Chapter Fourteen.

Chapter Fourteen.The Wickedness of the World.It was no surprise to Sylvester Riddell, when, as he sat alone on that same morning, in the room appropriated to himself and his home belongings, Lucian Leigh burst in upon him, white-faced and fierce, and broke out with no previous greeting.“Sylvester! You were with my mother yesterday. What does it all mean? What is this extraordinary delusion?”All through the long hours of the sleepless night, Sylvester had turned over and over in his mind what answer he should give to this inevitable question. He knew what no one else knew, enough to make him certain that there was some coil around the girl, who, three months before, had seemed the embodiment of fresh, frank youth, enough to make him doubtful how far the coil was of her own twisting. He was Lucian’s friend, he feared for his future, and yet, if Mrs Leigh’s eyes had not seen as well as his, he felt that he would have forsworn the witness of his own eyes and ears, sooner than betray his suspicions.“What—what has taken place?” he said, lamely.Lucian was in great agony of mind. Every moment that had passed since he left Amethyst had added to the tumult within him; but he stood up straight, and spoke clearly and to the point.“You were with my mother; I need not repeat her story. Amethyst denies it utterly. She was never there with him. But she says she took a walk with him in the shrubbery, and that you met them.—Well, I saw you with them!”“Well!” said Sylvester, in a tone of noncommittal.“She gave him a packet. There was some mystery between them?”Sylvester was silent, and Lucian hurried on—“Lady Haredale brought up one of the little girls to say that it was some childish present. She—Amethyst—did not confirm it, but—Oh, I cannot discuss it, or her—” stamping his foot impatiently. “But she won’t speak out. It is maddening, Sylvester?”Poor Lucian appealed for he knew not what—contradiction, advice, sympathy; and yet all the time he was fully conscious how unfit it was that he should make any appeal at all on such a matter.“Lucian,” cried Sylvester, starting up, and driving his hands into his pockets as he walked about the room, “she has got involved in some ugly coil. Take her, and ask her if it should come between you. Abide by her answer. She loves you—I know she loves you; no one could see her with you, and doubt it. Take her out of the snares. Before Heaven, I would!”“Yes,” said Lucian, after a moment’s silence, “I know she loves me. But, sometimes, even then.—And oh, my God, if she did not tell me the truth! They were all lying.”He sat down on the window-seat, and stared out at the trees in the rectory garden,—delicate acacias, with their fine green leaves dancing against the blue sky. He watched them, and noticed their soft fluttering motion, without really heeding them at all. Sylvester looked at his young fair face with its set lips and contracted brows, and saw how the hand on his knee trembled.“My mother didn’t make a mistake?” he said, presently.“No,” said Sylvester.“Lady Haredale tried to make me think it was one of the children!”“Look here, Lucy,” said Sylvester suddenly, and using Lucian’s old school nickname, “the truth is your due; and, if you know the truth, you can give Miss Haredale a better chance of explaining herself. Two or three days ago I saw her post a letter to Major Fowler. It was in her writing—she dropped it, and I picked it up; she blushed, and was embarrassed. When I came upon them at Loseby in the shrubbery they were talking earnestly, and she did give him a packet. He went away and left her there, and she turned and saw me. Una came up to us in a minute, she did not tell her that she had been with Fowler.”“That disposes of the ‘children’s present’,” interpolated Lucian bitterly.“After that,” continued Sylvester, “as I sat with your mother in the conservatory, Miss Haredale came through it. She was alone, and looked hurried. Mrs Leigh got up to join her; we looked through into the ante-room, and saw—a parting embrace. Afterwards we met her walking with Fowler and Miss Verrequers. She was not the least embarrassed then. There’s something not explained—some secret. And even if some childish indiscretion, some folly permitted by her mother, customary perhaps among them, has—has hampered her, Lucian, I believe on my soul she is a pure and noble creature, and she loves you—as—as no man on earth can deserve to be loved.”Sylvester splice with passionate earnestness, heedless of the chance of self-betrayal; but Lucian never thought of him at all.“It is either true, or false—and so is she,” he said, with white lips.“Suppose we go and talk it over with your mother,” said Sylvester, after a pause, in a lame and commonplace fashion.“I must go back, and settle it,” said Lucian, taking up his hat.They walked away through the sunny fields together, each as miserable as he well could be, Sylvester, tormented with pity and indignant pain, feeling that the innate, inherent beauty of Amethyst’s soul was written in her face. She was worth trusting. And then there swept over him the thought of her mother and her elder sister, and the sad conviction thatallthe possibilities of her most lovely face were not noble ones. “Yet I would trust her, I would risk it all,” Sylvester thought, with a pang that was like an inward sob, as he knew not whether he were weaker or wiser than the poor young fellow beside him, on whom the problem turned another face, and who could only feel that love however passionate, beauty however exquisite, must not be weighed in the balance with honour and truth.As they came up the garden at Ashfield, Mrs Leigh was standing on the terrace with a note in her hand, while two broad hats and striped frocks were disappearing down the footpath in the direction of Cleverley Hall. As Mrs Leigh saw the two young men coming, she retreated into the drawing-room, beckoning to them to follow her. She looked very pale and grave as she spoke to Sylvester.“You have come to our help in this miserable business,” she said. “I don’t know what light, if any, is thrown on it by this extraordinary note.”The note was written in an ill-formed, girlish hand, with spelling not above suspicion.“Dear Mrs Leigh,” it ran, “There’s no reason for Amethyst to be in a scrape. Dear old Tony has made pets of us always, and he kissedmein the anti-room just for a spree. He’dneverkiss HER, I’m certain, so don’t trouble yourself about it.“Sincerely yours,—“Una Haredale.”“Una!” cried Sylvester, as by Mrs Leigh’s desire he read this extraordinary production, over Lucian’s shoulder. “Is that possible? can we have been mistaken?”“I am certain of my own eyesight,” said Mrs Leigh. “This is a pretence. Lady Haredale is capable of anything; I have no dependence on a word they say.”And Lucian thought of the story of the purse, of the “Make up some story to tell him,” that he had overheard—of what seemed to him the impossibility of mistaking Una for Amethyst—and was silent.“Don’t you see?” said Sylvester hurriedly, “if this is so, all the rest goes for nothing—is easily explained by some one else’s secret.”“You must know whether it was Una that you saw,” said Lucian, sullenly.“Certainly it was not,” said Mrs Leigh. “Sylvester, you cannot think so.”“You might ask her face to face,” he said.“I cannot believe any of them!” said Mrs Leigh, with agitation. “If they confuse the evidence, till proof is impossible, I shall never feel confidence again. Lucian, my dear, dear boy, it is a heartbreaking business, but oh, don’t you see that it is better to be warned in time?”“Hush, mother!” said Lucian, “not till we know. But—but I know that in justice to myself—to all of us, the truth must be made clear. But,” he added again, “I was violent, and frightened her. Give me that note; I can have no one doubt that she will tell me the truth about it I shall go to her again.”He looked very resolute and very wretched, and Sylvester felt that Amethyst’s chance was small.“I shall go alone,” said Lucian, “it is my own affair, and, mother, you must trust me to judge rightly.”In the meantime Amethyst had not long remained crying in Una’s arms. The instinct of self-preservation was strong within her. She would not go down in the whirlpool without a struggle. She got up and went resolutely to her mother, whom she found in her dressing-room, reading a note just received by the second post from Lord Haredale.The mother was not very sensitive, but she could hardly fail to feel the change from the loving deference, the admiring tenderness of her daughters manner, to the cold, sad, and half-contemptuous look with which Amethyst now faced her.“Mother,” she said, “will you let me tell Lucian that I had to communicate a family secret to Major Fowler? There is no use in pretending that there is no mystery; but I do not wish the children to tell falsehoods on my account.”“Ah, my dear child,” said Lady Haredale, “innocent things like you are very hard. What is a little fib, compared to all the misery that would follow on telling the truth? I am sure I had rather tell a thousand fibs than make my darling child unhappy.”“Unfortunately, people who are accustomed to telling the truth, don’t believe them,” said Amethyst bitterly. “Icannottell Lucian a falsehood,” she added with more emotion, “nor try to make him believe what is not true, but I can keep your secret from him if I must.”Lady Haredale hesitated for a moment, and looked at the letter in her hand. Judging by herself, she did not believe for one moment, that the girl would or could be true to her in the face of Lucian’s anger, and she was, in fact, in a very great difficulty.“Amethyst,” she said, suddenly rising from her seat, and putting on a grand manner, which was new to her daughter, “Lucian has behaved very ill; you are too ignorant of the world to know how much he has insulted you by refusing to believe your first denial. If he does not give in at once and entirely, without demanding any explanations at all, I shall insist on the engagement being broken off. I won’t have you sacrificed to a man with a suspicious, jealous temper. And, remember, if you did tell him that you had messages from me, if he is of that nature, and once thinks you have been too intimate with poor Tony, it would make no difference, because, you know, it is no proof against it. If he and his mother think you were indiscreet, they will think so, and never forget it.”“Then, mother,” said Amethyst, with flashing eyes, “you have been very cruel to me, in setting me to do such a compromising thing.”“My darling, it is impossible to calculate on the fads of countrified andbornéspeople, like the Leighs. How could I think such ideas would occur to them?”“I am countrified too,” said Amethyst, “and I think they are quite right.”“Ah, my dear,” said Lady Haredale, “you think so now. But depend upon it, you will feel differently when you are a little older. I know what it is, and Lucian and his people would make you miserable. He’ll never understand you, and you would break your heart in trying to content him. I never ought to have let him have you.”“Mother, do you want us to be parted?” cried Amethyst, in despair.Lady Haredale paused for a moment. She had often had to sacrifice a great deal to meet the exigencies caused by her own difficulties and her husband’s, and now, besides the dread of exposure, there was upon her that most irresistible pressure of all, the need of ready money. The letter in her hand told her what she already partly knew, that Lord Haredale could only raise the three thousand pounds, which he was bound to produce on Amethyst’s wedding-day, with the consent of his son, at great sacrifices; while, having raised a part of it, if it could only be applied to other purposes, sundry small debts of his own, and, as Lady Haredale felt, her own liabilities, could be settled off-hand, and a respite from intolerable pressure be obtained. It was, really, to this humiliating need, rather than to any misapprehension or dread of discovery, that Amethyst’s fate was owing. Under the circumstances Lucian could hardly be asked to give time for the payment of the small marriage portion. After all, he was no millionaire, Amethyst might easily marry better. No, Lady Haredale would not make that prettily-worded confession of her little plans, that half playful, half regretful acknowledgment of Una’s childish folly that might have set all right. A broken engagement was nothing for a girl of eighteen, and with the quick resolution born of hundreds of emergencies, she took her line at once.“That must depend on how far Lucian is reasonable,” she said; “but, my darling, you must trust me to know what you may rightly demand of him.”“I don’t think I can trust any one,” said Amethyst, but, as she spoke, Tory opened the door.“Amethyst, Lucian wants you,” she said.“I am coming too,” said Lady Haredale. “It is to me that he must answer for his unworthy suspicions.”“Speak out, Amethyst,” whispered Tory, as she passed her. “Don’t be bullied into giving him up. What does it matter what any one knows about my lady?”Lucian was in the library, and when he saw Lady Haredale, he stopped short in his eager movement towards Amethyst, drew himself up, and said sternly and shortly—“My business is with Amethyst alone.”“I do not think it is, Mr Leigh,” said Lady Haredale. “You have refused to accept her word as to the nature of her interview with Major Fowler. I will not say anything about Mrs Leigh’sextraordinarymisapprehension, or what motive she may have had in bringing it forward; but, unless you at once withdraw all your suspicions, and apologise to my daughter for your words this morning, neither Lord Haredale nor myself will allow her to continue her engagement.”Lucian could not fail to see that this speech was intended to offend him, and, taken in conjunction with Lady Haredale’s previous excuses, that it was intended to conceal the truth. He turned away from her, and caught Amethyst roughly by both hands.“What have you to say?” he said. “You must tell me the truth. If you don’t, I shall go mad. I do believe you, I will believe you, but you must speak out. You owe it to me to make everything clear.”“It can never be clear,” said Amethyst. “I don’t think you could trust me, and so—if that’s so—we had better part.”She spoke calmly, and looked him full in the face; he showed much more emotion, turning white and red, and losing the thread of what he meant to say. He dropped her hands, and walked over to the window, leaning against the shutter for a moment or two, and trying to collect himself enough to speak. At last he turned round and said—“I see it in this way. I couldn’t stand any mystery about my wife. I should not forget it. Amethyst, tell me.”The misery of the doubt showed itself in stern displeasure. He looked so hard a judge with his clear eyes and frowning brows, that Amethyst, angered and embittered already by the dreadful experience she had undergone, felt that, having once doubted, he would never have faith again.“Then you had better not marry me,” she said. “I think you have every right to distrust me; but since you do, I will never marry you. I dare say I am bad—or shall be; I will not injure you.”She turned and went out of the room, with a sudden movement, and in the instant’s pause that followed, they heard her girlish rush up the long staircase before Lady Haredale said—“It is your own fault, Mr Leigh; my daughter is above suspicion.”“No, Lady Haredale,” said Lucian, fiercely, “that cannot be under the circumstances. There is no more to be said.”He went out by the open window, walking with long strides across the bright sunny lawn, away from the place that had been as a Paradise to him, leaving all the trustful joy of his young life behind him.

It was no surprise to Sylvester Riddell, when, as he sat alone on that same morning, in the room appropriated to himself and his home belongings, Lucian Leigh burst in upon him, white-faced and fierce, and broke out with no previous greeting.

“Sylvester! You were with my mother yesterday. What does it all mean? What is this extraordinary delusion?”

All through the long hours of the sleepless night, Sylvester had turned over and over in his mind what answer he should give to this inevitable question. He knew what no one else knew, enough to make him certain that there was some coil around the girl, who, three months before, had seemed the embodiment of fresh, frank youth, enough to make him doubtful how far the coil was of her own twisting. He was Lucian’s friend, he feared for his future, and yet, if Mrs Leigh’s eyes had not seen as well as his, he felt that he would have forsworn the witness of his own eyes and ears, sooner than betray his suspicions.

“What—what has taken place?” he said, lamely.

Lucian was in great agony of mind. Every moment that had passed since he left Amethyst had added to the tumult within him; but he stood up straight, and spoke clearly and to the point.

“You were with my mother; I need not repeat her story. Amethyst denies it utterly. She was never there with him. But she says she took a walk with him in the shrubbery, and that you met them.—Well, I saw you with them!”

“Well!” said Sylvester, in a tone of noncommittal.

“She gave him a packet. There was some mystery between them?”

Sylvester was silent, and Lucian hurried on—“Lady Haredale brought up one of the little girls to say that it was some childish present. She—Amethyst—did not confirm it, but—Oh, I cannot discuss it, or her—” stamping his foot impatiently. “But she won’t speak out. It is maddening, Sylvester?”

Poor Lucian appealed for he knew not what—contradiction, advice, sympathy; and yet all the time he was fully conscious how unfit it was that he should make any appeal at all on such a matter.

“Lucian,” cried Sylvester, starting up, and driving his hands into his pockets as he walked about the room, “she has got involved in some ugly coil. Take her, and ask her if it should come between you. Abide by her answer. She loves you—I know she loves you; no one could see her with you, and doubt it. Take her out of the snares. Before Heaven, I would!”

“Yes,” said Lucian, after a moment’s silence, “I know she loves me. But, sometimes, even then.—And oh, my God, if she did not tell me the truth! They were all lying.”

He sat down on the window-seat, and stared out at the trees in the rectory garden,—delicate acacias, with their fine green leaves dancing against the blue sky. He watched them, and noticed their soft fluttering motion, without really heeding them at all. Sylvester looked at his young fair face with its set lips and contracted brows, and saw how the hand on his knee trembled.

“My mother didn’t make a mistake?” he said, presently.

“No,” said Sylvester.

“Lady Haredale tried to make me think it was one of the children!”

“Look here, Lucy,” said Sylvester suddenly, and using Lucian’s old school nickname, “the truth is your due; and, if you know the truth, you can give Miss Haredale a better chance of explaining herself. Two or three days ago I saw her post a letter to Major Fowler. It was in her writing—she dropped it, and I picked it up; she blushed, and was embarrassed. When I came upon them at Loseby in the shrubbery they were talking earnestly, and she did give him a packet. He went away and left her there, and she turned and saw me. Una came up to us in a minute, she did not tell her that she had been with Fowler.”

“That disposes of the ‘children’s present’,” interpolated Lucian bitterly.

“After that,” continued Sylvester, “as I sat with your mother in the conservatory, Miss Haredale came through it. She was alone, and looked hurried. Mrs Leigh got up to join her; we looked through into the ante-room, and saw—a parting embrace. Afterwards we met her walking with Fowler and Miss Verrequers. She was not the least embarrassed then. There’s something not explained—some secret. And even if some childish indiscretion, some folly permitted by her mother, customary perhaps among them, has—has hampered her, Lucian, I believe on my soul she is a pure and noble creature, and she loves you—as—as no man on earth can deserve to be loved.”

Sylvester splice with passionate earnestness, heedless of the chance of self-betrayal; but Lucian never thought of him at all.

“It is either true, or false—and so is she,” he said, with white lips.

“Suppose we go and talk it over with your mother,” said Sylvester, after a pause, in a lame and commonplace fashion.

“I must go back, and settle it,” said Lucian, taking up his hat.

They walked away through the sunny fields together, each as miserable as he well could be, Sylvester, tormented with pity and indignant pain, feeling that the innate, inherent beauty of Amethyst’s soul was written in her face. She was worth trusting. And then there swept over him the thought of her mother and her elder sister, and the sad conviction thatallthe possibilities of her most lovely face were not noble ones. “Yet I would trust her, I would risk it all,” Sylvester thought, with a pang that was like an inward sob, as he knew not whether he were weaker or wiser than the poor young fellow beside him, on whom the problem turned another face, and who could only feel that love however passionate, beauty however exquisite, must not be weighed in the balance with honour and truth.

As they came up the garden at Ashfield, Mrs Leigh was standing on the terrace with a note in her hand, while two broad hats and striped frocks were disappearing down the footpath in the direction of Cleverley Hall. As Mrs Leigh saw the two young men coming, she retreated into the drawing-room, beckoning to them to follow her. She looked very pale and grave as she spoke to Sylvester.

“You have come to our help in this miserable business,” she said. “I don’t know what light, if any, is thrown on it by this extraordinary note.”

The note was written in an ill-formed, girlish hand, with spelling not above suspicion.

“Dear Mrs Leigh,” it ran, “There’s no reason for Amethyst to be in a scrape. Dear old Tony has made pets of us always, and he kissedmein the anti-room just for a spree. He’dneverkiss HER, I’m certain, so don’t trouble yourself about it.“Sincerely yours,—“Una Haredale.”

“Dear Mrs Leigh,” it ran, “There’s no reason for Amethyst to be in a scrape. Dear old Tony has made pets of us always, and he kissedmein the anti-room just for a spree. He’dneverkiss HER, I’m certain, so don’t trouble yourself about it.“Sincerely yours,—“Una Haredale.”

“Una!” cried Sylvester, as by Mrs Leigh’s desire he read this extraordinary production, over Lucian’s shoulder. “Is that possible? can we have been mistaken?”

“I am certain of my own eyesight,” said Mrs Leigh. “This is a pretence. Lady Haredale is capable of anything; I have no dependence on a word they say.”

And Lucian thought of the story of the purse, of the “Make up some story to tell him,” that he had overheard—of what seemed to him the impossibility of mistaking Una for Amethyst—and was silent.

“Don’t you see?” said Sylvester hurriedly, “if this is so, all the rest goes for nothing—is easily explained by some one else’s secret.”

“You must know whether it was Una that you saw,” said Lucian, sullenly.

“Certainly it was not,” said Mrs Leigh. “Sylvester, you cannot think so.”

“You might ask her face to face,” he said.

“I cannot believe any of them!” said Mrs Leigh, with agitation. “If they confuse the evidence, till proof is impossible, I shall never feel confidence again. Lucian, my dear, dear boy, it is a heartbreaking business, but oh, don’t you see that it is better to be warned in time?”

“Hush, mother!” said Lucian, “not till we know. But—but I know that in justice to myself—to all of us, the truth must be made clear. But,” he added again, “I was violent, and frightened her. Give me that note; I can have no one doubt that she will tell me the truth about it I shall go to her again.”

He looked very resolute and very wretched, and Sylvester felt that Amethyst’s chance was small.

“I shall go alone,” said Lucian, “it is my own affair, and, mother, you must trust me to judge rightly.”

In the meantime Amethyst had not long remained crying in Una’s arms. The instinct of self-preservation was strong within her. She would not go down in the whirlpool without a struggle. She got up and went resolutely to her mother, whom she found in her dressing-room, reading a note just received by the second post from Lord Haredale.

The mother was not very sensitive, but she could hardly fail to feel the change from the loving deference, the admiring tenderness of her daughters manner, to the cold, sad, and half-contemptuous look with which Amethyst now faced her.

“Mother,” she said, “will you let me tell Lucian that I had to communicate a family secret to Major Fowler? There is no use in pretending that there is no mystery; but I do not wish the children to tell falsehoods on my account.”

“Ah, my dear child,” said Lady Haredale, “innocent things like you are very hard. What is a little fib, compared to all the misery that would follow on telling the truth? I am sure I had rather tell a thousand fibs than make my darling child unhappy.”

“Unfortunately, people who are accustomed to telling the truth, don’t believe them,” said Amethyst bitterly. “Icannottell Lucian a falsehood,” she added with more emotion, “nor try to make him believe what is not true, but I can keep your secret from him if I must.”

Lady Haredale hesitated for a moment, and looked at the letter in her hand. Judging by herself, she did not believe for one moment, that the girl would or could be true to her in the face of Lucian’s anger, and she was, in fact, in a very great difficulty.

“Amethyst,” she said, suddenly rising from her seat, and putting on a grand manner, which was new to her daughter, “Lucian has behaved very ill; you are too ignorant of the world to know how much he has insulted you by refusing to believe your first denial. If he does not give in at once and entirely, without demanding any explanations at all, I shall insist on the engagement being broken off. I won’t have you sacrificed to a man with a suspicious, jealous temper. And, remember, if you did tell him that you had messages from me, if he is of that nature, and once thinks you have been too intimate with poor Tony, it would make no difference, because, you know, it is no proof against it. If he and his mother think you were indiscreet, they will think so, and never forget it.”

“Then, mother,” said Amethyst, with flashing eyes, “you have been very cruel to me, in setting me to do such a compromising thing.”

“My darling, it is impossible to calculate on the fads of countrified andbornéspeople, like the Leighs. How could I think such ideas would occur to them?”

“I am countrified too,” said Amethyst, “and I think they are quite right.”

“Ah, my dear,” said Lady Haredale, “you think so now. But depend upon it, you will feel differently when you are a little older. I know what it is, and Lucian and his people would make you miserable. He’ll never understand you, and you would break your heart in trying to content him. I never ought to have let him have you.”

“Mother, do you want us to be parted?” cried Amethyst, in despair.

Lady Haredale paused for a moment. She had often had to sacrifice a great deal to meet the exigencies caused by her own difficulties and her husband’s, and now, besides the dread of exposure, there was upon her that most irresistible pressure of all, the need of ready money. The letter in her hand told her what she already partly knew, that Lord Haredale could only raise the three thousand pounds, which he was bound to produce on Amethyst’s wedding-day, with the consent of his son, at great sacrifices; while, having raised a part of it, if it could only be applied to other purposes, sundry small debts of his own, and, as Lady Haredale felt, her own liabilities, could be settled off-hand, and a respite from intolerable pressure be obtained. It was, really, to this humiliating need, rather than to any misapprehension or dread of discovery, that Amethyst’s fate was owing. Under the circumstances Lucian could hardly be asked to give time for the payment of the small marriage portion. After all, he was no millionaire, Amethyst might easily marry better. No, Lady Haredale would not make that prettily-worded confession of her little plans, that half playful, half regretful acknowledgment of Una’s childish folly that might have set all right. A broken engagement was nothing for a girl of eighteen, and with the quick resolution born of hundreds of emergencies, she took her line at once.

“That must depend on how far Lucian is reasonable,” she said; “but, my darling, you must trust me to know what you may rightly demand of him.”

“I don’t think I can trust any one,” said Amethyst, but, as she spoke, Tory opened the door.

“Amethyst, Lucian wants you,” she said.

“I am coming too,” said Lady Haredale. “It is to me that he must answer for his unworthy suspicions.”

“Speak out, Amethyst,” whispered Tory, as she passed her. “Don’t be bullied into giving him up. What does it matter what any one knows about my lady?”

Lucian was in the library, and when he saw Lady Haredale, he stopped short in his eager movement towards Amethyst, drew himself up, and said sternly and shortly—

“My business is with Amethyst alone.”

“I do not think it is, Mr Leigh,” said Lady Haredale. “You have refused to accept her word as to the nature of her interview with Major Fowler. I will not say anything about Mrs Leigh’sextraordinarymisapprehension, or what motive she may have had in bringing it forward; but, unless you at once withdraw all your suspicions, and apologise to my daughter for your words this morning, neither Lord Haredale nor myself will allow her to continue her engagement.”

Lucian could not fail to see that this speech was intended to offend him, and, taken in conjunction with Lady Haredale’s previous excuses, that it was intended to conceal the truth. He turned away from her, and caught Amethyst roughly by both hands.

“What have you to say?” he said. “You must tell me the truth. If you don’t, I shall go mad. I do believe you, I will believe you, but you must speak out. You owe it to me to make everything clear.”

“It can never be clear,” said Amethyst. “I don’t think you could trust me, and so—if that’s so—we had better part.”

She spoke calmly, and looked him full in the face; he showed much more emotion, turning white and red, and losing the thread of what he meant to say. He dropped her hands, and walked over to the window, leaning against the shutter for a moment or two, and trying to collect himself enough to speak. At last he turned round and said—

“I see it in this way. I couldn’t stand any mystery about my wife. I should not forget it. Amethyst, tell me.”

The misery of the doubt showed itself in stern displeasure. He looked so hard a judge with his clear eyes and frowning brows, that Amethyst, angered and embittered already by the dreadful experience she had undergone, felt that, having once doubted, he would never have faith again.

“Then you had better not marry me,” she said. “I think you have every right to distrust me; but since you do, I will never marry you. I dare say I am bad—or shall be; I will not injure you.”

She turned and went out of the room, with a sudden movement, and in the instant’s pause that followed, they heard her girlish rush up the long staircase before Lady Haredale said—

“It is your own fault, Mr Leigh; my daughter is above suspicion.”

“No, Lady Haredale,” said Lucian, fiercely, “that cannot be under the circumstances. There is no more to be said.”

He went out by the open window, walking with long strides across the bright sunny lawn, away from the place that had been as a Paradise to him, leaving all the trustful joy of his young life behind him.

Chapter Fifteen.All Over.Matters did not end at once. Interview after interview filled up the rest of that miserable day. Lord Haredale came down from London, apparently already determined to break off the engagement. Mrs Leigh’s determination went steadily in the same direction. She scouted Una’s letter as a manifest falsehood, of a piece with the story of the purse, and declared that nothing would induce her to accept Lady Haredale’s daughter as her son’s wife. As Lucian would not own himself convinced, she proposed a private appeal to Major Fowler, but this he fiercely negatived, saying that the facts were valueless, except as coming from Amethyst herself, and also that Major Fowler could do nothing but echo the denial.Lord and Lady Haredale declared that unless Lucian, and Mrs Leigh also, withdrew their suspicions at once and wholly, and apologised for having entertained them, they would not allow their daughter to continue her engagement. Amethyst herself, angered and hurt, ashamed and confounded, too inexperienced to follow the dictates of the love that ought to have been stronger than all else, wounded at Lucian’s doubts, and believing that the duty of hiding her mother’s disgrace came before the duty of being open with her lover, was passive and silent. Lucian, with intervals of passionate desire to give up everything rather than lose her, recurred again and again to his instinctive utterance, “She ought to tellme” well knowing that it was out of his power to endure the doubt that had fallen on her. So he fought back the impulse to trust her, as a temptation, and she fought back the longing to tell him, as a sin; and so, forced on by the determination of their elders, the fatal deed was completed. The packets of letters and presents were exchanged, the notes and telegrams to stop the wedding preparations were already being despatched, Amethyst had locked herself into her own room, feeling as if she could never show her face again, and Lucian, in his, was roughly throwing his things into a portmanteau, determining that months should elapse before he again saw Ashfield, if indeed he ever returned there at all, when Mr Riddell, unluckily absent from home all day on clerical business, drove himself back in the cool of the evening in his little pony-trap, his mind recurring to his son’s distress of mind on the night before. Presently he saw Sylvester coming along the road to meet him.“Oh, father,” said the young man, as the pony pulled up, “this has been a miserable day.”“What is it? Get in, and tell me about it,” said the Rector.Sylvester nerved himself to tell the story clearly.“We did see her. I cannot think otherwise,” he concluded. “But I would stake my soul on it, that there is some way out of the mystery.”“My dear boy, it doesn’t do to begin married life with a mystery. Wait, and it may be solved yet.”“Her life will be ruined!”“No, I hope not; we must try to show her kindness, to help her. But, if all had gone smooth, and she had married Lucian, who can tell how it would have been? He is a good fellow; but she—”“She is more than good,” said Sylvester, under his breath, “but—” then suddenly he flung up his head, and said passionately, “Iwould have run the risk.”“I think,” said Mr Riddell, after a moment’s pause, “that I should try to look on this engagement as only delayed. If the attachment between them is of a sterling kind, it will survive much.”“I expect Lucian will set himself to get over it,” said Sylvester. “He’ll think it a duty.”He was pale, and had an agitated look, and his father glanced round at him for a moment.“IthinkI should regard its renewal as still a possibility,” he said. “Here is the turn to the Mount, perhaps I had better go at once to Mrs Leigh.”“And I to look after poor Lucy,” said Sylvester with some compunction.But all the time he was wondering who would comfort Amethyst, and thinking that the woe that her beautiful eyes could express, would be deeper than Lucian’s nature was capable of feeling.Perhaps he was wrong. Lucian was incapable of speech, indifferent to sympathy. He did not care just then whether Sylvester came to him or not. He would not let his mother say a word to him, except on the business necessary to be gone through; no friendship and no family affection could help him then. Like many happy, unemotional young people, he had taken all these sentiments for granted; the first conscious emotion he had known had been his ill-starred love, and now this love was changed into stinging, burning pain. He had once been for some shooting up to the West of Scotland, he would go there now and walk over the moors, and face it out by himself. It was impossible to oppose him, and Mrs Leigh spared him, as much as possible, the anxious cautions which she longed to give.Mr Riddell attempted little but a squeeze of the hand and an earnest—“God bless you, my dear boy, and bring good out of evil.”“Thank you,” said Lucian. “I shall write, mother, and you know my address.”“Take care of yourself, my dearest boy. If you would but have let me come with you.”“I’d rather be alone. Good-bye,” said Lucian.It was not pride, struggling to control emotion, it was simple incapacity to express, almost to feel, the blow that had come upon him.Sylvester went to the station with him to meet the evening train, for Mrs Leigh’s satisfaction, and as they walked up and down the platform, waiting for it, Lucian said suddenly—“Amethyst is very fond of the Rector and Miss Riddell, I hope they’ll go on being kind.”“I am sure they will,” said Sylvester, starting at the name which had not yet had time to grow strange to Lucian’s lips. “And, Lucy, any time you send me a word, I’ll come to you.”“Thanks,” said Lucian, “but I think I’d rather not have any one from here.”“Well—I will write if—”“No,” said Lucian, suddenly and abruptly, “I don’t want to hear.”Ungracious as the speeches sounded, they did not so strike Sylvester, even though Lucian parted from him with only an ordinary hand-shake, and with no softening of eye or lip.He went away as he had said, by himself, and spun along through the long night hours, till the morning found him in fresh air, in new scenes, all his past ruined. He walked far and fast, climbed heights, and changed from one place to another, fished by way of occupation, fell in with a reading party of old college acquaintances and joined their expeditions, got invitations for future shooting, planned further travel, wrote short letters home, never about himself. He was exceptionally strong and vigorous, so that his health did not suffer from his trouble; he turned away as much as he could, both by instinct and of set purpose, from thoughts of his past happiness, indeed he thought very little of anything; but now and then he became suddenly conscious of intense misery, and once, poor fellow, as he sat alone on the heather, found himself, before he knew it, shedding bitter tears, not called up by any special image, but by a wave of desolate feeling. His mother wrote that she trusted that he would get over it, but he could not look forward to any change in a feeling that had once possessed him. It was there; why should it alter? But he began to wonder if he ever could “do his duty,” and live at Toppings by himself. What else could he do? He could not invent a new sort of life. He did not feel the least impulse to drown his trouble in any sort of dissipation. He hated London, and gaieties, and rowdyism of all sorts. He liked a country gentleman’s duties, varied with a good deal of sport. But he liked nothing now; he could not even imagine anything that he should like.

Matters did not end at once. Interview after interview filled up the rest of that miserable day. Lord Haredale came down from London, apparently already determined to break off the engagement. Mrs Leigh’s determination went steadily in the same direction. She scouted Una’s letter as a manifest falsehood, of a piece with the story of the purse, and declared that nothing would induce her to accept Lady Haredale’s daughter as her son’s wife. As Lucian would not own himself convinced, she proposed a private appeal to Major Fowler, but this he fiercely negatived, saying that the facts were valueless, except as coming from Amethyst herself, and also that Major Fowler could do nothing but echo the denial.

Lord and Lady Haredale declared that unless Lucian, and Mrs Leigh also, withdrew their suspicions at once and wholly, and apologised for having entertained them, they would not allow their daughter to continue her engagement. Amethyst herself, angered and hurt, ashamed and confounded, too inexperienced to follow the dictates of the love that ought to have been stronger than all else, wounded at Lucian’s doubts, and believing that the duty of hiding her mother’s disgrace came before the duty of being open with her lover, was passive and silent. Lucian, with intervals of passionate desire to give up everything rather than lose her, recurred again and again to his instinctive utterance, “She ought to tellme” well knowing that it was out of his power to endure the doubt that had fallen on her. So he fought back the impulse to trust her, as a temptation, and she fought back the longing to tell him, as a sin; and so, forced on by the determination of their elders, the fatal deed was completed. The packets of letters and presents were exchanged, the notes and telegrams to stop the wedding preparations were already being despatched, Amethyst had locked herself into her own room, feeling as if she could never show her face again, and Lucian, in his, was roughly throwing his things into a portmanteau, determining that months should elapse before he again saw Ashfield, if indeed he ever returned there at all, when Mr Riddell, unluckily absent from home all day on clerical business, drove himself back in the cool of the evening in his little pony-trap, his mind recurring to his son’s distress of mind on the night before. Presently he saw Sylvester coming along the road to meet him.

“Oh, father,” said the young man, as the pony pulled up, “this has been a miserable day.”

“What is it? Get in, and tell me about it,” said the Rector.

Sylvester nerved himself to tell the story clearly.

“We did see her. I cannot think otherwise,” he concluded. “But I would stake my soul on it, that there is some way out of the mystery.”

“My dear boy, it doesn’t do to begin married life with a mystery. Wait, and it may be solved yet.”

“Her life will be ruined!”

“No, I hope not; we must try to show her kindness, to help her. But, if all had gone smooth, and she had married Lucian, who can tell how it would have been? He is a good fellow; but she—”

“She is more than good,” said Sylvester, under his breath, “but—” then suddenly he flung up his head, and said passionately, “Iwould have run the risk.”

“I think,” said Mr Riddell, after a moment’s pause, “that I should try to look on this engagement as only delayed. If the attachment between them is of a sterling kind, it will survive much.”

“I expect Lucian will set himself to get over it,” said Sylvester. “He’ll think it a duty.”

He was pale, and had an agitated look, and his father glanced round at him for a moment.

“IthinkI should regard its renewal as still a possibility,” he said. “Here is the turn to the Mount, perhaps I had better go at once to Mrs Leigh.”

“And I to look after poor Lucy,” said Sylvester with some compunction.

But all the time he was wondering who would comfort Amethyst, and thinking that the woe that her beautiful eyes could express, would be deeper than Lucian’s nature was capable of feeling.

Perhaps he was wrong. Lucian was incapable of speech, indifferent to sympathy. He did not care just then whether Sylvester came to him or not. He would not let his mother say a word to him, except on the business necessary to be gone through; no friendship and no family affection could help him then. Like many happy, unemotional young people, he had taken all these sentiments for granted; the first conscious emotion he had known had been his ill-starred love, and now this love was changed into stinging, burning pain. He had once been for some shooting up to the West of Scotland, he would go there now and walk over the moors, and face it out by himself. It was impossible to oppose him, and Mrs Leigh spared him, as much as possible, the anxious cautions which she longed to give.

Mr Riddell attempted little but a squeeze of the hand and an earnest—

“God bless you, my dear boy, and bring good out of evil.”

“Thank you,” said Lucian. “I shall write, mother, and you know my address.”

“Take care of yourself, my dearest boy. If you would but have let me come with you.”

“I’d rather be alone. Good-bye,” said Lucian.

It was not pride, struggling to control emotion, it was simple incapacity to express, almost to feel, the blow that had come upon him.

Sylvester went to the station with him to meet the evening train, for Mrs Leigh’s satisfaction, and as they walked up and down the platform, waiting for it, Lucian said suddenly—

“Amethyst is very fond of the Rector and Miss Riddell, I hope they’ll go on being kind.”

“I am sure they will,” said Sylvester, starting at the name which had not yet had time to grow strange to Lucian’s lips. “And, Lucy, any time you send me a word, I’ll come to you.”

“Thanks,” said Lucian, “but I think I’d rather not have any one from here.”

“Well—I will write if—”

“No,” said Lucian, suddenly and abruptly, “I don’t want to hear.”

Ungracious as the speeches sounded, they did not so strike Sylvester, even though Lucian parted from him with only an ordinary hand-shake, and with no softening of eye or lip.

He went away as he had said, by himself, and spun along through the long night hours, till the morning found him in fresh air, in new scenes, all his past ruined. He walked far and fast, climbed heights, and changed from one place to another, fished by way of occupation, fell in with a reading party of old college acquaintances and joined their expeditions, got invitations for future shooting, planned further travel, wrote short letters home, never about himself. He was exceptionally strong and vigorous, so that his health did not suffer from his trouble; he turned away as much as he could, both by instinct and of set purpose, from thoughts of his past happiness, indeed he thought very little of anything; but now and then he became suddenly conscious of intense misery, and once, poor fellow, as he sat alone on the heather, found himself, before he knew it, shedding bitter tears, not called up by any special image, but by a wave of desolate feeling. His mother wrote that she trusted that he would get over it, but he could not look forward to any change in a feeling that had once possessed him. It was there; why should it alter? But he began to wonder if he ever could “do his duty,” and live at Toppings by himself. What else could he do? He could not invent a new sort of life. He did not feel the least impulse to drown his trouble in any sort of dissipation. He hated London, and gaieties, and rowdyism of all sorts. He liked a country gentleman’s duties, varied with a good deal of sport. But he liked nothing now; he could not even imagine anything that he should like.

Chapter Sixteen.Better.The last day of July had come, the day that should have been the wedding-day was over and past, the fresh green turf of the Cleverley garden was brown and dry, with long hours of scorching sunshine, the flowers looked hot and overblown in the blazing afternoon light. Some empty chairs, and a tea-table with empty tea-cups, stood on the edge of a group of trees, and on the rug in front of them lay Una in a faded shabby frock, and with a face in which there seemed to be no girlish freshness remaining. Her long hair hung heavily round her, her eyes stared wearily out of their dark circles; she had nothing to do but to play with every morbid and unwholesome fancy that can enter the brain of an ill-trained and unhappy girl.Tony’s wedding-day was fixed. He did not lovehernow. By and by, when she was grown-up, she would meet him, and make him care for her again, if she didn’t die first. Why not drown herself in the pond in the wood? Una pictured the plunge, the stillness, and herself and her hair floating on the top, like ‘The Christian Martyr.’ But Amethyst did not love her now. How should she? Her life was a ruin too; dying would be much better for them both. Una thought again of the cool dark pond in the wood, with a sense of desire; but her exceeding weariness and languor kept her still. It was not worth while to get up, even to commit suicide.As she lay still, getting a dreary sort of amusement out of these miserable fancies, she saw Amethyst come out of the house, walk slowly across the brown scorched grass, and sit down on one of the chairs, without noticing her sister’s presence.She sat perfectly still, with a hard unsmiling face, at variance with the gay trim dress in which she had been entertaining some recent visitors. They were gone, and she could sit still now, and think—think the bitter thoughts in which her cruel disappointment took form.All that she had lost, still more all that she now had left, passed before her mind, and was weighed in the balance. She had no illusions now. Perhaps the bitterest drop was not so much the loss of Lucian, as the sense that he ought to have read her more truly. He himself had failed her. As for her mother, her eyes were as clear as Tory’s; and her heart, how hard and bitter! And the days had to go on. It was not only that she wasnotLucian’s happy wife, shewasAmethyst Haredale, with parents whom she despised, and a house in which no good thing could flourish; and yet, her aunt’s anxious entreaty to join her as soon as she would, had no attraction for her. Religion—goodness? Mrs Leigh and Lucian were good and religious, and had cruelly misjudged her. Were good people really much better than bad ones? She had thought herself religious; but she had got below all the religion that she had ever experienced, and with the distrust of all earthly love, came also distrust of the Divine love, from which she had scarcely distinguished it. Amethyst was one of those, to whom trouble comes, not only in vague and overwhelming feelings, but in keen sharp thoughts; and, young as she was, her thoughts hit life’s hard problems like well-aimed arrows.“Well, Amethyst, do you think, now, there’s any good in being good?”Una’s voice, with a hard ring through its weary languor, roused her with a start.“Una! Why do you lie there in the sun? It’s very bad for you!” she said petulantly.“Suppose it is, what does it matter? There’s nothing doing, and nothing worth living for, that I can see. You can’t say there is.”“You ought not to say things like that, Una,” said Amethyst. “It is not right.”“As if being right mattered!” said Una, and then with a sudden change the ready tears filled her eyes. “I am so—so miserable,” she sobbed, “andyouare unkind to me now, Amethyst. The children tease me, and you don’t care for me now.”Amethyst looked round at her. It was quite true. She had not cared. Even now she felt impatient of the trouble that was like a caricature of her own.“It’s natural you should hate me, when I did all the mischief. But oh, I did try to make up for it—I did!”“Nonsense!” said Amethyst. “I don’t hate you, but I don’t know that I can say anything to do you any good.”She started up, and walked away as she spoke, her nerves were all on edge, her temper irritated, her conscience beginning to struggle with her sense of injury. The craving for Lucian came over her, as, with unconscious force, she said to herself, “like a flood of hot lava.” How could she think about other people? She escaped from the sight of Una, and walked along the little path across the fields, towards the village. Then the place recalled the beginning of her troubles. She had come this way to post the fatal letter which Sylvester Riddell had seen. She believed Sylvester to be her worst enemy, and it was with a sense of angry recoil that she saw his father and aunt coming to meet her. What part they had taken, if any, in her affairs, she did not know, and she had seen neither of them since the party at Loseby. Probably they thought that she was a bad girl, and would show it in their manner to her. She stiffened up her head, and would have passed with a bow; but the Rector, who was nearest to her, stopped, raised his hat, and held out his hand.“How do you do, my dear?” he said in his kindest voice; “my sister was coming to ask a little favour of you.”“It is this,” said Miss Riddell, without waiting for Amethyst to speak; “I want to interest some of the young girls about here in improving their minds. There are a good many in Cleverley without much object in life; I think some of them might be encouraged to work for an examination. As your experience is so fresh, and you were so successful, I wondered if you would come to tea to-morrow afternoon, and tell us a little about it.”“So fresh?” Yes, only three months old; but what a fiery gulf seemed to roll between. Amethyst was quick enough to see that this proposal was meant most kindly as a link with her old life, and also, to show the neighbourhood that, in the opinion of the Rectory, Miss Haredale was an example to be followed, a companion to be desired.She hesitated and was silent.“The kindness would be very great,” said the Rector. Miss Riddell moved a little away, and he continued, “You have had a great trial, nothing seems attractive to you now. Will this be more than you are ready for?”“I don’t feel as if I could remember about it,” said Amethyst, with a sudden impulse, the change in her face showing that she was still child enough to be touched by the first kind word.“No, my dear, but don’t you think it would be good for you to recall it?”“I can’t be good, I wasn’t made to be,” said Amethyst, in a tone which she thought was wickedly defiant, but which really showed confidence in her listener’s comprehension.“No, my dear,” said the Rector again; “very few of us are. But we are all made to be a little better by effort, and prayer.”“I amworse,” said Amethyst, tears filling her eyes, while her whole figure trembled.“Yes, no doubt; but I think you will find it possible to make each day a little better. And I have always found it worth while, Amethyst. It makes all the difference in the long run between one man and another. I am sure there is a better and a worse before you in life, my dear, even if you think there is not a very good.”Perhaps this was the consolation of age rather than of youth. But it came to Amethyst as a truth. It might not be worth while to be a little less self-absorbed, a little less wretched; but she knew that it was possible.“God bless you, my dear child, and good-bye,” said Mr Riddell, “you shall come or not to the Rectory to-morrow, as you like.”Miss Riddell went away with only a kind smile and hand-shake, and Amethyst, left alone, burst into a rain of tears. The kindness, the sense of trust in the speakers had been like her native tongue in a foreign land. It was natural; while her own people were strange. She remembered the kind of girl she used to be, as if her girlhood were twenty years away; bliss and misery had alike blotted it out.But the habits and the instincts of her whole training were not utterly killed; the sense of duty began to lift its head. It was better to be kind to Una, and to show her that there was “a better” in life, than to acquiesce in her despair. It was better to read history, and to practise or to walk with the girls, than to sit alone and brood over her injuries, or to read, in the novels left about by her mother, of far worse injuries leading to worse despair, to learn from these books to what her infant passions were akin, and to bite deeper into the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge—of herself. Of course, she did not put it so. “It was better not to feel like those wicked people, at least not to think of feeling like them.” And slowly and dully she turned her steps homewards through the wood; a bad way to come, since she and Lucian had loved it together. Oh, what washedoing? Did he feel as if life was done? Perhaps the most agonising moment she had known, was when the conviction came to her that it was not in him to feel as she did.“If I had thought that he had gambled or betted, or been wicked, I would have held on tighter, to help him to be good. But he gave upme!”“But if you had thought he was faithless to you?” came an answering voice in her soul. It was no thought, but an impulse of fury, that seized upon Amethyst in reply. And then—“But I could not think so, he could not be bad, he could not be false. But oh, he is—he is—for he has no faith in me. ‘Better!’ There’s no ‘better.’ If he were to come back now, if he ever finds out and believes,Ishall never forget?”She flung herself down on the ground, on the bank where they had sat together by the little pool where they had fished for water-lilies, where they had exchanged forget-me-nots; the very revival of spirit, caused by the friendly words, making her grief more articulate, and for the moment more bitter.Her tears were dried up; she lay with her hands clenched in the grass, absolutely still. Suddenly a rustling, creeping sound came among the herbs and water-weeds near, then panting, sobbing breath.Amethyst lifted her head. Not twenty yards from her stood Una, her hands clasped, her eyes fixed on the water, her foot extended. Amethyst sprang to her feet, Una gave a violent start, and either lost her balance and fell, or suddenly jumped into the water.“Una, Una!” screamed Amethyst, all else forgotten in a moment. She scrambled through the rushes, and caught at her sister’s hands and dress.Una was on her feet, the water was shallow, but the bottom was soft and muddy; she sank to her knees, and Amethyst, her own foothold insecure in the rushes, could not hold her up.The young life woke up strong in them both, they screamed and struggled; Amethyst slipped off the bank up to her knees in the pool. As the cold water, the slimy mud, touched her feet, the warm sun struck on her head, the light and the blue of the sky were round and over her.“Oh, God—oh, God! I don’t want to die! Oh, save us! oh, save us!” she cried.There was a ringing shout.“Stand still—stand still! For your lives, don’t struggle! It’s all right, I’ll help you!” And Sylvester Riddell came with a rush towards them, set his foot on a firmer tuft of rushes, grasped Una by the waist, and lifted her, sobbing and shaking, on to dry land, then pulled Amethyst out of the water, and in another moment they were safe on a mass of chervil, campion, stitchwort and sting-nettles high above the water’s edge, wet and miserable, covered with mud and water-weed.Half an hour later, Sylvester came back to the Rectory with a rapid step and brilliant eyes, but with an amount of mud on his trousers that required explanation. This he gave in rather an off-hand fashion. Una Haredale had slipped into the pond, gathering lilies he supposed, and he had helped her sister to pull her out.“Was she hurt?” said Miss Riddell, rather curiously.“No, but she was faint and frightened, and wet through. I helped Miss Haredale to get her home. It was an awkward accident.”It seemed, however, to have raised Sylvester’s spirits, which had been down to zero of late. He was going abroad with a friend, but he had lingered and put off his start in the hope of once more seeing Amethyst, a sight which he had nevertheless dreaded unspeakably. They had met now, with no time for resentment or embarrassment, and his one feeling was that she was now free. He saw her once again; for she came to the Rectory on the next afternoon, just as he was setting out on his journey.The weather had changed, and the sky was grey. Amethyst wore a grey frock and hat. She was pale, and looked much less pretty than usual, and her manner was cold, and, he fancied, showed displeasure.Sylvester’s train was due, he could only shake hands and inquire for her sister.“She was very much upset and frightened; but she has not been well lately. We must take much more care of her, then I hope she will be better.”With the last word, she lifted her eyes for a moment to the Rector’s face as he stood behind his son; but they did not meet Sylvester’s, and in a moment she had passed into the drawing-room out of his sight.He thought of her, as he had seen her first with the glowing amethysts on her brow and neck, an angelic vision; at the primrose-picking, a fresh and joyous girl; when he had come home at Midsummer, happy and proud in her betrothal; at the fatal garden-party, with eyes that had fallen before his own, with a cloud of doubt on her face. He had admired her, idealised her, and, he knew it now, all the while he had loved her, and yet his fate had given him a share in breaking her heart. Now he had seen her again, pale and sad, in the light of common day.Sylvester took his ticket for London, labelled his luggage, got into the train, and exchanged a newspaper with a friend.But, in his heart, he vowed himself to Amethyst’s service, he took her for the lady of his love, as if with her colours in his helmet, he had ridden forth to cry her name in the battle-field, and die with it on his lips.

The last day of July had come, the day that should have been the wedding-day was over and past, the fresh green turf of the Cleverley garden was brown and dry, with long hours of scorching sunshine, the flowers looked hot and overblown in the blazing afternoon light. Some empty chairs, and a tea-table with empty tea-cups, stood on the edge of a group of trees, and on the rug in front of them lay Una in a faded shabby frock, and with a face in which there seemed to be no girlish freshness remaining. Her long hair hung heavily round her, her eyes stared wearily out of their dark circles; she had nothing to do but to play with every morbid and unwholesome fancy that can enter the brain of an ill-trained and unhappy girl.

Tony’s wedding-day was fixed. He did not lovehernow. By and by, when she was grown-up, she would meet him, and make him care for her again, if she didn’t die first. Why not drown herself in the pond in the wood? Una pictured the plunge, the stillness, and herself and her hair floating on the top, like ‘The Christian Martyr.’ But Amethyst did not love her now. How should she? Her life was a ruin too; dying would be much better for them both. Una thought again of the cool dark pond in the wood, with a sense of desire; but her exceeding weariness and languor kept her still. It was not worth while to get up, even to commit suicide.

As she lay still, getting a dreary sort of amusement out of these miserable fancies, she saw Amethyst come out of the house, walk slowly across the brown scorched grass, and sit down on one of the chairs, without noticing her sister’s presence.

She sat perfectly still, with a hard unsmiling face, at variance with the gay trim dress in which she had been entertaining some recent visitors. They were gone, and she could sit still now, and think—think the bitter thoughts in which her cruel disappointment took form.

All that she had lost, still more all that she now had left, passed before her mind, and was weighed in the balance. She had no illusions now. Perhaps the bitterest drop was not so much the loss of Lucian, as the sense that he ought to have read her more truly. He himself had failed her. As for her mother, her eyes were as clear as Tory’s; and her heart, how hard and bitter! And the days had to go on. It was not only that she wasnotLucian’s happy wife, shewasAmethyst Haredale, with parents whom she despised, and a house in which no good thing could flourish; and yet, her aunt’s anxious entreaty to join her as soon as she would, had no attraction for her. Religion—goodness? Mrs Leigh and Lucian were good and religious, and had cruelly misjudged her. Were good people really much better than bad ones? She had thought herself religious; but she had got below all the religion that she had ever experienced, and with the distrust of all earthly love, came also distrust of the Divine love, from which she had scarcely distinguished it. Amethyst was one of those, to whom trouble comes, not only in vague and overwhelming feelings, but in keen sharp thoughts; and, young as she was, her thoughts hit life’s hard problems like well-aimed arrows.

“Well, Amethyst, do you think, now, there’s any good in being good?”

Una’s voice, with a hard ring through its weary languor, roused her with a start.

“Una! Why do you lie there in the sun? It’s very bad for you!” she said petulantly.

“Suppose it is, what does it matter? There’s nothing doing, and nothing worth living for, that I can see. You can’t say there is.”

“You ought not to say things like that, Una,” said Amethyst. “It is not right.”

“As if being right mattered!” said Una, and then with a sudden change the ready tears filled her eyes. “I am so—so miserable,” she sobbed, “andyouare unkind to me now, Amethyst. The children tease me, and you don’t care for me now.”

Amethyst looked round at her. It was quite true. She had not cared. Even now she felt impatient of the trouble that was like a caricature of her own.

“It’s natural you should hate me, when I did all the mischief. But oh, I did try to make up for it—I did!”

“Nonsense!” said Amethyst. “I don’t hate you, but I don’t know that I can say anything to do you any good.”

She started up, and walked away as she spoke, her nerves were all on edge, her temper irritated, her conscience beginning to struggle with her sense of injury. The craving for Lucian came over her, as, with unconscious force, she said to herself, “like a flood of hot lava.” How could she think about other people? She escaped from the sight of Una, and walked along the little path across the fields, towards the village. Then the place recalled the beginning of her troubles. She had come this way to post the fatal letter which Sylvester Riddell had seen. She believed Sylvester to be her worst enemy, and it was with a sense of angry recoil that she saw his father and aunt coming to meet her. What part they had taken, if any, in her affairs, she did not know, and she had seen neither of them since the party at Loseby. Probably they thought that she was a bad girl, and would show it in their manner to her. She stiffened up her head, and would have passed with a bow; but the Rector, who was nearest to her, stopped, raised his hat, and held out his hand.

“How do you do, my dear?” he said in his kindest voice; “my sister was coming to ask a little favour of you.”

“It is this,” said Miss Riddell, without waiting for Amethyst to speak; “I want to interest some of the young girls about here in improving their minds. There are a good many in Cleverley without much object in life; I think some of them might be encouraged to work for an examination. As your experience is so fresh, and you were so successful, I wondered if you would come to tea to-morrow afternoon, and tell us a little about it.”

“So fresh?” Yes, only three months old; but what a fiery gulf seemed to roll between. Amethyst was quick enough to see that this proposal was meant most kindly as a link with her old life, and also, to show the neighbourhood that, in the opinion of the Rectory, Miss Haredale was an example to be followed, a companion to be desired.

She hesitated and was silent.

“The kindness would be very great,” said the Rector. Miss Riddell moved a little away, and he continued, “You have had a great trial, nothing seems attractive to you now. Will this be more than you are ready for?”

“I don’t feel as if I could remember about it,” said Amethyst, with a sudden impulse, the change in her face showing that she was still child enough to be touched by the first kind word.

“No, my dear, but don’t you think it would be good for you to recall it?”

“I can’t be good, I wasn’t made to be,” said Amethyst, in a tone which she thought was wickedly defiant, but which really showed confidence in her listener’s comprehension.

“No, my dear,” said the Rector again; “very few of us are. But we are all made to be a little better by effort, and prayer.”

“I amworse,” said Amethyst, tears filling her eyes, while her whole figure trembled.

“Yes, no doubt; but I think you will find it possible to make each day a little better. And I have always found it worth while, Amethyst. It makes all the difference in the long run between one man and another. I am sure there is a better and a worse before you in life, my dear, even if you think there is not a very good.”

Perhaps this was the consolation of age rather than of youth. But it came to Amethyst as a truth. It might not be worth while to be a little less self-absorbed, a little less wretched; but she knew that it was possible.

“God bless you, my dear child, and good-bye,” said Mr Riddell, “you shall come or not to the Rectory to-morrow, as you like.”

Miss Riddell went away with only a kind smile and hand-shake, and Amethyst, left alone, burst into a rain of tears. The kindness, the sense of trust in the speakers had been like her native tongue in a foreign land. It was natural; while her own people were strange. She remembered the kind of girl she used to be, as if her girlhood were twenty years away; bliss and misery had alike blotted it out.

But the habits and the instincts of her whole training were not utterly killed; the sense of duty began to lift its head. It was better to be kind to Una, and to show her that there was “a better” in life, than to acquiesce in her despair. It was better to read history, and to practise or to walk with the girls, than to sit alone and brood over her injuries, or to read, in the novels left about by her mother, of far worse injuries leading to worse despair, to learn from these books to what her infant passions were akin, and to bite deeper into the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge—of herself. Of course, she did not put it so. “It was better not to feel like those wicked people, at least not to think of feeling like them.” And slowly and dully she turned her steps homewards through the wood; a bad way to come, since she and Lucian had loved it together. Oh, what washedoing? Did he feel as if life was done? Perhaps the most agonising moment she had known, was when the conviction came to her that it was not in him to feel as she did.

“If I had thought that he had gambled or betted, or been wicked, I would have held on tighter, to help him to be good. But he gave upme!”

“But if you had thought he was faithless to you?” came an answering voice in her soul. It was no thought, but an impulse of fury, that seized upon Amethyst in reply. And then—

“But I could not think so, he could not be bad, he could not be false. But oh, he is—he is—for he has no faith in me. ‘Better!’ There’s no ‘better.’ If he were to come back now, if he ever finds out and believes,Ishall never forget?”

She flung herself down on the ground, on the bank where they had sat together by the little pool where they had fished for water-lilies, where they had exchanged forget-me-nots; the very revival of spirit, caused by the friendly words, making her grief more articulate, and for the moment more bitter.

Her tears were dried up; she lay with her hands clenched in the grass, absolutely still. Suddenly a rustling, creeping sound came among the herbs and water-weeds near, then panting, sobbing breath.

Amethyst lifted her head. Not twenty yards from her stood Una, her hands clasped, her eyes fixed on the water, her foot extended. Amethyst sprang to her feet, Una gave a violent start, and either lost her balance and fell, or suddenly jumped into the water.

“Una, Una!” screamed Amethyst, all else forgotten in a moment. She scrambled through the rushes, and caught at her sister’s hands and dress.

Una was on her feet, the water was shallow, but the bottom was soft and muddy; she sank to her knees, and Amethyst, her own foothold insecure in the rushes, could not hold her up.

The young life woke up strong in them both, they screamed and struggled; Amethyst slipped off the bank up to her knees in the pool. As the cold water, the slimy mud, touched her feet, the warm sun struck on her head, the light and the blue of the sky were round and over her.

“Oh, God—oh, God! I don’t want to die! Oh, save us! oh, save us!” she cried.

There was a ringing shout.

“Stand still—stand still! For your lives, don’t struggle! It’s all right, I’ll help you!” And Sylvester Riddell came with a rush towards them, set his foot on a firmer tuft of rushes, grasped Una by the waist, and lifted her, sobbing and shaking, on to dry land, then pulled Amethyst out of the water, and in another moment they were safe on a mass of chervil, campion, stitchwort and sting-nettles high above the water’s edge, wet and miserable, covered with mud and water-weed.

Half an hour later, Sylvester came back to the Rectory with a rapid step and brilliant eyes, but with an amount of mud on his trousers that required explanation. This he gave in rather an off-hand fashion. Una Haredale had slipped into the pond, gathering lilies he supposed, and he had helped her sister to pull her out.

“Was she hurt?” said Miss Riddell, rather curiously.

“No, but she was faint and frightened, and wet through. I helped Miss Haredale to get her home. It was an awkward accident.”

It seemed, however, to have raised Sylvester’s spirits, which had been down to zero of late. He was going abroad with a friend, but he had lingered and put off his start in the hope of once more seeing Amethyst, a sight which he had nevertheless dreaded unspeakably. They had met now, with no time for resentment or embarrassment, and his one feeling was that she was now free. He saw her once again; for she came to the Rectory on the next afternoon, just as he was setting out on his journey.

The weather had changed, and the sky was grey. Amethyst wore a grey frock and hat. She was pale, and looked much less pretty than usual, and her manner was cold, and, he fancied, showed displeasure.

Sylvester’s train was due, he could only shake hands and inquire for her sister.

“She was very much upset and frightened; but she has not been well lately. We must take much more care of her, then I hope she will be better.”

With the last word, she lifted her eyes for a moment to the Rector’s face as he stood behind his son; but they did not meet Sylvester’s, and in a moment she had passed into the drawing-room out of his sight.

He thought of her, as he had seen her first with the glowing amethysts on her brow and neck, an angelic vision; at the primrose-picking, a fresh and joyous girl; when he had come home at Midsummer, happy and proud in her betrothal; at the fatal garden-party, with eyes that had fallen before his own, with a cloud of doubt on her face. He had admired her, idealised her, and, he knew it now, all the while he had loved her, and yet his fate had given him a share in breaking her heart. Now he had seen her again, pale and sad, in the light of common day.

Sylvester took his ticket for London, labelled his luggage, got into the train, and exchanged a newspaper with a friend.

But, in his heart, he vowed himself to Amethyst’s service, he took her for the lady of his love, as if with her colours in his helmet, he had ridden forth to cry her name in the battle-field, and die with it on his lips.

Chapter Seventeen.“Iris.”One sunny afternoon in spring, Lucian Leigh was sitting on a bench in the garden at Ashfield Mount. Nearly two years had passed since he had left Cleverley in the agony of his great disappointment, and he had now come back to it for the first time.The flowers were as gay as when he had walked among them during the brief days of his betrothal, the house looked as cheerful and comfortable as of old; the great deer-hound that sat at his feet was unchanged during his absence, but Lucian himself had grown from youth to manhood, and though the expression of his impassive, regular-featured face had changed but little, it was so effectually bronzed, that hair, and even eyes, showed light against the sunburn.He sat still and smoked, and patted Donald’s head—he liked the feel of it—till footsteps approached, and he was hailed from the neighbouring shrubbery.“Ha, Syl!” he said, jumping up, “so there you are. Glad to see you.”“I’m uncommonly glad to see you,” said Sylvester, grasping his hand. “I began to think you were never coming home any more, but were permanently given over to tigers and elephants. Did you like India?”“No,” said Lucian, “the big game is the only thing worth going there for. I’ve had a shot, I believe, at everything there is there to shoot at I know all the tracks of them, but so do so many other men. Now I think of trying bears in the Rockies for a change; and I should like to go north—an arctic expedition would be rather jolly.”“You want to add a polar bear’s hide to all the tiger skins you have sent home to adorn the hall at Toppings, before you settle down to pot your own partridges.”“Yes,” said Lucian.“But what does Mrs Leigh say to that?”“She doesn’t like it. She wants me to go to London now, and, as she calls it, ‘keep up our old connection,’ and then keep open house at Toppings in the autumn, have shoots, and so on. I have been there with her now, you know, for two months.”“And you don’t see it?”“No, not yet. I must, of course, finally. But Evans is a very good agent, and the Rectory people look after the tenants. I subscribe properly to everything,—schools, and hunt, and county show, and so on; but I’m not going to live there now. Why should I?”“Well, you might see a little more of the world first, certainly.”“In two years’ time Miss Carisbrooke comes of age, and the lease of this house will be up. The mother will have to make a new start somewhere then, and it will be time for Kate, at any rate, to come out. That ought to be in our own neighbourhood, so I must be in England then.”“Does Miss Carisbrooke mean to live here?”“I believe so. My mother had her to stay here, and liked her, before I came home. You might try your luck, Syl, she’s a catch. Her only relation is a youngish uncle, her guardian. I believe he lives abroad a good deal.”Lucian paused, then said—“She has been living for the last year with that old Miss Haredale, who lost her money. She chaperons Miss Carisbrooke, and is to bring her out, I believe, in London this year.”There was a little silence. Perhaps it had been from a kind of embarrassment that Lucian had at once rained facts upon Sylvester, and put him in possession of his intentions. Now he said—“Don’t let the mother set you on to bully me about staying at home. I always meant to have a shot at a white bear some time—except once, for about three months.—And that’s quite over, for good and all. I’ve no more concern with it. So I must do something else, you know; and I like sport, and seeing new places.”Lucian paused again, and Sylvester looked at him keenly, hardly knowing what to say in answer.“I am convinced,” continued Lucian, with the same unmoved voice and face, “that I acted rightly. So we’ll say no more about it. What have you been about? The mother says you’re writing a poem.”“Yes,” said Sylvester; “will you read it?”“I’llbuyit,” said Lucian, gravely; “and, yes, I’ll read it, if you like, as it’s yours. I hope you’ll make Tennyson take a back seat.”“Thank you,” said Sylvester, laughing. “I’ll be content to hang on behind his coach. But of course I’m rather full of it. I’ve had several things in reviews and magazines, and some men, whose word is worth something, like them. But it’s all luck. The public’s harder to hit than a tiger, Lucy.”“I hope it won’t turn and rend you. Well, it’s jolly to see you again, after all. Come in, I’ve got some curiosities for you—art objects, don’t you call them?—to adorn your rooms at Cuthbert’s.”“Thanks. And then come down and see Aunt Meg and the governor. They’ll be delighted.”If Lucian had not known Sylvester from babyhood, he would have had little in common with him; but, as it was, whatever he had to say, he said to Sylvester; he took all his alien tastes for granted, and never supposed it possible to be so intimate with any one else. Absence, probably, neither made his heart grow fonder, nor the reverse; he would have given and expected exactly the same amount of regard, after an absence of five-and-twenty years instead of two.Sylvester had other friends, and his notion of sympathetic intercourse included more than this, but he had a brotherly regard for “Miss Lucy,” as the pretty-faced, but manly little boy had been called in his early school-days, and liked his company. Lucian now took him into the house, and bestowed various Indian valuables on him, stating where and when they had been bought on purpose for him, and giving him many distinct pictures of places and people; for he was very observant, and had an accurate memory.Then, as they walked down together to the Rectory, he asked after old friends, and neighbours, till they turned into the Rectory drive, opposite which, half open, were the great iron gates of Cleverley Hall.“There’s Aunt Meg,” said Sylvester. “Who’s that girl?—Good heavens,” as Lucian suddenly stopped, and held him back; for there, not fifty feet from them, in the act of parting from Miss Riddell, stood Amethyst Haredale.Retreat was for her impossible. As she turned and saw them, Lucian, without an instant’s pause, raised his hat, turned and went off up a side path into the garden.Sylvester moved forward, blushing and confused, but with an eager light in his eyes. She came straight on towards him, stopped, and held out her hand.“How do you do, Mr Riddell?” she said, in soft gracious tones, like Lady Haredale’s own. “I have come down for a few hours on business for my mother, and I came to see Miss Riddell. I am hurrying now to catch the London train. Good-bye.”She did not speak hurriedly, she left time for Sylvester’s confused murmurs of reply between her sentences, but she had walked on and turned out of sight before Miss Riddell had time to come up to them.“The hand of fate!” she exclaimed. “It is months since she was here, and now only for an hour or two.”“I’ll find Lucian,” stammered Sylvester, turning into the garden, where Lucian came quickly to meet him.“I was told they were away,” he said abruptly.“So they are. She came down on business. She—she—”“Don’t talk about her,” said Lucian, sternly. “There’s the Rector, and Miss Riddell with him.”He came up to them, shook hands cordially, presented his little offerings of Indian curios, and after a very short visit, took his leave, and went away by himself.“Unlucky!” exclaimed Miss Riddell. “I wish it had not occurred.”“But, Aunt Meg, are they coming down here?” said Sylvester, hurriedly.“No, they are to be in London for the season, Amethyst is to be presented. I suppose their affairs are looking up. They have been abroad, you know, for some time, and visiting-about; but Amethyst was in town last year for a very short time, with their cousin, Lady Molyneux, at the end of the season. You heard that? She was only there long enough to show that she would make a sensation. R, the new artist, asked to paint her, the picture is to be in the Academy this year. She will have every chance now. She looks well, and has not lost her sweet manner, but her girlishness has all gone, and she is more the grand lady than her mother.”“I—I hardly remember what a beauty she was,” said Sylvester, rather nervously. “And that fellow, Fowler, he married the heiress, didn’t he?”“Yes. They live in London. Haven’t you ever met them at Loseby? The marriage turned out very well. There is something very engaging about Amethyst, and she spoke nicely of her sister Una, who is very delicate, she tells me. But, dear me, it was a bad business for Lucian. I don’t know when he will settle down. His mother longs for him to marry and live at Toppings.”“He had much better see the world first,” said Sylvester.“One doesn’t quite see the end of it for him,” said Mr Riddell, thoughtfully. “But, Syl, I thought I was to see themagnum opus. I like to know what you young men are doing.”Sylvester recalled himself with a start, to what had been an hour before an important ordeal to him. Now, part of the poem seemed to have come to life, and the picture faded before the original.That same brief three months, which had turned Lucian Leigh’s outward life away from the course that had seemed marked out for it, had given a colour to all Sylvester Riddell’s inward existence. When he began to add another to the many poetical versions of a youth in search of an ideal, that ideal was, for him, embodied in his memory of Amethyst Haredale. He might call her Art, Truth, Womanhood, Beauty, anything he would, she looked at him from the deep grave eyes, and smiled the enchanting smile which had filled his imagination at first sight. To Lucian, every thought of Amethyst was painful, never, if possible, to be recalled; to Sylvester, she was a dream of beauty and delight, and, as he had never seen her since the fatal summer, there was a certain dreaminess in his feelings with regard to her.But when, encouraged by various successes in the way of criticism and of occasional verses, and having a good deal of leisure on his hands, he began to write a long poem, he had no doubt as to the source of his inspiration.He had called his poem ‘Iris,’ and the subject was that of a youth pursuing an ideal love. The hero was a minnesinger of the early middle ages, and the story was related in sections of narrative interspersed with suitable lyrics. The subject was not new, and he could only hope that the treatment was. He had not yet decided whether Iris should be for ever unattainable, a rainbow of promise, melt mystically into his hero’s being in some ineffable manner, as a final reward, or identify herself with the maiden who had been his childish friend.But the sight of the real Amethyst had dimmed this ideal Iris, and he hardly knew whether it was as lover or author, that he blushed and hesitated as his father settled himself in his study to listen. He was so nervous that he read hurriedly and badly, and his father told him that he was not doing himself justice, and made him read a passage over again, in which Amelot, as the minstrel boy was called, played and sang to himself in the sunset, his heart full of longing to express itself in song, till, with the sweetest strains that he had ever uttered, the soft and amethystine colours of sun and air took shape and form, and the lovely eyes of Iris shone upon him, amid rainbow hues and gleaming mists, beckoning him ever onward and upward to more strenuous efforts to attain her.“Of course,” said Sylvester, hurriedly, as he paused, “I suppose he never did reach her—I think she was always the end of the rainbow.”Mr Riddell did not appear deeply interested in this question. It did not, he said, affect the intrinsic merit of the poem.But he pounced on the song with which Iris had inspired Amelot, and after declaring it to be smooth, and not without sweetness, tore it to pieces in its author’s sight, proclaimed one epithet commonplace and another redundant, and finally told him, that he should aim at simplicity of sentiment and perfection of expression.“What all the world can feel, my dear boy, and only you can say,—that’s poetry.”“I—I am afraid,” said Sylvester, “that Amelot’s devotion to Iris is rather unusual—the lot of the few. Dante is of course the eternal model, after which one can only labour.”“A case in point, Syl,” said Mr Riddell, briskly. “Thousands of young men have fallen in love, like Dante, with unattainable young women. He knew how to tell the world of it. Besides, Dante was a prophet; he had another function to fulfil. But the simplest things are the greatest.”Sylvester did not agree, he was not at all prepared to consider that the devotion of Amelot to Iris was usual; quite the contrary. It was an exceptional grace bestowed on such as could receive it.The point was, however, rather too personal for comfortable argument. Besides, he did not know yet what his father thought about the poem.“I gather,” he said, “that you think the sentiment of the poem rather too finespun.”“Oh dear, no,” said Mr Riddell. “Not at all. I’ve often felt the sort of thing myself. I’m glad young men can still be honestly sentimental. Don’t get too mystical, and avoid unusual words—all sorts of aesthetic slang. The thing has a good deal of merit in its own way. I must go down and see old Tomkins.”And while Sylvester hardly knew whether he was pleased or not, the Rector rammed on his shabby soft hat, stuck his walking-stick under his arm, and remarked—“Glad you employ your leisure time so well Very pretty lines—many of them—excellent tone and feeling. Of course the genuine lilt of a perfect love-song only drops from the sky once in a generation.”Sylvester had hardly expected that his father would tell him that, in Lucian’s language, he had made Tennyson take a back seat; but he felt ruffled and dissatisfied.Sympathetic as Mr Riddell was, he did not quite know what his verdict was to his son. He had written many a smooth and graceful copy of verses in his own young days, reflecting more or less the style and taste of his generation, and he had long survived the discovery that they had not added much to what it had to tell the world. He had found quite enough to live for, without poetry.Sylvester was of a more intense and less many-sided nature; worthy and sufficient objects in life did not seem to him so easy to find. He had secretly lived much for his poem, and he needed to find it worth living for.Now, the thing most worth living for seemed to be the hope of seeing Amethyst again. Fate had kept them apart hitherto by a series of chances; but now, if the poem was finished, if it came out and was a success, if he met her in London, if she did not cherish any resentment against him—if she could ever know that Iris—So Sylvester dreamed. But Lucian went up to London to meet the friend who shared his aspirations as to the bears of the Rocky Mountains, and made arrangements for an immediate start in pursuit of them.

One sunny afternoon in spring, Lucian Leigh was sitting on a bench in the garden at Ashfield Mount. Nearly two years had passed since he had left Cleverley in the agony of his great disappointment, and he had now come back to it for the first time.

The flowers were as gay as when he had walked among them during the brief days of his betrothal, the house looked as cheerful and comfortable as of old; the great deer-hound that sat at his feet was unchanged during his absence, but Lucian himself had grown from youth to manhood, and though the expression of his impassive, regular-featured face had changed but little, it was so effectually bronzed, that hair, and even eyes, showed light against the sunburn.

He sat still and smoked, and patted Donald’s head—he liked the feel of it—till footsteps approached, and he was hailed from the neighbouring shrubbery.

“Ha, Syl!” he said, jumping up, “so there you are. Glad to see you.”

“I’m uncommonly glad to see you,” said Sylvester, grasping his hand. “I began to think you were never coming home any more, but were permanently given over to tigers and elephants. Did you like India?”

“No,” said Lucian, “the big game is the only thing worth going there for. I’ve had a shot, I believe, at everything there is there to shoot at I know all the tracks of them, but so do so many other men. Now I think of trying bears in the Rockies for a change; and I should like to go north—an arctic expedition would be rather jolly.”

“You want to add a polar bear’s hide to all the tiger skins you have sent home to adorn the hall at Toppings, before you settle down to pot your own partridges.”

“Yes,” said Lucian.

“But what does Mrs Leigh say to that?”

“She doesn’t like it. She wants me to go to London now, and, as she calls it, ‘keep up our old connection,’ and then keep open house at Toppings in the autumn, have shoots, and so on. I have been there with her now, you know, for two months.”

“And you don’t see it?”

“No, not yet. I must, of course, finally. But Evans is a very good agent, and the Rectory people look after the tenants. I subscribe properly to everything,—schools, and hunt, and county show, and so on; but I’m not going to live there now. Why should I?”

“Well, you might see a little more of the world first, certainly.”

“In two years’ time Miss Carisbrooke comes of age, and the lease of this house will be up. The mother will have to make a new start somewhere then, and it will be time for Kate, at any rate, to come out. That ought to be in our own neighbourhood, so I must be in England then.”

“Does Miss Carisbrooke mean to live here?”

“I believe so. My mother had her to stay here, and liked her, before I came home. You might try your luck, Syl, she’s a catch. Her only relation is a youngish uncle, her guardian. I believe he lives abroad a good deal.”

Lucian paused, then said—

“She has been living for the last year with that old Miss Haredale, who lost her money. She chaperons Miss Carisbrooke, and is to bring her out, I believe, in London this year.”

There was a little silence. Perhaps it had been from a kind of embarrassment that Lucian had at once rained facts upon Sylvester, and put him in possession of his intentions. Now he said—

“Don’t let the mother set you on to bully me about staying at home. I always meant to have a shot at a white bear some time—except once, for about three months.—And that’s quite over, for good and all. I’ve no more concern with it. So I must do something else, you know; and I like sport, and seeing new places.”

Lucian paused again, and Sylvester looked at him keenly, hardly knowing what to say in answer.

“I am convinced,” continued Lucian, with the same unmoved voice and face, “that I acted rightly. So we’ll say no more about it. What have you been about? The mother says you’re writing a poem.”

“Yes,” said Sylvester; “will you read it?”

“I’llbuyit,” said Lucian, gravely; “and, yes, I’ll read it, if you like, as it’s yours. I hope you’ll make Tennyson take a back seat.”

“Thank you,” said Sylvester, laughing. “I’ll be content to hang on behind his coach. But of course I’m rather full of it. I’ve had several things in reviews and magazines, and some men, whose word is worth something, like them. But it’s all luck. The public’s harder to hit than a tiger, Lucy.”

“I hope it won’t turn and rend you. Well, it’s jolly to see you again, after all. Come in, I’ve got some curiosities for you—art objects, don’t you call them?—to adorn your rooms at Cuthbert’s.”

“Thanks. And then come down and see Aunt Meg and the governor. They’ll be delighted.”

If Lucian had not known Sylvester from babyhood, he would have had little in common with him; but, as it was, whatever he had to say, he said to Sylvester; he took all his alien tastes for granted, and never supposed it possible to be so intimate with any one else. Absence, probably, neither made his heart grow fonder, nor the reverse; he would have given and expected exactly the same amount of regard, after an absence of five-and-twenty years instead of two.

Sylvester had other friends, and his notion of sympathetic intercourse included more than this, but he had a brotherly regard for “Miss Lucy,” as the pretty-faced, but manly little boy had been called in his early school-days, and liked his company. Lucian now took him into the house, and bestowed various Indian valuables on him, stating where and when they had been bought on purpose for him, and giving him many distinct pictures of places and people; for he was very observant, and had an accurate memory.

Then, as they walked down together to the Rectory, he asked after old friends, and neighbours, till they turned into the Rectory drive, opposite which, half open, were the great iron gates of Cleverley Hall.

“There’s Aunt Meg,” said Sylvester. “Who’s that girl?—Good heavens,” as Lucian suddenly stopped, and held him back; for there, not fifty feet from them, in the act of parting from Miss Riddell, stood Amethyst Haredale.

Retreat was for her impossible. As she turned and saw them, Lucian, without an instant’s pause, raised his hat, turned and went off up a side path into the garden.

Sylvester moved forward, blushing and confused, but with an eager light in his eyes. She came straight on towards him, stopped, and held out her hand.

“How do you do, Mr Riddell?” she said, in soft gracious tones, like Lady Haredale’s own. “I have come down for a few hours on business for my mother, and I came to see Miss Riddell. I am hurrying now to catch the London train. Good-bye.”

She did not speak hurriedly, she left time for Sylvester’s confused murmurs of reply between her sentences, but she had walked on and turned out of sight before Miss Riddell had time to come up to them.

“The hand of fate!” she exclaimed. “It is months since she was here, and now only for an hour or two.”

“I’ll find Lucian,” stammered Sylvester, turning into the garden, where Lucian came quickly to meet him.

“I was told they were away,” he said abruptly.

“So they are. She came down on business. She—she—”

“Don’t talk about her,” said Lucian, sternly. “There’s the Rector, and Miss Riddell with him.”

He came up to them, shook hands cordially, presented his little offerings of Indian curios, and after a very short visit, took his leave, and went away by himself.

“Unlucky!” exclaimed Miss Riddell. “I wish it had not occurred.”

“But, Aunt Meg, are they coming down here?” said Sylvester, hurriedly.

“No, they are to be in London for the season, Amethyst is to be presented. I suppose their affairs are looking up. They have been abroad, you know, for some time, and visiting-about; but Amethyst was in town last year for a very short time, with their cousin, Lady Molyneux, at the end of the season. You heard that? She was only there long enough to show that she would make a sensation. R, the new artist, asked to paint her, the picture is to be in the Academy this year. She will have every chance now. She looks well, and has not lost her sweet manner, but her girlishness has all gone, and she is more the grand lady than her mother.”

“I—I hardly remember what a beauty she was,” said Sylvester, rather nervously. “And that fellow, Fowler, he married the heiress, didn’t he?”

“Yes. They live in London. Haven’t you ever met them at Loseby? The marriage turned out very well. There is something very engaging about Amethyst, and she spoke nicely of her sister Una, who is very delicate, she tells me. But, dear me, it was a bad business for Lucian. I don’t know when he will settle down. His mother longs for him to marry and live at Toppings.”

“He had much better see the world first,” said Sylvester.

“One doesn’t quite see the end of it for him,” said Mr Riddell, thoughtfully. “But, Syl, I thought I was to see themagnum opus. I like to know what you young men are doing.”

Sylvester recalled himself with a start, to what had been an hour before an important ordeal to him. Now, part of the poem seemed to have come to life, and the picture faded before the original.

That same brief three months, which had turned Lucian Leigh’s outward life away from the course that had seemed marked out for it, had given a colour to all Sylvester Riddell’s inward existence. When he began to add another to the many poetical versions of a youth in search of an ideal, that ideal was, for him, embodied in his memory of Amethyst Haredale. He might call her Art, Truth, Womanhood, Beauty, anything he would, she looked at him from the deep grave eyes, and smiled the enchanting smile which had filled his imagination at first sight. To Lucian, every thought of Amethyst was painful, never, if possible, to be recalled; to Sylvester, she was a dream of beauty and delight, and, as he had never seen her since the fatal summer, there was a certain dreaminess in his feelings with regard to her.

But when, encouraged by various successes in the way of criticism and of occasional verses, and having a good deal of leisure on his hands, he began to write a long poem, he had no doubt as to the source of his inspiration.

He had called his poem ‘Iris,’ and the subject was that of a youth pursuing an ideal love. The hero was a minnesinger of the early middle ages, and the story was related in sections of narrative interspersed with suitable lyrics. The subject was not new, and he could only hope that the treatment was. He had not yet decided whether Iris should be for ever unattainable, a rainbow of promise, melt mystically into his hero’s being in some ineffable manner, as a final reward, or identify herself with the maiden who had been his childish friend.

But the sight of the real Amethyst had dimmed this ideal Iris, and he hardly knew whether it was as lover or author, that he blushed and hesitated as his father settled himself in his study to listen. He was so nervous that he read hurriedly and badly, and his father told him that he was not doing himself justice, and made him read a passage over again, in which Amelot, as the minstrel boy was called, played and sang to himself in the sunset, his heart full of longing to express itself in song, till, with the sweetest strains that he had ever uttered, the soft and amethystine colours of sun and air took shape and form, and the lovely eyes of Iris shone upon him, amid rainbow hues and gleaming mists, beckoning him ever onward and upward to more strenuous efforts to attain her.

“Of course,” said Sylvester, hurriedly, as he paused, “I suppose he never did reach her—I think she was always the end of the rainbow.”

Mr Riddell did not appear deeply interested in this question. It did not, he said, affect the intrinsic merit of the poem.

But he pounced on the song with which Iris had inspired Amelot, and after declaring it to be smooth, and not without sweetness, tore it to pieces in its author’s sight, proclaimed one epithet commonplace and another redundant, and finally told him, that he should aim at simplicity of sentiment and perfection of expression.

“What all the world can feel, my dear boy, and only you can say,—that’s poetry.”

“I—I am afraid,” said Sylvester, “that Amelot’s devotion to Iris is rather unusual—the lot of the few. Dante is of course the eternal model, after which one can only labour.”

“A case in point, Syl,” said Mr Riddell, briskly. “Thousands of young men have fallen in love, like Dante, with unattainable young women. He knew how to tell the world of it. Besides, Dante was a prophet; he had another function to fulfil. But the simplest things are the greatest.”

Sylvester did not agree, he was not at all prepared to consider that the devotion of Amelot to Iris was usual; quite the contrary. It was an exceptional grace bestowed on such as could receive it.

The point was, however, rather too personal for comfortable argument. Besides, he did not know yet what his father thought about the poem.

“I gather,” he said, “that you think the sentiment of the poem rather too finespun.”

“Oh dear, no,” said Mr Riddell. “Not at all. I’ve often felt the sort of thing myself. I’m glad young men can still be honestly sentimental. Don’t get too mystical, and avoid unusual words—all sorts of aesthetic slang. The thing has a good deal of merit in its own way. I must go down and see old Tomkins.”

And while Sylvester hardly knew whether he was pleased or not, the Rector rammed on his shabby soft hat, stuck his walking-stick under his arm, and remarked—

“Glad you employ your leisure time so well Very pretty lines—many of them—excellent tone and feeling. Of course the genuine lilt of a perfect love-song only drops from the sky once in a generation.”

Sylvester had hardly expected that his father would tell him that, in Lucian’s language, he had made Tennyson take a back seat; but he felt ruffled and dissatisfied.

Sympathetic as Mr Riddell was, he did not quite know what his verdict was to his son. He had written many a smooth and graceful copy of verses in his own young days, reflecting more or less the style and taste of his generation, and he had long survived the discovery that they had not added much to what it had to tell the world. He had found quite enough to live for, without poetry.

Sylvester was of a more intense and less many-sided nature; worthy and sufficient objects in life did not seem to him so easy to find. He had secretly lived much for his poem, and he needed to find it worth living for.

Now, the thing most worth living for seemed to be the hope of seeing Amethyst again. Fate had kept them apart hitherto by a series of chances; but now, if the poem was finished, if it came out and was a success, if he met her in London, if she did not cherish any resentment against him—if she could ever know that Iris—

So Sylvester dreamed. But Lucian went up to London to meet the friend who shared his aspirations as to the bears of the Rocky Mountains, and made arrangements for an immediate start in pursuit of them.

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