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and wolf, the shadows in a London house were full of fear, vague
and shapeless fear, an oppression that had neither form nor name,
and that was infinitely worse than any materialisation. She was
standing by the window in her morning-room looking down into the
grey emptiness of the wide carriage way, where no carriages were
passing, and on pavements where unfashionable pedestrians were
moving quickly through a drizzling rain, when a servant announced
Father Hammond.
"Can you forgive me for calling at such an unorthodox time? I
happened to be passing your door, and as I have called several
times at the right hour and not found you, I thought I would try the
wrong hour."
"No hour can be wrong that brings you," she said in a low voice, as
she gave him her hand; and the words sounded more sincere than
such speeches usually are.
"I am glad to hear you say as much, and I believe you. In the
whirlpool of frivolity a few serious moments may have the charm of
contrast."
"I have done with the whirlpool."
"Tired of it? After only three years? There are some of my flock who
have been going round in the same witches' dance for a quarter of a
century, and are still in the crowd on the Brocken. I can but think
you have made the pace too fast since your second marriage, or
perhaps it is your husband who has made the pace."
"You must not think that. We both like the same things. We are
companions now as we were when I was a child at Disbrowe Park,
and when we were so happy together."
Her eyes filled with tears. Oh, how far away that time of innocent
gladness seemed, as she looked back! What an abyss yawned
between then and now.
"I have distressed you," the priest said gently, taking her hand.
"No, no, but it is always painful to look back."
Father Hammond drew her towards the sofa by the open window,
and seated himself at her side.
"Let us have a real friendly talk now I have been so lucky as to find
you alone," he said. "I am glad—very glad—that you are tired of the
whirlpool, for to be tired of a bad kind of life is the beginning of a
better kind of life. You know what I think of modern Society,
especially in its feminine aspect, and how I have grieved over the
women who were made for better things than the witches' dance.
We have talked of these things in your first husband's lifetime, but
then I thought you were taking your frivolous pleasures with a
careless indifference that showed your heart was not engaged in
them, and that you had a mind for higher things. Even your dabbling
with Mr. Symeon's quasi-supernatural philosophy was a sign of
superiority. His disciples are not the basest or most empty-headed
among worldlings, though they keep touch with the world. In those
days you know I had hopes of you, but since you have been Claude
Rutherford's wife, I have seen you given up to an insatiate love of
pleasure, a headlong pursuit of every new thing, the more
extravagant and the more dangerous the more hotly pursued by you
and your husband; so that it has become a byword, 'If the thing is to
cost a fortune, and to risk a life, the Rutherfords will be in it.'"
"Claude is impetuous, easily caught by novelty," she said
deprecatingly, with lowered eyelids.
"He was not always so impetuous, rather a loiterer, indifferent to all
strenuous pleasures, delighting in all that is best in literature, and
worshipping all that is best in art, though too idle to achieve
excellence even in the art he loved. But since his marriage—and
forgive me if I say since his command of your wealth—he has
changed and degenerated."
"You are not complimentary to his wife," Vera said, with a faint
laugh.
"I am too much in earnest to be polite, but it is not your influence
that has done harm, it is your money—that fatal gold which has
changed the whole aspect of Society within the last thirty years, a
change that will continue from bad to worse as long as diamond
mines and gold mines are productive, and the inheritors of great
names can smile at the vulgarity of millionaires who 'do them well'
and will give the open hand of friendship to a host who to-morrow
may be branded as a thief What does it matter, if the thief has
bought Lord Somebody's estate, and shooting that is among the
best in England?"
"Well, it is all done with now, as far as I am concerned," Vera said
wearily. "I used to go everywhere Claude liked to go. People laughed
at us for being inseparable; but I am sick to death of it all, and now
he must go to the fine houses alone. No doubt he will be all the
more welcome."
"Perhaps; but I did not come to talk of trivialities or to echo
hackneyed diatribes against a state of things so corrupt and evil that
its vices have become the staple of every preacher's discourses,
cleric or layman. I want to talk about you and your husband, not
about the world you live in. Since you have done with the whirlpool,
there is nothing to keep you from better influences. Will you let mine
be the hand to lead you along the passive way of light and love, the
way that leads to pardon and peace?"
Vera turned from him, trying to hide her agitation, but the feelings
he had awakened were too strong, and she let her head fall upon
the arm of the sofa, and gave herself up to a passion of tears.
"Pardon?" she gasped, amidst her sobs; "you know I need pardon?"
"We all need pity and pardon. No man's life is spotless, and the life
you and Claude have been living is a life of sin—aimless, sensual,
godless. I have had a wide experience of men, I have known the
best and the worst, and have seen the strange transmutations that
may take place in a man, under certain influences—how the sinner
may become a saint, and the saint fall into an abyss of sin—but I
have never seen changes so sudden and so inexplicable as those I
have seen in your husband, whom I have known, and I think I may
say I have loved, from the time when he began to have a will and a
mind."
"I hope you do not blame me for his having left the monastery and
come back to the world."
"How can I blame you when his mother was the active agent? She is
a good woman, though a weak one, where her affections are
engaged. She was perfectly frank with me. She told me how you had
refused to use your influence to keep her son in the world, and she
loved you because she thought it was his love for you that made him
abandon his purpose. She rejoiced in his marriage, but I doubt if she
has been any more edified than I have been in watching the life you
and her son have been leading since then. No, I do not blame you
for Claude's sudden breakdown, but I deeply deplore that he should
have turned back, since I know that his resolution to have done with
the world was a right one—astounding as it seemed to me when I
first heard of it. I urged him against a step for which I thought him
utterly unprepared. I did not believe in his vocation, but after-
consideration made me take a different view of his case. I knew that
such a man would never have contemplated such a renunciation
without so strong a reason that it was my duty to encourage him in
his sacrifice of the world rather than to hold him back. I will say
something more than this, Mrs. Rutherford, I will tell you that if it
was to make his peace with God that your husband entered the
Roman monastery, he lost all hope of peace when he left it, and he
will never know rest for his heart and his conscience until he returns
to the path that leads to the cloister."
"Claude is happy enough," Vera answered lightly. "He has so many
occupations and interests. He is not as tired of things as I am. But
no doubt I shall have to go on giving parties now and then, on
Claude's account. He is not tired of the maelstrom, and it would not
please him for me to drop out altogether, and to be talked about as
eccentric, or 'not quite right.'"
She spoke with a weariness that moved the priest to pity. And then
he spoke to her—as he had sometimes spoken in the past—words
that were profoundly earnest, even eloquent, for what highly-
educated man, or even what uneducated man, can miss being
eloquent when his faith is deeply rooted and sincere, and his feelings
are strongly moved?
He offered her the shelter of the Church, the only armour of defence
against the weariness and wickedness of life. He would have led her
in the passive way of light and love. He offered her the only certain
cure for that Welt-Schmerz of which her husband had complained
when he wanted to end his life in a cloister. He had pleaded with her
before to-day, had tried to win her, years ago, when the pleasures of
life had still something of their first freshness. He had tried vainly
then, and his efforts were as vain now. She answered him coldly,
almost mechanically. Yes; it was true that she was tired of
everything, as Claude had been years ago, before their marriage, as
he would be again perhaps by and by. But the Church could not help
her. If she were to become a Roman Catholic it would only be in
order to escape from the world—to do as Claude had wished to do,
and make an end of a life that had lost all savour. But until she was
prepared to take the veil she would remain as she was—a believer,
but not in formulas—a believer, in the after-life and in the influencing
minds, the purified souls that had crossed the river.
"I see you prefer Mr. Symeon's religion of the day before yesterday
to that of the saints and martyrs of two thousand years," Cyprian
Hammond said in his coldest tones, as he rose to leave her. "You are
as dark a mystery as your husband is. God help you both, for I fear I
cannot."
The grey darkness of a wet summer night was in the room as Vera
rose to ring the bell and switch on the lamps. The clear white light
showed her face drawn and pale, but very calm.
She held out both her hands to the priest.
"Forgive me," she said; "the day may come when I shall ask you to
open the convent door for me; but I am not ready yet."
 CHAPTER XXIV
The Goodwood of that year was a brilliant meeting. The winners
were the horses that all the smart people wanted to win. The
weather, with the exception of that first rainy twilight, was perfect,
and all the smart frocks and hats spread themselves and unfolded
their beauty to the sun, like flowers in a garden by the Lake of
Como.
Among the owners of winning horses Mr. Rutherford was
conspicuous.
"You rich people are always lucky," said his friends. "You never buy
duffers, and you can afford to pay for talent. I don't suppose you
make much by your luck, but you have the glory of it."
The house in which Claude Rutherford was staying was one of the
smartest houses between Goodwood and Brighton, a house where
there were always to be found clever men and handsome women—
musical people and painting people, and even acting people—people
who could sing and people who could talk; women who shone by
the splendour of physical beauty, and women whose audacious wit
made the delight of princes. It was a house in which cards were a
secondary consideration, but where stakes were high and hours
were late.
Lady Waterbury, the hostess, expressed poignant disappointment at
Vera's non-arrival.
"My poor little wife is completely run down," Claude told her. "She
was a rag this morning, and it would have been cruel to persuade
her to come with me, though I hated leaving her in London at this
dismal fag-end of the season. I thought her pal, Susan Amphlett,
would have spent most of the week with her, but I hear Lady Susie
is at the Saxemundhams'."
"Do you suppose Susie would miss a Goodwood—no, not for
friendship," exclaimed Sir Joseph, the jovial host, one of the last of
the private bankers of London, coming of a family so long
established in wealth that he could look down upon new money.
"Well, there is one of our beauties ruled out. I don't know what we
should do if we hadn't secured Mrs. Bellenden."
"It was just as well to ask her this year," said his wife, with pinched
lips, "though it was Sir Joseph's idea, not mine. I doubt if the best
people will care about meeting her next season."
"What has Mrs. Bellenden done to risk her future status?" Claude
asked, and then, with his cynical smile. "Certainly she has committed
the unforgivable sin of being the handsomest woman in London,
which is quite enough to set all the other women against her."
"It isn't her beauty that is the crime, but the use she makes of it.
She has made more than one wife I know unhappy."
"And yet you ask her to your house?"
"Sir Joseph invites her. I only write the letter. So far she is just
possible; but if I have any knowledge of character, she will be quite
impossible before long."
"Let us make the most of her while her good days last," Claude said,
laughing. "I should like to make a sketch of her before the brand of
infamy is on her forehead. I have met her often, but my wife and
she have not become allies; and if she is a snare for husbands and a
peril for wives, it's rather lucky that Vera is not with me, for after a
week in this delightful house they must have become pals."
"I don't think proximity would make two such women friends," Lady
Waterbury replied severely. "Again, if I am any judge of character, I
should say that Vera and Mrs. Bellenden must be utterly
unsympathetic."
"My wife and I have a friendly compact," said Sir Joseph. "She may
invite as many dowdy nieces and boring aunts as she likes, provided
she asks no troublesome questions about the pretty women I want
her to ask, and gives my nominees the best rooms."
"Poor Aunt Sophia had a mere dog-hole last Christmas," sighed Lady
Waterbury.
"Well, didn't she bring her dog?"
"Poor darling; she never goes anywhere without Ponto: and, of
course, she is a shade tiresome, and it is rather sweet of Joe to put
up with her. Mrs. Bellenden may pass this time."
"Did I hear somebody talking of me?" cried a crystal clear voice, and
a woman as lovely as a midsummer dawn came with swift step
across the velvet turf towards the stone bench where Claude
Rutherford and his host and hostess were seated.
They had strolled into the Italian garden, after an abundant tea that
had welcomed the first batch of guests, a meal at which Mrs.
Bellenden had not appeared, preferring to take tea in her dressing-
room, while she watched her maid unpack, and planned the week's
campaign; the exact occasion for every frock and hat being thought
out as carefully as the general in command of an army might
consider the position of his forces. It was to be a visit of five days
and evenings, and none of those expensive garments which the
maid was shaking out and smoothing down with lightly caressing
fingers, was to be worn twice. All those forces had to be reviewed.
Not a silk stocking not a satin slipper must be reported missing.
Silken petticoats that rustled aggressively; petticoats of muslin and
lace that were as soft and noiseless as the snow whose whiteness
they imitated; fans, jewels, everything must be put away in perfect
condition, ready for a lady who sometimes left herself the shortest
possible time for an elaborate toilette, and yet always contrived to
appear with faultless finish.
And this evening, as she came sailing across the garden, having
changed her travelling clothes for a mauve muslin frock of such
adorable simplicity that a curate's wife might have tried to copy it
with the aid of a seamstress at eighteenpence a day, she was a
vision of beauty that any hostess might have been proud to number
among her guests.
She took her seat between Sir Joseph and his wife with careless
grace, and held out her hand to Claude Rutherford without looking
at him.
"Lady Waterbury told me that you and Mrs. Rutherford were to be
here," she said. "Is she resting after her journey?"
"I am sorry to say she was not able to come with me."
"Not ill, I hope?"
"Not well enough for another Goodwood."
"The race weeks come round so quickly as one gets old," sighed
Mrs. Bellenden. "There seems hardly breathing time between the
Two Thousand and the Leger—and while one is thinking about
where to go for the winter, another year has begun and people are
motoring to Newmarket for the Craven."
"The story of our lives from year to year is rather like a merry-go-
round in a fair, but Mrs. Bellenden is too young to feel the rush."
"Too young! I feel old, ages old. As old as Rider Haggard's Ayesha
when the spell was broken and the enchantress changed to a hag.
But I am sadly disappointed at not meeting your wife," she went on,
turning the wonderful eyes that people talked about with full power
upon Claude. "I wanted to meet her in a nice friendly house. We
have only met in crowds, and I believe she rather hates me."
"How can you imagine anything so impossible?"
"At any rate, she has given me no sign of liking, while I admire her
intensely. Francis Symeon has talked to me about her. I have had so
much of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that I want to know
something of a lady whom he calls one of his beautiful souls."
Upon this Mr. Rutherford had to say something polite, a something
which implied that his wife would be charmed to see more of the
lovely Mrs. Bellenden.
People talked of Mrs. Bellenden's beauty to her face. It was one of
the things which her own sex registered against her as a mark of
bad style. She might be ever so handsome, other women admitted,
but she was the worst possible style. A circus rider, promoted from
the sawdust to a Mayfair drawing-room, could hardly have been
worse.

It was not long since this woman had burst upon the world of
London—a revelation of physical loveliness.
Then felt they, like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken.
There are planets and planets, as there are skies and skies.
Assuredly neither Uranus nor Neptune created a greater ferment in
the world of the wise than was made by Mrs. Bellenden's first
season in the world of the foolish.
The phrase "professional beauty" had been exploded, as vulgar and
stale, but the type remained under new names.
Mrs. Bellenden was simply the new beauty; invited everywhere; the
star of every fashionable week-end party, every smart dance or
dinner. Afternoon or evening—to hear divine music or to play
ridiculous games; to be instructed about radium, or to lose money
and temper at bridge, there could be no party really successful
without Mrs. Bellenden.
Men looked round the flower-garden of picture hats with a
disappointed air if her eyes did not flash lovely lightning from under
one of them. Impetuous youths made a bee-line for her, and
threaded the crowd with relentless elbows, calmly ignoring their
loves of last season and the season before last.
"Men are absolute idiots about that woman," the last seasons told
each other. "No one has a look in where she is."
Mrs. Bellenden was a young widow, a widow of two years'
widowhood, the first of which it was whispered she had spent in a
private lunatic asylum.
"That's where she got her complexion," said Malice. "It was just as
good as a year's rest in a nursing home."
"And a strait-waistcoat. That's where she got her figure," said Envy.
She was now six-and-twenty, a widow, living in a small house in a
narrow street like the neck of a bottle, between Park Lane and South
Audley Street, with an income of two thousand a year, but popularly
reputed to be spending at least five thousand. Her reputation in her
first season had been unassailed, but she was rather taken upon
trust, on the strength of the houses where she was met, than by
reason of any exact knowledge that people had of her character and
environment. Good-natured friends declared that she was
thoroughbred. A creature with such exquisite hands and feet, and
such a patrician turn of the swan-like throat, could hardly have come
out of the gutter; and her husband had belonged to one of the
oldest families in Wessex. So in that first season, except among her
rivals in the beauty show, the general tone about her was approval.
Then, in her second year as the lovely widow, things began to leak
out, unpleasant things—as to the men she knew, and the money she
spent, the hours she kept in that snug little house in Brown Street;
the places at which she was seen in London and Paris, chiefly in
Paris, where people pretended that she had a pied-à-terre in the
new quarter beyond St. Geneviève. People talked, but nothing was
positively stated, except that she did curious things, and was
beginning to be regarded somewhat shyly by prudish hostesses. She
still went to a great many houses—smart houses and rich houses;
but not quite the best houses, not the houses that can give a cachet,
and stop the mouth of slander.
She gave little luncheons, little dinners, little suppers, in the little
street out of Park Lane, and her lamp-lit drawing-room used to shine
across the street in the small hours, as a token that there were talk
and laughter and cards and music in the gay little room for tout le
monde, or at least for her particular monde. She had a fine contralto
voice, and sang French and Spanish ballads delightfully, could
breathe such fire and passion into a song that the merest doggerel
seemed inspired.
But before this second season was over there were a few people in
London who had dreadful things to say about Mrs. Bellenden, and
who said them with infinite cruelty; people for whose belongings—
son or daughter, foolish youth or confiding young wife—this lovely
widow had been a scourge.
Looking at the radiant being people did not always remember, and
some people did not know, the tragedy of her youth. She had been a
good woman once, quite good, a model wife. She had married,
before her eighteenth birthday, a husband she adored. A creature of
intense vitality, made of fire and light, sense and not mind, love with
her had been a flame; unwise, unreasoning, exacting; love without
thought; wildly adoring, wildly jealous. A word, a look given to
another woman set her raging; and it was after one of the fierce
quarrels that her jealous temper made only too frequent that her
husband—handsome, gay, in the flower of his youth—left her
without the goodbye kiss, for his last ride. He was brought back to
her in the winter twilight, without a word of warning, killed at the
last ditch in a point-to-point race, a race that was always
remembered as the finest of many seasons; perhaps all the more
vividly remembered because of that tragedy just before the finish,
when Jim Bellenden broke his neck.
For some time after that dreadful night Kate Bellenden was under
restraint; and then, after nearly a year, in which none but near
relations had seen her or had even known where she was, she came
back to the world; not quite sane, and desperately wicked. That
small brain of hers had not been large enough to hold a great grief.
Satan had taken possession of a mind that had never been rightly
balanced.
"I have done with love," she told her âme damnée. She had always
her shadow and confidante, upon whom she lavished gifts and
indulgences. "I can never love anybody after him: but I like to be
loved, and I like to make it hard for my lovers."
And then, in still wickeder moods, she would say, "I like to steal a
woman's husband, or to cut in between an engaged girl and the
man she is to marry. I like to make another woman as desolate as I
was after Jim was killed, but I can't make her quite as miserable. I
am not Death. But," with a little exulting laugh, "I am almost as
bad."
There were people—a mother, a sister, or a wife—here and there in
the crowd we call Society, who thought Mrs. Bellenden worse than
Death; people who knew the fortunes she had wasted, the houses
she had ruined, the hearts she had broken, the careers she had
blighted, and the souls that had been lost for her.
 CHAPTER XXV
Finding Claude Rutherford the most agreeable person in a house full
of people, Mrs. Bellenden took possession of him on the first evening
—not with any obvious devices or allurements, but coolly and calmly,
just as she possessed herself of the most becoming arm-chair in the
drawing-room, with such an air of distinct appropriation that other
women avoided it.
"You seem to be the only amusing person here," she said, as he
came to her side after dinner. "Isn't it strange that in so small a
party there should be such a prodigious amount of dullness?"
"Have you sampled all the people? There is Mr. Fitzallan over there,
talking to Lady Waterbury, a musical genius, who sets Shakespeare's
sonnets and Heine's ballads deliciously, and sings them delightfully.
You can't call him dull."
"Not while he is singing—but I have heard all his songs."
"Ask him to sing presently, and you will find he has brought a new
batch. Then there is Eustace Lyon, the poet."
Mrs. Bellenden smiled.
"Do you know what they say of him?" she asked.
"Who can remember half the things people say of a genius who lays
himself out to be talked about?"
"People are impertinent enough to say that he invented me."
"That is to make him equal to Jove, nay, superior, for it was only
incarnate wisdom—not surpassing beauty—that came from the brain
of the Thunderer."
"I believe he did rave about me the year before last, when I set up
house in London—went about talking idiotically—called me 'a
soothing gem,' and a hundred other ridiculous names."
"But you didn't mind? You bear no malice."
"No, he and I are always chums. I rather liked being advertised."
"Gratis?"
"Of course. I treat him rather worse than my butler, but I admire his
genius, and I let him sit on the carpet and read his poems to me,
before they go to the printer."
The poet joined them presently, stalking across the room, a tall, slim
figure, with a pale, lank face and long hair.
The composer joined the group five minutes afterwards, and Mrs.
Bellenden, having appropriated the only interesting men in the party,
sank farther back in her deep chair, slowly fanning herself with her
large white ostrich fan, and, as it were, withdrawing her beauty from
circulation.
Other women might affect a little fan, but Kate Bellenden knew the
value of a large one, when there is a perfect arm with a hoop of
Brazilian diamonds to be displayed.
"I am only one of three," Claude said later in the week, when one of
the men chaffed him about Mrs. Bellenden's favours. "She is a tête
de linotte, and at her best in a quartette. One would soon come to
the end of one's resources as an amusing person in a tête-à-tête."
He told himself that this peerless beauty might soon become a bore;
and he thought how much peerless loveliness there must have been
in the Royal Preacher's palace at the very time he was writing
Ecclesiastes: but all the same he found that Mrs. Bellenden's
conversation—empty-headed as it might be—gave a gusto to his
days and nights during that Goodwood week. Their trivial talk was
pleasant from its very foolishness. It was conversation without
disturbing thought. There were no flashlights of memory to bring
sudden sadness. A good deal of their talk was sheer nonsense—of
no more value than the dialogue in a musical comedy—but it was a
relief to talk nonsense, to laugh at bad puns, and to ridicule the
serious side of life. Claude gave himself up to the mood of the
moment, and was at his best: the irresponsible trifler, the mocker at
solemn things, who had once been the desire of every hostess; the
light, airy jester, to keep the table in a roar, the insidious flirt and
flatterer, to amuse women after dinner.
People told each other that Rutherford was quite in his old form. He
had become horribly blasé and distrait of late, as if all the sparkle
had gone out of him under the weight of his wife's gold.
"I don't believe a millionaire can be happy," said the poet.
"Rutherford has been deteriorating ever since his marriage. He
rushes about doing things; racing, ballooning, flying, acting, hunting,
shooting; perpetual motion without gaiety. He was twice the man
when he was loafing about the world on fifteen hundred a year."
"He is one of those men whom marriage always spoils," replied the
painter. "A chameleon soul that ought never to have worn fetters. To
chain such a creature to a wife is as bad as caging a skylark. If he
can't soar, he can't sing."
"I take it he will soon be out of the cage. He has done two years of
the married lover's business, and we shall see him presently as the
emancipated husband."
 CHAPTER XXVI
Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford were to winter in Rome, but there was the
autumn still to be disposed of. Neither of them wanted Marienbad.
They knew the place inside out, and hated it; and after wasting half
an hour at the breakfast-table turning over a Continental Bradshaw,
they had only arrived more certainly at the conviction that they were
tired of everywhere.
The whole system of continental travelling was weariness and
monotony: the race to Dover through the freshness of morning, the
race across sunlit waves to Calais, the hurried luncheon in the
station, and the three hours' run to Paris, the huge Gare du Nord,
with its turmoil of blue blouses and loaded barrows; the long drive to
the hotel, and the early start in the Rapide for the South: or the
Engadine express, with the night journey through pine woods, and
the rather weary awakening at Lucerne, and then on to Locarno and
the great lake. It had been delicious while it was new, and while it
was new for these two to be together, wedded and inseparable for
evermore. But all the tracks that had been new were old now; and
though they were lovers still, something had come between them
that darkened love.
"Tyrol, Engadine, Courmayeur? No," said Vera, throwing Bradshaw
aside. "No, no, no. The hotels are all alike, and they make the
scenery seem the same. If one could be adventurous, if one could
stop at strange inns, where one need never hear an English voice, it
would be better. But it is always the same hotel, the same rooms,
and the same waiters, and the same food."
"A little better or a little worse; generally worse," assented Claude.
"I have had a letter from Aunt Mildred this morning. She wants us to
spend August at Disbrowe."
"Would you like it?" he asked.
"Like it?" she echoed, with her eyes clouding, and a catch in her
voice; and then she started up from her seat and came to her
husband, and put her hand upon his shoulder.
"I think we have been getting rather modern of late, Claude," she
said in a low voice, "rather semi-detached. Disbrowe would bring us
nearer together again. We should remember the old days."
"Disbrowe, by all means, then," he answered gaily.
"We must never drift apart, Claude," she went on earnestly, with
something of tragedy in her voice, which trembled a little as she
crept closer to him. "Remember, we have nothing but our love,
nothing else between us and despair."
"Don't be tragic, Vera," he said quickly. "Disbrowe, by all means. Let
us play at being boy and girl again. Let us do daring things on
Okehampton's twopenny-halfpenny yacht, and ride horses that other
people are afraid to handle. Let us put fire into the embers of the
past. I suppose your aunt will have a few amusing people. It won't
be the vicar and his wife and sister-in-law every night, and the
curate at luncheon every other day."
"She will have all sorts and conditions, but that doesn't matter. I
want to be with you in the place where we were so happy."
"You want to fall in love with me again? Well, it was time," he said,
half gaily and half sadly; but with always the air of a man who
means to take life easily.
August was August that year, and Disbrowe was at its best. The
great red cliffs, the azure and emerald sea had the colour and the
glory that had made North Devon fairyland for the child Vera in her
one blissful summer.
Other children, as they grew up, had a succession of delicious
summers to look back upon, and could make comparisons, and
wonder which was happiest; but Vera had only one season of
surpassing joy to remember. She remembered it now, and contrived
to draw a thick curtain over all other memories.
Aunt Mildred was full of compliments.
"This air evidently suits you, child," she said, when her niece had
been with her a week. "You look ten years younger than when I saw
you last in London."

These two who had begun to be tired of each other were lovers
again—and even memory was kind—even memory, the slow torture
of thoughtful minds. They recalled the joys of fifteen years ago; and
the joys of to-day were almost the same. Instead of the thirteen two
barb there were half a dozen hunters—thoroughbreds of fine quality,
the disappointments of Claude's racing stud—instead of the dinghy
there was Okehampton's forty-ton cutter, a rakish craft that had
begun life at Cowes, another disappointment. There was the sea,
and there was the moorland, and there were the patches of wood on
the skirts of the park, that had seemed boundless forests to Vera in
her twelfth year. Her twelfth year? She remembered Claude's
affected contempt for her youth.
"Why, you are only a dozen—and not a round dozen, only eleven
and a half. No wonder your cousins in the school-room look down
upon you. If there were still a nursery, you would be there, sitting on
a high chair at tea, your cheeks smeared with jam, and a bib tied
under your chin."
She remembered all his foolish speeches now, and what serious
insults they had seemed to her, or to the child that she had once
been—that innocent child whose identity with herself was so hard to
believe.
They were happy again, they were lovers again. Here they could say
to each other, "Do you remember?" Here memory was a gentle
nymph, and not an avenging fury.
For Vera, who had hunted with her husband every year since their
marriage, a season at Grantham, a season in the Shires, and two
winters in the Campagna, it might seem a small thing to ride with
Claude and a handful of squireens and farmers rattling up the cubs
in the woods, yet she found it pleasant to rise before the dawn, and
creep through the silent house and out into the crisp morning air,
and to spring on to a horse that seemed to skim the ground in an
ecstasy of motion. Flying could hardly be better than to sit on this
light, leaping creature, and see the dewy wood rush by, and the
startled rabbits flash across the path; or to be lifted into the air as
the thoroughbred stood on end at the whirr and rush of a pheasant.
A discarded racer was scarcely the best mount for pottering about
after the cubs; but the pursuit of pleasure, that was always a
synonym for excitement, had made Vera a fine horsewoman, and
she loved the surprises that a light-hearted four-year-old can give his
rider; and when the last cub had been slaughtered, to gratify Mr.
Somebody's hounds, Claude and Vera had to ride to please their
horses, and there was a spice of danger in the tearing gallop across
great stretches of pasture, where the green sward sloped upward or
downward to the crumbling edge of the red cliffs, and where they
saw the wide, blue floor of the sea, and the dim outline of the Welsh
coast.
One morning, when they were riding shoulder to shoulder, at a
wilder pace than usual, and when Vera's horse was doing his best to
get absolute possession of his bridle, she turned with a light laugh to
her husband.
"Isn't this delicious?" she asked breathlessly, thrilled by the freshness
of the air and the rapture of the pace. "Would you mind if we were
not able to stop them on this side of the sea?"
"Would I mind?" he echoed, looking at her with his careless smile,
the smile in which there was often a touch of mockery. "Not I, my
love. It wouldn't be half a bad end, to finish one's last ride in a
headlong plunge over the cliff—to know none of the gruesome
details of dissolution—nothing but a sense of being hurled through
bright air, forty fathoms deep into bright water. All the same, I don't
mean these brutes to have their own way," he concluded in his most
matter-of-fact tone, with his hand upon Ganymede's bridle.
They turned their horses, and trotted quietly home, Vera pale and
somewhat shaken by the excitement of the long gallop. They were
near the end of their country holiday, and they were to part at the
end of the week, Claude to spend a fortnight at Newmarket, Vera to
start alone for Italy, stopping here and there for a few days, on her
way to her Roman villa, where Claude was to join her, bringing his
hunters with him, not these light thoroughbreds, but horses of
coarser quality and more experience, fitter for the rough work of the
Campagna.
It had been Vera's own fancy to revisit familiar places in Italy. Claude
had been urgent with her to abandon the idea, but she would not
listen to him.
"I want to see San Marco, where I lived so long with Grannie; when
we were poor and shabby—such a humdrum life. I sometimes
wonder how I could bear it?"
"Poor child! It was hard lines for you. But why conjure up the
memory of things that were sad? Looking back is always a mistake.
Looking back at the old worn-out things, going back to long-trodden
paths! Nobody can afford to do that. Plus ultra is my motto. In Rome
there will be plenty for us to do. We must make our third winter
more astounding than either of the other two. I know lots of people
who are to be there, all sorts of big pots, pretty women, scribblers,
painters, soldiers. You will have to invent new features for your
evenings, new combinations of all kinds, and you must cultivate the
new lights. When the season is over people must go about saying
that Mrs. Rutherford has made Rome."
Vera looked at her husband curiously. How shallow he was, after all,
how trivial! There were moments when her heart felt frozen,
dreadful moments of disenchantment in which the man she had
loved seemed to change and become a stranger; moments when
she asked herself with a sudden wonder why she had ever loved
him.
These were but flashes of disillusion. A touch of tenderness, a
thought of all they had been to each other, and her bitter need of his
love, made her again his slave. From the hour when he surrendered
his chance of redemption, and came to her in her Roman garden,
came to claim her with passionate words of love, he had been
something more than her lover and her husband. He had been her
master, ruling her life even in its trivialities, with a mind so shallow
that it could find delight in details, leading and directing her in an
existence where there was to be no room for thought.
He had planned their days at Disbrowe so that there should be no
margin for ennui. When they were not riding they were on the yacht
racing round the coast to Boscastle or Padstow: or they were playing
tennis or croquet with the house-party, creating an atmosphere of
excitement.
They parted at Disbrowe, Claude leaving for Newmarket; and they
were not to meet till November, when he was to find Vera
established in the Roman villa. All gaiety and excitement seemed to
have left her with him, and Aunt Mildred remarked the change.
"You ought to have gone to Newmarket with your husband," she
said, "though I have always thought it a horrid place for women, a
place where they think of nothing but horses, and talk nothing but
racing slang, and are as full of their bets as professional book-
makers. I hate horsey women; but you and Claude are such a
romantic couple, that it seems a pity you should ever be separated."
"Romance cannot last for ever, my dear aunt. We have been married
nearly three years. It is time we became like other people. I have
just your feeling about Newmarket. I was keen about the stud for
the first year or two, petting the horses, and watching their gallops
in the early mornings; and then it began to seem childish to care so
much about them; and whether they won or lost it was the same
thing over and over again. The trainer and his boys said just the
same things about every success and every defeat. The crack
jockeys were all the same, and I hardly knew one from another. I
still love the horses for their own sake; and I am miserable if any of
them are sold into bondage. But I am sick to death of the whole
business."
There was a fortnight to spare before Vera was to start for Italy, and
Lady Okehampton wanted her to stay at Disbrowe till a day or two
before she left England.
"Portland Place will be awfully triste," she said; "I cannot see why
you should go and bury yourself alive there for a fortnight."
Vera pleaded preparations—clothes to order for the winter.
"Surely not in London, when you can stop in Paris and get all you
want."
There were other things to be done, arrangements to be made, Vera
told her aunt. A certain portion of the staff was to start for Rome, by
direct and rapid journeying, while she, with only her maid and a
footman, was to travel by easy stages along the Riviera.
Lady Okehampton was rather melancholy in the last hour she and
her niece spent together in her morning-room.
"I'm afraid the pace at which you and Claude are taking life must
wear you out before long," she said. "You are never quiet; always
rushing from one thing to another; even here, where I wanted you
to come for absolute rest, just to dawdle about the gardens, and
doze in a hammock all the afternoon, with a quiet evening's bridge.
But you have given yourself no more rest here than in London.
Okehampton told me the way you tore about on those ungovernable
horses, miles and miles away over the moor, while other people
were jogging after the hounds, or waiting about in the lanes. He said
it was not cubbing, but skylarking; and the skipper complained that
Mr. Rutherford insisted on sailing the yacht in the teeth of a
dangerous gale. 'He's the generousest gentleman I've ever been out
with,' old Peter said, 'but he's the recklessest; and I wouldn't give
twopence for his chance of making old bones.'"
"Poor old Peter," sighed Vera. "We often had a squabble with him—
what he called a stand-further. He's a conscientious old dear, and a
fine sailor; but he would never have found the shortest way to
India."
"You wanted rest, Vera; but instead of resting, you have done all the
most tiring things you could invent for yourself."
"Claude is the inventor, not I. And it is good for me to be tired; to lie
down with weary limbs and fall into a dreamless sleep or into a sleep
where the dreams are sweet, and bring back lost things."
"I should not say all this, if I were not anxious about your health,"
Aunt Mildred continued gravely. "You look well and brilliant at night,
but your morning face sometimes frightens me; and you are
woefully thin, a mere shadow. It is all very well for people to call you
ethereal, but I don't want to see you wasting away."
"There is nothing the matter. I was always thin. I have a little cough
that sometimes worries me at night, but that has been much better
since I came here."
"You ought to take care of your health, Vera. You have a great
responsibility."
"How do you mean?"
"Have you ever thought of those who have to come after you? Do
you ever consider that your splendid fortune dies with you, and that
your power to help those members of our family who need help—
alas, too many of them—depends upon your enjoying a long life."
"My dear aunt, I cannot promise to spin out a tedious existence in
order to find money for poor relations."
"That remark is not quite nice from you, Vera. You yourself began
life as a poor relation."
"I have not forgotten, and I have given my needy cousins a good
deal of money since I have been rich; and, of course, I shall go on
doing so."
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