III
IN THE FIRELIGHT
Snow had been drifting again, softly, thickly, and persistently, since dawn. The angles of the window sills were filled with it, every square and diamond in the leaded gallery windows was rimmed with the crystalline fur. The coats of the deer in the home park glowed a rich rusty red against its intense and sparkling purity; half of every trunk and branch at the edge of the wood was erased by it like a crayon drawing by the india rubber of some impatient drawing-room master. Fenella had spent the short winter afternoon roaming through galleries and chambers of state, or watching the flakes that tumbled giddily from the shrouded sky turn blue and green and red as they passed the painted blazons in the great oriel window—coats fessed and barrelled and ermined, of Alfords, and Corbets, and Danseys, and Maddocks, whose hale and temperate blood ran in her own veins.
She was alone for the first time in the home of her forefathers. Her uncle was away in the old capital of Powysland on some political business or another; her cousins had driven down to the church an hour ago, in a governess-cart heaped with ropes and garlands of holly and fir. There were wreaths and crosses, too, for the woman who was spending her first Christmas beneath the frozen earth, and Fenella had shrunk from sharing the pious duty in which her heart could have so little part. She was glad to be alone, and to muse undisturbed in the ghostly protracted twilight. After the tempest of her grief something of weakness and passivity lingered still; her heart felt the languor of convalescence. Her movements were slower, her poises more consciously graceful; with the restlessness of childhood the last of its angles had gone. So imperative is nature, that she can make even a broken heart subsidiary to her purpose. She had prayed to die, and was three pounds heavier.
When the twilight glimmer in the long gallery was too ghostly to be borne she descended to the dining-hall. Under its hooded fireplace the roaring grate was heaped with blocks of ligneous coal almost as large as boulders. Freres Lulford is in that borderland 'twixt the old England and the new where, for a ten-mile walk, one may make choice between coal-shafts and rolling mills, or ancient timbered hamlets and the "forest fleece" of Wenlock Edge. She called Perseus, the house-dog, to her, an eerie, feathery creature with a mouth like a shark, and, holding his head in her lap with one hand, rested her round cheek, dusky red from the fire into which she gazed, upon the other. The flames, as they rose and fell, tossed a distorted shadow of her head and shoulders, now low along the faded Persian carpets that covered the polished oak boards, now high up on the diapered wall, across helmet and cuirass, fringed silken banner, or antlered head, until, reaching the straddled legs or flowered petticoat of some high-hung ancestor, it sank again to the carpeted floor. She was dressed in a high-waisted frock of some soft white material, with short sleeves that left most of her arms bare, and with a high net collar kept pointed to the ears with little whalebones, after a senseless momentary fashion that forced her to carry her chin in the air. It was a very pretty chin, however; and wherefore does fashion change at all if not to call attention, through successive exaggerations, to the varied prettinesses of woman.
Was she beginning to taste content again? Was she even resigned? She could not tell. A broken heart is such a relative term, one so justly discredited by those who have not the patience or the knowledge to follow its deadly sequelae that, except as the loosest of illustration, it is grown to be a useless one as well. But without flattering her own constancy in the least, Fenella could well perceive that, but for a providence so despised at the time, it might have gone very hard with her. Never, she owned it humbly and thankfully, could power to endure so timely have followed the blow, ministering angels the draining of the chalice. The worth or tenacity of a love that death or something else violently disrupts is not to be measured in an instant. At first, while the soul is nothing save a shocked protesting mass of severed nerve and impulse, all comfort is welcome, no matter whence it comes. It is not until the pain has abated that a perverse relish for it becomes possible, and that its ameliorations can seem a treachery done to love. So she had judged her own once, with the indignation of youth for wise restraining laws that will let no passion, by taking thought, grow beyond a certain stature. She was wiser now as well as humbler—could bless the diversion even for the poor perished love's sake. It had saved her from the meaner vexations that, for the woman, follow the breaking of an engagement, the unwelcome sympathy and the meaning glance, the loneliness of the long empty hours, and the perpetual challenge to memory of familiar scenes and faces. New skies, as the poet sings, may not change the heart, but this much is certain—nowhere is disappointment borne so hardly as among those who have been witness to the illusion. She went from her lover's arms discredited, soiled even, but, at least, to those who were ignorant of her history, and could not compare her with the Fenella of old. Meantime, her sorrow lurked somewhere, to wake, she felt instinctively, the day another man should ask her for love.
Her cousins were kind and natural, so natural that, after three months, she seemed to have known them all her life. Leslie Barbour was tall, thin and melancholy, mildly mad, and with the good looks that were the only unentailed heritage in the Barbour family marred in her case by ill-health and emaciation. She spoke little, and regarded her new-found cousin with a purblind stare that it took Fenella a long time to get used to, but which she was content now to accept as a tribute of adoring affection. She loved white, waxy flowers with heavy odors, and was psychically inquisitive.
Nelly was rather afraid of her uncle, abruyantpeer with a past of which the late Lady Lulford had been a very small part. He had a fine head and heavy, fleshy face, opulently bearded, that Holbein would have loved to paint, the face of one of the terrible new lords of the English Renaissance who hung the abbots and gobbled up the abbeys. In the country he affected knickerbockers and velvet coats, and was sophisticated rather than intellectual, with a sophistication that he had placed a whole life long at the service of his pleasures. His pursuits being apt to clash with his eldest son's, Basil was at present in Damaraland shooting big game; but Jack Barbour, the younger son, a cheery and casual young lancer, fell unreservedly in love with his pretty cousin, with a fine quality of hopeless adoration in his homage (he has since married money and freckles) that the girl was used to by now, and could deal with competently. The two became great chums. Jack liked to have his well-turned-out little kinswoman for brisk walks across the Park, or for a saunter down Bond Street at the hours of resort. He did not mind how many of his comrades-in-arms caught him in company that did him so much credit. "Where did you find the pretty lady you were with in Burlington Street, Suds?" "Don't be an ass, Bogey," Suds would make reply. "She's a little cousin of ours. I'll introduce you in the spring when we start goin' round again." Fenella, wearing her own sad colors in her heart, looked forward to the promised gaieties almost with dismay. Life had become such a serious thing. She worked hard at her dancing, teaching, and learning while she taught, and making strides that carried her rapidly beyond Mme. de Rudder's power to appreciate justly. On the morning of her interview with Joe Dollfus she thought it well to take her eccentric cousin into her confidence. The look of hopeless adoration only intensified in the vacant, troubled face. Leslie put out her hand and touched the girl's black hair timidly.
"Blame you, child?" she repeated. "Does one blame the butterfly for seeking the sun? Will you forget me, darling, in your success—for I see success written on your brow? Will you be only one other sad memory in my breast—one pearl white head the more along the long rosary of my regrets?" She sighed luxuriously. "I shall recall you best," she decided after a moment's consideration, "when I see a creamy-white rose, half-blown."
Fenella wriggled uneasily. She did not want to be any one else's regret. Brows and breasts, moreover, had a mortuary flavor. Foreheads and chests were much cheerfuller everyday matters. They were at lunch, and she caught her cousin's hand under the table-cloth.
"Don't be gloomy, Les," she pleaded; "you make me feel allsquigglywhen you talk that way. Of course I sha'n't forget you. I want you to come with me and madame this afternoon."
We know now what Mr. Dollfus thought; but his outward recognition of his opportunity had been temperate, and the three women discussed his attitude rather ruefully over their tea. Leslie looked at the girl's flushed, chagrined face a long while in silence.
"Don't be afraid, Cousin Nelly," she said at last. "It's going to be all right. That man is wild to have you."
Fenella turned on her breathlessly. "Oh, Les! do you mean it? How can you know?"
Leslie narrowed her pale eyes and shook her head slowly.
"Never mind how I know," she said cryptically. "These things aren't withheld from me. They wouldn't be fromyouif you could empty your mind ofselffor even a moment."
No reinforcement to hope is really insignificant. Nelly had glowed at the eerie assurance. She was recalling it now, and smiling over poor Les's unearthly manner, when the hairy head under her hand moved convulsively. Perseus uttered a wild, strangling bark. A man was standing on the opposite side of the fireplace, looking at the pretty group of girl and animal—the dog asleep, the girl dreaming.
"Hello!" he said cheerfully.