Beatrice by H. Rider Haggard (page 3)

enough, but her heart beat fast beneath her breast.

“I want to ask you,” he said, speaking slowly and thickly, “if you will be my wife?”

Beatrice opened her lips to speak, then, seeing that he had only paused because his inward emotion checked his words, shut them again, and went on digging little holes. She wished to rely on the whole case, as a lawyer would say.

“I want to ask you,” he repeated, “to be my wife. I have wished to do so for some years, but I have never been able to bring myself to it. It is a great step to take, and my happiness depends on it. Do not answer me yet,” he went on, his words gathering force as he spoke. “Listen to what I have to tell you. I have been a lonely man all my life. At sea I was lonely, and since I have come into this fortune I have been lonelier still. I never loved anybody or anything till I began to love you. And then I loved you more and more and more; till now I have only one thought in all my life, and that thought is of you. While I am awake I think of you, and when I am asleep I dream of you. Listen, Beatrice, listen!–I have never loved any other woman, I have scarcely spoken to one–only you, Beatrice. I can give you a great deal; and everything I have shall be yours, only I should be jealous of you–yes, very jealous!”

Here she glanced at his face. It was outwardly calm but white as death, and in the blue eyes, generally so placid, shone a fire that by contrast looked almost unholy.

“I think that you have said enough, Mr. Davies,” Beatrice answered. “I am very much obliged to you. I am much honoured, for in some ways I am not your equal, but I do not love you, and I cannot marry you, and I think it best to tell you so plainly, once and for all,” and unconsciously she went on digging the holes.

“Oh, do not say that,” he answered, almost in a moan. “For God’s sake don’t say that! It will kill me to lose you. I think I should go mad. Marry me and you will learn to love me.”

Beatrice glanced at him again, and a pang of pity pierced her heart. She did not know it was so bad a case as this. It struck her too that she was doing a foolish thing, from a worldly point of view. The man loved her and was very eligible. He only asked of her what most women are willing enough to give under circumstances so favourable to their well-being–herself. But she never liked him, he had always repelled her, and she was not a woman to marry a man whom she did not like. Also, during the last week this dislike and repulsion had hardened and strengthened. Vaguely, as he pleaded with her, Beatrice wondered why, and as she did so her eye fell upon the pattern she was automatically pricking in the sand. It had taken the form of letters, and the letters were G E O F F R E–Great heaven! Could that be the answer? She flushed crimson with shame at the thought, and passed her foot across the tell-tale letters, as she believed, obliterating them.

Owen saw the softening of her eyes and saw the blush, and misinterpreted them. Thinking that she was relenting, by instinct, rather than from any teaching of experience, he attempted to take her hand. With a turn of the arm, so quick that even Elizabeth watching with all her eyes saw nothing of the movement, Beatrice twisted herself free.

“Don’t touch me,” she said sharply, “you have no right to touch me. I have answered you, Mr. Davies.”

Owen withdrew his hand abashed, and for a moment sat still, his chin resting on his breast, a very picture of despair. Nothing indeed could break the stolid calm of his features, but the violence of his emotion was evident in the quick shivering of his limbs and his short deep breaths.

“Can you give me no hope?” he said at last in a slow heavy voice. “For God’s sake think before you answer–you don’t know what it means to me. It is nothing to you–you cannot feel. I feel, and your words cut like a knife. I know that I am heavy and stupid, but I feel as though you had killed me. You are heartless, quite heartless.”

Again Beatrice softened a little. She was touched and flattered. Where is the woman who would not have been?

“What can I say to you, Mr. Davies?” she answered in a kinder voice. “I cannot marry you. How I can I marry you when I do not love you?”

“Plenty of women marry men whom they do not love.”

“Then they are bad women,” answered Beatrice with energy.

“The world does not think so,” he said again; “the world calls those women bad who love where they cannot marry, and the world is always right. Marriage sanctifies everything.”

Beatrice laughed bitterly. “Do you think so?” she said. “I do not. I think that marriage without love is the most unholy of our institutions, and that is saying a good deal. Supposing I should say yes to you, supposing that I married you, not loving you, what would it be for? For your money and your position, and to be called a married woman, and what do you suppose I should think of myself in my heart then? No, no, I may be bad, but I have not fallen so low as that. Find another wife, Mr. Davies; the world is wide and there are plenty of women in it who will love you for your own sake, or who at any rate will not be so particular. Forget me, and leave me to go my own way–it is not your way.”

“Leave you to go your own way,” he answered almost with passion–“that is, leave you to some other man. Oh! I cannot bear to think of it. I am jealous of every man who comes near you. Do you know how beautiful you are? You are too beautiful–every man must love you as I do. Oh, if you took anybody else I think that I should kill him.”

“Do not speak like that, Mr. Davies, or I shall go.”

He stopped at once. “Don’t go,” he said imploringly. “Listen. You said that you would not marry me because you did not love me. Supposing that you learned to love me, say in a year’s time, Beatrice, would you marry me then?”

“I would marry any man whom I loved,” she answered.

“Then if you learn to love me you will marry me?”

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” she said. “It is not probable, it is hardly possible, that such a thing should happen. If it had been going to happen it would have happened before.”

“It might come about,” he answered; “your heart might soften towards me. Oh, say yes to this. It is a small request, it costs you nothing, and it gives me hope, without which I cannot live. Say that I may ask you once more, and that then if you love me you will marry me.”

Beatrice thought for a moment. Such a promise could do her no harm, and in the course of six months or a year he might get used to the idea of living without her. Also it would prevent a scene. It was weak of her, but she dreaded the idea of her having refused Owen Davies coming to her father’s ears.

“If you wish it, Mr. Davies,” she said, “so be it. Only I ask you to understand this, I am in no way tied to you. I give you no hope that my answer, should you renew this offer a year hence or at any other time, will differ from that I give you to-day. I do not think there is the slightest probability of such a thing. Also, it must be understood that you are not to speak to my father about this matter, or to trouble me in any way. Do you consent?”

“Yes,” he answered, “I consent. You have me at your mercy.”

“Very well. And now, Mr. Davies, good-bye. No, do not walk back with me. I had rather go by myself. But I want to say this: I am very sorry for what has happened. I have not wished it to happen. I have never encouraged it, and my hands are clean of it. But I am sorry, sorry beyond measure, and I repeat what I said before–seek out some other woman and marry her.”

“That is the cruellest thing of all the cruel things which you have said,” he answered.

“I did not mean it to be cruel, Mr. Davies, but I suppose that the truth often is. And now good-bye,” and Beatrice stretched out her hand.

He touched it, and she turned and went. But Owen did not go. He sat upon the rock, his head bowed in misery. He had staked all his hopes upon this woman. She was the one desirable thing to him, the one star in his somewhat leaden sky, and now that star was eclipsed. Her words were unequivocal, they gave but little hope. Beatrice was scarcely a woman to turn round in six months or a year. On the contrary, there was a fixity about her which frightened him. What could be the cause of it? How came it that she should be so ready to reject him, and all he had to offer her? After all, she was a girl in a small position. She could not be looking forward to a better match. Nor would the prospect move her one way or another. There must be a reason for it. Perhaps he had a rival, surely that must be the cause. Some enemy had done this thing. But who?

At this moment a woman’s shadow fell athwart him.

“Oh, have you come back?” he cried, springing to his feet.

“If you mean Beatrice,” answered a voice–it was Elizabeth’s–“she went down to the beach ten minutes ago. I happened to be on the cliff, and I saw her.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Granger,” he said faintly. “I did not see who it was.”

Elizabeth sat down upon the rock where her sister had sat, and, seeing the little holes in the breach, began indolently to clear them of the sand which Beatrice had swept over them with her foot. This was no difficult matter, for the holes were deeply dug, and it was easy to trace their position. Presently they were nearly all clear–that is, the letters were legible.

“You have had a talk with Beatrice, Mr. Davies?”

“Yes,” he answered apathetically.

Elizabeth paused. Then she took her bull by the horns.

“Are you going to marry Beatrice, Mr. Davies?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he answered slowly and without surprise. It seemed natural to him that his own central thought should be present in her mind. “I love her dearly, and want to marry her.”

“She refused you, then?”

“Yes.”

Elizabeth breathed more freely.

“But I can ask her again.”

Elizabeth frowned. What could this mean? It was not an absolute refusal. Beatrice was playing some game of her own.

“Why did she put you off so, Mr. Davies? Do not think me inquisitive. I only ask because I may be able to help you.”

“I know; you are very kind. Help me and I shall always be grateful to you. I do not know–I almost think that there must be somebody else, only I don’t know who it can be.”

“Ah!” said Elizabeth, who had been gazing intently at the little holes in the beach which she had now cleared of the sand. “Of course that is possible. She is a curious girl, Beatrice is. What are those letters, Mr. Davies?”

He looked at them idly. “Something your sister was writing while I talked to her. I remember seeing her do it.”

“G E O F F R E–why, it must be meant for Geoffrey. Yes, of course it is possible that there is somebody else, Mr. Davies. Geoffrey!–how curious!”

“Why is it curious, Miss Granger? Who is Geoffrey?”

Elizabeth laughed a disagreeable little laugh that somehow attracted Owen’s attention more than her words.

“How should I know? It must be some friend of Beatrice’s, and one of whom she is thinking a great deal, or she would not write his name unconsciously. The only Geoffrey that I know is Mr. Geoffrey Bingham, the barrister, who is staying at the Vicarage, and whose life Beatrice saved.” She paused to watch her companion’s face, and saw a new idea creep across its stolidity. “But of course,” she went on, “it cannot be Mr. Bingham that she was thinking of, because you see he is married.”

“Married?” he said, “yes, but he’s a man for all that, and a very handsome one.”

“Yes, I should call him handsome–a fine man,” Elizabeth answered critically; “but, as Beatrice said the other day, the great charm about him is his talk and power of mind. He is a very remarkable man, and the world will hear of him before he has done. But, however, all this is neither here nor there. Beatrice is a curious woman, and has strange ideas, but I am sure that she would never carry on with a married man.”

“But he might carry on with her, Miss Elizabeth.”

She laughed. “Do you really think that a man like Mr. Bingham would try to flirt with girls without encouragement? Men like that are as proud as women, and prouder; the lady must always be a step ahead. But what is the good of talking about such a thing? It is all nonsense. Beatrice must have been thinking of some other Geoffrey–or it was an accident of something. Why, Mr. Davies, if you for one moment really believed that dear Beatrice could be guilty of such a shameless thing as to carry on a flirtation with a married man, would you have asked her to marry you? Would you still think of asking such a woman as she must be to become your wife?”

“I don’t know; I suppose not,” he said doubtfully.

“You suppose not. I know you better than you know yourself. You would rather never marry at all than take such a woman as she would be proved to be. But it is no good talking such stuff. If you have a rival you may be sure it is some unmarried man.”

Owen reflected in his heart that on the whole he would rather it was a married one, since a married man, at any rate, could not legally take possession of Beatrice. But Elizabeth’s rigid morality alarmed him, and he did not say so.

“Do you know I feel a little upset, Miss Elizabeth,” he answered. “I think I will be going. By the way, I promised to say nothing of this to your father. I hope that you will not do so, either.”

“Most certainly not,” said Elizabeth, and indeed it would be the last thing she would wish to do. “Well, good-bye, Mr. Davies. Do not be downhearted; it will all come right in the end. You will always have me to help you, remember.”

“Thank you, thank you,” he said earnestly, and went.

Elizabeth watched him round the wall of rock with a cold and ugly smile set upon her face.

“You fool,” she thought, “you fool! To tell /me/ that you ‘love her dearly and want to marry her;’ you want to get that sweet face of hers, do you? You never shall; I’d spoil it first! Dear Beatrice, she is not capable of carrying on a love affair with a married man–oh, certainly not! Why, she’s in love with him already, and he is more than half in love with her. If she hadn’t been, would she have put Owen off? Not she. Give them time, and we shall see. They will ruin each other–they /must/ ruin each other; it won’t be child’s play when two people like that fall in love. They will not stop at sighs, there is too much human nature about them. It was a good idea to get him into the house. And to see her go on with that child Effie, just as though she was its mother–it makes me laugh. Ah, Beatrice, with all your wits you are a silly woman! And one day, my dear girl, I shall have the pleasure of exposing you to Owen; the idol will be unveiled, and there will be an end of your chances with him, for he can’t marry you after that. Then my turn will come. It is a question of time–only a question of time!”

So brooded Elizabeth in her heart, madded with malicious envy and passionate jealousy. She loved this man, Owen Davies, as much as she could love anybody; at the least, she dearly loved the wealth and station of which he was the visible centre, and she hated the sister whom he desired. If she could only discredit that sister and show her to be guilty of woman’s worst crime, misplaced, unlegalised affection, surely, she thought, Owen would reject her.

She was wrong. She did not know how entirely he desired to make Beatrice his wife, or realise how forgiving a man can be who has such an end to gain. It is of the women who already weary them and of their infidelity that men are so ready to make examples, not of those who do not belong to them, and whom they long for night and day. To these they can be very merciful.

CHAPTER XIII

GEOFFREY LECTURES

Meanwhile Beatrice was walking homewards with an uneasy mind. The trouble was upon her. She had, it is true, succeeded in postponing it a little, but she knew very well that it was only a postponement. Owen Davies was not a man to be easily shaken off. She almost wished now that she had crushed the idea once and for all. But then he would have gone to her father, and there must have been a scene, and she was weak enough to shrink from that, especially while Mr. Bingham was in the house. She could well imagine the dismay, not to say the fury, of her money-loving old father if he were to hear that she had refused– actually refused–Owen Davies of Bryngelly Castle, and all his wealth.

Then there was Elizabeth to be reckoned with. Elizabeth would assuredly make her life a burden to her. Beatrice little guessed that nothing would suit her sister’s book better. Oh, if only she could shake the dust of Bryngelly off her feet! But that, too, was impossible. She was quite without money. She might, it was true, succeed in getting another place as mistress to a school in some distant part of England, were it not for an insurmountable obstacle. Here she received a salary of seventy-five pounds a year; of this she kept fifteen pounds, out of which slender sum she contrived to dress herself; the rest she gave to her father. Now, as she well knew, he could not keep his head above water without this assistance, which, small as it was, made all the difference to their household between poverty and actual want. If she went away, supposing even that she found an equally well-paid post, she would require every farthing of the money to support herself, there would be nothing left to send home. It was a pitiable position; here was she, who had just refused a man worth thousands a year, quite unable to get out of the way of his importunity for the want of seventy-five pounds, paid quarterly. Well, the only thing to do was to face it out and take her chance. On one point she was, however, quite clear; she would /not/ marry Owen Davies. She might be a fool for her pains, but she would not do it. She respected herself too much to marry a man she did not love; a man whom she positively disliked. “No, never!” she exclaimed aloud, stamping her foot upon the shingle.

“Never what?” said a voice, within two yards of her.

She started violently, and looked round. There, his back resting against a rock, a pipe in his mouth, an open letter on his knee, and his hat drawn down almost over his eyes, sat Geoffrey. He had left Effie to go home with Mr. Granger, and climbing down a sloping place in the cliff, had strolled along the beach. The letter on his knee was one from his wife. It was short, and there was nothing particular in it. Effie’s name was not even mentioned. It was to see if he had not overlooked it that he was reading the note through again. No, it merely related to Lady Honoria’s safe arrival, gave a list of the people staying at the Hall–a fast lot, Geoffrey noticed, a certain Mr. Dunstan, whom he particularly disliked, among them–and the number of brace of partridges which had been killed on the previous day. Then came an assurance that Honoria was enjoying herself immensely, and that the new French cook was “simply perfect;” the letter ending “with love.”

“Never what, Miss Granger?” he said again, as he lazily folded up the sheet.

“Never mind, of course,” she answered, recovering herself. “How you startled me, Mr. Bingham! I had no idea there was anybody on the beach.”

“It is quite free, is it not?” he answered, getting up. “I thought you were going to trample me into the pebbles. It’s almost alarming when one is thinking about a Sunday nap to see a young lady striding along, then suddenly stop, stamp her foot, and say, ‘No, never!’ Luckily I knew that you were about or I should really have been frightened.”

“How did you know that I was about?” Beatrice asked a little defiantly. It was no business of his to observe her movements.

“In two ways. Look!” he said, pointing to a patch of white sand. “That, I think, is your footprint.”

“Well, what of it?” said Beatrice, with a little laugh.

“Nothing in particular, except that it is your footprint,” he answered. “Then I happened to meet old Edward, who was loafing along, and he informed me that you and Mr. Davies had gone up the beach; there is his footprint–Mr. Davies’s, I mean–but you don’t seem to have been very sociable, because here is yours right in the middle of it. Therefore you must have been walking in Indian file, and a little way back in parallel lines, with quite thirty yards between you.”

“Why do you take the trouble to observe things so closely?” she asked in a half amused and half angry tone.

“I don’t know–a habit of the legal mind, I suppose. One might make quite a romance out of those footprints on the sand, and the little subsequent events. But you have not heard all my thrilling tale. Old Edward also informed me that he saw your sister, Miss Elizabeth, going along the cliff almost level with you, from which he concluded that you had argued as to the shortest way to the Red Rocks and were putting the matter to the proof.”

“Elizabeth,” said Beatrice, turning a shade paler; “what can she have been doing, I wonder.”

“Taking exercise, probably, like yourself. Well, I seat myself with my pipe in the shadow of that rock, when suddenly I see Mr. Davies coming along towards Bryngelly as though he were walking for a wager, his hat fixed upon the back of his head. Literally he walked over my legs and never saw me. Then you follow and ejaculate, ‘No, never!’–and that is the end of my story. Have I your permission to walk with you, or shall I interfere with the development of the plot?”

“There is no plot, and as you said just now the beach is free,” Beatrice answered petulantly.

They walked on a few yards and then he spoke in another tone–the meaning of the assignation he had overheard in the churchyard grew clear to him now.

“I believe that I have to congratulate you, Miss Granger,” he said, “and I do so very heartily. It is not everybody who is so fortunate as to—-“

Beatrice stopped, and half turning faced him.

“What /do/ you mean, Mr. Bingham?” she said. “I do not understand your dark sayings.”

“Mean! oh, nothing particular, except that I wished to congratulate you on your engagement.”

“My engagement! what engagement?”

“It seems that there is some mistake,” he said, and struggle as he might to suppress it his tone was one of relief. “I understood that you had become engaged to be married to Mr. Owen Davies. If I am wrong I am sure I apologise.”

“You are quite wrong, Mr. Bingham; I don’t know who put such a notion into your head, but there is no truth in it.”

“Then allow me to congratulate you on there being no truth in it. You see that is the beauty of nine affairs matrimonial out of ten–there are two or more sides of them. If they come off the amiable and disinterested observer can look at the bright side–as in this case, lots of money, romantic castle by the sea, gentleman of unexceptional antecedents, &c., &c, &c. If, on the other hand, they don’t, cause can still be found for thankfulness–lady might do better after all, castle by the sea rather draughty and cold in spring, gentlemen most estimable but perhaps a little dull, and so on, you see.”

There was a note of mockery about his talk which irritated Beatrice exceedingly. It was not like Mr. Bingham to speak so. It was not even the way that a gentleman out of his teens should speak to a lady on such a subject. He knew this as well as she did and was secretly ashamed of himself. But the truth must out: though Geoffrey did not admit it even to himself he was bitterly and profoundly jealous, and jealous people have no manners. Beatrice could not, however, be expected to know this, and naturally grew angry.

“I do not quite understand what you are talking about, Mr. Bingham,” she said, putting on her most dignified air, and Beatrice could look rather alarming. “You have picked up a piece of unfounded gossip and now you take advantage of it to laugh at me, and to say rude things of Mr. Davies. It is not kind.”

“Oh, no; it was the footsteps, Miss Granger, /and/ the gossip, /and/ the appointment you made in the churchyard, that I unwillingly overheard, not the gossip alone which led me into my mistake. Of course I have now to apologise.”

Again Beatrice stamped her foot. She saw that he was still mocking her, and felt that he did not believe her.

“There,” he went on, stung into unkindness by his biting but unacknowledged jealousy, for she was right–on reflection he did not quite believe what she said as to her not being engaged. “How unfortunate I am–I have said something to make you angry again. Why did you not walk with Mr. Davies? I should then have remained guiltless of offence, and you would have had a more agreeable companion. You want to quarrel with me; what shall we quarrel about? There are many things on which we are diametrically opposed; let us start one.”

It was too much, for though his words were nothing the tone in which he spoke gave them a sting. Beatrice, already disturbed in mind by the scene through which she had passed, her breast already throbbing with a vague trouble of which she did not know the meaning, for once in her life lost control of herself and grew hysterical. Her grey eyes filled with tears, the corners of her sweet mouth dropped, and she looked very much as though she were going to burst out weeping.

“It is most unkind of you,” she said, with a half sob. “If you knew how much I have to put up with, you would not speak to me like that. I know that you do not believe me; very well, I will tell you the truth. Yes, though I have no business to do it, and you have no right–none at all–to make me do it, I will tell you the truth, because I cannot bear that you should not believe me. Mr. Davies did want me to marry him and I refused him. I put him off for a while; I did this because I knew that if I did not he would go to my father. It was cowardly, but my father would make my life wretched—-” and again she gave a half- choked sob.

Much has been said and written about the effect produced upon men by the sight of a lady in, or on the border line of tears, and there is no doubt that this effect is considerable. Man being in his right mind is deeply moved by such a spectacle, also he is frightened because he dreads a scene. Now most people would rather walk ten miles in their dress shoes than have to deal with a young lady in hysterics, however modified. Putting the peculiar circumstances of the case aside, Geoffrey was no exception to this rule. It was all very well to cross spears with Beatrice, who had quite an equal wit, and was very capable of retaliation, but to see her surrender at discretion was altogether another thing. Indeed he felt much ashamed of himself.

“Please don’t–don’t–be put out,” he said. He did not like to use the word “cry.” “I was only laughing at you, but I ought not to have spoken as I did. I did not wish to force your confidence, indeed I did not. I never thought of such a thing. I am so sorry.”

His remorse was evidently genuine, and Beatrice felt somewhat appeased. Perhaps it did not altogether grieve her to learn that she could make him feel sorry.

“You did not force my confidence,” she said defiantly, quite forgetting that a moment before she had reproached him for making her speak. “I told you because I did not choose that you should think I was not speaking the truth–and now let us change the subject.” She imposed no reserve on him as to what she had revealed; she knew that there was no necessity to do so. The secret would be between them– another dangerous link.

Beatrice recovered her composure and they walked slowly on.

“Tell me, Mr. Bingham,” she said presently, “how can a woman earn her living–I mean a girl like myself without any special qualifications? Some of them get on.”

“Well,” he answered, “that depends upon the girl. What sort of a living do you mean? You are earning a living now, of a kind.”

“Yes, but sometimes, if only I could manage it, I think that I should like to get away from here, and take another line, something bigger. I do not suppose that I ever shall, but I like to think of it sometimes.”

“I only know of two things which a woman can turn to,” he said, “the stage and literature. Of course,” he added hastily, “the first is out of the question in your case.”

“And so is the other, I am afraid,” she answered shaking her head, “that is if by literature you mean imaginative writing, and I suppose that is the only way to get into notice. As I told you I lost my imagination–well, to be frank, when I lost my faith. At one time I used to have plenty, as I used to have plenty of faith, but the one went with the other, I do not understand why.”

“Don’t you? I think I do. A mind without religious sentiment is like a star without atmosphere, brighter than other stars but not so soft to see. Religion, poetry, music, imagination, and even some of the more exalted forms of passion, flourish in the same soil, and are, I sometimes think, different manifestations of the same thing. Do you know it is ridiculous to hear you talk of having lost your faith, because I don’t believe it. At the worst it has gone to sleep, and will wake up again one day. Possibly you may not accept some particular form of faith, but I tell you frankly that to reject all religion simply because you cannot understand it, is nothing but a form of atrocious spiritual vanity. Your mind is too big for you, Miss Granger: it has run away with you, but you know it is tied by a string –it cannot go far. And now perhaps you will be angry again.”

“No, indeed, why should I be angry? I daresay that you are quite right, and I only hope that I may be able to believe again. I will tell you how I lost belief. I had a little brother whom I loved more than anything else in the world, indeed after my mother died he was the only thing I really had to love, for I think that my father cares more for Elizabeth than he does for me, she is so much the better at business matters, and Elizabeth and I never quite got on. I daresay that the fault is mine, but the fact remains–we are sisters but we are not intimate. Well, my brother fell ill of a fever, and for a long time he lay between life and death, and I prayed for him as I never prayed for anybody or anything before–yes, I prayed that I might die instead of him. Then he passed through the crisis and got better, and I thanked God, thinking that my prayers had been answered; oh, how happy I was for those ten days! And then this happened:–My brother got a chill, a relapse followed, and in three days he was dead. The last words that he spoke to me were, ‘Oh, don’t let me die, Bee!’–he used to call me Bee–‘Please don’t let me die, dear Bee!’ But he died, died in my arms, and when it was over I rose from his side feeling as though my heart was dead also. I prayed no more after that. It seemed to me as though my prayers had been mocked at, as though he had been given back to me for a little while in order that the blow might be more crushing when it fell.”

“Don’t you think that you were a little foolish in taking such a view?” said Geoffrey. “Have you not been amused, sometimes, to read about the early Christians?–how the lead would not boil the martyr, or the lion would not eat him, or the rain from a blue sky put out the fire, and how the pagan king at once was converted and accepted a great many difficult doctrines without further delay. The Athanasian Creed was not necessarily true because the fire would not light or the sword would not cut, nor, excuse me, were all your old beliefs wrong because your prayer was unanswered. It is an ancient story, that we cannot tell whether the answering of our petitions will be good or ill for us. Of course I do not know anything about such things, but it seems to me rash to suppose that Providence is going to alter the working of its eternal laws merely to suit the passing wishes of individuals–wishes, too, that in many cases would bring unforeseen sorrows if fulfilled. Besides I daresay that the poor child is happier dead than he would have been had he lived. It is not an altogether pleasant world for most of us.”

“Yes, Mr. Bingham, I know, and I daresay that I should have got over the shock in time, only after that I began to read. I read the histories of the religions and compared them, and I read the works of those writers who have risen up to attack them. I found, or I thought that I found, the same springs of superstition in them all– superstitions arising from elementary natural causes, and handed on with variations from race to race, and time to time. In some I found the same story, only with a slightly altered face, and I learned, moreover, that each faith denied the other, and claimed truth for itself alone.

“After that, too, I went to the college and there I fell in with a lady, one of the mistresses, who was the cleverest woman that I ever knew, and in her way a good woman, but one who believed that religion was the curse of the world, and who spent all her spare time in attacking it in some form or other. Poor thing, she is dead now. And so, you see, what between these causes and the continual spectacle of human misery which to my mind negatives the idea of a merciful and watching Power, at last it came to pass that the only altar left in my temple is an altar to the ‘Unknown God.'”

Geoffrey, like most men who have had to think on these matters, did not care to talk about them much, especially to women. For one thing, he was conscious of a tendency to speech less reverent than his thought. But he had not entered Beatrice’s church of Darkness, indeed he had turned his back on it for ever, though, like most people, he had at different periods of his past life tarried an hour in its porch. So he ventured on an objection.

“I am no theologian,” he said, “and I am not fond of discussion on such matters. But there are just one or two things I should like to say. It is no argument, to my mind at least, to point to the existence of evil and unhappiness among men as a proof of the absence of a superior Mercy; for what are men that such things should not be with them? Man, too, must own some master. If he has doubts let him look up at the marshalling of the starry heaven, and they will vanish.”

“No,” said Beatrice, “I fear not. Kant said so, but before that Molière had put the argument in the mouth of a fool. The starry heavens no more prove anything than does the running of the raindrops down the window-pane. It is not a question of size and quantity.”

“I might accept the illustration,” answered Geoffrey; “one example of law is as good as another for my purpose. I see in it all the working of a living Will, but of course that is only my way of looking at it, not yours.”

“No; I am afraid,” said Beatrice, “all this reasoning drawn from material things does not touch me. That is how the Pagans made /their/ religions, and it is how Paley strives to prove his. They argued from the Out to the In, from the material to the spiritual. It cannot be; if Christianity is true it must stand upon spiritual feet and speak with a spiritual voice, to be heard, not in the thunderstorm, but only in the hearts of men. The existence of Creative Force does not demonstrate the existence of a Redeemer; if anything, it tends to negative it, for the power that creates is also the power which destroys. What does touch me, however, is the thought of the multitude of the Dead. /That/ is what we care for, not for an Eternal Force, ever creating and destroying. Think of them all–all the souls of unheard-of races, almost animal, who passed away so long ago. Can ours endure more than theirs, and do you think that the spirit of an Ethiopian who died in the time of Moses is anywhere now?”

“There was room for them all on earth,” answered Geoffrey. “The universe is wide. It does not dismay me. There are mysteries in our nature, the nature we think we know–shall there be none in that which we know not? Worlds die, to live again when, after millions of ages, the conditions become once more favourable to life, and why should not a man? We are creatures of the world, we reflect its every light and shadow, we rejoice in its rejoicing, its every feature has a tiny parallel in us. Why should not our fate be as its fate, and its fate is so far as we know eternal. It may change from gas to chaos, from chaos to active life, from active life to seeming death. Then it may once more pass into its elements, and from those elements back again to concrete being, and so on for ever, always changing, but always the same. So much for nature’s allegory. It is not a perfect analogy, for Man is a thing apart from all things else; it may be only a hint or a type, but it is something.

“Now to come to the question of our religion. I confess I draw quite a different conclusion from your facts. You say that you trace the same superstitions in all religions, and that the same spiritual myths are in some shape present in almost all. Well, does not this suggest that the same great /truth/ underlies them all, taking from time to time the shape which is best suited to the spiritual development of those professing each. Every great new religion is better than the last. You cannot compare Osirianism with Buddhism, or Buddhism with Christianity, or Mahomedanism with the Arabian idol worship. Take the old illustration–take a cut crystal and hold it in the sun, and you will see many different coloured rays come from its facets. They look different, but they are all born of the same great light; they are all the same light. May it not be so with religion? Let your altar be to the ‘Unknown God,’ if you like–for who can give an unaltering likeness to the Power above us?–but do not knock your altar down.

“Depend upon it, Miss Granger, all indications to the contrary notwithstanding, there is a watching Providence without the will of which we cannot live, and if we deliberately reject that Providence, setting up our intelligence in its place, sorrow will come of it, even here; for it is wiser than we. I wish that you would try and look at the question from another point of view–from a higher point of view. I think you will find that it will bear a great deal of examination, and that you will come to the conclusion that the dictum of the wise- acre who says there is nothing because he can see nothing, is not necessarily a true one. There, that is all I have to say, and I wish that I could say it better.”

“Thank you,” said Beatrice, “I will. Why here we are at home; I must go and put Effie to bed.”

And here it may be stated that Geoffrey’s advice was not altogether thrown away. Beatrice did try looking at the question again, and if Faith did not altogether come back to her at least Hope did, and “the greatest of these, which is Charity,” had never deserted her. Hope came slowly back, not by argument probably, but rather by example. In the sea of Doubt she saw another buoyed up, if it were but on broken pieces of the ship. This encouraged her. Geoffrey believed, and she– believed in Geoffrey. Indeed, is not this the secret of woman’s philosophy–even, to some extent, of that of such a woman as Beatrice? “Let the faith or unfaith of This, That, or the other Rabbi answer for me,” she says–it is her last argument. She believes in This, or That, or some other philosopher: that is her creed. And Geoffrey was the person in whom Beatrice began to believe, all the more wholly because she had never believed in any one before. Whatever else she was to lose, this at least she won when she saved his life.

CHAPTER XIV

DRIFTING

On the day following their religious discussion an accident happened which resulted in Geoffrey and Beatrice being more than ever thrown in the company of each other. During the previous week two cases of scarlatina had been reported among the school children, and now it was found that the complaint had spread so much that it was necessary to close the school. This meant, of course, that Beatrice had all her time upon her hands. And so had Geoffrey. It was his custom to bathe before breakfast, after which he had nothing to do for the rest of the day. Beatrice with little Effie also bathed before breakfast from the ladies’ bathing-place, a quarter of a mile off, and sometimes he would meet her as she returned, glowing with health and beauty like Venus new risen from the Cyprian sea, her half-dried hair hanging in heavy masses down her back. Then after breakfast they would take Effie down to the beach, and her “auntie,” as the child learned to call Beatrice, would teach her lessons and poetry till she was tired, and ran away to paddle in the sea or look for prawns among the rocks.

Meanwhile the child’s father and Beatrice would talk–not about religion, they spoke no more on that subject, nor about Owen Davies, but of everything else on earth. Beatrice was a merry woman when she was happy, and they never lacked subjects of conversation, for their minds were very much in tune. In book-learning Beatrice had the advantage of Geoffrey, for she had not only read enormously, she also remembered what she read and could apply it. Her critical faculty, too, was very keen. He, on the other hand, had more knowledge of the world, and in his rich days had travelled a good deal, and so it came to pass that each could always find something to tell the other. Never for one second were they dull, not even when they sat for an hour or so in silence, for it was the silence of complete companionship.

So the long morning would wear away all too quickly, and they would go in to dinner, to be greeted with a cold smile by Elizabeth and heartily enough by the old gentleman, who never thought of anything out of his own circle of affairs. After dinner it was the same story. Either they went walking to look for ferns and flowers, or perhaps Geoffrey took his gun and hid behind the rocks for curlew, sending Beatrice, who knew the coast by heart, a mile round or more to some headland in order to put them on the wing. Then she would come back, springing towards him from rock to rock, and crouch down beneath a neighbouring seaweed-covered boulder, and they would talk together in whispers, or perhaps they would not talk at all, for fear lest they should frighten the flighting birds. And Geoffrey would first search the heavens for curlew or duck, and, seeing none, would let his eyes fall upon the pure beauty of Beatrice’s face, showing so clearly against the tender sky, and wonder what she was thinking about; till, suddenly feeling his gaze, she would turn with a smile as sweet as the first rosy blush of dawn upon the waters, and ask him what /he/ was thinking about. And he would laugh and answer “You,” whereon she would smile again and perhaps blush a little, feeling glad at heart, she knew not why.

Then came tea-time and the quiet, when they sat at the open window, and Geoffrey smoked and listened to the soft surging of the sea and the harmonious whisper of the night air in the pines. In the corner Mr. Granger slept in his armchair, or perhaps he had gone to bed altogether, for he liked to go to bed at half-past eight, as the old Herefordshire farmer, his father, had done before him; and at the far end of the room sat Elizabeth, doing her accounts by the light of a solitary candle, or, if they failed her, reading some book of a devotional and inspired character. But over the edge of the book, or from the page of crabbed accounts, her eyes would glance continually towards the handsome pair in the window-place, and she would smile as she saw that it went well. Only they never saw the glances or noted the smile. When Geoffrey looked that way, which was not often, for Elizabeth–old Elizabeth, as he always called her to himself–did not attract him, all he saw was her sharp but capable-looking form bending over her work, and the light of the candle gleaming on her straw- coloured hair and falling in gleaming white patches on her hard knuckles.

And so the happy day would pass and bed-time come, and with it unbidden dreams.

Geoffrey thought no ill of all this, as of course he ought to have thought. He was not the ravening lion of fiction–so rarely, if ever, to be met with in real life–going about seeking whom he might devour. He had absolutely no designs on Beatrice’s affections, any more than she had on his, and he had forgotten that first fell prescience of evil to come. Once or twice, it is true, qualms of doubt did cross his mind in the earlier days of their intimacy. But he put them by as absurd. He was no believer in the tender helplessness of full-grown women, his experience having been that they are amply capable–and, for the most part, more than capable–of looking after themselves. It seemed to him a thing ridiculous that such a person as Beatrice, who was competent to form opinions and a judgment upon all the important questions of life, should be treated as a child, and that he should remove himself from Bryngelly lest her young affections should become entangled. He felt sure that they would never be entrapped in any direction whatsoever without her full consent.

Then he ceased to think about the matter at all. Indeed, the mere idea of such a thing involved a supposition that would only have been acceptable to a conceited man–namely, that there was a possibility of this young lady’s falling in love with him. What right had he to suppose anything of the sort? It was an impertinence. That there was another sort of possibility–namely, of his becoming more attached to her than was altogether desirable–did, however, occur to him once or twice. But he shrugged his shoulders and put it by. After all, it was his look out, and he did not much care. It would do her no harm at the worst. But very soon all these shadowy forebodings of dawning trouble vanished quite. They were lost in the broad, sweet lights of friendship. By-and-by, when friendship’s day was done, they might arise again, called by other names and wearing a sterner face.

It was ridiculous–of course it was ridiculous; he was not going to fall in love like a boy at his time of life; all he felt was gratitude and interest–all she felt was amusement in his society. As for the intimacy–felt rather than expressed–the intimacy that could already almost enable the one to divine the other’s thought, that could shape her mood to his and his to hers, that could cause the same thing of beauty to be a common joy, and discover unity of mind in opinions the most opposite–why, it was only natural between people who had together passed a peril terrible to think of. So they took the goods the gods provided, and drifted softly on–whither they did not stop to inquire.

One day, however, a little incident happened that ought to have opened the eyes of both. They had arranged, or rather there was a tacit understanding, that they should go out together in the afternoon. Geoffrey was to take his gun and Beatrice a book, but it chanced that, just before dinner, as she walked back from the village, where she had gone to buy some thread to mend Effie’s clothes, Beatrice came face to face with Mr. Davies. It was their first meeting without witnesses since the Sunday of which the events have been described, and, naturally, therefore, rather an awkward one. Owen stopped short so that she could not pass him with a bow, and then turned and walked beside her. After a remark or two about the weather, the springs of conversation ran dry.

“You remember that you are coming up to the Castle this afternoon?” he said, at length.

“To the Castle!” she answered. “No, I have heard nothing of it.”

“Did not your sister tell you she made an engagement for herself and you a week or more ago? You are to bring the little girl; she wants to see the view from the top of the tower.”

Then Beatrice remembered. Elizabeth had told her, and she had thought it best to accept the situation. The whole thing had gone out of her mind.

“Oh, I beg your pardon! I do remember now, but I have made another plan–how stupid of me!”

“You had forgotten,” he said in his heavy voice; “it is easy for you to forget what I have been looking forward to for a whole week. What is your plan–to go out walking with Mr. Bingham, I suppose?”

“Yes,” answered Beatrice, “to go out with Mr. Bingham.”

“Ah! you go out with Mr. Bingham every day now.”

“And what if I do?” said Beatrice quickly; “surely, Mr. Davies, I have a right to go out with whom I like?”

“Yes, of course; but the engagement to come to the Castle was made first; are you not going to keep it?”

“Of course I am going to keep it; I always keep my engagements when I have any.”

“Very well, then; I shall expect you at three o’clock.”

Beatrice went on home in a curiously irritated condition of mind. She did not, naturally, want to go to the Castle, and she did want to go out with Geoffrey. However, there was no help for it.

When she came in to dinner she found that Geoffrey was not there. He had, it seemed, gone to lunch with Dr. Chambers, whom he had met on the beach. Before he returned they were all three starting for the Castle, Beatrice leaving a message to this effect with Betty.

About a quarter of an hour afterwards, Geoffrey came back to fetch his gun and Beatrice, but Beatrice was gone, and all that he could extract from Betty was that she had gone to see Mr. Davies.

He was perfectly furious, though all the while he knew how unreasonable was his anger. He had been looking forward to the expedition, and this sudden change of plan was too much for his temper. Off he started, however, to pass a thoroughly miserable afternoon. He seemed to miss Beatrice more each step and gradually to grow more and more angry at what he called her “rudeness.” Of course it never occurred to him that what he was really angry at was her going to see Mr. Davies, or that, in truth, her society had become so delightful to him that to be deprived of it even for an afternoon was to be wretched. To top everything, he only got three good shots that afternoon, and he missed them all, which made him crosser than ever.

As for Beatrice, she enjoyed herself just as little at the Castle as Geoffrey did on the beach. Owen Davies took them through the great unused rooms and showed them the pictures, but she had seen them before, and though some of them were very fine, did not care to look at them again–at any rate, not that afternoon. But Elizabeth gazed at them with eager eyes and mentally appraised their value, wondering if they would ever be hers.

“What is this picture?” she asked, pointing to a beautiful portrait of a Dutch Burgomaster by Rembrandt.

“That,” answered Davies heavily, for he knew nothing of painting and cared less, “that is a Velasquez, valued for probate at £3,000–no,” referring to the catalogue and reading, “I beg your pardon, the next is the Velasquez; that is a Rembrandt in the master’s best style, showing all his wonderful mastery over light and shade. It was valued for probate at £4,000 guineas.”

“Four thousand guineas!” said Elizabeth, “fancy having a thing worth four thousand guineas hanging on a wall!”

And so they went on, Elizabeth asking questions and Owen answering them by the help of the catalogue, till, to Beatrice’s relief, they came at length to the end of the pictures. Then they took some tea in the little sitting room of the master of all this magnificence. Owen, to her great annoyance, sat opposite to Beatrice, staring at her with all his eyes while she drank her tea, with Effie sitting in her lap, and Elizabeth, observing it, bit her lip in jealousy. She had thought it well to bring her sister here; it would not do to let Mr. Davies think she was keeping Beatrice out of his way, but his mute idol worship was trying to her feelings. After tea they went to the top of the tower, and Effie rejoiced exceedingly in the view, which was very beautiful. Here Owen got a word with Elizabeth.

“Your sister seems to be put out about something,” he said.

“I daresay,” she answered carelessly; “Beatrice has an uncertain temper. I think she wanted to go out shooting with Mr. Bingham this afternoon.”

Had Owen been a less religious person he might have sworn; as it was, he only said, “Mr. Bingham–it is always Mr. Bingham from morning to night! When is he going away?”

“In another week, I believe. Beatrice will be sorry, I think; she makes a great companion of him. And now I think that we must be getting home,” and she went, leaving this poisoned shaft to rankle in his breast.

After they had returned to the vicarage and Beatrice had heard Effie her prayers and tucked her up in her small white bed, she went down to the gate to be quiet for a little while before supper. Geoffrey had not yet come in.

It was a lovely autumn evening; the sea seemed to sleep, and the little clouds, from which the sunset fires had paled, lay like wreaths of smoke upon the infinite blue sky. Why had not Mr. Bingham come back, she wondered; he would scarcely have time to dress. Supposing that an accident had happened to him. Nonsense! what accident could happen? He was so big and strong he seemed to defy accidents; and yet had it not been for her there would be little enough left of his strength to-day. Ah! she was glad that she had lived to be able to save him from death. There he came, looming like a giant in the evening mist.

There was a small hand-gate beside the large one on which she leant. Geoffrey stalked straight up to it as though he did not see her; he saw her well enough, but he was cross with her.

She allowed him to pass through the gate, which he shut slowly, perhaps to give her an opportunity of speaking, if she wished to do so; then thinking that he did not see her she spoke in her soft, musical voice.

“Did you have good sport, Mr. Bingham?”

“No,” he answered shortly; “I saw very little, and I missed all I saw.”

“I am so sorry, except for the birds. I hate the birds to be killed. Did you not see me in this white dress? I saw you fifty yards away.”

“Yes, Miss Granger,” he answered, “I saw you.”

“And you were going by without speaking to me; it was very rude of you –what is the matter?”

“Not so rude as it was of you to arrange to walk out with me and then to go and see Mr. Davies instead.”

“I could not help it, Mr. Bingham; it was an old engagement, which I had forgotten.”

“Quite so, ladies generally have an excuse for doing what they want to do.”

“It is not an excuse, Mr. Bingham,” Beatrice answered, with dignity; “there is no need for me to make excuses to you about my movements.”

“Of course not, Miss Granger; but it would be more polite to tell me when you change your mind–next time, you know. However, I have no doubt that the Castle has attractions for you.”

She flashed one look at him and turned to go, and as she did so his heart relented; he grew ashamed.

“Miss Granger, don’t go; forgive me. I do not know what has become of my manners, I spoke as I should not. The fact is, I was put out at your not coming. To tell you the honest truth, I missed you dreadfully.”

“You missed me. That is very nice of you; one likes to be missed. But, if you missed me for one afternoon, how will you get on a week hence when you go away and miss me altogether?”

Beatrice spoke in a bantering tone, and laughed as she spoke, but the laugh ended in something like a sigh. He looked at her for a moment, looked till she dropped her eyes.

“Heaven only knows!” he answered sadly.

“Let us go in,” said Beatrice, in a constrained voice; “how chill the air has turned.”

CHAPTER XV

ONLY GOOD-NIGHT

Five more days passed, all too quickly, and once more Monday came round. It was the 22nd of October, and the Michaelmas Sittings began on the 24th. On the morrow, Tuesday, Geoffrey was to return to London, there to meet Lady Honoria and get to work at Chambers. That very morning, indeed, a brief, the biggest he had yet received–it was marked thirty guineas–had been forwarded to him from his chambers, with a note from his clerk to the effect that the case was expected to be in the special jury list on the first day of the sittings, and that the clerk had made an appointment for him with the solicitors for 5.15 on the Tuesday. The brief was sent to him by his uncle’s firm, and marked, “With you the Attorney-General, and Mr. Candleton, Q.C.,” the well-known leader of the Probate and Divorce Court Bar. Never before had Geoffrey found himself in such honourable company, that is on the back of a brief, and not a little was he elated thereby.

But when he came to look into the case his joy abated somewhat, for it was one of the most perplexing that he had ever known. The will contested, which was that of a Yorkshire money-lender, disposed of property to the value of over £80,000, and was propounded by a niece of the testator who, when he died, if not actually weak in his mind, was in his dotage, and superstitious to the verge of insanity. The niece to whom all the property was left–to the exclusion of the son and daughter of the deceased, both married, and living away from home –stayed with the testator and looked after him. Shortly before his death, however, he and this niece had violently quarrelled on account of an intimacy which the latter had formed with a married man of bad repute, who was a discharged lawyer’s clerk. So serious had been the quarrel that only three days before his death the testator had sent for a lawyer and formally, by means of a codicil, deprived the niece of a sum of £2,000 which he had left her, all the rest of his property being divided between his son and daughter. Three days afterwards, however, he duly executed a fresh will, in the presence of two servants, by which he left all his property to the niece, to the entire exclusion of his own children. This will, though very short, was in proper form and was written by nobody knew whom. The servants stated that the testator before signing it was perfectly acquainted with its contents, for the niece had made him repeat them in their presence. They also declared, however, that he seemed in a terrible fright, and said twice, “It’s behind me; it’s behind me!”

Within an hour of the signing of the will the testator was found dead, apparently from the effects of fear, but the niece was not in the room at the time of death. The only other remarkable circumstance in the case was that the disreputable lover of the niece had been seen hanging about the house at dusk, the testator having died at ten o’clock at night. There was also a further fact. The son, on receiving a message from the niece that his father was seriously worse, had hurried with extraordinary speed to the house, passing some one or something–he could not tell what–that seemed to be running, apparently from the window of the sick man’s room, which was on the ground floor, and beneath which footmarks were afterwards found. Of these footmarks two casts had been taken, of which photographs were forwarded with the brief. They had been made by naked feet of small size, and in each case the little joint of the third toe of the right foot seemed to be missing. But all attempts to find the feet that made them had hitherto failed. The will was contested by the next of kin, for whom Geoffrey was one of the counsel, upon the usual grounds of undue influence and fraud; but as it seemed at present with small prospect of success, for, though the circumstances were superstitious enough, there was not the slightest evidence of either. This curious case, of which the outlines are here written, is briefly set out, because it proved to be the foundation of Geoffrey’s enormous practice and reputation at the Bar.

He read the brief through twice, thought it over well, and could make little of it. It was perfectly obvious to him that there had been foul play somewhere, but he found himself quite unable to form a workable hypothesis. Was the person who had been seen running away concerned in the matter?–if it was a person. If so, was he the author of the footprints? Of course the ex-lawyer’s clerk had something to do with it, but what? In vain did Geoffrey cudgel his brains; every idea that occurred to him broke down somewhere or other.

“We shall lose this,” he said aloud in despair; “suspicious circumstances are not enough to upset a will,” and then, addressing Beatrice, who was sitting at the table, working:

“Here, Miss Granger, you have a smattering of law, see if you can make anything of this,” and he pushed the heavy brief towards her.

Beatrice took it with a laugh, and for the next three-quarters of an hour her fair brow was puckered up in a way quaint to see. At last she finished and shut the brief up. “Let me look at the photographs,” she said.

Geoffrey handed them to her. She very carefully examined first one and then the other, and as she did so a light of intelligence broke out upon her face.

“Well, Portia, have you got it?” he asked.

“I have got something,” she answered. “I do not know if it is right. Don’t you see, the old man was superstitious; they frightened him first of all by a ghostly voice or some such thing into signing the will, and then to death after he had signed it. The lawyer’s clerk prepared the will–he would know how to do it. Then he was smuggled into the room under the bed, or somewhere, dressed up as a ghost perhaps. The sending for the son by the niece was a blind. The thing that was seen running away was a boy–those footprints were made by a boy. I have seen so many thousands on the sands here that I could swear to it. He was attracted to the house from the road, which was quite near, by catching sight of something unusual through the blind; the brief says there were no curtains or shutters. Now look at the photographs of the footprints. See in No. 1, found outside the window, the toes are pressed down deeply into the mud. The owner of the feet was standing on tip-toe to get a better view. But in No. 2, which was found near where the son thought he saw a person running, the toes are spread out quite wide. That is the footprint of some one who was in a great hurry. Now it is not probable that a boy had anything to do with the testator’s death. Why, then, was the boy running so hard? I will tell you: because he was frightened at something he had seen through the blind. So frightened was he, that he will not come forward, or answer the advertisements and inquiries. Find a boy in that town who has a joint missing on the third toe of the right foot, and you will soon know all about it.”

“By Jove,” said Geoffrey, “what a criminal lawyer you would make! I believe that you have got it. But how are we to find this boy with the missing toe-joint? Every possible inquiry has already been made and failed. Nobody has seen such a boy, whose deficiency would probably be known by his parents, or schoolfellows.”

“Yes,” said Beatrice, “it has failed because the boy has taken to wearing shoes, which indeed he would always have to do at school. His parents, if he has any, would perhaps not speak of his disfigurement, and no one else might know of it, especially if he were a new-comer in the neighbourhood. It is quite possible that he took off his boots in order to creep up to the window. And now I will tell you how I should set to work to find him. I should have every bathing-place in the river running through the town–there is a river–carefully watched by detectives. In this weather” (the autumn was an unusually warm one) “boys of that class often paddle and sometimes bathe. If they watch close enough, they will probably find a boy with a missing toe joint among the number.”

“What a good idea,” said Geoffrey. “I will telegraph to the lawyers at once. I certainly believe that you have got the clue.”

And as it turned out afterwards Beatrice had got it; her suppositions were right in almost every particular. The boy, who proved to be the son of a pedlar who had recently come into the town, was found wading, and by a clever trick, which need not be detailed, frightened into telling the truth, as he had previously frightened himself into holding his tongue. He had even, as Beatrice conjectured, taken off his boots to creep up to the window, and as he ran away in his fright, had dropped them into a ditch full of water. There they were found, and went far to convince the jury of the truth of his story. Thus it was that Beatrice’s quick wit laid the foundations of Geoffrey’s great success.

This particular Monday was a field day at the Vicarage. Jones had proved obdurate; no power on earth could induce him to pay the £34 11s. 4d. due on account of tithe. Therefore Mr. Granger, fortified by a judgment duly obtained, had announced his intention of distraining upon Jones’s hay and cattle. Jones had replied with insolent defiance. If any bailiff, or auctioneer, or such people came to sell his hay he would kill him, or them.

So said Jones, and summoned his supporters, many of whom owed tithe, and none of whom wished to pay it, to do battle in his cause. For his part, Mr. Granger retained an auctioneer of undoubted courage who was to arrive on this very afternoon, supported by six policemen, and carry out the sale. Beatrice felt nervous about the whole thing, but Elizabeth was very determined, and the old clergyman was now bombastic and now despondent. The auctioneer arrived duly by the one o’clock train. He was a tall able-bodied man, not unlike Geoffrey in appearance, indeed at twenty yards distance it would have been difficult to tell them apart. The sale was fixed for half-past two, and Mr. Johnson–that was the auctioneer’s name–went to the inn to get his dinner before proceeding to business. He was informed of the hostile demonstration which awaited him, and that an English member of Parliament had been sent down especially to head the mob, but being a man of mettle pooh-poohed the whole affair.

“All bark, sir,” he said to Geoffrey, “all bark and no bite; I’m not afraid of these people. Why, if they won’t bid for the stuff, I will buy it in myself.”

“All right,” said Geoffrey, “but I advise you to look out. I fancy that the old man is a rough customer.”

Then Geoffrey went back to his dinner.

As they sat at the meal, through a gap in the fir trees they saw that the great majority of the population of Bryngelly was streaming up towards the scene of the sale, some to agitate, and some to see the fun.

“It is pretty well time to be off,” said Geoffrey. “Are you coming, Mr. Granger?”

“Well,” answered the old gentleman, “I wished to do so, but Elizabeth thinks that I had better keep away. And after all, you know,” he added airily, “perhaps it is as well for a clergyman not to mix himself up too much in these temporal matters. No, I want to go and see about some pigs at the other end of the parish, and I think that I shall take this opportunity.”

“You are not going, Mr. Bingham, are you?” asked Beatrice in a voice which betrayed her anxiety.

“Oh, yes,” he answered, “of course I am. I would not miss the chance for worlds. Why, Beecham Bones is going to be there, the member of Parliament who has just done his four months for inciting to outrage. We are old friends; I was at school with him. Poor fellow, he was mad even in those days, and I want to chaff him.”

“I think that you had far better not go, Mr. Bingham,” said Beatrice; “they are a very rough set.”

“Everybody is not so cowardly as you are,” put in Elizabeth. “I am going at any rate.”

“That’s right, Miss Elizabeth,” said Geoffrey; “we will protect each other from the revolutionary fury of the mob. Come, it is time to start.”

And so they went, leaving Beatrice a prey to melancholy forebodings.

She waited in the house for the best part of an hour, making pretence to play with Effie. Then her anxiety got the better of her; she put on her hat and started, leaving Effie in charge of the servant Betty.

Beatrice walked quickly along the cliff till she came in sight of Jones’s farm. From where she stood she could make out a great crowd of men, and even, when the wind turned towards her, catch the noise of shouting. Presently she heard a sound like the report of a gun, saw the crowd break up in violent confusion, and then cluster together again in a dense mass.

“What could it mean?” Beatrice wondered.

As the thought crossed her mind, she perceived two men running towards her with all their speed, followed by a woman. Three minutes more and she saw that the woman was Elizabeth.

The men were passing her now.

“What is it?” she cried.

“/Murder!/” they answered with one voice, and sped on towards Bryngelly.

Another moment and Elizabeth was at hand, horror written on her pale face.

Beatrice clutched at her. “/Who/ is it?” she cried.

“Mr. Bingham,” gasped her sister. “Go and help; he’s shot dead!” And she too was gone.

Beatrice’s knees loosened, her tongue clave to the roof of her mouth; the solid earth spun round and round. “Geoffrey killed! Geoffrey killed!” she cried in her heart; but though her ears seemed to hear the sound of them, no words came from her lips. “Oh, what should she do? Where should she hide herself in her grief?”

A few yards from the path grew a stunted tree with a large flat stone at its root. Thither Beatrice staggered and sank upon the stone, while still the solid earth spun round and round.

Presently her mind cleared a little, and a keener pang of pain shot through her soul. She had been stunned at first, now she felt.

“Perhaps it was not true; perhaps Elizabeth had been mistaken or had only said it to torment her.” She rose. She flung herself upon her knees, there by the stone, and prayed, this first time for many years –she prayed with all her soul. “Oh, God, if Thou art, spare him his life and me this agony.” In her dreadful pangs of grief her faith was thus re-born, and, as all human beings must in their hour of mortal agony, Beatrice realised her dependence on the Unseen. She rose, and weak with emotion sank back on to the stone. The people were streaming past her now, talking excitedly. Somebody came up to her and stood over her.

Oh, Heaven, it was Geoffrey!

“Is it you?” she gasped. “Elizabeth said that you were murdered.”

“No, no. It was not I; it is that poor fellow Johnson, the auctioneer. Jones shot him. I was standing next him. I suppose your sister thought that I fell. He was not unlike me, poor fellow.”

Beatrice looked at him, went red, went white, then burst into a flood of tears.

A strange pang seized upon his heart. It thrilled through him, shaking him to the core. Why was this woman so deeply moved? Could it be—-? Nonsense; he stifled the thought before it was born.

“Don’t cry,” Geoffrey said, “the people will see you, Beatrice” (for the first time he called her by her christian name); “pray do not cry. It distresses me. You are upset, and no wonder. That fellow Beecham Bones ought to be hanged, and I told him so. It is his work, though he never meant it to go so far. He’s frightened enough now, I can tell you.”

Beatrice controlled herself with an effort.

“What happened,” he said, “I will tell you as we walk along. No, don’t go up to the farm. He is not a pleasant sight, poor fellow. When I got up there, Beecham Bones was spouting away to the mob–his long hair flying about his back–exciting them to resist laws made by brutal thieving landlords, and all that kind of gibberish; telling them that they would be supported by a great party in Parliament, &c., &c. The people, however, took it all good-naturedly enough. They had a beautiful effigy of your father swinging on a pole, with a placard on his breast, on which was written, ‘The robber of the widow and the orphan,’ and they were singing Welsh songs. Only I saw Jones, who was more than half drunk, cursing and swearing in Welsh and English. When the auctioneer began to sell, Jones went into the house and Bones went with him. After enough had been sold to pay the debt, and while the mob was still laughing and shouting, suddenly the back door of the house opened and out rushed Jones, now quite drunk, a gun in his hand and Bones hanging on to his coat-tails. I was talking to the auctioneer at the moment, and my belief is that the brute thought that I was Johnson. At any rate, before anything could be done he lifted the gun and fired, at me, as I think. The charge, however, passed my head and hit poor Johnson full in the face, killing him dead. That is all the story.”

“And quite enough, too,” said Beatrice with a shudder. “What times we live in! I feel quite sick.”

Supper that night was a very melancholy affair. Old Mr. Granger was altogether thrown off his balance; and even Elizabeth’s iron nerves were shaken.

“It could not be worse, it could not be worse,” moaned the old man, rising from the table and walking up and down the room.

“Nonsense, father,” said Elizabeth the practical. “He might have been shot before he had sold the hay, and then you would not have got your tithe.”

Geoffrey could not help smiling at this way of looking at things, from which, however, Mr. Granger seemed to draw a little comfort. From constantly thinking about it, and the daily pressure of necessity, money had come to be more to the old man than anything else in the world.

Hardly was the meal done when three reporters arrived and took down Geoffrey’s statement of what had occurred, for publication in various papers, while Beatrice went away to see about packing Effie’s things. They were to start by a train leaving for London at half-past eight on the following morning. When Beatrice came back it was half-past ten, and in his irritation of mind Mr. Granger insisted upon everybody going to bed. Elizabeth shook hands with Geoffrey, congratulating him on his escape as she did so, and went at once; but Beatrice lingered a little. At last she came forward and held out her hand.

“Good-night, Mr. Bingham,” she said.

“Good-night. I hope that this is not good-bye also,” he added with some anxiety.

“Of course not,” broke in Mr. Granger. “Beatrice will go and see you off. I can’t; I have to go and meet the coroner about the inquest, and Elizabeth is always busy in the house. Luckily they won’t want you; there were so many witnesses.”

“Then it is only good-night,” said Beatrice.

She went to her room. Elizabeth, who shared it, was already asleep, or pretending to be asleep. Then Beatrice undressed and got into bed, but rest she could not. It was “only good-night,” a last good-night. He was going away–back to his wife, back to the great rushing world, and to the life in which she had no share. Very soon he would forget her. Other interests would arise, other women would become his friends, and he would forget the Welsh girl who had attracted him for a while, or remember her only as the companion of a rough adventure. What did it mean? Why was her heart so sore? Why had she felt as though she should die when they told her that he was dead?

Then the answer rose in her breast. She loved him; it was useless to deny the truth–she loved him body, and heart and soul, with all her mind and all her strength. She was his, and his alone–to-day, to-morrow, and for ever. He might go from her sight, she might never, never see him more, but love him she always must. And he was married!

Well, it was her misfortune; it could not affect the solemn truth. What should she do now, how should she endure her life when her eyes no longer saw his eyes, and her ears never heard his voice? She saw the future stretch itself before her as a vision. She saw herself forgotten by this man whom she loved, or from time to time remembered only with a faint regret. She saw herself growing slowly old, her beauty fading yearly from her face and form, companioned only by the love that grows not old. Oh, it was bitter, bitter! and yet she would not have it otherwise. Even in her pain she felt it better to have found this deep and ruinous joy, to have wrestled with the Angel and been worsted, than never to have looked upon his face. If she could only know that what she gave was given back again, that he loved her as she loved him, she would be content. She was innocent, she had never tried to draw him to her; she had used no touch or look, no woman’s arts or lures such as her beauty placed at her command. There had been no word spoken, scarcely a meaning glance had passed between them, nothing but frank and free companionship as of man with man. She knew he did not love his wife and that his wife did not love him–this she could /see/. But she had never tried to win him from her, and though she sinned in thought, though her heart was guilty–oh, her hands were clean!

Her restlessness overcame her. She could no longer lie in bed. Elizabeth, watching through her veil of sleep, saw Beatrice rise, put on a wrapper, and, going to the window, throw it wide. At first she thought of interfering, for Elizabeth was a prudent person and did not like draughts; but her sister’s movements excited her curiosity, and she refrained. Beatrice sat down on the foot of her bed, and leaning her arm upon the window-sill looked out upon the lovely quiet night. How dark the pine trees massed against the sky; how soft was the whisper of the sea, and how vast the heaven through which the stars sailed on.

What was it, then, this love of hers? Was it mere earthly passion? No, it was more. It was something grander, purer, deeper, and quite undying. Whence came it, then? If she was, as she had thought, only a child of earth, whence came this deep desire which was not of the earth? Had she been wrong, had she a soul–something that could love with the body and through the body and beyond the body–something of which the body with its yearnings was but the envelope, the hand or instrument? Oh, now it seemed to Beatrice that this was so, and that called into being by her love she and her soul stood face to face acknowledging their unity. Once she had held that it was phantasy: that such spiritual hopes were but exhalations from a heart unsatisfied; that when love escapes us on the earth, in our despair, we swear it is immortal, and that we shall find it in the heavens. Now Beatrice believed this no more. Love had kissed her on the eyes, and at his kiss her sleeping spirit was awakened, and she saw a vision of the truth.

Yes, she loved him, and must always love him! But she could never know on earth that he was hers, and if she had a spirit to be freed after some few years, would not his spirit have forgotten hers in that far hereafter of their meeting?

She dropped her brow upon her arm and softly sobbed. What was there left for her to do except to sob–till her heart broke?

Elizabeth, lying with wide-open ears, heard the sobs. Elizabeth, peering through the moonlight, saw her sister’s form tremble in the convulsion of her sorrow, and smiled a smile of malice.

“The thing is done,” she thought; “she cries because the man is going. Don’t cry, Beatrice, don’t cry! We will get your plaything back for you. Oh, with such a bait it will be easy. He is as sweet on you as you on him.”

There was something evil, something almost devilish, in this scene of the one watching woman holding a clue to and enjoying the secret tortures of the other, plotting the while to turn them to her innocent rival’s destruction and her own advantage. Elizabeth’s jealousy was indeed bitter as the grave.

Suddenly Beatrice ceased sobbing. She lifted her head, and by a sudden impulse threw out the passion of her heart with all her concentrated strength of mind towards the man she loved, murmuring as she did so some passionate, despairing words which she knew.

At this moment Geoffrey, sleeping soundly, dreamed that he saw Beatrice seated by her window and looking at him with eyes which no earthly obstacle could blind. She was speaking; her lips moved, but though he could hear no voice the words she spoke floated into his mind–

“Be a god and hold me
With a charm!
Be a man and fold me
With thine arm.

Teach me, only teach, Love!
As I ought
I will speak thy speech, Love,
Think thy thought–

Meet, if thou require it,
Both demands,
Laying flesh and spirit
In thy hands.

That shall be to-morrow
Not to-night:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight.

Must a little weep, Love,
(Foolish me!)
And so fall asleep, Love,
Loved by thee.”

Geoffrey heard them in his heart. Then they were gone, the vision of Beatrice was gone, and suddenly he awoke.

Oh, what was this flood of inarticulate, passion-laden thought that beat upon his brain telling of Beatrice? Wave after wave it came, utterly overwhelming him, like the heavy breath of flowers stirred by a night wind–like a message from another world. It was real; it was no dream, no fancy; she was present with him though she was not there; her thought mingled with his thought, her being beat upon his own. His heart throbbed, his limbs trembled, he strove to understand and could not. But in the mystery of that dread communion, the passion he had trodden down and refused acknowledgment took life and form within him; it grew like the Indian’s magic tree, from seed to blade, from blade to bud, and from bud to bloom. In that moment it became clear to him: he knew he loved her, and knowing what such a love must mean, for him if not for her, Geoffrey sank back and groaned.

And Beatrice? Of a sudden she ceased speaking to herself; she felt her thought flung back to her weighted with another’s thought. She had broken through the barriers of earth; the quick electric message of her heart had found a path to him she loved and come back answered. But in what tongue was that answer writ? Alas! she could not read it, any more than he could read the message. At first she doubted; surely it was imagination. Then she remembered it was absolutely proved that people dying could send a vision of themselves to others far away; and if that could be, why not this? No, it was truth, a solemn truth; she knew he felt her thought, she knew that his life beat upon her life. Oh, here was mystery, and here was hope, for if this could be, and it /was/, what might not be? If her blind strength of human love could so overstep the boundaries of human power, and, by the sheer might of its volition, mock the physical barriers that hemmed her in, what had she to fear from distance, from separation, ay, from death itself? She had grasped a clue which might one day, before the seeming end or after– what did it matter?–lay strange secrets open to her gaze. She had heard a whisper in an unknown tongue that could still be learned, answering Life’s agonizing cry with a song of glory. If only he loved her, some day all would be well. Some day the barriers would fall. Crumbling with the flesh, they would fall and set her naked spirit free to seek its other self. And then, having found her love, what more was there to seek? What other answer did she desire to all the problems of her life than this of Unity attained at last–Unity attained in Death!

And if he did not love her, how could he answer her? Surely that message could not pass except along the golden chord of love, which ever makes its sweetest music when Pain strikes it with a hand of fear.

The troubled glory passed–it throbbed itself away; the spiritual gusts of thought grew continually fainter, till, like the echoes of a dying harp, like the breath of a falling gale, they slowly sank to nothingness. Then wearied with an extreme of wild emotion Beatrice sought her bed again and presently was lost in sleep.

When Geoffrey woke on the next morning, after a little reflection, he came to the decision that he had experienced a very curious and moving dream, consequent on the exciting events of the previous day, or on the pain of his impending departure. He rose, packed his bag– everything else was ready–and went in to breakfast. Beatrice did not appear till it was half over. She looked very pale, and said that she had been packing Effie’s things. Geoffrey noticed that she barely touched his fingers when he rose to shake hands with her, and that she studiously avoided his glance. Then he began to wonder if she also had strangely dreamed.

Next came the bustle of departure. Effie was despatched in the fly with the luggage and Betty, the fat Welsh servant, to look after her. Beatrice and Geoffrey were to walk to the station.

“Time for you to be going, Mr. Bingham,” said Mr. Granger. “There, good-bye, good-bye! God bless you! Never had such charming lodgers before. Hope you will come back again, I’m sure. By the way, they are certain to summon you as a witness at the trial of that villain Jones.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Granger,” Geoffrey answered; “you must come and see me in town. A change will do you good.”

“Well, perhaps I may. I have not had a change for twenty-five years. Never could afford it. Aren’t you going to say good-bye to Elizabeth?”

“Good-bye, Miss Granger,” said Geoffrey politely. “Many thanks for all your kindness. I hope we shall meet again.”

“Do you?” answered Elizabeth; “so do I. I am sure that we shall meet again, and I am sure that I shall be glad to see you when we do, Mr. Bingham,” she added darkly.

In another minute he had left the Vicarage and, with Beatrice at his side, was walking smartly towards the station.

“This is very melancholy,” he said, after a few moments’ silence.

“Going away generally is,” she answered–“either for those who go or those who stay behind,” she added.

“Or for both,” he said.

Then came another pause; he broke it.

“Miss Beatrice, may I write to you?”

“Certainly, if you like.”

“And will you answer my letters?”

“Yes, I will answer them.”

“If I had my way, then, you should spend a good deal of your time in writing,” he said. “You don’t know,” he added earnestly, “what a delight it has been to me to learn to know you. I have had no greater pleasure in my life.”

“I am glad,” Beatrice answered shortly.

“By the way,” Geoffrey said presently, “there is something I want to ask you. You are as good as a reference book for quotations, you know. Some lines have been haunting me for the last twelve hours, and I cannot remember where they come from.”

“What are they?” she asked, looking up, and Geoffrey saw, or thought he saw, a strange fear shining in her eyes.

“Here are four of them,” he answered unconcernedly; “we have no time for long quotations:

“‘That shall be to-morrow,
Not to-night:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight.'”

Beatrice heard–heard the very lines which had been upon her lips in the wild midnight that had gone. Her heart seemed to stop; she became white as the dead, stumbled, and nearly fell. With a supreme effort she recovered herself.

“I think that you must know the lines, Mr. Bingham,” she said in a low voice. “They come from a poem of Browning’s, called ‘A Woman’s Last Word.'”

Geoffrey made no answer; what was he to say? For a while they walked on in silence. They were getting close to the station now. Separation, perhaps for ever, was very near. An overmastering desire to know the truth took hold of him.

“Miss Beatrice,” he said again, “you look pale. Did you sleep well last night?”

“No, Mr. Bingham.”

“Did you have curious dreams?”

“Yes, I did,” she answered, looking straight before her.

He turned a shade paler. Then it was true!

“Beatrice,” he said in a half whisper, “what do they mean?”

“As much as anything else, or as little,” she answered.

“What are people to do who dream such dreams?” he said again, in the same constrained voice.

“Forget them,” she whispered.

“And if they come back?”

“Forget them again.”

“And if they will not be forgotten?”

She turned and looked him full in the eyes.

“Die of them,” she said; “then they will be forgotten, or—-“

“Or what, Beatrice?”

“Here is the station,” said Beatrice, “and Betty is quarrelling with the flyman.”

Five minutes more and Geoffrey was gone.

CHAPTER XVI

THE FLAT NEAR THE EDGWARE ROAD

Geoffrey’s journey to town was not altogether a cheerful one. To begin with, Effie wept copiously at parting with her beloved “auntie,” as she called Beatrice, and would not be comforted. The prospect of rejoining her mother and the voluble Anne had no charms for Effie. They all three got on best apart. Geoffrey himself had also much to think about, and found little satisfaction in the thinking. He threw his mind back over the events of the past few weeks. He remembered how he had first seen Beatrice’s face through the thick mist on the Red Rocks, and how her beauty had struck him as no beauty ever had before. Then he thought of the adventure of their shipwreck, and of the desperate courage with which she had saved his life, almost at the cost of her own. He thought, too, of that scene when on the following day he had entered the room where she was asleep, when the wandering ray of light had wavered from her breast to his own, when that strange presentiment of the ultimate intermingling of their lives had flashed upon him, and when she had awakened with an unearthly greeting on her lips. While Effie slowly sobbed herself to silence in the corner opposite to him, one by one, he recalled every phase and scene of their ever-growing intimacy, till the review culminated in his mysterious experience of the past night, and the memory of Beatrice’s parting words.

Of all men Geoffrey was among those least inclined to any sort of superstition; from boyhood he had been noted for common sense, and a somewhat disbelieving turn of mind. But he had intellect, and imagination which is simply intellect etherealised. Without these, with his peculiar mental constitution, he would, for instance, probably have been a religious sceptic; having them, he was nothing of the sort. So in this matter of his experience of the previous night, and generally of the strange and almost unnatural sympathy in which he found himself with this lady, common sense and the results of his observation and experience pointed to the whole thing being nonsense– the result of “propinquity, Sir, propinquity,” and a pretty face–and nothing more.

But here his intellect and his imagination stepped in, telling him plainly that it was not nonsense, that he had not merely made a donkey of himself over an hysterical, or possibly a love-sick girl. They told him that because a thing is a mystery it is not necessarily a folly, though mysteries are for the most part dealt in by fools. They suggested that there may be many things and forces above us and around us, invisible as an electric current, intangible as light, yet existent and capable of manifestation under certain rare and favourable conditions.

And was it not possible that such conditions should unite in a woman like Beatrice, who combined in herself a beauty of body which was only outpassed by the beauty of her mind? It was no answer to say that most women could never inspire the unearthly passion with which he had been shaken some ten hours past, or that most men could never become aware of the inspiration. Has not humanity powers and perceptions denied to the cattle of the fields, and may there not be men and women as far removed from their fellows in this respect as these are from the cattle?

But the weak point of mysterious occurrences is that they lead nowhere, and do not materially alter the facts of life. One cannot, for instance, plead a mystery in a court of law; so, dropping the imaginative side of the question as one beyond him, Geoffrey came to its practical aspect, only to find it equally thorny.

Odd as it may seem, Geoffrey did not to this moment know the exact position which he occupied in the mind of Beatrice, or that she occupied in his. He was not in love with her, at least not in a way in which he had ever experienced the influence of that, on the whole, inconvenient and disagreeable passion. At any rate he argued from the hypothesis that he was not in love with her. This he refused to admit now in the light of day, though he had admitted it fully in the watches of the night. It would not do to admit it. But he was forced to acknowledge that she had crept into his life and possessed it so completely that then and for months afterwards, except in deep sleep or in hours of severe mental strain, not a single half hour would pass without bringing its thought of Beatrice. Everything that was beautiful, or grand, or elevating, reminded him of her–and what higher compliment could a mistress have? If he listened to glorious music, the voice of Beatrice spoke to him through the notes; if he watched the clouds rolling in heavy pomp across a broken sky he thought of Beatrice; if some chance poem or novel moved him, why Beatrice was in his mind to share the pleasure. All of which was very interesting, and in some ways delightful, but under our current system not otherwise than inconvenient to a married man.

And now Beatrice was gone, and he must come back to his daily toil, sweetened by Honoria’s bitter complaints of their poverty, and see her no more. The thought made Geoffrey’s heart ache with a physical pain, but his reason told him that it was best so. After all, there were no bones broken; there had been no love scenes, no kiss, no words that cannot be recalled; whatever there was lay beneath the surface, and while appearances were kept up all was well. No doubt it was an hypocrisy, but then hypocrisy is one of the great pillars of civilization, and how does it matter what the heart says while the lips are silent? The Recording Angel can alone read hearts, and he must often find them singularly contradictory and untrustworthy writings.

Die of them, die of her dreams! No, Beatrice would not die of them, and certainly he should not. Probably in the end she would marry that pious earthly lump, Owen Davies. It was not pleasant to think of, it was even dreadful, but really if she were to ask him his opinion, “as a friend,” he should tell her it was the best thing that she could do. Of course it would be hypocrisy again, the lips would give his heart the lie; but when the heart rises in rebellion against the intelligence it must be suppressed. Unfortunately, however, though a small member, it is very strong.

They reached London at last, and as had been arranged, Anne, the French /bonne/, met them at the station to take Effie home. Geoffrey noticed that she looked smarter and less to his taste than ever. However, she embraced Effie with an enthusiasm which the child scarcely responded to, and at the same time carried on an ocular flirtation with a ticket collector. Although early in the year for yellow fogs, London was plunged in a dense gloom. It had been misty that morning at Bryngelly, and become more and more so as the day advanced; but, though it was not yet four o’clock, London was dark as night. Luckily, however, it is not far from Paddington to the flat near the Edgware Road, where Geoffrey lived, so having personally instructed the cabman, he left Anne to convoy Effie and the luggage, and went on to the Temple by Underground Railway with an easy mind.

Shortly after Geoffrey reached his chambers in Pump Court the solicitor arrived as had been arranged, not his uncle–who was, he learned, very unwell–but a partner. To his delight he then found that Beatrice’s ghost theory was perfectly accurate; the boy with the missing toe-joint had been discovered who saw the whole horrible tragedy through a crack in the blind; moreover the truth had been wrung from him and he would be produced at the trial–indeed a proof of his evidence was already forthcoming. Also some specimens of the ex-lawyer’s clerk’s handwriting had been obtained, and were declared by two experts to be identical with the writing on the will. One thing, however, disturbed him: neither the Attorney-General nor Mr. Candleton was yet in town, so no conference was possible that evening. However, both were expected that night–the Attorney-General from Devonshire and Mr. Candleton from the Continent; so the case being first on the list, it was arranged that the conference should take place at ten o’clock on the following morning.

On arriving home Geoffrey was informed that Lady Honoria was dressing, and had left a message saying he must be quick and do likewise as a gentleman was coming to dinner. Accordingly he went to his own room– which was at the other end of the flat–and put on his dress clothes. Before going to the dining-room, however, he said good-night to Effie –who was in bed, but not asleep–and asked her what time she had reached home.

“At twenty minutes past five, daddy,” Effie said promptly.

“Twenty minutes past five! Why, you don’t mean to say that you were an hour coming that little way! Did you get blocked in the fog?”

“No, daddy, but—-“

“But what, dear?”

“Anne did tell me not to say!”

“But I tell you to say, dear–never mind Anne!”

“Anne stopped and talked to the ticket-man for a long, long time.”

“Oh, did she?” he said.

At that moment the parlourmaid came to say that Lady Honoria and the “gentleman” were waiting for dinner. Geoffrey asked her casually what time Miss Effie had reached home.

“About half-past five, sir. Anne said the cab was blocked in the fog.”

“Very well. Tell her ladyship that I shall be down in a minute.”

“Daddy,” said the child, “I haven’t said my prayers. Mother did not come, and Anne said it was all nonsense about prayers. Auntie did always hear me my prayers.”

“Yes, dear, and so will I. There, kneel upon my lap and say them.”

In the middle of the prayers–which Effie did not remember as well as she might have done–the parlourmaid arrived again.

“Please, sir, her ladyship—-“

“Tell her ladyship I am coming, and that if she is in a hurry she can go to dinner! Go on, love.”

Then he kissed her and put her to bed again.

“Daddy,” said Effie, as he was going, “shall I see auntie Beatrice any more?”

“I hope so, dear.”

“And shall you see her any more? You want to see her, don’t you, daddy? She did love you very much!”

Geoffrey could bear it no longer. The truth is always sharper when it comes from the mouth of babes and sucklings. With a hurried good-night he fled.

In the little drawing-room he found Lady Honoria, very well dressed, and also her friend, whose name was Mr. Dunstan. Geoffrey knew him at once for an exceedingly wealthy man of small birth, and less breeding, but a burning and a shining light in the Garsington set. Mr. Dunstan was anxious to raise himself in society, and he thought that notwithstanding her poverty, Lady Honoria might be useful to him in this respect. Hence his presence there to-night.

“How do you do, Geoffrey?” said his wife, advancing to greet him with a kiss of peace. “You look very well. But what an immense time you have been dressing. Poor Mr. Dunstan is starving. Let me see. You know Mr. Dunstan, I think. Dinner, Mary.”

Geoffrey apologised for being late, and shook hands politely with Mr. Dunstan–Saint Dunstan he was generally called on account of his rather clerical appearance and in sarcastic allusion to his somewhat shady reputation. Then they went in to dinner.

“Sorry there is no lady for you, Geoffrey; but you must have had plenty of ladies’ society lately. By the way, how is Miss–Miss Granger? Would you believe it, Mr. Dunstan? that shocking husband of mine has been passing the last month in the company of one of the loveliest girls I ever saw, who knows Latin and law and everything else under the sun. She began by saving his life, they were upset together out of a canoe, you know. Isn’t it romantic?”