Denis would not look at his friend. "I can't say I envy you your job," remarked the young man.
"That just shows you don't know anything about it," was the instant retort. "Criminals have souls as well as you, haven't they? There are better men in prison than scores I've met outside, whom our ungodly laws can't or won't touch. I've known one man get eighteen months for stealing a pair of boots, and another let off with a fine and a caution for roasting a cat on the fire. Christians? Why, we haven't got up to the ten commandments yet! The Jews did put Thou shalt not kill and Thou shalt not commit Adultery before Thou shalt not steal; but impurity's nothing to us, and cruelty not much more. Christians! We reserve our jails for any one who dares to meddle with our sacred property. Upon my soul, I wonder any man can find the face to refuse the women a share in mending the laws of this land, considering the pretty mess we've made of them ourselves!"
He shot out of his chair and marched to the edge of the roof. Gardiner followed, laughing, and sat on the parapet. A rose and silver sunset was darkening the fells above Easedale Tarn, and the moon, a globe of pearl, made beautiful the cold gray eastern sky.
"I don't know what you want to leave your own country for," said Scott, still irascible, but simmering into calm. "Isn't this good enough for you?"
"Oh, I'm out for a land where they have more Christian laws," said Gardiner easily. "England's too civilized to be livable," he added.
Scott did not hear him. He was studying the house under their feet.
"That's Mrs. Trent's room below, I suppose? And your parlor below that, on the ground floor? Any one in that south wing opposite could see straight in. Lucky for you there was nobody watching on Thursday evening."
"Lucky? What the devil do you mean?"
Scott turned round and stared in the face.
"You didn't want any visitors in hysterics, did you? Enough people involved in it already, aren't there? What do you mean yourself?"
"I thought," said Gardiner, "I thought you were echoing Mrs. Trent's idea, and suggesting I'd done him in."
It was the best he could do, but it was not good. Scott stared at him with his bright eyes, shifted them to Denis, and brought them back to Gardiner again. Gardiner knew that in the first moment of surprise he had started violently, changed color, showed all the signs of guilt. Nothing could erase that impression.
"Your nerves must be in a bad way for you to jump like that at an innocent remark," said Scott dryly.
"They are, I told you so. You can give me something for them, if you like. I don't mind swallowing your beastlinesses."
"No," said Scott. He pulled out his watch. "I must go to my patient. Good-night to you both." He climbed down through the trap-door, and then poked his head up again to add: "Mind, I never meddle with what isn't my concern. Never."
He was seen no more, and they heard him descending the ladder.
"Damn," said Gardiner.
"He won't make any use of it," said Denis. "That's not a bad little chap, Harry."
"Not a bad little chap? He's a most confoundedly inquisitive little chap! He won't rest till he's ferreted out the whole thing. Oh, damn! I wouldn't have had this happen for anything. Why the devil couldn't I keep my countenance? I thought I might have trusted myself for that!"
He paced up and down in a fury.
"You've had a tryin' time."
"Trying? I've had a scarifying time! That inquest, when the foreman began pumping you—I'd have murdered you as well, Denis, if you hadn't been adroit. But if I'm going to lose my nerve over such trifles as this—what an ass! oh, what an ass!"
He threw himself back on the lounge. Denis could not help feeling that he took it rather weakly. He did not allow for the rift in his friend's armor, that demoralizing fear of confinement. In these last few days their positions seemed to have been reversed.
"Scott can't do anything," he said rather coolly. "It's no use his suspectin' if there's no one he can pump, and there isn't. I'm not going to give it away, and you aren't either, when you're yourself again. As to Mrs. Trent, she can't prove anything from the chisel—you might have left it there from openin' the case. Besides, Scott wouldn't discuss it with her. He's above that."
"I dare say you're right, but I wish I hadn't been such an ass, and I wish he weren't the doctor at Westby," said Gardiner, with a huge yawn, "it brings it so unpleasantly near. Oh, Lord! I am tired. Do you mind clearing out now? I expect I shall sleep like a log. Please the pigs, in another couple of weeks' time I'll be out of this over-civilized, over-populated country!"
CHAPTER V THE FLY ON THE WALL
Three days after the inquest Denis came up to town to interview a timber merchant as to a contract about which there had been a difference of opinion. He looked down on the man through his eyeglass, carried all his points, and departed, leaving exasperation in his wake. After this, finding he had some hours to spare before he need catch his train to Bredon, he went to pay a call on his cousin Lettice.
Denis was, like his friend Gardiner, the son of a clergyman; but not of a poor country parson. Denis's father was honorary canon of Rochester and rural dean; he held a family living, and had besides a comfortable income of his own. There was some excuse for the double name. The Merions were a penniless Irish family with a pedigree derived from the ancient kings (all Irish pedigrees derive from the ancient kings). The Smith and the money had come to them together, a couple of generations back, from an eccentric old bachelor who had loved and lost one of the daughters of the house. Marrying late, Canon Merion-Smith was over fifty when his only son was born and his wife died. Denis had only a nurse to mother him, but he did not suffer; he was a very happy small boy, who from his babyhood never thought of anything but engines. He was not at all like his father, an easy-going Irishman with a strong sense of humor, but they were inseparable friends, who explored the path of knowledge hand in hand. There was no question of parental authority. Denis did what was required either because he considered it reasonable, or else to please his father, to whom the staid small boy was a perpetual fund of amusement.
Canon Merion-Smith taught his son at home till he was fourteen, and then, rather doubtfully, sent him to Rochester, whither his friend Harry Gardiner had preceded him. Doubtfully, because he was beginning to distrust his own training. He did not think Denis would be happy at school; but he had no desire to be the parent of a prig. Denis was not happy. He hated arbitrary rules; he could never get into his head that it was not his to reason why. Only Gardiner made his schooldays endurable. He stayed at Rochester till he was nearly seventeen, and then passed unexpectedly without extra coaching straight into Woolwich. He was very clever, and strikingly handsome in a thin, aristocratic way, but he thought no more of his abilities than of his good looks. Denis was proud, but he had not a trace of vanity. He was an example of the not uncommon blend of class arrogance and personal modesty.
He passed out of Woolwich first in his batch, went to Chatham, to Rangoon, saw active service in a frontier campaign—the most unhappy years of his life. He had gone into the army to please his father, but he hated discipline, and his heart was set on aeronautics. When Canon Merion-Smith died, Denis resigned his commission and devoted himself to the problems of flight. The way of inventors is hard. He lost all his own money and some of Gardiner's, who came back into his life in time to do the beloved aeroplane a service which Denis, conservative in gratitude, never forgot. He brought himself to the verge of bankruptcy. At his last sixpence he fell in with Sydney Wandesforde, a well-known motor-racing amateur, who had transferred his interest to the new sport, and was as keen on the practical side of flying as Denis on the theoretical. He had what Denis had not—a bottomless purse and family influence to back it. They joined forces, and from that time Denis's future was assured.
His cousin Lettice—Lætitia Jane Smith—had been in his life for many years, since she, with her mother and sisters, came to settle in the village of which Canon Merion-Smith was incumbent. Rosabel and Stella were charming, half Irish and half French; but Lettice, the eldest, had always been Denis's ally. She was deliberate where they were quick, silent while they chattered, methodical instead of happy-go-lucky. They were clever, but she was the born student, patient, accurate, thorough. The household was always short of money, so Lettice, who suffered in that atmosphere of elegant muddle, left home as soon as she could and set up for herself. She was very fond of her relations, and they of her, but she found them trying to live with. Lettice had a temper; she said herself it was a dumb devil. Still, since it was very strictly dumb, you had to know her well, and watch her carefully, before you discovered its existence.
She now occupied an attic in Pimlico, and worked all day in the British Museum library. She might have been more comfortable in a boarding-house, but she preferred solitude, or rather silence; she was perennially interested in her fellow-creatures, but she did not want to be talked to by them. She was always the spectator, never the actor, having eyes, and ears, a synthetic mind, and that delicate sense of humor, pity and irony in one, which is a lamp to the feet of its possessor.
But what marked Lettice off from other people was her passion for self-obliteration. Most of us in our hearts love to fill the center of the stage. Lettice was miserable there. She liked to be the fly on the wall. Yet she was unselfish as well as selfless, gentle, accommodating, all things to all men. She was like a penny-in-the-slot machine for doing good: you put in your need, out came her response: and she asked no more gratitude than the machine. To thank her was like touching the horns of a snail. A harmless whim in many ways, yet with elements of danger; for tastes of this sort strengthen as they grow, and Lettice's friends were beginning to fear she would fade away altogether to an impersonal ghost, unless something happened to call her back.
She should have been Merion-Smith too; she owed the affix to the same Irish grandmother from whom Denis had inherited his profile, his accent, his superstitions, and his family pride. He had been known to send back a letter addressed to the name of Smith. Lettice, on the other hand, had dropped the hyphen with all celerity. Denis might lecture her on her slackness; she concurred amiably so long as she was with him, and then went on her way exactly as before. Lettice on the surface was all sweet pliability, but underneath lay solid rock. Denis faced the world as an obstinate, pugnacious Irishman, whereas a skilful hand could guide him with a silken thread. Lettice read him like a book and made soft fun of him, but always with a reserve of peculiarly tender affection; she thought a great deal of her cousin. And Denis thought a great deal—a very great deal—of her. He was aware that in half her innocent speeches she was, to put it gracefully, having him on; but what did that matter? Lettice was Lettice. He did not analyze his friends; he idealized them.
Denis was received at No. 33 Canning Street by the daughter of the house, a smart young person in silk stockings who invited him, with never a "Sir" to her sentence, to step up and find Miss Smith in the top back attic. The stairs were dark; Denis, gloomily reflecting on the decadence of the lower classes, fell over a pair of boots and trod in a dust-pan which flew up and hit him. He was not in the best of tempers when he knocked at his cousin's door.
"Come in!" called out an abstracted voice, wearily raised; and he obeyed. There stood Lettice in the middle of the floor, holding out with both arms before her nose a newspaper which enwrapped her, mind and body. Lettice had been known, when she came in from the Museum after her day's work, to read through the whole of a novel, standing under the gas, before she moved to take off her hat. It took some time for Denis's presence to penetrate, and then she lowered her arms slowly and looked round.
"O-oh," she said. "I thought you were the milk. Sit down, sit down."
She folded up her paper and poked it under a book, took away his hat and stick, and fetched the milk from the passage, hurrying slowly, as her custom was. Denis sat down, and discovered that he was very glad to be with her again. A cooling fountain in life's dry, dreary sand, that was what Lettice represented. She was not a beauty; she had none of the attributes of a heroine. Her nose was nondescript, her complexion poor, her mouth large, though there was character in the full under lip; character also, and brains, in the big forehead which she hid beneath her soft brown hair. For the rest, she had drooping shoulders and a long slim neck; she chose and put on her clothes like a Frenchwoman; but her best points were the set and shape of her graceful little head, and the somewhat misleading sweetness of her hazel eyes.
Her room was a long white attic, one end curtained off. There was a window in the gable facing west, and in the window a table overflowing with manuscripts and books; sheets of foolscap covered with her graceful writing, an Old English text, a Latin grammar, a treatise on court hand. She was trying to make up for a haphazard education by teaching herself. As she passed on her way to the cupboard, she drew a sheet of paper out of the muddle and presented it to Denis.
"Now you can just look through that while I'm making the tea, and see if there are any mistakes," she enjoined him in the minute expressive voice which was one of her charms to those who found her charming. Denis found himself faced by a Latin exercise. When he had learned all his cousin could tell him about the wreaths and the roses that adorned the girls and the queens, he turned the page, and came on something more attractive. In her hours of ease Lettice was a poet. Looking up from her task with the bread knife, she saw what he was doing, turned a deep pink, and silently but swiftly removed the sheet from the fingers. Denis laughed.
"Haven't you anything to show?"
"No, I haven't," said Lettice, acerb and forbidding.
Denis quoted maliciously. The poet covered her ears with her hands.
"Oh, do-o-on't!"
"Well, let me see the rest of it!"
"Well, it isn't finished; it's no good looking at a thing till it's finished, is it?" retorted Lettice in a soft flurry of exasperation. Her poetry was dug out of her own soul, and she suffered the pains of vivisection in hearing it discussed. Denis knew this well, and Lettice knew he knew it. Looking like an affronted kitten, she retired into a silence that the brutal critic might have called sulky, and seemed disposed to stay there. But Denis knew how to make his peace. Just then the kettle boiled over. He was quick to lift it off—and to put it down again in a hurry, shaking his fingers. Before he could find his handkerchief, down swooped Lettice's arm; she seized the handle, bore it away, took her time over filling the teapot, ostentatiously stayed to settle the cozy; then, having displayed beyond possibility of oversight the superior hardness of her palm, she replaced the kettle on the hob, and returned to her toasting fork, exuding vainglory.
This incident settled, they talked of the aeroplane. This was invariably Lettice's first question, and it brought down a shower of information, all water on a duck's back. Considering what excellent brains she had, it was surprising how dense she could be when she chose. When Denis's fluent Irish tongue ran dry, she was ready with her next question.
"And did you have a nice time at Grasmere with dear Harry?"
"No, I didn't," said Denis with unexpected force. "I had a perfectly beastly time!"
"Dear, dear! How was that?"
"Oh, things went wrong," said Denis vaguely. He wanted to tell the whole story—Lettice seemed to purify and sweeten all she took into her knowledge, and this badly needed sweetening. He hated it; he hated his evasions at the inquest, what Gardiner called his adroitness; he hated soiling his fingers; he was vaguely dissatisfied with his friend. But since, for Gardiner's sake, he could not tell her all, he told her nothing. Half-truths were no good with Lettice. "By the by, why didn't you come?" he said. "I was expectin' you all the time. I couldn't think where you'd got to. You as good as promised to turn up!"
"Were you very disappointed?"
"No. No, I can't say I was—not altogether. I want you to meet Harry, but I didn't want you this time. Queer chap he is—you may think you know a man, but you never do."
Lettice's eyebrows moved upwards ever so little. "How do you mean queer?"
"Oh, I don't know. He has all sorts of cranks. Last time he was at Bredon, that cold spell when all the pipes were burstin', nothing would do but he must sleep out in the garden all the time. And it was just the same at Grasmere, though it rained cats and dogs. You can't be even with his fads," Denis added with a sigh, extending himself in his chair, his long legs stretched half across the hearth. "He's off almost at once to that place in the Ardennes I was tellin' you about. I've promised to run over there next summer. I wish you'd come too, Lettice, as you didn't bring it off this time."
"You said you didn't want me," murmured Lettice reproachfully.
"I didn't want you when things were all beastly. But I do want you to meet Harry. I want your opinion of him."
To this Lettice made no reply. She set a few slow, neat stitches in the cloth she was embroidering.
"Whereabouts is it, this place in the Ardennes?"
"Near Bouillon. You can get there for next to nothing, if that's what you're thinkin' of, but I wish you'd let me take you. I did rather well over that deal this morning and I'm rollin'. After all, you're as good as my sister. You might just as well."
Lettice did not thank him; that was taken for granted. They understood each other so well that words were often superfluous.
"If it's not very expensive I might manage it myself," she said. "My old man in Harley Street says I've got to take a holiday, so I suppose I must go somewhere, just to satisfy him. And I should rather like to see the Ardennes."
"Have you been to the doctor again? Why didn't you tell me before, Lettice? What does he say?"
"He says," said Lettice with inimitable unction, "that I am in a state of thorough nervous exhaustion, and ought to take six months' rest. So."
"Then I hope you're going to do it!"
Lettice smiled. She did not look particularly docile. Denis was beguiled into lecturing her about her health, though he knew it was time wasted—nay, rather, time misspent. For Miss Smith was like a pig, and if you pulled her one way she was apt to go the other. In this case, however, it seemed that she had fairly made up her mind before he came to a holiday abroad, for presently she let slip that she had been studying a guide to the Ardennes, which she had borrowed from a neighbor below. Denis sent her down to borrow it again.
While she was away he wandered about, looking at her books. Under a fat dictionary he came upon the paper she had been reading when he entered, and he pulled it out to see if she still took what he called the Radical rag. Its name stared him in the face: The Westmorland Gazette. It was doubled back at page four: Fatality at Grasmere.
He wheeled as she came into the room. "Lettice, how on earth did you get hold of this thing?"
She stopped dead for a moment, then came on.
"I ordered it."
"What for?"
"Because I'd seen something about the accident, and I wanted to know more. So I went to Finch's at the corner and asked him to get me the local paper, and he did."
Lettice had a talent for explaining the obvious.
"Where did you see anything about the accident?"
"There was a paragraph in my halfpenny rag."
"Confound!" said Denis, black as a thunder-cloud.
Lettice smiled, recovering her equanimity as he lost his. "Well, you shouldn't go and make interesting things like aeroplanes and become a public character," she murmured pianissimo.
"Why didn't you tell me that you knew?"
She looked at him, allowing her speakingly derisive eyes to retaliate that question.
"I couldn't tell you about it, it wasn't my affair," said Denis hotly and confusedly. "Gardiner doesn't want the story all over the place. How could I help it, Lettice? But when I was talkin' about Easedale, I think you might have let me know you knew!"
"My dear child, I couldn't begin on it if you didn't, could I?" said Lettice patiently. "I was simply longing to ask questions. It was nice, proper, lady-like feeling made me hold my tongue, what you always say you like. And now you're cross with me! Well, well."
Denis was cross; he stood crumpling the paper in his hands, visibly fuming. Lettice took it away from him and smoothed it out.
"I shan't talk about it to Mr. Gardiner when I come to Rochehaut, if that's what you're afraid of."
"Are you really comin' to Rochehaut?"
"Don't you want me now you know I know?"
She looked at him with those impish eyes.
"You know too much, Lettice!" said her cousin, discomfited, half laughing. She turned away with her small foreign shrug.
"Dear, dear! there's no pleasing some people!"
CHAPTER VI SIC TRANSIT
On a cold morning in July, 1913, Lettice climbed down from a Belgian third-class carriage, dragging her luggage behind her, and found herself at Graide station, province of Luxemburg. Lettice was an expert in the art of traveling cheaply. She had left Victoria the previous afternoon, in a slow train, because the boat expresses don't take third-class passengers. After a wait at Dover, she had crossed by night in the fetid atmosphere of the second-class ladies' cabin of the old Rapide, and had been excessively ill. Continuing her journey at 4 A.M., she had traveled to Brussels in a smoking compartment with all the windows shut. Namur, Dinant, Houyet—she lost count of her changes after that. Sometimes she faced the engine; more often she had to ride back; once a Belgian père de famille marched across the width of the carriage and ruthlessly pulled up the window, her window, under her very nose. Always somebody was smoking, to the usual accompaniments, under the notice "Niet Rooken"; and always, at every change, she had to drag her heavy basket down steps and across lines of rail and heave it up to racks far above her aching head. We buy our pleasures dear when we are young. But this was the end. At Graide she was to meet the diligence which should land her at the doors of the Hôtel Bellevue.
Of course there was no porter. In those days there never were any porters at a Belgian country station. If you didn't expédier your baggage (as every self-respecting traveler should), you had to carry it yourself. Lettice's baggage was what is known as a pilgrim basket, gone at the corners, with a double strap which had slipped into a string round its middle, leaving the ends bulging. Bending to it like a patient donkey, she trailed across the loose gray gravel to the exit, and at last was outside in the road. The Café de la Gare confronted her, a yellow house with red facings and a blue slate roof. "Bureau de la diligence" appeared on its sign, but the customary shabby, dirty, stuffy, rickety ruin of a two-horse shandrydan was nowhere to be seen.
"Pour Rochehaut, madame?"
A smart commissionaire had seized her basket. Round his cap in gilt lettering ran the words, "Hôtel Bellevue." Lettice nodded distrustfully, and in a trice was whisked round the corner, still clinging to her strap. Behold the diligence of the Hôtel Bellevue—a brand-new motor char-à-banc, glistening in tan-colored varnish! The commissionaire threw open the door with a flourish worthy of the boulevards, and Lettice subsided in a corner as if her patient knees had at last given way.
In the fresh air she presently revived enough to take notice of her fellow-travelers. There were two, both women, the elder obviously a maid. Lettice had seen them before, at Dinant, descending from a voiture-salon with a porter in attendance, and had marked them with a malevolent eye, having tried in vain to secure that porter herself. But even without that memory she would have noticed the younger of the two.
She was a tall slip of a girl, scarcely out of her teens, but not dressed like an ingénue. Her French hat, her furs, her gloves, the exquisite cloth of her suit, all her traveling appointments might have belonged to a married woman of thirty. Yet she was not married, for there was no wedding ring among the diamonds on her finger, and Lettice, whose eyes were as good as opera-glasses, could read the label on the gold-mounted dressing-case in the rack above her head—Miss D. M. O'Connor, Hôtel Bellevue. She looked fragile, as if recovering from an illness, and her figure was still slender and undeveloped; but she had masses of exquisitely glossy dark hair, and great dark eyes, full of fire and gloom. Young though she was, she knew how to get herself obeyed. When she scowled (and she could scowl, with those black brows), even a Belgian porter came to attention. Lettice was wondering what it was that had set her at odds with the world, and written such bitterness on the small, brooding face, when the dark eyes looked up and met hers with a smile, sudden and child-like, which had just the effect of a sunburst over a gloomy landscape.
But before she could speak the unsociable Lettice hurriedly averted her eyes and blotted herself in her corner. She make talk with a stranger for an hour, and begin an acquaintance which would have to be continued, with smiles and remarks about the weather, every time they chanced to meet in the hotel? No, thank you! The most interesting character study was not worth that. Lettice would have walked a couple of miles any day to avoid a chance acquaintance.
Miss O'Connor stared, half incredulous; then the clouds came down again with a vengeance, and she turned her back on the ungrateful Lettice and looked out of the window. They were passing down a straight road between long strips of arable land, wheat, potatoes, cabbages, beets, fenceless and flat as a table; and with the road went an avenue of trees, each lopped to a mop-head atop of its naked stem, crawling away like a green caterpillar to the limit of sight. In the distance a tiny white church raised a gray conical spire like an extinguisher; a group of white and gray dolls'-houses clustered below, drowsily basking, blue haze and brown dust, under the hazy sky.
"Louisa! What time do we get to Rochehaut?"
"Half-past twelve the book said, Miss Dot."
"Which means half-past one, I suppose," said Dorothea O'Connor in her caustic young voice. They were speaking in undertones, but Lettice, whose ears were as sharp as her eyes, could not help hearing every word. "This is the most hatefully ugly place I've ever seen. Of course one expects advertisements to lie, but there is such a thing as overdoing it."
When Dorothea was annoyed, she let it be known. Louisa, faithful soul, bowed her head before the storm; but she paid about as much attention as to the rages of a child.
"Oh, Miss Dot dear, I wish you'd leave this dreadful heathen country and come back to England!"
"I'm coming back to England when I've done what I want, and not before." There was a pleasing vigor and directness in Dorothea's statements. "I'm sorry for you, Louisa, but after all you'll be able to get a cup of real English tea at the Bellevue—all the advertisements said so!"
"'Tisn't tea I'm thinking of, Miss Dot, but this dreadful wicked idea of yours. Deceiving your dear kind uncle and all—"
"It's no business of Uncle Jack's what I do, and if I don't tell him it's only because I don't want him to be bothered." Louisa sighed and shook her head. "I won't be moaned at," Dorothea declared, with an inimical flash. "No, and I won't be prayed at either! I've told you, you can go home if you like; but if you stay, you'll just have to resign yourself, because I am going through with it—I should despise myself for ever and ever if I didn't! There: is that plain?"
"Oh, Miss Dot, you have shook your hat so crooked!" was Louisa's earnest reply. Dorothea laughed, as she submitted to have it set straight.
"I rather hate you sometimes, Louisa darling, you make me feel such a brute," she said, "but I'm going on, all the same. Dear me, is this place an example of the unsurpassed view, I wonder? It'll add a fresh joy to Rochehaut if there's an outbreak of typhoid!"
They were passing through the village which in the distance had looked so trim. Set well back from the road on either side was a row of white houses; before each house, a midden, foursquare; before the middens, a gutter, running auburn; between the gutters, the main street, down which the omnibus had to pass. Dorothea, her face buried in her handkerchief, was rummaging her bag impatiently for a bottle of lavender salts, when something made her glance at her fellow-traveler. Lettice was no longer gray, she was green, and trying weakly to unfasten her veil. Suddenly her surprised and unyielding waist was clasped by a peremptory arm, and the lavender salts were thrust under her nose.
"How many hatpins have you?—oh, here's the last. Move my things off the seat, Louisa. Now put your head down on these rugs; that's better. We shall be out of this hateful village directly."
The amazed Lettice found herself laid flat on the cushions. Automatically she rose up, reacting like a bent twig; instantly she was pressed back again.
"No, you must lie still. I saw you at Brussels, looking as ill as ill, even then. Are you ill, or is it only the traveling that's upset you?"
"I had a bad crossing," said Lettice, in a tone that was almost surly.
"A bad crossing? You came over last night? Then I don't wonder at anything. My flask, Louisa—no, that's the eau-de-Cologne, how stupid you are! I'm going to give you a liqueur; brandy's hateful, and no good at all, but a curaçao does pull you together. Open your mouth—that's right—"
Lettice had opened her mouth to say she did not like liqueurs, but she was given no time; her zealous nurse immediately poured the dose down her throat. This was an outrage—it was forcible feeding—and on Lettice, of all people! Lettice, who could not bear so much as to be touched against her will! Coughing in the most lady-like way, pink with choking and with injured dignity, she presented a pathetic sight for any one with eyes to see. Dorothea had none.
"You aren't one bit fit to be going about alone and looking after yourself," she said, in a mixture of severity and solicitude. "You ought to be in bed! Are you cold?—why, your hands are like lumps of ice! My cloak, Louisa. When we get to the hotel you shall have a hot bottle and I'll see after you properly. No, don't try to talk."
Hitherto Lettice had expressed no gratitude, but now, having been told to keep silence, she said "Thank you," in a tone of acid obstinacy. It is trying to be done good to against your will. Nobody had ever before attempted such a liberty with Lettice. Denis might lecture, but he never dreamed of enforcing his advice; while her own sisters would have laughed at the possibility. "Make Lettice do what she doesn't choose?" cried Rosabel. "You might just as well argue with the leg of that table!"
Lettice, of course, did not agree with them; she considered herself to be of a yielding disposition, bordering on flabbiness; but there are things the meekest cannot stand. The moment Dorothea's back was turned she rose up and put on her hat again. After that she felt happier, if less comfortable. Lettice was one of those persons who are never really happy when they are comfortable; instinctive dread of slackness (springing by rebound from innate love of luxury) drove her to deny her body in order to ease her soul. Certainly her body was not at ease. Violent remedies did not suit her. It might have been the curaçao, or the insult, or both of them together, but her sensations were growing acute.
She saw nothing when they plunged into a rick dark green valley of woods. She was blind to the silvery splendors of distant hills and river. They turned into a wide courtyard and drew up. Lettice saw only that the Hôtel Bellevue had many piazzas and balconies, all full of people, all watching the arrival of the coach. Dorothea descended on one side. Her patient slipped out on the other and made towards the door.
"Why, Lettice!"
It was Denis, who had sprung out of his chair and was advancing towards her, smiling, as the phrase goes, all over his face. Lettice, while wishing him at Jericho, produced an answering smile.
"Well," said she.
"Why didn't you tell me you were coming? You said you meant to spend the night in Brussels! You might have sent a wire!"
"I forgot," said Lettice, still edging towards the door. She wished he would not stand directly in the way. Denis at last began to perceive that something was wrong.
"Did you have a bad crossing? You're all the colors of the rainbow, my dear girl—"
Lettice suddenly swerved past him and almost ran towards the house. As she reached the door another dense and solid person came out, and got hopelessly in the way. A delay at such a moment ... well, if it had been anybody in the world but Lettice ... and even as it was....
"Good Lord!" said Denis.
The new-comer, who was Harry Gardiner, turned with commendable presence of mind and rang for a maid. "Show this lady to her room—"
"And take her a cup of tea at once," finished Dorothea, coming up breathless to resume command. "I'll see to her myself in a moment."
Lettice's last thought, as she hid her shame within the house, was that she must on no account forget to lock her door.
CHAPTER VII AUBADE
The house was asleep. The white corridor was filled with blue reflections of the sky, from the French window open at its north end; but the blind of the south window opposite glowed golden, and streaks of sunlight slipped in, slanting up the wall. The house was asleep, every one was asleep except the sun, who had just risen to his beneficent work, rejoicing as a giant to run his course. Denis's kitten (he had saved her from some boys who wanted to drown her in the river) poked her small black inquiring nose round the glass door, and scampered in to play with the vine-leaf shadows dancing on the wall. She patted them with velvet paw, crouched with tail lashing for a spring, reared up and fell over sideways and scuffled round and round on her back, clawing and biting her own tail.
There Gardiner saw her when he too came in from the balcony, walking in his socks and carrying his wading boots. He scooped her up in one hand and bore her down the corridor to Denis's room. No one answering his tap, he walked in. A small white chamber, facing west; the curtain drawn back from the open lattice, and Denis lying asleep beneath. Everything about him was sternly neat. His clothes were folded on a chair, his boots stood side by side, his Bible and Prayer Book lay on the window-ledge at the bed's head. The wind had blown back the cover, and Gardiner stooped to read the inscription. "Denis Arthur Merion-Smith, from his Affectionate Father, March 4, 1897"—the date of his confirmation. Underneath, the reference 1 Tim. v. 22. Gardiner with unscrupulous curiosity turned the pages till he found the verse, underscored: "Keep thyself pure." He stood looking at his friend's unconscious face with something of envy. He was never in doubt as to the relative worth of himself and Denis.
"Mrrreow!" said the kitten, suddenly biting and kicking in earnest. Gardiner dropped her on the sleeper, and laughed to see his violent start.
"Come on fishing, lazy brute!"
"What, now?" asked Denis, rubbing his eyes and soothing the kitten at the same time.
"Yes, now, pronto, this instant. I've wasted the prime of the morning already, because I knew I shouldn't be able to drag you out of your bed before."
"All right, I'm on," said Denis with disarming amiability. Gardiner left him feeding the kitten with biscuits, and went down to his larders, which he knew as well as any careful housewife. He secured some of yesterday's croissants, butter in a china pot, sliced ham, half-a-dozen shrimp patties, a pocketful of pears; he boiled up coffee on an electric stove to fill his flask, and was ready to join Denis in the courtyard.
Just after four: the morning blue and gold and breathless still. They came into the road which runs embanked along the heights of Rochehaut, and paused at the parapet. Deep the cleft of the valley, rich in forests, dropping sheer to the river—and what a river! The Semois, on a map, looks like a dislocated corkscrew; she twists and she turns, tying herself into S's and W's, running impartially north, south, east, and west among her maze of hills. Here at the foot of the cliffs of Rochehaut she sweeps a long loop at the beholder, inclosing in her slender silver arms a long, long narrow peninsula of hills which swell up to end in a rounded baby mountain immediately below. This is Frahan. The ends of the loop run far away out of sight among the hills, incurving so that you would swear they must meet somewhere in the chaos of dim peaks on the horizon. The sun from behind the watchers was faintly gilding the velvety gray-green crest of the peninsula, and the tiny church of Frahan, on its flank, gleamed like an ivory toy; but the river cleft was still deep in hyacinthine shadows, veiled in the gauzes of the mists, drenched with the gray-silver of the dews.
The fishermen found a winding path which led them to the river, and turned down-stream, fishing and wading. Of all the lovely daughters of the Meuse the Semois is the loveliest. The Lesse, issuing cold and mysterious from the caverns of Han, has been insulted by a railway; the Amblève is gloomy with dark bowlders and wild monotonous hills; the turbulent Ourthe, beautiful among the mountains in the ravine of Sy, is elsewhere spoilt by quarries and by tourists. But the Semois is never gloomy; she seems to hold the sunshine in her golden sands. You may follow her wrigglings for a whole morning and see no road, no tilth, no sign of human handiwork save the very primitive cart track which conducts you impartially beside the water and through it.
A slab of rock, embedded in the turf, served as their breakfast-table. A wall of limestone rose behind, graced with ferns and mosses and the delicate carmine leaflets of the wild geranium. Fallen bowlders shelved half across the stream, which surged round them in a ruff, or slid past like thin crystal. What richness of color everywhere! They could see the river dancing towards them down the green and smiling valley, bluer than the sky, a-sparkle with diamonds, beset with flowers—forget-me-nots, the tender lilac crocus of the autumn, yellow lilies on a pool where the Semois condescended for a moment to lie still. The woods were green as sycamores in May. A kingfisher swept by, tropically brilliant. On the purple mint at the water's edge a great butterfly sat poised, pivoting round the flower-head, stiffly opening and closing its gorgeous, downy wings of scarlet, black, and white.
"Talk to me of your beastly England!" said Gardiner, flat on his back in the grass. "A man can breathe here. Look at those trees—none of your spindly copses with the sky showing through on the other side, but good solid cut-and-come-again forest, for leagues on end! I could say my prayers to a forest."
"It's good fishin'," said Denis, more intent on his catch than on the scenery. The Ourthe may brag of its salmon, but the Semois has noble trout. "Better than it was at Grasmere."
"Oh, Grasmere...."
Gardiner's face was not expressive, but his voice told Denis that he was back among scenes which by common consent they had not mentioned before, and which Denis had no wish ever to mention again. He saw what he had brought on himself, and blessed his blundering tongue. Sure enough, after some pause the younger man asked:
"Did you ever hear any more of Mrs. Trent after I left?"
"A little, from Scott," Denis unwillingly admitted.
"From Scott? Did he write to you, then?"
"No, I saw him."
"Where? In town?"
"At Westby."
"You saw Scott at Westby?"
"I spent a week-end with him there last November," said Denis stiffly. "He asked me when we were at Easedale. He's a nice little chap. I like him."
"Well, I'm hanged!" said Gardiner, settling back his head, which he had lifted to stare at his friend. "You talk too much about your own affairs, Denis, that's what's the matter with you. Go on. What did he tell you about Mrs. Trent?"
"He said she'd not made at all a good recovery; after leavin' Easedale she'd to go to a nursing home in town, and from there she sent him down a cross and candlesticks for the prison chapel. Scott was quite set up about it, he's a ritualistic little chap; and I suppose they were handsome enough if you like such things, I don't—"
"My good Denis, what have I to do with crosses and candlesticks? Did he say she said anything about me?"
"He did," said Denis, more unwillingly than ever. "He said she asked for your address."
"Oh, confound—! Did he give it?"
"He had to. He said it was no use refusin', as she'd easily have got it out of any one else."
"He said that, did he? Confound him too! I seem to have left several loose ends over this affair. Was that all he told you?"
"Yes. After she wrote with the things he heard no more."
"I wonder why she wanted my address," said Gardiner, frowning. "Well, I suppose it must be all right—after all this time."
He pulled at his pipe in silence. Happening to glance at Denis, he surprised that look of distaste and repugnance which he had never seen on his friend's face before Easedale. Gardiner was not fond of owning himself in the wrong; few men are, and he less than most. But he spoke out now on impulse.
"Look here, Denis, I know very well I ought to have owned up. I knew it at the time, but I was too beastly scared!—and that's the plain truth. It was the idea of prison; for the moment it knocked all the stuffing out of me—you needn't think I admire myself. And to drag you into it as well—oh, it was a rotten business!"
"You didn't drag me, I dragged myself," said Denis quickly. "If anybiddy was to blame, it was I."
"You! You'll be telling me you killed him next. No, it's my own funeral—and I've been such a concentrated ass over it, that's what gets me! If I'd told the truth at once, there would have been practically no bother, I'm certain of it. I could have done it then; afterwards, at the inquest, when I wanted to, it was too late. I couldn't tell the tale without its point; and I couldn't tell that particular point when that unhappy little thing had lost both her husband and her kid. No, I don't consider myself to shine in this affair, either in morals or intelligence."
"It was I began it," said Denis obstinately.
Gardiner shrugged his shoulders; what was the use of contradiction? Denis was mending a fly; and by the happy clearing of his face it was plain that he was also busy mending his ideal and setting it back on its pedestal with an added glory. There is no surer way of earning a man's esteem than by begging his pardon. All Gardiner's faults were hidden under this new coat of gilding. "You're an incurable idealist, my good Denis," he said to himself, watching the process of rehabilitation. "You idealize me on the one hand, and that inoffensive but very ordinary little cousin of yours on the other. Lord send you never find us out, for you'll break your knees badly when you do!" The undeserved good opinion of a friend makes a thorny bed. Yet, though Gardiner did not see it, he was moving towards the fulfillment of his friend's conception of his character. That is the worst of idealists—they shame us into acting up to their ideas!
Denis was a devout fisherman. As soon as he had finished the fly he started off again, wading round the bend out of sight. Gardiner, who fished only because any sport was better than none, stayed where he was. Minutes passed. He was nearly asleep when some one hailed him. At first he thought it was Denis, and took no notice; but the voice becoming insistent, he opened one eye, and immediately sprang up. It was Miss O'Connor, on the other side of the river.
She made a trumpet of her hands and shouted some question, but the Semois drowned her words. Gardiner was wearing the orthodox Ardennes waders, which begin as boots and continue as shiny waterproof breeches right up to the waist, so it was nothing for him to splash across to the farther shore. (It may be mentioned that Denis stuck obstinately to his English boots, which came scarcely higher than his knee; with the result that he got very wet, for the Semois came considerably higher than his knee.)
Dorothea was wearing a short tweed skirt with leather buttons; square-toed, solid brown brogues; a white shirt, a tan belt, and a brown tie to match. She was hatless, and her hair, smooth, parted, and rippling over her ears, was glossy as a Frenchwoman's. Her face, which had lost its fragility, was softly, evenly brown; her lips, a veritable cupid's bow, were cherry-red. They were drawn straight as she looked at Gardiner, and her manner was distant.
"I took you for a woodcutter, or I should not have disturbed you," she said. "I wished to ask if there is a way back along the river."
"Well, there is," said Gardiner, looking down at the ruts under their feet, "and you're on it. If you follow this track, it will bring you straight to Rochehaut."
"But it goes through the water."
"It does."
"Must I go through the water, then?"
"Unless you like to make a bee-line up through the forest to Botassart. It's nearly perpendicular, and miles out of your way."
"Very inconvenient," said Dorothea displeasedly. "Why isn't there a ferry?"
"Well, you see this track isn't much used, except by the timber wagons. It won't be above your knees, if you'll allow me to show you the way; this is a regular ford. But perhaps you'd rather I retired round the bend?"
"That will not be necessary," she said, more frigidly than ever, and without more ado went behind a bush to take off her shoes and stockings. Gardiner thought her very pretty and rather ridiculous, and wondered if he were called on to see her home. He decided that he was not. It occurred to him that by all the laws of romance he ought to carry her across; but he decided again that nature had not cut him out for the part. No true hero should be half-an-inch shorter than the heroine; and certainly none has ever been known to drop a lady in the middle of a river.
Dorothea appeared barefoot, and motioned him imperiously to lead the way. They stepped into the clear, shallow water, scattering a cloud of tiny fishes. As they advanced, Dorothea's skirts bunched up higher and higher. If Gardiner had not kept his eyes delicately averted, he might have had a glimpse, and more than a glimpse, of certain tweed garments that were not a part of her skirt. The Semois, though shallow, is very swift. Midway across the golden pebbles were succeeded by slabs of gray-green rock, tressed with weed. Gardiner heard a small exclamation, and turned just in time to save his companion from measuring her length in the river. His arm went round the slim figure, so soft and pliant, with no more sentiment than if it had been a boy. But she—her color flamed as she was thrown against him; she dropped her skirts and clutched his arm to push him away.
"Steady!" said Gardiner, "or you'll have us both over. These stones are as slippery as glass."
"I—trod on something sharp," said Dorothea in a strangled voice. She stood there with her skirts in the water, still holding him off with both hands.
"Hurt yourself?"
She shook her head.
"Sure? Will you take my arm for a bit?" said Gardiner, puzzled by her unaccountable emotion.
She shook her head again, and stumbled after him to the shore. There she sat down on the stone which had been their table, to put on her shoes and stockings while he collected his possessions. He gave her plenty of time, as he thought, yet when he turned she was still sitting there, with one foot bare on the grass. Across the instep, blanched alabaster white by the water, ran a crimson gash.
"Hullo! you have damaged yourself," said Gardiner. "You ought to have something between that and the stocking, if you'll allow me to say so. Got a handkerchief?"
"I've lost it," she said without looking up.
"Have mine, then." He held it out; she made no movement. "May I do it for you?"
After a brief incomprehensible hesitation, she murmured: "Please." More and more puzzled, Gardiner knelt down and took her foot in his hand. It was a bad cut, but not very bad; some women would have made nothing of it; he was glad she belonged to the more feminine type. He washed away the gravel and fixed a neat bandage, Dorothea sitting passive. But he could feel that she was conscious of him; and he became acutely conscious of her. When it was done, she murmured something which might have been supposed to be thanks, slipped half her foot into her shoe and stood up.
"You'll never get home at that rate. Let me help you," said Gardiner, watching her attempt to shuffle along.
"I—I think I can manage. Is it far?"
"Twenty minutes' walk, and shocking bad going."
"I shall be taking you out of your way."
"Not a bit of it. It's time I got back too."
"But your friend—I saw him fishing up the stream."
"Oh, he's old enough to play by himself," said Gardiner easily, his keenness growing in proportion to her reluctance. (It may be said that Denis, when he returned, spent half-an-hour hunting for his friend before he decided to follow him home. Thus does Love elbow Friendship out of the way.) "Don't you want me to help you?" he added bluntly. "Do you object to me personally? Shall I cut on home and send your maid?"
"Oh, no, no," said Dorothea hurriedly, and thereupon took his arm. Gardiner had what he wanted, and a little more; heavens! what was the matter with the girl? She was shaking all over, an electric battery of emotion; the strong current of her trouble and indecision thrilled him in every nerve. More than that, he was left in no doubt that he himself was the cause of her agitation.
There was nothing of the ascetic in Gardiner; he was warm-blooded and inflammable, as he had already found to his cost. Since he could not get away from his temperament, he got round it, by avoiding women, and by keeping any necessary intercourse free from the first beginnings of sentiment. As his will was stronger than his passions, except when they got out of hand and were running away, this plan had worked well. But he could not avoid Dorothea; and when she slipped her hand through his arm she undid the work of years, and stirred ashes into flame. Passion, unlike love, is a sudden growth, and it was passion he felt: that inexplicable force which draws men and women together, often in defiance of every natural taste and sentiment. The situation was alluring. Dorothea was not merely a pretty girl, she was a personage, as she had very soon made known in the hotel; a star far away in the sky above Gardiner's head. Yet the touch of his hand set her shaking like a reed. Gardiner was not coxcomb enough to imagine that she had fallen in love with his fine eyes; but he was prepared to stake his soul that for some undiscoverable reason she was half afraid of him. What man could resist that lure?
It was not a long journey to the Bellevue, but it was eventful; for things move fast in the campaigns of the heart. Gardiner did not capitulate without a struggle. "You ass, you don't want an affair of this sort on your hands, particularly not with one of your own boarders," he told himself. "You preposterous ass, go slow!" And paid as much heed as men in such circumstances usually do to their own wisdom. "I can resist everything except temptation"—the phrase flitted ruefully through his mind. He was trying hard to convince himself that Dorothea's tremors were not necessarily flattering, when they came out of the woods into the road, in view of the hotel.
Dorothea stood still.
"I—I think I'd rather manage the rest alone, if you don't mind."
Gardiner started, dropped her arm, stepped back out of sight among the trees.
"Of course. You naturally would. I ought to have understood before."
"Oh, I didn't mean that!"
"Oh, I think you did. It would hardly do, would it?"
"Oh, no, no, no!" cried Dorothea. She hesitated; he could see her visibly struggling with herself; then she raised her head. Whatever quinine of common-sense he might administer to himself, there was no possibility of mistaking the expression in those pansy-brown eyes. She might have wavered before; she had made up her mind now.
"I didn't mean that," she said. "I never thought of such a thing. It was only that—that—people do talk, if they see things—and suppose you asked me to go for a walk with you again—"
"Do you mean that if I did, you would?"
He got no answer. Lettice had just come out to the gates of the hotel to taste the morning sun, with the kitten squirming on her shoulder; and at sight of her Miss O'Connor ran away.
CHAPTER VIII AMANDUS, -A, -UM
"Mine is a long and a sad tale," said the Mouse, sighing.
The Bellevue, when Gardiner first set eyes on it, was a cross between a hostelry and a farm, tumbled round three sides of a quadrangle where black-and-white pigs rooted and grunted, among middens and mangy grass, under the windows of the dining-room. The Ardennes hotel of those days had no drains, no baths, no basins bigger than soup-plates and not many towels, no easy-chairs, no salons; in fact, none of the comforts of a refined home. There would be middens outside and the odor of the cow-stable within. On the other hand, the rooms would be clean, the beds comfortable, the food abundant, if peculiar; and the friendly welcome which met the traveler made up for many discomforts.
In all his former ventures Gardiner had been a tenant; the Bellevue was his own. He had bought the freehold with an opportune legacy, and was spending on it his savings of ten years. According to his usual plan, he went to work first to make the outside attractive. The quadrangle where the pigs had fed was now a lawn, laid out with flower-beds. Of the dilapidated out-buildings, some had been pulled down, others built up and turned into additional bedrooms. Round the three sides of the court ran a piazza with easy-chairs, and tables, and ever more flowers, sure attraction to an English eye. Inside, his alterations had been more costly. He had put in baths; he had laid on electric light; he had partially refurnished the house—not, however, with conventional "suites" from Liège. They would not have suited the heterogeneous old mansion, on whose lintel was carved the date 1548, and which had been successively convent, country house, farm, and inn. For those who had eyes to see, there was in those days a good deal of fine old furniture, carved presses, beds, and so forth, to be picked up in the farms and the villages. It had been a labor of love for Gardiner to go round bargaining for these things, and bringing them home in triumph to his picturesque old rooms. He made a play of his work, and a pet of his home; he grudged no labor spent in beautifying it; he enjoyed dressing it up, as a child dresses up a doll. In the end, what with polished floors, casement curtains, and Noah's Ark plants in pots, the place looked like a garden-city house, as Lettice unkindly remarked. There was nothing like it in the Ardennes.
His next step was to advertise, a branch of their business on which hotel-keepers in general do not seem to spend their brains. Gardiner did not want a mixed clientèle, he was out to attract the poorer gentry, parsons, doctors, schoolmasters, retired colonels and commanders, literary men—the class which he had found pleasantest to deal with. Therefore he put his discreet little paragraphs into such papers as The Guardian, The Church Times, The Author, The Journal of Education, The Spectator, and various ladies' periodicals. Each advertisement was worded differently, to suit its audience, but all wound up with the formula: "Inclusive terms, 4s. 6d. per day. Fifteen-day excursions, Dover—Rochehaut, second class, £1. 8s. 3d. Exact directions as to journey given." And to meet the demand which arose, he had leaflets printed, giving alternative routes by day or night, plans of stations, prices in detail, travel hints, the minute advice of an old traveler who knows every trick of the journey; leaflets which enabled the greenest novice to face the douane, and change at the right places, and catch the right trains. This branch of his work alone kept him busy, for he was his own secretary. But it gained him what he wanted, and filled his house. Satan had not much chance of finding Gardiner's hands at his disposal. Nevertheless, in those summer days he found time to get into mischief.
Lettice was enjoying herself very much in her own fashion, though to more adventurous souls her daily round might have seemed dull. She came down to breakfast at nine, and then crawled out half-a-mile to a certain brushwood pile in the forest, commanding the view over Frahan. There she sat down, the faggots providing a comfortable seat with a back. She took a work-bag and a Latin grammar, and spent her morning alternately in setting slow stitches in a green tablecloth and in learning Latin verbs from the volume open on her knee. After lunch she retired to her room in company with a sheaf of foolscap. If she wrung out one whole line in a day, she considered herself to have done brilliantly. After tea came a solemn constitutional with Denis, which, as her chronic tiredness wore off, extended from two miles to six, or even ten. Then followed dinner; and after dinner, bed at nine o'clock.
One morning about three weeks after her arrival she was starting on her customary crawl to the wood pile, when Dorothea jumped up from her seat on the terrasse.
"Are you going for a walk? May I come too?"
"I'm not going far," Lettice warned her in a discouraging hurry.
"I know; you go into the woods and sit down, don't you? I'll bring my book."
"That will be very nice," declared Lettice. Any one who knew the A B C of her expressions must have seen that she was, to put it prettily, as cross as two sticks. Dorothea was not blind; nevertheless, she persisted. They walked in silence, Dorothea now a little ahead, now checking herself back to her companion's unalterable crawl. Arrived at the wood pile, Lettice sat down on the identical bundle of sticks which she had picked out for herself seventeen days before. She was conservative as a cat in all her ways.
The morning was hazy. Round them the woods had been cleared of forest trees; there was a carpet of reddish leathery leaves, across which the great silver boles lay forlorn, amid the white chips of their slaughter. Low bushes were green, and there were leaves overhead, a thin tracery; but elsewhere only russet tones and gray, gray-stemmed saplings and grayish mists. Gray too was Frahan in the valley, softly molded in haze, white the river circling its utterly improbable peninsula, gray the far mountains, pearl-gray and silver, losing themselves in silvery sky. Between her participles and her stitches Lettice would often lift up her eyes to the hills; she dearly loved a distant view. But to-day she was watching her companion.
Dorothea had plumped down among the withered leaves and sat there, hugging her knees and staring gloomily into the forest. To the feminine eye it was plain that she wore no stays; she bent about like a willow wand, and her attitudes were unstudied as a child's. Youth is often tragic; but there was real bitter experience written on those soft childish contours, and it was the contradiction which interested Lettice. Turning her head suddenly, Dorothea caught her with her needle suspended, staring, and broke into her charming smile.
"I want to tell you something about myself; may I?"
Lettice instantly became all attention. Nature had designed her as a casket for confidences, and they were often poured into her patient ear. Dorothea uncurled herself and lay prone, snuggling close, propping her chin in her hands, and looking now on the ground, now up at Lettice with her big soft eyes.
"It's a long tale, but it's really quite funny," she said. "It all began about money. There was a family place, and my father, when he died, left it to me, with his brother as my guardian; but the brother, my uncle, thought it ought to have been left to him direct, do you see?—not to a scrap of a girl. So he was very angry and always bore me a grudge, and I do think he had a sort of grievance, only he needn't have been so horrid about it. He wouldn't have been so bad but for his wife. She was a clever woman, and he was a big soft handsome booby who always believed what she told him; so when she said I was sly and wicked, of course he was sure I was. Well, I lived with them, and they had the use of my money. But they were always most desperately afraid I should get married and take it away. So they wouldn't let me go anywhere. I never went to a dance, I never played tennis, I wasn't even let go out to tea or have any girl friends, not after I was fourteen. Clara (that's what I had to call her) used to go up to town, and shop in Bond Street, and do the round of the theaters, on my money, while I was left at home to dust the drawing-room and wash the stockings. It was funny! Just like Cinderella!"
"Why didn't you run away?"
"I hadn't any money except threepence a week, or any one to run to. Besides—" She hesitated. "You don't know how helpless a girl can be in the hands of a grown-up man," she said, with resurgent bitterness. "He used to tell me I was the sort of girl who makes a man want to thrash her. He did hit me once or twice. Oh! I could have killed him!"
She stabbed the dead leaves viciously with Lettice's scissors.
"But, but—but didn't people talk?" Lettice asked.
"Yes, they did, and some of them even quarreled with my uncle about me; but you see he told every one what a bad girl I was, and in a way it wasn't a lie, and he could make people believe it, because he believed it himself. He did really believe that I'd made father leave the money to me, though I was only five when he died. Why, sometimes I even got muddled myself, and used to feel I must be all the dreadful things he said. Oh! I was miserable. You can be very, very miserable when you're seventeen, and it doesn't seem a bit funny then. I remember once I saved up my pennies and retrimmed my summer hat—I always hated the things she got for me—and made it look quite pretty. I was so pleased with it; and then when I came down she said it was unsuitable, and she made me take it off, and go to church in the horrid old brown felt I'd worn all the winter, though it was a broiling June day! I cried—I cried all the service. So to punish me, when we came out, she asked the vicar, me standing by, to change our pew, because she said she couldn't trust me so near the choir! (That was one of the things they always said, that I ran after men.) However, she was done that time, for the vicar played up like a trump. He said he'd speak to the choir, and see they didn't annoy me again; and then he turned to me and paid the dearest old-fashioned compliment about my sweet face being enough to turn any young man's head—and me in that frightful old hat and my nose swelled purple with crying!" She burst out laughing.
"But you did get away at last?"
"Yes, I did. I found a friend to help me ... but I can't talk about that." Visibly, under Lettice's eyes, her face clouded over and changed. It was a significant change: not a mere shadow falling from without, but a revolution within. The under side of her nature, black with premature grief and premature passions, slowly turned its ugliness into view.
"Did you ever hate any one?" she asked, her voice sinking and her eyes glowing as she relived the feelings she described. "Did you ever know what it was to turn sick and cold with loathing, to have the world go black, black, when a certain person comes near? Did you? No, I know you never did, you're far too good a Christian. But I'm not a Christian. I don't believe in any religion of love. There's little enough love here, and what there is goes to the wall. And there's no love over us; just a cruel, cruel, grinding power, which delights in breaking to bits whatever it sees that's beautiful and happy. Oh, it's an ugly, cruel, hateful world!"
"I think it's a very nice world," said Lettice, her words falling like drops of soft water on white-hot steel. They did not very accurately reflect her thoughts, but Lettice's words seldom did that. Dorothea laughed them to scorn.
"You wouldn't if you were in my shoes," she said derisively. She sat up. "Listen, and I'll tell you if you like. You've just heard what sort of life I had when I was a girl; I can laugh over it now, but it wasn't very gay at the time. Well, I got away, as I said; and for a little I was happy—oh, I was—for just a little, little while. And then, in a moment—everything gone. Everything. All I'd cared for, and the hopes I had—oh, I had, I had such heavenly hopes—all gone, all broken, dead, dead, dead." She beat her palm on the ground. "I dare say if I'd been older I might have taken it better," she said, turning her eyes on Lettice with an appeal which nothing in earth or heaven could satisfy; for it was an appeal to the Moving Finger to go back, to reverse what had been written. "I might have been gentle and forgiving and resigned then. But I wasn't old enough. I'm only twenty-one now. And I'm tired—I'm tired."