Marcia, who had dreamed all night of blue skies flecked with little fragments of white cloud, a soft west wind and sun-bathed meadows, descended the creaking stairs of the Inn at Fakenham, paused upon the broad landing to admire the great oak chests and the cupboards full of china, and then made her way to the coffee room. She found Borden standing at the window, looking down into the country street and talking with a stranger, whom he left, however, at her entrance. They took their places at the breakfast table to which a waiter ushered them.
"Still lucky," her companion remarked, as he watched Marcia pour out the coffee. "It's going to be another delightful day."
She glanced out into the sunlit street. Just opposite was a house almost hidden in clematis, and in the background was a tall row of elm trees amongst the branches of which the rooks were cawing.
"I feel like Rip van Winkle," she whispered. "Do you know that twenty-five years ago I came to what is called a Farmers' Ordinary in this very room? Tell me," she went on, "who was the man with whom you were talking? His face is quite familiar to me."
He glanced around. Thain had taken his place at the further end of the room.
"The man of whom we were speaking the other day," he said,—"David Thain. I think that you have met him, haven't you?"
She nodded.
"Why, of course! I didn't recognise him in tweeds. Whatever is he doing down here? But I know before you can tell me," she continued quickly. "He has taken Broomleys, hasn't he?"
"He told me that he had taken a house in the neighbourhood," Borden replied. "He is going over there this morning to meet the present occupiers."
"It is a very small world," Marcia observed. "I wonder whether he recognised me."
"Without undue flattery, I think I might say that I should think it probable."
"And of course he is imagining all sorts of improper things,—chuckling about them, I dare say, in the way men do. He is being what I suppose he thinks tactful. He never glances in this direction at all. I'll give him a surprise in a minute or two!"
They finished their breakfast, and Marcia crossed towards David's table. As soon as he was conscious of her approach, he rose. He welcomed her, however, without a smile.
"From Trewly's at dinner to the Mandeleys Arms for breakfast," she remarked, smiling. "I feel quite flattered that you remembered me, Mr. Thain."
"Did I show any signs of remembering you?" he asked a little grimly.
"Of course you didn't," she acknowledged. "You ignored even my sweetest bow. That is why I felt sure that you recognised me perfectly."
David remained silent, standing still with an air of complete but respectful patience.
"You have taken a house down here, the Marquis tells me," she continued.
"I have taken Broomleys."
"I hope that you will like the neighbourhood," she said. "I used to live here once myself."
"So I understood."
She was for a moment taken aback, conscious now of a certain definitely inimical attitude in the man who stood looking coldly into her eyes.
"You know all about me, then? That is the worst of getting into 'Who's Who.'"
"I know more about you than I do about your companion, certainly," he admitted.
She laughed mockingly. To a downright declaration of war she had no objection whatever.
"That is Mr. Borden, who publishes my stories," she told him. "I don't suppose you read them, do you?"
"I am not sure," he replied. "I read very little modern fiction, and I never look at the names of the authors."
"Then we must take it for granted," she sighed, "that my fame is unknown to you. If you should see the Marquis before I do, please tell him that he was entirely wrong about the best route here. His advice has cost us nearly thirty miles and a punctured tire. You won't forget?"
"Certainly not," he promised.
She turned away with a little nod of farewell, to which David's response was still entirely formal. Left alone in the room he resumed his breakfast, finished it with diminished appetite, and within a few minutes was speeding through the country lanes in his great Rolls-Royce car. The chauffeur sat a little uneasily in his place. It was very seldom that his master showed such signs of haste. In a quarter of an hour they were in the avenue of Mandeleys. Instead of turning to the right, however, to Broomleys, he took the turning to the Abbey and pulled up short when within a hundred yards of the house.
"Wait here for me," he directed. "If you see another car coming up, blow your horn."
He walked across the smooth, ancient turf, stepped over the wire fence and raised the latch of Richard Vont's cottage gate. His uncle, a little disturbed, came hastily down the garden path. His clothes were stained with clay, and the perspiration was on his forehead. David looked at him in surprise.
"Working so early?"
Vont nodded.
"You forget," he said, "that this is not early for me. All my life I have risen with the sun and gone to bed with it. Come inside, David. I'll get this muck off my hands. You spoke of the afternoon."
"I came direct from the village," David replied, as he followed his uncle into the house. "I came because I thought you would like to know that there is another visitor on the way to see you."
Richard Vont looked round and faced his nephew. His shirt was open at the throat, his trousers were tied up with little pieces of string. In whatever labour he had been engaged, it had obviously been of a strenuous character. He wiped the perspiration from his forehead.
"What's that, David?" he demanded. "A visitor?"
"Marcia is at the Mandeleys Arms," David told him. "I am taking it for granted that she is on her way to see you."
Vont turned deliberately away, and David heard his heavy feet ascending the staircase. In a few moments he called downstairs. His voice was as usual.
"Step round this afternoon, lad, if you think it's well."
David passed out of the little garden, crossed the strip of park, and, taking the wheel, drove slowly round by the longer route to Broomleys. He passed before the front of the Abbey—a mansion of the dead, with row after row of closed blinds, masses of smokeless chimneys, and patches of weeds growing thick in the great sweep before the house. Even with its air of pitiless desertion, its severe, semi-ecclesiastical outline, its ruined cloisters empty to the sky on one wing, its unbroken and gloomy silence, the place had its atmosphere. David slackened the speed of his car, paused for a moment and looked back at the little creeper-covered cottage on the other side of the moat. So those two had faced one another through the years—the Abbey, silent, magnificent, historical, with all the placid majesty of its countless rows of windows; its chapel, where Mandeleys for generations had been christened and buried,—at its gates the little cottage, whose garden was filled with spring flowers, and from whose single stack of chimneys the smoke curled upwards. Even while he watched, Richard Vont stood there upon the threshold with a great book under his arm.
David shivered a little as he threw in the clutch, passed on round the back of the building and through the iron gates of the ancient dower house. He felt a little sigh of relief as he pulled up in front of the long, grey house, in front of which Sylvia Laycey was waiting to receive him. She waved her hand gaily and looked with admiration at the car.
"They are all here, Mr. Thain," she exclaimed,—"Mr. Merridrew and father and your own builder. Come along and quarrel about the fixtures. I thought I had better stay with you because dad loses his temper so."
David descended almost blithely from his car. He was back again in a human atmosphere, and the pressure of the girl's fingers was an instant relief to him.
"I am not going to quarrel with any one," he declared. "I shall do exactly what Mr. Muddicombe tells me—and you."
She was a very pleasant type of young Englishwoman—distinctly pretty, fair-skinned, healthy and good-humoured. Notwithstanding the fact that their acquaintance was of the briefest, David was already conscious of her charm.
"You'll find me, in particular, very grasping," she declared, as they entered the long, low hall. "I want to make everything I can out of you, so that daddy and I can have a real good two months in London. I don't believe you know the value of things a bit, do you—except of railways and those colossal things? Cupboards, for instance? Do you know anything about cupboards? And are you going to allow us anything for the extra bathroom we put in?"
"Well, I am rather partial to bathrooms," he confessed, "and I should hate you to take it away with you."
She drew a sigh of relief.
"So long as you look upon the bathroom matter reasonably, I am quite sure we shan't quarrel. Tell me about Lady Letitia, please? Is she quite well—and the Marquis and all of them? And when are they coming down?"
"They are quite well," he told her, "and Lady Letitia sent you her love. They talk of coming down almost at once."
"I do hope they will," she replied, "because when we leave here dad and I are going to stay for a week or so with some friends quite near. There! Did you hear that noise? That's daddy stamping because he is getting impatient."
"Then perhaps—" David suggested.
"I suppose we'd better," she interrupted. "Be lenient about the bathroom, please. And if you could manage not to notice that the dining room wants papering, you'd be an angel. This way."
David proved himself such a very satisfactory incoming tenant that the Colonel insisted upon his staying to lunch and hastened off into the cellar to find a bottle of old Marsala, of which he proposed that they should partake with a dry biscuit before Mr. Merridrew's departure. Sylvia sank into a low chair with a little exclamation of despair.
"Now daddy's done it!" she exclaimed. "Are you hungry, Mr. Thain?"
"Not very—yet," David replied, glancing at his watch. "You see, it's only half-past eleven."
"Because," she said impressively, "there are exactly three rather skinny cutlets in the house. All the servants left this morning—'all', I said. We only have two!—and an old woman from the village is coming up at half-past twelve to cook them. One was for me and two were for father. Perhaps you will tell me what I am to do?"
David smiled.
"Well," he observed, "I was distinctly asked to luncheon, and I accepted. Haven't you anything—"
"Anything what?" she asked patiently.
"Tinned in the house, or that sort of thing?" he suggested, a little vaguely.
"Of course we haven't," she replied. "Don't you know that we are all packed up and leaving to-morrow? It's the biggest wonder in the world that we have any biscuits to eat with that precious Marsala."
"Why not," he proposed hopefully, "put on your hat and motor into Fakenham with me? I suppose there is a butcher's shop there. We can buy something together."
She sprang to her feet.
"And you can choose exactly what you like!" she exclaimed. "Mr. Thain, you are delightful! That is the best of you Americans. You are full of resource. I shan't be a minute getting a hat and a pair of gloves."
David strolled about the gardens of his new demesne until Sylvia reappeared. She had pinned on a blue tam-o'-shanter and was wearing a jersey of the same colour.
"I shall love a spin in your car!" she exclaimed. "And you drive yourself, too. How delightful!"
They swung off through the more thickly wooded part of the park, driving in places between dense clumps of rhododendrons, and coming unexpectedly upon a walled garden, neglected, but brilliant with spring and early summer flowers.
"Isn't it queer to have a garden so far away from the house," the girl remarked, "but I dare say you've heard that the late Marquis of Mandeleys was mad about underground passages. There is one existing somewhere or other to the summer house in that garden from the Abbey, and lots of others. I am not at all sure that there isn't one to Broomleys."
"Haven't you been afraid sometimes lest the ghosts of the dead monks might pay you an unexpected visit?"
She shook her head.
"They always held the funeral services in the chapel," she explained, "but the burying place is at the side of the hill there. You can see the Mandeleys vault from here."
"And the cypress trees," David pointed out. "I wonder how old they are."
"The American of you!" she scoffed. "You ought to love Mandeleys—and Broomleys. Everything about the place is musty and ancient and worn out. You know the Marquis, don't you?"
"Slightly," David assented.
"Is he really human," she asked, "or is he something splendidly picturesque which has just stepped out of one of the frames in his picture gallery? I can never make up my mind. He is so beautiful to look at, but he doesn't look as though he belonged to this generation, and why on earth they ever used to call him 'The Wicked Marquis' I can't imagine. I've tried him myself," she went on ingenuously, "in no end of ways, but he treats me always as though I were some grandchild, walking on stilts. Of course you're in love with Lady Letitia?"
"Must I be?"
"But isn't it all absolutely preordained?" she insisted, "in fact, it's almost depressingly obvious. Here are the Mandeleys estates, the finest in Norfolk, mortgaged up to the hilt, the Abbey shut up, the Marquis and all of them living on credit, the family fortunes at their lowest ebb. And here come you, an interesting American stranger, with more millions than the world has ever heard of before. Of course you marry Lady Letitia and release the estates!"
"Do I!" he murmured. "Well, it seems plausible."
"It has to be done," she decided, with a sigh. "It's a pity."
"Why?"
She shook her head.
"We mustn't flirt. We should be interfering with the decrees of Providence.—What an interesting-looking woman! You know her, too."
They passed Marcia and her companion, about half-way to Fakenham. Marcia bowed cheerfully and looked with interest at Sylvia.
"I know her very slightly," David admitted.
"She doesn't belong to these parts," Sylvia said. "We've lived here for nearly seven years, you know, and I know every one for miles round, by sight."
"She came originally from somewhere in the neighbourhood, I believe," David observed.
"Tell me everything about her, please?" his companion demanded. "I am a born gossip."
"You finish with the romance of Mandeleys first," he suggested evasively.
"Well, we've finished that, so far as you are concerned," she said, "but as soon as you have rescued the family and the wedding bells have ceased ringing, you'll find yourself faced with another problem. Did you notice a queer little cottage, right opposite the Abbey?"
"Of course I did."
"Well, there's an old man sits in the garden there," she went on, "reading the Bible and cursing the Marquis, most of the day. He used to do it years ago, and then he went to America. Now he's come back, and he's started it again."
"And what does the Marquis do about it?" David enquired.
"He can't do anything. The late Marquis made the old man a present of the cottage for saving his life, and they can't take it away from him now. I suppose he must have been really wicked when he was young—I mean the Marquis," she went on, "because, you see, he ran away with that old man's daughter. It's the sort of thing," she went on, "that Marquises are supposed to do in stories, but it doesn't make them popular in a small neighbourhood. Now tell me about the good-looking woman who bowed to you, please?"
"She is the daughter of the man of whom you have been speaking," David told her. "She is the lady with whom the wicked Marquis eloped nearly twenty years ago."
Sylvia's interest was almost breathless.
"You mean to say that you knew the story—you—an American?"
"Absolutely," he replied. "I came into touch with it in a queer way. The old man Vont came back from America on the same steamer that I did. I'll tell you another thing. The wicked Marquis, as you call him, and that lady whom we have just passed, dine together now at least one night a week, and the woman has become quite a famous authoress. She writes under the name, I believe, of Marcia Hannaway."
Sylvia threw herself back in her seat.
"Why, it's amazing!" she declared. "It turns a sordid little village tragedy into a piece of wonderful romance. Perhaps, after all, that is what makes the Marquis seem like a piece of wood to every other woman."
"I have heard it said," David continued, "that he has been entirely faithful to her all his life. Where do I stop, please?"
"Here," she replied, "at this shop. Please come in and choose your own meat. I feel in much too romantic a frame of mind to even know beef from mutton."
David followed her a little doubtfully into the shop.
"Perhaps," he ventured to suggest, "as the nucleus of your meal has already been decided upon—"
"Of course," she interrupted; "cutlets. We want more cutlets. You needn't bother. I'll see about it."
David slipped into the next shop and reappeared with a huge box of chocolates, which he handed over apologetically.
"I am not sure whether you'll find these up to much."
"For the first time," she exclaimed, as she accepted them, "I realise what it must be to be a millionaire! I have never seen such a box of chocolates in my life. Do you mind going over to the grocer's and letting him see me with you?" she went on. "It will be so good for our credit, and his is just one of the accounts we have to leave for a little time. Were you ever poor, Mr. Thain?"
"Poor, but not, alas! romantically so," he confessed. "To be the real thing, I ought to have earned my first few pounds, oughtn't I? You see, I didn't. I was educated by relatives, and when a great chance came my way I was able to take advantage of it. An uncle advanced me a thousand pounds, upon one condition."
"Had you to make him a partner?" she asked, in the intervals of giving a small order at the grocer's.
He shook his head.
"No," he answered gravely, "it wasn't a financial condition. In a way it was something more difficult."
She looked at him curiously.
"Whatever it was," she said, "if you promised, I am quite sure that you would keep your word."
They motored homewards and David was for a few minutes unexpectedly thoughtful. He deliberately approached Broomleys from the back, but even then it was impossible to avoid a distant view of the cottage. He looked towards it grimly.
"Conditions are stern things," he sighed.
"Haven't you kept that one yet?" she asked.
"The time is only just coming," he told her.
She looked up at him pleadingly.
"Don't bother about it now, please," she begged. "This is such a delightful day. And whatever you do, you mustn't let it interfere with your eating three cutlets."
Borden's car came to a standstill in the avenue, and Marcia looked across the strip of green turf towards the cottage with a queer little thrill of remembrance.
"You are sure you won't mind waiting?" she asked, as she sprang down. "If there is any fatted calf about, I'll call you in."
Borden showed her his pockets, bulging with newspapers.
"I shall be perfectly content here," he said, "however long you may be. I shall back the car on to the turf and read."
She nodded, turned away, lifted the latch of the gate and made her way towards the cottage,—curiously silent, and with no visible sign of habitation except for the smoke curling up from the chimney. As she drew nearer to the rustic entrance, she hesitated. A rush of those very sensations at which she had so often gently mocked swept through her consciousness, unsteadying and bewildering her. Mandeleys, imposing in its grim stillness, seemed to be throwing out shadows towards her, catching her up in a whirlpool of memories, half sentimental, half tragical. It was in the little cottage garden where she now stood, and in the woods beyond, that she had wandered with that strange new feeling in her heart of which she was, even at that moment, intensely conscious, gazing through the mists of her inexperience towards the new world and new heaven which her love was unfolding before her. A hundred forgotten fancies flashed into her brain. She remembered, with a singular and most unnerving accuracy, the silent vigils which she had spent, half hidden amongst those tall hollyhocks. She had seen the grey twilight of morning pass, seen the mists roll away and, turret by turret, the great house stand out like some fairy palace fashioned from space in a single night. She had seen the thrushes hop from the shrubberies and coverts on to the dew-spangled lawn, had heard their song, growing always in volume, had seen the faint sunlight flash in the windows, before she had crept back to her room. Another day in that strange turmoil which had followed the coming of her love! She had watched shooting parties assemble in the drive outside, her father in command, she herself hidden yet watchful, her eyes always upon one figure, her thoughts with him. And then the nights—the summer nights—when men and women in evening costume strolled down from the house. She could see their white shirt fronts glistening in the twilight. Again she heard the firm yet loitering step and the quiet, still voice which had changed the world for her. "Is Vont about, Miss Marcia?" she would hear him say. "I want to have a talk with him about the partridge drives to-morrow." She closed her eyes. The smell of the honeysuckle and the early cottage roses seemed suddenly almost stupefying. There were a few seconds—perhaps even a minute—before Vont had donned his brown velveteen coat and issued from the cottage—just time for a whispered word, a glance, a touch of the fingers.—Marcia felt her knees shake as she lingered underneath the porch. She was swept with recalcitrant memories, stinging like the lash of a whip. Perhaps this new wisdom of hers was, after all, a delusion, the old standards of her Calvinistic childhood unassailable. Then, for the first time, she was conscious of a familiar figure. Richard Vont was seated in a hard kitchen chair at the end of the garden, with a book upon his knee and his face turned to Mandeleys. At the sound of her little exclamation he turned his head. At first it was clear that he did not recognise his visitor. He laid down the book and rose to his feet. Marcia came a few steps towards him and then paused. Several very ingenious openings escaped her altogether.
"Father," she began, a little hesitatingly, "you see, I've come to see you. Are you glad?"
He stood looking at her—a man of rather more than middle height but bowed, with silvery hair and a little patch of white whiskers. The rest of his face was clean-shaven, still hard and brown as in his youth, and his eyes were like steel.
"No," he answered, "I am not glad. Since you are here, though, take this chair. I will fetch another while I hear what you have to say."
"Shall we go inside?" she suggested.
He shook his head.
"Your mother lived and died there," he reminded her.
Marcia set her teeth.
"I suppose she walked in the garden sometimes," she said resentfully.
"The garden is different," he declared. "The earth changes from generation to generation, just as the flowers here throw out fresh blossoms and the weeds come and go. But my rooftree stands where it always did. Wait."
He disappeared into the house and returned in a few moments with a chair which he placed a few feet away from Marcia. Then he sat and looked at her steadily.
"So you are Marcia," he said. "You've grown well-looking."
"Marcia—your daughter," she reminded him gently. "Are you going to forget that altogether?"
"Not," he replied, "if you are in need of succour or help, but I judge from your appearance that you need neither. You are flesh of my flesh, as I well know."
"I want nothing from you, father, except a little kindness," she pleaded.
His hands trembled.
"Kindness," he repeated. "That's strange hearing. You are without friends, perhaps? You made some, maybe, and they heard of your disgrace, and they've cast you off?"
She shook her head.
"No, it isn't that at all. I have many friends, and they most of them know my history."
"Friends of your own sort, then!"
Marcia moved uneasily in her chair.
"Father," she said gently, "don't you sometimes think that your views of life are a little narrow? I am very sorry indeed for what I did, inasmuch as it brought unhappiness to you. For the rest, I have nothing to regret."
He was breathing a little harder now.
"Nothing to regret?" he muttered.
"Nothing," she repeated firmly. "For many years the man who took me away from you gave me everything I asked of him in life, everything he promised. He is still willing to do the same. If any change comes into our relations, now or in the future, it will be my doing, not his."
"Meaning," he demanded, "that you've seen the wickedness of it?"
"Meaning nothing of the sort," she replied. "I want you to try and realise, father, if you can, that I have passed into a larger world than you or this little village community here know very much about. I have written books and been praised for them by men whose praise is worth having. There are plenty of perfectly good and well-living people who know what I have done and who are glad to be my friends. There is one who wants to marry me."
Richard Vont looked at her long and steadily. Marcia was, as usual, dressed with extreme simplicity, but her clothes were always good, and economy in boots and hats was a vice which she had never practised. When she told him that she had passed into a world apart from his, he realised it. The only wonder was that she had ever been his daughter!
"To marry you!" he repeated. "It's one of those of your own loose way of thinking, eh? One of those who have forgotten the laws of God and have set up for themselves some graven image in which there's nought of the truth?"
"The man who wishes to marry me, father," she said warmly, "is a man of honour and position. Can't you believe me when I assure you that there is another way of looking at what you consider so terrible? I have been as faithful to my vows as you to your marriage ones. The man whom I am told you still hate has never wavered in his loyalty to me, any more than I have in my fidelity to him. Can't you believe that to some extent, at least, we have sanctified our love?"
James Vont passed his hand a little wearily over his forehead.
"It's blasphemous gibberish that you're talking," he declared. "If you had come back to me, Marcia, in rags and in want, maybe there is something in my heart would have gone, and I'd have taken you and we'd have found a home somewhere far away. But to see you sitting there, soft and well-spoken, speaking of your success, pleased with your life, turns that very hatred you spoke of into fury! You and your learning and your writing of books! Why, you're ignorant, woman, more ignorant than the insects about you. You don't know right from wrong."
"Father," she pleaded—
"Aye, but listen," he went on. "You've children, eh?"
"No," she answered softly.
"No children to bear your shame, eh? And why not?"
She looked for a moment into his eyes, and then away.
"That may be the one weak spot," she confessed.
"The one weak spot!" he repeated bitterly. "Shall I tell you what you are, you women who live cheerfully with the men you sell yourselves to, and defy the laws of God and the teaching of the Bible? You're just wastrels and Jezebels. Ay, and there's the garden gate, Marcia, and my heart's as hard as a flint, even though the tears are in your eyes and you look at me as your mother used to look. It's no such tears as you're shedding as'll bring you back into my heart. Your very prosperity's an offence. You carry the price of your shame on your back and in your smooth speech and in this false likeness of yours to the world you don't belong to. If it's duty that's brought you here, you'd better not have come."
Marcia rose to her feet.
"You're very hard, father," she said simply.
"You're very hard, father," she said simply."You're very hard, father," she said simply.
"You're very hard, father," she said simply."You're very hard, father," she said simply.
"The ways of the transgressors are hard," he replied, pointing still towards the gate. "If you'd come here in shame and humiliation, if you'd come here as one as had learnt the truth, you'd have found me all that you sought. But you come here a very ignorant woman, Marcia, and you leave me a little harder than ever before, and you leave the curses that choke my throat a little hotter, a little more murderous."
His clenched fist was pointing towards Mandeleys, his face was like granite. Marcia turned and left him without a word, opened the gate, walked across the little strip of turf, and half shrank from, half clung to the hand which helped her up into the car.
"Get away quickly, please," she implored him. "Don't talk to me, James. Outside the gates as quickly as you can go!"
He started his engine, and they drove off, through the lodge gates into the country lane, where the hedges were beautiful with fresh green foliage and fragrant with early honeysuckle.
"To London," she begged. "Don't stop—anywhere yet."
He nodded and drove a little faster, his eyes always upon the road. It was not until they had reached the heath country and the great open spaces around Newmarket that a little colour came back into her cheeks.
"It wasn't a success, James," she said quietly.
"I was afraid it mightn't be," he admitted.
"Nothing but a Drury Lane heroine would have moved him," she went on, with an uneasy little laugh. "If I could have gone back in rags, in a snowstorm, with a child in my arms, he'd have forgiven me. As I am now, I am an offence to all that he holds right, and his ideas are like steel cables—you can't twist or bend them."
Borden nodded. He relaxed his speed a little and glanced towards his companion.
"You know what our friend said in that Russian manuscript I lent you," he reminded her: "'The primitive laws are for the primitive world.'"
"But what do we learn, Jim?" she asked him tremulously. "What is its value? Is it sophistry or knowledge? I lived in that little cottage once. I have smiled at the memory of those days so often. I did homely tasks and dreamed of books and learning. To me it seems, although my fingers are bleeding, that I have climbed. And to him—and he looked just like something out of the Bible, Jim—I am nothing more—"
"Don't," he interrupted. "He is of his world and you of yours. You can't work out the sum you are trying to solve, there isn't any common denominator."
"I don't know," she answered, a little pitifully. "There was a single second, as I saw him sitting there with his Bible on his knee and remembered that he was a clean, well-living, honest man, when my heart began to shake. I remembered that he was my father. It seems to me that it is all wrong that there should be any difference between us. I suddenly felt that a brain really didn't count for anything, after all, that all the culture in the world wasn't so beautiful as a single right feeling."
He slackened again the speed of the car. As far as they could see was a great open space of moorland, with flaming bushes of yellow gorse, little clumps of early heather, and, in the distance, a streak of blue from the undergrowth of a long belt of firs. She looked about her for a moment and closed her eyes.
"There," he said, "is one of the simplest phases of beauty, the world has ever given us—flowers and trees, an open space and a west wind. There isn't any one who can look at these things and be happy who isn't somewhere near the right path, Marcia."
She leaned back, her eyes fixed dreamily upon the blue distance.
"Just drive on, please, Jim," she begged.
David ate his three cutlets and, both as regards appetite and in other ways, was a great success at the little luncheon party. Afterwards, they finished the bottle of Marsala under a cedar tree, and whilst the Colonel indulged in reminiscences, Sylvia's eyes rested more than once upon the automobile drawn up before the door. It was quite an adventure in her rather humdrum life, and, after all, there was no reason why a fairy prince shouldn't be an American millionaire and come in a Rolls-Royce.
"I am sure I hope you'll like Broomleys, Mr. Thain," the Colonel said, as David rose to make his adieux. "I am delighted to leave the place in the hands of such a good tenant. It makes one almost sorry to go away when one realises what one is missing in the shape of neighbours, eh, Sylvia?"
Sylvia was unaccountably shy, but she raised her eyes to David's for a moment.
"It is most disappointing," she agreed. "Mr. Thain is such a sympathetic shopper."
David drove off a little gloomily.
"Why the devil couldn't I fall in love with a nice girl like that," he muttered to himself, "instead of—"
He pulled up short, set his heel upon that other vision, and braced himself for the immediate task before him. He drove around the park, drew up outside the cottage, and, descending from the car, approached the low hedge. At the further end of the garden he could hear his uncle's sonorous voice. He was seated in a high-backed chair, the Bible upon his knee, reading to himself slowly and with great distinctness the Ten Commandments. On the ground by his side were the remnants of another chair. As David came up the little path, his uncle concluded his reading and laid down the Bible.
"Bring out a chair and sit with me, David," he invited.
David pointed to the ground.
"Your furniture seems—"
"Don't jest," his uncle interrupted. "That chair I have broken to pieces with my own hands because of the woman who sat upon it not many hours since."
David frowned.
"You mean Marcia?"
"I mean Marcia—the woman who was my daughter," was the stern reply, "the woman of whose visit you warned me."
"Come into the house with me," David begged, turning his back upon Mandeleys. "You sit and look at that great drear building and brood overmuch. I want to talk with you."
Richard Vont rose obediently to his feet and followed his visitor into the little parlour. David looked around him curiously.
"This place seems to have the flavour of many years ago," he said. "Sometimes I can scarcely realise that I have ever eaten my meals off that oak table. Sometimes it seems like yesterday."
"Time passes, but time don't count for much," the old man sighed. "Mary Wells will be up from the village soon, and she'll make us a cup of tea. Sit opposite me, lad. Is there any more news?"
"None!"
"Them shares, for instance?"
"There will be no change in them," David replied. "In two months' time he will know it."
"And he'll have forty thousand pounds to find, eh?—forty thousand pounds which he will never be able to raise!" Richard Vont muttered, his eyes curiously bright. "There isn't an acre of land here that isn't mortgaged over and over again."
"You'll make him a bankrupt, I suppose," David said thoughtfully.
"Ay, a bankrupt!" his uncle repeated, lingering over the word with a fierce joy. "But there's something more as'll fall to your lot, David," he went on,—"something more—and the time's none so far off."
David moved in his chair uneasily.
"Something more?"
"Ay, ay!" the old man assented. "You'll find it hard, my boy, but you'll keep your word. You've got that much of the Vonts in your blood. Your word's a bond with you."
"Tell me," David begged, "about that something more?"
"The time's not yet," his uncle replied. "You shall know, lad, in good season."
David was silent for a moment, filled with nameless and displeasing apprehensions. He was brave enough, prepared to meet any ordinary emergency, but somehow or other the vagueness of the task which lay before him seemed appalling. Outside was Mandeleys, a grim and silent remembrance. Inside the cottage everything seemed to speak of changeless times. The pendulum of the tall clock swung drowsily, as it had swung thirty years ago. The pictures on the wall were the same, the china, the furniture, even its arrangement. And the man who sat in his easy-chair was the same, only that his whiskers and hair were white where once they had been black.
"Uncle," he begged, "let me know the worst now?"
"You'll know in good time and not before," was the almost fierce reply. "Don't weary me to-night, lad," Vent continued, his voice breaking a little. "The day has been full of trials for me. 'Twas no light matter to have a strange woman here—the strange woman, David, that was once my daughter."
David frowned a little.
"Uncle," he said, "I don't wish to pain you, but I am sorry about Marcia."
"You don't need to be, lad. She isn't sorry for herself. She is puffed up with the vanity of her brain. She came here in fine clothes and with gentle manners, and a new sort of voice. She has made herself—a lady! Poor lass, her day of suffering is to come! Maybe I was hard on her, but I couldn't bear the sight of her, and that's the truth. She talked to me like one filled with wisdom. It was me whom she thought the ignorant one. Put Marcia out of your mind, David. We will talk of other things."
David leaned forward in his chair. His eyes were bright, his tone eager.
"Let us have this out, uncle," he begged. "I've been thinking of it—perhaps as much as you lately. They may have been wrong, those two; they may be sinners, but, after all, the world isn't a place for holy people only. The Bible tells you that. For nearly twenty years he has stood by her and cared for her. There has been no meanness, no backing out on his part. He is as much to her to-day as ever he was."
"Ay," his listener interposed scornfully, "she talked that way. Do you reckon that a man and woman who sinned a score of years ago are any the better because they are going on sinning to-day? Faithfulness to good is part of the Word of God. Faithfulness in sin is of the Devil's handing out."
David shook his head.
"I am sorry, uncle," he said earnestly, "I have come to look on these things a little differently. Many years ago, in America, I used to wonder what it was that kept you apart from every one else, kept the smile from your lips, made you accept good fortune or ill without any sign of feeling. I was too young to understand then, but I realise everything now. I know how you denied yourself to send me to school and college. I know how you left yourself almost a beggar when you gave me the chance of my life and trusted me with all your savings. These things I shall never forget."
"One word, lad," Vont interrupted. "It's the truth you say. I trusted you with well-nigh all I had that stood between me and starvation, but I trusted you with it on one condition. Do you mind that condition? We sat outside the little shanty I'd built with my own hands, up in the Adirondacks there, and before us were the mountains and the woods and the silence. We were close to God up there, David. You remember?"
"I remember."
"You'd come hot-foot from the city, and you told me your story. I sat and listened, and then I told you mine. I told you of the shame that had driven me from England, and I told you of the thoughts that were simmering in my mind. As we sat there your wrath was as mine, and the oath which I had sworn, you swore, too. I lent you the money over that oath, boy. Look back, if you will. You remember the night? There was a hot wind—cool before it reached us, though—rushing up from the earth, rushing through the pine trees till they shook and bowed around us; and a moon, with the black clouds being driven across it, looking down; and the smell of the pines. You remember?"
"I remember," David repeated.
"We stood there hand in hand, and there was no one to hear us except those voices that come from God only knows where, and you swore on your soul that you would help me as soon as the time came to punish the man who had blasted my life. In my way you promised—not yours. There should be no will but mine. For this one thing I was master and you were slave, and you swore."
"I swore. I am not denying it," David acknowledged. "Haven't I made a start? Haven't I deceived the man at whose table I sat and laid a plot to ruin him? And I have ruined him! Do you want more than this?"
"Yes!" was the unshaken reply.
"Then what, in heaven's name, is it?" David demanded. "Out with it, for God's sake! I carry this whole thing about with me, like a weight upon my soul. Granted that you are master and I am slave. Well, I've done much. What is there left?"
"That you will be told in due season."
"And meantime," David continued passionately, "I am to live in a sort of prison!"
"You've no need to find it such," the old man declared doggedly.
David sprang to his feet. The time had come for his appeal. The words seemed to rush to his lips. He was full of confidence and hope.
"Uncle," he began, "you must never let a single word that I may say seem to you ungrateful, but I beseech you to listen to me. Life is like a great city in which there are many thoroughfares. It is an immense, insoluble problem which no one can understand. You never open another book except your Bible. You have never willingly exchanged speech with any human being since you left here. In America you shunned all company, you lived in the gloomiest of solitudes. This little corner of the earth is all you know of. Perhaps there is more in life even than that Book can teach you."
"Marcia talked like this," Richard Vont said quietly. "She spoke of another world, a world for cleverer folk than I. Are you going to try and break my purpose, too?"
"I would if I could," David declared fervently. "This man is what his ancestors and his education have made him. He has led a simple, ignorant, and yet in some respects a decent life. He is too narrow to understand any one's point of view except his own. When he took Marcia away, she was the village girl and he the great nobleman. To-day Marcia holds his future in her hands. She is the strong woman, and he is the weak man. She has achieved fame and made friends. She has lived a happy life, she is at the present moment perfectly content. Every promise he made her he has kept. Well, why not let it go at that?"
"So you are another poor child who knows all about this wonderful world of which I am so ignorant," Richard Vont said bitterly. "Yet, my lad, I tell you that there's one great truth that none of you can get over, and that is that sin lives, and there is nothing in this world, save atonement, can wash it out."
"There's a newer doctrine than that, uncle," David insisted. "You talk with the voice of the black-frocked minister who dangles Hell in front of his congregation. There is something else can clear away sin, and the Book over which you pore, day by day, will teach it you, if you know where to look for it. There's love."
"Was it love, then, that brought him down through the darkness to dishonour my daughter?" Vont demanded, with blazing eyes.
"It didn't seem like it, but love must have been there," David answered. "Nothing but love could have kept these two people together all this time, each filling a great place in the other's life. I haven't thought of these things much, uncle, but I tell you frankly, I've read the Bible as well as you, and I don't believe in this black ogre of unforgivable sin. If these two started in wrong fashion, they've purified themselves. I hold that it's your duty now to leave them alone. I say that this vengeance you still hanker after is the eye for an eye and limb for a limb of the Old Testament. There has been a greater light in the world since then."
"Have you done?" Vont asked, without the slightest change in his tone or expression.
"I suppose so," David replied wearily. "I wish you'd think over it all, uncle. I know I'm right. I know there is justice in my point of view."
"I'll not argue with you, lad," his uncle declared. "I'll ask you no'but this one question, and before you answer it just go back in your mind to the night we stood outside my shack, when the wind was blowing up from the valleys. Are you going to stand by your pledged word or are you going to play me false?"
The great clock ticked drearily on. From outside came the clatter of teacups. David walked to the latticed window and came back again. Richard Vont was seated in his high-backed chair, his hands grasping its sides. His mouth was as hard and tightly drawn as one of his own vermin traps, but his eyes, steadfastly fixed upon his nephew, were filled with an inscrutable pathos. David remembered that passionate outburst of feeling on a far-distant night, when the tears had rolled down this man's cheeks and his voice was choked with sobs. And he remembered—
"I shall keep my word in every way," he promised solemnly.
Vont rose slowly to his feet. His knees were trembling. He seemed to be looking into a mist. His hands shook as he laid them on David's shoulders.
"Thank God!" he muttered. "David, boy, remember. This light talk is like an April shower on the warm earth. Goodness and sin are the same now as a thousand years ago, and they will be the same in a thousand years to come. We may pipe a new tune, but it's only the Devil's children that dance to it—sin must be punished. There's no getting over that! Forgiveness later maybe—but first comes punishment."