OPHELIA STRONG had abandoned St. Aylmers and descended unannounced upon Saltire with bag and baggage. The irrepressible Miss Saker accompanied her. Manifold confidences had of late passed between the two, confidences of a most intimate and interesting nature. Miss Saker, at her “dear friend’s” earnest desire, had accompanied her to Saltire to support her in the somewhat delicate dramaticisms that threatened the domestic peace.
Time, that green-eyed quipster, had set so cunningly the dial of circumstance that Ophelia’s return fell upon the day when Gabriel and Joan took leave of each other under the yews in Burnt House garden. It was late in the afternoon when Gabriel, parched and miserable, came up the road from Steelcross Bridge across the Mallan and saw a carriage swing into The Friary gate with a swirl of dust from the white highway. Two parasols, red and blue, flashed in the victoria, hiding the occupants as the carriage rounded the curve of the stone wall. The man’s conjectures, rife on the instant, suggested Judith and the Saltire equipage. As for his wife, her last letter had prophesied her advent as fixed for the second week in June. Tired and miserable as he was, he was in no mood for a social ordeal. At the lodge gate his gardener’s wife informed him with a courtesy that the young mistress had just driven up from the station.
No tidings could have been more leaden to the man’s mind, weighted as it was with a misery gotten of the tragic temper of the day. He passed up the drive unwillingly enough, heeding nothing, the banks of rhododendrons shining mauve and white and red. Entering upon the sleek stretch of lawn, with its standard roses hung with the lamps of June, its beds brilliant with geranium and lobelia, he found the carriage standing empty before the porch. James, the butler, was removing sundry wraps and parcels from the cushions. The man smiled in a peculiar, starched fashion when he saw his master, and jerked a grimace at the coachman, a grimace tipped with a coarse innuendo suited to the tongue of a pantry cynic.
Gabriel, entering the hall of his own home, saw his wife standing in the centre of a blood-red Oriental carpet, with the carved front of an antique cupboard for a background. She was wearing a large hat trimmed with white sea-bird’s wings and sky-blue silk; her dress of olive gray with green facings was moulded to her figure, throwing into evidence in the French fashion the fulness of her bust and the contour of her hips. Despite her journey, she appeared fresh as a pink azalea in bloom, boasting more color than of yore, plumper about the mouth. There was even a suspicion of pencilling about the finely arched brows and the too languorous lids. Possibly the first thing Gabriel noted about his wife was the petulant glint of her blue eyes, a feline gleam that he had grown familiar with of old.
His sensations were peculiarly incongruous for the moment. It was four months since they had met, and her sudden presence there that day quickened his moody discontent. Nor could he save his senses from being enveloped by the sheer loveliness of the woman, her sinuous, tiger-like perfection of body. She was one of those suggestive beings such as Parisian society might delight in. Contrasted with the spiritual image graven upon Gabriel’s brain, his wife seemed a mere voluptuary snatched from the canvas of a Rubens.
The greeting between man and wife was in every sense prophetic. Neither approached the other; they stood at a little distance, looking tentatively into each other’s eyes. There were sketches—blurs of color—upon the panelled walls. A suit of armor, grotesquely sullen, stood at the man’s right hand. The place was full of shadows, though the garden was gay without.
“This is a bolt from the blue,” said the man, with a strained yet niggardly enthusiasm. “I never thought I should find you here.”
“You had my telegram,” came the clear retort.
“No; I had turned out early and so missed it. I did not expect you till I saw your carriage.”
The woman’s face seemed to grow paler, giving her eyes a yet more sensuous brilliance.
“So it seems,” she said. “I hope you are not grievously disappointed.”
“You must be tired.”
“Don’t worry yourself on my account. James sent the carriage down to meet us. Ah, I have forgotten to introduce you to Miss Saker; she has come back with me for a fortnight. Mab, dear, my husband.”
It was like the wooden chatter of a pair of dolls, lacking warmth or the merest flicker of enthusiasm. The same spirit hovered in the air as of yore. Gabriel had been chilled and repelled from the first glance. Meanwhile a streak of green silk had risen from a neighboring settee; Miss Saker and the man had bowed to each other and extended listless hands. Miss Saker had been staring him over from his first entry, much as she would have scrutinized an interesting co-respondent bandying words with a barrister in the divorce court. Unfortunately he had disappointed Miss Saker’s malice, being not the Faustus she had expected, but rather a poor creature considered in the part of the melodramatic villain.
It was as sorry a clashing of moods as even a mediæval witch-damsel could have predestinated. Gabriel, after a stroll in the garden, followed his wife slowly up the oak staircase with its broad, shining steps and rich-wrought balustrade. His reason was too maimed for the moment to serve him with any warmth or virtue. He moved as one half-dazed, taking in the minutiæ of the scenes around him with that peculiar vividness that often accompanies pain. He marked how the lozenged panes in the blazoned windows gleamed with a singular and sensuous brilliance. How the dust danced golden in the slanting beams of the sun. How one of the old oil pictures, a coarse Flemish genre work, hung awry on the landing. He was in the act of levelling it when his wife came out from the “blue room,” closing the door with its painted panels carefully after her.
She stood there holding the handle of the door and looking at him with a peculiar expression of critical composure. The silver girdle about her waist glittered in the sun, and on her bosom she wore a cross set with garnets. Her eyes were unwaveringly bright and even more brilliantly blue than of yore.
Feeling for the moment more like a homeless child than a grown man, he yearned to be comforted even by this woman whom he had ceased to love. Was she not more to him than a sister! Indubitably beautiful as she stood before him, possibly some old tenderness not wholly selfish whimpered in his heart. The very touch of a human hand seemed precious in that hour of desolation and despair. Enigmatic though his sensations were, he yielded to them with the mute helplessness of one in pain.
“You are looking wondrous well, dear,” he said to her.
“Indeed!”
“I will ring to have our room set in order. Since you have been away from me I have been sleeping in my dressing-room.”
“My orders have been already given,” said the wife, with no softening of her mouth.
“Your pardon; I have grown such a bachelor in four months.”
“Probably.”
“It is good to have you back again.”
There was the slightest quivering of Ophelia’s lids. It was as though in this trite dramatic incident she was preparing to crush her husband’s sentiments. She kept her hand upon the handle of the door, stiffening herself upon her arm. Her eyes had grown peculiarly dull and sullen.
“I intend changing my régime,” she said.
“Of course, dear, if—”
“I am sleeping with Mabel in the ‘blue room.’ ”
It was a simple thrust enough, but deep in meaning. Ophelia watched the man’s face much as Cleopatra might have studied the face of a slave poisoned in a wanton thirst for knowledge. Her voice sounded strangely harsh and resonant, a discord the more telling upon the man’s hypersensitive brain.
“If you wish it so.”
“If I had not wished it,” she interjected, irritably, “I should have arranged otherwise. Order Thompson to bring me up some hot water when you go down-stairs. I can’t talk to you now; it always bores me to talk after travelling.”
DINNER that evening proved a lugubrious and problematic meal. The conversation was interjectory and spasmodic, the topics comet-like in character, smiting vaguely through a void of silence. Gabriel attempted a hypocritic cheerfulness for the better masking of his own discomfort. His vivacity inspired no feminine response. He was compelled to undergo the ordeal of being studied in detail by his wife and her brown-haired friend. From the first handshake he had conceived a sincere disrelish for Miss Mabel Saker, and her critical silence that evening did not tend to dispossess him of his antipathy. He was not grieved when the white napkins were laid upon the table and the women carried their perfumed persons to the privacy of the drawing-room.
Miss Saker bared the keyboard of the piano and suffered her slim fingers to produce musical etchings in black and white. She was considered something of a wit in her own circle, her humor emulating the spangled, short-skirted brilliance of the variety stage. Miss Saker was in a mischievous mood that evening, and the starched artificiality of the dinner-hour emphasized the reaction.
Putting down sundry chords in the base with melodramatic thunder, she glanced over her shoulder with a theatrical frown.
“Tragedy, my dear—tragedy,” she said; “the man is in a deep, deceitful mood. He has something ponderous and painful upon his conscience.”
Ophelia turned herself in her lounge-chair and lay with one cheek on the cushion, a diamond crescent shining in her hair.
“He is too talkative,” she remarked.
“True, O queen. When a man talks thus”—and Miss Saker evolved a rackety and hysterical air—“you may bet your boots his nerves are on the tingle. He is hiding something under his coat.”
“It was easy to see that from the first,” remarked the wife.
“He went green when he saw us in the hall.”
“Rather a shock, perhaps. The man had been out all day; I can guess where.”
Meanwhile Gabriel had wandered to the garden, where the hand of evening was crushing the red juices of the sunset, staining the cloudy steps of heaven. The lawns were of green silk, the flowers thereon like color fallen from the pallet of day. The cypresses stood clothed with azure, the pines like Ethiop maidens wrapped in gossamer work of gold. In the thickets two thrushes were singing, flinging lyric rivalry over the dusky leaves.
The man plunged to the more lonely depths, a broad hollow where flowers and shrubs were tangled in a mist of green. He walked, inhaling the perfumed breath of the hour, with head thrown back, as one who watches the heavens. All the damsels of the night seemed to steal out of their chambers, dewy-lipped, ebon-tressed, with eyes liquid as moon-kissed water. Love! What was it? A vapor and a shade? An intangible essence dying on the lips when tasted, with an infinite regret!
He passed again from the swarthy shrubberies, and saw the windows of his own home yellow and tiger-eyed towards the night. Roses beckoned in the gloom. What were they to him? With the grass like velvet moss under his feet, he drew near to a window and listened. Music came from within, and laughter, facile and light. They were merry, these two, merry at his heart’s cost, and perhaps Gabriel guessed it. Their words were like falling water to him, confused and meaningless. Despite the pleading voice of his woman of dreams, he grew full of bitterness and keen irony of soul.
It had grown dark when he went in to them. A constrained quiet seemed to pervade the room even from the moment that his hand had touched the door. Books were forthcoming, cushions, and an occasional trite monosyllable that broke the silence. More than once a yawn arose behind the ivory screen of five white fingers. The man’s presence seemed to agree ill with the atmosphere. It was not long before the two oppressed ones arose and trailed languidly to bed.
Gabriel sat on over a paper-backed novel that he had found lying in a chair.A Close Climaxwas its title, and from some casual introspection of its pages he surmised that it was gotten from the French, and not the more ideal for that same reason. He noted remarks concerning ladies’ underclothing, a perfervid scene in a fashionable Spanish beauty’s boudoir, sundry hints as to happiness, physical of course, and a frequent appeal to a sentiment named Love. The book did not hold much converse with him that evening. It abode on his knee more as a cynical fragment of realism. An instinctive and nameless fear of the future was the wraith that stood at his side that night.
The expression of the ensuing week was no less proud and icy. An intangible antagonism pervaded the home life of the place, freezing the fibres and sinews of truth, congealing such magnanimity as moved in the man’s blood. After the first three days he abandoned all attempts at conjuring his wife from her impregnable attitude of silence. She appeared unimpressionable as granite; her very beauty was the opalescent flash of sunlight upon ice. Moreover, the inevitable Miss Saker, like a watchful crow, was forever flapping on the horizon. On no single occasion did Gabriel succeed in obtaining any lengthy privacy with his wife. They seemed to exist on frigid society small-talk and on mundane inanities that gave no scope to the man’s conscience.
On the Wednesday after Ophelia Strong’s return the Gabingly folk with half the Saltire worthies descended upon The Friary for the purpose of courteous chatter. To Gabriel’s sensitive melancholy the house appeared converted into a sudden pandemonium of fashion. His political responsibilities hung like a girdle of thorns about his loins. Mr. Mince, with his usual oleaginous arrogance, deigned to dictate to him on the educational question and the rights of church schools. Later he was cornered by his father-in-law, who demanded, with superlative geniality: “Why the deuce, man, don’t you run over and see us oftener; my Blanche swears you’re turning into a damned political hermit, only bobbing up on state occasions.” The culminating irritation descended upon him in the person of his father, who indulged, for some fateful reason, in parental inquires as to his domestic happiness. The suggestion was the last bodkin prick, rankling in the man’s flesh. John Strong parted from his son that afternoon with a somewhat ruffled temper. Gabriel was more than ever an enigma to the paternal mind, and John Strong, like most Britishers, cordially detested anything he could not understand.
At the end of the aforesaid week Gabriel was like a man groping through a quagmire on a moonless night. The stagnant pools around him, symbolizing his own thoughts, gave back a distorted and sinister reflection of his misery. It was not in his nature to suspect the sincerity of his wife’s scorn. The mood was logical enough, condoned, indeed, by his own conscience. How much she knew or surmised he dared not imagine; it was sufficient for him to realize that some deep gulf lay between them. Harassed with loneliness, unable to thread the future or to pierce the past, he seemed surrounded by a deep and desolate wilderness where he heard the shriek of the lapwing, the beating of invisible wings, the hoarse chatter of dead and wind-shaken grass. Above lay the sky, the black bowl of fate, starless, limitless, and void.
IF sorrow and solitude go hand-in-hand, Joan Gildersedge indeed had wedded the twain. Her life for years had been but a November repression of the sunnier moods of childhood. The passionate red ore had been hoarded in the dark, not squandered easily or tossed to every beggarly cringe of chance. It was nature that had uncovered this same treasure. Her hand had sprinkled on the childish bosom the blood of a thousand roses. The flowers had touched her white feet with their dewy lips. Wondrous alchemy, indeed! The gold of heaven, the red blood of earth, the milk-white waxen flesh of the moor merged into one slim pillar of virgin loveliness!
It was this same intense virginity of soul that caused Joan to respond more deeply to the human refrain that had swept like strange music into her life. She had escaped the sentimentalisms, the erotic artificialities that mar so many women in the making. Vanity had no acknowledged niche within her heart. She was a spontaneous being, infinitely good by sheer beauty of instinct, unconsciously divine. She had never had the ego emphasized in its meaner characteristics by contact with individuals less generous than herself. Joan had served her father with a quiet patience, not from love, which was indeed impossible, but from a superabundant yet unconscious sense of duty. Her strength was a fine spiritual energy, not the mere forcefulness of the strenuous development of self, the arrogance of astute individualism insisting upon a recognition of rights from monads of like impulse.
It was this same bright sensitiveness of soul that rendered this single romance of hers the more tragic in its earlier season. Like some world-worn wanderer the man had parted the boughs of spring and fallen at her feet, weary of life, desirous only of some subtle Lethe. Her heart had gone out to him from the first hour, spontaneously and without forethought. She had ministered to him, giving him the waters of love for comfort, pointing him onward to a happier dawn.
Thus when she had constituted herself the priestess of the man’s ideals, her hidden oracle had condemned her to pronounce her own doom. That day under the yews her fine self-abnegation had lifted her to queen it over the pleadings of her own heart. For the man’s sake she had understood the strong need of heroism. The sacrificial fire had been quenched upon the altar. She had cast down her divining-rod, broken her magic ring in twain, and returned mutely to her pristine solitude.
What depths of gloom the renunciation meant to her she never comprehended till the first night came. Darkness, heavy, and without dawn! Never to behold the man’s face again; nay, what was more, never to feel her spirit mount with his into the azure of that sympathy that had made earth heaven! There seemed a crass cruelty in the event, an illogical malice that stunned her reason. Yet never in her heart did she blame Gabriel for aught he had made her suffer.
Three successive phases possessed her during those dark hours of anguish and deep bitterness.
For two days she was like a dumb, dazed thing, helpless, wide-eyed, infinitely silent. She went about her duties like one whose soul had been turned to stone. The dull pageant of life about her was a mere shadow show, dusky, nebulous, and unreal. She felt like one dead, standing beyond the tide of time, gazing back upon a paradisic past streaked with the mysterious purple of romance.
The third day she broke down utterly and became even as a child. Her inspired strength ebbed from her. She wept often in secret, and talked to herself like one half-crazed by sorrow. Often she would crush roses to her lips, bury her face in the green and quiet foliage of the trees, cling to some rugged trunk as a child to a mother’s bosom. Apathy had passed, and the flood-gates of grief were open. It was her first great sorrow, her first vision of the infinite pathos of life, the first unbending of her soul before the Eternal Being whose face shines forth on those who suffer. She grew comforted by her own sorrow. Many hours she spent wandering in the woods, or lying hid in the deep June grass, watching the blood ebb from her soul’s side. Then an invisible hand seemed to touch the wound and stanch the flow. Her old vitality returned, a calm and quiet melancholy tinged with a wistful wisdom. At night she would lie by the window in her cushioned chair and stare at the sky for hours together. No season of sleep was it, but a solemn vigil, even beneath the hill of Calvary.
The third phase succeeded a mysterious and more subtle mood in every sense. She remembered Gabriel’s kiss upon her lips. Her yearning for the love he had given her kindled and increased. It was a mute and piteous stretching forth of hands, a great cry of the heart, a thirst of the soul for the wine of life. A strange hope leaped up within her, a passionate prophecy of comradeship that was to be. She had a dream that they would bear much anguish together, face the world and its perils hand-in-hand. She could have rejoiced with pale Francesca at that season, drifting through woes that were divine, when the arms of a lover circled her soul.
Meanwhile, with Gabriel the car of life rumbled upon rugged highways. From mere scorn had arisen sardonic bickerings and the like. It was soon plain to the man that the two women, wife and friend, were in league for the tempting of his anger. It was even as though they had plotted to goad him to some incriminating act of violence. A campaign seemed to have been conceived against his patience.
Torch was set to tinder at last one evening after dinner. Whether there had been conspiracy in the event or no Gabriel could never tell. Cynicisms had been exchanged during the meal. After dessert Gabriel had retired straightway to the library, and Ophelia had followed him, pale and stiff about the lips, a woman bent on battle. She had come by some excuse for an attack upon the man, and her tongue soon set the scene ablaze. Hot words were exchanged, taunts, recriminations, and the like. As a climax the woman overturned a writing-table with a crash at her husband’s feet, flung defiance in his face, and left him.
Ophelia had compassed the necessary finale. As she passed back up the passage towards the hall, she tore her dress at the neck, and, taking the substance of her left arm between her teeth, she bruised the flesh till purple blood showed under the skin. Meeting no witnesses upon the way, she disordered her hair as she climbed the oak stairway, and beat her mouth with her fist so that her lips bled.
By some foreordained coincidence Miss Mabel Saker was looking over the contents of her jewel-case in the “blue bedroom.” Moreover, this particular room was set directly above the library, and any occupant thereof could hear in measure what passed below. Hence, when Ophelia Strong entered to her friend, that lady received her with a shocked pity that was zealously dramatic.
“Dear, what has happened?”
By way of retort Gabriel’s wife displayed to her indignant confidante her bruised arm and bleeding mouth.
“The cad; the mean coward!” was Miss Saker’s cry. “I heard him storming at you. How did it happen?”
“He lost his temper,” said the wife.
“By Jove, if I were only a man!”
“I feel faint, Mab.”
“The brute! Let me bathe your mouth.”
Angelic ministerings to misfortune ensued. Smelling-salts, eau-de-cologne, and much sympathy were forthcoming. Ophelia lay back in a lounge-chair breathing spasmodically, with certain hysteric symptoms, while Miss Saker hung over her and bathed her face.
Ophelia clasped her arm about her friend’s neck and drew her face down close to hers. Her disordered hair had fallen upon her shoulders, a pathetic web of gold.
“You will remember this, Mab,” she said, significantly.
“Should I forget it, dear! If James Maltravers only knew!”
The woman in the chair shuddered and hid her face in the other’s bosom.
“Can I stay here much longer?” she said.
“Good Heavens, no! He will be killing you next. There must be an end to this.”
It may easily be imagined that no apologies were forthcoming from Gabriel for the affair, seeing that he was ignorant of the incidents chronicled above. The quarrel in the library, a mere tumult of words, had arisen like a dust-storm in the desert, sudden and without warning. The man had lost his dignity for the moment under the lash of the woman’s tongue, though even his involuntary descent to her level had not justified, in his estimation, her exhibition of feline spite. He was utterly innocent of the suspicion that she had deliberately tricked him into a display of violence. She was too subtle for the man with her glittering cleverness, perilous as a Spanish dagger.
The following day Gabriel had political business in Rilchester and drove off early in his dog-cart, purposing to be home before the evening dinner-hour. Ophelia and Mabel Saker were breakfasting in the “blue room,” and Gabriel did not see his wife that morning. He was in a dismal mood enough, harassed by shapeless fancies, haunted by the pale face and the shimmering hair of the woman who held his heart. He had fathomed hour by hour the gulf of gloom she had left within his life. The world stood at June, the man’s mood at December.
It was even remarked that day by certain of his political confrères that he seemed depressed and burdened beyond his strength. He appeared, in fact, like a man overshadowed by some secret shame. His conversation had none of the subtle and half-cynical adroitness that had characterized it of old; it was limp and listless, a blunted weapon wielded by a weary hand. His intellect seemed out of gear, wayward, languid, masterless. Occasionally a sparkle of enthusiasm shone through the preoccupied mask of melancholy. It was the common dictum of his acquaintances that “young Strong was out of health.”
He drove homeward late in the afternoon, with the sky a peerless pavilion of gold above his head. A preternatural peace seemed to weigh upon the lids of the day. In the depths of her green valley the Mallan lay with her glittering coils torpid in the sun. The trees took no breath. The clouds stood statuesque upon the hills.
A prophetic sense of evil awoke in the man’s mind as he climbed the hill towards his home. He saw the gray chimneys rising above the green, the shrubberies dusky upon the hill-side, gardens gleaming like painted glass. The place looked peaceful as sleep, a home to love and to be loved in, a haunt for elfish children, a calm refuge from the world.
As he drove in by the gate the gardener’s children ran out from the lodge and stood staring at him with credulous blue eyes. He tossed them some coppers as he drove by, smiling to himself half bitterly. All about him were sun-kissed trees, flowers brilliant in the sun. The scent of new-mown hay came from the meadows. There were pigeons cooing on the great, white wooden columbary behind the house.
In the hall the butler met him, salver in hand. The man had a loose and inquisitive smirk upon his lips which he attempted to stiffen. His small gray eyes stared into space and yet seemed to observe everything.
“Mrs. Strong and Miss Saker have left for Gabingly Castle, sir,” he said, snapping out his words with a clean-shaven gravity.
“When are they expected back, James?”
“Taken luggage with them, sir.”
“Luggage!”
“Madame desired me to hand you this letter.”
The man watched his master cross the hall and disappear in the direction of the library “The fur ’ill fly,” he remarked, depositing the salver on the hall table. With a significant clucking of his tongue he retired to the kitchen quarters and described how “the gov’ner had looked sick as a turnip.”
In the library, with its gilded tiers of books, its panelling, and its archaic gentleness of atmosphere, a torn envelope lay at Gabriel’s feet. He was standing by the window holding the sheet of scented paper close to his eyes, like one whose sight is feeble.
The epistle ran as follows:
“After your gross disloyalty and your cruel insolence I can remain under your roof no longer. I have returned to my father.Your Wife.”
“After your gross disloyalty and your cruel insolence I can remain under your roof no longer. I have returned to my father.
Your Wife.”
When Gabriel had read the letter twice, he folded it up slowly and placed it in the breast-pocket of his coat. Walking to a rosewood cabinet, he chose a cigar with peculiar deliberation, lit it, and, seating himself in the window-seat, smoked with a vicious pensiveness, puffing out smoke volubly and watching it die into the gloom of the room.
THE gloomy gate of life is not ever the least auspicious; from beneath its arch the warrior beholds a braver dawn gleam on the pinnacles of a sublimer city. Fate is no basilisk when stared betwixt the brows. Courage kindles at the clarion cry of death.
For the first season of his life Gabriel grew single and strong of purpose. Affectations, dreams fell away like the last rotting leaves from a tree in spring. He was the man at last, courageous, uncringing, standing alone for simple truth and honor. Primitive tones inspired him, the deep, rich instincts of the heart. He had lived an indolent and facile visionary. Now there was need of manhood and the sword.
He sallied early for Gabingly that morning, riding his favorite black mare, briskly breasting the hills. The sky was clear and vigorous; the green slopes stood out against the azure and the sunny bosoms of the clouds. Honeysuckle clambered in the hedgerows. A light breeze laughed through the rising corn, but could not stir the weightier passion of the woods.
Avoiding Saltire by the cross-roads, and casting a long, meditative stare at the hall, ruddy amid its trees, Gabriel took a grass-grown track that wound westward over the hills. Dense thickets of pines and larches hedged this antique roadway with primeval gloom. The sunlight filtered through in showers, staining the vivid grass with gold. At Beacon Point the man drew rein, turned the mare that he might gaze over towards the sea. A cataract of foliage thundered at his feet. Far to the east Cambron Head towered purple over a shimmering sea. Beneath him the great valley with its woods and pastures stretched solemn and silent in the sun. Yonder the red roofs of Saltire lay like rusty shields amid the green. Farther still the Mallan streaked the lowlands. Even in the distance he could mark the blue hills above Rilchester, with their mist of tufted trees.
Gabriel held on again with brow furrowed and eyes at gaze. The quest was no idle venture, the issue no gay joust of sentiments. He rode to recover his own conscience and the peace of the woman whom he loved. Even as he brooded the Georgian shadows of Gabingly rose up amid the pines, looming to his tragic idealism like the sullen walls of some perilous hold. Therein sat this Brunhilde, this Icelandic woman of the cold, proud face, strong beyond the strength of men, beautiful, yet iron of soul. He wondered what would chance between them that morning, whether he would have speech with her or no.
The park gates stood open prosaicly enough, barriers of iron swinging upon pillars of brick, under the patronage of half a score of gigantic elms. The gravel drive wound primly through the home park with its austere trees standing in solemn isolation, like proud Pharisees drawing the blue borders of their robes from chance defilement. There were a few deer couched or grazing amid the green lagoons of bracken. As for the castle, its leaden eyes seemed to stare obtusely at creation; it was a purely plutocratic edifice, a bovine building, dull and blank of face.
Gabriel dismounted on the gravel semilune before the castle, and buckled his mare’s bridle to a horse-post set beside an old stone mounting-block. His hand was on the iron bell-pull when Blanche Gusset, in sporting attire, appeared in the porch. The meeting was mutually unexpected. The girl in the check skirt colored even more healthily than usual, and her fat fingers tightened on the riding-switch she carried in her hand. The terrier that followed her sniffed tentatively at the man’s leggings.
“You—here!”
Gabriel went to the core of the problem with the composure of a man utterly in earnest.
“I have ridden to see Ophelia.”
“So I observe.”
The pair eyed each other for a moment with the concentrated alertness of wrestlers watching for a “catch.” Blanche had speedily recovered from her temporary embarrassment. Nervousness did not bulk largely amid her virtues; nor was she a person who boasted a delicate tact in her methods of dealing with friends. It was she who went in boldly and opened the tussle.
“Gabriel Strong,” she said, squaring her shoulders and looking him fairly in the face, “I never thought you would turn out a blackguard.”
The man winced but kept his temper.
“You have made up your mind somewhat hastily,” he said to her.
“By Jove! yes, we have that,” she retorted. “The whole tale has come out. Upon my soul, Gabriel, I never thought you would turn out such a cur.”
There was a species of hearty frankness even in her recriminations, a bluff and ruddy brevity that smacked of stall and stubble.
“May I ask you to tell my wife that I am here,” was the man’s reply.
“Drop that polite bluff, then,” said the girl.
“You will not gainsay me the justice of being suffered to proclaim the truth.”
Blanche Gusset twisted her broad red mouth into a puckered expression of incredulity.
“Some one has poisoned the porridge,” she remarked, “or half the county’s a liar. Pity the governor’s out; he would have had something to say on the matter,” and she smote her leg with her switch.
The man’s courage flashed out pathetically and appealed her pity.
“For God’s sake listen to reason,” he said; “what Ophelia has been told I cannot imagine. I can swear the whole is a wicked myth. You were a good friend to me once; let me see Ophelia now. I swear I have nothing to say that can hurt her heart.”
The girl in the check skirt scrutinized him with an air of pity and partial scorn. Her creed was more a man’s, florid and unimaginative. Life did not revolve for her, but hung, a mere sphere of prejudice, displaying one face alone to her uncompromising vision. After a moment’s thought she turned on her heel and offered to serve as herald in the parley.
“I will turn in and see,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Keep to the doorstep. You do not cross our threshold unless Phyl gives the word. Stand tight for ten minutes.”
Gabriel paced the gravel, morose and irritable. Possibly he had not prophesied so prosaic a prologue. Blanche Gusset was not a woman capable of moving to the rhythm of blank verse. The man realized from this one incident that the Cerberus of popular prejudice bayed to him from its kennel. There was to be no splendid gloom in this descent into hades, but vulgar glare and debasing discords.
Blanche Gusset came back to him very speedily. Her steel-tipped shoes clattered on the parquetry of the hall; she still carried her little switch. There was a compressed yet juvenile severity upon her florid face. It was evident that she felt strongly for her sister, and that her sympathies had ranged themselves against Gabriel in the moil.
“Listen,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Phyl will see you in the drawing-room; you know your way; but mind this—”
The man thrust back his pride and listened to her hectoring with a submissive calm.
“Well?”
“I shall wait in the gallery; if you try any blackguardism, my buck, I’ll have our men up pretty briskly. I shall give them the tip to kick you out of the front door. See?”
Gabriel, white to the lips, bowed to her like an antique aristocrat and desired her to lead on.
“Even a lord’s daughter is not infallible,” he said.
“March,” was her retort.
“I wait for you.”
Man and wife were left alone together in the great salon of the castle, with its gilt panelling and many mirrors. Gabriel, standing by the door, saw Ophelia stretched at half length on a sofa by the open French window. She had a book in her hands, and a table beside her bearing flowers and a confectionery-box. Red cushions pillowed her opulent shoulders. She was dressed in black, with a red rose over her heart and a collar of Venetian lace about her throat.
She glanced up as the man entered, and closed the book in her lap with an affectation of languor. If the sister’s virago-like methods had kindled the man’s temper, Ophelia’s mood chilled him into a pillar of intellect. It was easily discernible that Ophelia had petrified her mind for the ordeal. There was to be no passionate rhetoric, no pleading, no elevation of sentimentalism. The man read her temper as he gazed at her brilliant eyes and firm white face.
“Well?” she said, with a certain flippant hauteur that was admirably assumed.
“I have ridden over to see you.”
“Evidently.”
“I am your husband.”
“A platitude.”
“I have a right to claim some explanation from you for this.”
She smiled very slightly, stretched out a white hand, and chose a chocolate from the box with purposeful deliberation.
“Do not pretend to be ingenuous,” she said; “there is no need for an exchange of confidences. The matter is simple enough; let us keep to crude facts. You have preferred a farm wench to your wife. I cannot see that any explanations are needed.”
Gabriel flushed for the moment, bit his lip, and relapsed into composure.
“I should be glad to know to whom you refer.”
“Please do not ape the simpleton.”
“Answer me this.”
“I believe her name is Gildersedge, or something of the sort.”
“An infamous lie.”
“Is it? My solicitors have advised me differently.”
There was silence a moment between them. The woman lay back on her cushions and watched the man with imperturbable curiosity, infinite satisfaction.
“Do you know what you are doing?” he asked, speaking with peculiar quietness.
“Probably.”
“Ruining the life of an innocent girl.”
“And you?”
“I am telling you the truth.”
“My dear coz, saintliness hardly suits the occasion.”
In the gallery they could hear Blanche pacing to and fro. There was a finer element of tragedy in this silence than any passionate bluster could have boasted. Through the open window the man could see Oriental poppies like a scarlet cloud in bloom at sunset. Their opulent color seemed in contrast to the woman’s pale, firm face.
“For the last time let me tell you,” he said, “that you are wronging the innocent and acting upon the evidence of liars. We are as we ever were. Before God and man, I am your husband.”
For answer she jerked her hand suddenly, and three glittering circlets leaped and shimmered athwart the floor. One, a band of gold, curled and settled at his feet. They were the rings he had given her. He looked at them a moment as they glittered like basilisk eyes in the sun, and then turned to her with a half gesture of despair.
“This, then, is your answer?” he said.
“My answer.”
“For all time?”
“For all time.”
He picked up the marriage-ring, held it in his palm a moment, tossed it aside again with a twinge of scorn.
“Yours be the blame,” he said.
“You are generous, as ever.”
It was in Gabriel’s heart to cast the whole truth in her face even as she had flung the rings at his feet. Yet even in his angry irony he remembered Joan and the peril that was drawing about her name. The strongest faith to her lay in silence.
“Some day you may repent of this,” he said, “for they who believe liars tempt shame in turn. Be assured that I have told you the truth this morning.”
“Thanks,” she retorted as he left her, “let me give you a fragment of advice.”
He looked at her over his shoulder a moment and listened.
“Engage a smart K.C. You will need him. Do not forget it.”
THE sky was suffused with opalescent vapors rising from the golden bowl of the sea. Joan Gildersedge, with a page of Spenser unread upon her lap, was sitting under the pine-tree on the half-moon of grass in Burnt House garden, looking out towards the south. It was her especial curtilage, her garden of gems, arabesques of brilliant color burning amid the green. Towards the west a screen of purple clematis ran like a frieze above a bank of fuchsias, red, amethyst, and white. Over the warm bosom of the low brick wall a passion-flower clambered to hear the rhapsodies of a rose. To the east Canterbury-bells, a gracious company, wove wondrous textures of purple and snow. Amid the enamelled faces of a myriad pansies, night-stock dowered the evening with a subtle fragrance.
Joan’s heart had opened to the thousand voices of her flowers. She was in a golden mood, sad, yet happy—the mood of one who lives in dreams and forgets the present. The greater burden of the day had been passed with her father; she had found him more human for the nonce, less gray and barbarous. Bodily he was much like a withered leaf that had mouldered to a lacelike skeleton, a traceried image of itself. During the early summer he had weakened, maintaining none the less his mercenary acumen of mind, that like a red spark fed still upon the rotten tinder of the flesh. He was much abed now; his cottages at Rilchester had not tumbled their rents into his leather bag these many months. An agent fingered the blue-leaved ledger and harvested pence in that provincial slum.
Joan had been reading of Britomart, that woman queening it in the pages of romance. This British heroine had ever had a strong hold on the child Joan’s heart, an idyllic foster-mother, pure and fearless. Even now, in the deeper wisdom of her wounded days, the girl had found in this fair woman of legendary lore a sister quickened with a kindred sympathy.
Perhaps there was a suggestive moral in the legend that had startled Joan like the sudden voice of one singing in the woods. She remembered that Artegal the Just had proved vincible, a god of clay with a heart of gold. Despite his manhood, he had fallen into unheroic jeopardy, even to the quaint ignominy of wearing women’s gear. And it had needed Britomart to end his shame.
Whatever mysterious philosophies were moving in her heart, the girl was doomed to discover scope for heroism that evening. Up the narrow lane circling the hill-side a man was urging a jaded horse, slouching low in the saddle. The western light smote upon his face, making it white and ethereal, like the face of one who had risen from a sick-bed.
Drawing rein before the iron gate and rolling out of the saddle, he tethered his horse and passed up the darkening drive. The gravel complained beneath his feet. Reaching the porch, he set the bell clanging through the solitary house, mocking, metallic laughter that died in a rattling chuckle. Anon, as he stamped restlessly to and fro, the door opened, and Mrs. Primmer’s stony face stared at him out of the dusk of the hall. Gabriel saw her lips tighten as she looked him over. There was a new significance for him in the steel of her observant eyes. She snapped the words out of her narrow mouth, forestalling his question with an intelligence that was almost insolent.
“Miss Joan’s in the garden.”
The man turned away with a clinched jaw and a hot color. There was something sinister even in the tone of the woman’s voice, a hint at knowledge that brimmed his cup of bitterness the more. The children of Mammon had proved wiser than he in their generation. Like an idealist in hades, he was mocked by the scoffing shades of the grossly wise dead.
Gabriel passed the rank lawns, the arbor of yews, and the tall acacia, glanced at the dial-plate, ineffectual at that hour of the decline. Plunging through Joan’s arch of roses, he came by a bank of cypresses to the full mountainous glory of the west. Clouds, red of bosom, sailed solemn over the sea. The valley beneath was veiled in splendor.
On the half-circle of grass he saw Joan sitting with the book in her lap, her face turned from him towards the west. The boughs of the pine-tree overshadowed her. Her dress ran a faint blue streak in the grass. He stood and watched her a moment, shading his eyes with his hand, with an expression half of despair upon his face. He was a coward no longer in the meaner sense, yet his heart sickened when he remembered the words that were poised upon his tongue.
Crossing the lawn he called the girl by name. She turned with a strange swiftness, rose up from under the tree like one wakened out of a dream. Her face was afire, her eyes full of a sudden recognition. It was easy to define the feeling that was uppermost in her heart.
They stood some paces apart and looked at each other in silence. The girl’s attitude was that of wistful appeal, generous ignorance thirsting for the truth. Gabriel saw her standing before him, enshrined by the gold of the west, pure and infinitely gracious. The very beauty of her innocence smote his courage as with fire. All the glib and tragic pathos he had conjured into his heart was shrivelled, parched into inarticulate fear. The horror of sacrilege possessed him. He stood as one palsied, stricken mute like Zacharias by his vision in the temple.
“Gabriel.”
Of a sudden she ran to him, stooping and looking in his face. From the warmth of her thoughtless joy she had gone white, strangely earnest and eager. Gazing in Gabriel’s eyes, she read the fear therein, the haggard, strained look upon his face that declared deep dread within.
“Gabriel,” she said again, almost in a whisper.
“Ah, do not look at me like this.”
“What is it—tell me?”
“The worst.”
“Ah no, not that!”
He threw up his arm with a gesture of anguish and covered his face.
“My God, how can I tell you the truth!”
Joan caught him by the wrists, drew down his hand, stared in his face, one deep, tragic look. The man’s eyes shirked hers. His lips were quivering like the lips of one in peril of tears.
Joan drew a sudden, deep breath, loosed her hold, and stood back from him with her hands pressed over her heart.
“Gabriel.”
He could not answer her. Her words came to him with a passionate breathlessness born of despair.
“I understand—yes, yes, do not speak—I can bear it—let it come slowly. I understand now.”
She stood with her head thrown back, her throat showing, her eyes closed as in prayer. Her face was as pale as the petals of the passion-flower upon the wall. Gabriel, with lips twitching, paced to and fro like one in physical anguish. A hand of ice seemed contracting about his heart. Suddenly, as by some superhuman instinct, he fell down with a half-muffled cry at the girl’s feet, caught her by the knees, and buried his face in her dress.
“Joan, Joan.”
She still stood with eyes closed, her body quivering, her hands over her heart.
“Joan, curse me, for God’s sake curse me!”
“No, no.”
“That I should have brought this upon you!”
“No, no.”
“Curse me.”
She slipped suddenly to her knees as though her soul failed her, wound her arms about the man’s neck, and hid her face upon his shoulder. They kneeled thus for some moments, wrapped in each other’s arms like two children. Neither spoke. It was a merging of their common woe into one deep flux of silent sympathy.
The fall of tears on her cheek roused Joan, like the touch of a child’s hand bestirs a mother. She lifted her head, held the man at arm’s-length, looked in his face with a great flash of womanly tenderness.
“Gabriel.”
“Girl—”
“Weep not for me.”
“You shame me too utterly.”
“Ah no, do not think that of me. God knows, I shall help you by being strong.”
She passed her hand over his forehead, smiled with an infinite wistfulness, lifted up her mouth to his, and kissed him.
“Courage,” she said.
For the first time he looked in her eyes, steadily, yet with an incredulous awe that was not of earth. Had Christ spoken He could not have breathed a diviner love.
“You shame me,” was all he said.
“No, no.”
“What am I, that you should treat me thus?”
“Ah, is it so strange?”
“It is marvellous, beyond belief.”
She put his hands from her very gently, rose up, and stood at her full height, looking out towards the sea. The blood had risen again from her heart; her lips were no longer tremulous; her eyes shone more bright with hope. Gabriel watched her, holding close under the pine-tree so that he stood in shadow, while Joan breathed in the sun. The scene was figurative to him of her finer beauty of soul.
“Gabriel,” she said at last, turning her head so that he saw her pure, strong profile and then the sunlight in her eyes.
“I am listening.”
“Can you believe me? but I had half prayed for this.”
“Joan!”
“It is the truth.”
He left the shadows of the tree and stood again at the girl’s side. His fingers touched Joan’s. Standing hand in hand, they looked out over the sea at the sun sinking in a whorl of lambent fire.
“I am no longer afraid.”
“Nor I, save for your sake.”
“Ah, Gabriel, what is sacrifice but love transfigured?”
The clouds were paling in the west; a glamour of light still poured upward into the heavens.
“Had I been less a fool,” he said, “I could have saved all this. Thank God, I am no longer clay, to be thumbed by circumstance!”
“And yet,” she said, with a deep inrush of heroism.
“Well?”
“I would not have had it otherwise. It is the fire that refines and tempers. It is by battle that we overcome the world.”
“Yes, men still need the sword.”
“Well spoken.”
“I draw mine for our liberty, your honor.”
THE master of Saltire Hall was a hard man, a man of steady nerve and unbending obstinacy. His brain was as a granite-plinthed banking-house, his soul a delicately designed machine for testing the current gold of the realm. Provided an argument bulked short by five grains in his estimation, he would toss it aside with an abrupt and hard-mouthed confidence that abhorred sentiment.
Walled within his materialism, he yet believed himself to be religious, his creed being a species of Mosaic law, practical and eminently rigid. Had fate destined him for an Annas, he would have crucified a Christ with quiet conscience—ay, even with zest. There was nothing spiritual about him in the higher sense; yet he passed as a good man, orthodox and respectable to the last button.
Hence it may be imagined that when Lord Gerald Gusset rode over to Saltire one morning, and proceeded to harangue the ex-tea-merchant on the iniquities of his son, John Strong gaped like a ravaged sepulchre, and discovered no relief in monosyllabic wrath.
Above and before all things the master of Saltire had been ambitious for his son. It was the ambition of a tyrant, a task-master who had conceived the erection of a social pyramid. He had thought to pinnacle his son on the summit of this ambition, to make of him a fashionable anachronism, a member of a New Nobility coroneted by commerce. It was the dream of a materialist, of a man who trusted in his gold.
John Strong’s wrath may be pictured when he beheld this excellent edifice crumbling before his eyes. Grim man that he was, he was overwhelmed for the instant, beaten to his knees, threatened as with social bankruptcy. His fibre, however, was not of the willow. With twisted branches he stood to the storm, and shook out anathemas at the cloud that had given it birth. He turned iconoclast against his own ambition, and prepared to tear down with his own hands the idol that had disgraced his pride. Lacking any elasticity of sentiment, he was the more incensed against Gabriel, his son.
The morning after his reunion with Joan Gildersedge, Gabriel took horse and rode for Saltire to see his father. He was ignorant as to Lord Gerald’s previous visit and the insurrection of John Strong’s ambitious prejudices. Gabriel was in a sanguine mood. Joan’s spirit had borne him above himself; her love like a golden banner beaconed him from the hills. Chivalry stirred in his blood. His poetic pessimism had fallen from him like the bonds of a witch damsel broken by the hand of a saint.
He rode through Saltire village with his chin high and his horse well in hand. The few sleepy folk idling about the street gaped at him with an apathetic curiosity. He passed James Marjoy rolling along in his gig, a red carnation in his button-hole and his stethoscope hanging from his pocket. The doctor gave him a curt nod and stared blankly into space. By the church the Rev. Jacob Mince eyed the horseman under the brim of his black hat, and turned from him with a pharisaical dignity. Gabriel tilted his chin more loftily towards the stars, put his shoulders back, touched his horse with the spurs.
Threading the park, a slumbering Arcady, he came, by the three sun-burnished fish-ponds, to the dusky edge of the Saltire garden. A wicket-gate closed a grass-path that delved into the green. Gabriel saw a streak of white amid the bushes and a hand that waved to him with quick appeal.
“Gabriel!”
The man dismounted, threw the reins over the fence, and turned to the gate. Judith stood there with her hand upon the latch, her bronze hair brilliant in the sun. She was in white, fair as a magnolia in bloom, her eyes preternaturally dark in her pale and wistful face.
“Gabriel, I must speak to you.”
He met her very calmly, with the strength gotten of his rehallowed love. There was no distrust upon her face, only a sorrowful foreboding, a fear for that which was to follow. The man saw that the cup of malice had been emptied at her feet.
“Are you also against me?” he asked her, sadly.
Their hands met. Gabriel went in and stood beside her under the laurels. He seemed taller than of yore, more deep of chest, keener about the eyes. Judith looked at him, a slight color suffusing her face.
“Gabriel, this is terrible.”
“Mere venom,” he said.
“I do not believe these lies,” she answered, with the calm of one whose convictions were carven out of white marble.
“For these words, dear, I thank you.”
“It is these women who have worked this web of slander.”
Brother and sister stood silent a moment, looking at each other like two trustful children.
“What of father?” he asked her, suddenly.
A shadow swept across her face, and her eyes darkened.
“He is reasonless,” she said—“mad, mad.”
“I must renew his sanity.”
“I doubt it—I doubt it.”
“Is he so ungenerous to his own son?”
“Ah, Gabriel, did I not warn you against prejudiced affections and ambitious love. Slander and shame have turned father into a Shylock. He will believe nothing, accept nothing.”
“I must face him,” he said to her, moving on amid the laurels.
“Be wise, weigh well your words.”
Judith followed at his heels. There was great sadness upon her face. Before the path upon the Saltire lawns, she touched Gabriel’s arm and beckoned him back within the shadows of the thicket.
“Gabriel,” she said.
“Sister.”
“Tell me one thing before you go: do you love this Joan Gildersedge?”
He started to hear the hallowed name upon her lips, for he had never heard it save in his own heart.
“I love her as Dante loved Beatrice.”
“And she is worthy?”
“Worthy indeed.”
Judith looked at the sky; her lips moved as in prayer; the sunlight played upon her face.
“Would to God, Gabriel, she had come into your life before.”
“Amen to that.”
“This will prove a fiery trial to you both.”
“Judith, I must stand betwixt her and the world.”
“Well said, brother mine; remember, I am with you ever.”
He kissed her, and passed on alone towards the house.
A path betwixt yews led him to the garden below the terrace, a garden redolent of jasmine, lavender, and rose. A thousand flowers upturned their innocent faces at his feet.
Beyond the balustrading of the terrace, with its rampart of red roses, Gabriel saw his father standing in the sun. The old man turned to meet him as he climbed the steps. There was a ruthlessness upon his stubborn face, an arrogance in his stout, stolid manner. John Strong stood out like a patriarch of old, save that there was but little ardor in his keen, gray eyes.
Without one word to his son, and with no outstretching of the hand, he turned towards the library and entered by the open window, Gabriel following him. John Strong locked the door with the composure of a man sure of his own cause.
Father and son faced each other in the silent room. The antique clock measured the moments with unhurried hand. John Strong was the first to open the debate.
“A nice muddle you have made of life,” was his magnanimous decree.
Gabriel, leaning against the carved pillar of the mantel-shelf, regarded his father with a melancholy smile.
“So you believe these lies,” he said, with a twinge of scorn.
John Strong retreated to the library chair before his escritoire and fingered a quill.
“Let me tell you,” he began, “that you have acted like a scoundrel and a blackguard. Son of mine that you are, the evidence of your guilt is overwhelming. What can you plead to lessen you dishonor?”
“That there is no truth in these allusions.”
“Pah! Am I a fool?”
“Has God made you a judge to read truth or evil in the hearts of others?”
Gabriel walked the room behind his father’s chair. The summer sunshine smote into the room, and the incense of flowers perfumed the atmosphere.
“Will you tell me,” said the son, “upon what evidence you base your condemnation?”
“I am not here, sir, to argue.”
“Nor to damn me—like a tyrant.”
John Strong flashed round and stared in his son’s face.
“Come,” he said; “have you had to do with this bawdy rustic, or have you not? There lies the pith of the problem.”
Gabriel faced him, his shoulders squared.
“I remember that you are my father,” he said.
“A rare privilege, it seems.”
“The instincts of a gentleman—”
“Answer my question.”
“—should keep you from dishonorable abuse.”
John Strong’s temper burst its bonds. He sprang up, overturning his chair in the effort, and stood with his gray eyes gleaming under his bushy brows.
“You young fool!” he said—“insolent even in your folly. For this farm wench you have damned your life, shamed your sister, soiled our name. Think of it, you puppy, to wreck your career for—”
Gabriel’s voice, clear yet passionate, rang out, drowning the elder man’s violent refrain. He stood at his full height, defiant and eager.
“Silence! I have heard enough!”
“By Heaven—”
“Silence! You have bullied me over long; I will turn tyrant at the last.”
John Strong’s broad face grew a shade grayer. He mastered the wrath that streamed to his lips, grew calm and deliberate like the hard man that he was. The spirit of the commercial autocrat rose to chasten him. He spoke slowly and distinctly, fixing his hands on the back of a chair.
“Very well,” he said, “I give you one month to leave Saltire. Your house, your furniture, your very servants are mine. You defy me? Very good; go out and starve.”
Gabriel stood with head thrown back, breathing deeply, staring in his father’s face.
“Let it be so,” he said, calmly.
“The remnant of your quarter’s allowance, two hundred pounds, I leave with you. Not another farthing shall you ever draw out of my pocket. Defy me if you will, but, by God, I’ll drive you out of Saltire!”
Gabriel stood a moment as in thought. Then he turned to the window, unlatched it, and stepped out onto the terrace.
“Let it be so,” he said; “I will be pampered no more that I may act a lie.”
When Gabriel had gone, John Strong walked to his escretoire, took down his son’s photograph that stood thereon. Pursing up his lips, he stared at it calmly, tore it into fragments, and threw them into the empty grate.