I shall remember while the light lives yet, And in the darkness I shall not forget.
Seymour Michael was no coward where hard words and no hard knocks were to be exchanged. His faith in his own keenness of intellect and unscrupulousness of tongue was unbounded.
He smiled when he read Anna Agar's letter over a dainty breakfast at his club the next morning. The cunning of it was obvious to his cunning comprehension, and the fact of her suppressing her newly-acquired surname only convinced him that she knew but little about himself.
That same evening at four o'clock he presented himself at the lordly hall-door of Mr. Hethbridge. Since first he had raised his hand to this knocker, fingering his letter of introduction to the East India director, Seymour Michael had learnt many things, but the knowledge was not yet his that indiscriminate untruths are apt to fly home to roost.
Anna Agar had easily managed to send her mother out of the house; her husband spent his days as far from Clapham as circumstances would allow. She was seated on a sofa at the far end of the room when Seymour Michael was shown in, and the first thing that struck her was his diminutiveness. After the hearty country gentlemen who habitually carried mud into the Stagholme drawing-room, this small-limbed dapper soldier of fortune looked almost puny. But there is a depth in every woman's heart which is only to be reached by one man. Whatever betide them both, that one is different from the rest all through life.
Neither of these two persons spoke until the servant had closed the door. Then, as is usual in such cases, the more indifferent spoke first.
“Why did you never write to me?” said Seymour Michael, fixing his mournful glance on her face.
“Because I thought you were dead.”
“You never got my letter contradicting the report?”
“No,” she answered, with so cheap a cunning that it deceived him.
“And,” he went on, with the heartlessness of a small man, for large men respect woman with a deeper chivalry than every puny knight yet compassed, “and you did not trouble to inquire. You did not even give me six months' grace to cool in my grave.”
“How did you send your letter?” she asked, with a suppressed excitement which he misread entirely.
“By the usual route. I wrote off at once.”
“Liar! liar! liar!” she shrieked.
She had risen, and stood pointing an accusatory finger at him. Then suddenly the dramatic force of the situation seemed to fail, and she burst out laughing. For some seconds it seemed as if her laughter was getting beyond her control, but at last she checked it with a gurgle.
The complete success of the trap which she had laid for him almost disappointed her. Few things are more disappointing than complete success. She hated him, and yet for the sake of the one gleam of good love that had flickered once in her essentially sordid heart, she had nourished a vague hope that he would clear himself—that at all events he would have the cleverness to see through her stratagem.
“Liar!” she repeated. “In this room last night—not twenty-four hours ago—Mr. Wynderton told me all about it. He said that you told several men in his presence that you did not love me, and that your death reported in the papers was the best way of breaking off the engagement.”
Seymour Michael's eyes never wavered. For once they were still, with that solemn depth of gaze which tells of the curse laid on a smitten, miserable race. It was strange that before honest men and women his glance wavered ever—he could never meet honest eyes; but looking at Anna Agar they were as steady as those of a true man.
“Wynderton,” ho said, “the man whose promotion I stopped, by a report against him for looting.”
When Nature makes a fool in the guise of a woman she turns out a finished work. Mrs. Agar's eyes actually lighted up. Seymour Michael saw; but he knew that he had no case. Nevertheless, in view of the Squire's advanced age (a fact of which he had made sure), he attempted to carry through a forlorn hope.
“And you believe this man before you believe me?” said Michael. It is strange how often one hears the word “believe” on the lips of those whose veracity is doubtful.
Now it happened that Mr. Hethbridge had spoken of Wynderton at breakfast that morning in terms which left no doubt as to the untruth of the statement just made in regard to him. But even this would have been passed over by the woman who had a natural tendency towards falsehood herself, had not Seymour Michael made a hideous mistake. A wiser man than any of us has said that there is a time for all things. Most distinctly defined is the time for making love. More men come to grief by making too much love than too little. Seymour Michael, being heartless, deemed erroneously that this was a propitious moment to essay the power which had once been his over this woman.
He accompanied his reproachful speech with a tender glance, which in olden times had never failed to call forth an answering look of love in her eyes. Now, it suddenly aroused her to realise the extent of her hatred. In some subtle way it humiliated her; for she looked back into the past, and saw herself therein a dupe to this man.
“No!” she cried, and her raised voice had a sudden twang in it—suggestive of the streets; of the People. “No—you needn't trouble to make soft eyes at me. I know you now—I know that what that man said was true. He called you a coward and a cad. You are worse! You are a Jew—a mean, lying Jew.”
There are few greater trials to a man's dignity than vituperation from the lips of a woman. She walked towards him, clumsily, menacingly and raised her hand as if to strike him.
Seymour Michael's brown face turned yellow beneath her blazing anger.
“Sit down!” he commanded, “and don't make a fool of yourself.”
He was mean enough to pay her back in her own coin—the paltry, loud-ringing coin which is all that a woman has.
“I do not mean to wrangle,” he said coolly; “but I may as well tell you now that I never cared a jot for you. I was laughing at you in my sleeve all the time. I did not want you but your money. I concluded that the money would be too dear at the price, so I determined to throw you over. The way I chose to do it was as good as any other, because it saved me the trouble of writing to you.”
Anna Agar had obeyed him. She was sitting down in a stiff-backed arm-chair, looking stupidly at the pattern of the carpet as if it were something new to her. Between physical pain and mental excitement she was beginning to wander. She was the sort of woman to lose control over her mind with a temperature of one hundred and one.
Michael looked keenly at her. He had a racial terror of physical ailment. He saw that something was wrong, but his knowledge went no further. He had never seen a woman faint, so limited had been his experience of the sex.
“Come,” he said consolingly, “it is all for the best. We made a mistake. In a few years we shall look back to this, and thank Heaven for saving us many years of unhappiness. We are not suited to each other, Anna. We never should have been happy.”
It was characteristic of the man to be more afraid of a fainting fit than of a broken heart.
He went to her side and stood, not daring to touch her, for fear of arousing another of those fits of passion in her which neither of them seemed to understand. At length she spoke in a singular monotonous tone which an experienced doctor would have recognised at once as the speech of a tongue unguided for the time being. She did not look up, but kept her eyes fixed on the carpet as if reading there.
“Some day,” she said, “I will pay you back. Some day—some day. I do not know how, but I feel that you will be sorry you ever did this.”
Twenty-five years afterwards these words came back to him in a flash. They passed through his brain—conglomerate—in a flash, in a hundredth part of the time required to speak them.
Even at the time of hearing them, spoken in that voice which did not seem to belong to Anna Hethbridge at all, he turned pale. For all the hatred that burnt within her like a fire smouldered in the deliberate tones of her voice. Hatred and love can teach us more in a moment than the experience of a lifetime; for through either of them we see ourselves face to face. This hatred made Anna Agar in twenty-four hours, and the woman thus created went through a lifetime unchanged.
Michael went towards the bell.
“I am going to ring,” he said, “for your maid.”
“Twice,” she muttered in the same vague way.
He obeyed her, ringing twice.
Presently the woman came.
“Your mistress,” said Michael in a low voice to her at the door, “has been suddenly seized with faintness. I leave her to you.”
Without looking round he passed through the doorway and out into his own self-seeking life. But Anna Agar's revenge began from that moment. To a man of his nature, in whose veins ran the taint of a semi-superstitious Oriental blood, there was a nameless terror in the hatred of a human being, however helpless. Surely the hell of the coward will be a twilight land of vague shadowy dangers ever approaching and receding.
In such a land Seymour Michael moved for some months, until he returned to India; and there, in the daily round of a new life, he gradually learnt to shake off the past. The world is very large despite chance meetings. It is easy enough to find room for two even in the same county, with the exercise of a little care.
Twenty-five years elapsed before these two met again, and then they only had time to exchange a glance. By that time the result of their own actions had passed beyond their control.
Seymour Michael walked across the Common, which was in those days still wild and almost beautiful; and on the whole he was pleased with the result of this interview. He knew that it was destined to come sooner or later—he had known that all along; and it might have been worse. It is characteristic of an untruthful nature to be impervious to the shame of mere detection. In Eastern countries the liar detected smiles in one's face. Detection is to an Oriental no punishment; something more tangible is required to pierce his mental epidermis.
Being quite incapable of a strong love this man was innocent of consuming hatred. He therefore vaguely wondered whether the day might come wherein he would once more lay siege to the affections of Anna Agar, a rich widow.
Had he seen the face of the woman whom he had just left as it lay at that moment, hardly less pale than the pillow between the fluted mahogany pillars of a huge four-post bed, he would not have understood its meaning. He would never have divined that the dull gleam shining between her half-closed eyelids was simple hatred of himself, that the restless, twitching lips were whispering curses upon his head, that the half-stunned brain was struggling back to circulation and thought for the sole purpose of devising hurt to him.
Seymour Michael, ignorant of all this, went peaceably back to his club, where he dressed, dined, and proceeded to pass the evening at a theatre.
That night, while he was displaying his diamond studs in the stalls of Drury Lane Theatre, was born into the world—long before his time—a child, Arthur Agar, destined to walk the smoothest paths of life, literally in silk attire; for he grew up to love such things.
But the ways of Nature are strange. She is very quiet; patient as death itself. She holds her hand for years—sometimes for a generation—but she strikes at last.
She is more cruel than man, or even than woman which is saying much, She is the best friend we have, and the worst foe, for she never forgives an outrage.
Nature raised her hand over this puny, whimpering child, Arthur Agar. She never forgot a mother's selfish passion. She forgets nothing. When first he opened his little pink lids upon the world he looked round with a scared wonder in a pair of colourless blue-grey eyes; and that vague look of expectation never left his eyes in later life. It almost seemed as if the infant orbs could see ahead into the future—could discern the lowering hand of outraged Nature.
This hand was suspended over the ill-fated, poorly-endowed head for years, then Nature struck—hard.
“Yes, dear. I have great news for you to take back to your mother. Jem has got his commission—in a Goorkha regiment!”
The lady who spoke leant back in her chair, half turning her head, but not looking entirely round in the direction of the only other occupant of the room—a girl of nineteen.
“In a Goorkha regiment, Aunt Anna?” repeated the girl; “what is that? It sounds as if he would have to black his face and wear a turban. It suggests curry and gymkhanas (whatever they may be) and pyjamas and bananas and other pickles. A Goorkha regiment.”
There was a faint drop in her tone—on the last three words, which to very keen ears might have signified reproach, but the hearer was not keen—merely cunning, which is quite a different matter.
“Yes, dear. They tell me that these Indian regiments are much the best for a young man who is likely to get on. There are so many more chances of promotions and—er—er—distinction.”
The girl was standing by the open window, and she turned her head without otherwise moving, looking at the speaker with a pair of exceedingly discriminating eyes.
“Bosh, my dear aunt!” she whispered confidingly to the blind-cord.
“Yes,” pursued the lady, with the eager credulity of her first mother, ever ready to believe the last speaker when belief is convenient—“Yes. Sister Cecilia tells me that all the great men began in the Indian Service.”
“Oh! I wonder where they finished. Royal Academy—finishing Academy. Regimentals and a gold frame—leaning heroically on a mild-looking cannon with battles in the background.”
“Yes, dear,” replied Mrs. Agar, who only half understood Dora Glynde at all times; “it is such a good thing for Jem. Such a splendid opportunity, you know!”
“Yes,” echoed the girl, with a twist of her humorous lips. “Splendid!”
She had turned again, and was looking out of the window across a soft old lawn where two Wellingtonians towered side by side like sentries. Without glancing in the direction of her companion she knew the expression of Mrs. Agar's face, the direction of her gaze; the very thought in her shallow mind. She knew that Mrs. Agar was sitting with her arms on the little davenport, gazing rapturously at the photograph of an insipid young man with a silk-faced smoking jacket; with clean linen, clean countenance, clean hands, immaculate hair, and a general air of being too weak to be mean.
“Sister Cecilia,” went on the elder lady, “seems to know all about it.”
It is useless to attempt concealment of the fact that at this juncture Dora Glynde made a face—an honest schoolgirl behind-your-back Face—indicative of supreme scorn for some person or persons unspecified.
Hers was a countenance which lent itself admirably to the purpose, with lips full of humour, and capable, as such lips are, of expressing a great and wonderful tenderness. The face,du reste, was that of a healthy, fair-skinned English girl, liable to honest change from pale to pink, according to the dictates of an arbitrary climate. Her eyes were of a dark grey-blue, straightforward and steady, with a shadow of thought in them which made wise people respect her presence. She was not painfully beautiful, like the heroine of a novel—nor abnormally plain, like the antitype who has found her way into fiction, and there (alone) brings all hearts to her feet.
“Is Jem glad?” she asked cheerfully. “Is he thirsting for gore and glory?”
“Oh, delighted! Arthur will be so pleased too. Dear boy,heis so interested in soldiers, but of course he could not go into the army! He is too delicate—besides, the life is rough, and the risks are very great.”
Mrs. Agar was speaking with her head slightly inclined to one side, and she never raised her adoring eyes from the photograph of the insipid young man. Had she done so she would have seen a look of patient, if comic, resignation come over the face of her youthful companion at the mention of her son's name.
“I will tell mother,” said Dora Glynde, purposely ignoring Arthur Agar, whose name was always dragged sooner or later into every conversation. “Fancy Jem in a helmet, or a turban, with his face blacked! All the same, if I were a man I should be a soldier. When does he go—to join his regiment?”
“Oh, almost at once.”
The girl winced, quietly, between herself and the blind-cord.
“And in the meantime,” she said lightly, “I suppose he is fully engaged in buying swords and guns and bomb-shells, or whatever the Goorkhas use in warfare.”
“He is coming home to-morrow for Sunday,” replied Jem Agar's stepmother absently. She was thinking of her own son, and therefore did not hear the quick sigh which was almost a gasp; did not note the sudden light in the girl's eyes.
Dora Glynde was rather a solitary-minded young person. The only child of elderly parents, she had never learnt in the nursery to indulge in the indiscretions of confiding girlhood. She had the good fortune to be without a bosom-friend who related her most sacred secrets to other bosom friends and so on, as is the way of maidens. From her father she had inherited a discriminating mind and a most admirable habit of reserve. She was quite happy when alone, which, according to La Bruyère, is a great safeguard against all evil.
She wanted to be alone now, and therefore passed out of the open window with a non-committing “Good-bye, Aunt Anna!”
“Good-bye, dear,” replied the lady, awaking suddenly from a reverie. But by the time she had turned round in her chair, the girl was gone.
Dora crossed the lawn, passing between the sentinel pines and crossing the moat by the narrow footbridge. She climbed the railing with all the ease of nineteen years and struck a bee-line across the park. She never raised her eyes from the ground, never paused in her swinging gait, until she reached the brown hush of the beechwood which divided the Rectory garden from the southern extremity of the park.
Having climbed the railing again she sat on a mossy mound at the foot of a huge beech tree. Her manner of doing so subtly indicated that she did not only know the spot, but was in the habit of sitting there, possibly to think. A youthful privilege of doubtful value, for, as we get busier in life we have to do the thinking as we go along.
“Oh!” she muttered, “oh, how awful!”
A new expression had come over her face. She looked older, and all the vivacity had suddenly left her lips.
While she was still sitting there the crisp sound of footsteps on the fallen leaves approached through the wood. Looking up she saw her father, following the winding path through the spinney towards his home.
A grave man was the Rector of Stagholme in his declining years; hopelessly, wisely pessimistic, with sudden youthful returns of interest in matters literary and theological. As he came he read a book.
Instantly the expression of Dora's face changed. She rose and went towards him, smiling contemptuously towards his lowering gravity. He looked up, gave a little grunt of recognition, and closed his book.
“Father,” she said, “I've just heard a piece of news.”
“Bad, I suppose.”
She laughed.
“Well,” she answered, “I suppose we shall survive it. Jem has got his commission, in a Goorkha regiment.”
“Goorkha regiment? Nonsense!”
“Aunt Anna has just told me so. She is very pleased, and seems prepared for the—best.”
“That is the custom of fools, to be prepared for the best—only.”
The Rector gave a despairing shrug of the shoulders. He was a man who allowed himself, after the manner of the ancients with whom he lived mentally, a few gestures. He smoked a very expressive cigarette. He was smoking one at this moment, and threw it away half consumed. This divine was possessed of a rooted conviction that the Almighty made a great mistake whenever He invested temporal power in a woman, whom he was ungallantly inclined to classify under a celebrated dictum of Mr. Carlyle's respecting the population of these happy Isles, who, truth to tell, care not one jot what Mr. Carlyle may think of them.
The Reverend Thomas Glynde and his daughter walked all the way home without exchanging another word. In the Rectory drawing-room they found Mrs. Glynde, small, nervous, worried. She had evidently devoted considerable thought and attention to the preservation of the hot buttered toast. Poor humble little soul, she was quite content to minister to the bodily requirements of her spouse, having long been convinced of the inferiority of her own sex in every respect except a certain limited knowledge of housekeeping matters.
She was vaguely conscious of inferiority to Dora from a literary point of view, and talked with abject humility to her own daughter of all things appertaining to books. But on all other points connected with the child of her old age this quiet little woman was absolute mistress. Years before the Rector had made a great mistake; he had, as the plain-spoken East Burgen doctor put it, made an ass of himself on the matter of a childish illness, thereby imperilling Dora's half-fledged little life. Mrs. Glynde had then, like a diminutive tigress, stood up boldly before her awesome lord and master, saying such things to him that the remembrance of them made her catch her breath even now. From that time forth the Rector was allowed to hold forth on symptoms to his heart's content, to take down from his library shelf a stout misguided book of medical short-cuts to the grave, but nothing more.
He never referred to the asinine business, and in the course of years he forgave the doctor (having in view the fact that that practitioner had been carried away by a right and proper sense of the importance of the case), but he tacitly acknowledged that in the practice of home-administered medical assistance, his knowledge was second to a mother's instinct.
“It appears,” he said sharply, while he was stirring his tea, “that Jem Agar has got his commission in a Goorkha regiment.”
Now Mrs. Glynde knew more about the organisation of the heavenly bands than of the administration of the Indian army. She did not know whether to rejoice or lament, and having been sharply pulled up—any time during the last twenty years—for doing one or the other in the wrong place, she meekly took soundings.
“What is that, dear?” she inquired.
“The Goorkhas are native Indian soldiers,” explained the Rector. “Very good fellows, no doubt. They get all the hard knocks in small frontier wars and none of the half-pence. What the woman can have been thinking of, I don't know.”
Mrs. Glynde was anxiously glancing towards Dora, who was nicking the nose of a sportive kitten with the tassel of the tea-cosy.
“And will he go to India?” she asked, with laudable mental grovellings in the mire of her own ignorance.
“Course he will.”
“And,” added Dora cheerfully, “he will come home covered with glory and medals, with a weakness for strong pickles and hot language—I mean hot pickles and strong language.”
“But,” said Mrs. Glynde rather breathlessly, “are they never stationed in England?”
“No—never,” replied her husband snappishly.
Mrs. Glynde had a pink patch on each cheek—precisely on the spot whore two such patches had appeared years ago when the doctor spoke so strongly. Those patches were maternal, and only appeared when Dora's affairs, spiritual or temporal, were concerned.
“I don't know,” put in Dora again, “but I have a sort of lurking conviction that Jem will have to wear a turban and red morocco boots.”
“But,” pursued Mrs. Glynde, with that courage which cometh with a red patch on either cheek, “I always thought these Indian regiments were meant for people who are badly off.”
The Rector gave a short laugh.
“You are not so very far wrong, my dear,” he admitted. “And no one can say that Jem is badly off. He will be very rich some day.”
The Rector assumed an air of superior discretion, to which he usually treated his women-folk when he thought fit to consider that they were touching on matters beyond their jurisdiction.
“Some more tea, please, mother,” put in Dora appropriately. “Excuse my appetite. I suppose it is the autumn air.”
There was a short silence, during which Mrs. Glynde sought to propitiate her angered spouse with sodden toast and a second brew of tea.
“I always said,” observed the Rector at last, “that your cousin was a fool.”
And in some indefinite way Mrs. Glynde felt that she was once more responsible.
Shall I forget on this side of the grave? I promise nothing; you must wait and see.
From the train arriving at East Burgen station at eight o'clock that same evening there alighted a youth who seemed suddenly to have taken manhood upon his shoulders. He stood on the platform and pointed out to a porter, who called him Master James, a large Gladstone bag and a new sword-case.
Although he could have carried the luggage under one arm and the porter under the other, he carefully refrained from offering to convey anything except his own walking-stick. Such is the force of education. This boy had been brought up to expect service. He was to be served all his life, and so the sword-case had to be left to the porter whom he envied.
During the journey down—between the farthest-removed stations—the sword had flashed more than once in the dim light of the carriage lamp. Ah! those first swords! Not Toledo nor Damascus can produce their equal in after years.
The porter, honest father of two private soldiers of the line himself, saw it all—at once. He carried the sword-case with an exaggerated reverence and forbore from remark just then. Afterwards, beneath the station-lamp, he looked at the shilling—the first of its kind from that quarter—with a pathetic, meaning smile.
It was Saturday night. The streets of East Burgen were rather crowded, and Jem Agar—with elbows well in and the whip at the regulation angle across old Lasher's face, who could not help squinting at the pendant thong—shouted to the country-folk in a new voice of mighty deep register.
He carried his boyish head stiffly, and had for ever discarded a turn-down collar. At first he kept old Lasher at a respectful distance, asking in a somewhat curt and business-like manner after the stables. Then gradually, as they bowled along the country road in the familiar hush of an April evening, he thawed, and proceeded to vouchsafe to that steady coachman a series of very interesting details of military matters in general and the Indian army in particular.
“Well, I'm sure, Mas—sir,” opined Mr. Lasher at length; “if there's any one as has got into his right rut, so to speak, in this world, it's you. I always said you was a born soldier.”
“Ah—then you've heard that I've got my commission?” inquired Jem airily, as if he had had many such in bygone years.
“Oh yes, sir! Miss Dora it was that told me.”
Somehow this caused a little silence.
Truth to tell, Dora had lost her rank as the most beautiful and accomplished maiden in Christendom. This situation was at that moment occupied by a young person hight Evelina Louisa Barmond, sister to Billy Barmond of the Hundred and second, a veteran fellow-soldier and comrade who had jumped five feet six at the Sandhurst sports a year before. Miss Evelina Louisa was twenty-four, five years Dora's senior, and only three years and two months older than Jem Agar himself. He had spoken to her twice, and thought about her in the intervals allowed by such weighty matters as uniform and the new sword, which, however, required almost constant consideration at that time.
“Well,” said Jem, with exaggerated nonchalance, “I am afraid I should never be fit for anything else.”
Whereat Lasher laughed and touched his hat. He made it a rule to salute a joke in that manner, either from a general respect for humour, or looking at it in the light of a mental gratuity offered by his betters.
“There's one thing you can do, Master Jem, sir—leastwise, which you can do as well as any man in the British army,” he said, with pardonable pride, “and that is sit a 'orse.”
“Thanks to you, Lasher,” Jem was kind enough to say with a flourish of his whip.
The dignity was now ebbing fast, and by the time that the clever little cob swung round the gate-post into the avenue of Stagholme, Jem and Lasher were fully re-established on the old familiar footing.
There was a bright moon overhead, and at the end of the avenue beyond the dip where the lake gleamed mysteriously, the gables and solid towers of Stagholme stood peacefully confessed.
Jem Agar was firmly convinced that England only contained one Stagholme, and perhaps he was right. Six miles from the nearest station, the great house stands self-sufficient, self-contained. The moat, now dry and cultivated, is still traceable, and requires bridging in two places. Surrounded by vast park-like meadowland, where huge trees guard against cutting wind or prying modern journalistic instinct, the house is only approached by a private road.
Inside the gates of this road there is something ancient and feudal in the very scent of the air. The tones of the big bell striking the hour over the wide portico die away over the lands that still belong to Stagholme, despite the vicissitudes through which all ancient families run.
Jem, however, whose childhood and youth had been passed amidst companions with names as good as his, had learnt long ago to keep his pride to himself. He was Jem Agar, and the family name seemed somehow to belong exclusively to his father still, although that thorough old sportsman had lain for three years and more beneath the quiet turf of the little churchyard within his own park gates.
As he pulled up at the door this was thrown open, and within its frame of light he saw the gracious form of his stepmother waiting to welcome him. Behind her, in the shadow, and amidst the decoration of staghorns, ancient pike and hanger, loomed a tall dark figure startlingly in keeping with the semi-monastic architecture of the house. This was Sister Cecilia. She was always thus—behind Mrs. Agar, with clasped hands and a vaguely approving smile, as if Mrs. Agar conferred a benefit upon suffering humanity by the mere act of existing.
A slightly bored expression came into Jem's patient eyes. It was not that he had very much in common with his stepmother, although he had an honest affection for her; but he instinctively disliked Sister Cecilia and all her works. These latter were of the class termed “good.” That is to say, this lady, the spinster daughter of a former rector in the neighbourhood, considered that the earthly livery of a marvellous black bonnet which was almost a cap, and quite hideous, justified a shameless interference in the most intimate affairs of her neighbours, rich and poor.
Under the cover of charity she committed a thousand social sins. She constituted herself mother-confessor to all who were weak enough to confide in her or seek her advice, and in soul she was the most arrant time-server who ever flattered a rich woman.
Jem distrusted her soft and “holy” ways, more especially her speech, which had the lofty condescension of the saved towards the damned in prospective. In his calmly commanding way he had, months before, forbidden Dora Glynde to kiss Sister Cecilia, because that ostentatiously virtuous person was in the habit of kissing the maids when she met them; and he maintained that this Christian practice, if very estimable theoretically, was socially an insult either to the mistress or the maid.
In view of the important changes in his own life which were about to supervene, that is to say, firstly, his departure for India, and secondly, his coming of age before he could hope to return from that land of promise, he had counted on a quiet evening with his mother. Moreover, he was vaguely conscious of the fact that a right-minded person would have carefully abstained from accepting the most pressing invitation to form a third that evening.
In view of this Jem Agar had recourse to the last refuge of the simple. He retired within himself, and, so to speak, shut the door. He had dined with these women before, and knew that the conversation would follow its usual mazy course through a forest of cross-questions upon all subjects, and notably upon those intimate matters which were essentially his own business.
Sister Cecilia, good mistaken soul that she was, tried her best. She was lively in a Sunday-school-tea style. She was by turns tender and warlike as occasion seemed to demand; but no scrap or tittle of personal information did she extract from Jem, stiffly on guard behind his high collar. Mrs. Agar was excited and failed utterly to follow the wiser footsteps of her bosom friends. She talked such arrant nonsense about India, the Goorkhas, and matters military, that more than once Jem glanced at the imperturbable servants with misgiving.
The next day was Sunday, and after morning service Jem eagerly accepted an invitation to have supper at the Rectory after evening church. Sister Cecilia was staying from Saturday till Monday, which alone was sufficient reason for this young soldier to pass his last evening in Stagholme under another than his own historic roof. With her in the house he knew that the chances of serious conversation were small; for she encouraged such topics as the possibility of sending fresh eggs packed in lime to the Goorkhas of his prospective half-company. So Jem retired within himself, and finally left England without having said many things which should have been said between stepmother and son.
At the Rectory he found a very different atmosphere—that air of cheerful intellectuality which comes from the presence of cultivated men and women.
The Rector held strong views on the rare virtue of minding one's own business, and in loyalty to such, deemed it right to refrain from mentioning his opinion as to the wisdom of selecting a native branch of the military service for the heir to Stagholme.
The supper passed pleasantly enough in the discussion of general topics all bordering on the great question they had at heart. They were like people seeking for each other in the dark around the edge of a pit—the pit being India. Dora, and Dora alone, laughed and treated matters lightly. Mrs. Glynde blundered several times, and stepping backwards over an abyss of years, called the new soldier “darling” more than once. Twice she required helping out by Dora, and on the second occasion something was said which Jem remembered afterwards with a stolid British memory.
“Jem,” said the girl, buttering a biscuit with a light hand, “you should write a diary. All great men write diaries which their friends publish afterwards.”
“I do not think,” replied Jem, with that contempt for the pen which the possession of a new sword ever justifies, “that writing a diary is much in my line.”
“Ah, you can never tell till you try. Of course it would not be published straight off. Some literary person would be hired to cross the t's and dot the i's.”
There was a little pause. Dora glanced at Jem Agar, and something made him say:
“All right. I'll try.”
“Who knows?” said the Rector, with a smile of indulgent affection. “There may be great literary capacity lying dormant in Jem. The worst of a diary is that one may come to look at it in after years, when one finds a very different story has been written from what one intended to write.”
“Oh,” said Dora, lightly skipping over the chasm of gravity, “that is Providence. We must blame Providence for these littlecontretemps. Some one must be blamed, and Providence obviously does not mind.”
Jem laughed—somewhat lamely; but still it was a laugh. Supper was despatched somehow—as last meals are. Some of us never forget the flavour of those cups of tea gulped down in the gorgeous steamer-saloon while the stewards get the hand luggage on board. It was a late meal on Sunday evening at the Rectory, and the servants soon followed their betters into the drawing-room for prayers.
Then the Rector lighted his last cigarette, and Mrs. Glynde began to show symptoms of a patch of pink in either cheek.
At last Jem rose—awkwardly—in the midst of a sally from Dora, who seemed afraid to stop speaking.
“Must be going,” he said; and he shook hands with the Rector.
Mrs. Glynde, with nervous deliberation, kissed him and squeezed his hand jerkily.
“Dora—will open the door for you,” she said, with an apprehensive glance towards her husband, who, however, showed no inclination to move from his chair.
Dora not only opened the door, but left it open, and walked with him across the lawn towards the stile. When they reached it there was a little pause. He vaulted over and she quietly followed—without his proffered assistance.
Then at last Jem spoke.
“You don't seem to care!” he said gruffly—with his new voice.
“Oh,don't!”she whispered imploringly.
And they walked on beneath the murmuring trees where the yellow moonlight stole in and out between the trunks. It was not cheerful. For when Nature joins her sadness to the sad libretto of life she usually breaks a heart or two. Fortunately for us we mostly act our tragedies in the wrong scenery—the scenery that was painted for a comedy.
“I don't understand it,” said the girl at length.
“I suppose it is in order to save money for Arthur.”
“If I don't, go,” replied Jem, “it will be a question of letting Stagholme.”
Dora knew of the ancient horror of such a necessity, handed down from one Agar to another, like a family tradition. Moreover, women seem to respect men who have some simple creed and hold to it simply. Are they not one of our creeds themselves, though by seeking for rights instead of contenting themselves with privileges, some of them try to make atheists of us?
“So,” she said nevertheless, “you are being sacrificed to Arthur!”
He answered nothing, but he had forgotten for ever Miss Evelina Louisa Barmond.
“When do you go?” asked Dora suddenly, with something in her voice which no one had ever heard before. She was startled at it herself.
He waited until the soft old church bell finished striking ten, then he answered:
“To-morrow!”
They had reached the farthest limit of the wood and stood at the park railing.
“Then—,” she paused, and seemed to collect herself as if for a leap; “then good-bye, Jem!”
He took the outstretched hand; his large grasp seemed to swallow it up.
“Good-bye!” he said.
He climbed the rail without agility, paused for a moment, and the moonlight happened to gleam on his face through the gently waving branches as he looked down at her in dumb distress.
Then he turned and walked away across the shimmering grass.
A few minutes later Dora re-entered the drawing room. Her father and mother were seated close together, closer than she had seen them for years. Mrs. Glynde was pale, with two scarlet patches.
Dora collected her belongings, preparatory to going to bed.
“Jem,” she said quietly, “is absurdly proud of his new honours. It affects his chin, which has gone up exactly one inch.”
Then she went to bed.