BEGGARS ON HORSEBACK

London: William Heinemann, 1915

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED
WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE
TO
MISS HANNAH MERCY ROBERTS
(NAN)
AS A SMALL ACKNOWLEDGMENT
OF A LARGE DEBT

Contents

A SHEPHERDESS OF FAUNS

A SHEPHERDESS OF FAUNS

Archie Lethbridge arrived in Provence thoroughly satisfied with life. He had just sold a big picture; was contemplating, with every prospect of success, giving a "one-man-show" in London of the work he would do in Provence; and the girl he loved had accepted him.

Miss Gwendolen Gould was eminently eligible—her income, though comfortable, was not large enough to brand her husband as a fortune-hunter; she was pretty in a well-bred way that satisfied the eye without causing it to turn and gaze after her; and above all, she could be relied upon never to do, say, or think an unusual thing. Like all painters, when they are conventionally minded, Archie was the fine flower of propriety—he owned to enough wild oats of his own sowing to save him from inferiority in the society of his fellow-men, and he held exceedingly rigid views on the subject of his womenkind. Gwendolen might—doubtless had, for she was one of the large army of young women brought up to no profession save that of sex—give this or that man a kiss at a dance, but she would never have saved all of passion and possibilities for one man, and lavished them on him, regardless of suitable circumstances. Archie's name (that he hoped one day to adorn with some coveted letters at which he now pretended to sneer) would be perfectly safe with Gwendolen.

The only drawback to his complete content was that his fair, sleek person showed signs of getting a trifle too plump—for he was only young as a man who is nearly "arrived" counts youth. On the whole, however, it was with a feeling of settled attainment that Archie left Nice and proceeded to strike up into the Alpes Maritimes, totally unprepared for any bizarre or inexplicable event—he would have laughed satirically at the bare idea.

To do him justice, he worked hard, and he had a tremendous facility and a certain charm that concealed his lack of true artistic sensitiveness. There is probably nothing more difficult to interpret in paint than an olive-tree—the incredible grey brilliance of the thing, each leaf set at a slightly different angle, and refracting the light till the whole tree seems made of blown mist and sharp-cut shadows. Archie painted olives under every effect; sparkling in the sun, fog-grey on a grey day, and pale with the shimmering under-side of straining leaves against a storm-dark sky. He also painted very dirty children picking the ranked violets and stocks that grew along the olive terraces, and this he achieved without once descending into the realms of the "pretty-pretty," while at the same time infusing just the right amount of sentiment to ensure a sale.

He painted here and there from Grasse to Le Broc, and then one day, feeling he had taken all he could from the soft-scented land of olives and flowers, he hired a motor to convey him up into the Back o' Beyond, and drop him there. Once he met a couple of women bearing on their heads the sheaves of tight little red rosebuds that look exactly like bundles of radishes, and caught a whiff of the strange, bitter-sweet smell of the newly cut stems. Then he passed an old shepherd in a cloak of faded blue, with sheepskin legs cross-gartered to the knee, taking his lean, golden-brown flock up into the mountains.

After that he saw no living thing, neither bird nor beast nor human, for many miles. Rounded hills, opening out from each other in endless succession and covered from crest to base with harsh yellow grass, and strewn with grey boulders. Deep gullies that at one time had been set alight and now were scorched and brown like plague-pits, with here and there a patch of pale stones showing up lividly from the charred thorns and blackened soil. Archie shivered, partly because of the keen wind blowing down from the great plateau beyond the hills, partly because something savage in the scene gripped at him.

The car throbbed on, higher and higher, till the road, winding acutely along the edge of precipices, developed a surface that caused his chauffeur to swear gently to himself. Valley after valley opened out, long and narrow, and Archie noticed signs of a long-past cultivation in the curved terraces into which the bed of each valley was cut, forming an endless series of semicircles. There was no trace of any crop, and the whole effect was as of some rude amphitheatre where prehistoric man had sat and watched gladiatorial shows.

The car, sticking now and then in a rut, or jolting violently over stones, finally crested the last rise, and Archie found himself on a vast stretch of land ringed in by sharp-edged hills, like some dead, gigantic crater; to the right, far away on a slope of the mountain ring, lay a grey straggling town that looked hacked out of the hardened lava. The only sign of life was in a patch of vividly green grass near at hand, where hundreds of crocuses had burned their way up through the earth and showed like a bed of thin blue flames.

Archie directed the contemptuous chauffeur towards the town, and they finally drew up at the inn—a little green-shuttered affair, with a stone-flagged passage, and a tortoise-shell cat drowsing beside the door. Outside a buvette opposite was a marble-topped table at which sat a couple of workmen drinking cider. An evanescent gleam of sun shone out, and the tawny liquid caught and held it, making each glass throw on to the table a bubble of gold fire enmeshed in the delicate shadow of the vessel itself. Archie stood transfixed for a moment with pleasure, then, as the gleam faded and died, he entered the inn.

* * * * *

Like most people with the creative temperament, Archie Lethbridge was the prey of environment. The unborn child is not more influenced by the surroundings of its mother than a book or picture by those of its creator. Draginoules took such a deep, sure grip of Archie that it did more than merely affect his work—it began to upset his neatly arranged values, and, since Nature abhors a vacuum, to substitute fresh ones in their place. Draginoules, in short, behaved like a master of scenic effects; it allowed a couple of days for the background to permeate Archie's consciousness, and, when he was ripe for it, introduced the human element, which, to a man of his type, means a woman.

It was one morning when he was washing brushes in the dim inn kitchen that he saw her first. She came out of the buvette to serve some workmen, and Archie stopped dead in the act of swirling a cobalt-laden brush round and round in the hollowed yellow soap he held. He always saw the whole scene in memory as clearly as he saw it then—the low-fronted buvette,the glass of the door refracting the light as it still quivered from her passage; the pools of blue shadow that lay under the table and chairs on the pavement; the blouse-clad figures of the workmen, particularly a young man with a deeply burnt back to his neck; and the girl herself, holding aloft a tray of liqueur glasses, that winked like little eyes. All this he saw framed by the darkness of the kitchen and cut sharply into squares by the black bars of the window; then, as he mechanically went on frothing blue-stained bubbles out of the soap, he said to himself, "I must paint that girl."

He soon found out that she was the niece of the stout couple who kept the buvette, and that her name was Désirée Prévost. As they mentioned her most people shrugged their shoulders. Oh, no, there was nothing against the girl—though it was true her eyebrows met in a thick bar across her nose, and old people had always said that was a sign of the Loup-Garou; enlightened moderns, however, did not really hold by that. The town was proud of her looks, for it considered her très bien, the highest expression of praise from a Provençal, who is a dour kind of person, taking his pleasures as sadly as the proverbial Englishman, and whose chief aim in life is to place one sou on the top of another, and when possible insert a third in between.

Archie approached the aunt of Désirée on the subject of sittings with some trepidation, but met with an agreeable pliancy from her, and a calm though indifferent assent from Désirée herself. She had a high opinion of her own value, and no amount of appreciation surprised her.

Scanning her afresh as they stood on the pavement making final arrangements, Archie inwardly congratulated himself. From the heavy brass-coloured hair massed with a sculptured effect round her well-poised head, to the firmly planted feet, admirably proportioned to the rest of her, she was entirely right for his purpose—she seemed the spirit of Draginoules incarnate. Owing to the opaque pallor of her skin, her level bar of fair eyebrow and heavily folded lids, her big, finely modelled nose and faintly tinted mouth, all took on a sculptured quality that made for repose; the very shadows of her face were delicate in tone, mere breaths of shadows. Yet she was excessively vital, but it was a smouldering, restrained vitality suggestive of a quiescent crater. Her face was too individual to be perfect—the nose over big; the brow too narrow for the full modelling across the cheekbones, but she had an egg-like curve from turn of jaw to pointed chin. When she laughed her teeth showed large and strong, and her throat was the loveliest Archie had ever seen—magnificently big—and she had a trick of tilting her head back that made the smoothly knitted muscles of her neck swell a little under the white skin. As he painted her Archie used to find himself racking his brains for some speech that would make her head take that upward poise, so that he could watch the play of throat.

He chose his background well; a sheltered spot in a fold of hill just beyond the town, where a slim young oak sapling still retained its copper-hued autumn leaves, that seemed almost fiery against the deep, soft blue of the sky. He had conceived of her as standing under the oak-tree, so that, to him, working lower down on the slope she too showed against the sky, seemingly caught in a network of delicate boughs. Being below her he was also the richer by the soft, three-cornered shadow under her chin, and the whole of her became a tone of exquisite delicacy, as of shadowed ivory, in the setting of sky—that sky of southern spring which seems literally drenched in light. The tawny note of the oak-leaves was to be repeated in some sheep, which, though kept subservient to the figure of Désirée, were to supply the motive of the picture—or so Archie thought till the sudden freak that made him introduce the fauns.

Désirée was all for robing herself in her best—a black silk bodice with a high collar, and a be-trained, jet-spangled skirt, but Archie coaxed her into wearing the dress he first saw her in; a mere wrapper of indefinite prune colour, belted in at the waist to show the lines of her deep chested, long flanked figure, and cut so low as to leave her throat bare from the pit of it. Her sleeves were rolled back to the elbow and her arms showed milk-white as far as the reddened wrists and the big, work-roughened hands that held a hazel switch across her thighs.

Archie was Anglo-Saxon enough to feel a slight stiffness at the first sitting, but Désirée was a stranger to the sensation of tied tongue.

"I like the English," she announced. "Not many of them come here, but I have not spent my life in Draginoules, no, indeed! I was in a laundry once at La Madeleine. Do you know it? It is where they take in the washing of Nice. So I used to go much into Nice, and an English lady there painted me. She had a talent! She made me look beautiful. In Draginoules, do you know what they call me? They call me l'Anglaise manquée!"

"Because you like the English so?" asked Archie. His French was considerably purer than hers, she spoke it with the Provençal accent that sounds exactly like a Cockney twang.

"Because I have the nature, the habits of an English woman. Oh, I assure you! I like to live out of doors—to be out all day with one's bread and a bottle of wine and sleep on the hillside—that is what I call living. I always open my window at night, though my aunt says it is a folly. I could go to England if I chose, as a maid. My English lady would have me. Ah! how I long to see England. One gets so tired with Draginoules."

"But your friends—you would be sorry to leave them?"

"Oh, for that, I do not care about the people of Draginoules. It was my mother's place, not mine. I was born in Lyons, where my father was a silk-weaver. But he was a bad kind of man, so I came to my aunt to live. I do not think much of the people of Draginoules. They all like me, but I do not like them!"

"Why don't you go to England, then? Though I think you are far better here!" quoth Archie, on whom the glamour of the place was strong.

"My fiancé would kill himself," said Désirée serenely.

"Oh—you are fiancée?" murmured Archie, wondering why he felt that absurd mingling of relief and regret.

"To Auguste Colombini. He is a mechanician in Nice. We are to marry when he gets a rise. Hélas! je ne serai plus fille!"

Her words, so simply and directly spoken, caught at Archie's imagination—"Hélas! je ne serai plus fille!"

"What a vierge farouche!" he said to himself. "If I can get that feeling into my picture!" Aloud he said: "And your fiancé—he is very devoted, then?"

"He adores me. It is a perfect folly, see you, to feel for anyone what he does for me. He is mad about me."

She spoke with a calm arrogance that was very effective. How sure she was of her man! Was it a peculiarity of temperament in her or her fiancé that made such confidence possible? Archie flattered himself he was something of a student of human nature, and he absorbed all of Désirée that he could get in a spirit positively approaching that of the journalist.

When a man and woman fall into the habit of discussing the intimate things, such as love and marriage; and, above all, of comparing the sexes; disaster, even if only a temporary one, is apt to follow. Archie returned to the themes next time she posed for him.

"So you think a man can care too much for a woman?" he asked, and stopped for a moment with raised brush to watch her answer. She shrugged her shoulders slightly, yet enough to make the folds of her wrapper strain upward for a fleeting moment.

"As to that I think women are worth it. But it is foolish to care everything for one person."

"You could care for others, then—as well as M. Colombini?" asked Archie with a sudden stir at his pulses.

"I? One can care a little—here and there. But commit a folly for a man, that is a thing I would never do. And I am very fond of Auguste. If I did not think we should be happy and faithful I should not marry him. I look round on all the married people I know, and see nothing but betrayal everywhere. Here a husband plays his wife false, there she in her turn cheats him. Bah!—it is not good, that!"

"How right you are!" said Archie virtuously. "But you do not then think it necessary to care as much for Auguste as he cares for you?"

"Damme, no! How should I? He pleases me, and he is good—I can respect him. And I like him to kiss me . . ." the most charming look of self-consciousness mingled with reminiscence flitted over her face—"but for him—he is mad when he kisses me. Women do not care like that. It is a folly. And it is always happier, Monsieur, when it is the husband who cares the most. That is how men are made."

Oh, yes, thought Archie, she was a woman after all, this vierge farouche, and more unashamedly woman, franker in her admissions of knowledge—for she admitted in her expressive face and gestures more than she actually said—than any woman of his world. He worked in silence for a while then told her to rest.

She flung herself on the turf with an abandonment of limb and muscle usually only seen in young animals, and he came and lay a little below her and lit a cigarette. Désirée lay serenely, her face upturned, and he studied her thoughtfully.

"Surely very few of your countrywomen are as blonde as you?" he asked her. "Your eyes are blue, and your brows and lashes a faint brown and your hair is——"

He paused, at a loss how to describe her hair. It was not golden, rather that strong brass-colour that, had he seen it on a sophisticated townswoman he would have dubbed "peroxide." It was oddly metallic hair, not only in its colour, but in the carven ripples of it where she wore it pulled across her low brow and massed in heavy braids round her head. That way of wearing her hair right down to her brows, except for a narrow white triangle of forehead showing, boy-like, at one side, gave her an oddly animal look—using the word in its best sense. A look as of some low-browed, heavy-tressed faun, fearless and unashamed—it was only in her eyes that mystery lay.

"My hair?" she exclaimed, showing her big white teeth in a laugh as frank as a boy's; "but that, you know, is not natural! It was an accident!"

"An accident! How on earth——?"

"Why, I was doing the ménage for a chemist and his wife over the border, at Cannes. And she had hair like this, and one day she gave me a little bottle and said: 'Désirée, you're a good girl, but you don't know how to make the best of yourself. You put some of this on your head.' I rubbed some on, one side only, just to see what would happen, and next day I found one half of my head golden—golden like the sun. 'Mon Dieu!' I said, 'but what do I look like, one half yellow and one half brown!' So I poured it on all over. It is nothing now because I have not put on the stuff for so long, but at one time it was beautiful. Such hair! Below my waist, and gold, oh, such a gold! Now it wants doing again."

She ducked her head down for him to see the crown of it, and he perceived from the parting outwards two inches of unabashed dark hair—almost blue it looked by contrast with the circling wrappings of yellow. Archie, immensely tickled at finding this splendid young savage in the Back o' Beyond with dyed hair, could but shout with mirth, and Désirée, totally unoffended, joined in. When he went back that evening he felt he knew her far better than on the preceding day. In intimacies between men and women each day marks a distinct phase, making a series of steps; and the only possible thing to do is to see that the steps do not lead downwards. Like most people when on those magic stairs, Archie gave no heed to the question.

The next day he unconsciously took up their conversation of the day before—a sure sign of intimacy if ever there were one. They were resting again, for he said it was too hot to work; and the sunset effect he wanted was growing later every day.

"So you could care a little for some one else before you marry Auguste?" he suggested lightly enough, and looking away from her to the snow mountains that bared white fangs in the blue of the sky.

She laughed a little, stretched herself, drooped her lids, was in a flash, and for a flash, entirely woman—alluring, withdrawing, sure of herself. As she gained in poise Archie felt his own tenure on self-control slipping away from him.

"Could you?" he persisted, his eyes by now back on her changing face.

"How does one care? What is it?" she evaded. "I do not think you would be able to tell me. You are so cold, so English, you would care just as much as would be pleasant and never enough to make you uncomfortable!"

The penetration of this remark displeased Archie.

"But you are like that yourself," he objected. "You are the most cool, calculating girl I ever met—everything you say shows it."

She rolled over slightly on the grass, so that her head, the chin thrust forward on her cupped hands, was brought nearer to him but kept at the provocative three-quarter angle suggestive of withdrawal. Her thick heavy lids were drooped, but suddenly they flickered and half-rose to show a gleam so wild, so unlike anything he had ever seen in her, that Archie caught his breath. It was as though some alien spirit, a pagan, woodland thing, was looking at him through the eyes of the self-possessed, level-headed young woman, who at times even seemed more bourgeois than peasant.

"Désirée! How beautiful you are!" he cried.

"As beautiful as Mademoiselle your fiancée?" asked Désirée.

With a run Archie descended into the commonplace, and Désirée became for him nothing but a pretty girl who went rather too far.

"Englishmen do not care to discuss the lady of their choice," he said grandiloquently. "May I ask how you knew I was fiancé?"

"I have seen her picture in your room," said Désirée frankly; "the patronne told me there was one there. She is pretty, but yes, very pretty. Her hair is so beautifully done in all those little rolls, one would say it must be false. She is altogether mignonne, one would say the head of a doll!"

Désirée was absolutely sincere in thinking she was giving Miss Gwendolen Gould the highest praise possible. She would willingly have exchanged her splendid muscular body for the slim, corseted form of Miss Gould, and have bartered her strongly modelled head for the small, regular features and Marcel-waved hair of the other girl. It was only his perception of this that kept Archie from anger, and as it was the truth of the praise hit him sharply. That night he sat down before the miniature and conscientiously tried to conjure up the emotions of a lover. The experiment was a failure.

When he came to go to bed he found, to his amazement, a sprig of myrtle lying on his pillow—just a spray of leaves and a cluster of the purple berries with their little frilled heads.

"How did that get there I wonder?" he asked himself, and then stooped, with an exclamation of disgust. A corner of the turned back sheet that trailed on the floor was lightly powdered with earth as though a muddy shoe had stood on it. The footprint—if footprint it were—was oddly impossible in shape, short and rounded, more like the mark of a hoof.

"Can the patronne's goat have got up here? I saw it wandering in the passage to-day," thought Archie vexedly. "Beastly animal to drop half-chewed green food all over my pillow!"

The injured man thumped his pillow and turned it over, so that the despised myrtle sprig lay crushed beneath it. Then he went to bed and to sleep.

"I dreamt of you all night, Désirée," he told her next day.

"I was pursuing you round rocks and over streams and through undergrowth all night long. You were you and yet you weren't. Somehow I got the impression that it was you as you would have been hundreds and thousands of years ago. And I kept on losing you and then little satyrs beckoned at me to show me the way you'd gone, and I stumbled on after the hoofs that were always flashing up just ahead—just vanishing round corners."

"Satyrs? What are they?" asked Désirée.

Archie explained as picturesquely as possible, but was brought to a stop by a curious change in Désirée's eyes. They wore the strained, misty look of the person who is trying hard to catch at some long-lost memory. Again he was startled by that strange feeling that something else was looking from between those placid lids of hers.

"But I know," she began—"those creatures you are telling me—what is it I know about them?" She broke off and shook herself impatiently. "Bah! It is gone. And then what happened—did you find me at the end?"

"I can't quite remember," said Archie slowly "Something happened, but what it was is all blurred. I believe you're a wood-nymph, Désirée—a wood-nymph whose father was a satyr—and he chased and caught your mother and took her down through his tangle of undergrowth with his hands in her hair, never heeding her screams. You have very definite little points at the top of your ears, you know! We all have them a bit to remind us of our wild-dog days, but yours are the most so I've ever seen. Do you never take off all your clothes and go creeping and slipping through the woods at night, to bathe in one of the crater-pools by the light of the moon?"

"How did you know?" She turned wide, startled eyes on him, her quickened breath fluttered her gown distressfully.

"What!—you do it, then?" exclaimed Archie.

"No! no! What folly are you talking!" She sprang to her feet and slipped behind the oak-sapling, as though it were a defence against some danger; across the boughs he saw her puzzled, fearful eyes. As he watched her the expression of alarm faded—she put up her hand to her hair, gave it a quieting pat and tucked some stray strands into place, then she looked across at the easel.

"It must be time to work again!" she exclaimed. "Have we been resting long, M'sieu? I feel as though I'd been asleep and you'd just awakened me." She yawned as she spoke, stretching her strong arms in a slow, wide circle, the muscles of her shoulders rounding forward and making two little hollows appear above her collar-bones. The sight aroused the artist in Archie, and he too scrambled up, and betook himself to work. The sheep and goats that he had bribed the shepherd to pasture there happened to "come" as he wanted them that evening, and he began to work away at them in silence. One of the goats, a piebald, shaggy creature, reared itself up on its hind legs, with its fore-feet against the tree trunk, and began to nibble at the foliage. Something about the pose of the creature sent a swift suggestion to Archie's mind, and he just had time to rough in the legs, with their slight outward tilt, the hoofs set firmly apart and the tail sticking out and up from the sharply curved-in rump, before the animal dropped on all fours and moved away. Archie, with the smile of the creator in his eyes, worked on, and the goat's legs merged into the beginnings of a slim human body with the hands leaning against the tree and the head, tilted on one side, peering around at the figure of Désirée. Suddenly he gave an exclamation of annoyance.

"There is some one watching us from those myrtle bushes. Confound the beggar—some one from the village, I suppose."

Désirée turned sharply, just in time to see a brown face grinning through the leaves. It was a face compact of curiously slanting lines—upward-twitched tufts of brows, upward wrinkles at the corners of the narrow eyes, and a slanting mouth that laughed above a pointed, thrusting chin.

"That! That is only my little brother, M'sieu. It is one of God's innocents and lame on both feet. Sylvestre! Come out and speak to M'sieu—no one will hurt you."

The bushes rustled and parted and an odd little figure, apparently that of a boy of about ten, came scrambling out with a queer, lungeing action from the hips. The child's legs were deformed, but he swung himself forward at a marvellous speed on a pair of clumsy crutches. Archie saw that when he was not laughing his brown eyes were wide and grave, with a look of innocence in them that contrasted oddly with the knowing gleam they showed a minute earlier.

"But he is exactly what I want for the picture!" cried Archie, running his hand through the boy's tangled curls and tilting his face gently backwards. "He is exactly like the things I was telling you of. He must sit to me."

He deftly tugged the boy's shirt out of his belt and peeled it off him, exposing a thin little brown body with a skin as fine as silk. When he felt the sun on his bare flesh the child made guttural sounds of delight, flinging himself backwards on the ground; and, supported by his elbows, letting his head tip back till his curls touched the grass. As the shielding locks fell away, Archie saw with a thrill which was almost repulsion, that dark brown hair grew thickly out of the boy's ears. . . .

"Would he stay still, do you think?" he asked Désirée.

"He will if I tell him," replied Désirée. "Come to me, Sylvestre," and drawing the child to her she stroked his head and whispered to him with a motherly gesture of which Archie would not have thought her capable. He had listened to her exceedingly modern views on the subject of the family, and her own strictly limited intentions in that respect.

After the addition of Sylvestre the picture made great strides, even if the intimacy between Archie and Désirée advanced less rapidly than before. And yet every now and again, in sudden flashes of wildness, in a half-uttered phrase totally at variance with her normal self—little things that she seemed to remember from some forgotten whole, Désirée would give him that impression of being two people at once; and always, on these occasions, she was as puzzled as he, and with an added touch of something that seemed almost shame. For the everyday Désirée, that calm, practical and comely young woman, Archie's friendliness was touched by nothing warmer than the inevitable element of sex; but the shy, bold thing that sometimes peeped from between her lids, that thing that seemed to take possession of her beautiful body, and mock and allure and chill him in a breath, that thing was waking an answering spirit in himself, and he knew it. Miss Gould's portrait was unable to protect him from wakeful nights, when he turned his pillow again and again to find a cool surface for his cheek, nights when he would at last fling off the clothes and lean out of the window to watch the steel-blue dawn turn to the blessed light of everyday. He was living in a state of tension, and it seemed to him that some great event was holding its breath to spring, as though the very trees and rocks, the brooding sky and quiescent pools, were all in some conspiracy, hoodwinking yet preparing him for the moment of revelation.

It was on to the sensitive surface of this mood that a letter from Gwendolen, announcing her speedy arrival on the Riviera dropped like a dart, tearing the delicate tissues and stringing the fibres to the necessity for haste. Gwendolen, aunt-dragoned, and Baedeker in hand, meant the return to the acceptance of the old values that had once filled him with complacency. And yet, with all the jarring sense of intrusion that Gwendolen's advent instilled, there mingled a feeling that was almost relief—as though he were being saved, against his will, but with his judgment, from something too disturbing and beautiful to be quite comfortable.

Three or four days after receiving Gwendolen's letter, he put the last touches to the picture and informed Désirée he would need her no more. She received the news quite calmly, apparently without regret—thus do women tactlessly fail in what is expected of them. Archie felt absurdly flat as he wrapped up his wet brushes in a week-old sheet of the Petit Niçois. He also felt very virtuous, and told himself it was not many men who would have refrained from making love to the girl under the circumstances. It is astonishing what a comfortless thing is the glow of conscious virtue—it is bright in hue but gives off no warmth.

There was a little hut, used for stacking wood, close to where he worked, and here, thanks to the courtesy of the owner, he was wont to put his picture for the night. Désirée, as usual, helped him to carry it in and plant the legs of the easel firmly into the earthen floor. He had worked late, and the sun had just slipped behind the far ridge of the mountains; the tiny hut was filled with a deepening half-light, the stacked brush-wood seemed wine-coloured in the warm shadow, here and there a peeled twig stood out luminously. By the open door hoof-marks in the trampled earth showed that the patronne's mule had been carrying away wood that morning. That was as palpable as the fact that it must have been Sylvestre's deformed foot which had soiled Archie's sheet, yet those marks re-created the atmosphere of his dream, and seemed, in the sudden confusion mounting to his brain at the warmth and nearness of Désirée, to mix madly with Sylvestre, and rustled undergrowth and the glimmer of elusive hoofs round myrtle-bushes—and the glimmer of something whiter and more elusive still.

He could hear Désirée's breathing beside him—not as even as usual, but deeper-drawn and uncertain, and turning, he met the sidelong glance of her eyes.

"Désirée . . . you said you sometimes slipped out at night and played in the woods—and the pools. Take me out with you to-night and show me where you go and what you do. . . . I'll be awfully good, I swear I will—you're not a woman, you're a nymph, a strange, uncanny thing. I believe you meet your kinsfolk there and dance with them—Désirée!"

She looked at him for a moment in silence. In her eyes her normal and her unknown selves contended.

"It is true I often go out as you say, something drives me, but I do not know why myself. And I get very tired and can never remember clearly what it has been like. It is as though I did it almost in my sleep, or had dreamt it."

"It is a dream—everything's a dream, and I've got to wake up soon. Let's have this bit of dream together—Désirée!"

She yielded. They took bread and wine and apples for a midnight feast, and set off together over the lava-fields to the woods that tufted the mountain slopes. Through the deep, soft night the pallor of her face and throat glimmered as through dark water. She held his hand to guide him over the fissures and round the piled boulders, once he slipped on a hummock of harsh grass, and felt her grow rigid on the instant to check his fall. They were very silent, until, seated at the edge of the woods, they ate their supper, and then they laughed softly together like children, with fragmentary speech; and once Désirée sang a snatch of a Provençal song; Archie, who knew his Mistral, joining in.

Presently, when they fell on silence again, it seemed the wood was full of noises—stealthy footfalls, snapping of dry twigs, the rustling of parted shrubs. As the late moon, almost at the full, swam up the sky, making the distant snow-peaks gleam like white flames against the dusky blue, and shimmering on the pools cupped here and there over the hollowed expanse below, Archie could have sworn that the penetrating light showed quick-glancing faces and bright eyes from the thicket. . . . Once a great white owl did sail out with a beating of wings; so close to them that they could see the stiff brows that bristled over his lambent orbs, and once a strong smell and a gleam of black and white told of a wild cat tracking her prey.

They buried the disfiguring remnants of their little feast, and then Archie solemnly poured out what was left of the red wine on to the slope below.

"For the gods!" he announced, "the liquor for us and the dregs for them!"

"Ah!" cried Désirée, as though his action pricked sleeping memories to life, "now I remember it all again! I forget when I go home, but then the next time everything is clear again, and so it goes on."

She disappeared in a jutting spur of the wood, and Archie scrambled to his feet and followed her. As he broke through to the further edge, which hung over a wide pool, he caught his foot in something soft—Désirée's clothes that lay in a circle, just as she had slipped out of them.

She stood at the pool's brim, her hands clasping at the back of her head; a thing to dream of. She was so lovely that all feeling died save a passionate appreciation, keen to the verge of pain; she was so lovely that of necessity she awoke an impersonal motion. Slowly she stretched herself, and as the muscles rippled into curves and sank, the delicate shadows ebbed and breathed out again on the pearl-white of her body. Archie's every nerve was strung not to lose one line or one breath of tone.

Putting out a foot she touched the water, so that little tremors soft as feathers fled over the surface; then, as she waded in, deeper and deeper, the water parted round her in flakes of brightness that shook and mixed up and broke away. When she rose, dripping wet, the moonlight refracted off her, was mirrored in the water, and thrown back again on her—a magic shuttle weaving an aura of whiteness. Long arrows of light fled back through the pool as she waded to shore, where she stood for a moment motionless; head slightly forward, arms hanging, and one hip thrown outwards as she poised her weight. Myriads of tiny, crescent-shaped drops clung to her limbs like fish-scales, so that she seemed more mermaiden than wood-nymph, but Archie's eyes proclaimed her Artemis—she would have calmed a satyr as she stood. Thoughts of forest glades were chill, sweet sports were held, and the wildest hoof was tamed to the childlike kinship with Nature that is pagan innocence, floated through his mind like visible things.

Suddenly she became conscious of his presence, and gave one glance in which invitation and a certain calm aloofness seemed to mingle.

"Désirée!" stammered Archie, "Désirée!"

All at once excitement tingled through him, blurring his ideas, just as chloroform sets the blood pricking with thousands of points and edges, while dizzying the brain. She stayed still a second longer; then, either the fearful nymph swayed her utterly, or, as it seemed to Archie, a sudden rejection of him, the clumsy, civilized mortal, sprang into her eyes. She flung up her head, turned, and was gone in the tangle of the woods. Without more than a second's hesitation he plunged in after her.

To Archie, whenever he looked back, that night seemed an orgy of chase-gone-mad; gathering in force as it went and sweeping into its resistless flow the most incongruous of elements.

He ran after her, stumbling, tripping, whipped across the face by brambles. Everything in life was crystallized into the desire to catch up, to track her to the enchanted green where, with her, he could become part of a remote free life he had never imagined before. All his own personality, except that in him which was hers, had ceased to exist—work, Gwendolen, the great world, and the inn at Draginoules, were wiped out of knowledge by the force of his concentration on one thing. The arbitrary line drawn between the actual and the unreal, the credible and the impossible, sanity and so-called madness, was swept away. She, the descendant of the gods knew what strange race—a race that perhaps had lingered in these crater-fastnesses and myrtle groves long after it had died off the rest of the earth—was fleeing before him through a wood alive with brightened eyes and quickened hoofs; and in her veins the slender strain of blood derived from some goat-legged, tall-eared thing—a strain asleep through the generations of her ancestors, had mastered all the rest of her heritage, and was triumphant in her soul as in Sylvestre's body. She ran on, swiftly, and without effort, and Archie ran after her.

* * * * *

Dawn broke at last, reluctant, chill, showing the woods clear-edged and motionless as though cut out of steel, glimmering on the quiet pools and the ribbed lava slopes, though the hollow of the plain still held a great lake of shadow.

Désirée's clothes lay no longer by the pool where she had bathed; no trace of human presence remained; even the marshy edge showed only trampled hoof-marks, as though some goat-footed herd had watered there.

To Archie, breaking through the undergrowth at the edge of the wood, it seemed incredible that everything should look so much as usual. Still more he felt the wonder when, with the broad sunlight, he reached his inn. He himself felt so shaken in soul that even the thought of the Englishman's panacea—a cold bath—failed to appeal to him as a solution of all trouble. Plucked out of his accustomed place, flung by the sport of what strange gods he knew not, into a headlong medley of undreamed emotions, his values had been so violently disrupted that he could not have told which held true worth—the normal life of Gwendolens and one-man shows and newspaper criticisms, or what had passed in the woods that night. And, whatever strange rite he had surprised, and whether it were golden actuality that a man might live happy because he had once seen, or the mere wildness of a dream, there had been something about it which taught him not to blaspheme the revelation. He did not tell himself that the vin ordinaire must have gone to his head, or that he had been a romantic fool worked on by moonlight. This was remarkable, for few people are strong enough not to profane the past.

So much of grace held by him even when he found a letter awaiting him to tell of Gwendolen's arrival with the obedient aunt at Cannes, whither she summoned him. He debated whether to say good-bye to Désirée or not. The matter was settled for him by meeting her accidently outside the buvette. She was looking pale and jaded, not at all at her best, but her eyes were blankly unknowing and clear of all embarrassment. She said good-bye with charming unemotional friendliness and informed him that she was going to be married very soon—Monsieur Colombini had had a rise that justified it. Here was anti-climax enough, even if the cold bath, the letter and the prose of packing were not sufficient. And yet, since it had not been Désirée, the frank peasant, who had shown Archie the wonders of that night, his memories remained. Half-fearful and half splendid, not enough to make him walk with the vision beautiful, but merely enough to spoil his pictures for the public, because instead of being content with the merely obvious he was now always trying for something beyond his powers to express. Enough also, to prick him to an occasional weary clear-eyed knowledge of his Gwendolen—a knowledge that was hardly criticism, for he admitted his kinship with her world. And what it was that companioned him, that he strove to show in his pictures, he never entirely told; for just as no woman ever tells what it is her sex has and the other lacks—that something which makes all the difference—just as no man tells a woman what it is he and his fellows talk about when the last skirt has trailed from the dinner-table, so no one ever tells the whole truth about the beloved.

THE LADDER

THE LADDER

I

THE TRIAL

(Account taken from a contemporary journal)

"To-day, March 3, the Court being sat in the Castle at Launceston, about eight o'clock in the morning, the prisoner was set to the bar.

"Sophia Bendigo, of the parish of St. Annan in this county, was indicted, for that she, not having the fear of God before her eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil, on October 20, in the 24th year of his Majesty's reign, and again since, to wit, on October 21, with force and arms upon the body of Constantine Bendigo, Gent., her father, did make an assault, and in her malice aforethought, did kill and murder, by putting into some water-gruel a certain powder called arsenic, and afterwards giving to him, the said Constantine Bendigo, a potion thereof, knowing it to be mixed with the powder aforesaid, so that he, the said Constantine, was poisoned, and of which poison, he, the said Constantine, died, on the 22nd of the said month of October; against the peace of our Sovereign Lord the King, his crown and dignity.

"The Counsel for the Crown were the Hon. Mr. Bathwick; Mr. Sergeant Wheeler; Mr. Grice, Town Clerk of Launceston; Mr. Rose, Mr. Kirton, and the Hon. Mr. Harrington: And for the prisoner, Mr. Ford, Mr. Bennett and Mr. Walton.

"The Counsel for the Crown having opened the indictment, proceeded to inform the Court and Jury that this prosecution was carried on by the order, and at the expense of his Majesty (who is ever watchful to preserve the lives, liberties, and properties of his subjects) against the prisoner at the bar, Sophia Bendigo, for one of the most atrocious crimes; the cruel, inhuman, and deliberate murder of her own father: That the prisoner at the bar was the daughter and only child of Mr. Constantine Bendigo, Squire of Troon, in the hundred of Penwith, a gentleman both by his birth and education; that as she was the only, so she was the beloved child of her father, who had spared no pains in giving her a genteel, as well as a pious education; that her father, indeed, had used this pious fraud (if he might be allowed that expression) in saying that her fortune would be £10,000, to the end, he supposed, that his daughter might be married suitable to such a fortune. That in June of the preceding year one Capt. William Lucius Crandon came to Penwith map-making, and hearing that Miss Bendigo was a £10,000 fortune, and having a mind to marry this fortune, notwithstanding he had a wife and child alive, contrived to get acquainted with this family; how well he succeeded, and how sadly for this family, this unhappy catastrophe has shown. That Mr. Bendigo, having been informed that Mr. Crandon was married, he desired his daughter to break off all correspondence with him; that instead of doing so, she acquainted Mr. Crandon with her father's command, who, instead of clearing his character to her father's satisfaction, contrives the means and persuades this beloved, this tenderly indulged daughter, to be an actor in her father's destruction.

"That the Captain left Cornwall at the end of September, since when, on the miscarriage of his plans, he had disappeared entirely; and soon after he is gone, we find this wicked scheme beginning to be put into execution. That on October 20, Mr. Bendigo found himself much disordered after taking some tea, that next day, the prisoner having made him another dish of tea, deceased had thought it to taste odd and sent it downstairs; that Crandon, to hasten the work of destruction, sent a letter to the prisoner, making use of an allegorical expression, not to spare the powder, in order to keep the rust off the pebbles. That the tea being too thin to admit of a larger quantity at the time, you will find by the witnesses that shall be produced, that the prisoner did mix a large quantity of the powder in a pan of water-gruel and gave some of it to her father next day which had such terrible effects as to occasion his death on the morning of the 23rd. That he would call the physicians first, and they would prove that what was administered to the deceased was poison and the cause of his death.

"Mr. Harvey, of St. Annan, and Dr. Polwhele, of Penzance, were then called and both sworn; and Mr. Harvey said that, being on the evening of the 22nd sent for to Mr. Bendigo, he thus made his complaints: That he had a violent burning pain, saying it was a ball of fire in his guts, that he vomited much since taking some tea two days before and again after taking some gruel that evening, that he had a cold sweat, hiccups, prickings all over his body, which he compared to a number of needles. He desired to drink, but could not swallow, his pulse intermitted, his tongue swelled, his throat was excoriated, his breath difficult and interrupted. Towards morning he grew worse, became delirious and sank gradually, dying about six o'clock in the morning.

"Being asked if he thought Mr. Bendigo was poisoned, witness answered, He really believed he was, for that the symptoms, while living, were like those of a person who had taken arsenic; and the appearances after death, like those that were poisoned by arsenic."[A]

"King's Counsel: Did you also make an examination of the powder found in the gruel?

"Mr. Harvey: I did. I threw it upon a hot iron; boiled ten grains in water and divided the concoction, after filtering it into five equal parts. Into one I put oil of vitriol, into another tartar, into the third spirit of sal ammoniac, into the fourth spirit of salt, and into the fifth spirit of wine. I tried it also with syrup of violets, and made the like experiments with the same quantity of white arsenic which I bought in Penzance. It answered exactly to every one of them, and therefore I believed it to be white arsenic.

"Mr. Harvey further deposed that Mr. Bendigo told him that he suspected poison, and that he believed it came to his daughter with the serpentine beads, for that his daughter had had a present of those damned pebbles that morning; that if he, this witness, would look in the gruel, he might find something, that when he, this witness, asked Mr. Bendigo whom he imagined gave him the poison, he replied, A poor love-sick girl, but I forgive her; what will not a woman do for the man she loves?

"That later on the evening of the 22nd, Mr. Bendigo being a trifle easier, consented to see Miss, that he, this witness, was present when Miss came into the chamber, and fell down upon her knees, saying, Oh! sir, forgive me! Do what you will with me, and I'll never see Crandon more if you will but forgive me. To which Mr. Bendigo replied, I forgive thee, but thou shouldst have remembered that I am thy father, upon which Miss said, Oh, sir, your goodness strikes daggers to my soul; sir, I must down on my knees and pray that you will not curse me. He replied, No, child, I bless thee and pray that God may bless thee and let thee live to repent. Miss then declared she was innocent of this illness, and he replied, that he feared she was not, and that some of the powder was in such hands as would show it against her. Witness added that deceased, before Miss Bendigo's entry, had bidden him look to the remainder of the gruel.

"Prisoner's Counsel: Who was it sent for you when deceased was taken ill?

"Harvey: James Ruffiniac,[B] the steward, fetched me and said it was at the command of Miss Bendigo, who said, to-morrow will not satisfy me, you must go now, which he did.

"Prisoner's Counsel: All the years you have known Miss Bendigo what has been her behaviour to her father? Has she not always done everything that an affectionate child could for her father's ease?

"Harvey: She always behaved like a dutiful daughter, as far as ever I knew, and seemed to do everything in her power for her father's recovery whenever he was indisposed.

"King's Counsel: Did she tell you that she had put anything into her father's gruel and that she feared it might in some measure occasion his death?

"Harvey: She never did.

"Dr. Polwhele, having been sworn at the same time as Mr. Harvey, and stood in Court close by him, was now asked by the King's Counsel if he was present at the opening of Mr. Bendigo and whether the observations made by Mr. Harvey were true: he said he was present and made the same observations himself. He was then asked what was his opinion of the cause of the death of Mr. Bendigo, and he replied, by poison absolutely.

"Eliza Ruffiniac, being sworn, said, that on the afternoon of the 20th, her master being unwell, from (as they thought at the time) an attack of bile, Miss Bendigo, the prisoner at the bar, made him a dish of tea. That after taking it he was very sick, but seemed easier next day, when Miss again made him some tea which he did not drink. That next evening he sent for the witness and asked for some water-gruel to be made; that Miss on hearing of it, said, I will make it, that there's no call for you to leave your ironing; that Miss was a long time stirring the gruel in the pantry, and on coming into the kitchen said, I have been taking of my father's gruel, and I think I shall often eat of it; I have taken a great fancy to it.

"King's Counsel: Do you recollect that one Keast, the cook-maid, had been taken ill with drinking some tea the day before, and tell the Court how it was.

"E. Ruffiniac: Hester Keast brought down the tea from my master's room and afterwards drank it in the scullery, where I found her crying out she was dying, being taken very ill with a violent vomiting and pains and a great thirst.

"Prisoner's Counsel: On that occasion, how did Miss Bendigo behave?

"E. Ruffiniac: She made Hester Keast go to her bed and sent her a large quantity of weak broth and white wine whey.

"King's Counsel: Did you ever see Miss Bendigo burn any papers, and when?

"E. Ruffiniac: On the evening of the 22nd, Miss brought a great many papers in her apron down into the kitchen and put them on the fire, then thrust them into it with a stick and said, now, thank God, I am pretty easy, and then went out of the kitchen; that this witness and Hester Keast were in the kitchen at the time; that they, observing something to burn blue, it was raked out and found to be a paper of powder that was not quite consumed; that there was this inscription on the paper; Powder to clean the pebbles, and that this paper, she, the witness, delivered to Dr. Polwhele next day. Being shown a paper, with the above inscription on it, partly burnt, she said she believed the paper to be the same the prisoner put into the fire and she took out.

"This witness was asked if she ever heard the prisoner use any unseemly expressions against her father, and what they were? Replied, many times; sometimes she damned him for an old rascal; and once when she was in the dairy and the prisoner passing at the time outside, she heard her say, Who would not send an old father to hell for ten thousand pounds?

"Hester Keast, the cook-maid, deposed, That, on the 21st she bore down her master's dish of tea and drank of it, being afterwards taken very ill, that on the next day, being down in the kitchen after her master was taken ill, Lylie Ruffiniac brought a pan with some gruel in it to the table and said, Hester, did you ever see any oatmeal so white? that this witness replied, That oatmeal? Why, it is flour! and Lylie replied, I never saw flour so gritty in my life; that they showed it to Mr. Harvey, the apothecary, who took it away with him.

"James Ruffiniac was next called and sworn.

"King's Counsel: When your master was dead, did you not have some particular conversation with the prisoner? Recollect yourself, and tell my Lord and the Jury what it was.

"J. Ruffiniac: After my master was dead, Miss Bendigo asked me if I would live along with her, and I said no, and she then said, If you will go with me, your fortune will be made; I asked her what she wanted me to do and she replied, Only to hire a post-chaise to go to London. I was shocked at the proposal and absolutely refused her request. On this she put on a forced laugh, and said, I was only joking with you.

"Charles Le Petyt, Clerk in Holy Orders, was next called and sworn, and said, That, meeting Miss Bendigo in St. Annan when the crowd was insulting her, he took her into the inn, and spoke with her there, asking if she would not return home under his protection; she answered yes, that upon this he got a closed post-chaise and brought her home; that upon her coming home she asked him what she should do, that he, having heard her, said that they should fix the guilt upon Crandon if she could produce anything to that end, but in some agony she replied she had destroyed all evidences of his guilt.

"Prisoner's Counsel: Do you, Mr. Le Petyt, believe that the Prisoner had any intention to go off, from what appeared to you, and if she was not very ready to come back with you from the inn?

"Le Petyt: She was very ready to come back, and desired me to protect her from the mob, and she had, I am sure, no design to make an escape.

"Here the Counsel for the Crown rested their proof against the prisoner, and she was thereupon called to make her defence.

"Prisoner: My Lord, in my unhappy plight, if I should use any terms that may be thought unfitting, I hope I shall be forgiven, for it will not be with any desire to offend. My Lord, some time before my father's death, I unhappily became acquainted with Captain Crandon. This, after a time, gave offence to my father, and he grew very angry with me over Captain Crandon. I am passionate, which I know is a fault, and when I have found my father distrustful over Captain Crandon, I may have let fall an angry expression, but never to wish him injury, I have always done all in my power to tend him, as the witnesses against me have not denied. When my father was dead, being ill and unable to bear confinement in the house, I took a walk over to St. Annan, but I was insulted, and a mob raised about me, so that when Mr. Le Petyt came to me I desired his protection and to go home with him, which I did.

"I will not deny, my Lord, that I did put some powder into my father's gruel; but I here solemnly protest, as I shall answer it at the great tribunal, and God knows how soon, that I had no evil intention in putting the powder in his gruel: It was put in to procure his love and not his death.

"Then she desired that several witnesses might be called in her defence, who all allowed that Miss Bendigo always behaved to her father in a dutiful and affectionate manner. And Anne Lear and Elizabeth Pollard, women occasionally employed at Troon, deposed that they had heard Lylie Ruffiniac say, Damn the black bitch (meaning the prisoner), I hope I shall see her walk up a ladder and swing.

"The prisoner having gone through her defence, the King's Counsel, in reply, observed, That the prisoner had given no evidence in contradiction of the facts established by the witnesses for the crown; that indeed, Anne Lear and Elizabeth Pollard had sworn to an expression of Lylie Ruffiniac, which, if true, served to show ill-will in Ruffiniac towards the prisoner, but that he thought the incident was too slight to deserve any manner of credit. That the other witnesses, produced by the prisoner, served only to prove that Mr. Bendigo was a very fond, affectionate and indulgent parent, therefore there could be no pretence of giving him powders or anything else to promote in him an affection for his daughter. That if the Jury believed the prisoner to be innocent, they would take care to acquit her: but if they believed her guilty, they would take care to acquit their own consciences.[C]

"The prisoner desired leave to speak in answer to what the King's Counsel had said, which being granted, she said, The gentleman was mistaken in thinking the powders were given to her father to produce his affection to her, for that they were given to procure her father's love to Captain Crandon.

"The judge summed up the evidence in a clear and impartial manner to the Jury, and they, without going out of Court, brought in their verdict: Guilty, Death.

"After sentence of death was pronounced upon her she, in a very solemn and affecting manner, prayed the Court that she might have as much time as could be allowed her to prepare for her great and immortal state. The Court told her she should have a convenient time allowed her; but exhorted her, in the meantime, to lose not a moment, but incessantly to implore the mercy of that Being to Whom alone mercy belongs."