"Oh please let me go; your hands hurt me. I can never be your wife, never, never!""Oh please let me go; your hands hurt me. I can never be your wife, never, never!"
"Oh please let me go; your hands hurt me. I can never be your wife, never, never!""Oh please let me go; your hands hurt me. I can never be your wife, never, never!"
He released her reluctantly, for his quick ear had caught the sound of a horse galloping upon the open grass beyond the thicket.
"You will answer me differently another day," he said smilingly; "meanwhile,cara mia, there are two secrets to keep—yours and mine. If the charming Lady Evelyn will not hear me, I must remember Etta Romney, a young lady of my acquaintance—ah, you know her too; and that is well for her. Let us return to the house. My lord will have much to say to me and I to him."
They went up to the Hall together in silence. Evelyn knew how much she was in his power and how idle her veiled threats had been.
She could save her father from this man—truly. But at what a price!
"Etta Romney would marry him," she said bitterly; "but I—Evelyn—God help me to be true to myself!"
Golf at Moretown is "by favor of the Lord of the Manor" played across a corner of the home park, so remote from Melbourne Hall that you have a vista of that fine old house but rarely from the trees, and nowhere at all if you be an ardent player.
Such a description could in all sincerity have been applied to either of our old friends Dr. Philips and the Rev. Harry Fillimore, the vicar of the parish. They played the game as though all their worldly hope depended upon it. The best of friends at common times, difficulty could provoke them to such violent hostilities that they did not speak a word to each other until the after-luncheon glass of port had been slowly sipped. Intimate in their knowledge each of the other, the Vicar knew exactly when to cough that the Doctor's forcible exclamations might not be overheard by the caddies. The Doctor, upon his part, sympathized very cordially with the Vicar when that worthy found himself in a bunker. "Harry, my dear boy, pray remember where you are," he would say, and to give him his due, the Vicar rarely forgot the number of strokes necessary to extract himself from one of these many vales of tears which abounded at Moretown.
Other moments, it should be observed, were those of mutual admiration.
"If you could only putt as well as you can drive, you might play Vardon," the Vicar would tell the Doctor.
To which the reply would be:
"My dear Harry, Taylor could not play a better approach than that. You'll be down to scratch if you go on improving in this way."
Needless to say, such enthusiasm demanded complete absorption in the game and tolerated no liberties. If anyone had told the Doctor of the fall of Port Arthur at the moment of his playing an approach, that man assuredly would have deserved any fate that overtook him. When the stove in the vestry set fire to the chancel roof and did five hundred pounds worth of damage to Moretown Church, no one had the courage to tell the Vicar until he had holed out on the eighteenth, green. "Words won't put the roof on again," the sexton wisely said, "and a precious lot of words you'll get from 'ee while 'ee's playin' with his ball." So the doleful news was reserved for the Club House. "I really fear I ought not to play a second round," the Vicar exclaimed when he heard it; "most vexing, I must say."
These being the circumstances of the weekly duelà outrance, it certainly was astonishing to discover the Vicar and the Doctor talking of any other subject but golf on a day of July some three weeks after Count Odin's arrival at Melbourne Hall. Strange to say, however, they discussed neither the merits of the cut nor the doubtful wisdom of running up approach; but playing their strokes with some indifference as to the attending consequences, they spoke of my lord of Melbourne and of the turn affairs at the Hall were taking. To be entirely candid, the Vicar left the main part of the talk to the Doctor; for the secret which he carried he had as yet no courage to tell to anyone.
"Most extraordinary—not the same man, sir, by twenty years. If he were a woman, I would call it neurasthenia and back my opinion for a Haskell. What do you think of a sane human being letting a lot of dirty gypsies have the free run of the Hall; in and out like rabbits in a warren—drinking his best wines and riding his horses, and lots more besides that the servants hint at but won't talk about? Why, they tell me that he's up half the night with the scum sometimes, as wild as the rest of them when they fiddle and caper in the Long Gallery. What's common sense to make of it? What do you make of it, leaving common sense out of the matter?"
The Vicar looked somewhat askance at the dubious compliment; nor did it encourage him to tell of the strange sights he had seen in Melbourne Park some twelve hours before this epoch-making encounter.
"I hear the men are Roumanians," he said, taking a brussie from his bag and making an atrocious shot with it. "Of course the Earl—this is miserable—the Earl was in Roumania as a young man. Perhaps he is returning some courtesy these wild fellows showed to him. You play the odd, I think."
"Odd or the like, I don't care a—that is to say, it is most extraordinary. Why, they're bandits, Harry—bandits, I tell you, and, unless Mrs. Fillimore looks out, they'll carry her off to Matlock Tor and hold her out to ransom—perhaps while we're on the links. A pretty advertisement you'd get if that came off. A Vicar's wife stolen by brigands. The Reverend Gentleman on the Q. Tee. Think of it in the evening papers! How some of them would chaff you!"
The Vicar played an approach shot and said, "This is really deplorable." He would have preferred to talk golf; but the Doctor gave him no rest, and so he said presently:
"I wonder what Lady Evelyn thinks of it all? She went by me in the car yesterday and Bates was driving her. Now, I've never seen that before.... God bless me, what a shocking stroke!"
He shook his head as the ball went skimming over the ground into the deepest and most terrible bunker on Moretown Links—the Doctor following it with that sympathetic if hypocritical gaze we turn upon an enemy's misfortunes. Impossible not to better such a miserable exhibition, he thought. Unhappy man, game of delight, the two were playing from the bunker together before a minute had passed!
"You and I would certainly do better at the mangle if this goes on," the Doctor exclaimed with honest conviction; "the third bunker I've found to-day. A man cannot be well who does that."
"Rheumatism, undoubtedly," the Vicar said slyly.
A boyish laugh greeted the thrust.
"Shall we call it curiosity? Hang the game! What does it matter? You put a bit of india-rubber into a flower-pot and think you are a better man than I am. But you're not. I'd play you any day for the poor-box. Let's talk of something else—Lady Evelyn, for instance."
"Will she marry him, Frederick?"
"Him—the sandy-haired foreigner with the gypsy friends?"
"Is there any other concerned?"
"Oh, don't ask me. Do I keep her pocket-book?"
"I wish you did, my dear fellow. From every point of view, this marriage would be deplorable."
"From every point of view but that of the two people concerned, perhaps. She is a girl with a will of her own—do you think she would marry him if she didn't like him?"
"She might, from spite. There are better reasons, perhaps worse. You told me at their first meeting that you believed her to be in love with him."
"I was an idiot. Let's finish the round. The man will probably live to be hanged—what does it matter?"
"Well, if it doesn't matter to you, it matters to nobody. I'll tell you something queer—a thing I saw last night. It's been in my head all day. I'll tell you as we go to the next green."
They drove a couple of good balls and set out from the tee with lighter hearts. As they went, the Vicar unburdened himself of that secret which golf alone could have prevented him disclosing an hour ago.
"I told you that I dined with Sir John Hall last night," he said in a low voice; "well, young John drove me home, and, of course, he went through the Park. Poor boy, his case is quite hopeless. He drives his horse to death round and round the house on the off chance of seeing the flash of her gown between the trees. Well, he drove me home and just as we entered the Park, what do you think—why, three or four men passed us at the gallop—soldiers, I say, in white uniforms with gold sashes and gold sword-hilts. I saw them as plainly as I see you now—the Earl was one of them—the young Count another. Now, what do you think of it? Are they mad, or is some great jest being played? I give it up. This sort of thing is beyond my experience—it should be a case for you, Frederick, though if you can make anything of it, I'm a Dutchman."
The Doctor shook his head. He did not doubt the truth of the Vicar's story, but he made believe to doubt it.
"You dined with John Hall, Harry?"
"I have told you so."
"Sixty-three port, I suppose, on the top of champagne?"
"That is mere foolishness, Frederick."
"Admittedly, forgive me—I can be serious and am. Here's an affair which a man might write about in text-books. This grown man puts on a coat he may have worn in his youth and rides like a steeplechaser through the Park. Why does he do it? What's he after? I'll tell you, his lost youth, that's what he's after. Trying to catch up Time and give the fellow the go-by. I've seen that disease in many shapes, but this is a new one. Try to think it out. This young Count comes over from Roumania; he brings these gypsy rascals with him. Their tongue, their dress, their music, speak to the Earl as his youth used to speak to him. He's living for a moment a life he lived thirty years ago. I can see him grasping at the straws of youth every time I go up to the Hall. These midnight carousals are so much midnight madness. The man is saying to Age, you shall not have me. Ten years of respectability go at one fell swoop. He'd sell those he loved best on earth to win back one year of the days which have been. That's my diagnosis. The bacillus,La Jeunesse! And that's a bacillus you cannot cure, Harry."
He was in deadly earnest and the Vicar looked grave enough. In his dim way, he understood the Doctor and believed him to be speaking the truth. Lord Melbourne had been an enigma to him from the first; an aristocrat and not an aristocrat; one of the Melbournes and yet an alien; a man whose mask of reservation the keenest eyes could not pierce; a silent man when one asked for that key by which alone the secret chambers of his mind could be entered. Of such a one any fable might be told and believed. The Vicar understood that he had come face to face with some mystery; but of its witnesses he could make nothing.
"I do believe you are right," he said at length; "there have been tales as strange in the story of the house—generally concerning a lady, I fear At least Evelyn can know nothing of this," he added a little thoughtfully; "it would be a great misfortune for her."
"Heritage has little regard for the fortunes of others," said the Doctor. "I don't suppose she would have married an Englishman—she's not the girl to do it. That comes of educating them abroad—I would sooner send a daughter of mine to fight the Russians than to a school in Paris. Make Englishwomen of them, I say, and leave the fal-de-lals alone. What's it worth to a girl if she can jabber French and has lost her English heart! No, my dear Vicar, England for me and English roses for my home. Evelyn will marry this man because France taught her to think well of foreigners. If she had gone to a Derbyshire school, he might as well have proposed to Cleopatra's monument on the Thames Embankment. I'm sorry for her, truly, but words won't change the thing, and that's the end of it. Let's go and lunch. We have done nothing ill for one morning, any way."
They went to lunch and afterward to the business of a common day. As it fell out, they did not meet again until after church upon the following Sunday, when the Vicar, still wearing his surplice as he crossed from the vestry to the parsonage, found the Doctor waiting for him with the air of one who has important tidings and must impart them quickly.
"No bad news from the Hall?" he exclaimed, so much was that great house now in his mind.
The Doctor, however, drew him aside and told him in a word.
"The Count's gone," he said quickly. "He comes back in October. The Earl told me so himself. She's to marry him in the winter, and that's the end of it, Harry."
The Vicar shook his head gravely.
"The beginning of it, Frederick, the beginning," he said wisely.
In what manner Gavin Ord arrived at Melbourne Hall and took up his residence there has already been recorded in the early pages of this narrative.
He came upon a night in August, three weeks precisely after the departure of Count Odin for Bukharest. Of the people of the Hall he knew little save that which common gossip and the tittle-tattle of the newspapers had taught him; nor was his the temperament to be troubled over-much by the strange hallucination which had attended his journey from Moretown to the Manor. That which some people would have called an apparition, he attributed to fatigue and the hour of the night; and while an uneasy feeling that this simple account of it might not ultimately satisfy him was not to be lightly dismissed, the hospitalities of the great house and the work to which he had been called there quickly dispelled the impression of it, and left him with some shame that he had been such an easy victim to a vulgar delusion. For the rest, curiosity remained the only intruder between him and the work he had been summoned to do.
The Lady Evelyn! Where had he seen her before? How came it that her face was so familiar to him?
Every hour that he lived at the Hall quickened this impression of familiarity. Her very voice could make him start, as though one whom he knew well were speaking to him. Her stately movements, her gestures, tormented his memory as though inciting it to recall forgotten scenes for him. At the luncheon table, upon the second day, he made bold to tell her of his immovable idea.
"We have met somewhere, Lady Evelyn," he said, "I cannot tell where; but it was in some such house as this—in the gardens of such a house. And that is odd, for to my knowledge I was never in a Tudor house before. Now, say that I am dreaming it; that it is just one of those foolish ideas which come to one in sleep and are remembered when waking. It could hardly be anything else, of course."
Evelyn flushed crimson while he was speaking; but she retained her composure sufficiently to declare that she had no recollection of such an occasion.
"We rarely go from here," she said evasively. "I cannot recollect visiting any Tudor house in England—you see so many, Mr. Ord. It would be natural to have such an idea, I think."
"Oh, perfectly and perhaps foolish. Our brains play us strange tricks, and, often enough, the wildest of them have the least meaning. I know a man in Paris who dreamed three nights running that he would be thrown out of a motorcar on his way to Monte Carlo. He put off the visit in consequence and was knocked down next day by a cab in the Rue Quatre Septembre. I don't mean to say that he was killed, but he had a nasty fall, and that was the price he paid for dreaming. I try to dismiss these things as soon as they come to me. Here's a case in point. You and I clearly have never met—unless it were in London," he added, with another keen glance at her.
Evelyn could not suppress the high color in her cheeks, and they were crimson when she found her father's eyes watching her curiously as though some train of thought had been set in motion by the argument. Perfectly well did she know that Gavin Ord had seen her in London, on the stage of the Carlton Theatre; and that discovery had looked her in the face twice in as many months. This time, however, she feared it less; for she had come to believe by this time that she would presently be compelled to tell her story to all the world before many weeks had passed.
"We are not often in London," the Earl said dryly; "with such a house as this, why should we be? Lady Evelyn cares nothing for society. I regard it as the refuge of the mentally destitute. If I travel, it is from one solitude to another. A man is never so much master of himself and of the world as when he is alone. Can we consider the modern life as anything but a glorification of the aggregate and not of the individual? Your profession is the best friend you have, Mr. Ord. Those who follow noble ends establish nobility in their own characters. That's a creed I wish I had known twenty years ago. You are a young man and should recite it every day while your youth remains to you."
Gavin replied that a man was neither older nor younger than his ideas; and the drift of the conversation being changed, to Evelyn's evident relief, they fell again to their plans for the restoration of the Hall and that which must be done before the wet weather set in. Until this time, Evelyn had scarcely noticed Gavin or taken any interest in his coming to the Manor. The truce between her father and herself left her in a dream-world from which there appeared to be no gate of escape whatever. She had neither counsellor nor friend. To Count Odin she had said, "You shall have my answer in three months' time." Her father's almost passionate desire for this marriage, which his own youth had contrived, won from her no promise more definite than that which she had given to the Count. The time had passed for any but the frankest expressions upon either side. In the plainest words, the Earl told her that this Roumanian had crossed Europe to demand the liberty of a man who had long been but a number in a prison upon the shores of the Black Sea.
"Let Georges Odin be released," he had said, "and unless you are his son's wife, he will kill me."
Lady Evelyn knew this to be no chimera of weakness or fear. The vengeance of the mountains would follow Robert Forrester even to the glades of Derbyshire. Witnesses to the truth still pitched their tents beneath the giant yews—the smoke of the gypsy camp drifted day by day, blue and lingering over the waters of the river. From these there was no escape, for they were the sentinels of the absent Count's honor, and they dogged the Earl's footsteps wherever he turned. When Gavin Ord appeared at the Manor, their suspicions were instantly aroused. They hid from him, and yet watched him every hour. Who was he; whence had he come? And was he also the enemy of the man who had been Zallony's friend? This they made it their purpose to discover, entering even Gavin's bedroom for that purpose.
He was very far from being a timid man or the episode referred to would quickly have driven him from Derbyshire, despite the engrossing interest of the work to which he had been called there. This was the third day of his residence at the Hall. Being left to himself immediately after dinner, he continued to draw for an hour and to read for another before courting sleep in the great black bed which tradition, loving the slumbers of kings, had allotted in its accustomed way to that very wakeful person, James II. His bedroom was high up in the northern tower of the house; a low-pitched spacious apartment with some fine Chippendale chairs in it and a dressing-table for which any Bond Street dealer would cheerfully have paid a thousand pounds. Gavin delighted in these things because he was an artist; while the attendant luxury, the service of man and valet, the superb fittings of the bathroom adjoining his bedroom, the fruit, the cigarettes, the books which decorated the apartment, seemed in some way to be the reward of his own labors, not to speak of the attainments of long-cherished ambitions.
To this historic chamber he retired on the evening of the third day, and having added a little to his plans, read some pages of a county history and smoked a final and contemplative pipe, he undressed and got into bed, and for an hour or more slept that refreshing sleep which attends judicious success and a mind little given to trivialities. From this, against all habit, he passed to dreams, at first welcome and pleasing; dreams of broad acres and sheltering trees and a land of plenty—then to visions more disturbing, and to one, chiefly of a storm passing over the woods and his own spirit abroad in the storm and unable to find harborage. As a weary bird that can reach no shelter and is buffeted by every wind, so did he, in his dream, appear to be cast out from the world and unable to return to his home and kindred; a wanderer through a tempestuous night, beyond whose horizon, far beyond it but ever growing more distant, there arose the crimson light of day and the dawning beams of the hidden sun. Strive as he would he could not cast the darkness from him or shut out the sounds of wild winds blowing in his ears. Unseen hands held him back; voices mocked him; he heard the rustling of wings and was conscious of the movements of unknown figures. And then he awoke to find a light shining full in his face and to see two black eyes peering down at him beyond it. But for an instant he saw them; then the light was blown out swiftly and utter darkness fell. He knew that he was not alone; but feared nothing, he knew not why.
Some man had entered his room while he slept and stood, he imagined, even at that moment so close to his bedside that he had but to put out a hand to touch him. Who the man was or what his errand might be, Gavin did not attempt even to guess. More by force of habit than from any other reason, he asked aloud, "Who is there, what do you want?"—but he did not expect to be answered, nor did any sound follow his question. Lying quite still upon the bed and beginning to be a little alarmed as his senses came back to him, he listened intently for an echo of footsteps across the polished floor, arguing that the unknown man would wear no boots and must turn the handle of a door to go. This was no burglar, he felt sure; and he was half willing to believe that he had dreamed the whole episode when a footfall made itself plainly audible, and was followed by a deep breath as of one who until that time had been afraid to breathe at all. Again Gavin asked, "What is it, what do you want?" The silence continued unbroken, and the fear of things unknown robbed him for the moment of the voice to repeat the question. This he set down afterward to the traditions of Melbourne Hall and his intimate knowledge of them. He would not have been afraid in any other house.
Gavin stretched out his hand and tried to switch on the electric light. A clumsy effort in an unfamiliar room found him passing his fingers idly over a wainscoted wall; and when he felt for the reading lamp by his bedside, he overturned it with his elbow and could not replace the plug which his maladroitness had detached. Alarmed now as he never believed that any situation could alarm him, he sprang from his bed and felt with both hands extended for the figure which the room concealed. Hither, thither, with an oath upon his clumsiness, he sought the unknown, his hands touching unfamiliar objects, the darkness seeming almost to mock him. That the unknown man was still in the room he had no doubt whatever; for the interludes repeated the sound of quick breathing and he heard a garment rustling just as he had heard it in his sleep. Once, indeed, he felt the warm breath upon his cheek and struck savagely at an enemy of sounds, who still uttered no word nor would acknowledge his presence. Had he been calmer, he might have known that the darkness also deceived the intruder and that he too was at a loss to escape; but this Gavin did not discover until the door opened suddenly and a flash of light from the corridor struck across the room like a sunbeam suddenly admitted by a lifted blind. Then he saw the face of the escaping man for the second time and stood amazed at its familiarity.
"The old gypsy I saw in the park yesterday walking with the Earl," he said, astounded, and then, "What in the devil's name is he doing here?"
That should not have been a difficult question to answer, and Gavin instantly determined to make no mention of it until the morning. The fellow was probably a thief, who had the run of the house and had taken advantage of its master's forbearance. It would be sufficient to name the circumstance at the breakfast table and to leave the rest to the Earl, who could act in the matter as he pleased. None the less, Gavin found his nerves much shaken and sleep for the remainder of the night was out of the question. Switching on every lamp in his room, and locking and bolting the heavy door, he sat by the open window and asked himself into what house of mysteries he had stumbled and what secrets it was about to reveal to him. But chiefly he asked where he had met the Lady Evelyn before ... and memory befriending him suddenly, as memory will at a crisis, he exclaimed aloud:
"The Carlton Theatre—Haddon Hall—Etta Romney, by all that's amazing!"
Was the thought also a chimera of the night? He knew not what to think. The dawn found him still at his window debating it.
Gavin had always been an early riser and one who flouted the modern idea that the world should be aired before men went abroad. Faithful to his habit, the following morning found him riding in the park a little after seven o'clock; and not until the sweet cold air of the highlands had recompensed him for a waking night did he return to the Hall and the generous breakfast table there spread for him. A professed disciple of the simple life, Gavin confessed that the Earl's lavish hospitalities were altogether too much for his philosophy; and he ate and drank with the hearty relish of one to whom these unending luxuries were both a revelation in the art of living and a satire upon the habits of the rich.
What vast quantities of food were heaped upon that priceless sideboard—in dishes of shining silver, each warmed by the clear flame of a silver lamp beneath. Lift a lid of one of those granaries and there you would espy an omelet which none but a man from Paris could cook. Peep into another and there are eggs prepared so cunningly that they would melt the heart of Master Fastidity himself. Fish and fowl and flesh, great red joints upon the buffet, exquisite peaches from the hothouses, bunches of grapes that would have taken prizes in any show—how ironical to remember the class of man who usually sat to such a table, his ennui, his distaste, and the abstinence cure the physicians compelled him to practise. Gavin was just a hearty Englishman, fit and strenuous and needing no "waters" to make life endurable. He took what came to him and made no bones about it. Had he been a rich man himself, he would have done the same, he thought. Humbug was no part of his creed, and he never mistook necessity for self-sacrifice.
The Earl had not come down when he entered the famous breakfast-room, and, not a little to his satisfaction, he found himself alone with Lady Evelyn for the first time since his arrival at the Manor. A student of faces always, he studied this face to-day with a curiosity which he set down to his own delusions rather than to an absolute interest in the personality of a stranger. A beautiful woman he had admitted her to be when first he saw her by her father's side upon the night which carried him to the Hall. But now his scrutiny went deeper, and, so far as opportunity served, he looked at her as one seeking a woman's secret, and seeking it with a man's desire to help her.
And first he said that it was an English face in repose, and yet not an English face when the repose was lost. The masses of jet black hair would have excited no surprise upon the Corso at Rome or shining in an aureole cast out from a Florentine window. Here, in England, the tresses spoke of the South and its suns—and yet, in flat contradiction, the perfect skin, smooth and silky as the leaf of a pink white rose, could tell of English lanes and sunless days and the kinder climate of the North. Character he read in the firm contour of her chin—romance and passion in the deep blue of her eyes and the modulations of a voice whose music had not been lost in the roaring Saturnalia of the modernsalon. That he himself had so far failed to attract her notice was a fact which neither wounded his vanity nor abated his interest. It had been the first maxim of his life to hasten slowly, and to no pursuit was this maxim more necessary than to that of friendship.
This, then, was the estimate which one strong personality formed of another; the man saying to himself, "I would read this woman's heart!" the woman asking herself if she must talk architecture until the Earl came to her assistance. Breaking the ice with a common observation, she remarked that she had seen him galloping across the park and regretted the dilatory habit which kept her in bed.
"Getting up is a foreign art," she said. "It lives in kitchens and places where they scrub. The doctors positively forbid it nowadays. And, of course, life is too short to disobey the doctors."
Gavin looked at her with the air of a man who has too much common sense to deal in frivolities and rarely troubled to say the thing which was not.
"They talk nonsense," he said quietly; "the profession is becoming far too commercial. It lives and thrives upon the credulity of fools. Just consider—man is the only animal which does not glory in the Creator's gift, the dawning day and all its wonders. For what do we change it! For the electric light and the champagne which disagrees with us? We borrow of the night and then grumble because we have nothing to offer the day. If men could get up at five o'clock and go to bed at ten, they would begin to understand the realities of living."
Evelyn, much amused at his earnestness and quite understanding that some pleasant originality of character dictated the outburst, looked at him a little mischievously from beneath her long lashes while she said:
"In winter—surely not five o'clock then, Mr. Ord?"
"Not at all," was the quick reply; "we are expected to use our common sense in the matter. A winter's dawn is distinctly unpleasant; have nothing to do with it. A true benefactor of mankind would help us to hibernate. Imagine how splendid it would be to sleep from the twenty-sixth day of December until the first day of April. Those are the months of the income tax—of no interest to you, Lady Evelyn, but of great importance to poor people who are unable to help the Government to throw hay into the sea from the shores of South Africa. Blot out the winter, by all means; but leave us the summer, and do not expect us to spend the best hours of it in bed."
"Am I, then, personally guilty in the matter? Frankly, you will never convert me. I am hateful before ten o'clock, and if I go riding before that time, the very horses tremble. Consider what going to bed at ten o'clock would mean to us in the season?"
"I have considered it often. We should be spared a large number of very indifferent plays; a great many falsehoods would not be told to our acquaintances; old gentlemen would not, under such circumstances, need to go to Carlsbad to be scrubbed. You would save vast quantities of good food; learn what the country is to those who really know it; and, perhaps, discover that strange personality, yourself. Why should we be so frightened of such an excellent companion? Men and women tell you that they do not like to be alone. Is not that to say that they desire to keep self at a distance. The fellow would be troublesome, ask questions, and that sort of thing. But let others always be shouting in our ears (and modern society has excellent lungs), then we keep the stranger out and are glad to be quit of him. Some achieve the same end by work. I am one of them. When my work gets hold of me I cannot answer a common question decently. Sometimes I wake up suddenly and say, 'My dear Gavin, how are you getting on and what have you been doing all this time?' I become solicitous for the fellow and want to peep into his private books. That is often at dawn, Lady Evelyn, just when the sun is shooting up over the horizon. Then a man may not be ashamed to meet himself. For the rest of the time he is often play-acting."
A faint blush came to her cheeks and she turned away her head.
"Why not if play-acting amuses us? Perhaps we are not all contented with that amiable stranger, ourselves. Some other figure of the present or the past may seem more desirable as a friend. Is there any law of Nature which compels us to take one personality rather than another? Cannot you imagine a man or a woman living years of make-believe—play-acting always, if by play-acting they can discover a world more desirable than the one they live in? We speak of imagination as a rare gift. I doubt if it is so. Even little children have their dream-worlds, and they are more remarkable than any books. I would say that your outlook is too limited. You see one side of life, Mr. Ord, and quarrel with those who can look tolerantly upon both."
Gavin was honest enough to admit that it might be so.
"Yes," he said, "I grant you that the world is sometimes better for make-believe. If we did not deceive ourselves, some of us would commit suicide. The age is to blame for the necessity. We have not color enough in our lives, and even our devotions are often entirely selfish. Witness the case of a modern millionaire who is proud of being called 'a hustler.' This rogue tells his friends that he has no time for ordinary social intercourse. My answer is that he ought to be hanged out of hand. Such a fellow never comes face to face with himself once in twenty years. Men envy him and yet despise him. Take the meanest hero of mediæval fiction and place him side by side with a Gould or a Vanderbilt. What a very monarch he becomes! Total up the riches of a trust and remember Mozart died of starvation. Vulgarity everywhere—none of us is free from it. Our very ambitions are advertised."
"And we have not even the courage to hide ourselves in nunneries."
"They would come here with cameras and photograph our habits. No, we must accept the position frankly and make the best of it. That carries me round the circle. By getting up with the sun we see something of ourselves sometimes. Our work is not then the whole occupation of the day."
"But yours, surely, is not work you despise, Mr. Ord?"
"So little that I fear it on that very account. Just imagine how this house is going to make a captive of me. I shall know every stone of it before a month has passed. I will tell you then all its truths and all its fables. The dead will become my intimate friends. I shall reconstruct from the beginning. I must do it, for how shall I dare to touch the hallowed walls unless something of the builder's secret is known to me. In six months' time I will show the harvest of dreams. In six months' time——"
"In six months' time! What an age to wait! I may not be in England then."
"You will return to be my critic."
"I may never return."
"Never return! my dear lady, you could not possibly desert Melbourne Hall. The very stones would cry out upon you."
"Oh," she said, looking straight into his face; "my husband may not like England, you know."
"I will believe it when he has the courage to tell me so."
"Men are generally courageous when it is a question of telling a woman what they do not like. I am to live in Bukharest, be it known. My summers will be spent in the Carpathians. I shall become a child of the primitive colors—the red, the blue, and the orange—which Menie Muriel Dowie tells us are an eternal delight to the eyes. I am promised glorious weeks on the Black Sea, and more glorious weeks on seas which are not black. The sun is always shining there—why should one want to come back to England?"
Had anyone asked Evelyn why she spoke in this way to a stranger, a man of whose existence she had hardly been aware yesterday, she would certainly have been unable to give a satisfactory answer. To no other in all her life had she spoken so openly and so readily as to this fair-haired, blue-eyed Englishman, who did not appear to have one grain of humbug in all his body. Her surprise was not greater than her pleasure; she would not deny that it pleased her thus to confess intimate thoughts which she had not shared even with her own father. Gavin, upon his part, a servant of candor always, observed nothing unusual in her freedom; but he could ask himself already if she were in love with the man to whom her future was pledged.
"We are forgetting how to be serious," he rejoined; "that is also one of the vices of the age. People chatter away as though words were enough and the truth of words nothing at all. You do not mean anything you say, and you expect me to listen to you in the same spirit. I decline to do so. If you go to Bukharest, you will come back again before the year is out. As for the blue, red and orange, well, I could as soon imagine you buying an early Victorian sideboard. That is my frank opinion. You must forgive me if it offends?"
He looked straight into her eyes and she did not turn away. Gavin Ord was unlike any man she had known—not by mere cleverness alone, but by that strength of will and character which could not fail to assert itself in any company, whatever its nature. Here sat one whom, were he to command her, she would certainly obey. Such a possibility of docility astonished Evelyn beyond measure—but it also encouraged her to put a question to him.
"Frank opinions need no forgiveness," she said. "I am longing for more, Mr. Ord. You told me last night that you believed you had met me in London. Please tell me where it was."
She asked the question with some pretty pretence of indifference which did not deceive him for an instant. It is better, he thought, that I should tell her, and so he said, without any affectation whatever:
"I am quite wrong, of course; but when I thought the matter over I remembered that a young actress, who made a great sensation at the Carlton Theatre in May, might have been named for your own sister. That is what gave me the idea that I had seen you before."
"How strange! Do you also remember the lady's name?"
"Perfectly. All London went mad over her. She called herself Etta Romney, and the play showed just such a house as this. It was the old story of Di Vernon retold, Lady Evelyn."
"You were much taken with the play, it appears?"
"Not with the play at all. But I thought Etta Romney one of the cleverest women I have ever seen on the stage."
"Is she playing still, may I ask?"
"You know that she is not, Lady Evelyn."
"I know it—are you serious?"
"So serious that I shall forget the subject until you choose to speak of it again."
"But it interests me greatly," she pleaded, with that insistence which often attends the discussion of things better avoided. "If I am really so like somebody else, ought I not to be curious? You say——"
"Indeed, I say nothing," he exclaimed quickly, and then in a lower voice—"at least until the Earl has breakfasted."
She did not reply. The Earl entered the room and began at once to speak of Gavin's work and the arrangements which must be made for it.
Gavin's little band of workmen ran up a light scaffold of ladders and boards for him against the belfry tower, and had it finished upon the morning of the conversation with the Lady Evelyn. To this height he climbed early in the day, when began an examination of the decaying fabric and set down the first lines of the report he had to make to the Earl. The old building was in a shocking state certainly; the plumb-line declared surprising departures from that stately grace of perpendicularity the text-books had taught him to esteem. Gavin should have taken the greatest interest in all this, but he did not. Had you spoken to him yesterday, he would have been ready to declare that nothing on earth could be more fascinating than the very task he now pretended to be engaged upon; but his habitual candor came to his rescue to-day and he now pronounced the work to be almost distasteful. For, in truth, he had discovered a secret as old as man, and the delight of that new knowledge surpassed the worker's dreams by far.
He stood upon a dizzy height, but custom had staled the peril of his employment, and, in this aspect, fear was unknown to him. A high trembling ladder permitted him to climb up to a couple of boards suspended from the parapet above by frail ropes cunningly wound about the embrasures of the battlements. He stood with his back to a mossy wall; beneath him lay the fair domain of Melbourne Hall; its ancient trees so many children's fretted toys; its grass lands supremely green; pool and lake and river ablaze with the golden light of an Autumn sun. But more to Gavin than these was the figure of the Lady Evelyn herself, clearly to be seen in the glade where the gypsies had pitched their camp—the figure of an English girl divinely tall, of one whom the splendid woods might well choose for their divinity.
She rode through the glade and by her side their walked a rough fellow, who, Gavin thought, would have been much better in Derby jail than idling in the home park at Melbourne. Some chance observations which had fallen from servants' lips had made him acquainted with the circumstances under which these apparent vagrants had come to Derbyshire; and he was quick enough to perceive the connection between the Earl's younger days and this odd visitation.
"He knew these fellows in Roumania and they have come here to blackmail him," was the unspoken comment. "Their master is a shady Roumanian Count—one of the long-haired brand, who ogle the women. I take it that she had promised to marry this man, not altogether at her father's bidding, but just because he is romantic liar enough to appeal to one side of her imagination. That's what sent her to London play-acting. She had to escape from this monotony or it would have killed her. Well, I think I know the temperament—a very dangerous temperament which has sent many a woman the wrong way and will send many more before the world is done with."
He turned again to the crumbling stone work and passed his hand idly over it. This old house, how many women's hearts had it not imprisoned and stilled! What stories of woman's love and passion could it not unfold if these rotting stones might speak? Many a Di Vernon had gone forth from secret doors to meet her lover; many a one had lived and died with her girlish secret unspoken. Study in those records and the true story of Evelyn, my Lord of Melbourne's daughter, would be read. A brave girl, a lonely girl, full of the stuff of which dreams are made, such he believed her to be. And she had come suddenly into his life, bidding him turn from his work to gaze after her, impotently as a man may look upon a precious thing he may never possess. For even if she loved him, what right had he to speak to her; what position or name had he to give her? He was a worker in clay. Bricks and mortar were not the tokens in which a woman's imagination deals.
"If I built a cathedral," he said to himself ironically, "she would merely say, 'How draughty!' It is necessary to be a brigand or a musician to reach the heart of her desires."
So the work went on a little savagely. He had the scaffold shifted to the tower of the chapel where the clock face records the deeds of that Lord of Melbourne who fell with Picton's troop at Waterloo. "Time passed above his head but will turn to look at him..." the inscription went. Gavin was cleaning the dust of the century from it when he heard a voice upon the parapet above, and looking up he perceived my Lady Evelyn there, standing by the battlement and watching him curiously.
"Is not that dreadfully dangerous?" she asked him, indicating the frail scaffold upon which he stood.
He answered at once by another question.
"Do you refer to Time? If so, yes, it is always dangerous. Time never sleeps, remember."
She laughed and leaned over, a little afraid of the height, but desiring, she knew not why, to hear him talk.
"You will not look Time in the face, then?" she said; "or does the bell of Time speak to you? I know people in France who always cross themselves when the clock chimes the hour."
"The bells chime eternity—oh, yes. Time rarely laughs if it is not ironically. Here's a clock which tries to tell all the world how a brave man died. Time passed him by, but returns twice a day to have a look at him. The dirt of nearly a hundred years is cast upon his monument by Time. The ages used to be cleaner, Lady Evelyn. Nowadays we trample mud on every tomb. There is always an 'if' for the best of our friends."
"Meaning that some disappointment has made a cynic of you, Mr. Ord?"
"Perhaps, I cannot tell you. What is the good of ideals in this twentieth century? We have learned to scoff at simple things, faith, honesty, even courage. Rich men try to believe that they were never poor and the poor believe that they are rich—and go through the Bankruptcy Court accordingly. I could do great work in the world, but my enemy is an estimate. A man no longer builds a temple to the glory of God; he builds it to the memory of John Snooks, hog-merchant. Most of our ailments are the penalty of soullessness. If we lived and strived toward an end, the mind would not smart so often as the body. That saps our courage as well. I can work upon a scaffold like this because I have the past all round about me. But directly I cease to work I become a coward. Time is dangerous because Time is truth; one of the few truths our modern life permits us to recognize."
"Then you do really believe that the old glory of achievement lingers somewhere?"
"In the imagination of men who would be artists but remain the servants of Mammon. Let me interrupt you to beg a favor. Your arm is shifting the rope and if it gave way——"
"The rope—the one I am leaning against? Does that go down to your scaffolding? I never noticed it."
"There is no damage done," he said quietly; "please pull it down over the stone-work. No, hardly that way. Let me come up and show you."
A short ladder led up from the scaffold to the roof of the clock tower. The foothold of planks was held up by stout ropes wound about the embrasures of the parapets. Unconsciously as she talked to him, Evelyn had shifted the right-hand rope from its place and Gavin's heart leaped when he perceived that in another instant boards and man and ladder must go headlong to the stone terrace below. In truth, the climax came while the light words were still upon his lips, and the rope, slipping away from the girl's weak hand, the scaffold swung out in an instant and Gavin was left above the abyss, his fingers twined about the second rope and his feet vainly seeking a hold against the time-worn stone.
Men fight for their lives in many ways—the cowards desperately and without reason, brave men with a quick apprehension of the circumstances and a bold course from which fear does not divert them. Desperate as Gavin's situation had become, he realized the whole truth of it in an instant. Forty feet below him was the square flagged pavement built about the belfry door. Above him a single rope swayed and strained against the stone of the parapet, here bulging outward and difficult to climb. If the rope held, Gavin believed that he might touch the parapet, but to mount it would be an acrobat's task. Other help seemed impossible to bring. His assistants had gone down to the outer stables to load up the permanent scaffold. His quick eye could not detect the presence of a single human being in the vicinity of the gardens. Evelyn herself stood as one petrified by the battlements, afraid for the instant to lift a hand or utter a word lest the spell of his momentary safety would be broken. She had never possessed that particular courage which stands upon a height unflinchingly, and this dreadful accident found all her nervous impulse paralyzed and shattered. She listened, as in a trance of terror beyond all words to describe, for the broken cry which would speak of death; for the sound of a body falling upon the flags below. Infinitely beyond Gavin Ord's, her imagination added its darkest picture to her handiwork. She clinched her hands, fearing their clumsiness, and with eyes half-closed drew back from the battlements. Never until this day had she seen a man die; never had she been asked to take an instantaneous resolution wherein the measure of her own peril might be the measure of another man's safety. If for the briefest instant she failed to answer the call, cowardice had no part in her irresolution. Few would have acted otherwise.
Gavin climbed the rope almost inch by inch, seeking as he did so a foothold upon the rotting stone and careful always to bring no sudden jerk upon the trembling cord. It seemed an eternity before he reached the forbidding parapet where the graver danger must be faced; but when he did so and tried to put an arm over the bulging stone, then he understood that if none came to his assistance, he was most certainly doomed. Beneath him, the crumbling cornice became so much powdered dust whenever his feet touched it—he could find no foothold there, nor so much as feel a single projection upon the buttress by which he might pull himself up to safety. And his wrists now ached with a pain which threatened to become intolerable, the rope cut his hands until drops of blood trickled from them to his face. Salvation depended upon that which he could do while a man might count twenty, and with death looking up at him exultingly, he made a last effort to surmount the bulging parapet and in the same instant told himself that it was impossible.
"My God," he cried aloud; "I cannot do it—I cannot do it!"
Perhaps he no longer feared death. There is this merit of exhaustion in danger that it blinds the imagination and leaves indifference to the ultimate issue. Gavin was just at that point when a man is incapable of further effort, even in the cause of his own safety, when, looking up, he perceived Evelyn at the balustrade, her face deathly white, her eyes shining terror; but her acts were as cool and collected as they had been when first he met her in the long gallery of Melbourne Hall. Waked from the trance of fear by the words he had spoken, she cast one quick glance at the figure swaying upon the rope; then turned about her and, stooping, she picked up the long rope which her own maladroitness had displaced from the battlements. Methodically and without a blunder, she made a noose in this and passed it over the parapet.
"Slip your arm over it," she said, in a voice that betrayed no emotion whatever. "I will tie it to the weather-vane—please, please try. I can help you—I am very strong, Mr. Ord. Yes, that is the way—now take my hand—don't be afraid to hurt me—yes, yes, like that."
He slipped one arm over the noose and changing hands cleverly upon the other rope and digging his feet deep into the rotting stone, he drew the noose around his body while she caught up the slack of the cord and bound it round and round the great iron pillar of the weather-vane which crowns the Belfry Tower of Melbourne Hall. His position was such in this instant that he hung out clear above the abyss with his face upon a level with the parapet and his body backward to the flags below. All depended upon the iron pillar of the weather-vane and the stuff of which the rope was made. Gavin had no alternative but to trust to it, and he swung himself out fearlessly with one earnest prayer for safety upon his lips. So near to him that he wondered that his arms could not touch her was the figure of Evelyn, seeming to beckon him to salvation. He felt the noose draw tight about his body, and for some instants he swung to and fro almost with the content of one who has waged a good fight and would sleep. Then her voice came welcomely to his ears once more, bidding him make an effort; and at this he pulled himself up almost with superhuman will and touched the round of the stone-work with his hands laid flat upon it and his knees bent upon the balustrade. Would he fall back once more or had she the strength to save him? Her little hands had caught him by the wrists now; and, kneeling, she exerted a strength she had never known herself to possess. Must they go crashing together to the flags shining in the sunlight below? In vain he supplicated her to release her hold and leave him to do battle for himself.
"I shall pull you over," he cried madly. "For God's sake, leave me to myself!"
She scarcely heard him; her eyes were closed, her lips were hard set; she had thrown her whole weight backward from the hips and with every muscle straining, every danger forgotten, but that of the man whose safety she had imperilled, she drew him to her side and fell fainting before him.
Gavin was dizzy and sick from fear. His hands were cut and bleeding; his clothes torn to ribbons; he could hear the heavy pulsation of his heart when he bent to lift Evelyn in his strong arms as one who, henceforth, had some right to do so.
"The worst may become the best," he said to himself quietly; "she will tell me her story now."
And so he carried her down to the Long Gallery and Melbourne Hall heard of the accident for the first time.