Haidee, waiting for Darlington in Paris, spent the time in a state of perfect peace, amused herself easily and successfully, and at the same time kept clear of such of her acquaintance as she knew to be in the French capital at that moment. On the morrow Darlington would return, and after that everything would be simple. She had arranged it all in her own mind as she travelled from London, and she believed—having a confident and sanguine disposition—that the way in which the affair presented itself to her was the only way in which it could possibly present itself to any one. It had been a mistake to marry Lucian. Well, it wasn’t too late to rectify the mistake, and one was wise, of course, in rectifying it. If you find out that you are on the wrong road—why, what more politic and advisable than to take the shortest cut to the right one? She was sorry for Lucian, but the path which he was following just then was by no means to her own taste, and she must leave him to tread it alone. She was indeed sorry for him. He had been an ardent and a delightful lover—for a while—and it was a pity he was not a rich man. Perhaps they might be friends yet. She, at any rate, would bear no malice—why should she? She was fond enough of Lucian in one way, but she had no fondness for a quiet life in Florence or Pisa or anywhere else, and she had been brought up to believe that a woman must be good to the man who can best afford to be good to her, and she felt as near an approach to thankfulness as she had ever felt in her life when she remembered that Eustace Darlington still cherished a benevolent disposition towards her.
Darlington did not return to Paris until nearly noon of the following day. When he reached his hotel he was informed by his valet, whom he had left behind, that Mrs. Damerel had arrived, and had asked for him. Darlington felt no surprise on hearing this news; nothing more serious than a shopping expedition occurred to him. He sent his man to Haidee’s rooms with a message, and after changing his clothes went to call upon her himself. His manner showed her that he neither suspected nor anticipated anything out of the common, but his first question paved the way for her explanation. It was a question that might have been put had they met in New York or Calcutta or anywhere, a question that needed no definite answer.
‘What brings you here? Frills, or frocks, or something equally feminine, I suppose?’ he said carelessly, as he shook hands with her. ‘Staying long?’
The indifference of his tone sounded somewhat harshly in Haidee’s hearing. It was evident that he suspected nothing and had no idea of the real reason of her presence. She suddenly became aware that there might be difficulties in the path that had seemed so easy.
‘Lucian here?’ asked Darlington, with equal carelessness.
‘No,’ she said. Then, in a lower tone, she added, ‘I have left Lucian.’
Darlington turned quickly from the window, whither he had strolled after their greeting. He uttered a sharp, half-suppressed exclamation.
‘Left him?’ he said. ‘You don’t mean——’
His interrogative glance completed the sentence. There was something in his eyes, something stern and businesslike, that made Haidee afraid. Her own eyes turned elsewhere.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Darlington put his hands in his pockets and came and stood in front of her. He looked down at her as if she had been a child out of whom he wished to extract some information.
‘Quarrelling, eh?’ he said.
‘No, not quarrelling at all,’ she answered.
‘Then—what?’
‘He has spent all the money,’ she said, ‘and lots beside, and he is going to sell everything in the house in order to pay you, and then he wanted me to go and live cheaply—cheaply, you understand?—in Italy; and—and he said I must sell my diamonds.’
‘Did he?’ said Darlington. ‘And he is going to sell everything in order to pay me, is he? Well, that’s honest; I didn’t think he’d the pluck. He’s evidently not quite such an utter fool as I’ve always thought him. Well?’
‘And, of course, I left him.’
‘That “of course” is good. Of course, being you, you did, “of course.” Yes, I understand that part, Haidee. But’—he looked around him with an expressive glance at her surroundings, ‘why—here?’ he inquired sharply.
‘I came to you,’ she said in a low and not too confident voice.
Darlington laughed—a low, satirical, cynical laughter that frightened her. She glanced at him timidly; she had never known him like that before.
‘I see!’ he said. ‘You thought that I should prove a refuge for the fugitive wife? But I’m afraid that I am not disposed to welcome refugees of any description—it isn’t my métier, you know.’
Haidee looked at him in astonishment. Her eyes caught and held his: he saw the growing terror in her face.
‘But——’ she said, and came to a stop. Then she repeated the word, still staring at him with questioning eyes. Darlington tore himself away with a snarl.
‘Look here!’ he said, ‘I’m not a sentimental man. If I ever had a scrap of sentiment, you knocked it out of me four years ago. I was fond of you then. I’d have made you a kind husband, my girl, and you’d have got on, fool as you are by nature. But you threw me over for that half-mad boy, and it killed all the soft things I had inside me. I knew I should have my revenge on both of you, and I’ve had it. He’s ruined; he hasn’t a penny piece that isn’t due to me; and as for you—listen, my girl, and I’ll tell you some plain truths. You’re a pretty animal, nice to play with for half an hour now and then, but you’re no man’s mate for life, unless the man’s morally blind. I once heard a scientific chap say that the soul’s got to grow in human beings. Well, yours hasn’t sprouted yet, Haidee. You’re a fool, though you are a very lovely woman. I suppose—’—he came closer to her, and looking down at her astonished face smiled more cynically than ever—‘I suppose you thought that I would run away with you and eventually marry you?’
‘I—yes—of course!’ she whispered.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘if I, too, had been a fool, I might have done that. But I am not a fool, my dear Haidee. Perhaps I’m hard, brutal, cynical—the world and its precious denizens have made me so. I’m not going to run away with the woman who ran away with another man on the very eve of her marriage to me; and as to marrying you, well—I’m plain spoken enough to tell you that I made up my mind years ago that whatever other silliness I might commit, I would never commit the crowning folly of marrying a woman who had been my mistress.’
Haidee caught her breath with a sharp exclamation. If she had possessed any spirit she would have risen to her feet, said things, done things: having none, like most of her sort, she suddenly buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
‘I dare say it doesn’t sound nice,’ said Darlington, ‘but Lord knows it’s best to be plain spoken. Now, my girl, listen to me. Go home and make the best of your bargain. I’ll let Lucian Damerel off easily, though to tell you the truth I’ve always had cheerful notions of ruining him hopelessly. If he wants to live cheaply in Italy, go with him—you married him. You have your maid here?—tell her to pack up and be ready to leave by the night train. I dare say Damerel thinks you have only run over here to buy a new gown; he never need know anything to the contrary.’
‘B-b-b-but I have t-t-told him!’ she sobbed. ‘He knows!’
‘Damn you for a fool!’ said Darlington, between his teeth. He put his hands in his pockets again and began rattling the loose money there. For a moment he stood staring at Haidee, his face puckered into frowning lines. He came up to her. ‘How did you tell him?’ he said. ‘You didn’t—write it?’
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘I did—I wrote him a letter.’
Darlington sighed.
‘Oh, well!’ he said, ‘it doesn’t matter, only he’ll be able to get heavy damages, and I wanted to clear him out. It’s the fortune of war. Well, I’m going. Good-day.’
He had walked across to the door and laid his hand upon the latch ere Haidee comprehended the meaning of his words. Then she sprang up with a scream.
‘And what of me?’ she cried. ‘Am I to be left here?’
‘You brought yourself here,’ he retorted, eyeing her evilly. ‘I did not ask you to come.’
She stared at him open-mouthed as if he were some strange thing that had come into her line of vision for the first time. Her breath began to come and go in gasps. She was an elementary woman, but at this treatment from the man she had known as her lover a natural indignation sprang up in her and she began to find words.
‘But this!’ she said, with a nearer approach to honesty than she had ever known, ‘this is—desertion!’
‘I am under no vow to you,’ he said.
‘You have implied it. I trusted you.’
‘As Lucian trusted you,’ he sneered.
She became speechless again. Something in her looks brought Darlington back from the door to her side.
‘Look here, Haidee,’ he said, not unkindly, ‘don’t be a little fool. Go home quickly and settle things with your husband. Tell him you wrote that letter in a fit of temper; tell him—oh, tell him any of the lies that women invent so easily on these occasions! It’s absolutely hopeless to look to me for protection, absolutely impossible for me to give it——’
He stopped. She was staring at him in a strange way—the way in which a dumb animal might stare if the butcher who was about to kill it condescended to try to explain to it why it was necessary that he should presently cut its throat. Darlington hummed and ha’d when he caught that look. He cast a furtive glance at the door and half turned away from Haidee.
‘Yes, quite impossible,’ he repeated. ‘The fact is—well, you may as well knew it now as hear it later on—I am going to be married.’
She nodded her head as if she quite understood his meaning, and he, looking full at her again, noticed that she was trying to moisten her lips with the tip of her tongue, and that her eyes were dilated to an unusual degree.
‘You can’t say that I’ve treated you badly,’ he said. ‘After all, you had the first chance, and it wasn’t my fault if you threw it away. There, now, be sensible and go back to London and make it up with Damerel. You can easily get round him—he’ll believe anything you tell him. Say you were upset at the thought of going to Italy with him, and lost your head. Things will come all right if you only manage your cards properly. Well, I’m going—good-day.’
He turned slowly from her as if he were somewhat ashamed of his desertion. They had been standing by the side of a table, littered about on which were several odds and ends picked up by Haidee on the previous day. Amongst them was an antique stiletto, sharp as a needle, which had taken her fancy at a shop in the Palais Royal. She had thought of using it as a hat-pin, and was charmed when the dealer suggested that it had probably tasted the heart’s-blood of more than one victim. Its glitter caught her eye now, and she picked it up and struck furiously at Darlington’s back.
At that moment Lucian was being conducted to his wife’s room by a courteous manager. At the threshold they paused, brought to a simultaneous standstill by a wild scream. When they entered the room, Darlington lay crumpled up and dead in the centre of the floor, and Haidee, gazing spellbound at him from the furthest corner, was laughing—a long, low ripple of laughter that seemed as if it would never cease. The stiletto, thrown at her feet, flashed back a ray of sunlight from the window.
That afternoon Saxonstowe arrived in town from Yorkshire with a grim determination in his heart to have it out once and for all with Sprats. He had tried to do his duty as a country squire and to interest himself in country life and matters: he had hunted the fox and shot pheasants, sat on the bench at petty and at quarter sessions, condoled with farmers on poor prices and with old women on bad legs, and he was still unsatisfied and restless and conscious of wanting something. The folk round about him came to the conclusion that he was not as other young men of his rank and wealth—he seemed inclined to bookishness, he was a bit shy and a little bit stand-offish in manner, and he did not appear to have much inclination for the society of neighbours in his own station of life. Before he succeeded to the title Saxonstowe had not been much known in the neighbourhood. He had sometimes visited his predecessor as a schoolboy, but the probability of his becoming the next Lord Saxonstowe was at that time small, and no one had taken much notice of Master Richard Feversham. When he came back to the place as lord and master, what reputation he had was of a sort that scarcely appealed to the country people. He had travelled in some fearsome countries where no other man had ever set foot, and he had written a great book about his adventures, and must therefore be a clever young man. But he was not a soldier, nor a sailor, and he did not particularly care for hunting or shooting, and was therefore somewhat of a hard nut to crack. The honest gentlemen who found fox-hunting the one thing worth living for could scarcely realise that even its undeniable excitements were somewhat tame to a man who had more than once taken part in a hunt in which he was the quarry, and they were disposed to regard the new Viscount Saxonstowe as a bit of a prig, being unconscious that he was in reality a very simple-minded, unaffected young man who was a little bit embarrassed by his title and his wealth. As for their ladies, it was their decided opinion that a young peer of such ancient lineage and such great responsibilities should marry as soon as possible, and each believed that it was Lord Saxonstowe’s bounden duty to choose a wife from one of the old north-country families. In this Saxonstowe agreed with them. He desired a wife, and a wife from the north country, and he knew where to find her, and wanted her so much that it had long been evident to his sober judgment that, failing her, no other woman would ever call him husband. The more he was left alone, the more deeply he sank in the sea of love. And at last he felt that life was too short to be trifled with, and he went back to Sprats and asked her firmly and insistently to marry him.
Sprats was neither hurt nor displeased nor surprised. She listened silently to all he had to say, and she looked at him with her usual frankness when he had finished.
‘I thought we were not to talk of these matters?’ she said. ‘We were to be friends—was there not some sort of compact?’
‘If so, I have broken it,’ he answered—‘not the friendship—that, never!—but the compact. Besides, I don’t remember anything about that. As to talking of this, well, I intend to go on asking you to marry me until you do.’
‘You have not forgotten what I told you?’ she said, eyeing him with some curiosity.
‘Not at all. I have thought a lot about it,’ he answered. ‘I have not only thought, but I have come to a conclusion.’
‘Yes?’ she said, still curious. ‘What conclusion?’
‘That you are deceiving yourself,’ he answered. ‘You think you love Lucian Damerel. I do not doubt that you do, in a certain way, but not in the way in which I would wish you, for instance, to love me, and in which I believe you could and would love me—if you would let yourself.’
Sprats stared at him with growing curiosity and surprise. There was something masterful and lordly about his tone and speech that filled her heart with a great sense of contentment—it was the voice of the superior animal calling to the inferior, of the stronger to the weaker. And she was so strong that she had a great longing to be weak—always providing that something stronger than herself were shielding her weakness.
‘Well?’ was all she could say.
‘You have always felt a sense of protection for him,’ continued Saxonstowe. ‘It was in you from the first—you wanted something to take care of. But isn’t there sometimes a feeling within you that you’d like to be taken care of yourself?’
‘Who taught you all this?’ she asked, with puzzled brows. ‘You seem to have acquired some strange knowledge of late.’
‘I expect it’s instinct, or nature, or something,’ he said. ‘Anyhow, have I spoken the truth?’
‘You don’t expect me to confess the truth to you, do you?’ she answered. ‘You have not yet learned everything, I see.’ She paused and regarded him for some time in silence. ‘I don’t know why,’ she said at last, ‘but this seems as if it were the prelude to a fight. I feel as I used to feel when I fought with Lucian—there was always a lot of talk before the tearing and rending began. I feel talky now, and I also feel that I must fight you. To begin with, just remember that I am a woman and you’re a man. I don’t know anything about men—they’re incomprehensible to me. To begin with, why do you wish to marry me?—you’re the first man who ever did. I want to know why—why—why?’
‘Because you’re the woman for me and I’m the man for you,’ he replied masterfully. ‘You are my mate.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I feel it.’
‘Then why don’t I feel it?’ she asked quickly.
‘Are you dead certain you don’t?’ he said, smiling at her. ‘I think, perhaps, that if you could just get deep down into yourself, you do.’
‘But that doesn’t explain why you want to marry me,’ she said inconsequently. ‘You tell me that what I have always felt for Lucian is not what I ought to feel for the man I love. Well, if I analyse what I feel for Lucian, perhaps it is what you say it is—a sense of protection, of wanting to help, and to shield; but then, you say that that is the sort of love you have for me.’
‘Did I?’ he said, laughing quietly. ‘You forget that I have not yet told you what sort of love I have for you—we have not reached the love-making stage yet.’
Sprats felt femininity assert itself. She knew that she blushed, and she felt very hot and very uncomfortable, and she wished Saxonstowe would not smile. She was as much a girl and just as shy of a possible lover as in her tom-boy days, and there was something in Saxonstowe’s presence which aroused new tides of feeling in her. He had become bold and masterful; it was as if she were being forced out of herself. And then he suddenly did a thing which sent all the blood to her heart with a wild rush before it leapt back pulsing and throbbing through her body. Saxonstowe spoke her name.
‘Millicent!’ he said, and laid his hand very gently on hers. ‘Millicent!’
She drew away from him quickly, but her eyes met his with courage.
‘My name!’ she said. ‘No one ever called me by my name before. I had half forgotten it.’
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I want you to think all this over, like the woman you are. Don’t waste your life on a dream or a delusion. Come to me and be my wife and friend so long as God lets us live. You are a true woman—a woman in a thousand. I would not ask you else. I will be a true man to you. And you and I together can do great things, for others. Think, and tell me your thoughts—afterwards.’
‘Yes, afterwards,’ she said. She wanted him to go, and he saw it and went, and Sprats sat down to think. But for the first time in her life she found it impossible to think clearly. She tried to marshal facts and to place them before her in due sequence and proper order, but she discovered that she was pretty much like all other women at these junctures and that a strange confusion had taken possession of her. For the moment there was too much of Saxonstowe in her mental atmosphere to enable her to think, and after some time she uttered an impatient exclamation and went off to attend to her duties. For the remainder of the afternoon she bustled about the house, and the nursing-staff wondered what it was that had given their Head such a fit of vigorous research into unexplored corners. It was not until evening that she allowed herself to be alone again, and by that time she was prepared to sit down and face the situation. She went to her own room with a resolute determination to think of everything calmly and coolly, and there she found evening newspapers lying on the table, and she picked one up mechanically and opened it without the intention of reading it, and ere she knew what was happening she had read of the tragedy in Paris. The news stamped itself upon her at first without causing her smart or pain, even as a clean shot passes through the flesh with little tearing of the fibres. She sat down and read all that the telegrams had to tell, and searched each of the newspapers until she was in possession of the latest news.
She had gone into her room with the influence of Saxonstowe’s love-making still heavy upon her womanhood; she left it an unsexed thing of action and forceful determination. In a few moments she had seen her senior nurse and had given her certain orders; in a few more she was in her outdoor cloak and bonnet and at the door, and a maid was whistling for a hansom for her. But just as she was running down the steps to enter it, another came hurriedly into the square, and Saxonstowe waved his hand to her. She paused and went back to the open door; he jumped from his cab and joined her, and they went into the house together, and into the room which she had just left.
‘I was going to you’ she said, ‘and yet I might have known that you would come to me.’
‘I came as soon as I knew,’ he answered.
She looked at him narrowly: he was watching her with inquiring eyes.
‘We must go there at once,’ she said. ‘There is time to catch the night train?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘plenty of time. I have already made some arrangements—I thought you would wish it.’
She nodded in answer to this, and began to take some things out of a desk. Saxonstowe noticed that her hand was perfectly steady, though her face was very pale. She turned presently from packing a small handbag and came up to him.
‘Listen,’ she said; ‘it is you and I who are going—you understand?’
He looked at her for a moment in silence, and then bowed his head. He had not understood, but he felt that she had come to some determination, and that that was no time to question her. In a few moments more they had left the house and set out on their journey to Paris.
Our neighbours on the other side of the Channel are blessed with many qualities which were not given to us who reside in these islands, and amongst them is one which most Englishmen would not pay a penny for if it were on sale in market overt. This is the quality of sentiment—a thing which we others strive to choke at its birth, and to which at any time we give but an outside corner of the hearth of life. It is a quality of which one may have too much, but in its place it is an excellent and a desirable quality, for it tends to the establishment of a fitting sense of proportion, and makes people polite and considerate at the right moment. Had the tragedy of Haidee and Darlington occurred in England, there would have been much vulgar curiosity manifested, for amongst us we often fail to gauge the niceties of a situation. In Paris, sentiment fixed the affaire Damerel at its right value in a few hours. It was a veritable tragedy—one to be spoken of with bated breath—one of those terrible dramas of real life which far transcend anything that can be placed upon the stage. The situations were pathetic, the figures of the chief actors of a veritable notability. The young husband, great as a poet and handsome as a Greek god; the young wife, beautiful and charming; the plutocrat lover, of whom death forbade to speak—they were all of a type to attract. Then the intense tragedy of the final situation! Who could tell what had occurred between the lover and the wife in that last supreme scene, since he was dead and she bereft of reason? It had all the elements of greatness, and greatness demands respect. Therefore, instead of being vulgarised, as it would have been in unsentimental England, the affaire Damerel was spoken of with a tender respect and with few words. It was an event too deplorable to merit common discussion.
Lucian had swept through London to Paris intent on killing Darlington with his own hands. His mental balance had been destroyed, and he himself rendered incapable of hearing or seeing reason long before he reached the French capital. The courteous manager who replied to Lucian’s calm inquiries for Mrs. Damerel did not realise that the composure of the distinguished-looking young gentleman was that of the cunning madman. Inside Lucian’s breast nestled a revolver—his fingers were itching to get at it as he followed his guide up the stairs, for he had made up his mind to shoot his faithless wife and his treacherous enemy on sight.
The sight of Haidee, mopping and mowing in her corner, the sound of her awful laughter, brought Lucian back to sanity. Living and moving as if he were in some fearful dream, he gave orders and issued directions. The people of the hotel, half paralysed by the strangeness of the tragedy, wondered at his calmness; the police were astonished by the lucidity of the statement which he gave to them. His one great desire was to shield his wife’s name. The fierce resentment which he had felt during his pursuit of her had completely disappeared in presence of the tragedy. Before the end of the afternoon some curious mental process in him had completely rehabilitated Haidee in his estimation: he believed her to have been deeply wronged, and declared with emphasis that she must have killed Darlington in a fit of desperation following upon some wickedness of his own. Her incriminating letter he swept aside contemptuously—it was a sure proof, he said, that the poor child’s mind was already unhinged when it was written. He turned a blind eye to undoubted facts. Out of a prodigal imagination and an exuberant fancy he quickly built up a theory which presently assumed for him the colours of absolute truth. Haidee had been tempted in secret by this devil who had posed as friend; he had used his insidious arts to corrupt her, and the temptation had fallen upon her at the very moment when he, Lucian, was worrying her with his projects of retrenchment. She had taken flight, the poor Haidee who had lived in rose-leaf luxury all her days, and had fled from her exaggerated fears to the man she believed her friend and Lucian’s. Then, when she had found out his true character, she—in a moment of awful fear or fright, most probably—had killed him. That was the real story, the poor, helpless truth. He put it before Sprats and Saxonstowe with a childlike belief in its plausibility and veracity that made at least one of them like to weep—he had shown them the letter which Haidee had written to Lucian before leaving town, and they knew the real truth of the whole sorry business. It seemed best, after all, thought Sprats, and said so to Saxonstowe when she got the chance, that Lucian should cherish a fiction rather than believe the real truth. And that he did believe his fiction was soon made evident.
‘It is all my fault—all!’ he said to Sprats, with bitter self-reproach. ‘I never took care of her as I should have done, as I had vowed to do. You were right, Sprats, in everything that you said to me. I wonder what it is that makes me so blind to things that other people see so clearly? I ought not to have let the poor child be exposed to the temptations of that arch-devil; but I trusted him implicitly. He always made the most sincere professions of his friendship for both of us. Then again, how is it, why is it, that people so constantly deceive me? I believe every man as I expect every man to believe me. Do you think I ever dreamt of all this, ever dreamt of what was in that scoundrel’s mind? Yet I ought to have foreseen—I ought to have been guided by you. It is all my fault, all my fault!’
It was useless to argue with him or to condole with him. He had persuaded himself without an effort that such and such things were, and the only thing to be done with him was to acquiesce in his conclusions and help him as judiciously as possible. The two faithful friends who had hurried to his side remained with him until the troubled waters grew calm again. That was now an affair of time. Haidee was certainly insane, and the physicians held out little hope of her recovery. By their advice she was removed to a private institution within easy distance of Paris, and Lucian announced his intention of settling down in the gay city in order to be near her. He talked of her now as if she had been a girl-bride, snatched away from him by ruthless fate, and it was plain to see that he had obliterated the angry thoughts that had filled him during his frenzy of resentment, and now cherished nothing but feelings of chastened and tender regret. For Haidee, indeed, frailest of frail mortals, became apotheosised into something very different. Lucian, who never did anything by halves and could not avoid extremes, exalted her into a sort of much-wronged saint; she became his dream, and nobody had the heart to wake him.
Sprats and Saxonstowe worked hard for him at this time, one relieving him of much trouble in making the necessary arrangements for Haidee, the other of a large part of the business affairs brought into active operation by the recent tragedy. Saxonstowe, working untiringly on his behalf, was soon able to place Lucian’s affairs in order. Lucian gave him full power to act, and ere long had the satisfaction of knowing that the liability to Darlington and Darlington had been discharged, that Miss Pepperdine’s mind had been set at rest as to the preservation of the family honour, and that he owed money to no one. He would be able to surround the stricken Haidee with every comfort and luxury that one in her condition could enjoy, and he himself need never feel a moment’s anxiety. For the affaire Damerel had had its uses. Lucian came again in the market. Mr. Robertson began to sell the thin green-clad volumes more rapidly than ever before; even the portly epic moved, and finally began racing its sister competitors for the favour of the fickle public. Mr. Harcourt, with a rare sense of fitness, revived Lucian’s first play to crowded houses; an enterprising Frenchman went over to London and witnessed a performance, and within a few weeks presented a version of it at one of the Parisian theatres. French translations of Lucian’s works followed, and sold like hot cakes; the Italian translations received a fillip, and people in the United States became interested. Nothing, said Mr. Robertson, could have been better, from a trade point of view.
Lucian accepted all this with indifference and equanimity. All his thoughts were centred on the quiet house in the little village outside Paris, where Haidee laughed at her own fingers or played with dolls. Every afternoon he left his appartement and travelled into the country to inquire after his wife’s health. He always carried some little gift with him—flowers, fruit, a child’s picture-book, a child’s toy, and the nurse to whom these things were given used to weep over them, being young and sentimental, and very much in love with Lucian’s face and hair, which was now turning a pretty and becoming grey at the temples. Sometimes he saw the doctor, who was sympathetic, and guarded in his answers, and sometimes he walked in the garden with an old abbé who used to visit the place, and exchanged pious sentiments with him. But he never saw Haidee, for the doctors feared it, and thus his conception of her was not of the madwoman, but of the young beauty with whom he had made an impetuous runaway marriage. He used to walk about Paris in those days with eyes that wore a far-away expression, and the women would speak of his beauty with tears in their eyes and shake their heads over the sadness of his story, which was well known to everybody, and in pecuniary value was worth a gold-mine.
When they had done everything that could be done for him at that time, Sprats and Saxonstowe left Lucian in Paris and returned together to London. He appeared to have no particular desire that they should remain with him, nor any dread of being alone. Sprats had seen to the furnishing of his rooms and to the transportation of his most cherished books and pictures; he was left surrounded with comfort and luxury, and he assured his friends that he wanted for nothing. He intended to devote himself to intense study, and if he wanted a little society, well, he already had a considerable acquaintance amongst authors and artists in Paris, and could make use of it if need were. But he spoke of himself as of an anchorite; it was plain to see that he believed that the joie de vivre existed for him no longer. It was also plain that something in him wished to be clear of the old life and the old associations. He took an affectionate farewell of Sprats and of Saxonstowe at the Gare du Nord, whither he accompanied them on their departure, but Sprats was keenly aware of the fact that there was that in him which was longing to see the last of them. They were links of a chain that bound him to a life with which he wished to have no further connection. When they said good-bye, Sprats knew that she was turning down a page that closed a long chapter of her own life.
She faced the problem bravely and with clear-headedness. She saw now that much of what she had taken to be real fact had been but a dream. Lucian had awakened the mother-instinct in her by his very helplessness, but nothing in him had ever roused the new feeling which had grown in her every day since Saxonstowe had told her of his love. She had made the mistake of taking interest and affection for love, and now that she had found it out she was contented and uneasy, happy and miserable, pleased and furious, all at once. She wanted to run away from Saxonstowe to the very ends of the earth, but she also cherished a secret desire to sit at his feet and be his slave, and would rather have torn her tongue out than tell him of it.
While they were father-and-mother-ing Lucian in Paris, Saxonstowe had remained solid and grim as one of the Old Guard, doing nothing but his duty. Sprats had watched him with keen observation, and had admired his stern determination and the earnest way in which he did everything. He had taken hold of Lucian as a big brother might take a little one, and had been gentle and firm, kindly and tactful, all at once. She had often longed to throw her arms round him and kiss him for his good-boy qualities, but he had sunk the lover in the friend with unmistakable purpose, and she was afraid of him. She began to catch herself looking at him out of her eye-corners when he was not looking at her, and she hated herself. Once when he came suddenly into a room, she blushed so furiously that she could have cried with vexation, and it was all the more aggravating, she said, because she had just happened to be thinking of him. Travelling back together, she was very subdued and essentially feminine. Her manner invited confidence, but Saxonstowe was stiff as a ramrod and cold as an icicle. He put her into a hansom at Charing Cross, and bade her good-bye as if she had been a mere acquaintance.
But he came to her the next afternoon, and she knew from his face that he was in an urgent and a masterful mood. She recognised that she would have to capitulate, and had a happy moment in assuring herself that she would make her own terms. Saxonstowe wasted no time. He might have been a smart young man calling to collect the water-rate.
‘The night that we went to Paris together,’ he said, ‘you made an observation which you thought I understood. I didn’t understand it, and now I want to know what you meant.’
‘What I said. That we were going—you and I—together,’ she answered.
‘But what did that mean?’
‘Together,’ she said, ‘together means—well, of course, it means—together.’
Saxonstowe put his hands on her shoulders; she immediately began to study the pattern of the hearthrug at their feet.
‘Will you marry me, Millicent?’ he said.
She nodded her head, but her eyes still remained fixed on his toes.
‘Answer me,’ he commanded.
‘Yes,’ she said, and lifted her eyes to his.
A moment later she disengaged herself from his arms and began to laugh.
‘I was going to extract such a lot of conditions,’ she said. ‘Somehow I don’t care about them now. But will you tell me just what is going to happen?’
‘You knew, I suppose, that I should have already mapped everything out. Well, so I have. We shall be married at once, in the quietest possible fashion, and then we are going round the world in our own way. It is to be your holiday after all these years of work.’
She nodded, with perfect acquiescence in his plans.
‘At once?’ she said questioningly.
‘A week from to-day,’ he said.
The notion of such precipitancy brought the blood into her face.
‘I suppose I ought to say that I can’t possibly be ready in a week,’ she said, ‘but it so happens that I can. A week to-day, then.’
Mr. Chilverstone came up from Simonstower to marry them. It was a very quiet wedding in a quiet church. Lady Firmanence, however, was there, and before the bride and bridegroom left to catch a transatlantic liner for New York she expressed a decided opinion that the fourth Viscount Saxonstowe had inherited more than his share of the good sense and wise perception for which their family had always been justly famous.
Lucian settled down into a groove-like existence. He read when he liked and worked when he felt any particular inclination to do so; he amused himself at times with the life which a man of his temperament may live in Paris, but always with the air of one who looks on. He made a few new friends and sometimes visited old ones. Now and then he entertained in a quiet, old-fashioned way. He was very indulgent and caressing to a certain coterie of young people who believed in him as a great master and elevated his poetry to the dignity of a cult. He was always a distinguished figure when he showed himself at the opera or the theatre, and people still pointed him out on the boulevards and shook their heads and said what a pity it was that one so young and handsome and talented should carry so heavy a burden. In this way he may be said to have become quite an institution of Paris, and Americans stipulated with their guides that he should be pointed out to them at the first opportunity.
Whatever else engaged Lucian’s attention or his time, he never forgot his daily visit to the quiet house in the suburbs where Haidee still played with dolls or laughed gleefully at her attendants. He permitted nothing to interfere with this duty, which he regarded as a penance for his sins of omission to Haidee in days gone by. Others might forsake Paris for the sea or the mountains; Lucian remained there all the year round for two years, making his daily pilgrimage. He saw the same faces every day, and heard the same report, but he never saw his wife. Life became curiously even and regular, but it never oppressed him. He had informed himself at the very beginning of this period that this was a thing to be endured, and he endured it as pleasantly and bravely as possible. During those two years he published two new volumes, of a somewhat new note, which sold better in a French translation than in the English original, and at Mr. Harcourt’s urgent request he wrote a romantic drama. It filled the Athen?um during the whole of a London season, and the financial results were gratifying in a high degree, for the glamour and mystery of the affaire Damerel were still powerful, and Lucian had become a personality and a force by reason of his troubles.
At the end of two years, the doctor to whose care Haidee had been entrusted called Lucian into his private room one day and told him that he had grave news to communicate. His patient, he said, was dying—slowly, but very surely. But there was more than that: before her death she would recover her reason. She would probably recall everything that had taken place; it was more than possible that she would have painfully clear recollections of the scene, whatever it might be, that had immediately preceded her sudden loss of sanity. It was but right, said the doctor, that Mr. Damerel should know of this, but did Mr. Damerel wish to be with his wife when this development occurred? It might be a painful experience, and death must soon follow it. It was for Mr. Damerel to decide. Lucian decided on the instant. He had carried an image of Haidee in his mind for two years, and it had become fixed on his mental vision with such firmness that he could not think of her as anything but what he imagined her to be. He told the doctor that he would wish to know as soon as his wife regained her reason—it was his duty, he said, to be with her. After that, every visit to the private asylum was made with anxious wonder if the tortured brain had cleared.
It was not until the following spring—two and a half years after the tragedy of the Bristol—that Lucian saw Haidee. He scarcely knew the woman to whom they took him. They had deluged him with warnings as to the change in her, but he had not expected to find her a grey-haired, time-worn woman, and he had difficulty in preserving his composure when he saw her. He did not know it, but her reason had returned some time before, and she had become fully cognisant of her surroundings and of what was going to happen. More than that, she had asked for a priest and had enjoyed ghostly consolation. She gazed at Lucian with a curious wistfulness, and yet there was something strangely sullen in her manner.
‘I wanted to see you,’ she said, after a time. ‘I know I’m going to die very soon, and there are things I want to say. I remember all that happened, you know. Oh yes, it’s quite clear to me now, but somehow it doesn’t trouble me—I was mad enough when I did it.’
‘Don’t speak of that,’ he said. ‘Forget it all.’
She shook her head.
‘Never mind,’ she went on. ‘What I wanted to say was, that I’m sorry that—well, you know.’
Lucian gazed at her with a sickening fear creeping closely round his heart. He had forced the truth away from him: he was to hear it at last from the lips of a dying woman.
‘You were to blame, though,’ she said presently. ‘You ought not to have let me go alone on his yacht or to the Highlands. It was so easy to go wrong there.’
Lucian could not control a sharp cry.
‘Don’t!’ he said, ‘don’t! You don’t know what you’re saying. It can’t be that—that you wrote the truth in that letter? It was—hallucination.’
She looked at him out of dull eyes.
‘I want you to say you forgive me,’ she said. ‘The priest—he said I ought to ask your forgiveness.’
Lucian bowed his head.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I forgive all you wish. Try not to think of it any more.’
He was saying over and over to himself that she was still disordered of mind, that the sin she was confessing was imaginary; but deeper than his insistence on this lay a dull consciousness that he was hearing the truth. He stood watching her curiously. She suddenly looked up at him, and he saw a strange gleam in her eyes.
‘After all,’ she said, half spitefully, ‘you came between him and me at the beginning.’
Lucian never saw his wife again. A month later she was dead. All the time of the burial service he was thinking that it would have been far better if she had never recovered her reason. For two years he had cherished a dream of her that had assumed tender and pathetic tones. It had become a part of him; the ugly reality of the last grim moments of her life stood out in violent contrast to its gentleness and softness. When the earth was thrown upon the coffin, he was wondering at the wide difference which exists between the real and the unreal, and whether the man is most truly blessed who walks amongst stern verities or dreams amidst the poppy-beds of illusion. One thing was certain: the face of truth was not always beautiful, nor her voice always soothing to the ear.
After Haidee’s death Lucian left Paris, and during the rest of the spring and summer of that year went wandering hither and thither about Europe. His mind was at this time in a state of quiescence; he lounged from one place to another, faintly interested and lazily amused. He was beginning to be a little bored by life, and a little tempted to drift with its stream. It was in this frame of mind that he returned to London in the following autumn. There, soon after his return, he sprang into unwonted activity.
It was on the very eve of the outbreak of the war in South Africa. Men were wondering what was going to happen. Some, clearer of vision than their fellows, saw that nothing but war would solve the problem which had assumed vast proportions and strange intricacies because of the vacillating policy of a weak Government of twenty years before; the Empire was going to pay now, with millions of its treasure and thousands of its men, for the fatal error which had brought the name of England into contempt in the Transvaal and given the Boers a false notion of English strength and character. Others were all for a policy of smoothing things over, for spreading green boughs over pitfalls—not that any one should fall into them, but in order to make believe that the pitfalls were not there. Others again, of a breed that has but lately sprung into existence in these islands, advocated, not without success, a policy of surrender to everybody and everything. There was much talking at street corners and in the market-place; much angry debate and acrimonious discussion. Men began to be labelled by new names, and few took the trouble to understand each other. In the meantime, events developed as inevitable consequence always develops them in such situations. Amidst the chattering of tiny voices the thunders of war burst loud and clear.
Lucian was furious with indignation. Fond as he was of insisting on his Italian nationality, he was passionately devoted to England and the English, and had a great admiration for the history and traditions of the country of his adoption. There had once been a question in his mind as to whether he should write in English or in Italian—he had elected to serve England for many reasons, but chiefly because he recognised her greatness and believed in her destiny. Like all Italians, he loved her for what she had done for Greece and for Italy. England and Liberty were synonymous names; of all nations in the world, none had made for freedom as England had. His blood had leapt in his veins many a time at the thought of the thousand and one great things she had done, the mighty battles she had fought for truth and liberty; he had drunk in the notion from boyhood that England stood in the very vanguard of the army of deliverance. And now she was sending out her armies, marshalling her forces, pouring out her money like water, to crush a tiny folk, a nation of farmers, a sturdy, simple-minded race, one of the least amongst the peoples of the earth! He shook his head as if he had been asleep, and asked himself if the nation had suddenly gone mad with lust of blood. It was inconceivable that the England of his dreams could do this thing. He looked for her, and found her nowhere. The streets were hot all day with the tramping of armed men. The first tidings of reverse filled the land with the old savage determination to fight things out to the end, even though all the world should range itself on the other side.
Lucian flung all his feelings of rage, indignation, sorrow, and infinite amazement into a passionate sonnet which appeared next morning in large type, well leaded and spaced, in the columns of a London daily newspaper that favoured the views of the peace-at-any-price party. He followed it up with others. At first there was more sorrow and surprise than anything else in these admonitions; but as the days went on their tone altered. He had endeavoured to bring the giant to his senses by an appeal to certain feelings which the giant was too much engaged to feel at that moment; eliciting no response, he became troublesome, and strove to attract the giant’s attention by pricking him with pins. The giant paid small attention to this; he looked down, saw a small thing hanging about his feet with apparently mischievous intentions, and calmly pushed it away. Then Lucian began the assault in dead earnest. He could dip his pen in vitriol with the best of them, and when he realised that the giant was drunk with the lust of blood he fell upon him with fury. The vials of poetic wrath had never been emptied of such a flood of righteous anger since the days wherein Milton called for vengeance upon the murderers of the Piedmontese.
It is an ill thing to fight against the prevalent temper of a nation. Lucian soon discovered that you may kick and prick John Bull for a long time with safety to yourself, because of his good nature, his dislike of bothering about trifles, and his natural sluggishness, but that he always draws a line somewhere, and brings down a heavy fist upon the man who crosses it. He began to find people fighting shy of his company; invitations became less in number; men nodded who used to shake hands; strong things were said in newspapers; and he was warned by friends that he was carrying things too far.
‘Endeavour,’ said one man, an acquaintance of some years’ standing, for whose character and abilities he had a great regard, ‘endeavour to get some accurate sense of the position. You are blackguarding us every day with your sonorous sonnets as if we were cut-throats and thieves going out on a murdering and marauding expedition. We are nothing of the sort. We are a great nation, with a very painful sense of responsibility, engaged in a very difficult task. The war is bringing us together like brothers—out of its blood and ashes there will spring an Empire such as the world has never seen. You are belittling everything to the level of Hooliganism.’
‘What is it but Hooliganism?’ retorted Lucian. ‘The most powerful nation in the world seizing one of the weakest by the throat!’
‘It is nothing of the sort,’ said the other. ‘You know it is your great curse, my dear Lucian, that you never get a clear notion of the truth. You have a trick of seeing things as you think they ought to be; you will not see them as they are. Just because the Boers happen to be numerically small, to lead a pastoral life, and to have gone into the desert like the Israelites of old, you have brought that far too powerful imagination of yours to bear upon them, and have elevated them into a class with the Swiss and the Italians, who fought for their country.’
‘What are the Boers fighting for?’ asked Lucian.
‘At present to grab somebody else’s property,’ returned the other. ‘Don’t get sentimental about them. After all, much as you love us, you’re only half an Englishman, and you don’t understand the English feeling. Are the English folk not suffering, and is a Boer widow or a Boer orphan more worthy of pity than a Yorkshire lass whose lad is lying dead out there, or a Scottish child whose father will never come back again?’
Lucian swept these small and insignificant details aside with some impatience.
‘You are the mightiest nation the world has ever seen,’ he said. ‘You have a past—such a past as no other people can boast. You have a responsibility because of that past, and at present you have thrown all sense of it away, and are behaving like the drunken brute who rises gorged with flesh and wine, and yells for blood. This is an England with vine-leaves in her hair—it is not the England of Cromwell.’
‘I thank God it is not!’ said the other man with heartfelt reverence. ‘We wish for no dictatorship here. Come, leave off slanging us in this bloodthirsty fashion, and try to arrive at a sensible view of things. Turn your energies to a practical direction—write a new romantic play for Harcourt, something that will cheer us in these dark days, and give the money for bandages and warm socks and tobacco for poor Tommy out at the front. He isn’t as picturesque—so it’s said—as Brother Boer, but he’s a man after all, and has a stomach.’
But Lucian would neither be cajoled nor chaffed out of his r?le of prophet. He became that most objectionable of all things—the man who believes he has a message, and must deliver it. He continued to hurl his philippics at the British public through the ever-ready columns of the peace-at-any-price paper, and the man in the street, who is not given to the drawing of fine distinctions, called him a pro-Boer. Lucian, in strict reality, was not a pro-Boer—he merely saw the artistry of the pro-Boer position. He remembered Byron’s attitude with respect to Greece, and a too generous instinct had led him to compare Mr. Kruger to Cincinnatus. The man in the street knew nothing of these things, and cared less. It seemed to him that Lucian, who was, after all, nothing but an ink-slinger, a blooming poet, was slanging the quarter of a million men who were hurrying to Table Bay as rapidly as the War Office could get them there. To this sort of thing the man in the street objected. He did not care if Lucian’s instincts were all on the side of the weaker party, nor was it an excuse that Lucian himself, in the matter of strict nationality, was an Italian. He had chosen to write his poems in England, said the man in the street, and also in the English language, and he had made a good thing out of it too, and no error, and the best thing he could do now was to keep a civil tongue in his head, or, rather, pen in his hand. This was no time for the cuckoo to foul the nest wherein he had had free quarters for so long.
The opinion of the man in the street is the crystallised common-sense of England, voiced in elementary language. Lucian, unfortunately, did not know this, and he kept on firing sonnets at the heads of people who, without bluster or complaint, were already tearing up their shirts for bandages. The man in the street read them, and ground his teeth, and waited for an opportunity. That came when Lucian was ill-advised enough to allow his name to be printed in large letters upon the placard of a great meeting whereat various well-intentioned but somewhat thoughtless persons proposed to protest against a war which had been forced upon the nation, and from which it was then impossible to draw back with either safety or honour. Lucian was still in the clouds; still thinking of Byron at Missolonghi; still harping upon the undoubted but scarcely pertinent facts that England had freed slaves, slain giants, and waved her flag protectingly over all who ran to her for help. The foolishness of assisting at a public meeting whereat the nation was to be admonished of its wickedness in daring to assert itself never occurred to him. He was still the man with the message.
He formed one of a platform party of whom it might safely have been said that every man was a crank, and every woman a faddist. He was somewhat astonished and a little perplexed when he looked around him, and realised that his fellow-protestants were not of the sort wherewith he usually foregathered; but he speedily became interested in the audience. It had been intended to restrict admission to those well-intentioned folk who desired peace at any price, but the man in the street had placed a veto upon that, and had come in large numbers, and with a definite resolve to take part in the proceedings. The meeting began in a cheerful and vivacious fashion, and ended in one dear to the English heart. The chairman was listened to with some forbearance and patience; a lady was allowed to have her say because she was a woman. It was a sad inspiration that led the chairman to put Lucian up next; a still sadder one to refer to his poetical exhortations to the people. The sight of Lucian, the fashionably attired, dilettante, dreamy-eyed poet, who had lashed and pricked the nation whose blood was being poured out like water, and whose coffers were being depleted at a rapid rate, was too much for the folk he essayed to address. They knew him and his recent record. At the first word they rose as one man, and made for the platform. Lucian and the seekers after peace were obliged to run, as rabbits run to their warrens, and the enemy occupied the position. Somebody unfurled a large flag, and the entire assemblage joined in singing Mr. Kipling’s invitation to contribute to the tambourine fund.
In the school of life the teacher may write many lessons with the whitest chalk upon the blackest blackboard, and there will always be a child in the corner who will swear that he cannot see the writing. Lucian could not see the lesson of the stormed platform, and he continued his rhyming crusade and made enemies by the million. He walked with closed eyes along a road literally bristling with bayonets: it was nothing but the good-natured English tolerance of a poet as being more or less of a lunatic that kept the small boys of the Strand from going for him. Men at street corners made remarks upon him which were delightful to overhear: it was never Lucian’s good fortune to overhear them. His nose was in the air.
He heard the truth at last from that always truthful person, the man in liquor. In the smoking-room of his club he was encountered one night by a gentleman who had dined in too generous fashion, and whose natural patriotism glowed and scintillated around him with equal generosity. He met Lucian face to face, and he stopped and looked him up and down with a fine and eminently natural scorn.
‘Mr. Lucian Damerel,’ he said, with an only slightly interrupted articulation; ‘Mr. Lucian Damerel—the gentleman who spills ink while better men spend blood.’ Then he spat on the ground at Lucian’s feet, and moved away with a sneer and a laugh.
The room was full of men. They all saw, and they all heard. No one spoke, but every one looked at Lucian. He knew that the drunken man had voiced the prevalent sentiment. He looked round him, without reproach, without defiance, and walked quietly from the room and the house. He had suddenly realised the true complexion of things.
Next morning, as he sat over a late breakfast in his rooms, he was informed that a young gentleman who would give no name desired earnestly to see him. He was feeling somewhat bored that morning, and he bade his man show the unknown one in. He looked up from his coffee to behold a very young gentleman upon whom the word subaltern was written in very large letters, whose youthful face was very grim and earnest, and who was obviously a young man with a mission. He pulled himself up in stiff fashion as the door closed upon him, and Lucian observed that one hand evidently grasped something which was concealed behind his back.
‘Mr. Lucian Damerel?’ the young gentleman said, with polite interrogation.
Lucian bowed and looked equally interrogative. His visitor glowered upon him.
‘I have come to tell you that you are a damned scoundrel, Mr. Lucian Damerel,’ he said, ‘and to thrash you within an inch of your beastly life!’
Lucian stared, smiled, and rose lazily from his seat.
The visitor displayed a cutting-whip, brandished it, and advanced as seriously as if he were on parade. Lucian met him, seized the cutting-whip in one hand and his assailant’s collar in the other, disarmed him, shook him, and threw him lightly into an easy-chair, where he lay gasping and surprised. Lucian hung the cutting-whip on the wall. He looked at his visitor with a speculative gaze.
‘What shall I do with you, young sir?’ he said. ‘Throw you out of the window, or grill you on the fire, or merely kick you downstairs? I suppose you thought that because I happen to be what your lot call “a writin’ feller,” there wouldn’t be any spunk in me, eh?’
The visitor was placed in a strange predicament. He had expected the sweet savour of groans and tears from a muscleless, flabby ink-and-parchment thing: this man had hands which could grip like steel and iron. Moreover, he was cool—he actually sat down again and continued his breakfast.
‘I hope I didn’t squeeze your throat too much,’ said Lucian politely. ‘I have a nasty trick of forgetting that my hands are abnormally developed. If you feel shaken, help yourself to a brandy and soda, and then tell me what’s the matter.’
The youth shook his head hopelessly.
‘Y—you have insulted the Army!’ he stammered at last.
‘Of which, I take it, you are the self-appointed champion. Well, I’m afraid I don’t plead guilty, because, you see, I know myself rather better than you know me. But you came to punish me? Well, again, you see you can’t do that. Shall I give you satisfaction of some sort? There are pistols in that cabinet—shall we shoot at each other across the table? There are rapiers in the cupboard—shall we try to prick each other?’
The young gentleman in the easy-chair grew more and more uncomfortable. He was being made ridiculous, and the man was laughing at him.
‘I have heard of the tricks of foreign duellists,’ he said rudely.
Lucian’s face flushed.
‘That was a silly thing to say, my boy,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘Most men would throw you out of the window for it. As it is, I’ll let you off easy. You’ll find some gloves in that cupboard—get them out and take your coat off. I’m not an Englishman, as you just now reminded me in very pointed fashion, but I can use my fists.’
Then he took off his dressing-gown and rolled up his sleeves, and the youngster, who had spent many unholy hours in practising the noble art, looked at the poet’s muscles with a knowing eye and realised that he was in for a very pretty scrap. He was a little vain of his own prowess, and fought for all he was worth, but at the end of five minutes he was a well-licked man, and at the expiration of ten was glad to be allowed to put on his coat and go.
Lucian flung his gloves into the corner of the room with a hearty curse. He stroked the satiny skin under which his muscle rippled smoothly. He had the arm of a blacksmith, and had always been proud of it. The remark of the drunken man came back to him. That was what they thought of him, was it?—that he was a mere slinger of ink, afraid of spilling his blood or suffering discomfort for the courage of his convictions? Well, they should see. England had gone mad with the lust of blood and domination, and after all he was not her son. He had discharged whatever debt he owed her. To the real England, the true England that had fallen on sleep, he would explain everything, when the awakening came. It would be no crime to shoulder a rifle and strap a bandolier around one’s shoulders in order to help the weak against the strong. He had fought with his pen, taking what he believed to be the right and honest course, in the endeavour to convert people who would not be converted, and who regarded his efforts as evidences of enmity. Very well: there seemed now to be but one straight path, and he would take it.
It was remembered afterwards as a great thing in Lucian’s favour that he made no fuss about his next step. He left London very quietly, and no one knew that he was setting out to join the men whom he honestly believed to be fighting for the best principles of liberty and freedom.
When the war broke out, Saxonstowe and his wife, after nearly three years of globe-trotting, were in Natal, where they had been studying the conditions of native labour. Saxonstowe, who had made himself well acquainted with the state of affairs in South Africa, knew that the coming struggle would be long and bitter. He and his wife entered into a discussion as to which they were to do: stay there, or return to England. Sprats knew quite well what was in Saxonstowe’s mind, and she unhesitatingly declared for South Africa. Then Saxonstowe, who had a new book on hand, put his work aside, and set the wires going, and within a few hours had been appointed special correspondent of one of the London newspapers, with the prospect of hard work and exciting times before him.
‘And what am I to do?’ inquired Lady Saxonstowe, and answered her own question before he could reply. ‘There will be sick and wounded—in plenty,’ she said. ‘I shall organise a field-hospital,’ and she went to work with great vigour and spent her husband’s money with inward thankfulness that he was a rich man.
Before they knew where they were, Lord and Lady Saxonstowe were shut up in Ladysmith, and for one of them at least there was not so much to do as he had anticipated, for there became little to record but the story of hope deferred, of gradual starvation, and of death and disease. But Sprats worked double tides, unflinchingly and untiringly, and almost forgot that she had a husband who chafed because he could not get more than an occasional word over the wires to England. At the end of the siege she was as gaunt as a far-travelled gypsy, and as brown, but her courage was as great as ever and her resolution just as strong. One day she received an ovation from a mighty concourse that sent her, frightened and trembling, to shelter; when she emerged into the light of day again it was only to begin reorganising her work in preparation for still more arduous duties. The tide of war rolled on northwards, and Sprats followed, picking up the bruised and shattered jetsam which it flung to her. She had never indulged in questionings or speculations as to the rights or wrongs of the war. Her first sight of a wounded man had aroused all the old mothering instinct in her, and because she had no baby of her own she took every wounded man, Boer or Briton, into her arms and mothered him.
A huddled mass of fugitives—men, women, children, horses, cattle—crowded together in the dry bed of a river, seeking shelter amongst rocks and boulders and under shelving banks, subjected continually to a hurricane of shot and shell, choked by the fumes of the exploding Lyddite, poisoned by the stench of blood, saturated all through with the indescribable odour of death. Somewhere in its midst, caged like a rat, but still sulkily defiant, the peasant general fingered his switch as he looked this way and that and saw no further chance of escape. In the distance, calmly waiting the inevitable end, the little man with the weather-beaten face and the grey moustaches listened to the never-ceasing roar of his cannon demanding insistently the word of surrender that must needs come.
Saxonstowe, lying on a waterproof sheet on the floor of his tent, was writing on a board propped up in front of him. All that he wrote was by way of expressing his wonder, over and over again, that Cronje should hold out so long against the hell of fire which was playing in and around his last refuge. He was trying to realise what must be going on in the river bed, and the thought made him sick. Near him, writing on an upturned box, was another special correspondent who shared the tent with him; outside, polishing tin pannikins because he had nothing else to do, was a Cockney lad whom these two had picked up in Ladysmith and had attached as body-servant. He was always willing and always cheerful, and had a trick of singing snatches of popular songs in a desultory and disconnected way. His raucous voice came to them under the booming of the guns.
‘Ow, ’ee’s little but ’ee’s wise,
’Ee’s a terror for ’is size,
An’ ’ee does not hadvertise:
Do yer, Bobs?’
‘What a voice that chap has!’ said Saxonstowe’s companion. ‘It’s like a wheel that hasn’t been oiled for months!’
‘Will yer kindly put a penny in my little tambourine,
For a gentleman in khaki ordered sou-outh?’
chanted the polisher of tin pans.
‘They have a saying in Yorkshire,’ remarked Saxonstowe, ‘to the effect that it’s a poor heart that never rejoices.’
‘This chap must have a good ’un, then,’ said the other. Give us a pipeful of tobacco, will you, Saxonstowe? Lord! will those guns never stop?’
‘For the colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady,
Are sisters hunder their skins,’
sang the henchman.
‘Will our vocalist never stop?’ said Saxonstowe, handing over his pouch. ‘He seems as unconcerned as if he were on a Bank Holiday.’
‘We wos as ’appy as could be, that dye,
Dahn at the Welsh ’Arp, which is ’Endon—’
The raucous voice broke off suddenly; the close-cropped Cockney head showed at the open flap of the tent.
‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said the Cockney voice, ‘but I fink there’s somethin’ ’appened, sir—guns is dyin’ orf, sir.’
Saxonstowe and his fellow scribe sprang to their feet. The roar of the cannon was dying gradually away, and it suddenly gave place to a strange and an awful silence.
Saxonstowe walked hither and thither about the bed of the river, turning his head jerkily to right and left.
‘It’s a shambles!—a shambles!—a shambles!’ he kept repeating. He shook his head and then his body as if he wanted to shake off the impression that was fast stamping itself ineffaceably upon him. ‘A shambles!’ he said again.
He pulled himself together and looked around him. It seemed to him that earth and sky were blotted out in blood and fire, and that the smell of death had wrapped him so closely that he would never breathe freely again. Dead and dying men were everywhere. Near him rose a pile of what appeared to be freshly slaughtered meat—it was merely the result of the bursting of a Lyddite shell amongst a span of oxen. Near him, too, stood a girl, young, not uncomely, with a bullet-wound showing in her white bosom from which she had just torn the bodice away; at his feet, amongst the boulders, were twisted, strange, grotesque shapes that had once been human bodies.
‘There’s a chap here that looks like an Englishman,’ said a voice behind him.
Saxonstowe turned, and found the man who shared his tent standing at his elbow, and pointed to a body stretched out a yard or two away—the body of a well-formed man who had fallen on his side, shot through the heart. He lay as if asleep, his face half hidden in his arm-pit; near him, within reach of the nerveless fingers that had torn out a divot of turf in his last moment’s spasmodic feeling for something to clutch at, lay his rifle: round his rough serge jacket was clasped a bandolier well stored with cartridges. His broad-brimmed hat had fallen off, and half his face, very white and statuesque in death, caught the sunlight that straggled fitfully through the smoke-clouds which still curled over the bed of the river.
‘Looks like an Englishman,’ repeated the special correspondent. ‘Look at his hands, too—he hasn’t handled a rifle very long, I’m thinking.’
Saxonstowe glanced at the body with perfunctory interest—there were so many dead men lying all about him. Something in the dead man’s face woke a chord in his memory: he went nearer and bent over him. His brain was sick and dizzy with the horrors of the blood and the stink of the slaughter. He stood up again, and winked his eyes rapidly.
‘No, no!’ he heard himself saying. ‘No! It can’t be—of course it can’t be. What should Lucian be doing here? Of course it’s not he—it’s mere imagination—mere im-ag-in-a-tion!’
‘Here, hold up, old chap!’ said his companion, pulling out a flask. ‘Take a nip of that. Better? Hallo—what’s going on there?’
He stepped on a boulder and gazed in the direction of a wagon round which some commotion was evident. Saxonstowe, without another glance at the dead man, stepped up beside him.
He saw a roughly built, rugged-faced man, wrapped in a much-worn overcoat that had grown green with age, stepping out across the plain, swishing at the herbage with a switch which jerked nervously in his hand. At his side strode a muscular-looking woman, hard of feature, brown of skin—a peasant wife in a faded skirt and a crumpled sun-bonnet. Near them marched a tall British officer in khaki; other Boers and British, a group of curious contrasts, hedged them round.
‘That’s Cronje,’ said the special correspondent, as he stepped down from the boulder. ‘Well, it’s over, thank God!’
The conquered was on his way to the conqueror.
The End