Jocelyn

He sprang to his feet, and reeled backwards.

“Don’t torture me, my darling! You don’t know what you’re saying,” he said in a hoarse whisper, then very deliberately and aloud, “You must go home—go on alone for a minute, I’ll come.” The words sounded hollow in his own ears, he had a feeling that some one else, not himself at all, had said them. He put his hands over his eyes and muttered indistinctly, “God help me!” with a short choking gasp.

The perfume of her dress and hair was wafted to him, mingled with the night scents, in the intoxicating stillness under those dark branches; he reeled a little, then he saw that Jocelyn too was on her feet. She stood before him quite close, her figure swaying, her breast heaving. In her eyes was an infinite pity; they fastened on his, intent and searching, they seemed trying to read his soul. She put out her hands. He moved with a writhing, helpless gesture, and seized them in his own. With the touch of those burning hands, with the fastening of his eyes on hers, there came a change in the girl’s face, the strained look went out of her eyes, they seemed to swim and burn; no longer questioning, they gave him back look for look. Her lips parted slightly in a sigh.

“Sweetheart!” She leaned towards him.

In that second, with his lips almost touching hers, knowing that if they touched there could be no holding back and no recall, everything passed before him. He saw himself. He saw what he was doing. Like a drowning man he saw all that had gone before, all that was coming, stretched grimly into a dim future. He saw her mind—the pity in it, the reflection of his own passion. He saw his wife. He saw all things—love, pity, and honour. He weighed them in the scales, they were all as nothing.

A short, sobbing breath of wind sighed through the olives.

Their lips met.

PART II

CHAPTER XI

Nielsen sipped his coffee, smoking quietly. He leant slightly forward, with his shoulders squared, his knees apart, and the rim of his hat pulled forward on his high forehead.

The café was nearly opposite the Hôtel Milano, which stood back from the road in its own garden. Nielsen watched the windows of the hotel, and the vague silhouettes of people’s figures against the lighted verandah. The lines of his pale, squarely-moulded face expressed a gently weary resignation, and he remained undisturbed by the wheeling of mosquitoes and the perpetual futile appearances of the unkempt Italian waiters.

That afternoon he had seen Jocelyn for the first time since the day at Bordighera. On that occasion he had been in earnest, with an earnestness that, upon reflection, had caused him surprise. He was aware that he would repeat his conduct under similar circumstances, but the idea of marriage had become so foreign to him in the course of his broken existence, that he was compelled to look upon himself as having deviated from the path of sanity. He had, moreover, been making love to women, more or less harmlessly, for so long, that an acquired cynicism informed him that these things were all a matter of degree, the end of the affair requiring a greater or less absence of the object of attraction. Man of the world, he acutely recognised that without a sustained and zealous siege he had no chance with Jocelyn; he salved his vanity by thinking that, with it, success was possible—even probable. In this way rebuff lost its sting, painful exertion became unnecessary.

The girl had a great attraction for him. She was always “in the picture,” her graceful personality was never marred by her surroundings. She had no taint of “insularity.” Without self-sufficiency, she seemed sufficient unto herself. All this appealed to the cosmopolitan in him. It was not too much to say, that she more nearly approached the persona grata of his fastidious imagination than any woman he had ever met. She was therefore dangerous, he reflected in her absence—in her presence he did not reflect at all, want of reflection in the presence of women having become habitual to him. At this particular moment he was profoundly puzzled.

He had found Jocelyn singularly absorbed, silent and unresponsive. She pleaded headache. Certainly she looked ill, but he had a disquieting feeling that there was something on her mind. She had sat dumb while he talked with her aunt, detailing gossip of the inner life of Monte Carlo, which the soul of that lady loved. When he spoke to her, she was distraite, and returned monosyllabic answers. He was not vain enough to attribute her manifest discomfort to his own presence, and, for the first time since he had known her, he came away without feeling the power of her attraction, experiencing instead a sensation of uneasiness and of curiosity, that was purely benevolent, and very characteristic.

He had dined at the café, and sat in the dusk waiting till the time for his return train.

A man walking hurriedly on the other side of the street went up through the gates of the hotel garden. Nielsen followed the figure negligently with his eyes, and saw it pass and repass the end of the verandah, and then stand motionless for a long time in the shadow of a tree. The faint inquisitiveness he felt in his movements died away presently in the countless, inconsequent reflections of one not compelled by circumstances to think steadily of any given thing. He yawned, looked at his watch, and throwing away his cigarette stepped out of the circle of light into the road leading to the railway station. As he did so, the man came suddenly down the garden path at a great pace, gesticulating with his clenched hands, passed close without seeing him, and hurried away in the direction of the town, muttering to himself. Nielsen stopped abruptly in recognition. He called after him—

“Hallo! Legard!” The man turned.

“Ah!” he said, “Good-night!”

His face was momentarily in the full glare of the café lights; the hat was slouched over it, but the line of his moustache was visible, black against the lower part. The movement of turning had seemed mechanical, the words sounded leaden. In another moment he was gone, walking faster than before, his shoulders hunched up to his ears in a way that suggested pain, and his hands thrust suddenly deep into his pockets as if to keep them still.

Nielsen stood looking after him.

“When a man talks to himself aloud, it is bad!” he said to himself. “When he talks, and clenches his hands comme ça, ah! that is very bad! That man is suffering!” He shrugged his shoulders, pointing mechanically with his stick after the figure.

“Yes, yes—I know. I do not like him, but I am sorry for him—he suffers verry grreatly.” He shook his head gravely, as he turned into the station.

. . . . . . . .

That supreme point, when for a time human nature recoils before suffering in a great lassitude, had not been reached by Giles Legard. Four days of torture had left him still capable of feeling.

Into his bedroom in the little grey villa the moon struck keenly and coldly; there was no other light. He had thrown off coat and waistcoat, and sat motionless, with his head bent on his arms folded across the back of his chair. Upon the table in front of him was a torn envelope and a half sheet of paper, folded and re-folded with innumerable creases. The room was empty of all other furniture except the bed, beside which, on a great rug of deerskin stretched over the bare panelling of the floor, Shikari lay, his head between his paws. In the bright moonlight all colours in the room gave way in a harsh contrasting of black and white, and outside the sea gleamed through the tops of the ghostly olives in silver ridges. Every now and then a loosened tendril of creeper swayed with the breath of a newly-born sea wind across the widely-opened casement. From his wife’s bedroom underneath came an occasional sound of hollow coughing.

Legard sat with his back turned to the window. The moonlight over the sea brought to him an agonising spasm of memory.... In return for an hour of mad, intoxicating passion, he had bartered everything! He took up the sheet of paper, looking at it dully as he twisted it in his hands. He had bartered everything! The thought was old, it seemed to him centuries since he had first realised it. Everything! There was not a shred left to him of his honour, or his self-respect; that did not seem to matter, he was beyond feeling it. But in that single hour of madness he had taken the happiness of the woman he loved—and with it his own—taken it, as it were, in his two hands, and flung it into the dust. Taken her well-being, her reserve, and her pride, and flung them brutally into the dust.

He read the letter mechanically again and again.

“I have tried, but I cannot see you. When you came near everything seemed to cry out at me. It is better that you should keep away—for you and for me. I cannot answer for myself.” That was all. No hope! No single stroke of the pen brought relief to his aching spirit.

He held the sheet of paper to catch the full of the moonlight; and her face rose above it, as he had seen it the one time since that night—a delicate, oval face, cold as the moonlight itself; averted and unseizable eyes, profound and dark, with the lids drooping over them and circles of black beneath; lips drawn together, cruelly set; cheeks colourless; between the brows a slight furrow; and over all the waving dark hair gathered back from the low forehead.

As nearly as a man may read the soul of a woman, he had read hers, with a vision supernaturally sharpened by pain. He had seen in her face the shame, the agony of violated reserve, the bitter wounding of her pride—the pride, which for no single moment had foreseen that ending. He had known that she was thinking, “I am a thing apart, but for the accident of concealment, a thing of shame.” He had recognised that in the reaction of her feelings there was a physical repulsion to himself, a desire to hurt because she had been hurt. He had understood what it was costing her to go about as usual, and keep her vizor down to the world. He had known in her a courage he did not possess himself, an untameable pride. All this he had seen in that face. That which he had not seen was the mysterious weakness of woman, the greatest and the most pitiful of all qualities.

He rose from his seat, went into his dressing-room, and poured some brandy from a shooting flask. When he had drunk it he came back again to his bedroom. He walked up and down once or twice softly, clenching his hands, and mechanically taking care that his footsteps made no noise on the bare, slippery floor. Then he put his hand into the breastpocket of his coat, took out a revolver, and dropped it into the table-drawer. As he did so he gave a queer little laugh. He had carried it about with him for three days, and it was like parting with an old friend. It had been comforting to feel the weight of it in his pocket, with the thought that there was always that escape from the grinding torture of the slowly moving hours.

He shut the drawer with a bang of finality. The brandy had cleared his brain, and he saw that for several reasons the end was not that way. He must see it out. He began to perceive also that it was a grimmer and a harder thing than he had imagined for a human being to abandon hope; and yet, as the bang of the shut drawer echoed in the silent room, he felt that it was even more grim and hard to go on living. He knew all the time that, of those two thoughts, he would never find out which was the truer, because of a deeply-rooted instinct, cowardly-heroic, which would drive him to live while he was sane.

He threw himself at full length upon the floor, pressing his face into the soft rug, and Shikari woke up to lick his outstretched hands. The moonlight passed on over the house and left him there.

Some time in the dense darkness he crawled to his knees, and bowed himself against the bed in a prayer, unconvinced, faithless, and voiceless, a mere straining after rest in the hard pressure of his face against the cool covering of the bed, after peace in the touch of his knees upon the floor.

He fell asleep so. When he woke it was with a vague contempt of himself that had no sting in it, and, half-dressed as he was, he fell asleep again upon the bed in sheer exhaustion.

CHAPTER XII

Yet, in spite of the agony of returning consciousness, there was a glow of resolution in his mind, another dawning of hope. He shrank before the acknowledgment of it. To his indolent, pleasure-loving nature, a resigned acceptance of the worst meant relief. He resented the renewed vitality which brought suspense, and a fresh struggle against the abandonment of hope. With every movement of his muscles in the morning air came another balancing of the possibilities. Effort of any sort, other than the purely physical, was painful to him; he shrank from beginning again a mental contest against overpowering odds, and all the time the struggle was renewing itself within him. It was his nature to shrink from obstacles, and to hate the rough of life, yet when he encountered it, something in him always forced him forward against his will. He began to calculate the earliest minute at which he might see Jocelyn.

He dressed hastily, swallowed some coffee and a roll, and ordered his pony. While waiting for it he paced restlessly up and down the little garden. Once, when he passed her window, he saw his wife’s figure moving feebly from her bedroom to her sitting-room. He had heard her talking, had heard her cough, had even heard her laughing, but it was all he had seen of her for three days. He turned away hastily, and walked down into the road to wait....

Four hours later the bay pony, very tired, stopped with a jerk before the villa door. The afternoon sun struck hotly on to the white road, and the palm trees by the Saracen tower were waiting dejectedly for the wind, that hung in the black clouds over the sea, to free them from their dusty covering. Giles got off, he staggered slightly, and wiped his forehead as he gave the reins to the slim, dark Italian boy, who appeared like a mournful shadow from an unexpected corner to take them—then throwing his head back he walked into the house.

Shortly, this was what had happened to him in the four hours.

He had ridden at a pace alternately very fast and very slow to the Hôtel Milano. At the gate of the hotel garden the German proprietor was standing, a large, grave man, with a military back. The ladies, he said, had gone to Monte Carlo, would Monsieur not come in and rest himself from the heat, and wait, for the ladies would surely be back very presently. Monsieur would not! The ladies would certainly return for the luncheon at half-one. Yes! there was a train from Monte Carlo at twelve o’clock; it was now eleven. Would not Monsieur, perhaps, drink something—there was some very good hock newly arrived. Monsieur would not! It was very hot! Aufwiedersehn!

As Giles dug his heels into the pony’s sides and clattered up the street towards the Cornice Road, the German proprietor, bowing his long, bearded face towards his gaunt chest, looked gravely after him.

“Mein Herr Legard is no longer the same man, I think,” he said slowly to his little French wife, in an interval of her flower gathering. “He used to be so calm, so nonchalant; now he does everything augenblicklich, with his mouth shut and his brows down. He is ill, I think, or he has lost money.”

“Que t’es bête, mon cher!” said Madame compassionately, a rose in her mouth, and her small, fat, French hands full of carnations.

Legard rode into Monte Carlo, he could not wait for the chance of their returning for lunch. He came upon them walking down from Smith’s bank to the station. He had the privilege of shaking hands with them. Mrs. Travis was slightly in front—she had always a conviction that trains wished to elude her. After a glance at his face, she discreetly increased her pace and disappeared into the station, perceiving from its expression that she would be more comfortable away from him.

Giles was alone with Jocelyn for two seconds. He had her hand in his, a perfectly cold, motionless hand. He looked at her eyes, they were half closed and averted; a furrow was between her brows, and her lips were pressed together. He could hardly prevent himself from crying out. Jocelyn turned her eyes to his face for one second, the face of a man in purgatory, with the corners of the mouth drawn back from the clenched teeth, the chin square, the jaw quivering, the eyes deep-sunk and staring. The expression of her own face did not change, it was at once shrinking and repellant. He dropped her hand with a gasp, and sat motionless on the pony, looking after her as she walked into the station. He sat there until he saw the train go out, but she did not come back.

Then he rode slowly home along the dusty road, at the pony’s own pace, bending over its neck, and staring in front of him like a man in a dream....

When he had thrown the reins to his servant he went up the steps to the house. At the top of the winding, rose-hung passage, he turned. A vision of Jocelyn, standing at the foot and looking up at him with the roses whispering above her, was for an instant before him; then it was gone, and there stood only an Italian boy, in nankeen clothes, and a wide-brimmed hat, holding the ends of the pony’s reins, and looking up at his master with mournful black eyes. Legard spoke in his gentle voice. It was characteristic of him that in his trouble his consideration for others did not lessen.

“Jacopo, we shall take the yacht and go shooting.”

Jacopo’s apathetic, olive-coloured face lighted up for a moment. He was a silent, ubiquitous boy, and devoted to his master.

“Si, Signore!”

“We start directly—you must be ready to-night.”

The boy stroked the pony’s nose solemnly with his dark fingers. Giles had chosen him because he was fond of animals—a rare thing in an Italian.

“For where, Signore?” he said.

“I don’t know yet; somewhere where there is something to shoot. Pack for cold weather and for hot. We shall be away a long time perhaps. Take Shikari, and put in a rug for him. That’s all, I think. Do you want any money?”

“No, Signore.”

Jacopo threw the reins on the pony’s neck and departed, whistling a little tune. The pony followed him like a dog.

Legard stayed a moment at the top of the steps, passing his hand over his brow, and trying to conjure up again the girl’s image, then he went into the house and began mechanically to overhaul his guns.

For a little while he felt the relief it would be to have done with it all—a merciful span of time that was gone as soon as it was come—then a great horror of loneliness, and a sense that the sands of his life had run out, came over him. He leant his face against the frame of the gun cabinet, feeling sick and cold. He could not live without her!

A great wave of pity for her carried him a little beyond that thought. Her eyes with the shrinking look in them were always before him. At whatever cost he would not crown the disgrace of his manhood by forcing himself upon her! The instinctive revolt within him against brutality of any sort, which was at once the strength and the weakness of his character, forbade that. To that instinct he must be true! He clung to it with the despairing clutch of a man who had lost other things which he had thought secure. He would go away! He would see her once again, that very day, as a matter of form—he did not confess to any hope—just as a matter of form. He was, in fact, unable, even then, to despair. He went to the sideboard, drank some wine, and ate some fruit—he could not get anything solid down—and went about his preparations mechanically. The thought came into his mind that, since he was going away, he must see his wife. He poured out the rest of the wine, drank it, and lit a cigarette. If it had to be done, it might as well be done at once. He sat down, and smoked the cigarette steadily through, with a sense of effacing his emotions. When he had finished it he got up and knocked at her door.

There was no answer. He opened it gently and went in.

CHAPTER XIII

It was so still there that Giles paused, and his heart gave a queer thump. He shut the door noiselessly, and bent his head, looking into his wife’s face. His tall, thin figure had a great dignity in the dim light.

She was not dead, as he had thought, she was asleep. On the little table by the couch were the book she had been reading—Tolstoi’s “The Kingdom of God is within You”—three roses, a medicine glass, and bottle. Giles’s eyes fastened on the roses; by some twist of fate they were Jocelyn’s favourites, the sunset-coloured Riviera roses. A bar of light fell across two of them, so that they gleamed and glowed at him; the third was in shadow, the colour drained from its petals by the blight of the grey room. It seemed to him as an omen, and he shivered. He took the rose, and turned its face to the sunlight. His wife sighed huskily in her sleep.

Giles stepped back, he thought she would wake, but she did not. He listened to her breathing, it was faint and strained; and but for the faint, irregular monotony of it she might have been dead. She was very far from death, as it seemed to him, with the insistent pain of Jocelyn’s suffering, and the lurking shadow of possible shame ever present to his mind.

A faint sound of voices rose in the outer corridor, and footsteps creaked coming down the passage towards the door. Giles stepped behind a screen, which sheltered the couch from a French window opening on the garden. His nerves were so jarred and unstrung that he recoiled from the idea of meeting any one, and having to talk in his wife’s presence. The clasp of the window was not fastened; it was slightly ajar. He waited, prepared to step out if any one came.

The door was opened softly, and he heard a whispered conversation in French.

“Madame is asleep, Monsieur.”

“Ah! then do not wake her for the world! I will call again later. It is of no consequence. I will take a little walk. Thank you, Pauline; shut the door gently.”

Giles recognised the peculiarly soft, purring tones of Nielsen’s voice. The door closed softly, and through the flower-covered trellis work, he watched the Swede’s square figure as he tiptoed his way down the steps. He noticed black clouds creeping fast towards the coast from over the sea, and the olives below the road beginning to sway a little. He saw very clearly, and with a childish feeling of irritation, Nielsen’s broad, wrinkled face, with its great tawny moustache and gold-rimmed eyeglass, lifted towards the sky at an angle which bared his short neck.

His brain was in an exhausted state of nervous excitement, rendering it as receptive of outward impression as a photographer’s plate; everything he saw and heard was graven upon it indelibly.

When Nielsen had disappeared, Giles turned back to his wife’s couch. The bars of sunlight were gone. She was still sleeping heavily; would she never wake, and let him get this over?

He fingered the medicine glass mechanically, there were a few drops of moisture at the bottom. He smelled it—the sickly-sweet, unmistakable smell of morphia—and put it down with a faint quiver of disgust. The drug she took every day to make her sleep. He looked at the bottle nearly full of a white liquid, with a kind of fascination. A tenth of it would kill him! An easy death, that! He felt with indignation that the bottle had no business to be there; his wife always put it under her cushions before going to sleep, for fear of a mistake—he had seen her many times. Fingering the cool, slippery round of the glass, he looked mechanically about him for the medicine that she took the instant she woke, heavy and dazed from the morphia. It should be there ready, it was always there! There was no bottle upon the table except the wrong one, that which should have been under her cushions.

A thought flashed through his mind, a vivid vision snatched from the future. What if—! He stood up, hardly breathing, his hands behind his back, looking down upon his wife. Her first waking act! Half conscious—the wrong bottle!—the wrong....

He drew a deep breath, turned suddenly upon his heel, and passed swiftly through the window.

The humming of insects and the long droning sigh of the coming wind was in the breath of the warm air as he stepped out. A creeper went swish-swish over his head, and a loosened spray of jessamine beat him in the face. Its sweet, subtle scent penetrated his senses, and gave him a queer feeling as if his heart were contracting within him, and the cool beat of the leaves against his face felt like the touch of fingers, forcing him back. He pulled the window to, very gently. A chance had been sent!

A chance had been sent! He had a dim vision of black clouds driving over the sky, olives swaying in a long line in front of him, and there was the road, long, white, and dusty, and he knew that what he had to do was to get down it, as far and as fast as he could. To get down it, before he began to think. He began to run—he had no hat on, and he knew it, but he knew that it was not his business to inquire into the reason why he had no hat, it was to get over the ground quickly.

He found that he was thinking as he went, but upon quite trivial matters. He thought of a little shop at the bottom of the road, where he could buy himself a hat, a peasant’s hat like Jacopo’s; he hoped it might be clean. He thought of the weather; it looked like breaking up, the clouds made a curious effect over the sea. He thought at a great pace, as fast as he could, and his thoughts left no mark whatever on his mind.

His tall figure striding along, bareheaded, with coat flying open, created no small astonishment in Nielsen’s mind, who, seated on the edge of the water-tank under the olives opposite, was waiting with his usual surface apathy to renew his visit at the villa. Remembering the scene of the night before, he made no attempt to attract Legard’s attention, but sat fingering his long moustache, and staring patiently after him, with mixed feelings of curiosity and commiseration.

Giles passed the shop without stopping—he was so busy keeping his mind unoccupied—and he had to turn back to buy himself a hat. He had exhausted his power of trivial reflection now, and he tried to think of Jocelyn. He would see her—he must see her! And as he walked he found that her image, to which he trusted to save himself from thought, danced elusively just out of the reach of his mind’s eye.

He walked swiftly, a man haunted by the hidden, ugly shape of an unborn remorse. At a turn in the road he came suddenly upon Jocelyn herself.

CHAPTER XIV

He felt no more indecision or dread, he felt nothing but the helplessness and pathos of her face. He brushed his hand over his eyes, walked across the road, and stood close to her, with his head bent down and his face hidden under the wide-brimmed peasant’s hat.

Without saying a word she put out her hand, and her slender fingers fell like bars of ice across his burning palm. Then she said—

“Will you come with me up the hill a little? If there is peace anywhere, it will be among the olives.”

His heart beat violently, giving him a sense of suffocation.

They left the dusty road, and mounted the banks silently, twisting in and out up the narrow path over slopes covered with yellow broom and magenta gladiolus, with snowy garlic flower, purple vetch, and masses of mauve wild thyme. The scent from the pine needles and the sage-plant rose from the cooling earth as the heat of the vivid, glaring day gave way under the clouds driven up by the rising wind.

At first, as they climbed the steep ascent, a rush of relief, a joyous flowing of his blood at being near her again, carried him away past all power of reason and doubt. It was happiness, just to see her slender figure swaying, as she mounted two paces in front of him, to hear her lightly-drawn breath, to catch the perfume of her hair, the half glimpse of her profile as the path twisted. But long before they stopped there had come a returning agony of doubt. What would she say when she at last spoke? What were they to be to each other in the future? Had he sinned beyond forgiveness? With one step he felt a mad spasm of hope, with the next the dull throb of a blank despair; and always with him, like the cloud left by a bad dream, was the grim shadow of his wife’s awakening beside the little table, in that darkened room.

They were high up now among the olives, and neither had spoken. A gloomy, purple hue had spread like a pall over the broken ridges of the mountains, which ran inland to the west. It shaded up from the surf-girt, murky sea, and deepened on the sides of the hills till it crowned the summit with a hard, blue line against the veiled sky. Upon the remote greyness of the westward sea the hidden sun threw a narrow streak of yellow light. Where the sun had travelled, far as the gloomy horizon, the violet waters brooded in long, broken ridges, and inshore little white waves hissed at the borders of shallow, turquoise pools.

The wind was sighing a mournful tune in gentle crescendo through the patient olives, whose knotted stems creaked a sad accompaniment. In the sinister colouring the vivid green of a tiny fig-tree made a single bright spot whereon the eye rested gratefully.

At the foot of a little tower, grey, ruined, and flanked by two towering cypresses, Jocelyn stopped, and, leaning against the broken stair, looked long and steadily over the sea. One small singing-bird was lifting the feeble requiem of the day’s departed glory, and from the valley came an occasional crowing of cocks; these, and the sigh of the wind, were the only sounds. Presently she spoke—

“I like that angry white blaze on the sea,” she said. Giles heard the even tones of her voice with wonder, but they served to steady him.

“Yes, it’s beautiful.” He was standing beside her, a tall figure, holding his hat in his hand, and taking deep breaths like a man that has come to the surface of water, after a long dive. He found it difficult to believe that he was actually at her side talking commonplaces, and he made a great effort to brace himself to meet what was coming. His impulse was to fling himself at her feet, but he stood straight and stiff, gnawing his moustache, and clenching his hands. Presently Jocelyn said, without looking at him—

“We have something to say to each other, haven’t we?”

“Yes. What made you come?”

“Your face at the station.”

“Ah!”

To both of them the interchange of question and answer seemed very strange and unreal. There was another silence. Of the two faces, side by side, staring visionless over the sea, the man’s showed the ravages of emotion most; perhaps because he was older, perhaps because it was his nature to take things harder. The little bird still lifted its voice; there was a curious pathos in the feeble twittering.

Jocelyn said suddenly, lifting her eyes to his—

“I have suffered so. I have cried till I think I shall never cry again. Forgive me, I didn’t mean to hurt you, I didn’t want to hurt you so. I couldn’t help it. Poor eyes!”

Her hand stole up, and touched his face. With the words and the touch of her hand, his self-control suddenly left him, and he shook with dry, silent sobs, burying his face deep in his hands. It was characteristic of him that he broke down most at the touch of tenderness.

Jocelyn pulled his head down on to her shoulder, stroking his hair and his cheek with her fingers, and murmuring—

“There, there!” as a mother cries to her child. All the hardness had gone out of her face, it was very tender, and her eyes were pure and deep-coloured with a wonderful pity.

Making a great effort, Giles mastered himself; he put his arms round her, and stood rocking himself to and fro gently, his face buried in her hair. There was no passion in his embrace, only pity, and gradually peace.

It was a long time before either spoke again.

“My darling, forgive me!” he said at last in a faint, husky whisper, barely heard in the moaning of the wind.

“Dear, there is nothing to forgive—it was my fault—I tempted you.”

Giles shuddered.

“No, no!” he said, and he pressed her convulsively in his arms.

The words came presently from him with an effort—

“Tell me, darling! Is it all pity you have for me now? Is there any love left?—tell me the truth,” but he could not look at her, he dreaded the answer too much.

Jocelyn drew herself gently away from him, till only the touch of his fingers rested on her arms.

“I don’t know,” she said; “it isn’t as it used to be—I can’t tell.”

He sighed.

“It isn’t as it used to be—how can it be? I think something has died in me. But, dear—I know that if I did not love you, I couldn’t pity you. I couldn’t be sorry for you. I’m sure of that—I could only hate you.”

“Thank God!” he said, breathing deeply. It was like the lifting of a great weight from his chest; but as he straightened himself, the spectre of his wife’s awakening in the darkened room suddenly started up before him.

“Promise me,” he said with an eager ring in his voice, “whatever comes, you won’t shut me quite away from you! Promise you’ll let me share your suffering! Promise me—”

She shuddered, and her eyes contracted.

“I promise,” she whispered.

“Thank you, Sweet, that is sacred,” he said.

He drew her again towards him, and would have kissed her lips; but she bent her forehead to him instead, and he kissed it reverently.

The wind was rising steadily, it swept through the trees, and whistled mournfully in the hollows of the ruined tower.

Jocelyn was shivering in her light blouse.

“Let me go home, there is a storm coming, and I am so tired.” She spoke like a frightened child.

He answered mechanically like a man in deep thought.

“Poor little one, yes, yes, at once.” He was holding his watch in his hand, and looking over her shoulder down the hill side, measuring time against distance. He was thinking there would still be a chance—his wife might have gone on sleeping. If he could only get back to the room in time? and he muttered to himself, absorbed in his sudden desire to get back before it was too late.

“Yes,” he said, “we must go down before the storm breaks. Come, darling,” and he led the way down the winding path rapidly.

When they reached the road, he said—

“Can you go home alone? You will be quite safe on the road, and I have something to do—very important, terribly important. I must go. Let me see you to-morrow. I will come, may I? Good-bye! good-bye! Poor child, you look so tired.” He put his hands gently on either side of her face, looking into her eyes.

“Remember your promise!” he said, and kissed her lips passionately; then, as if some invisible force had plucked him from her, he turned suddenly and walked along the road at full speed, his head bent down, and without once looking back.

Jocelyn gazed after him surprised and trembling. The tide of her emotions had run out and left her spent and heavy with a sense of coming disaster.

CHAPTER XV

A drove of kine passed close, their bells tinkling, as one by one turned wet muzzle, and moody, brown eyes towards him. The sound, full of memory, of those bells was a spur to his thoughts. Nothing was changed! A chance had been sent to him and to Jocelyn—above all, to Jocelyn! And he was going back to set it at naught?

He had a vision of the face that he loved, as it might become, haggard and shame-ridden, and of the faces of all the people he had ever known drawn in a sanctimonious circle around it. He felt as if he were being guilty of treachery. Why should he go back? He would stifle memory—forget he had ever been in the room. It was a cowardly thought, and he knew it. He could not get away from responsibility one way or the other—he had to accept it. He seemed continually to see his wife’s frail body half-raised on one bent elbow, her thin hand stretched gropingly, the long fingers closing on the medicine bottle—her face, the look of exhaustion upon it, and the heavy, half-closed eyes. He began to walk forward again, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

His mind swayed, like the olive trees in the gusty wind, this way and that. When at moments, in the blank irresolution of his thoughts, he had glimpses of the knowledge that it was all decided—that he was going back to save her if he could—he hated himself.

The sound of a horse’s gallop was in the wind that beat in his face. An undefined feeling of guilt made him stoop to avoid notice as he walked. The horseman passed; there was a cry in his ears, the single word “Madame!” He looked up sharply; through a cloud of dust he had a glimpse of flying hoofs, and of Jacopo’s body turned in the saddle, waving a hand towards the villa.

Something had happened! What? Was he to go down to the grave with the memory of his desertion staring him in the face? Anything was better than this suspense. He dashed forward and arrived, breathless, and dripping with perspiration. He ran up the steps. At the window, out of which he had come, he stopped; it was as he had left it. He set his face against the glass, and stared through. He could see things in the room dimly in the grey light, her couch and figures standing beside it, the white drapery upon it, but he could not see her face.

The same spray of jessamine trailed across his cheek, a cockchafer buzzed against him. Was it really two hours since he had left that room?

The shrill sound of a woman’s sob came to him from within; it jarred his nerves, so that he started and his hand knocked against the glass. A figure inside looked up sharply with a gesture of surprise. It was Nielsen. Giles stared back at him through the window, his face, very white and motionless, still pressed against it. After a moment, when nothing in the heavens and the earth seemed to move, he pushed it open, and went in, walking unsteadily, his hands clenched convulsively on the hat in them.

“What is it?”

“Dead!”

“Ah!” There was no movement in the room save the heaving of the maid’s shoulders, as she crouched by the body of her mistress. The two men faced each other staring, the minds of both busy with a thousand thoughts, their eyes expressing nothing.

A long-drawn, quavering sob, with a gasp at the end, vibrated painfully through the silence. Giles with an uncontrollable movement put his hands up to his ears. Nielsen did not stir, but he frowned.

“You had better go, Pauline,” he said to the maid, “you can be of no use till the doctor comes, then I will call you, but you must be good and quiet, you know.” She rose, and went out, choking back her sobs.

Once more there was silence, and at the foot of the couch the men stared at each other. Nielsen, the shorter by four or five inches, stood gnawing his moustache, his head stiffly bent back, his hands in front of him mechanically polishing his eye-glass; his shortsighted eyes were narrowed and puckered with the effort of vision. Legard stared downwards at him, his eyes deep sunk, his hands folding and refolding his hat; his teeth were clenched, and beads of perspiration stood on his forehead.

“I don’t believe—how do you know?” he said suddenly, but without looking at the couch.

“It is so, I have seen it too often. But look for yourself, I found her like that.” Nielsen pointed towards the body.

“No! No!” said Giles in a harsh whisper, “that’s enough.” He covered his eyes with his hand, and, turning away, began to walk up and down the room. He did not once glance at the body. Nielsen watched him unobserved with a growing feeling of perplexity and of repulsion. “Poor lady!” he said softly, and sat down by the side of the couch. Bending forward with his chin in his hand, he continued to watch Giles restlessly pacing up and down the room. He was trying to put the pieces of a puzzle together in his mind. It seemed to him singular that Legard had not asked any questions; he appeared to know already. His mind reverted to the picture of him hurrying away from the villa hatless and with great strides two hours ago, and a thought struck him.

“Was your wife alive when you left her, you know—two hours ago?” he asked suddenly.

Legard stopped short in his pacing; it was as if a sudden accusation had been hurled at him.

“Yes,” he said hoarsely. “That is—.” He broke off. How did Nielsen know he had been with her? He clenched his jaws and the snap of his teeth together was the only sound in the silent room. For an instant he felt like a hunted man, and he glared at the Swede, waiting for the next question. But it did not come. Nielsen sat there, quietly nursing his chin and looking at the floor—the answer had told him what he wanted to know. Legard had been in the room, but the servants had not known it; he had come out like a man flying from the plague, and it was not an hour since he had himself found Mrs. Legard dead. She had apparently died from an overdose of morphia, for as she lay with her hand by her side, the fingers of it were still closed upon the medicine glass.

It was a singular affair; with the discretion of experience he filed it for reference, and sat quietly nursing his chin and looking at the floor.

Outside, the wind moaned and raged, and a driving rain began to beat against the windows. Inside was the stillness of death itself.

Giles had fallen into a chair with his elbows resting on the table, and his face buried in his hands. The hunted feeling of the moment had gone in a great indifference—a numb sensation that was creeping over him. What did it matter? Let the fellow think what he would, he could know nothing. There was nothing to know, of course—it was a matter between him and his own conscience.

He was surprised that he no longer felt pain, remorse, or indecision, only a dull craving for rest, and that peculiar numbness in his brain and limbs.

There was a sound of wheels outside—then footsteps—he heard them indistinctly through the hissing of the rain and the moaning of the wind. The door opened, and some one came into the room.

In the dim light he had an impression of a man with a bearded face and dark clothes, of water dripping from the sleeves of his coat and from his hat. A doctor! Not his wife’s doctor! He was conscious, too, of the maid’s presence, of low-voiced questions and answers in French, of fingers pointed at himself, of a long hush, of the lifting of something white on the couch and of its being laid gently back again.

He had an impression of being spoken to, and of answering, of the subdued rattle of Venetian blinds drawn up, of the soft beating of the rain against the window panes.

The group of figures round the couch seemed to shift and shift again. There was another long hush, then a whisper in French.

“Poor fellow, he seems quite overcome!” And another voice, low also, and of uncertain intonation, said, “Que voulez-vous? it is his wife.”

In a silence, that seemed everlasting, he sat staring at a black figure leaning over the couch and going through evolutions with a bottle, measuring, smelling, tasting it, bending forward till his body was right-angled, raising himself again. Then the silence came to an end in words pronounced, distinctly and with finality, in the French tongue.

“Morphia—the bottle in her hand—she was in the habit of taking it? Ah! Yes—failure of the action of the heart, no doubt an overdose—dead about an hour—poor woman—not an uncommon case.”

He experienced a sensation of gratitude—the first sensation of any sort for many minutes—the affair was not eternal, he would sometime or another get rid of these people, and be left to himself and have rest. He got up slowly and with effort. Again the slurred rattle of the Venetian blinds, the rustle of a sheet drawn over the couch. Then a moment when three figures stood stiff, awkward, dismally devoid of action; a confused shaking of hands, a subdued unintelligible murmur, a glimpse of retreating figures, the fluttering whish of a skirt, the click of a closing door, and—he was alone.

CHAPTER XVI

It was only three o’clock, but he had finished work for the day. He sat on, apparently watching the game, in reality occupied in putting together the pieces of his puzzle. The polished floors, and even the garish colouring of the walls and ceilings, looked soft in the mellow light that filtered through the wire blinds set in the windows. The glass panes had disappeared for the summer, and the cooled air was sweet with the smell of flowers and shrubs. The murmuring of the few players, the monotonous scrape of the croupiers’ rakes, the sing-song of their voices, and the subdued rattle of coins on the green cloth, made a sleepy sum of sound.

Nielsen found nothing to disturb his reflections. The long rows of expressionless profiles, clear-cut or indefinite to this side and that, the shifting play of light and shade on the faces opposite, all meant nothing to him—no more than the scraping of his clerks’ pens and the rows of their bent shoulders mean to the merchant, or the eternal coming and going of pasty-faced assistants to the master shopman.

With him, the indifferent cry of the croupier’s voice, which announced the gain of his fixed, daily wage, was the ending of all concern in the tables. Sometimes he waited the whole day for it, watching the game as a cat watches a mouse, sometimes it came in half-an-hour, but it generally came. He knew the faces of nearly all the players; the faces of the born-gamblers who were ruining themselves—lined faces that were for the most part placid with a schooled placidity, and with restless eyes that seemed to look at everything and saw nothing but the eternal shifting of fortune; the faces of the “little” players, dilettante or careless, reckless or timid—faces which expressed all the emotions in turn, and which in the days when he had thought about these things had inspired him with a deep and disheartening belief in the smallness of human nature; the faces, too, such as you may see in any thoroughfare of life, of those who sit and sit and keep your place for a louis—patient, blighted faces, brightening only, and that for a second, at the sight of a client or a coin; again, the faces of such men as himself, and those so rare that he could count them on the fingers of one hand—of men who came there day after day, day after day, just as a man goes to his office or to his chambers, as habituated and as utterly indifferent to the inner life of their surroundings as any other professional man, and who, on leaving the doors of the Casino, shake the dust of it from their feet and from their minds.

Of the many things to which Nielsen had at one time or another turned his hand, journalism had had the most attraction for him. There had been a charm in having a finger, benevolent or corrective, in the pies of other people, which his own pies had never afforded him. He was by nature curiously indifferent to the turn of his own affairs, curiously alive to the weal or woe of the rest of the world. He experienced a mental glow when dealing with the problems of other people.

At this moment he was engaged upon such an one, and he was conscious of bringing a fettered intellect to the task. He was prejudiced against the man upon whose actions he was seeking judgment; prejudiced by the most hopeless of all prejudices, that of sex—jealous of him, in fact. He endeavoured to be impartial and logical, but the thing intruded itself upon him, hampered his reason, coloured his conclusions. He felt that his conviction was mainly a matter of instinct with him, but he was none the less convinced. He did not conceal from himself that he knew very little, had failed to put the puzzle together; but the impression made upon his mind by Legard’s conduct was vivid and painful. He felt certain that he had been directly, or indirectly, the cause of his wife’s death. The motive lay nakedly and glaringly exposed; the man was violently in love with Jocelyn, he had known that by a jealous instinct for many weeks. He did not know that Jocelyn returned that love. To his mind it was a monstrous and a painful idea that she ever should, and as he sat there, motionless, with the monotonous hum droning in his ears, his red-brown eyes glowed angrily, and the fingers of his hand began to drum the table.

His anger was personal, but he was also, and strongly, prompted by the impersonal feeling that it was a duty to interpose, as when one sees somebody running, blindfold, a great and unnecessary danger.

He would see Jocelyn, in some way or another he would warn her! He had said no word of his suspicions to any one, for in spite of his own conviction, he saw clearly that he had nothing in the nature of legal evidence; and he was too much a man of the world to put forward what he could not substantiate.

The funeral had taken place that morning; he had attended it with the doctor who had been called in.

Irma had been buried in the English cemetery at Mentone. No one had been invited, and the only other people present had been her own doctor, two Polish friends, and Legard himself. The latter had looked worn and ill, had spoken to nobody, and had gone away alone after the funeral. He seemed to Nielsen, throughout the ceremony, like a man witnessing some scene upon the stage; he had shown no emotion. There had been amongst those present a tacit understanding that the tragic and ill-fated manner of the death should be kept a secret. The doctors referred to it as failure of the heart. He understood that it was desired to avert the possible breath of scandal from her memory.

A faint stir at the table attracted his attention; a lady was sitting down opposite to him. He was conscious of a slight shock in the recognition of Mrs. Travis. She was bending her head forward, so that all he caught was a view of a black and white bonnet over an abundant fringe, and of plump, white-gloved hands arranging nervously her gambling paraphernalia. It had seemed to himself the most natural thing in the world to change his clothes and walk straight into the Casino from the funeral, but he was not somehow prepared for the appearance of a lady whom he knew to be a connection of Legard’s. After all, the thing was business to him, pleasure to her—a very different affair, as he reflected.

Mrs. Travis raised her head. In return for his bow he acquired the knowledge that her sight varied with her desires. She evidently held to the conviction that not to see was not to be seen, and held to it firmly, with a slight deepening of the red in her cheeks, and a puffing of her lips.

He smiled to himself, and rose gently from his seat. “Cette chère dame!” he thought. He would return her lead. He knew that her departure was fixed for the following day; he determined, therefore, to go into Mentone and call upon her. In that way he would certainly see Jocelyn alone. Upon reflection, he condoned Mrs. Travis’s appearance at the tables.

He took train and went into Mentone. As he walked up from the station to the hotel, picking his way carefully over the dusty road, a very correct figure in grey clothes with a flower in his buttonhole, his heart began to beat, and his breath to come a little fast. The subtle attraction which Jocelyn had for him stirred his pulses, and shook his nerve, with every step he took towards her. He had to stop at the entrance of the hotel to steady himself before he went in.

CHAPTER XVII

It was the third day since Giles had left her on the Cornice Road, and Jocelyn had not seen him since. She had been told of his wife’s sudden death. It had seemed to her like a fable with no certain meaning in it; but the news had left her strangely excited, full of fear and doubt, with the feeling that she was, like a swimmer, out of her depth and struggling in dark and uncertain waters. She longed wistfully for some glimpse into the dim future. She felt a tremulous compassion for the woman whose life had been so full of pain, whose end had been so sudden; and with that compassion was mingled a sense of remorse, of bitter regret that she had done her a great and unmerited wrong. During the first days of her own humiliation there had been no room for that feeling in the lonely stress of her spirit; now, when the tide of her shame ebbed, when the unwitting cause of that shame slipped silently and swiftly away from the reach of her secret resentment, this other pain came. But, above all else, she had a restless yearning to see Giles, to rest the burden of her grief and of her fear upon his shoulders; to shake herself once more free from this nightmare of whirling shadows and dark pitfalls, and step into the sunshine of life. She felt that he could help her, and he alone.

As she moved softly about the room arranging flowers and books with supple, slender fingers—Jocelyn’s fingers were always busy, moving swiftly to their various ends—she thought for the hundredth time of the wording of the note that was folded into her dress—

“Jacopo will have told you what has happened. I could not come yesterday, nor to-day. I will be at the hotel to-morrow at half-past four. I must see you alone.—G. L.”

At half-past four! It was four now. The minutes seemed leaden-winged.

She wandered to the window, and stepped out on to the stone terrace where the sun beat fiercely. She felt its fiery touch upon her face, upon her arms and neck through the thin muslin of her dress, and her spirits rose insensibly. Those were right who worshipped the Sun! It was he who brought colour to the rose, song to the air, life to the blood! He who sailed high in the heavens to warm and cherish when the world was dark and dreary! She leaned against the window, looking up at the yellow roses trailing above her head, and humming to herself.

Nielsen, whom the servant had shown into the room unannounced, stood looking at her a long time. He was thinking that never in his life had he seen anything prettier than the line of her slender, rounded throat, and of her pointed chin thrust softly forward. Her lips were slightly parted in the act of singing, but he could not hear her. The light went out of her face as quickly as it had come; with a sigh she bent her head, and moved restlessly back into the room.

Nielsen stepped forward; he had seen the bright look upon her face in the streaming sunlight, the sudden cloud that passed over her eyes and the droop of her mouth; and when she came to him with a smile and some commonplace remark of greeting, he experienced a feeling of discomfiture, a sense of having hit up against something hard and impassable. What did he, with all his experience, know of women?—of this girl, upon whose face he had seen a moment before the stamp of life, and who veiled it from him impenetrably with a smile? What had he come to see her for? To offer her a warning? To do it delicately and diplomatically? Fool! when with the touch of her fingers upon his, cold and light though it was, his head was going round! He saw that he had come rather to tell her how he could never forget her, would follow her, until some day or other she cared for him as he cared for her! The idea that she was going away from him, out of his reach, that he would no longer be able to come and see her daily, when he wished—was suddenly and crushingly brought home to him, as he looked at her slender figure in its soft, grey dress, and at the little head poised so erect and so daintily upon it.

“Won’t you sit down?”

Again, the sense of being baffled, of encountering a barrier. Yes, he would sit down, many thanks!

“And how is the dear aunt? And we shall lose you to-morrow, everything that makes life endurable?” And so on, and so on, in purring tones rolling his r’s. It was such a habit of his to talk, that he went on uttering smooth commonplaces and looking unutterable things—feeling all the time that he would give the world for a moment of silence in which to steady himself, and find out exactly what he wished to say, and how to say it.

Jocelyn had seated herself at her piano with her face half turned over her shoulder towards him, and while she answered him her fingers touched the notes silently. His eyes fastened on them, the swift, silent fingers that seemed to be keeping him at bay.

It roused a sudden feeling of anger in him. He would not—was there nothing in her he could touch, in those eyes that looked at him so coldly? He stopped talking, breathing quickly—he felt quite out of breath. A low chord, suddenly struck, vibrated softly through the room. He rose half way from his seat with his hands stretched out to lay them upon hers.

She began to speak. What was she saying? He sank back again.

“Mr. Nielsen, I want you to tell me about poor Mrs.—poor Irma’s death. Jacopo told me you were there.”

“Ah! poor lady! a dreadful thing!” He looked at her face tense and compassionate, and was doubtful of what he should tell her.

“But how did it happen? You were there, weren’t you?” she said.

“Well, no! I was not exactly there at the time, you know. It so happened that I came to call soon after she died. I was the first to find her.”

“But what was it? Why was it? It was so dreadfully sudden.”

“She died about three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, you know. It was verry terrible—verry sad—the heart—” he stammered. Looking at the white, sensitive face that hung upon his words, he had decided to lie about that tragic ending, but it was not easy to do so to her, and he stammered.

“Is that all?” The words were so incisive, the sentence so short that it gave him no time.

“It was morphia,” he said with a sudden, overwhelming conviction that lying was futile. “Poor lady! An overdose, don’t you know—she was in the habit—”

“Morphia!” her voice took the word from his, and echoed it in a whisper, and her eyes, large and dark, stared at him out of a face that was suddenly very white and still.

“Yes, an overdose, you know, quite an accident—er-r—” for the life of him he could not go on, with those frightened eyes staring into his.

There was silence, and he shifted his eyeglass methodically from one eye to the other, because, being damp with perspiration, he could not see through it. He tugged at his moustache—the girl’s face was so tragically still and white.

A terrible thought had been stricken into Jocelyn’s mind—the thought of suicide. What if she were the cause of this death—this overdose! It was a dreadful—an inconceivable—thought! What if, knowing everything, Irma had chosen this solution of the question! A murderess! The only motion she made in the hideous turmoil of her spirit was to clasp her hands together in her lap.

The sight of those interlacing fingers was very pitiful to Nielsen. He saw that he had touched some spring of painful feeling, the depth of which he could not sound. Why, in the name of God, had he not had the grace to lie? His feelings were a strange jumble of disgust with himself, perplexed pity, irritation that he could not read her feelings, and an aching conviction that he was beyond the pale, and entered not at all into the situation.

Jocelyn sat motionless, she would have given the world to be able to get up and walk about the room, for swift motion of any sort, to free her from the longing to scream that caught her by the throat, and made her feel breathless and suffocated. Why did not this man go and leave her alone? Alone with that thought! What was he staring at her for through that idiotic glass? Did he think she was going to faint? She wished she could. Why was she so tough that she was denied that relief?

She had an inclination to laugh wildly; she gave a little gasp. There was the sound of a closing door, and the laugh died on her lips. Nielsen, following the sudden eagerness in her eyes, turned, and saw Legard coming in. He seemed taller than ever in his black clothes, and his eyes looked straight past the Swede at Jocelyn.

Nielsen shot a quick glance at the girl. She stood waiting, her face was changed—different to the face he knew; on it was a curious look that baffled his comprehension, the eyes seemed to speak of entreaty, of fear, and of a something unfathomable beyond. Ah! they were wonderful eyes, wonderful! But they had forgotten his very existence.

He turned very pale, and rose from his chair, picking up his hat. He bowed low over it and said—