"I've won! Hurrah! I've won!" she shouted, breathlessly, and waved her whip at him.
Maxwell was swearing beneath his breath, in a spasm of anger and anxiety.
"Don't play the fool!" he cried, savagely, as he drew rein close to her. "You might have thrown the mare down or mixed her in with the gate, pulling her up short like that. It's a wonder you didn't come off yourself, for though you're a devil to go, you know as well as I do you're a poor horse-woman."
He was violently angry, partly at Mildred's ignorant rashness, partly because, after all, she had beaten him. She, taking her hat from his hand and fastening it on again, uttered apologies, but from the lips only; for she had never seen a man furious before, and she was keenly interested in the spectacle. Maxwell's eyes were not inscrutable now; they glittered with manifest rage. His harsh voice was still harsher, his hard jaw clinched, the muscles ofhis lean face, which was as pale as its brownness allowed it to be, stood out like cords, and the hand that grasped her reins shook. Mildred felt somewhat as she imagined a lion-tamer might feel; just the least bit alarmed, but mistress of the brute, on the whole, and enjoying the contact with anything so natural and fierce and primitive. The feeling had not had time to pall on her, when going through the gate, they were joined by two other members of the little clan of Wytham riders, and all rode back to Oxford together, through flying scuds of rain.
There is a proverbial rule against playing with fire, but it is one which, as Davison would have said, was evidently made by average people, who would in fact rather play with something else. There are others to whom fire is the only really amusing plaything; and though the by-stander may hold his breath, nine times out of ten they will come out of the game as unscathed as the professional fire-eater. This was not precisely true of Mildred, who had still a wide taste in playthings; but in the absence of anything new and exciting in her environment, she found an immense fascination in playing with the fiery elements in Maxwell Davison's nature, in amusing her imagination with visions of a free wandering life, led under a burning Oriental sky, which he constantly suggested to her. Yet dangerously alluring as these visions might appear, appealing to all the hidden nomad heart of her, her good sense was never really silenced. It told her that freedom from the shackles of civilization might become wearisome in time, besides involving heavier, more intolerable forms of bondage; although she did not perceive that Maxwell Davison's dislike to her being a slave was only a dislike to her being somebody else'sslave. He was a despot at heart and had accustomed himself to a frank despotism over women. Mildred's power over him, the uncertainty of his power over her, maddened him. But Mildred did not know what love meant. At one time she had fancied her affection for Ian might be love; now she wondered whether her strange interest in the society of a man for whom she had no affection, could be that. She did not feel towards Ian as an ordinary wife might have done, yet his feelings and interests weighed much with her. Milly, too, she must necessarily consider, but she did that in a different, an almost vengeful spirit.
One evening Ian, looking up from his work, asked her what she was smiling at so quietly to herself. And she could not tell him, because it was at a horrible practical joke suggested to her by an impish spirit within. What if she should prepare a little surprise for the returning Milly? Let her find herself planted in Araby the Blest with Maxwell Davison? Mildred chuckled, wondering to herself which would be in the biggest rage, Milly or Max; for however Tims might affirm the contrary, Mildred had a fixed impression that Milly could be in a rage.
The fire-game was hastening to its close; but before Mildred could prove herself a real mistress of the dangerous element, the sleep fell upon her.
Except a sensation of fatigue, for which it was easy to find a reason, there was no warning of the coming change. But Ian had dreams in the night and opened his eyes in the morning with a feelingof uneasiness and depression. Mildred could never sleep late without causing him anxiety, and on this morning his first glance at her filled him with a dread certainty. She was sleeping what was to her in a measure the sleep of death. He had a violent impulse to awaken her forcibly; but he feared it would be dangerous. With his arm around her and his head close to hers on the pillow, he whispered her name over and over again. The calmness of her face gradually gave way to an expression of struggle approaching convulsion, and he dared not continue. He could only await the inevitable in a misery which from its very nature could find no expression and no comforter.
Milly, unlike Mildred, did not return to the world in a rapture of satisfaction with it. The realization of the terrible robbery of life of which she had again been the victim, was in itself enough to account for a certain sadness even in her love for Ian and for her child. The hygiene of the nursery had been neglected according to her ideas, yet Baby was bonny enough to delight any mother's heart, however heavy it might be. Ian, she said, wanted feeding up and taking care of; and he submitted to the process with a gentle, melancholy smile. Just one request he made; that she would not spoil her pretty hair by screwing it up in her usual unbecoming manner. She understood, studying a certain photograph in a drawer—what drawer was safe from Milly's tidyings?—and dressed her hair as like it as she knew how, with a secret bitterness of heart.
Mildred had found a diary, methodically kept by Milly, of great use to her, and although incapable herself of keeping one regularly, she had continued it in a desultory manner, noting down whatever she thought might be useful for Milly's guidance. For whatever the feelings of the two personalities towards each other, there was a terrible closeness of union between them. Their indivisibility in the eyes of the world made their external interests inevitably one. New friends and acquaintances Mildred had noted down, with useful remarks upon them. She was not confidential on the subject of Maxwell Davison, but she gave the bare necessary information.
It was now late in the Summer Term and her bedroom chimney-piece was richly decorated with invitation cards. Among others there was an invitation to a garden-party at Lady Margaret Hall. Milly put on a fresh flowered muslin dress, apparently unworn, that she found hanging in one of the deep wall-cupboards of the old house, and a coarse burnt-straw hat, trimmed with roses and black ribbon, which became her marvellously well. All the scruples of an apostle of hygienic dress, all the uneasiness of an economist at the prospect of unpaid bills, disappeared before the pleasure of a young woman face to face with an extremely pretty reflection in a pier-glass. That glass, an oval in a light mahogany frame, of the Regency period, if not earlier, was one of Mildred's finds in the slums of St. Ebbes.
She walked across the Parks, where the CricketMatch of the season was drawing a crowd, meaning to come out by a gate below Lady Margaret Hall, the gardens and buildings of which did not then extend to the Cherwell. In their place were a few tennis-grounds and a path leading to a boat-house, shared by a score or more of persons. While she was still coming across the grass of the Parks, a man in flannels, very white in the sun, came towards her from the gate for which she was making. He must have recognized her from a long way off. He was a striking-looking man of middle age, walking with a free yet indolent stride that carried him along much faster than it appeared to do.
Milly had no idea who the stranger was, but he greeted her with: "Here you are at last, Mildred! Do you know how much behind time you are?"—he took out his watch—"Exactly thirty-five minutes. I should have given you up if I hadn't known that breaking your promise is not among your numerous vices, and unpunctuality is."
Who on earth was he? And why did he call her by her Christian name? Milly went a beautiful pink with embarrassment.
"I'm so sorry. I thought the party would have just begun," she replied.
"You don't mean to say you want to keep me kicking my heels while you go to a confounded party? I thought you knew I was off to Paris to-night, after that Firdusi manuscript, and I think of taking the Continental Express to Constantinople next week. I don't know when I shall be back. Surely, Mildred, it's not a great deal toask you to spare half an hour from a wretched party to come on the river with me before I go?" It struck Maxwell as he ended that he was falling into the whining of the Occidental lover. He was determined that he would clear the situation this afternoon; the more determined because he was conscious of a feeling odiously resembling fear which had before now held him back from plain dealing with Mildred. Afraid of a woman? It was too ridiculous.
Milly, meanwhile, felt herself on firmer ground. This must be Ian's cousin, Maxwell Davison, the Orientalist. But there was nothing nomadic in her heart to thrill to the idea of being on the Cherwell this afternoon, in London this evening, in Paris next morning, in Constantinople next week.
"Of course I'll come on the river with you," she said. "I'm sorry I'm late. I'm afraid I—I'd forgotten."
Forgotten! How simply she said it! Yet it was surely the veriest impudence of coquetry. He looked at her slowly from the hat downward, as he lounged leisurely at her side.
"War-paint, I see!" he remarked. "Armed from head to heel with all the true and tried female weapons. They're just the same all the world over—'plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,'—though no doubt you fancy they're different. Who's the frock put on for, Mildred? For the party, or—for me?"
Milly was conscious of such an extreme absence of intention so far as Maxwell was concerned, thatit would have been rude to express it. She went very pink again, and lifting forget-me-not blue eyes to his inscrutable ones, articulated slowly:
"I'm sure I don't know."
Her eyes were like a child's and a shy smile curved her pink lips adorably as she spoke. Such mere simplicity would not in itself have cast a spell over Maxwell, but it came to him as a new, surprising phase of the eternal feminine in her; and it had the additional charm that it caused that subjugated feeling resembling fear, with which Mildred could inspire him, to disappear entirely. He was once more in the proper dominant attitude of Man. He felt the courage now to make her do what he believed she wished to do in her heart; the courage, too, to punish her for the humiliation she had inflicted upon him. Six months ago he would have had nothing but a hearty contempt for the man who could beat thirty yards of gravel-path for half an hour, watch in hand, in a misery of impatience, waiting on the good pleasure of a capricious woman.
Meantime he laughed good-humoredly at Milly's answer and began to talk of neutral matters. If her tongue did not move as nimbly as usual, he flattered himself it was because she knew that the hour of her surrender was at hand.
Milly knew the boat-house well, the pleasant dimness of it on hot summer days; how the varnished boats lay side by side all down its length, and how the light canoes rested against the walls as it were on shelves. How, when the big doorswere opened on to the raft and the slowly moving river without, bright circles of sunlight, reflected from the running water, would fly in and dance on wall and roof. She stood there in the dimness, while Maxwell lifted down a large canoe and, opening one of the barred doors, took it out to the water. Mildred would have felt a half-conscious æsthetic pleasure in watching his movements, superficially indolent but instinct with strength. Milly had not the same æsthetic sensibilities, and she was still disagreeably embarrassed at finding herself on such a familiar footing with a man whom she had never seen before. Then, although she followed Aunt Beatrice's golden rule of never allowing a question of feminine dress to interfere with masculine plans, she could not but feel anxious as to the fate of her fresh muslin and ribbons packed into a canoe. Maxwell, however, had learned canoeing years ago on the Canadian lakes, and did not splash. His lean, muscular brown arms and supple wrists took the canoe rapidly through the water, with little apparent effort.
It was the prime of June and the winding willow-shaded Cherwell was in its beauty. White water-lilies were only just beginning to open silver buds, floating serenely on their broad green and red pads; but prodigal masses of wild roses, delicately rich in scent and various in color, overhung the river in brave arching bowers or starred bushes and hedgerows so closely that the green briers were hardly visible. Beds of the large blue water forget-me-not floated beside the banks, and abovethem creamy meadow-sweet lifted its tall plumes among the reeds and grasses. Small water-rats swam busily from bank to bank or played on the roots of the willows, and bright wings of birds and insects fluttered and skimmed over the shining stream.
The Cherwell, though not then the crowded waterway it has since become, was usually popular with boaters on such an afternoon. But there must have been strong counter-attractions elsewhere, for Milly and Davison passed only one, a party of children working very independent oars, on their way to the little gray house above the ferry, where an old Frenchman dispensed tea in arbors.
There was a kind of hypnotic charm in the gliding motion of the canoe and the water running by. Milly was further dazed by Maxwell's talk. It was full of mysterious references and couched in the masterful tone of a person who had rights over her—a tone which before he had been more willing than able to adopt; but now the bit was between his teeth. Perhaps absorbed in his own intent, he hardly noticed how little she answered; but he did notice every point of her beauty as she leaned back on the cushions in the light shade of her parasol, from the soft brightness of her hair to the glimpse of delicate white skin which showed through the open-work stocking on her slender foot.
When they were in the straight watery avenue between green willow walls, which leads up to the ferry, he slackened the pace.
"And what are you going to do next week?" he asked, as one of a series of ironical questions.
"A great deal; much more than I care to do. I'm going up to town to see the new Savoy opera, and I'm going to a dance, and to several garden-parties, and to dine with the Master of Durham."
"Quite enough for some people; but not for you, Mildred. Think of it—year after year, always the same old run. October Term, Lent Term, Summer Term! A little change in Vacations, say a month abroad, when you can afford it. You aren't meant for it, you know you're not, any more than a swallow's meant for the little hopping, pecketing life of a London sparrow."
"Indeed, I don't see the likeness either way. I'm quite happy as I am."
He smiled mockingly.
"Quite happy! As it's very proper you should be, of course. Come, Mildred, no humbug! Think how you'd feel if you knew that instead of going to all those idiotic parties next week you were going to Constantinople."
"Isn't it dreadfully hot at this time of year?"
"I like it hot. But at any rate one can always find some cool place in the hottest weather. How would you like to go in a caravan from Cairo to Damascus next autumn?"
"I dare say it would be delightful, if the country one passed through were not too wild and dangerous. But Ian would never be able to leave his work for an expedition like that."
Maxwell smiled grimly.
"I'd no idea you'd want him. I shouldn't. Do be serious. If you fancy I'm the sort of man you can go on playing with forever, you're most confoundedly mistaken."
Milly was both offended and alarmed. Was this strange man mad? And she alone with him on the river!
"I don't know what you mean," she said, coldly.
"Don't you?" he returned, and he still wore his ironic smile—"Well, I know what you mean all the time. You say I only know Oriental women, but, by Allah, there's not a pin to choose between the lot of you, except that there's less humbug about them, and over here you're a set of trained, accomplished hypocrites!"
Indignation overcame fear in Milly's bosom.
"We are nothing of the kind," she said. "How can you talk such nonsense?"
"Nonsense? I suppose being a woman you can't really be logical, although you generally pretend to be so. Why have you pranked yourself out, spent an hour I dare say in making yourself pretty to-day? For what possible reason except to attract the eyes of a crowd of men, young fools or doddering old ones—"
Milly uttered an expression of vehement denial, but he continued:
"Or else to whet my appetite for forbidden fruit. But there's no 'or' about it, is there? Most likely you had both of those desirable objects in view."
Milly was not a coward when her indignation wasaroused. She took hold of the sides of the canoe and began raising herself.
"I don't know whether you mean to be insulting," she said; "but I don't wish to hear any more of this sort of thing. I'd rather you put me out, please."
"Sit down," he said, with authority—the canoe was rocking violently—"unless you're anxious to be drowned. I warn you I'm a very poor swimmer, and if we upset there's not a ghost of a chance of my being able to save you."
Milly was a poor swimmer, too, and felt by no means competent to save herself; neither was she anxious to be drowned. So she sat down again.
"Put me out at the ferry, please," she repeated, haughtily.
They were reaching the end of the willow avenue, just where the wire rope crosses the river. On the right was a small wooden landing-stage, and high above it the green, steep river-bank, with the gray house and the arbors on the top. The old Frenchman stood before the house in his shirt-sleeves, watching sadly for his accustomed prey, which for some inexplicable reason did not come. He took off his cap expectantly to Maxwell Davison, whom he knew; but the canoe glided swiftly under the rope and on.
"No, I sha'n't put you out, Mildred," Maxwell answered with decision, after a pause. "I'm sorry if I've offended you. I've forgotten my manners, no doubt, and must seem a bit of a brute to you. I didn't bring you here just to quarrel, or to play a practical joke upon you, and send you ona field-walk in that smart frock and shoes—" he smiled at her, and this time she was obliged to feel a certain fascination in his smile—"nor yet to go on with the game you've been playing with me all these months. You forget; I've been used to Nature for so many years that I find it hard to realize how natural the most artificial conditions of life appear to you. I'll try to remember; but you must remember, too, that the most civilized beings on earth have got to come right up against the hard facts of Nature sometimes. They've got to be stripped of their top layer and see it stripped off other people, and to recognize the fact that every one has got a core of Primitive Man or of Primitive Woman in them; a perfectly unalterable, indestructible core. And the people who refuse to recognize that aren't elevated and refined, but simply stupid and obstinate and no good."
Milly, if she would have no compromise with principles, was always quick to accept an apology. She did not follow the line of Maxwell's argument, but she remembered it was noted in a certain deplorably irregular Diary, that he had lived for many years in the East and was quite Orientalized in many of his ways and ideas. With gentle dignity she signified that in her opinion civilized European manners and views were to be commended in opposition to barbarous and Oriental ones. Maxwell, his face bent towards the turning paddle, hardly heard what she was saying. He was paddling fast and considering many things.
They came to where the river ran under a narrowgrass field, rising in a steep bank and shut off from the world by a tall hedge and a row of elms, that threw long shadows down the grass and were reflected in the water. A path led through it, but it was little frequented. On the other side was a wide, green meadow, where the long grass was ripening under rose-blossoming hedges, and far beyond was the blueness of distant hills and woods. Maxwell ran the bow of the canoe into a thick bed of forget-me-nots, growing not far from the bank. He laid the dripping paddle aside, and, resting his elbows on his knees, held his head in his hands for a minute or more. When he turned his face towards her it was charged with passion, but most of all with a grave masterfulness. He had been sitting on a low seat, but now he kneeled so as to come nearer to her, and, stretching out his long arms, laid a hand, brown, long-fingered, smooth, on her two slight, gray-gloved ones.
"Mildred," he said, and his voice seemed to have lost its harshness, "I've brought you here to make you decide what you are going to do with me and with yourself. I want you—you know I want you, but I don't come begging for you as an alms. I say, just compare the life, the free, glorious life I can give you, and the wretched, petty round of existence here. Come with me, won't you? Don't be afraid I shall treat you like a slave; I follow Nature, and Nature made you a queen. Come with me to-night, come to Paris, to Constantinople, to all the East! Never mind about love yet, we won't talk about that, for I don'treally flatter myself you love me; I'm only sure you don't love Ian—"
Milly had listened to him so far, drawing herself back to the farthest end of the canoe, half petrified with amazement, half dominated by his powerful personality. At these words her pallor gave way to a scarlet flush.
"How dare you!" she cried, in a voice tremulous with indignation. "How dare you talk to me like this? How dare you name my husband? You brought me out here on purpose to say such things to me? Oh, it's abominable, it's disgraceful!"
There was no room for doubt as to the sincerity of her indignation. Maxwell drew back and his face changed. There were patches of dull red on his cheeks, almost as though he had been struck, and his narrow eyes glittered. Looking at him, Milly felt physical fear; she thought once more of insanity. There was a silence; then she spoke again.
"Put me on to the bank here, please. I'll walk back."
"I shall let you go when I choose," returned he, in a grating voice. "I have something to say to you first."
He paused and his frown darkened upon her. "You asked me how I 'dared.' Dare! Do you take me for a dog, to be chained up and tantalized with nice bits, and hardly allowed to whine for them? I say, how dare you entice me with your beauty—it's decked out now for me—entice mewith all your beguiling ways, your pretence of longing to go away and to live the free life in the East as I live it? Now, when you've made me want you—what else have you been aiming at? You pretend to be surprised, you pretend even to yourself, to be dreadfully shocked. What damned humbug! With us only the dancing-girls venture to play such tricks as you do, and they daren't go too far, because the men are men and wear knives. But here you proper women, with your weakness unnaturally protected, you go about pretending you don't know there's such a thing in the world as desire—oh, of course not!—and all the while you're deliberately exciting it and playing upon it."
Mildred had been right in saying that the gentle Milly could be in a rage; though it was a thing that had happened to her only once or twice before since her childhood. It happened now. Anger, burning anger, extinguished the fear that had held her silent while he was speaking.
"It's false!" she cried, with burning face and blazing eyes. "It's disgraceful of you to say such things—it's degrading for me to have to hear them. I will get away from you, if I have to jump into the river."
She started forward, but Maxwell, with his tall, lithe body and long arms, had a great reach. He leaned forward and his iron hands were upon her shoulders, forcing her back.
"Don't be a fool," he said, still fierce in eye and voice.
Her lips trembled with fury so that she could hardly speak.
"Do you consider yourself a gentleman?"
He laughed scornfully.
"I don't consider the question at all. I am a man; you are a woman, and you have presumed to make a plaything of me. You thought you could do it with impunity because we are civilized, because you are a lady; for bar-maids and servant-girls do get their throats cut sometimes still. Don't be frightened, I'm not going to kill you, but I mean to make you understand for once that these privileges of weakness are humbug, that they're not in nature. I mean to teach you that a man is a better animal—"
He suddenly withdrew his hands from her with a sharp exclamation. Milly's teeth were pearly white and rather small, but they were pointed, and they had met in the flesh of the right hand which rested so firmly on her shoulder. He fell back and put his hand to his mouth. A boat-hook lay within her reach, and her end of the canoe had drifted near enough to the river-bank for her to be able to catch hold with the hook and to pull it farther in. Braced to the uttermost by rage and fear, she bounded to her feet without upsetting the canoe. It lurched violently, but righted itself, swinging out once more into the stream. Maxwell looked up and saw her standing on the river-bank above him. She did not stay to parley, but with lifted skirt hurried up the steep meadow, through the sun-flecked shadows of the elm-trees, towards the path. When she was half-way up a harsh, sardonic laugh sounded behind her, and instinctively she looked back. Maxwell held up his wounded hand:
"Primitive woman at last, Mildred!" he shouted. "Don't apologize, I sha'n't."
Ian only came home just in time to scramble into his evening dress-suit for a dinner at the Fletchers'. He needed not to fear delay either from that shirt-button at the back, refractory or on the last thread, or from any other and more insidious trap for the hurrying male. Milly looked after him in a way which, if the makers of traditions concerning wives were not up to their necks in falsehood, must have inspired devotion in the heart of any husband alive. She had already observed that he had been allowed to lose most of the pocket-handkerchiefs she had marked for him in linen thread. That trifles such as this should cause bitterness will seem as absurd to sensible persons as it would to be told that our lives are made up of mere to-morrows—if Shakespeare had not happened to put that in his own memorable way. For it takes a vast deal of imagination to embrace the ordinary facts of life and human nature. But even the most sensible will understand that it was annoying for Milly regularly to find her own and the family purse reduced to a state that demanded rigid economy. The Invader, stirring in that limbo where she lay, might have answered that rigid economy was Milly's forte and real delight, andthat it was well she should have nothing to spend in ridiculously disguising the fair body they were condemned to share. Mildred certainly left behind her social advantages which both Ian and Milly enjoyed without exactly realizing their source, while her bric-à-brac purchases, from an eighteenth-century print to a Chinese ivory, were always sure to be rising investments. But all such minor miseries as her invasion might multiply for Milly, were forgotten in the horror of the abyss that had now opened under her feet. For long after that second return of hers, on the night of the thunderstorm, a shadow, a dreadful haunting thought, had hovered in the back of her mind. Gradually it had faded with the fading of a memory; but to-night the colors of that memory revived, the thought startled into a more vivid existence.
In the press and hurry of life, not less in Oxford than in other modern towns, the Stewarts and Fletchers did not meet so often and intimately as to make inevitable the discovery of Mildred Stewart's dual personality by her cousins. They said she had developed moods; but with the conservatism of relations, saw nothing in her that they had not seen in her nursery days.
Ian and Milly walked home from dinner, according to Oxford custom, but a Durham man walked with them, talking over a College question with Ian, and they did not find themselves alone until they were within the wainscoted walls of the old house. Milly had looked so pale all the evening that Ian expectedher to go to bed at once; but she followed him into the study, where the lamp was shedding its circle of light on the heaped books and papers of his writing-table. Making some perfunctory remarks which she barely answered, he sat down to work at an address which he was to deliver at the meeting of a learned society in London.
Milly threw off her white shawl and seated herself on the old, high-backed sofa. Her dress was of some gauzy material of indeterminate tone, interwoven with gold tinsel, and a scarf of gauze embroidered with gold disguised what had seemed to her an over-liberal display of dazzling shoulders. Ian, absorbed in his work, hardly noticed his wife sitting in the penumbra, chin on hand, staring before her into nothingness, like some Cassandra of the hearth, who listens to the inevitable approaching footsteps of a tragic destiny. At last she said:
"I've got something awful to tell you."
Ian startled, dropped his pen and swung himself around in his pivot chair.
"What about? Tony?"—for it was to this diminutive that Mildred had reduced the flowing syllables of Antonio.
"No, your cousin, Maxwell Davison."
Now, Ian liked his cousin well enough, but by no means as well as he liked Tony.
"About Max!" he exclaimed, relieved. "What's happened to him?"
"Nothing—but oh, Ian! I—hate even to speak of such a thing—"
"Never mind. Just tell me what it is."
"I was on the river with him this afternoon, and he—he made love to me."
The lines of Ian's face suddenly hardened.
"Did he?" he returned, significantly, playing with a paper-knife. Then, after a pause: "I'm awfully sorry, Milly. I'd no idea he was such a cad."
"He—he wanted me to run away with him."
Ian's face became of an almost inhuman severity.
"I shall let Maxwell Davison know my opinion of him," he said.
"But it's worse—it's even more horrible than that. He was expecting me. I—Iof course knew nothing about it; I only knew about the garden-party at Lady Margaret. But he said I'd promised to come; he said all kinds of shocking, horrid things about my having dressed myself up for him—"
"Please don't tell me what he said, Milly," Ian interrupted, still coldly, but with a slight expression of disgust. "I'd rather you didn't. I suppose I ought to have taken better care of you, my poor little girl, but really here in Oxford one never thinks of anything so outrageous happening."
"I must tell you one thing," she resumed, almost obstinately. "He said he knew I didn't love you—thatIdidn't loveyou, my own darling husband. Some one, some one—must be responsible for his thinking that. How do I know what happens when—when I'm away. My poor Ian! Left with a creature who doesn't love you!"
Ian rose. His face was cold and hard still, butthere was a faint flush on his cheek, the mark of a frown between his black brows. He walked to a window and looked out into the moonlit garden, where the gnarled apple-trees threw weird black shadows on grass and wall, like shapes of grotesque animals, or half-hidden spectres, lurking, listening, waiting.
"We're getting on to a dangerous subject," he answered, at length. "Don't give me pain by imagining evil about—about yourself. You could never, under any aspect, be anything but innocent and loyal and all that a man could wish his wife to be."
He smoothed his brow with an effort, went up to her, and taking her soft face between his hands kissed her forehead.
"There!" he exclaimed, with a forced smile. "Don't let's talk about it any more, darling. Go to bed and forget all about it. It won't seem so bad to-morrow morning."
But Milly did not respond. When he released her head she threw it back against her own clasped hands, closing her eyes. She was ghastly pale.
"No," she moaned, "I can't bear it by myself. It's too, too awful. It's not Me; it's something that takes my place. I saw it once. It's an evil spirit. O God, what have I done that such a thing should happen to me! I've always tried to be good."
There was a clash of pity and anger in Ian's breast. Pity for Milly's case, anger on account of her whom his inmost being recognized as another,whatever his rational self might say to the matter. He sat down beside his wife and uttered soothing nothings. But she turned upon him eyes of wild despair, the more tragic because it broke through a nature fitted only for the quietest commonplaces of life. She flung herself upon him, clutching him tight, hiding her face upon him.
"What have I done?" she moaned again. "You know I always believed in God, in God's love. I wouldn't have disbelieved even if He'd taken you away from me. But now I can't believe in anything. There must be wicked spirits, but there can't be a good God if He allows them to take possession of a poor girl like me, who's never done any one any harm. O Ian, I've tried to pray, and I can't. I don't believe in anything now."
Ian was deeply perplexed. He himself believed neither in a God nor in evil spirits, and he knew not how to approach Milly's mind. At length he said, quietly:
"I should have expected you, dear, to have reasoned about this a little more. What's the use of being educated if we give way to superstition, like savages, directly something happens that we don't quite understand? Some day an eclipse of conscious personality, like yours, will come to be understood as well as an eclipse of the moon. Don't let's make it worse by conjuring up superstitious terrors."
"At first I thought it was like that—an eclipse of memory. But now I feel more and more it's a different person that's here, it's not I. To-nightCousin David said that sometimes when he met me he expected to find when he got home that his Lady Hammerton had walked away out of the frame. And, Ian, I looked up at that portrait, and suddenly I was reminded of—that fearful night when I came back and saw—something. I am descended from that woman, and you know how wicked she was."
Again the strange irritation stirred in the midst of Ian's pity.
"Wicked, darling! That's an absurd word to use."
"She left her husband. And it's awful that I, who can't understand how any woman could be so wicked as to do that, should be so terribly like her. I feel as though it had something to do with this appalling thing happening to me. Perhaps her sins are being visited on me." She held the lapels of his coat and looked tenderly, yearningly, in his face. "And I could bear it better if—But oh, my Ian! I can't bear to think of you left with something wicked, with some one who doesn't love you, who deceives you, and—"
"Milly," he broke in, "I won't have you say things like that. They are absolutely untrue, and I won't have them said."
There was a note of sternness in his voice that Milly had never heard before, and she saw a hard look come into his averted face which was new to her. When she spoke it was in a gasp.
"You love her? You love that wicked, bad woman so much you won't let me tell you what she is?"
He drew himself away from her with a gesture, and in a minute answered with cold deliberation:
"I cannot cease to love my own wife because—because she's not always exactly the same."
They sat silent beside each other. At length Milly rose from the sofa. The tinselled scarf, that other woman's delicate finery, had slipped from the white beauty of her shoulders. She drew it around her again slowly, and slowly with bowed head left the room.
Between noon and one o'clock on a bright June morning there is no place in the world quite so full of sunshine and summer as the quadrangle of an Oxford College. Not Age but Youth of centuries smiles from gray walls and aery pinnacles upon the joyous children of To-day. Youth, in a bright-haired, black-winged-butterfly swarm, streams out of every dark doorway, from the austere shade of study, to disport itself, two by two, or in larger eddying groups, upon the worn gravel, even venturously flits across the sacred green of the turf. There is an effervescence of life in the clear air, and the sun-steeped walls of stone are resonant with the cheerful noise of young voices. Here and there men already in flannels pass towards the gate; Dons draped in the black folds of the stately gown, stand chatting with their books under their arms; and since the season of festivity has begun, scouts hurry cautiously to and fro from buttery and kitchen, bearing brimming silver cups crowned with blue borage and floating straws, or trays of decorated viands. The scouts are grave and careworn, but from every one else a kind of physical joy and contentment seems to breathe as perfume breathesfrom blossoms and even leaves, in the good season of the year.
Ian Stewart did not quite resist this atmosphere of physical contentment. He stood in the sunshine exchanging a few words with passing pupils; yet at the back of his mind there was a deep distress. He had been brought up in the moral refinement, the honorable strictness of principle with regard to moral law, common to his academic class, and, besides, he had an innate delicacy and sensibility of feeling. If his intelligence perceived that there are qualities, individualities which claim exemption from ordinary rules, he had no desire to claim any such exemption for himself. Yet he found himself occupying the position of a man torn on the rack between a jealous wife for whom he has affection and esteem, and a mistress who compels his love. Only here was not alone a struggle but a mystery, and the knot admitted of no severance.
He looked around upon his pupils, upon the distant figures of his fellow Dons, robed in the same garb, seemingly living the same life as himself. Where was fact, where was reality? In yonder phantasmagoric procession of Oxford life, forever repeating itself, or in this strange tragi-comedy of souls, one in two and two in one, passing behind the thick walls of that old house in the street nearby? There he stood among the rest, part and parcel apparently of an existence as ordinary, as peaceful, as monotonous as the Victorian era could produce. Yet if he were to tell any one within sight the plain truth concerning his life, it would be regarded as a fairy tale, the fantastic invention of an overwrought brain.
There is something in college life which fosters a reticence that is almost secretiveness; and this becomes a code, a religion; yet Stewart found himself seized with an intense longing to confide in someone. And at that moment, from under the wide archway leading into the quadrangle, appeared the Master of Durham. The Master was in cap and gown, and carried some large papers under his arm; he walked slowly, as he had taken to walking of late, his odd, trotting gait transformed almost to a hobble. Meditative, he looked straight before him with unseeing eyes. No artist was ever able to seize the inner and the outer verity of that round, pink baby face, filled with the power of a weighty personality and a penetrating mind. Stewart marked him in that minute, sagacity and benevolence, as it were, silently radiating from him; and the younger man in his need turned to the wise Master, the paternal friend whose counsels had done so much to set his young feet in the way of success.
When Stewart found himself in the Master's study, the study so familiar to his youth, with its windows looking out on the garden quadrangle, and saw the great little man himself seated before him at the writing-table, he marvelled at the temerity that had brought him there to speak on such a theme. But the cup was poured and had to be drunk. The Master left him to begin. He sat with a plump hand on each plump knee, and regarded his old pupil with silent benevolence.
"I've come to see you, Master," said Stewart, "because I feel very bewildered, very helpless, in a matter which touches my wife even more than myself. You were so kind about my marriage, and you have always been good to her as well as to me."
"Miss Flaxman was a nice young lady," squeaked the Master. "I knew you married wisely."
"Something happened shortly before we were engaged which she—we didn't quite grasp—its importance, I mean," Stewart began. He then spoke of those periodical lapses of memory in his wife which he had come to see involved real and extraordinary variations in her character—a change, in fact, of personality. He mentioned their futile visits to Norton-Smith, the brain and nerve specialist. The Master heard him without either moving or interrupting. When he had done there was a silence. At length the Master said:
"I suspect we don't understand women."
"Perhaps not. But, Master, haven't you yourself noticed a great difference in my wife at various times?"
"Not more than I feel in myself—not of another character, that is. We live among men; we live among men who, generally speaking, know nothing about women. That's why women appear to us strange and unnatural. Your wife's quite normal, really."
"But the memory alone, surely—"
"That's made you nervous; but I've known cases not far different. You remember meetingSir Henry Milwood here? When I knew him he was a young clergyman. He had an illness; forgot all about his clerical life, and went sheep-farming in Australia, where he made his fortune."
"But his personality?" asked Stewart, with anxiety. "Was that changed?"
"Certainly. A colonial sheep-farmer is a different person from a young Don just in orders."
"I don't mean that, Master. I mean did he rise from his bed with ideas, with feelings quite opposite to those which had possessed him when he lay down upon it? Did he ever have a return of the clerical phase, during which he forgot how he became a sheep-farmer and wished to take up his old work again?"
"No—no."
There was a pause. The Master played with his gold spectacles and sucked his under lip. Then:
"Take a good holiday, Stewart," he said.
Stewart's clear-cut face hardened and flushed momentarily. "These are not fancies of my own, Master. Cases occur in which two, sometimes more than two, entirely different personalities alternate in the same individual. The spontaneous cases are rare, of course, but hypnotism seems to develop them pretty freely. The facts are there, but English scientists prefer to say nothing about them."
The Master rose and trotted restlessly about.
"They're quite right," he returned, at length. "Such ideas can lead to nothing but mischief."
"Surely that is the orthodox theologian's usual objection to scientific fact."
The Master lifted his head and looked at his rebel disciple. For although he was an officiating clergyman, he and the orthodox theologians were at daggers drawn.
"Views, statements of this kind are not knowledge," he said, after a while, and continued moving uneasily about without looking at Stewart.
Stewart did not reply; it seemed useless to go on talking. He recognized that the Master's attitude was what his own had been before the iron of fact had entered into his flesh and spirit. Yet somehow he had hoped that his Master's large and keen perception of human things, his judicial mind, would have lifted him above the prejudices of Reason. He sat there cheerless, his college cap between his knees; and was seeking the moment to say good-bye when the Master suddenly sat down beside him. To any one looking in at the window, the two seated side by side on the hard sofa would have seemed an oddly assorted pair. Stewart's length of frame, the raven black of his hair and beard, the marble pallor of his delicate features, made the little Master look smaller, pinker, plumper than usual; but his face, radiating wisdom and affection, was more than beautiful in the eyes of his old disciple.
"I took a great interest in your marriage, Stewart," he said. "I always think of you and your wife as two very dear young friends. You must let me speak to you now as a father might—and probably wouldn't."
Stewart assented with affectionate reverence.
"You are young, but your wife is much younger.A man marries a girl many years younger than himself and has not the same feeling of responsibility towards her as he would have towards a young man of the same age. He seldom considers her youth. Yet his responsibility is much greater towards her than towards a pupil of the same age; she needs more help, she will accept more in forming her mind and character. Now you have married a young lady who is very intelligent, very pleasing; but she has a delicate nervous system, and it has been overstrained. She lets this peculiar weakness of her memory get on her nerves. You have nerves yourself, you have imagination, and you let your mind give way to hers. That's not wise; it's not right. Let her feel that these moods do not affect you; be sure that they do not. What matters mainly is that your mutual love should remain unchanged. When your wife finds that her happiness, her real happiness, is quite untouched by these changes of mood, she will leave off attributing an exaggerated importance to them. So will you, Stewart. You will see them in their right proportion; you will see the great evil and danger of giving way to imagination, of accepting perverse psychological hypotheses as guides in life. Reason and Religion are the only true guides."
The Master did not utter these sayings continuously. There were pauses which Stewart might have filled, but he did not offer to do so. The spell of his old teacher's mind and aspect was upon him. His spirit was, as it were, bowed before his Master in a kind of humility.
He walked home with a lightened heart, feeling somewhat as a devout sinner might feel to whom his confessor had given absolution. For about twenty-four hours this mood lasted. Then he confronted the fact that the beloved Master's advice had been largely, though not altogether, futile, because it had not dealt with actuality. And Ian Stewart saw himself to be moving in the plain, ordinary world of men as solitary as a ghost which vainly endeavors to make its presence and its needs recognized.
Tims had ceased to be an inhabitant of Oxford. She was studying physiology in London and luxuriating in the extraordinary cheapness of life in Cranham Chambers. Not that she had any special need of cheapness; but the spinster aunt who brought her up had, together with a comfortable competence, left her the habit of parsimony. If, however, she did not know how to enjoy her own income, she allowed many women poorer than herself to benefit by it.
She was no correspondent; and an examination, followed by the serious illness of her next-door neighbor—Mr. Fitzalan, a solitary man with a small post in the British Museum—had prevented her from visiting Oxford during Mildred's last invasion. She had imagined Milly Stewart to have been leading for two undisturbed years the busily tranquil life proper to her; adoring Ian and the baby, managing her house, and going sometimes to church and sometimes to committees, without wholly neglecting the cultivation of the mind. A letter from Milly, in which she scented trouble, made her call herself sternly to account for her long neglect of her friend.
It was now the Long Vacation, but Miss Burtwas still at Ascham and Lady Thomson was spending a week with her. She had stayed with the Stewarts in the spring, and resolutely keeping a blind eye turned towards whatever she ought to have disapproved in Mildred, had lauded her return to bodily vigor, and also to good sense, in ceasing to fuss about the health of Ian and the baby. Aunt Beatrice would have blushed to own a husband and child whose health required care. This time when she dined with the Stewarts she had found Milly reprehensibly pale and dispirited. One day shortly afterwards she came in to tea. The nurse happened to be out, and Tony, now a beautiful child of fifteen months, was sitting on the drawing-room floor.
The two women were discussing plans for raising money to build a gymnasium at Ascham, but Tony was not interested in the subject. He kept working his way along the floor to his mother, partly on an elbow and a knee, but mostly on his stomach. Arrived at his goal he would pull her skirt, indicate as well as he could a little box lying by his neglected picture-book, and grunt with much expression. A monkey lived inside the box, and Tony, whose memory was retentive, persevered in expecting to hear that monkey summoned by wild tattoos and subterranean growls until it jumped up with a bang—a splendidly terrible thing of white bristles, and scarlet snout—to dance the fandango to a lively if unmusical tune. Then Tony, be sure, would laugh until he rolled from side to side. Mummy never responded to his wishes now, but Daddy hadpleaded for the Jack-in-the-box to be spared, and sometimes when quite alone with Tony, would play the monkey-game in his inferior paternal style, pleased with such modified appreciation as the young critic might bestow upon him.
"I'm sorry Baby's so troublesome," apologized the distressed Milly, for the third time lifting Tony up and replacing him in a sitting posture, with his picture-book. "I'm trying to teach him to sit quiet, but I'm afraid he's been played with a great deal more than he should have been."
"To tell the truth, I thought so the last time I was here," replied Aunt Beatrice. "But he's still young enough to be properly trained. It's such waste of a reasonable person's time to spend it making idiotic noises at a small baby. And it's a thousand times better for the child's brain and nerves for it to be left entirely to itself."
Tony said nothing, but his face began to work in a threatening manner.
"I perfectly agree with you, Aunt Beatrice," responded Milly, eagerly.
Lady Thomson continued:
"Children should be spoken to as little as possible until they are from two to two and a half years old; then they should be taught to speak correctly."
Milly chimed in: "Yes, that's always been my own view. I do feel it so important that their very first impressions should be the right ones, that the first pictures they see should be good, that they should never be sung to out of tune and in general—"
Apparently this programme for babies did notcommend itself to Tony; certainly the first item, enjoining silent development, did not. His face had by this time worked the right number of minutes to produce a roar, and it came. Milly picked him up, but the wounds of his spirit were not to be immediately healed, and the roar continued. Finally he had to be handed over to the parlor-maid, and so came to great happiness in the kitchen, where there were no rules against infantile conversation. Milly was flushed and disturbed.
"Baby has not been properly brought up," she said. "He's been allowed his own way too much."
"Since you say so, Milly, I must confess I noticed in the spring that you seemed to be bringing the child up in an easy-going, old-fashioned way I should hardly have expected of you. I hope you will begin now to study the theory of education. A mother should take her vocation seriously. I own I don't altogether understand the taste for frivolities which you have developed since you married. It's harmless, no doubt, but it doesn't seem quite natural in a young woman who has taken a First in Greats."
Milly's hands grasped the arms of her chair convulsively. She looked at her aunt with desolation in her dark-ringed eyes. The last thing she had ever intended was to mention the mysterious and disastrous fate that had befallen her; yet she did it.
"The person you saw here last spring wasn't I. Oh, Aunt Beatrice! Can't you see the difference?"
Lady Thomson looked at her in surprise:
"What do you mean? I was speaking of my visit to you in March."
"And don't you see the difference? Oh, how hateful you must have found me!"
"Really, Mildred, I saw nothing hateful about you. On the contrary, if you want the plain truth, I greatly prefer you in a cheerful, common-sense mood, as you were then, even if your high spirits do lead you into a little too much frivolity. I think it a more wholesome, and therefore ultimately a more useful, frame of mind than this causeless depression, which leads you to take such a morbid, exaggerated view of things."
Every word pierced Milly's heart with a double pang.
"You liked her better than me?" she asked, piteously. "Yet I've always tried to be just what you wanted me to be, Aunt Beatrice, to do everything you thought right, and she—Oh, it's too awful!"
"What do you mean, Mildred?"
"I mean that the person you prefer to me as I am now, the person who was here in March, wasn't I at all."
The fine healthy carnation of Lady Thomson's cheek paled. In her calm, rapid way she at once found the explanation of Milly's unhealthy, depressed appearance and manner. Poor Mildred Stewart was insane. Beyond the paling of her cheek, however, Lady Thomson allowed no sign of shock to be visible in her.
"That's an exaggerated way of talking," she replied. "I suppose you mean your mood was different."
Milly was looking straight in front of her with haggard eyes.
"No; it simply wasn't I at all. You believe in the Bible, don't you?"
"Not in verbal inspiration, of course, but in a general way, yes," returned Lady Thomson, puzzled but guarded.
"Do you believe in the demoniacs? In possession by evil spirits?"
Milly was not looking at vacancy now. Her desperate hands clutched the arms of her chair, as she leaned forward and fixed her aunt with hollow eyes, awaiting her reply.
"Certainly not! Most certainly not! They were obviously cases of epilepsy and insanity, misinterpreted by an ignorant age."
"No—it's all true, quite literally true. Three times, and for six months or more each time, I have been possessed by a spirit that cannot be good. I know it's not. It takes my body, it takes the love of people I care for, away from me—" Milly's voice broke and she pressed her handkerchief over her face. "You all think her—But she's bad, and some day she'll do something wicked—something that will break my heart, and you'll all insist it was I who did it, and you'll believe I'm a wicked woman."
Lady Thomson looked very grave.
"Mildred, dear," she said, "try and collect yourself. It is really wicked of you to give way to such terrible fancies. Would God permit such a thing to happen to one of His children? We feel sure He would not."
Milly shook her head, but the struggle with her hysterical sobs kept her silent. Lady Thomson walked to the window, feeling more "upset" than she had ever felt in her life. The window was open, but an awning shut out the view of the street. From the window-boxes, filled with pink geraniums and white stocks, a sweet, warm scent floated into the room, and the rattle of the milkman's cart, the chink of his cans, fell upon Lady Thomson's unheeding ears. So did voices in colloquy, but she did not particularly note a female one of a thin, chirpy quality, addressing the parlor-maid with a familiarity probably little appreciated by that elegantly decorous damsel.
Milly had scarcely mastered her tears and Lady Thomson had just begun to address her in quiet, firm tones, when Tims burst unannounced into the room. Her hat was incredibly on one side, and her sallow face almost crimson with heat, but bright with pleasure at finding herself once more in Oxford.
"Hullo, old girl!" she cried, blind to the serious scene into which she was precipitated. "How are you? Now don't kiss me"—throwing herself into an attitude of violent defence against an embrace not yet offered—"I'm too hot. Carried my bag myself all the way from the station and saved the omnibus."
Lady Thomson fixed Tims with a look of more than usually cold disapproval. Milly proffered a constrained greeting.
"Anything gone wrong?" asked Tims, after aminute, peering at Milly's tear-stained eyes with her own short-sighted ones.
Milly answered with a forced self-restraint which appeared like cold deliberation.
"Aunt Beatrice thinks I'm mad because I say I'm not the same person she found in my place last March. I want you to tell her that it's not just my fancy, but that you know that sometimes a quite different person takes my place, and I'm not responsible for anything she says or does."
"Yes, that's a solemn Gospel fact, right enough," affirmed Tims.
Lady Thomson could hardly control her indignation, but she did, although she spoke sternly to Tims.
"Do I understand you to say, Miss Timson, that it's a 'solemn Gospel fact'—Gospel! Good Heavens—that Milly is possessed by a devil?"
Tims plumped down on the sofa and stared at Lady Thomson.
"Possessed by a devil? Good Lord, no! What do you mean?"
"Mildred believes herself to be possessed by an evil spirit."
Tims turned to Milly in consternation.
"Milly, old girl! Come! Poor old Milly! I never thought you were so superstitious as all that. Besides, I know more about it than you do, and I tell you straight, you mayn't be quite such a good sort when you're in your other phase, but as to there being a devil in it—well, devil's all nonsense, but if that were so, I should like to have a devil myself, and the more the merrier."
Milly turned on her a face pale with horror and indignation. Her eyes flashed and she raised a remonstrating hand.
"Hush!" she cried. "Hush! You don't know what dreadful things you're saying. I don't know exactly what this spirit is that robs me of my life; I'm only sure it's not Me and it's not good."
"Whatever may be the matter with you, Mildred," said Lady Thomson, "it can't possibly be that. I suppose you have suffered from loss of memory again and it's upset your nerves. Why will people have nerves? I should advise you to go to Norton-Smith at once."
Milly's tears were flowing again but she managed to reply:
"I've been to Dr. Norton-Smith, Aunt Beatrice. He doesn't seem to understand."
"He doesn't want to," interjected Tims, scornfully. "You don't suppose a respectable English nerve-doctor wants to know anything about psychology? They'd be interested in the case in France, or in the United States, but they wouldn't be able to keep down Milly Number Two."
"Then what use would they be to me?" asked Milly, despairingly. "I can only trust in God; and He seems to have forsaken me."
"No, no, my dear child!" cried Lady Thomson. "Don't talk in this painful way. I can't imagine what you mean, Miss Timson. It all sounds dreadfully mad."
"I can explain the whole case to you perfectly," stated Tims, with eager confidence.
"I'd better go away," gasped Milly between her convulsive sobs. "I can't bear any more. But Aunt Beatrice must know now. Tell her what you like, only—only it isn't true."
Milly fled to her bedroom; the long, low room, so perfect in its simplicity, its windows looking away into the sunshine over the pleasant boughs of orchards and garden-plots and the gray shingled roofs of old houses—the room from which on that November evening Milly's spirit had been absent while Ian, the lover whom she had never known, had watched his Beloved, the Desire of his soul and sense, returning to him from the unimagined limbo to which she had again withdrawn.