PART II

PART II

CHAPTER XI“So, Connie, you don’t want to go out with me this afternoon?” said Lady Langmoor, bustling into the Eaton Square drawing-room, where Connie sat writing a letter at a writing-table near the window, and occasionally raising her eyes to scan the street outside.“I’m afraid I can’t, Aunt Sophia. You remember, I told you, Mr. Sorell was coming to fetch me.”Lady Langmoor looked rather vague. She was busy putting on her white gloves, and inspecting the fit of her grey satin dress, as she saw it in the mirror over Connie’s head.“You mean—to see the young man who was hurt? Dreadfully sad of course, and you know him well enough to go and see him in bed? Oh, well, of course, girls do anything nowadays. It is very kind of you.”Connie laughed, but without irritation. During the week she had been staying in the Langmoors’ house, she had resigned herself to the fact that her Aunt Langmoor—as it seemed to her—was a very odd and hardly responsible creature, the motives of whose existence she did not even begin to understand. But both her aunt and Lord Langmoor had been very kind to their new-found niece. They had given a dinner-party and a tea-party in her honour; they had taken her to several crushes a night, and introduced her to a number of their own friends. And they would have moved Heaven and earth to procure her an invitation to the Court ball they themselves attended, on the day after Connie’s arrival, if only, as Lady Langmoor plaintively said—“Your poor mother had done the right thing at the right time.” By which she meant to express—without harshness towards the memory of Lady Risborough—how lamentable it was that, in addition to being christened, vaccinated and confirmed, Constance had not also been “presented” at the proper moment. However Constance probably enjoyed the evening of the Court ball more than any other in the week, since she went to the Italian Embassy after dinner to help her girl friend, the daughter of Italy’s new Prime Minister, Elisa Bardinelli, to dress for the function; and the two girls were so enchanted to see each other, and had so much Roman gossip to get through, that Donna Elisa was scandalously late, and the Ambassador almost missed the Royal Procession.But that had been the only spot of pleasure in Connie’s fortnight. Lady Langmoor was puzzled by her pale looks and her evident lack of zest for the amusements offered her. She could only suppose that her niece was tired out with the balls of Commem., and Connie accepted the excuse gratefully. In reality she cared for nothing day after day but the little notes she got from Sorell night and morning giving her news of Radowitz. Till now he had been too ill to see her. But at last the doctor had given leave for a visit, and as soon as Lady Langmoor had gone off on her usual afternoon round of concerts and teas, Connie moved to the window, and waited for Sorell.How long was it since she had first set foot in England and Oxford? Barely two months! And to Constance it seemed as if these months had been merely an unconscious preparation for this state of oppression and distress in which she found herself. Radowitz in his misery and pain—Falloden on the Cherwell path, defending himself by those passionate retorts upon her of which she could not but admit the partial justice—by these images she was perpetually haunted. Certainly she had no reason to look back with pleasure or self-approval on her Oxford experiences. In all her dealings with Falloden she had behaved with a reckless folly of which she was now quite conscious; courting risks; in love with excitement rather than with the man; and careless whither the affair might lead, so long as it gratified her own romantic curiosities as to the power of woman over the masculine mind.Then, suddenly, all this had become serious. She was like the playing child on whose hand the wasp sat down. But in this case the moral sting of what had happened was abidingly sharp and painful. The tragedy of Radowitz, together with the charm interwoven with all her few recollections of him, had developed in Connie feelings of unbearable pity and tenderness, altogether new to her. Yet she was constantly thinking of Falloden; building up her own harrowed vision of his remorse, or dreaming of the Marmion ball, and the ride in the bluebell wood,—those two meetings in which alone she had felt happiness with him, something distinct from vanity, and a challenging love of power. Now it was all over. They would probably not meet again, till he had forgotten her, and had married some one else. She was quite aware of his fixed and businesslike views for himself and his career—as to marriage, travel, Parliament and the rest; and it had often pleased her wilfulness to think of modifying or upsetting them. She had now far more abundant proof of his haughty self-centredness than their first short acquaintance on the Riviera had given her; and yet—though she tried to hide it from herself—she was far more deeply absorbed in the thought of him. When all was said, she knew that she had treated him badly. The effect of his violence and cruelty towards Radowitz had been indeed to make her shudder away from him. It seemed to her still that it would be impossible to forgive herself should she ever make friends with Douglas Falloden again. She would be an accomplice in his hardness of heart and deed. Yet she recognised guiltily her own share in that hardness. She had played with and goaded him; she had used Radowitz to punish him; her championship of the boy had become in the end mere pique with Falloden; and she was partly responsible for what had happened. She could not recall Falloden’s face and voice on their last walk without realising that she had hit him recklessly hard, and that her conduct to him had been one of the causes of the Marmion tragedy.She was haunted by these thoughts, and miserable for lack of some comforting, guiding, and—if possible—absolving voice. She missed her mother childishly day and night, and all that premature self-possession and knowledge of the world, born of her cosmopolitan training, which at Oxford had made her appear so much older than other English girls of twenty, seemed to have broken away, and left her face to face with feelings she could not check, and puzzles she wanted somebody else to judge.For instance—here was this coming visit to her aunts in Yorkshire. Their house in Scarfedale was most uncomfortably near to Flood Castle. The boundaries of the Falloden estate ran close to her aunts’ village. She would run many chances of coming across Douglas himself, however much she might try to avoid him. At the same time Lady Marcia wrote continually, describing the plans that were being made to entertain her—eager, affectionate letters, very welcome in spite of their oddity to the girl’s sore and orphaned mood. No she really couldn’t frame some clumsy excuse, and throw her aunts over. She must go, and trust to luck.And there would be Sorell and Otto to fall back upon—to take refuge with. Sorell had told her that the little rectory on the moors, whither he and Otto were bound as soon as the boy could be moved, stood somewhere about midway between her aunts’ house and Flood, on the Scarfedale side of the range of moors girdling the Flood Castle valley.It was strange perhaps that she should be counting on Sorell’s neighbourhood. If she had often petulantly felt at Oxford that he was too good, too high above her to be of much use to her, she might perhaps have felt it doubly now. For although in some undefined way, ever since the night of the Vice-Chancellor’s party, she had realised in him a deep interest in her, even a sense of responsibility for her happiness, which made him more truly her guardian than poor harassed Uncle Ewen, she knew very well that she had disappointed him, and she smarted under it. She wanted to have it out with him, and didn’t dare! As she listened indeed to his agitated report on Radowitz’s injuries, after the first verdict of the London surgeons, Connie had been conscious of a kind of moral terror. In the ordinary man of the world, such an incident as the Marmion ragging of a foreign lad, who had offended the prejudices of a few insolent and lordly Englishmen, would have merely stirred a jest. In Sorell it roused the same feelings that made him a lover of Swinburne and Shelley and the nobler Byron; a devoted reader of everything relating to the Italian Risorgimento; and sent him down every long vacation to a London riverside parish to give some hidden service to those who were in his eyes the victims of an unjust social system. For him the quality of behaviour like Falloden’s towards Otto Radowitz was beyond argument. The tyrannical temper in things great or small, and quite independent of results, represented, for him, the worst treason that man can offer to man. In this case it had ended in hideous catastrophe to an innocent and delightful being, whom he loved. But it was not thereby any the worse; the vileness of it was only made manifest for all to see.This hidden passion in him, as he talked, seemed to lay a fiery hand on Constance, she trembled under it, conscience-stricken. “Does he see the same hateful thing in me?—though he never says a word to hurt me?—though he is so gentle and so courteous?”A tall figure became visible at the end of the street. Connie shut up her writing and ran upstairs to put on her things. When she came down, she found Sorell waiting for her with a furrowed brow.“How is he?” She approached him anxiously. Sorell’s look changed and cleared. Had she put on her white dress, had she made herself a vision of freshness and charm, for the poor boy’s sake? He thought so; and his black eyes kindled.“Better in some ways. He is hanging on your coming. But these are awfully bad times for the nurses—for all of us.”“I may take him some roses?” she said humbly, pointing to a basket she had brought in with her.Sorell smiled assent and took it from her. As they were speeding in a hansom towards the Portland Place region, he gave her an account of the doctors’ latest opinion. It seemed that quite apart from the blood-poisoning, which would heal, the muscles and nerves of the hand were fatally injured. All hope of even a partial use of it was gone.“Luckily he is not a poor man. He has some hundreds a year. But he had a great scheme, after he had got his Oxford degree, of going to the new Leschetizsky school in Vienna for two years, and then of giving concerts in Warsaw and Cracow, in aid of the great Polish museum now being formed at Cracow. You know what a wild enthusiasm he has for Polish history and antiquities. He believes his country will rise again, and it was his passion—his most cherished hope—to give his life and his gift to her. Poor lad!”The tears stood in Connie’s eyes.“But he can still compose?” she urged piteously.Sorell shrugged his shoulders.“Yes, if he has the heart—and the health. I never took much account before of his delicacy. One can see, to look at him, that he’s not robust. But somehow he was always so full of life that one never thought of illness in connection with him. But I had a long talk with one of the doctors last week, who takes rather a gloomy view. A shock like this sometimes lets loose all the germs of mischief in a man’s constitution. And his mother was undoubtedly consumptive. Well, we must do our best.”He sighed. There was silence till they turned into Wimpole Street and were in sight of the nursing home. Then Connie said in a queer, strained voice: “You don’t know that it was partly I who did it.”Sorell turned upon her with a sudden change of expression. It was as though she had said something he had long expected, and now that it was said a great barrier between them had broken down. He looked at her with shining eyes from which the veil of reserve had momentarily lifted. She saw in them both tenderness and sorrow.“I don’t think you need feel that,” he said gently. Her lips trembled. She looked straight before her into the hot vista of the street.“I just played with him—with his whole future, as it’s turned out—without a thought.”Sorell knew that she was thinking of the Magdalen ball, of which he had by now heard several accounts. He guessed she meant that her provocation of Falloden had contributed to the tragedy, and that the thought tormented her. But neither of them mentioned Falloden’s name. Sorell put out his hand and grasped hers. “Otto’s only thought about you is that you gave him the happiest evening he ever spent in England,” he said with energy. “You won’t misunderstand.”Her eyes filled with tears. But there was no time to say more. The hansom drew up.[Illustration: ]Connie sat down beside Radowitz and they looked at each other in silenceThey found Radowitz lying partly dressed on the balcony of his back room, which overlooked a tiny walled patch of grass and two plane-trees. The plane-tree seems to have been left in pity to London by some departing rural deity. It alone nourishes amid the wilderness of brick; and one can imagine it as feeling a positive satisfaction, a quiet triumph, in the absence of its stronger rivals, oak and beech and ash, like some gentle human life escaped from the tyrannies of competition. These two great trees were the guardian genii of poor Otto’s afternoons. They brought him shade and coolness, even in the hottest hours of a burning June.Connie sat down beside him, and they looked at each other in silence. Sorell, after a few gay words, had left them together. Radowitz held her hand in his own left. The other was bandaged and supported on a pillow. “When she got used to the golden light filtering through the plane leaves, she saw that he was pale and shrunken, that his eyes were more living and blue than ever, and his hair more like the burnished halo of some Florentine or Siennese saint. Yet the whole aspect was of something stricken. She felt a foreboding, a terror, of which she knew she must let nothing appear.“Do you mind my staring?” he said presently, with his half-sad, half-mischievous smile. “You are so nice to look at.”She tried to laugh.“I put on my best frock. Do you like it?”“For me?” he said, wondering. “And you brought me these roses?”He lifted some out of the basket, looked at them, then let them drop listlessly on his knee. “I am afraid I don’t care for such things, as I used to do. Before—this happened, I had a language of my own, in which I could express everything—as artists or poets can. Now—I am struck dumb. There is something crying in me—that can find no voice. And when one can’t express, one begins not to feel!”She had to check the recurring tears before she could reply.“But you can still compose?”Her tone, in repeating the same words she had used to Sorell, fell into the same pleading note.He shook his head, almost with irritation.“It was out of the instrument—out of improvisation—that all my composing grew. Do you remember the tale they tell of George Sand, how when she began a novel, she made a few dots and scratches on a sheet of paper, and as she played with them they ran into words, and then into sentences—that suggested ideas—and so, in half an hour, she had sketched a plot, and was ready to go to work? So it was with me. As I played, the ideas came. I am not one of your scientific musicians who can build up everythingin vacuo. I must translate everything into sound—through my fingers. It was the same with Chopin.” He pointed to a life of Chopin that was lying open on the couch beside him.“But you will do wonders with your left hand. And your right will perhaps improve. The doctors mayn’t know,” she pleaded, catching at straws. “Dear Otto—don’t despair!”He flushed and smiled. His uninjured hand slipped back into hers again.“I like you to call me Otto. How dear that was of you! May I call you Constance?”She nodded. There was a sob in her throat that would not let her speak.“I don’t despair—now,” he said, after a moment. “I did at first. I wanted to put an end to myself. But, of course, it was Sorell who saved me. If my mother had lived, she could not have done more.”He turned away his face so that Constance should not see it. When he looked at her again, he was quite calm and smiling.“Do you know who come to see me almost every day?”“Tell me.”“Meyrick—Lord Meyrick, and Robertson. Perhaps you don’t know him. He’s a Winchester man, a splendid cricketer. It was Robertson I was struggling with when I fell. How could he know I should hurt myself? It wasn’t his fault and he gave up his ‘choice’ for the Oxford Eleven. They put him in at the last moment. But he wouldn’t play. I didn’t know till afterwards. I told him he was a great fool.”There was a pause. Then Connie said—with difficulty—“Did—did Mr. Falloden write? Has he said anything?”“Oh yes, he sent a message. After all, when you run over a dog, you send a message, don’t you?” said the lad with sudden bitterness. “And I believe he wrote a letter—after I came here. But I didn’t open it. I gave it to Sorell.”Then he raised himself on his pillows and looked keenly at Connie.“You see the others didn’t mean any harm. They were drunk, and it was a row. But Falloden wasn’t drunk—and he did mean—”“Oh, not to hurt you so?” cried Connie involuntarily.“No—but to humble and trample on me,” said the youth with vehemence, his pale cheeks flaming. “He knew quite well what he was about. I felt that when they came into my room. He is cruel—he has the temper of the torturer—in cold blood—”A shudder of rage went through him. His excitable Slav nature brought everything back to him—as ugly and as real as when it happened.“Oh, no—no!” said Constance, putting her hand over her eyes.Radowitz controlled himself at once.“I won’t say any more,” he said in a low voice, breathing deep—“I won’t say any more.” But a minute afterwards he looked up again, his brow contracting—“Only, for God’s sake, don’t marry him!”“Don’t be afraid,” said Constance. “I shall never marry him!”He looked at her piteously. “Only—if you care for him—what then? You are not to be unhappy!—you are to be the happiest person in the world. If you did care for him—I should have to see some good in him—and that would be awful. It is not because he did me an injury, you understand. The other two are my friends—they will be always my friends. But there is something in Falloden’s soul that I hate—that I would like to fight—till either he drops or I. It is the same sort of feeling I have towards those who have killed my country.”He lay frowning, his blue eyes sombrely fixed and strained.“But now”—he drew himself sharply together—“you must talk of something else, and I will be quite quiet. Tell me where you have been—what you have seen—the theatre—the opera—everything!”She did her best, seeing already the anxious face of the nurse in the window behind. And as she got up to go, she said, “I shall come again very soon. And when you go to Yorkshire, I shall see you perhaps every day.”He looked up in astonishment and delight, and she explained that at Scarfedale Manor, her aunts’ old house, she would be only two or three miles from the high moorland vicarage whither he was soon to be moved.“That will do more for me than doctors!” said Radowitz with decision. Yet almost before she had reached the window opening on the balcony, his pain, mental and physical, had clutched him again. He did not look up as she waved farewell; and Sorell hurried her away.Thenceforward she saw him almost every day, to Lady Langmoor’s astonishment. Sorell too, and his relation to Connie, puzzled her greatly. Connie assured her with smiles that she was not in love with the handsome young don, and never thought of flirting with him. “He was mother’s friend, Aunt Sophia,” she would say, as though that settled the matter entirely. But Lady Langmoor could not see that it settled it at all. Mr. Sorell could not be much over thirty—the best time of all for falling in love. And here was Connie going to pictures with him, and the British Museum, and to visit the poor fellow in the nursing home. It was true that the aunt could never detect the smallest sign of love-making between them. And Connie was always putting forward that Mr. Sorell taught her Greek. As if that kind of thing wasn’t one of the best and oldest gambits in the great game of matrimony! Lady Langmoor would have felt it her solemn duty to snub the young man had it been at all possible. But it was really not possible to snub any one possessed of such a courteous self-forgetting dignity. And he came of a good Anglo-Irish family too. Lady Langmoor had soon discovered that she knew some of his relations, and placed him socially to a T. But, of course, any notion of his marrying Connie, with her money, her rank, and her good looks, would be simply ridiculous, so ridiculous that Lady Langmoor soon ceased to think about it, accepted his visits, and began to like him on her own account.One evening towards the end of the first week in July, a hansom drew up before a house in Portman Square. Douglas Falloden emerged from it, as the door was opened by a maidservant.The house, which had been occupied at the beginning of the season by the family, was given over now to a charwoman and a couple of housemaids, the senior of whom looked a little scared at the prospect of having to wait on the magnificent gentleman who had just entered the house. In general, when Mr. Douglas came up to town in the absence of his family, he put up at his own very expensive club, and the servants in Portman Square were not troubled with him. But they, like every one else, knew that something was going wrong with the Fallodens.Falloden walked into the deserted and dust-sheeted house, while the cabman brought in his portmanteau. “Is Mr. Gregory here?” he enquired of the maid.“Yes, sir, he is in the library. Please, sir, Mrs. O’Connor wants to know if you’ll want dinner.”Falloden impatiently said “No,” and walked on down a long passage to the library, which had been built out at the back of the house. Here the blinds had been drawn up, only to reveal the dusty desolation of an unused room, in which a few chairs had been uncovered, and a table cleared. A man rose from a chair beside the table, and he and Falloden shook hands. He was a round-faced and broad-shouldered person, with one of the unreadable faces developed by the life of a prominent solicitor, in contact with all sorts of clients and many varieties of business; and Falloden’s sensitive pride had soon detected in his manner certain shades of expression to which the heir of Flood Castle was not accustomed.“I am sorry to hear Sir Arthur is not well.” Mr. Gregory spoke politely, but perhaps without that accent of grave and even tragic concern which six months earlier he would have given to the same words. “There is a great deal of heavy, and, I am afraid, disagreeable business to be done.”“My father is not fit for it,” said Falloden abruptly. “I must do the best I can.”Mr. Gregory gave a sign of assent. He drew a packet of documents from his pocket, and spreading out a letter from Sir Arthur Falloden on the table, proceeded to deal with the points in it seriatim. Falloden sat beside him, looking carefully through the various documents handed to him, asking questions occasionally, and making notes of his own. In the dusty northern light of the room, his face had a curiously purple and congested look; and his eyes were dead tired. But he showed so much shrewdness in his various remarks that the solicitor secretly admitted his capacity, reflecting indeed once or twice that, young as he was, it would have been a good thing if his father had taken him into counsel earlier. After the discussion had lasted half an hour, Falloden pushed the papers away.“I think I see. The broad facts are that my father can raise no more money, either on his securities, or on the land; his two banks are pressing him; and the Scotch mortgages must be paid. The estates, of course, will have to be sold. I am quite willing.”“So I understand. But it will take time and the bank overdrafts are urgent. Mason’s Bank declare that if their debt is not paid—or freshly secured—within a month from now, they will certainly take proceedings. I must remind you they have been exceedingly forbearing.”“And the amount?” Falloden consulted his papers.“Forty thousand. The securities on which Sir Arthur obtained it are now not worth more than eight.”The lawyer paused a moment, looked at his companion, and at last said—“There are, of course, your own expectations from Lord Dagnall. I do not know whether you and your father have considered them. But I imagine it would be possible to raise money on them.”Falloden laughed. The sound was a mixture of irritation and contempt.“Uncommonly little! The fact is my uncle—at seventy-two—is philandering with a lady-housekeeper he set up a year ago. She seems to be bent on netting him, and my father thinks she’ll do it. If she does, my uncle will probably find himself with an heir of his own. Anyway the value of my prospects is enormously less than it was. All the neighbours are perfectly aware of what is going on. Oh, I suppose he’ll leave me something—enough to keep me out of the workhouse. But there’s nothing to be got out of it now.”There was another silence. Falloden pondered the figures before him.“There are always the pictures,” he said at last, looking up.The lawyer’s face lightened.“If you and Sir Arthur will sell! But as you know they are heirlooms, and you could stop it.”“On the contrary, I am ready to agree to it,” said Falloden briefly. “But there will be a lot of legal business, won’t there?”“Certainly. But it can all be put through in time. And directly it was known that you would sell, the whole situation would be changed.”“We might save something out of the wreck?” said Falloden, looking up.The lawyer nodded gravely.“Something—certainly.”“What are they worth?” said Falloden, taking a note-book from his pocket, and looking at a list scribbled on its first page.Mr. Gregory laughed.“There is no market in the ordinary sense for such pictures as yours. There are only half a dozen millionaires in the world who could buy them—and one or two museums.” He paused a moment, looking thoughtfully at the young man before him. “There happens, however,”—he spoke slowly—“to be a buyer at this moment in London, whom it would be difficult to beat—in the matter of millions.”He mentioned the name.“Not an American? Well, send him along.” Falloden raised his eyebrows. “If my father doesn’t feel able to see him, I can tackle him. He can choose his own day and hour. All our best pictures are at Flood.”“And they include—”“Four Rembrandts,” said Falloden, looking at his list, “two Titians, two Terburgs, a Vermeer of Delft, heaps of other Dutchmen—four full-length Gainsboroughs, and three half-lengths—two full-length Reynoldses, three smaller—three Lawrences, a splendid Romney, three Hoppners, two Constables, etc. The foreign pictures were bought by my grandfather from one of the Orléans collections about 1830. The English pictures—the portraits—have all been at Flood since they were painted, and very few of them have ever been exhibited. I scribbled these few facts down before I left home. There is, of course, an elaborate catalogue.”For the first time the lawyer’s countenance as he listened showed a flash of active sympathy. He was himself a modest collector, and his house at Richmond contained a number of pretty things.“Sir Arthur will mind parting with them very much, I fear,” he said with real concern. “I wish with all my heart it had been possible to find some other way out. But we have really done our best.”Falloden nodded. He sat looking straight before him, one hand drumming on the table. The whole attitude was haughtily irresponsive. The slight note of compassion in Mr. Gregory’s tone was almost intolerable to him, and the lawyer guessed it.“Insolent cub!” he thought to himself; and thenceforward allowed himself no departure from a purely business tone. It was settled that the buyer—with legal caution, Mr. Gregory for the moment threw no further light upon him—was, if possible, to be got hold of at once, and an appointment was to be made for Flood Castle, where Falloden, or his father, would receive him.Then the solicitor departed, and Falloden was left to pace up and down the dismal room, his hands in his pockets—deep in thought.He looked back upon a fortnight of unbroken worry and distress. The news with which his father had received him on his return from Oxford had seemed to him at first incredible. But the facts on which it was based were only too substantial, and his father, broken in health and nerve, now that silence was once thrown aside, poured out upon his son a flood of revelation and confession that soon made what had happened tragically clear. It was the familiar story of wealth grasping at yet more wealth, of the man whose judgment and common sense begin to play him false, when once the intoxication of money has gone beyond a certain point. Dazzled by some first speculative successes, Sir Arthur had become before long a gambler over half the world, in Canada, the States, Egypt, Argentina. One doubtful venture supported another, and the City, no less than the gambler himself, was for a time taken in. But the downfall of a great Egyptian company, which was to have extracted untold wealth from a strip of Libyan desert, had gradually but surely brought down everything else in its train. Blow after blow fell, sometimes rapidly, sometimes tardily. Sir Arthur tried every expedient known to the financierin extremis, descending ever lower in the scale of credit and reputation; and in vain. One tragic day in June, after a long morning with the Gregory partners, Sir Arthur came home to the splendid house in Yorkshire, knowing that nothing now remained but to sell the estates, and tell Douglas that his father had ruined him. Lady Laura’s settlement was safe; and on that they must live.The days of slow realisation, after Douglas’s return, had tried both father and son severely. Sir Arthur was worn out and demoralised by long months of colossal but useless effort to retrieve what he had done. Falloden, with his own remorse, and his own catastrophe to think over, was called on to put it aside, to think for and help his father. He had no moral equipment—no trained character—equal to the task. But mercifully for them both, his pride came into play; his shrewd intelligence also, and his affection for his father—the most penetrable spot so far in his hard and splendid youth. He had done his best—a haughty, ungracious best—but still he had done it, and in the course of a few days, now that the tension of concealment was over, Sir Arthur had become almost childishly dependent upon him.A church clock struck somewhere in the distance. Falloden looked at his watch. Time to go to some restaurant and dine. With Gregory’s figures running in his head, he shrank from his Club where he would be sure to meet a host of Harrow and Oxford acquaintance, up for the Varsity match, and the latter end of the season. After dinner he would look into a music-hall, and about eleven make his way to the Tamworth House ball.He must come back, however, to Portman Square sometime to dress. Lady Tamworth had let it be known privately that the Prince and Princess were coming to her ball, and that the men were expected to appear in knee-breeches and silk stockings. He had told his valet at Flood to pack them; and he supposed that fool of a housemaid would be equal to unpacking for him, and putting out his things.“How do you do, Douglas?” said Lady Tamworth, an imposing, bejewelled figure standing at the head of the galleried staircase of Tamworth House. “Saw your father yesterday and thought him looking very seedy.”“Yes, he’s not the thing,” said Douglas. “We shall have to get him away to Marienbad, or somewhere of that kind.”Lady Tamworth looked at him closely, her eyelids fluttering just a little. Douglas noticed the flutter, and knew very well what it meant. Lady Tamworth and his father were first cousins. No doubt all their relations were busy discussing their affairs day and night; the City, he knew, was full of rumours, and certain newspapers had already scented the quarry ahead, and were beginning to make ghoulish hints and gibberings. As he passed on into the ballroom, every nerve in him was sensitive and alive. He seemed to have eyes at the back of his head, to catch everywhere the sudden attention, the looks of curiosity, sometimes of malice, that followed him through the crowd. He spoke to a great many acquaintance, to girls he had been accustomed to dance with and their mothers. The girls welcomed him just as usual; but the casual or interrupted conversation, which was all the mothers could spare him, showed him very soon how much was known or guessed, of the family disasters. He understood that he was no longer in the running for these exquisite creatures in their silks and satins. The campaigning mothers had already dropped him out of their lists. His pride recoiled in self-contempt from its own smart. But he had been accustomed to walk this world as one of its princelings, and indifference to what it might think of him was not immediately attainable.All the same, he was still handsome, distinguished, and well born. No one could overlook him in a ballroom, and few women could be quite indifferent to his approach. He danced as much as he wished, and with the prettiest girls. His eyes meanwhile were always wandering over the crowd, searching in vain for a delicate face, and a wealth of brown hair. Yet she had told him herself that Lady Langmoor was to bring her to this ball. He only wanted to see her—from a distance—not to speak to her—or be spoken to.“Douglas,” said a laughing voice in his ear—“will you dance the royal quadrille with me? Something’s happened to my partner. Mother sent me to ask you.”He turned and saw the youngest daughter of the house, Lady Alice, with whom he had always been on chaffing, cousinly terms; and as she spoke a sudden stir and hush in the room showed that the royal party had arrived, and were being received in the hall below.Falloden’s first irritable instinct was to refuse. Why should he go out of his way to make himself a show for all these eyes? Then a secret excitement—an expectation—awoke in him, and he nodded a laughing comment to Lady Alice, who just stayed to throw him a mocking compliment on his knee-breeches, and ran away. Immediately afterwards, the royal party came through the lane made for them, shaking hands with their acquaintance, and bowing right and left. As they disappeared into the room beyond, which had been reserved for them, the crowd closed up behind them. Falloden heard a voice at his elbow.“How are you? I hear you’re to be in the quadrille. You’ll have the pretty lady we saw at Oxford for a colleague.”He turned to see Mrs. Glendower, very much made-up and glittering with diamonds. Her face seemed to him to have grown harder and plainer, her smile more brazen since their Oxford meeting. But she filled up time agreeably till the quadrille was ready. She helped him to pin on the small rosette made of the Tamworth colours which marked all the dancers in the royal quadrille, and she told him that Constance Bledlow was to dance it with the Tamworths’ eldest son, Lord Bletchley.“There’s a great deal of talk about her, as perhaps you know. She’s very much admired. The Langmoors are making a great fuss about her, and people say she’ll have all their money as well as her own some day—not to speak of the old aunts in Yorkshire. I shouldn’t wonder if the Tamworths had their eye upon her. They’re not really well off.”Falloden gaily declared that he would back his cousin Mary Tamworth to get anything she wanted. Mrs. Glendower threw him a sudden, sharp look. Then she was swept into the crowd. A couple of men in brilliant uniform came by, clearing a space in the centre of the room, and Falloden saw Lady Alice beckoning.In another minute or two he and she were in their places, and what the newspapers who record these things call “a brilliant scene” was in full tide:—the Prince and Princess dancing with the master and mistress of the house, and the rest of the quadrille made up of the tallest men and handsomest women that Lady Tamworth, with a proper respect both to rank and to looks, had been able to collect.The six-foot-three Falloden and his fairylike partner were much observed, and Lady Alice bubbling over with fun and spirits, found her cousin Douglas, whom in general she disliked, far better company than usual. As for him, he was only really conscious of one face and form in the stately dance itself, or in the glittering crowd which was eagerly looking on. Constance Bledlow, in filmy white, was hisvis-à-vis. He saw her quick movement as she perceived him. Then she bowed slightly, he ceremoniously. Their hands touched at intervals, and not a few of the spectators noticed these momentary contacts with a thrill of pleasure—the splendid physique of the young man, the flowerlike grace of the girl. Once or twice, as they stood together in the centre of the “chain,” a few words would have been possible. But Constance never spoke, nor did Falloden. He had thought her very pale at first sight. But her cheek flushed with dancing; and with every minute that passed she seemed to him more lovely and more remote, like a spirit from another world, into which he could not pass.“Isn’t she pretty!—Connie Bledlow?” said Lady Alice enthusiastically. “She’s having a great success. Of course other people are much handsomer, but there’s something—”Yes, there was something!—and something which, like an exquisite fluttering bird, had just escaped from Douglas Falloden, and would now, he supposed, forever escape him.When the quadrille was over he watched her delicate whiteness disappear amid the uniforms, the jewels, and the festoons or roses hanging across the ballroom. The barbaric, overdecorated scene, with all its suggestions of a luxurious and self-confident world, where every one was rich and privileged, or hunting riches and privilege—a world without the smallest foreboding of change, the smallest doubt of its own right to exist—forced upon him by contrast the recollection of the hour he had just spent with Mr. Gregory in his father’s dusty dismantled library. He and his were, it seemed, “ruined”—as many people here already guessed. He looked at the full-length Van Dycks on the wall of the Tamworths’ ballroom, and thought, not without a grim leap of humour, that he would be acting showman and auctioneer, within a few days perhaps, to his father’s possessions of the same kind.But it was not the loss of money or power that was separating him from Constance Bledlow. He knew her well enough by now to guess that in spite of her youth and her luxurious bringing up, there was that in her which was rapidly shaping a character capable of fighting circumstance, as her heart might bid. If she loved a man she would stand by him. No, it was something known only to her and himself in all those crowded rooms. As soon as he set eyes on her, the vision of Radowitz’s bleeding hand and prostrate form had emerged in consciousness—a haunting presence, blurring the many-coloured movements of the ballroom.And yet it was not that maimed hand, either, which stood between himself and Constance. It was rather the spiritual fact behind the visible—that instinct of fierce, tyrannical cruelty which he had felt as he laid his hands on Radowitz in the Oxford dawn a month ago. He shrank from it now as he thought of it. It blackened and degraded his own image of himself. He remembered something like it years before, when he had joined in the bullying of a small boy at school—a boy who yet afterwards had become his good friend. If there is such a thing as “possession,” devilish possession, he had pleaded it on both occasions. Would it, however, have seemed of any great importance to him now, but for Constance Bledlow’s horror-struck recoil? All men of strong and vehement temperament—so his own defence might have run—are liable to such gusts of violent, even murderous feeling; and women accept it. But Constance Bledlow, influenced, no doubt, by a pale-blooded sentimentalist like Sorell, had refused to accept it.“I should be always afraid of you—of your pride and your violence—and love mustn’t be afraid. Good-bye!”He tried to scoff, but the words had burnt into his heart.

“So, Connie, you don’t want to go out with me this afternoon?” said Lady Langmoor, bustling into the Eaton Square drawing-room, where Connie sat writing a letter at a writing-table near the window, and occasionally raising her eyes to scan the street outside.

“I’m afraid I can’t, Aunt Sophia. You remember, I told you, Mr. Sorell was coming to fetch me.”

Lady Langmoor looked rather vague. She was busy putting on her white gloves, and inspecting the fit of her grey satin dress, as she saw it in the mirror over Connie’s head.

“You mean—to see the young man who was hurt? Dreadfully sad of course, and you know him well enough to go and see him in bed? Oh, well, of course, girls do anything nowadays. It is very kind of you.”

Connie laughed, but without irritation. During the week she had been staying in the Langmoors’ house, she had resigned herself to the fact that her Aunt Langmoor—as it seemed to her—was a very odd and hardly responsible creature, the motives of whose existence she did not even begin to understand. But both her aunt and Lord Langmoor had been very kind to their new-found niece. They had given a dinner-party and a tea-party in her honour; they had taken her to several crushes a night, and introduced her to a number of their own friends. And they would have moved Heaven and earth to procure her an invitation to the Court ball they themselves attended, on the day after Connie’s arrival, if only, as Lady Langmoor plaintively said—“Your poor mother had done the right thing at the right time.” By which she meant to express—without harshness towards the memory of Lady Risborough—how lamentable it was that, in addition to being christened, vaccinated and confirmed, Constance had not also been “presented” at the proper moment. However Constance probably enjoyed the evening of the Court ball more than any other in the week, since she went to the Italian Embassy after dinner to help her girl friend, the daughter of Italy’s new Prime Minister, Elisa Bardinelli, to dress for the function; and the two girls were so enchanted to see each other, and had so much Roman gossip to get through, that Donna Elisa was scandalously late, and the Ambassador almost missed the Royal Procession.

But that had been the only spot of pleasure in Connie’s fortnight. Lady Langmoor was puzzled by her pale looks and her evident lack of zest for the amusements offered her. She could only suppose that her niece was tired out with the balls of Commem., and Connie accepted the excuse gratefully. In reality she cared for nothing day after day but the little notes she got from Sorell night and morning giving her news of Radowitz. Till now he had been too ill to see her. But at last the doctor had given leave for a visit, and as soon as Lady Langmoor had gone off on her usual afternoon round of concerts and teas, Connie moved to the window, and waited for Sorell.

How long was it since she had first set foot in England and Oxford? Barely two months! And to Constance it seemed as if these months had been merely an unconscious preparation for this state of oppression and distress in which she found herself. Radowitz in his misery and pain—Falloden on the Cherwell path, defending himself by those passionate retorts upon her of which she could not but admit the partial justice—by these images she was perpetually haunted. Certainly she had no reason to look back with pleasure or self-approval on her Oxford experiences. In all her dealings with Falloden she had behaved with a reckless folly of which she was now quite conscious; courting risks; in love with excitement rather than with the man; and careless whither the affair might lead, so long as it gratified her own romantic curiosities as to the power of woman over the masculine mind.

Then, suddenly, all this had become serious. She was like the playing child on whose hand the wasp sat down. But in this case the moral sting of what had happened was abidingly sharp and painful. The tragedy of Radowitz, together with the charm interwoven with all her few recollections of him, had developed in Connie feelings of unbearable pity and tenderness, altogether new to her. Yet she was constantly thinking of Falloden; building up her own harrowed vision of his remorse, or dreaming of the Marmion ball, and the ride in the bluebell wood,—those two meetings in which alone she had felt happiness with him, something distinct from vanity, and a challenging love of power. Now it was all over. They would probably not meet again, till he had forgotten her, and had married some one else. She was quite aware of his fixed and businesslike views for himself and his career—as to marriage, travel, Parliament and the rest; and it had often pleased her wilfulness to think of modifying or upsetting them. She had now far more abundant proof of his haughty self-centredness than their first short acquaintance on the Riviera had given her; and yet—though she tried to hide it from herself—she was far more deeply absorbed in the thought of him. When all was said, she knew that she had treated him badly. The effect of his violence and cruelty towards Radowitz had been indeed to make her shudder away from him. It seemed to her still that it would be impossible to forgive herself should she ever make friends with Douglas Falloden again. She would be an accomplice in his hardness of heart and deed. Yet she recognised guiltily her own share in that hardness. She had played with and goaded him; she had used Radowitz to punish him; her championship of the boy had become in the end mere pique with Falloden; and she was partly responsible for what had happened. She could not recall Falloden’s face and voice on their last walk without realising that she had hit him recklessly hard, and that her conduct to him had been one of the causes of the Marmion tragedy.

She was haunted by these thoughts, and miserable for lack of some comforting, guiding, and—if possible—absolving voice. She missed her mother childishly day and night, and all that premature self-possession and knowledge of the world, born of her cosmopolitan training, which at Oxford had made her appear so much older than other English girls of twenty, seemed to have broken away, and left her face to face with feelings she could not check, and puzzles she wanted somebody else to judge.

For instance—here was this coming visit to her aunts in Yorkshire. Their house in Scarfedale was most uncomfortably near to Flood Castle. The boundaries of the Falloden estate ran close to her aunts’ village. She would run many chances of coming across Douglas himself, however much she might try to avoid him. At the same time Lady Marcia wrote continually, describing the plans that were being made to entertain her—eager, affectionate letters, very welcome in spite of their oddity to the girl’s sore and orphaned mood. No she really couldn’t frame some clumsy excuse, and throw her aunts over. She must go, and trust to luck.

And there would be Sorell and Otto to fall back upon—to take refuge with. Sorell had told her that the little rectory on the moors, whither he and Otto were bound as soon as the boy could be moved, stood somewhere about midway between her aunts’ house and Flood, on the Scarfedale side of the range of moors girdling the Flood Castle valley.

It was strange perhaps that she should be counting on Sorell’s neighbourhood. If she had often petulantly felt at Oxford that he was too good, too high above her to be of much use to her, she might perhaps have felt it doubly now. For although in some undefined way, ever since the night of the Vice-Chancellor’s party, she had realised in him a deep interest in her, even a sense of responsibility for her happiness, which made him more truly her guardian than poor harassed Uncle Ewen, she knew very well that she had disappointed him, and she smarted under it. She wanted to have it out with him, and didn’t dare! As she listened indeed to his agitated report on Radowitz’s injuries, after the first verdict of the London surgeons, Connie had been conscious of a kind of moral terror. In the ordinary man of the world, such an incident as the Marmion ragging of a foreign lad, who had offended the prejudices of a few insolent and lordly Englishmen, would have merely stirred a jest. In Sorell it roused the same feelings that made him a lover of Swinburne and Shelley and the nobler Byron; a devoted reader of everything relating to the Italian Risorgimento; and sent him down every long vacation to a London riverside parish to give some hidden service to those who were in his eyes the victims of an unjust social system. For him the quality of behaviour like Falloden’s towards Otto Radowitz was beyond argument. The tyrannical temper in things great or small, and quite independent of results, represented, for him, the worst treason that man can offer to man. In this case it had ended in hideous catastrophe to an innocent and delightful being, whom he loved. But it was not thereby any the worse; the vileness of it was only made manifest for all to see.

This hidden passion in him, as he talked, seemed to lay a fiery hand on Constance, she trembled under it, conscience-stricken. “Does he see the same hateful thing in me?—though he never says a word to hurt me?—though he is so gentle and so courteous?”

A tall figure became visible at the end of the street. Connie shut up her writing and ran upstairs to put on her things. When she came down, she found Sorell waiting for her with a furrowed brow.

“How is he?” She approached him anxiously. Sorell’s look changed and cleared. Had she put on her white dress, had she made herself a vision of freshness and charm, for the poor boy’s sake? He thought so; and his black eyes kindled.

“Better in some ways. He is hanging on your coming. But these are awfully bad times for the nurses—for all of us.”

“I may take him some roses?” she said humbly, pointing to a basket she had brought in with her.

Sorell smiled assent and took it from her. As they were speeding in a hansom towards the Portland Place region, he gave her an account of the doctors’ latest opinion. It seemed that quite apart from the blood-poisoning, which would heal, the muscles and nerves of the hand were fatally injured. All hope of even a partial use of it was gone.

“Luckily he is not a poor man. He has some hundreds a year. But he had a great scheme, after he had got his Oxford degree, of going to the new Leschetizsky school in Vienna for two years, and then of giving concerts in Warsaw and Cracow, in aid of the great Polish museum now being formed at Cracow. You know what a wild enthusiasm he has for Polish history and antiquities. He believes his country will rise again, and it was his passion—his most cherished hope—to give his life and his gift to her. Poor lad!”

The tears stood in Connie’s eyes.

“But he can still compose?” she urged piteously.

Sorell shrugged his shoulders.

“Yes, if he has the heart—and the health. I never took much account before of his delicacy. One can see, to look at him, that he’s not robust. But somehow he was always so full of life that one never thought of illness in connection with him. But I had a long talk with one of the doctors last week, who takes rather a gloomy view. A shock like this sometimes lets loose all the germs of mischief in a man’s constitution. And his mother was undoubtedly consumptive. Well, we must do our best.”

He sighed. There was silence till they turned into Wimpole Street and were in sight of the nursing home. Then Connie said in a queer, strained voice: “You don’t know that it was partly I who did it.”

Sorell turned upon her with a sudden change of expression. It was as though she had said something he had long expected, and now that it was said a great barrier between them had broken down. He looked at her with shining eyes from which the veil of reserve had momentarily lifted. She saw in them both tenderness and sorrow.

“I don’t think you need feel that,” he said gently. Her lips trembled. She looked straight before her into the hot vista of the street.

“I just played with him—with his whole future, as it’s turned out—without a thought.”

Sorell knew that she was thinking of the Magdalen ball, of which he had by now heard several accounts. He guessed she meant that her provocation of Falloden had contributed to the tragedy, and that the thought tormented her. But neither of them mentioned Falloden’s name. Sorell put out his hand and grasped hers. “Otto’s only thought about you is that you gave him the happiest evening he ever spent in England,” he said with energy. “You won’t misunderstand.”

Her eyes filled with tears. But there was no time to say more. The hansom drew up.

[Illustration: ]Connie sat down beside Radowitz and they looked at each other in silence

Connie sat down beside Radowitz and they looked at each other in silence

They found Radowitz lying partly dressed on the balcony of his back room, which overlooked a tiny walled patch of grass and two plane-trees. The plane-tree seems to have been left in pity to London by some departing rural deity. It alone nourishes amid the wilderness of brick; and one can imagine it as feeling a positive satisfaction, a quiet triumph, in the absence of its stronger rivals, oak and beech and ash, like some gentle human life escaped from the tyrannies of competition. These two great trees were the guardian genii of poor Otto’s afternoons. They brought him shade and coolness, even in the hottest hours of a burning June.

Connie sat down beside him, and they looked at each other in silence. Sorell, after a few gay words, had left them together. Radowitz held her hand in his own left. The other was bandaged and supported on a pillow. “When she got used to the golden light filtering through the plane leaves, she saw that he was pale and shrunken, that his eyes were more living and blue than ever, and his hair more like the burnished halo of some Florentine or Siennese saint. Yet the whole aspect was of something stricken. She felt a foreboding, a terror, of which she knew she must let nothing appear.

“Do you mind my staring?” he said presently, with his half-sad, half-mischievous smile. “You are so nice to look at.”

She tried to laugh.

“I put on my best frock. Do you like it?”

“For me?” he said, wondering. “And you brought me these roses?”

He lifted some out of the basket, looked at them, then let them drop listlessly on his knee. “I am afraid I don’t care for such things, as I used to do. Before—this happened, I had a language of my own, in which I could express everything—as artists or poets can. Now—I am struck dumb. There is something crying in me—that can find no voice. And when one can’t express, one begins not to feel!”

She had to check the recurring tears before she could reply.

“But you can still compose?”

Her tone, in repeating the same words she had used to Sorell, fell into the same pleading note.

He shook his head, almost with irritation.

“It was out of the instrument—out of improvisation—that all my composing grew. Do you remember the tale they tell of George Sand, how when she began a novel, she made a few dots and scratches on a sheet of paper, and as she played with them they ran into words, and then into sentences—that suggested ideas—and so, in half an hour, she had sketched a plot, and was ready to go to work? So it was with me. As I played, the ideas came. I am not one of your scientific musicians who can build up everythingin vacuo. I must translate everything into sound—through my fingers. It was the same with Chopin.” He pointed to a life of Chopin that was lying open on the couch beside him.

“But you will do wonders with your left hand. And your right will perhaps improve. The doctors mayn’t know,” she pleaded, catching at straws. “Dear Otto—don’t despair!”

He flushed and smiled. His uninjured hand slipped back into hers again.

“I like you to call me Otto. How dear that was of you! May I call you Constance?”

She nodded. There was a sob in her throat that would not let her speak.

“I don’t despair—now,” he said, after a moment. “I did at first. I wanted to put an end to myself. But, of course, it was Sorell who saved me. If my mother had lived, she could not have done more.”

He turned away his face so that Constance should not see it. When he looked at her again, he was quite calm and smiling.

“Do you know who come to see me almost every day?”

“Tell me.”

“Meyrick—Lord Meyrick, and Robertson. Perhaps you don’t know him. He’s a Winchester man, a splendid cricketer. It was Robertson I was struggling with when I fell. How could he know I should hurt myself? It wasn’t his fault and he gave up his ‘choice’ for the Oxford Eleven. They put him in at the last moment. But he wouldn’t play. I didn’t know till afterwards. I told him he was a great fool.”

There was a pause. Then Connie said—with difficulty—“Did—did Mr. Falloden write? Has he said anything?”

“Oh yes, he sent a message. After all, when you run over a dog, you send a message, don’t you?” said the lad with sudden bitterness. “And I believe he wrote a letter—after I came here. But I didn’t open it. I gave it to Sorell.”

Then he raised himself on his pillows and looked keenly at Connie.

“You see the others didn’t mean any harm. They were drunk, and it was a row. But Falloden wasn’t drunk—and he did mean—”

“Oh, not to hurt you so?” cried Connie involuntarily.

“No—but to humble and trample on me,” said the youth with vehemence, his pale cheeks flaming. “He knew quite well what he was about. I felt that when they came into my room. He is cruel—he has the temper of the torturer—in cold blood—”

A shudder of rage went through him. His excitable Slav nature brought everything back to him—as ugly and as real as when it happened.

“Oh, no—no!” said Constance, putting her hand over her eyes.

Radowitz controlled himself at once.

“I won’t say any more,” he said in a low voice, breathing deep—“I won’t say any more.” But a minute afterwards he looked up again, his brow contracting—“Only, for God’s sake, don’t marry him!”

“Don’t be afraid,” said Constance. “I shall never marry him!”

He looked at her piteously. “Only—if you care for him—what then? You are not to be unhappy!—you are to be the happiest person in the world. If you did care for him—I should have to see some good in him—and that would be awful. It is not because he did me an injury, you understand. The other two are my friends—they will be always my friends. But there is something in Falloden’s soul that I hate—that I would like to fight—till either he drops or I. It is the same sort of feeling I have towards those who have killed my country.”

He lay frowning, his blue eyes sombrely fixed and strained.

“But now”—he drew himself sharply together—“you must talk of something else, and I will be quite quiet. Tell me where you have been—what you have seen—the theatre—the opera—everything!”

She did her best, seeing already the anxious face of the nurse in the window behind. And as she got up to go, she said, “I shall come again very soon. And when you go to Yorkshire, I shall see you perhaps every day.”

He looked up in astonishment and delight, and she explained that at Scarfedale Manor, her aunts’ old house, she would be only two or three miles from the high moorland vicarage whither he was soon to be moved.

“That will do more for me than doctors!” said Radowitz with decision. Yet almost before she had reached the window opening on the balcony, his pain, mental and physical, had clutched him again. He did not look up as she waved farewell; and Sorell hurried her away.

Thenceforward she saw him almost every day, to Lady Langmoor’s astonishment. Sorell too, and his relation to Connie, puzzled her greatly. Connie assured her with smiles that she was not in love with the handsome young don, and never thought of flirting with him. “He was mother’s friend, Aunt Sophia,” she would say, as though that settled the matter entirely. But Lady Langmoor could not see that it settled it at all. Mr. Sorell could not be much over thirty—the best time of all for falling in love. And here was Connie going to pictures with him, and the British Museum, and to visit the poor fellow in the nursing home. It was true that the aunt could never detect the smallest sign of love-making between them. And Connie was always putting forward that Mr. Sorell taught her Greek. As if that kind of thing wasn’t one of the best and oldest gambits in the great game of matrimony! Lady Langmoor would have felt it her solemn duty to snub the young man had it been at all possible. But it was really not possible to snub any one possessed of such a courteous self-forgetting dignity. And he came of a good Anglo-Irish family too. Lady Langmoor had soon discovered that she knew some of his relations, and placed him socially to a T. But, of course, any notion of his marrying Connie, with her money, her rank, and her good looks, would be simply ridiculous, so ridiculous that Lady Langmoor soon ceased to think about it, accepted his visits, and began to like him on her own account.

One evening towards the end of the first week in July, a hansom drew up before a house in Portman Square. Douglas Falloden emerged from it, as the door was opened by a maidservant.

The house, which had been occupied at the beginning of the season by the family, was given over now to a charwoman and a couple of housemaids, the senior of whom looked a little scared at the prospect of having to wait on the magnificent gentleman who had just entered the house. In general, when Mr. Douglas came up to town in the absence of his family, he put up at his own very expensive club, and the servants in Portman Square were not troubled with him. But they, like every one else, knew that something was going wrong with the Fallodens.

Falloden walked into the deserted and dust-sheeted house, while the cabman brought in his portmanteau. “Is Mr. Gregory here?” he enquired of the maid.

“Yes, sir, he is in the library. Please, sir, Mrs. O’Connor wants to know if you’ll want dinner.”

Falloden impatiently said “No,” and walked on down a long passage to the library, which had been built out at the back of the house. Here the blinds had been drawn up, only to reveal the dusty desolation of an unused room, in which a few chairs had been uncovered, and a table cleared. A man rose from a chair beside the table, and he and Falloden shook hands. He was a round-faced and broad-shouldered person, with one of the unreadable faces developed by the life of a prominent solicitor, in contact with all sorts of clients and many varieties of business; and Falloden’s sensitive pride had soon detected in his manner certain shades of expression to which the heir of Flood Castle was not accustomed.

“I am sorry to hear Sir Arthur is not well.” Mr. Gregory spoke politely, but perhaps without that accent of grave and even tragic concern which six months earlier he would have given to the same words. “There is a great deal of heavy, and, I am afraid, disagreeable business to be done.”

“My father is not fit for it,” said Falloden abruptly. “I must do the best I can.”

Mr. Gregory gave a sign of assent. He drew a packet of documents from his pocket, and spreading out a letter from Sir Arthur Falloden on the table, proceeded to deal with the points in it seriatim. Falloden sat beside him, looking carefully through the various documents handed to him, asking questions occasionally, and making notes of his own. In the dusty northern light of the room, his face had a curiously purple and congested look; and his eyes were dead tired. But he showed so much shrewdness in his various remarks that the solicitor secretly admitted his capacity, reflecting indeed once or twice that, young as he was, it would have been a good thing if his father had taken him into counsel earlier. After the discussion had lasted half an hour, Falloden pushed the papers away.

“I think I see. The broad facts are that my father can raise no more money, either on his securities, or on the land; his two banks are pressing him; and the Scotch mortgages must be paid. The estates, of course, will have to be sold. I am quite willing.”

“So I understand. But it will take time and the bank overdrafts are urgent. Mason’s Bank declare that if their debt is not paid—or freshly secured—within a month from now, they will certainly take proceedings. I must remind you they have been exceedingly forbearing.”

“And the amount?” Falloden consulted his papers.

“Forty thousand. The securities on which Sir Arthur obtained it are now not worth more than eight.”

The lawyer paused a moment, looked at his companion, and at last said—

“There are, of course, your own expectations from Lord Dagnall. I do not know whether you and your father have considered them. But I imagine it would be possible to raise money on them.”

Falloden laughed. The sound was a mixture of irritation and contempt.

“Uncommonly little! The fact is my uncle—at seventy-two—is philandering with a lady-housekeeper he set up a year ago. She seems to be bent on netting him, and my father thinks she’ll do it. If she does, my uncle will probably find himself with an heir of his own. Anyway the value of my prospects is enormously less than it was. All the neighbours are perfectly aware of what is going on. Oh, I suppose he’ll leave me something—enough to keep me out of the workhouse. But there’s nothing to be got out of it now.”

There was another silence. Falloden pondered the figures before him.

“There are always the pictures,” he said at last, looking up.

The lawyer’s face lightened.

“If you and Sir Arthur will sell! But as you know they are heirlooms, and you could stop it.”

“On the contrary, I am ready to agree to it,” said Falloden briefly. “But there will be a lot of legal business, won’t there?”

“Certainly. But it can all be put through in time. And directly it was known that you would sell, the whole situation would be changed.”

“We might save something out of the wreck?” said Falloden, looking up.

The lawyer nodded gravely.

“Something—certainly.”

“What are they worth?” said Falloden, taking a note-book from his pocket, and looking at a list scribbled on its first page.

Mr. Gregory laughed.

“There is no market in the ordinary sense for such pictures as yours. There are only half a dozen millionaires in the world who could buy them—and one or two museums.” He paused a moment, looking thoughtfully at the young man before him. “There happens, however,”—he spoke slowly—“to be a buyer at this moment in London, whom it would be difficult to beat—in the matter of millions.”

He mentioned the name.

“Not an American? Well, send him along.” Falloden raised his eyebrows. “If my father doesn’t feel able to see him, I can tackle him. He can choose his own day and hour. All our best pictures are at Flood.”

“And they include—”

“Four Rembrandts,” said Falloden, looking at his list, “two Titians, two Terburgs, a Vermeer of Delft, heaps of other Dutchmen—four full-length Gainsboroughs, and three half-lengths—two full-length Reynoldses, three smaller—three Lawrences, a splendid Romney, three Hoppners, two Constables, etc. The foreign pictures were bought by my grandfather from one of the Orléans collections about 1830. The English pictures—the portraits—have all been at Flood since they were painted, and very few of them have ever been exhibited. I scribbled these few facts down before I left home. There is, of course, an elaborate catalogue.”

For the first time the lawyer’s countenance as he listened showed a flash of active sympathy. He was himself a modest collector, and his house at Richmond contained a number of pretty things.

“Sir Arthur will mind parting with them very much, I fear,” he said with real concern. “I wish with all my heart it had been possible to find some other way out. But we have really done our best.”

Falloden nodded. He sat looking straight before him, one hand drumming on the table. The whole attitude was haughtily irresponsive. The slight note of compassion in Mr. Gregory’s tone was almost intolerable to him, and the lawyer guessed it.

“Insolent cub!” he thought to himself; and thenceforward allowed himself no departure from a purely business tone. It was settled that the buyer—with legal caution, Mr. Gregory for the moment threw no further light upon him—was, if possible, to be got hold of at once, and an appointment was to be made for Flood Castle, where Falloden, or his father, would receive him.

Then the solicitor departed, and Falloden was left to pace up and down the dismal room, his hands in his pockets—deep in thought.

He looked back upon a fortnight of unbroken worry and distress. The news with which his father had received him on his return from Oxford had seemed to him at first incredible. But the facts on which it was based were only too substantial, and his father, broken in health and nerve, now that silence was once thrown aside, poured out upon his son a flood of revelation and confession that soon made what had happened tragically clear. It was the familiar story of wealth grasping at yet more wealth, of the man whose judgment and common sense begin to play him false, when once the intoxication of money has gone beyond a certain point. Dazzled by some first speculative successes, Sir Arthur had become before long a gambler over half the world, in Canada, the States, Egypt, Argentina. One doubtful venture supported another, and the City, no less than the gambler himself, was for a time taken in. But the downfall of a great Egyptian company, which was to have extracted untold wealth from a strip of Libyan desert, had gradually but surely brought down everything else in its train. Blow after blow fell, sometimes rapidly, sometimes tardily. Sir Arthur tried every expedient known to the financierin extremis, descending ever lower in the scale of credit and reputation; and in vain. One tragic day in June, after a long morning with the Gregory partners, Sir Arthur came home to the splendid house in Yorkshire, knowing that nothing now remained but to sell the estates, and tell Douglas that his father had ruined him. Lady Laura’s settlement was safe; and on that they must live.

The days of slow realisation, after Douglas’s return, had tried both father and son severely. Sir Arthur was worn out and demoralised by long months of colossal but useless effort to retrieve what he had done. Falloden, with his own remorse, and his own catastrophe to think over, was called on to put it aside, to think for and help his father. He had no moral equipment—no trained character—equal to the task. But mercifully for them both, his pride came into play; his shrewd intelligence also, and his affection for his father—the most penetrable spot so far in his hard and splendid youth. He had done his best—a haughty, ungracious best—but still he had done it, and in the course of a few days, now that the tension of concealment was over, Sir Arthur had become almost childishly dependent upon him.

A church clock struck somewhere in the distance. Falloden looked at his watch. Time to go to some restaurant and dine. With Gregory’s figures running in his head, he shrank from his Club where he would be sure to meet a host of Harrow and Oxford acquaintance, up for the Varsity match, and the latter end of the season. After dinner he would look into a music-hall, and about eleven make his way to the Tamworth House ball.

He must come back, however, to Portman Square sometime to dress. Lady Tamworth had let it be known privately that the Prince and Princess were coming to her ball, and that the men were expected to appear in knee-breeches and silk stockings. He had told his valet at Flood to pack them; and he supposed that fool of a housemaid would be equal to unpacking for him, and putting out his things.

“How do you do, Douglas?” said Lady Tamworth, an imposing, bejewelled figure standing at the head of the galleried staircase of Tamworth House. “Saw your father yesterday and thought him looking very seedy.”

“Yes, he’s not the thing,” said Douglas. “We shall have to get him away to Marienbad, or somewhere of that kind.”

Lady Tamworth looked at him closely, her eyelids fluttering just a little. Douglas noticed the flutter, and knew very well what it meant. Lady Tamworth and his father were first cousins. No doubt all their relations were busy discussing their affairs day and night; the City, he knew, was full of rumours, and certain newspapers had already scented the quarry ahead, and were beginning to make ghoulish hints and gibberings. As he passed on into the ballroom, every nerve in him was sensitive and alive. He seemed to have eyes at the back of his head, to catch everywhere the sudden attention, the looks of curiosity, sometimes of malice, that followed him through the crowd. He spoke to a great many acquaintance, to girls he had been accustomed to dance with and their mothers. The girls welcomed him just as usual; but the casual or interrupted conversation, which was all the mothers could spare him, showed him very soon how much was known or guessed, of the family disasters. He understood that he was no longer in the running for these exquisite creatures in their silks and satins. The campaigning mothers had already dropped him out of their lists. His pride recoiled in self-contempt from its own smart. But he had been accustomed to walk this world as one of its princelings, and indifference to what it might think of him was not immediately attainable.

All the same, he was still handsome, distinguished, and well born. No one could overlook him in a ballroom, and few women could be quite indifferent to his approach. He danced as much as he wished, and with the prettiest girls. His eyes meanwhile were always wandering over the crowd, searching in vain for a delicate face, and a wealth of brown hair. Yet she had told him herself that Lady Langmoor was to bring her to this ball. He only wanted to see her—from a distance—not to speak to her—or be spoken to.

“Douglas,” said a laughing voice in his ear—“will you dance the royal quadrille with me? Something’s happened to my partner. Mother sent me to ask you.”

He turned and saw the youngest daughter of the house, Lady Alice, with whom he had always been on chaffing, cousinly terms; and as she spoke a sudden stir and hush in the room showed that the royal party had arrived, and were being received in the hall below.

Falloden’s first irritable instinct was to refuse. Why should he go out of his way to make himself a show for all these eyes? Then a secret excitement—an expectation—awoke in him, and he nodded a laughing comment to Lady Alice, who just stayed to throw him a mocking compliment on his knee-breeches, and ran away. Immediately afterwards, the royal party came through the lane made for them, shaking hands with their acquaintance, and bowing right and left. As they disappeared into the room beyond, which had been reserved for them, the crowd closed up behind them. Falloden heard a voice at his elbow.

“How are you? I hear you’re to be in the quadrille. You’ll have the pretty lady we saw at Oxford for a colleague.”

He turned to see Mrs. Glendower, very much made-up and glittering with diamonds. Her face seemed to him to have grown harder and plainer, her smile more brazen since their Oxford meeting. But she filled up time agreeably till the quadrille was ready. She helped him to pin on the small rosette made of the Tamworth colours which marked all the dancers in the royal quadrille, and she told him that Constance Bledlow was to dance it with the Tamworths’ eldest son, Lord Bletchley.

“There’s a great deal of talk about her, as perhaps you know. She’s very much admired. The Langmoors are making a great fuss about her, and people say she’ll have all their money as well as her own some day—not to speak of the old aunts in Yorkshire. I shouldn’t wonder if the Tamworths had their eye upon her. They’re not really well off.”

Falloden gaily declared that he would back his cousin Mary Tamworth to get anything she wanted. Mrs. Glendower threw him a sudden, sharp look. Then she was swept into the crowd. A couple of men in brilliant uniform came by, clearing a space in the centre of the room, and Falloden saw Lady Alice beckoning.

In another minute or two he and she were in their places, and what the newspapers who record these things call “a brilliant scene” was in full tide:—the Prince and Princess dancing with the master and mistress of the house, and the rest of the quadrille made up of the tallest men and handsomest women that Lady Tamworth, with a proper respect both to rank and to looks, had been able to collect.

The six-foot-three Falloden and his fairylike partner were much observed, and Lady Alice bubbling over with fun and spirits, found her cousin Douglas, whom in general she disliked, far better company than usual. As for him, he was only really conscious of one face and form in the stately dance itself, or in the glittering crowd which was eagerly looking on. Constance Bledlow, in filmy white, was hisvis-à-vis. He saw her quick movement as she perceived him. Then she bowed slightly, he ceremoniously. Their hands touched at intervals, and not a few of the spectators noticed these momentary contacts with a thrill of pleasure—the splendid physique of the young man, the flowerlike grace of the girl. Once or twice, as they stood together in the centre of the “chain,” a few words would have been possible. But Constance never spoke, nor did Falloden. He had thought her very pale at first sight. But her cheek flushed with dancing; and with every minute that passed she seemed to him more lovely and more remote, like a spirit from another world, into which he could not pass.

“Isn’t she pretty!—Connie Bledlow?” said Lady Alice enthusiastically. “She’s having a great success. Of course other people are much handsomer, but there’s something—”

Yes, there was something!—and something which, like an exquisite fluttering bird, had just escaped from Douglas Falloden, and would now, he supposed, forever escape him.

When the quadrille was over he watched her delicate whiteness disappear amid the uniforms, the jewels, and the festoons or roses hanging across the ballroom. The barbaric, overdecorated scene, with all its suggestions of a luxurious and self-confident world, where every one was rich and privileged, or hunting riches and privilege—a world without the smallest foreboding of change, the smallest doubt of its own right to exist—forced upon him by contrast the recollection of the hour he had just spent with Mr. Gregory in his father’s dusty dismantled library. He and his were, it seemed, “ruined”—as many people here already guessed. He looked at the full-length Van Dycks on the wall of the Tamworths’ ballroom, and thought, not without a grim leap of humour, that he would be acting showman and auctioneer, within a few days perhaps, to his father’s possessions of the same kind.

But it was not the loss of money or power that was separating him from Constance Bledlow. He knew her well enough by now to guess that in spite of her youth and her luxurious bringing up, there was that in her which was rapidly shaping a character capable of fighting circumstance, as her heart might bid. If she loved a man she would stand by him. No, it was something known only to her and himself in all those crowded rooms. As soon as he set eyes on her, the vision of Radowitz’s bleeding hand and prostrate form had emerged in consciousness—a haunting presence, blurring the many-coloured movements of the ballroom.

And yet it was not that maimed hand, either, which stood between himself and Constance. It was rather the spiritual fact behind the visible—that instinct of fierce, tyrannical cruelty which he had felt as he laid his hands on Radowitz in the Oxford dawn a month ago. He shrank from it now as he thought of it. It blackened and degraded his own image of himself. He remembered something like it years before, when he had joined in the bullying of a small boy at school—a boy who yet afterwards had become his good friend. If there is such a thing as “possession,” devilish possession, he had pleaded it on both occasions. Would it, however, have seemed of any great importance to him now, but for Constance Bledlow’s horror-struck recoil? All men of strong and vehement temperament—so his own defence might have run—are liable to such gusts of violent, even murderous feeling; and women accept it. But Constance Bledlow, influenced, no doubt, by a pale-blooded sentimentalist like Sorell, had refused to accept it.

“I should be always afraid of you—of your pride and your violence—and love mustn’t be afraid. Good-bye!”

He tried to scoff, but the words had burnt into his heart.

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