; sometimes it affects a learned air, lines its walls with books that no one ever reads, and calls itself a library. Whatever form or phase it may take, it never fails to chill the visitor.
There was naturally no fire in this apartment. Isola sank shivering into a slippery leather chair, near the Early English fender; her husband walked up and down the narrow floor space. This lasted for nearly ten minutes, when Gwendolen came bursting in, a vision of splendour, in a grey satin tea-gown, frothed with much foam of creamy lace and pale pink ribbon, making a cascade of fluffiness from chin to slippered toes.
“What a most astonishing thing!” she cried, after kissing Isola, and holding out both her plump, white hands to the colonel. “Have you dear, good people dropped from the clouds? I thought you were nearly three hundred miles away when the man came to say you were waiting to see me. It is a miracle we are dining at home to-night. We are so seldom at home. Of course you will stay and dine with us. Come up to my room and take off your hat, Isa. No, you needn’t worry about dress,” anticipating Disney’s refusal; “we are quite alone. I am going to dine in my tea-gown, and Daniel is only just home from the city.”
“You are very kind; no, my dear Mrs. Hazelrigg, we won’t dine with you to-night,” answered Disney. “We have only just come up to town. We drove across the park to see you before going to our hotel. Our portmanteaux are waiting atthe door. We are in town for so short a time that I wanted to see you at once—particularly as I have—a rather foolish question to ask you.”
His voice grew husky, though he tried his uttermost to maintain a lightness of tone.
“Ask away,” said Gwendolen, straightening herself in her glistening grey gown, a splendid example of modern elegance in dress and demeanour, and altogether a more brilliant and imposing beauty than the pale, fragile figure sitting in a drooping attitude beside the fireless hearth. “Ask away,” repeated Gwendolen, gaily, glancing at her sister’s mournful face as she spoke. “If I can answer you I will—but please to consider that I have a wretched memory.”
“You are not likely to forget the fact I want to ascertain. My wife and I have had an argument about dates—we are at variance about the date of her last visit to you—while I was away—and I should like to settle our little dispute, though it did not go so far as a wager. When was she with you? On what date did she leave you?”
All hesitation and huskiness were gone from manner and voice. He stood like a pillar, with his face turned towards his sister-in-law, his eyes resolute and inquiring.
“Oh, don’t ask me about dates,” cried Gwendolen, “I never know dates. I buy Letts in every form, year after year—but I never can keep up my diary. Nothing but a self-acting diary would be of any use to me. It was in December she came to me—and in December she left—after a short visit. Come, Isa. You must remember the dates of your arrival and departure, better than I. You don’t live in the London whirl. You don’t have your brains addled by hearing about Buenos Ayres, Reading and Philadelphias, Berthas, Brighton A’s, and things.”
Martin Disney looked at her searchingly. Her manner was perfectly easy and natural, of a childlike transparency. Her large, bright, blue eyes looked at him—fearless and candid as the eyes of a child.
“You ought to remember that it was on the last day ofthe year I left this house,” said Isola, in her low, depressed voice, as of one weary unto death. “You said enough about it at the time.”
“Did I? Oh, I am such a feather-head,tête de linotte, as they used to call me at Dinan. So it was—New Year’s Eve—and I was vexed with you for not staying to see the New Year in. That was it. I remember everything about it now.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Hazelrigg,” said Martin Disney, and then going over to his wife, he said gravely, “Forgive me, Isola, I was wrong.”
He held out his hands to her with a pleading look, and she rose slowly from her chair, and let her head fall upon his breast as he put his arms round her, soothing and caressing her.
“My poor girl, I was wrong—wrong—wrong—a sinner against your truth and purity,” he murmured low in her ear; and then he added laughingly, to Gwendolen, “Were we not fools to dispute about such a trifle?”
“All married people are fools on occasion,” answered Mrs. Hazelrigg. “I have often quarrelled desperately with Daniel about a mere nothing—not because he was wrong, but because I wanted to quarrel. That kind of thing clears the air—like a thunderstorm. One feels so dutiful and affectionate afterwards. Dan gave me this sapphire ring after one of our biggest rows,” she added, holding up a sparkling finger.
Daniel Hazelrigg came into the room while she was talking of him, a large man, with a bald head and sandy beard, a genial-looking man, pleased with a world in which he had been permitted always to foresee the rise and fall of stocks. The Hazelriggs were the very type of a comfortable couple, so steeped in prosperity and the good things of this world as to be hardly aware of any keener air outside the gardenia-scented atmosphere of their own house; hardly aware of men who dined badly or women who made their own gowns; much less of men who never dined at all, orwomen who flung themselves despairing from the parapets of the London bridges.
Mr. Hazelrigg came into the room beaming, looked at his wife and smiled, as he held out his hand to Colonel Disney, looked at his sister-in-law and smiled again, and held out his hand to her, the smile broadening a little, as if with really affectionate interest.
“I’m very glad to see you, my dear Mrs. Disney; but I can’t compliment you upon looking as well as you did when we last met.”
“She is tired after her long journey,” said Gwendolen, quickly. “That’s all there is amiss.”
“The sooner we get to our hotel the better for both of us,” said Disney. “We are dusty and weather-beaten, and altogether bad company. Good night, Mrs. Hazelrigg.”
“But surely you’ll stop and dine; it’s close upon eight,” remonstrated Hazelrigg, who was the essence of hospitality. “You can send on your luggage, and go to your hotel later.”
“You are very good, but we are not fit for dining out. Isola looks half dead with fatigue,” answered Disney. “Once more, good night.”
He shook hands with husband and wife and hurried Isola to the door.
“Be sure you come to me the first thing to-morrow,” said Gwendolen to her sister. “I shall stay in till you come, and I can drive you anywhere you want to go for your shopping—Stores, Lewis and Allanby’s—anywhere. I want to show you my drawing-room. I have changed everything in it. You’ll hardly know it again.”
She and her husband followed the departing guests to the hall, saw them get into the little brougham and drive off into the night; and then Gwendolen put her arm through her husband’s with a soft clinging affectionateness, as of a Persian cat, that knew when it was well housed and taken good care of.
“Poor Isa! how awfully ill she looks,” sighed Gwendolen.
“Ghastly. Are all women alike, I wonder, Gwen?”
“I think you ought to know what kind of woman I am by this time,” retorted his wife, tossing up her head.
Martin Disney and his wife were alone in their sitting-room at the hotel, somewhat bare and unhomelike, as hotel rooms must always be, despite the march of civilization which has introduced certain improvements. He had made a pretence of dining in the coffee-room below, and she had taken some tea and toast beside the fire; and now at ten o’clock they were sitting on each side of the hearth, face to face, pale and thoughtful, and strangely silent.
“Isola, have you forgiven me?” he asked at last.
“With all my heart. Oh, Martin, I could never be angry with you—never. You have been so good to me. How could I be angry?”
“But you have the right to be angry. I ought not to have doubted. I ought to have believed your word against all the world; but that man raised a doubting devil in me. I was mad with fears and suspicions, wild and unreasonable—as I suppose jealousy generally is. I had never been jealous before. Great God! what a fearful passion it is when a man gives himself up to it. I frightened you by my vehemence, and then your scared looks frightened me. I mistook fear for guilt. Isola, my beloved, let me hear the truth from your own lips—the assurance—the certainty,” he cried with impassioned fervour, getting up and going over to her, looking down into the pale, upturned face with those dark, earnest eyes which always seemed to search the mysteries of her heart. “Let there be no shadow of uncertainty or distrust between us. I have heard from your sister that you were with her when you said you were. That is much. It settles for that vile cad’s insinuated slander; but it is not enough. Let the assurance come to me from your lips—from yours alone. Tell me—by the God who will judge us both some day—Are you my own true wife?”
“I am, Martin—I am your own true wife,” she answered,with an earnestness that thrilled him. “I have not a thought that is not of you. I love you with all my heart and mind. Is not that enough?”
“And you have never wronged me? You have been true and pure always? I call upon God to hear your words, Isola. Is that true?”
“Yes, yes; it is true.”
“God bless you, darling! I will never speak of doubt again. You are my own sweet wife, and shall be honoured and trusted to the end of my days. Thank God, the cloud is past, and we can be happy again!”
She rose from her low seat by the fire, and put her arms round his neck, and hid her face upon his breast, sobbing hysterically.
“My own dear girl, I have been cruel to you—brutal and unkind; but you would forgive me if you knew what I have suffered since noon yesterday; and, indeed, my suffering began before then. That man’s harping on Lostwithiel’s name in all his talk with you—his air of meaning more than he said—and your embarrassment, awakened suspicions that had to be set at rest somehow. Remember the disadvantages under which I labour—the difference in our ages; my unattractiveness as compared with younger men. These things predisposed me to doubt your love. I have not had a moment’s peace since the night of that odious dinner-party. Yes; I have felt a new sensation. I know what jealousy means. But it is past. Praise be to God, it is past. I have come out of the cloud again. Oh, my love, had it been otherwise! Had we been doomed to part!”
“What would you have done, Martin?” she asked, in a low voice, with her face still hidden against his breast, his arms still round her.
“What would I have done, love? Nothing to bring shame on you. Nothing to add to your dishonour or sharpen the agony of remorse. I should have taken my son—my son could not be left under the shadow of a mother’s shame. He and I would have vanished out of your life. You wouldhave heard no more of us. The world would have known nothing. You would have been cared for and protected from further evil—protected from your own frailty. So far, I would have done my duty as your husband to the last day of my life; but you and I would never have looked upon each other again.”
Colonel Disney and his wife stayed in London two days; perhaps to give a colour to their sudden and in somewise unexplained journey; but Isola refused all her sister’s invitations, to lunch, to drive, to dine, to go to an afternoon concert at the Albert Hall, or to see the last Shakespearean revival at the Lyceum. She pleaded various excuses; and Gwendolen had to be satisfied with one visit, at afternoon teatime, when husband and wife appeared together, on the eve of their return to Cornwall.
“It was too bad of you not to come to me yesterday morning, as you promised,” Gwendolen said to her sister. “I stayed indoors till after luncheon on your account; and the days are so short at this time of year. I couldn’t do any shopping.”
Mrs. Hazelrigg was one of those young women for whom life is flavourless when they have nothing to buy. She was so well supplied with everything that women desire or care for that she had to invent wants for herself. She had to watch the advertisements in order to tempt herself with some new wish; were it only for a patent toast-rack, or a new design in ivory paper-knives. The stationers helped to keep life in her by their new departures in writing-paper. Papyrus, Mandarin, Telegraphic, Good Form, Casual, mauve, orange, scarlet, verdigris green. So long as the thing was new it made an excuse for sitting in front of a counter and turning over the contents of a show-case.
“You never came to look at my drawing-room by daylight,” she went on complainingly. “You can’t possibly judge the tints by lamplight. Every chair is of a different shade. I think you have treated me shamefully. I havesent you more telegrams than I could count. And I had such lots to talk about. Have you heard from Dinan lately?”
“Not since August, when mother wrote in answer to our invitation for her and father to spend a month with us. I felt it was hopeless when I wrote to her.”
“Utterly hopeless! Nothing will tempt her to cross the sea. She writes about it as if it were the Atlantic. And Lucy Folkestone tells me she is getting stouter.”
“You mean mother?”
“Yes, naturally. There’s no fear of Lucy ever being anything but bones. Mother is stouter and more sedentary than ever, Lucy says. It’s really dreadful. One doesn’t know where it will end,” added Gwendolen, looking down at her own somewhat portly figure, as if fearing hereditary evil.
“I shall have to take Isa and the boy to Dinan next summer,” said Disney. “It is no use asking the father and mother to cross the channel; though I think they would both like to see their grandson.”
“Mother raved about him in her last letter to me,” replied Gwendolen. “She was quite overcome by the photograph you sent her, only she has got into such a groove—her knitting, her novel, her little walk on the terrace, her long consultations with Toinette about the smallest domestic details—whether the mattresses shall be unpicked to-day or to-morrow, or whether thelessiveshall be a week earlier or a week later. It is dreadful to think of such a life,” added Gwendolen, as if her own existence were one of loftiest aims.
CHAPTER XVI.
“SORROW THAT’S DEEPER THAN WE DREAM, PERCHANCE.”
Life flowed on its monotonous course, like the Fowey river gliding down from Lostwithiel to the sea; and there seemed nothing in this world that could again disturb Martin Disney’s domestic peace. Vansittart Crowther made nofurther attempt to avenge himself for the night attack upon his gates; nor did he demand any apology for the vulgar abuse which he had suffered in the sanctuary of his own library. This he endured, and even further outrage, in the shape of the following letter from Colonel Disney:—
“Sir,“As you have been pleased to take a certain old-womanish interest in my domestic affairs, I think it may be as well to satisfy your curiosity so far as to inform you that when your solicitor travelled in the same train with my wife, she was returning from a visit to her married sister’s house, a visit which had my sanction and approval. I can only regret that her husband’s modest means constrained her to travel alone, and subjected her to the impertinent attentions of one cad and to the slanderous aspersions of another.“I have the honour to be,“Yours, etc.,“Martin Disney.”
“Sir,
“As you have been pleased to take a certain old-womanish interest in my domestic affairs, I think it may be as well to satisfy your curiosity so far as to inform you that when your solicitor travelled in the same train with my wife, she was returning from a visit to her married sister’s house, a visit which had my sanction and approval. I can only regret that her husband’s modest means constrained her to travel alone, and subjected her to the impertinent attentions of one cad and to the slanderous aspersions of another.
“I have the honour to be,“Yours, etc.,“Martin Disney.”
Mr. Crowther treated this letter with the silent contempt which he told himself it merited. What could he say to a man so possessed by uxorious hallucinations, so steeped in the poppy and mandragora of a blind affection, that reason had lost all power over his mind.
“I spoke plain enough—as plain as I dared,” said Mr. Crowther. “He may ride the high horse and bluster as much as he likes. I don’t think he’ll ever feel quite happy again.”
Yet in spite of hints and insinuations from the enemy at his gates, Martin Disney was happy—utterly happy in the love of his young wife, and in the growing graces of his infant son. He no longer doubted Isola’s affection. Her tender regard for him showed itself in every act of her life; in every look of the watchful face that was always on the alert to divine his pleasure, to forestall his wishes. Mrs. Baynham went about everywhere expatiating on the domestic happiness of the Disney family, to whom she was more thanever devoted, now that she felt herself in a manner related to them, having been elevated to the position of godmother to the firstborn—a very different thing to being godmother to some sixth or seventh link in the family-chain, when all thought of selection has been abandoned, and the only question mooted by the parents has been, “What good-natured friendcanwe ask this time?”
Captain Hulbert took his yacht to other waters in November, only to come sailing back again in December, when he finally laid up theVendettain winter quarters, and took up his abode at the Mount, where he availed himself of his brother’s stud, which had been reduced to two old hunters and a pair of carriage-horses of mediocre quality. And so the shortening days drew on towards Christmas; baby’s first Christmas, as that small person’s adorers remarked—as if it were a wonderful thing for any young Christian to make a beginning of life—and all was happiness at the Angler’s Nest. All was happiness without a cloud, till one morning—Allegra and her brother being alone in the library, where she sometimes painted at her little table-easel, while he read—she put down her palette and went over to him, laying her hand upon his shoulder as he sat in his accustomed place in the old-fashioned bow-window.
“Martin, I want to speak to you about Isola,” she said, rather tremulously.
“What about her? Why, she was here this minute,” he exclaimed. “Is there anything amiss?”
“I do not think she is so strong as she ought to be. You may not notice, perhaps. A woman is quicker to see these things than a man—and she and I used to walk and row together—I am able to see the difference in her since last year. She seems to me to have been going back in her health for the last month or two, since her wonderful recovery from her illness. Don’t be anxious, Martin!” she said, answering his agonized look. “I feel sure there is nothing that a little care cannot cure; but I want to put you on your guard. I asked her to let me send for Mr. Baynham, and she refused.”
“Why, he sees her two or three times a week—he is in and out like one of ourselves.”
“But he doesn’t see her professionally. He comes in hurriedly late in the evening—or between the lights—to fetch his wife. He is tired, and we all talk to him, and Isa is bright and lively. He is not likely to notice the change in her in that casual way.”
“Is there a change?”
“Yes, I am sure there is. Although I see her every day, I am conscious of the change.”
“Baynham shall talk to her this afternoon.”
“That’s right, Martin—and if I were you I’d have the doctor from Plymouth again.”
Life had been so full of bliss lately, and yet he had not been afraid. Yes, it was the old story. “Metuit secundis.” That is what the wise man does. Fools do otherwise—hug themselves in their short-lived gladness, and say in their hearts, “There is no death.”
Mr. Baynham came in the afternoon, in answer to a little note from Martin Disney, and he and Isola were closeted together in the library for some time, with baby’s nurse in attendance to assist her mistress in preparing for the ordeal by stethoscope. Happily that little instrument which thrills us all with the aching pain of fear when we see it in the doctor’s hand, told no evil tidings of Isola’s lungs or heart. Thero was nothing organically wrong—but the patient was in a very weak state.
“You really are uncommonly low,” said Mr. Baynham, looking at her intently as she stood before him in the wintry sunlight. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing to yourself to bring yourself down so much since last summer—after all the trouble I took to build you up, too. I’m afraid you’ve been worrying yourself about the youngster—a regular young Hercules. I don’t know whether he’d be up to strangling a pair of prize pythons; but I’m sure he could strangle you. I shall send you a tonic; and you’ll have totake a good deal more care of yourself than you seem to have been taking lately.”
And then he laid down severe rules as to diet, until it seemed to Isola that he wished her to be eating and drinking all day—new-laid eggs, cream, old port, beef-tea—all the things which she had loathed in the dreary days of her long illness.
Mr. Baynham had a serious talk with the colonel after he left Isola, and it was agreed between them that she should be taken to Plymouth next day to see the great authority.
“You are giving yourself a great deal too much trouble about me, Martin,” she said. “There is nothing wrong. I am only a little weak and tired sometimes.”
Her husband looked at her heart-brokenly. Weak and tired. Yes; there were all the signs of failing life in those languid movements of the long, slender limbs, in the transparent pallor of the ethereal countenance. Decay was lovely in this fair young form; but he felt that it was decay. There must be something done to stop Misfortune’s hastening feet.