Oriole's daughter, a novel, Volume 3 (of 3)

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Before the end of June, Yewridge Hall had been taken by the Marchmonts for a year, and they were established in it, not without considerable noise and bustle, pomp and circumstance, all of which arose from Marchmont’s rather than from his wife’s inclinations. His stinginess, once so notorious, had yielded, or had been forced by circumstances to yield—at any rate, in the matter of outside appearances. Yewridge was a place requiring a large[Pg 3] establishment, a staff of servants, plenty of carriages and horses, and much movement and opulence in its arrangements, to redeem it from the semblance, both inside and out, of some huge empty barrack, devoid of comfort or anything homelike. Perhaps it might have been considered quite excusable and justifiable had Marchmont decided to let it look as gloomy as might be, while he lived in the strict retirement called for by his state of health. He had, however, no such intention. Everything was arranged as though he had intended to keep open house, and Fulvia spoke of it to Minna and Signor Giuseppe during some of her frequent visits to the smaller house.

‘He says people will come to call, and we must be ready to receive them,’ she said, smiling slightly, with that[Pg 4] perfectly impersonal smile which baffled Minna completely. It was as impersonal as the smile one sees on the lips of archaic heads, Greek, Egyptian, Etruscan—though a great deal more beautiful—the smile which is the same on the faces of gods and goddesses, warriors in the last agony or in the height of conflict, nymphs in repose, allegoric figures—everything; a smile conveying no expression, no meaning, and no soul—impersonal. Such was the smile with which Fulvia always spoke of her husband, of his sayings and doings, and of everything connected with him.

Minna looked at her as she said that Marchmont expected people to call. She was embarrassed to find an answer; at once vague and polite, to such a statement. Fulvia relieved her by continuing, in the same light and frivolous tone:

‘The county, I suppose he means. You see, signora mia, I am getting quite learned in all your English superstitions. “The county.” I know that is the object of every well-regulated, pious, and aspiring mind in the country in England—to be “in” with the county. And he thinks the county will rally round him—round us. Did you ever hear of such a delusion? But I don’t undeceive him. What would be the use? It occupies his mind, to make plans and cheat himself in this matter. He makes plans as to what he will do when the county has returned from town, and called upon us, and we upon it. He has made me send for some new dresses.’

‘He will very soon find that he is not strong enough to stand it, if the county[Pg 6] came round him ever so much,’ said Minna deprecatingly.

‘Of course he is weak, in a way. But he would die in the effort to take any place that was open to him, in the right sort of society. And if he is weak, I have to be very strong; of course I am strong, naturally, but, you know, this constant sitting up and these broken nights begin to tell, even upon me.’

‘I could if I might,’ replied Fulvia carelessly. ‘At two-and-twenty one must be very ill indeed to have lost one’s power of sleeping. It isn’t that. You see, night is the worst time with him. He often has pain then, and he sleeps wretchedly. He often could not sleep for months without morphia. They are[Pg 7] always calling me up in the middle of the night to go and talk to him or pacify him.’

‘You ought not to go,’ said Minna. ‘How can you be well if you burn your candle at both ends in that way?’

‘Gia! Well, what can I do?’ asked Fulvia carelessly. ‘I often sit up with him till about two in the morning, and then go; but sometimes, you know, I am really so tired, and perhaps have a hard day before me—not here, of course, but in other places where we have been—that I can’t do it. So I just tell the nurse what to do. She leaves his room for a few minutes, and then goes back again, and says Mrs. Marchmont begs him to excuse her, and she will come and see him first thing in the morning, before breakfast. That always makes him very angry, but he is helpless now. His anger comes to[Pg 8] nothing. And of course the nurse hasn’t been to me at all. I have told her beforehand that I must have a whole night’s rest. One must, you know, sometimes. And on those nights when I know I shall not be disturbed, don’t I sleep! I make up for hours and hours of wakefulness then, and my maid can hardly get my eyes open in the morning.’

‘Humph!’ snorted Signor Oriole, rising abruptly from his chair, and with a flash of his old rapid, irritable movement he left the room without a word to either of them.

‘He doesn’t like what I said,’ observed Fulvia with a heightened colour. ‘He is just the same as ever, though he looks so different. It is wonderful that he should have settled down here,’ she added, as if somewhat glad to turn the subject of her discourse. ‘I would never have believed[Pg 9] it if anyone had told me. You know, in the bad times when he was exiled from Italy, along with a lot of the others, and when he was travelling about, doing all kinds of odd things to keep himself alive, he was in Malta and Greece and Turkey and the Crimea and Switzerland, but he never came to England, as so many of his compatriots did. I have thought of it many a time. He is so thoroughly Southern in every thought and feeling and impulse, and yet here he is, in this English house, in this cold, Northern English country.’

‘Yes, it’s quite true,’ she said; ‘it is wonderful; and yet, you know, the English and Italians are so much alike—the Romans, at any rate, in some deep, far-reaching substratum of their characters or temperaments. I have often been struck[Pg 10] with it. It is only on the outside that we are so different.’

‘What he always loved and always managed to study in the midst of his greatest troubles: archæology, and history, and ancient art and antiquarian things—what he calls the history of the dust of Rome.’

‘Rome,’ repeated Fulvia in a deep voice, all her lightness of tone and manner gone. She had clasped her hands round her knee. ‘Yes, he is Roman through and through: who could ever be anything else who had once been Roman? I also,’ she added dreamily, as she looked across the dazzling yellow green of the lawn in front of the house towards a wooded glade of the park, fringed by heavy trees of a deep shade of foliage—‘I also.’

She heaved a profound sigh, sadness itself, deep and beyond the power of words to describe. Minna thrilled to it. It told her what she knew well enough of these two, the unacknowledged father and daughter, that despite all that might happen, though Rome should be full of enemies for them, and the rest of the world swarming with friends; though utter poverty, and obscurity, and unspeakable hardships might be their lot there, and ease and distinction and consideration might await them elsewhere, yet their hearts were there, in their own city. They were genuine Romans.

They tolerated other places and people, they resigned themselves to endure them as best they might; but the true, unmistakable Roman spirit was in them—the exclusiveness which cares not for the stranger, but only, as it were, endures him[Pg 12] on sufferance; the want of longing for any other life than that which they could lead within the walls of Aurelian; the haughty, yet not ill-natured, superb contempt for other towns, countries and peoples, which is, as it were, the hall-mark of your true Roman.

Minna knew it perfectly well, and resented it not in the least. She knew the fascination of the place, and had many a time said to herself: ‘If I were not an Englishwoman I would be a Roman; and if I were a Roman I should out-Roman all other Romans in my Romanness.’

So she knew perfectly well what Fulvia’s utterance of the word meant, and she sympathized with her to her heart’s core.

‘I suppose you have never had any communication with Rome since you left it?’ she asked seriously.

‘You mean, with my mother?’ she said, in a cool, hard voice. ‘Oh, certainly not. I never shall—never, under any circumstances. There is one fatal obstacle to it.’

‘Yes. I have always cared for the truth, and spoken the truth. Graf T——, a friend of ours at Vienna, told me it was the only obstacle in the way of my becoming an accomplished stateswoman. It is a sort of disease with me, you know, and I quite see how very much it is against me in many ways. I can never feel the same to people who tell lies as to those who tell the truth. The reason why I can be so much with you and Beppo now is because you always told me the truth. She lied to me. She told me I was to be happy. She told me lies about herself, about her[Pg 14] situation, about Beppo. If she had been openly brutal about my marriage, and had told me the naked truth all the time; that she meant to have money and freedom and ease, and was going to sell me to get them, and that she did not care for my happiness or her own salvation, so that she had them, I could have forgiven her in the end, as things have turned out. As it is, I shall never forgive her. I shall never be able to—because she lied to me, and persisted in it, and went on lying to the end. I can never forgive those lies.’

‘No.’ She glanced down at her wrist, on which was a narrow gold bangle, with a flat disc hanging from it, which bracelet she always wore. Suddenly she looked up and held out her hand and arm.

Minna examined the trinket, as she was evidently expected to do so. On the disc was engraved the very common device, in large thin letters one word above the other—Roma, Amor.

Minna smiled at first. Her eyes, her heart smiled, and smiled with delight. She possessed some such baubles herself, and loved them, though she never wore them. She smiled, therefore, looked up, and met Fulvia’s eyes.

The young woman still held out her hand and arm, steady and untrembling. She was not smiling. There was no alteration in the grave, firm line of her lips, in the straight sweep of her eyebrows, no deeper hue on her cheek or brow; but the light within her eyes and the expression which softened every line of her[Pg 16] face startled Minna with a great shock. That was not a touch of girlish sentiment, that was not a bright mist of tender tears. No grief or regret, but an immense joy, lay behind that look. What had joy to do there?

‘Buy it!’ Fulvia laughed. ‘No; one does not buy trumpery things like that—at least, I don’t. Had I been buying, I would have got something more elegant, in better taste—more recherchée in every respect. I did not buy it. It was given to me—bought off a second-hand dealer’s stall in the Campo dei Fiori, at the price that was asked for it, to the utter despair of the seller. I am sure that man will die with an unhealed wound in his heart, caused by the conviction that had he asked three times as much from the fool of a foreigner he could have got it.’

Minna smiled constrainedly, wishing she did not feel that disagreeable little thrill run down her spine on hearing this avowal; wishing also that the scene in the picture-gallery, when she had met Fulvia and Hans Riemann, had not flashed with such swiftness into her mind.

It was evening, towards half-past seven, and after the little pause which ensued upon her last words Fulvia said she must go or she would not be home again and dressed in time for dinner. They dined at eight, as Minna was aware. Marchmont insisted upon being wheeled into the great dining-room where the meal was set out in state, and where, at one end of the table, waited upon by his own servant, he made the kind of meal which he was[Pg 18] permitted to have, while his wife, at the other end of the board, in demie-toilette, ate her dinner under the auspices of a butler and a footman of the gravest type.

It was, as she had told Minna more than once, a ghastly entertainment; ‘but,’ she always concluded, ‘it seems to afford him some kind of comfort or to gratify his love of display, or something, so I make no objection.’

Minna, as a rule, dined somewhat earlier, but to-day she was expecting her brother, who could not arrive in time for her to dine before eight or after.

‘I will go with you to the gate,’ she said, rising also; and they passed out of the room.

Minna had noticed several times of late, when he did not present himself some time during her visit, or appear about the time of her departure, she looked round as if she missed him, and generally asked where he was.

‘He will, perhaps, be somewhere in the garden,’ she said, as they went along the hall towards the front-door.

Just before they reached it was heard a loud crunching of the gravel and rumbling of wheels, and a waggonette drove up and stopped before the door, looking very big, and making a huge barrier before the low, old-fashioned entrance.

‘Aunt Minna!’ cried a shrill, excited voice from the waggonette. ‘There they are; I met them on the road.’

She came to a dead stop, staring at the[Pg 20] party in the waggonette. Then she bestowed one swift glance upon Fulvia, and hated herself for not being able to prevent herself from doing so. Fulvia’s face did not change; only she looked very grave and quiet.

Rhoda had scrambled down from the vehicle in a state of high glee. Following her was a tall man with a pale face and a certain severity in his expression. This was Mr. Hamilton, whom everyone accused of being the reverse of severe, given to far too great a leniency in matters as to which society held certain unshakable traditional opinions. His grave face relaxed as his eyes fell upon Minna and upon the joyous figure of his young daughter. Rising from his seat, to get out after Mr. Hamilton, was Hans Riemann.

After a moment’s silence Minna advanced.[Pg 21] Fulvia remained somewhat in the background, gravely waiting. The brother and sister greeted each other. Then he said:

‘My dear Minna, look here!’ He turned to where Hans Riemann stood in the doorway, half smiling, not in the least deprecatory, not in the least embarrassed. ‘Hans turned up at my place last night, not knowing I was coming here, and intending to pay me a visit. So, as I know you have plenty of room, I just brought him on, and hope it is all right.’

It was not all right. Minna felt most distinctly that it was not all right; but, even had it been a great deal more wrong than it was, the appeal to her hospitality would have disarmed her. She smiled.

‘Come in, Hans; there is room for you, of course,’ she said. She could not speak[Pg 22] the words, ‘I am glad to see you,’ but she held out her hand, and said, ‘If you can transfer your affections from South to North with such rapidity it is very well. You know Mrs. Marchmont?’ she added coldly, though she was far from feeling so. She was inwardly furious at not being able to pass it all lightly by, as if it had been nothing. Scarcely giving Hans time even to shake hands with Fulvia, she drew her brother forward, and said:

‘Richard, you have often heard me speak of Mrs. Marchmont, whom I am lucky enough to have now as a neighbour, and she has heard of you from me many a time. I want you to know one another.’

Mr. Hamilton’s calm, rather tired-looking eyes rested openly and scrutinizingly upon the young woman. He was older than Minna, and scarcely resembled her at[Pg 23] all in appearance. His hair was more than grizzled; it had a distinct powdering of white in it. Yet the face was almost the face of a young man. All its lines, though thin, were not mean. He wore neither beard nor moustache. It was a curious and unusual face, and few there were who at first sight considered it an attractive one.

‘Yes, I have heard of you,’ he said, not smiling at all, as he held out his hand. Fulvia put hers within it, but did not speak. This man’s face and eyes and voice troubled and somewhat repelled her.

It was now the turn of Hans, who came forward with his calmly insouciant manner, offered his hand, and bowed low over hers. As he did so, the little gold bangle with its jangling disc, its ‘Roma, Amor,’ slipped down, almost[Pg 24] over her hand. As he lifted his head their eyes met.

‘Dear Mrs. Hastings, I must wait no longer. I will run to the Hall by a short path. Good-evening. A rivederci.’

Without looking again at the two men, she walked quickly out, through the front-door and away.

Scarcely had she left the garden of Minna’s house, and got into the grounds which strictly belonged to her own, than she saw Signor Giuseppe coming towards her, apparently returning from his walk[Pg 25] or wherever he had gone when he left them so suddenly.

‘Yes; it is late. The brother and the cousin of Mrs. Hastings have arrived,’ said she, and, rapidly though she had been walking, she also paused. It was very rarely that they exchanged words when no one else was present.

Signor Giuseppe seemed to forget that he also ought to be going in, that dinner—imperious dinner—would be ready immediately at the small house as well as at the great one. And Fulvia, though she knew full well that nothing so much exasperated her husband as waiting for this function, and though she made it her study not to cross him in things of that kind—Fulvia also betrayed no haste. Her face changed and grew softer. Signor[Pg 26] Giuseppe was looking very earnestly, yea, even wistfully, at her. She did not return his glance. On the contrary, her eyes were downcast—it almost appeared as if she had not the courage to meet his gaze.

‘It will give me the greatest pleasure if you will,’ was her low-voiced response, and they moved on. But there was no haste in her step now. Signor Oriole, though no weakling, was now an old man, and his griefs and troubles had added to the years which by nature were his. No doubt he would have walked quickly, and hastened, had she shown herself in a hurry. But she did not. She waited till she found out his pace, and then accommodated herself to it. She was silent, but still her eyes were downcast, and Fulvia[Pg 27] Marchmont, in the flush of her womanhood and in all her glorious beauty, with that expression of greater softness relaxing its usual smiling, cold composure, was as lovely a thing as man or woman could wish to look upon, be the same father or mother, lover, husband or friend.

‘You are glad to be here, near Mrs. Hastings?’ he asked her. They spoke Italian.

‘As glad as I can be of anything,’ she replied in a low voice. ‘I can look forward to the summer now with peace, at any rate. And it is better to be here in this quiet English country place than in some German bath or French watering-place, or——’

‘Yes, the two first would be a weariness, with their endless monotony of fashions,[Pg 28] and bands, and entertainments; and the last——’

‘And the last—Frascati, for instance, or further afield: Olevano, or Subiaco, or Rocco di Papa. Olevano—would not Olevano Romano please you now?’

Signor Giuseppe, though speaking quietly, had forgotten himself and his great self-restraint. He had forgotten the stately voi, and had called her ‘thee’ in a tone which seemed to stir some feeling at her inmost heart—who should say what feeling, what recollection of her childish days at Casa Dietrich, when she had hung on his arm, and teased him, and called him Beppo, and said ‘Cattivo!’ when he would not indulge her in some whim? She became very white, and looked at him speechlessly for a moment from a pair of wide-open, dry eyes, full of a pain that stabbed his own heart.

‘Carina, forgive me!’ he exclaimed in great distress, thereby making bad worse. He stopped again. ‘It is unwise; we had better not talk. I wish to spare your feelings, not to hurt them,’ he said quickly. ‘I will return now. Good-night.’

He refrained from even holding out his hand. Fulvia, with a white face and a wan smile, bowed her head, returned his valediction almost in a whisper, then darted onwards at a rapid pace. Soon she turned a corner, and was hidden from his view by a great clump of immense evergreen trees.

Signor Giuseppe turned back and went homewards. His head was sunk, his hands were clasped behind him, his walk was dejected.

‘If I might go away while she is here—go away, and not see it all!’ was the thought in his heart, which was filled to bursting with a great pain and a great anger.

‘Coward!’ then he told himself. ‘In spite of her white face, and her grief at my stupid mistake, I know that she prefers me to be here. If she were asked, she would not have me go. Ah, poverina! I wonder if she thinks I do not know—a stupid old fellow, engrossed in his studies, who cannot understand a young human heart, and its pain and its woe and its peril. Can I not see that heart, and understand both its weakness and its strength? Do I not know that she has fronted the storm, and come through it strong and proud, entitled to mock at weaker ones? Poor Minna is always pained by what she thinks my child’s cynicism—a skin-deep cynicism.[Pg 31] Altro! She is steeled to meet all misfortune with a smile, that superb smile which only they smile who have gone through the worst, and who know that all else which may befall them is but trivial. Grief and hatred and unhappiness will neither bend nor break her—she is used to them and despises them. But love, but worship, but adoration from one whom she too could love—ah!’

He raised his head, and looked up into the deep-blue sky, with its rolling white clouds, and thought deeply, as if trying to recollect something. Then—

‘Yes, I remember—a lesson lies before her when she could so well do with a respite. She is like my Rome, described by the historian from whom Minna long ago read me the description of its walls—a mighty city and a strong, defended on three sides by nature as well as art, but on[Pg 32] the fourth, where there was “no river to embank, no cliff to scarp,” weak and vulnerable. Servius made it strong by artificial means—the city. And she too—per Dio! A mighty defence am I, and a virtuous example!’

Fulvia’s mocking amusement at her husband’s grandiose ideas as to the society they would presently be called upon to entertain was not altogether justified by the result. A good many people did come to call upon them—a good many more people than Minna had expected to do so; as for Fulvia, she had not expected anyone, except perhaps the parson of the parish, with whom a visit to them would be all in the day’s work. In spite of all her experience of the world in the last five years, she had overrated the repellant[Pg 34] power of somewhat misty antecedents when backed by an anything but misty purse, suddenly appearing in the midst of a remote country district, where variety was not too frequent, and where curiosity was rampant. The clergyman did call, and it was known that Mrs. Hastings was on intimate terms with Mrs. Marchmont. Mrs. Marchmont’s beauty, like her husband’s riches, was a light which could not be hidden under a bushel; it burnt through it, and was evident to all who had the fortune to see her.

Society was kind enough to a certain extent to glaze over the fact of Marchmont’s being a mere parvenu, and a disagreeable one. His illness and helplessness were much in his favour, especially as it was understood that he had no wish to cloister that beautiful young wife whose devotion and absolute propriety of conduct[Pg 35] were understood to be exemplary. As the summer went on, invitations came, all of which he feverishly insisted upon her accepting. She was utterly averse to it, not, of course, from the motives attributed to her by society, but from sheer inner joylessness, emotional and moral starvation. She had been smitten to the heart when she had parted with her girlhood, and the wonderful strength which was hers was not the strength of joy and life, which initiates, enjoys, anticipates, but only that of repression and endurance. Whether she stayed at home or whether she went abroad was much the same to her. Each course was equally blank and barren and futile.

But perhaps it was less troublesome to put on the fine clothes and go and mix with others, with ever the same glacial smile, than to refuse to do it, and submit[Pg 36] to the querulous complaints and reproaches of her husband. Minna, who usually loved quietness, was quite willing to break through her habit to chaperon Fulvia, and she went out with her constantly. There was only one verdict as to Mrs. Marchmont. She was beautiful; she was clever; she was perfectly comme il faut; good style, quiet, self-possessed, no nonsense about her, ‘so much more like an Englishwoman than a foreigner,’ some discriminating critics said. But, then, she had been thrown so much amongst English people—she was so much with Mrs. Hastings—she had taken the stamp. The one fault that was found with her was that she was almost too quiet—was, at times, almost, if not quite, uninteresting.

Minna heard these comments, of course, and never replied to them. Fulvia may[Pg 37] have known more of them than was supposed. They were of about as much consequence to her as if they had never been uttered.

Marchmont was feverishly eager to, as she euphoniously put it, ‘make some return for all this hospitality,’ and lawn-tennis parties were arranged, archery was revived, the biggest strawberries and the thickest cream that the county produced were freely dispensed, together with rivers of champagne-cup and claret-cup; dances of an impromptu nature sometimes followed these entertainments, at which some young people, at any rate, had a good time. Yewridge Hall had not been so gay or seen so much dissipation for many a year, but, then, for many a year it had not been inhabited by a millionaire.

At all these entertainments the mistress of the house showed herself ever the same—calm,[Pg 38] cool, and beautiful, polite to all, effusive to none. She was perfectly independent. She chose to distinguish one man beyond others by her preference for his company, and by permitting him to render her fifty little services and attentions which many another man would have performed with delight. She did it openly, in the light of day, in the face of all her guests and of her husband, on the rare occasions when he could be present at any of these gatherings. That man was Hans Riemann, who accepted the distinction accorded to him, or, rather, availed himself of it as a matter of course, without excitement, without showing either exultation or embarrassment. At first, some malicious tongues said it was odd. It went on, whether it was odd or not, and at last people ceased to talk about it.

Hans Riemann had known Mrs. Marchmont[Pg 39] in Rome long ago, when Minna Hastings had been her friend there; Marchmont himself had known him there. He always welcomed the rising painter with effusion. It was all right, not a doubt of it. The parties proceeded and gossip dropped.

One evening Minna, her brother, and Hans were to dine alone at the Hall. Signor Giuseppe, who had never entered the house nor exchanged a word with Marchmont, was left at home with Rhoda Hamilton, who, as has been said, was a fast friend of his, finding a never-failing delight in his society. Rhoda revelled in the stories which Signor Oriole, when he was in a communicative humour, would tell her.

She was intelligent and sensitive, with a nature at once strong and romantic, and for such a girl no more delightful companion[Pg 40] could be imagined than the elderly Italian gentleman, with his stores of learning and knowledge and research, and with also the background of his own life, chequered and varied, from his early boyhood on his father’s estate amongst the Sicilian hills; all the strange games he used to play, all the wild adventures he knew of, with brigands and robbers, with peasants and gentry—tales of savage vendetta or romantic love, of curious hereditary customs appertaining to his house and family. Then, later, when he was a youth, the burning sense of wrong before the Italian risings against the hated foreign rule, the yoke of the Bourbon—this sense of wrong which ate into his soul and into the souls of other generous, hot-blooded lads like him; the secret societies into which they banded themselves, their thrilling adventures and escapes—not[Pg 41] always escapes, either; their seizure by the minions of the foreign Government: there was a story of one whole month in a veritable dungeon which absolutely enthralled Rhoda.

Then the utter renunciation of his entire inheritance in order to serve la patria; his services first in the Garibaldian army; the battles, the sorties, the fighting in the red shirt, the wounds, the hardships, the privations; his enrolment amongst regular troops, the ultimate triumph, the march into Rome through the breach by Porta Pia, the hoisting of the tricolour on Castel Sant’ Angelo and the Quirinal. Different bits of this long story he would tell her at different times, and of how he had been so very poor ‘after the battle was over,’ how for a time he had gained his living by cutting cameos till he had found shelter as a clerk for the[Pg 42] foreign correspondence of Gismondi and Nephew.

Rhoda listened, spell-bound, watching with fearsome delight for what she called the ‘gory passages,’ when Signor Giuseppe’s head was uplifted and his nostrils dilated, and his dark eyes flashed fire from under his shaggy, still black eyebrows.

‘Oh, Aunt Minna, doesn’t he look terrible,’ she would whisper beneath her breath, with a delicious shudder, ‘when he tells of battles and wounds!’

‘Ah, Rhoda, mia carina, you are like all the rest of your sex—so soft and gentle, and delighting so thoroughly in blood. I will wager that if the amphitheatre still existed, and the gladiators and the wild beasts were known to be particularly savage, you would flock there[Pg 43] in crowds, even as in the days of Nero, and Caligula and Commodus. And some of the best seats would still be set apart for the Vestal Virgins, who in this case would be the daintiest and most high-born dames in society, and who would never fail to claim their privilege, any more than those pagan priestesses did—you are all alike, everyone exactly alike.’

Rhoda would be uncomfortable and abashed at this ironical address, and would wriggle uneasily, till her old friend—her magician, as she called him—would go off on another tack, and, inspired by his own mention of the amphitheatre, would pour forth for her his stores of learning, the history of ancient times, and would make Rome live for her again. Rhoda did not know which kind of story she liked best. One day she said to him abruptly:

‘You tell these things so well, I am sure you have told them before. You say we are all alike. Did you ever tell them to any other girl, and did she like them too?’

They were alone on this occasion. Rhoda looked earnestly into Signor Giuseppe’s face. A strange expression came over it.

‘Oh—h!’ breathed Rhoda, shocked at her own indiscretion. ‘I’m sorry I asked,’ she added softly.

These two firm friends then were left at home, and Minna with her two men walked across the park to the Hall.

‘My husband is intensely disappointed,’ she said, ‘but he is not at all well to-day. Dr. Brownrigg was here this morning, and absolutely forbade his coming in to dinner. You will be kind enough to take me by myself.’

They had all enough savoir faire not to betray their great exultation at the announcement, and to say, without even a conscious look amongst them, that they were sorry Mr. Marchmont was suffering.

The dinner was a charming one. The conversation never ceased, and Marchmont’s name was scarcely mentioned. When the meal was over—they had lingered over it—they all went out of the dining-room together. In the hall Fulvia said:

‘If you want to smoke, do it now. I am going to ask Mrs. Hastings to do me a favour. Come with me,’ she added, turning to Minna. ‘I must just go and speak to him for a few moments before we go to the drawing-room.’

They found him in the midst of his luxuries—the softly shaded lights, the cunningly padded couches, the endless appliances for securing ease and comfort. He was already beginning to look very much flushed; his hard eyes were bright,[Pg 48] and his twisted mouth looked more askew, more grotesquely sardonic than ever.

When he saw Minna, he made an effort at something approaching politeness, but he looked at his wife with an irritated impatience which he did not attempt to conceal.

‘What have you been doing?’ he asked snappishly. ‘Does it take over two hours for four people to eat their dinner? I thought you were never coming.’

‘Have we been so long? We were enjoying ourselves, I suppose,’ said Fulvia, with a slight smile, as she approached his couch. ‘Che, che! Don’t excite yourself, or you will have a dreadfully bad night. You know you will.’

She spoke lightly, as one would speak to a fretful child, but without any of the tenderness one would use to such a[Pg 49] child. Her face was hard, and her eyes undisturbed.

‘Go and stand a little way off,’ he told her, not heeding what she had said to him. ‘I want to see what you look like. What gown is that? How long have you had it? It’s a new one.’ He spoke excitedly.

‘Indeed it is not. I have had it on several times. The flowers are different, that’s all.’

‘A preposterous dress for the occasion,’ he said crossly, but his eyes devoured the figure that wore it, and the face that looked so coldly and quietly down upon him from a little distance away.

‘That is very polite to Mrs. Hastings, who has done me the honour to come in evening dress,’ said Fulvia, and she pushed a chair forward for Minna. ‘Sit[Pg 50] down here,’ she said to her, looking at her with, as Minna could not help thinking, an underlying feeling of some kind—hatred, or despair, or a boundless ennui, under the forced patience of her eyes—for they were patient, those eyes of Fulvia Marchmont, or, if it were not patience, it was death that was in them—the death of all susceptibility and sensibility.

‘I meant no harm to Mrs. Hastings,’ said Marchmont with a kind of disgusted apology in his tone. Then, after a pause, when both the women were seated, he began:

‘Fulvia, this doctor here isn’t up to anything. I ought to have been on my legs again long before now. Why don’t you hurry him up? I believe you are in league together, he and you, to keep me ill.’

‘What a horridly uncomfortable feeling[Pg 51] to have!’ said his wife dryly. ‘Not a feeling I should like to have at all. I would much rather die at once than be always suspecting that the people about me were slowly killing me.’

‘Die!’ he repeated angrily. ‘I don’t mean to die, I can tell you. I mean to get well again—of course I shall. Bless my soul! I’m only five-and-thirty now. The idea of a man of five-and-thirty being incurably ill! Ridiculous! But I need very thorough treatment, and he doesn’t give it to me. He does nothing to make me well.’

‘Another? They are not so plentiful here. You remember what the man in London said about you?’

‘Well, has anything been neglected which he advised? You have the little book in which I wrote it all out. You can check off each thing, and judge for yourself whether or not his orders have been obeyed. He’s the first authority in the world on such matters, and you know it.’

‘If you mistrust Mr. Brownrigg to such an extent, you had better tell him so yourself—I shall not do it, for I think him most conscientious, and much cleverer than one would expect to find a country practitioner in an out-of-the-way place like this.’

‘You have? And what does he[Pg 53] say to it? I should really like to know.’

‘Sometimes he laughs. The last time he was quite angry because I said something about you. He said, “Come! none of that,” or something like it. It’s no good. They are either in love with you or afraid of you, all the lot of them. The next time I see a doctor I don’t intend you to come near till I’ve had it all out with him, and got to know his real opinion about me.’

‘I am sure I shall be very glad to be away,’ replied Fulvia with icy indifference. ‘We have talked long enough about this, too. I didn’t bring Mrs. Hastings to have anything of this kind inflicted upon her. Do you know what we were talking about at dinner?’

‘Very well; we’ll say good-evening, then. It is too great a penance for my[Pg 54] visitor.—Come!’ She looked at Minna, and rose.

‘Don’t go, Fulvia!’ cried her husband in a thin, piercing voice, which had a sound in it of fretful tears. ‘Can’t you understand what a man feels like, mewed up here all day, and not able to do anything that anyone else can?’

‘Oh, it must be very unpleasant, I am sure,’ she replied with perfect tranquillity. ‘But that is no reason why other people should be made uncomfortable by your discomfort.—Come!’ She again turned to Minna, with a smile.

Minna shook hands with the poor little suspicious, fretful mummy of a creature,[Pg 55] disliking him a degree less than she had ever done before. He was being punished so obviously and so severely.

‘A man!’ ejaculated Fulvia, half to herself, as she paused for a moment, and then gave a kind of laugh. ‘A man—già!’

They found Hans and Mr. Hamilton in the drawing-room waiting for them. They sat down in a group near one of the windows, and left the rest of the great cold-looking room to itself. The light grew dimmer and dimmer. A servant came with a lamp. Fulvia bade him place it on a table in the corner, and not to bring[Pg 56] any more lights. It made a radiant soft yellow glow in the background, with its gold-silk shade. They talked in low voices about Italy, even about Rome. Hans’ eye roved round the walls as if in search of something.

‘There is hardly a trace here, if any, that you are a foreigner, and have lived abroad most of your time,’ he said, laughing. ‘I speak, of course, from an English point of view.’

‘So far as this room goes, at any rate,’ she added. ‘But Mrs. Hastings knows that I have things upstairs, in my own sitting-room.’

‘Oh,’ said Fulvia very gently, but with a change in her voice for all that, ‘two of Melozzo da Forli’s angels.’

‘Yes, the divinely sentimental one, and the one with a drum—a kind of drum; do you remember? I have other things, too. Some of those white angels which are in one of the chapels, a broken-down place belonging to S. Gregorio Magno. Do you remember those, too?’

‘I should never have seen those pictures but for Mrs. Hastings,’ continued Fulvia. ‘I don’t think Roman girls as a rule know much of what there is all around them in their own city. Even Bep——’

She stopped suddenly and crimsoned.[Pg 58] There was a silence. Even Fulvia was embarrassed. Minna came to the rescue by asking Hans about his travels of last year.

He related some of his adventures in out-of-the-way places, and said carelessly that he thought of going soon to the Caucasus, where there was magnificent scenery, and of there making a series of landscape and costume studies, bringing them home, and exhibiting them in London.

‘Of course I should make them very realistic and very bizarre,’ he added; ‘that is the only road to name and fortune now. Of course, too, if I went, I should have to stay an awfully long time to accomplish what I want to do.’

Another pause. Minna wondered if it was only her excited imagination which saw a leaden pallor overspread Fulvia’s face. It[Pg 59] was Mr. Hamilton who at last asked, in a dry kind of voice:

‘For pleasure and for art,’ replied Hans promptly. ‘For what else should I go?’

‘There might be many reasons,’ was the reply, in a tone of profound indifference. Yet to this indifference there was, as it were, an edge which seemed in some way to pique or offend Hans. He rose suddenly from his chair, observing abruptly:

‘I cannot tell what on earth you mean, Hamilton.’ Then he stood before the window which looked across the park. ‘From here,’ he observed, in a strangled kind of voice, ‘one can see the trees of your garden, Minna.’

‘What a discovery! what a revelation to me!’ said she, laughing. ‘Have you only just found it out?’

‘Doubt is cast upon everything that I[Pg 60] say,’ exclaimed Hans, in a tone of annoyance. ‘Were you aware of those trees, Mrs. Marchmont?’

‘Coming to the edge of the wood, one might signal, if necessary, to the Hall. Did you never find it unpleasant, Minna, when the Parkynsons were here?’

‘Certainly not. The Parkynsons were well-behaved people, and I trust I am the same. Why should I have found it unpleasant?’

After this exchange of civilities of a dubious kind, the conversation flagged. Though it was nearing the end of July, the light continued strong and clear in that Northern sky until a late hour. They did not stay till late—left, in fact, so early that it was still daylight out-of-doors, and Fulvia said she would walk with them part of the way. She took a light shawl[Pg 61] over her arm, and they paced slowly along in the delicious summer evening. The air was filled with scents of flowers and hay; the thick trees stood motionless: their voices, if they raised them in the least, sounded echoing and clear.

‘It is lovely,’ said Fulvia, with a full sigh as of one who passes suddenly from pain to ease. She looked up into the glory of the darkening sky. ‘It rests one only to feel it.’

She was walking in advance with Minna and Richard Hamilton. The gravel drive was wide enough for half a dozen persons to walk abreast upon it, but Hans hung behind. As they drew near Minna’s domain, Fulvia said she must turn back. It was then that Hans stepped forward, saying in a matter-of-course tone:

The brother and sister went on in silence for a little time, till at last Minna said, in a tone of vexation, deep though muffled:

‘That was pretty strong, I must say. Richard, why did you not go back with them too?’

‘What does it matter whether they wanted you or not? I wish—oh, I wish so many things! You do not know how wild with vexation I was, when I saw Hans sitting beside you in the waggonette that evening! It was such impudence in him to come without an invitation!’

‘I never did. He invited himself. Of course I could not say no. From the very first I have mistrusted him. He was in love with her in Rome when she was a mere child, and——’

‘I don’t think you see the situation clearly,’ he said, in his indifferent way. ‘There is a situation, and it is one in which no outsider can do anything. For her,’ he added after a full stop, ‘except herself, of course. Whether she is strong or weak, it will prove.’

‘She is strong,’ Minna asseverated, almost passionately. ‘She must be tremendously strong, or how could she have lived through all she has had to live through, and have come out of it so splendidly?’

‘That’s one kind of strength—a purely negative kind, of which you women constantly[Pg 64] possess so much. Her pride has helped her through that, and an obstinate determination not to be dragged down by her husband to his level. She has brains, so of course the suffering must have been much more acute than if she had been a mere block of wood. But people can so often be strong through every kind of cruelty and hardness, and yet collapse at the first word of affection or sympathy—especially that kind of sympathy, of one sex to the other.’

‘I am saying nothing. I say, if she is to be helped out of this, it must be by her own strength.’

‘I wish Hans were in the Caucasus now, and would stay there,’ she said, with a bitter, uneasy resentment.

‘But he isn’t. And the Caucasus is a long way off. Here we are, at your house,[Pg 65] and here is Signor Oriole walking about the garden.’

Signor Giuseppe was pacing about a round sweep of gravel in front of the house, his hands clasped behind him, his head slightly bowed, his eyes fixed upon the marks left in the gravel by his own footsteps.

He was so lost in thought that Minna had to speak his name before he noticed them.

‘You have returned?’ he said, smiling; and then, looking round, his face suddenly became shadowed.

‘Here at your service,’ replied Hans, just behind them, and Minna, at least, instantly began to be thoroughly ashamed of what she called her own unworthy suspicions. She spoke to Hans with a cordiality which was almost eager.

They lingered a little out-of-doors, still enjoying the beauty of the night, and loath to leave it. Then the whole party went into the house.

In spite of all the care bestowed upon him, and of his own unrelaxing efforts to fulfil his doctor’s promises that he should get well, Marchmont’s health did not improve. There was not, said the medical men, the least real danger to his life; the probability was that, as he grew more helpless, his hold on his life would grow stronger.

‘In fact,’ said Mr. Brownrigg to Fulvia, in a private interview after Marchmont had had a very bad night, ‘there is no reason why he should not live to be an old[Pg 68] man. He will have every care and consideration; he has no worries; yes, he will settle down into a permanent invalid, but not one to whose life there is any imminent danger.’

All the gaiety and visitors had been strictly forbidden. The guest-chambers were empty, the gardens and park untenanted. The house was more like the barrack of a regiment of dead soldiers than ever.

As the days went on Marchmont grew more dissatisfied and restless, more exacting and more difficult to manage. His brain was not in the least touched by his illness; only his natural suspiciousness seemed to grow ever keener and sharper,[Pg 69] and his curiosity and determination to know everything, down to the minutest detail, of what went on in the household, more boundless and ungovernable. As August progressed, the lives of those at the great house did not grow happier. Marchmont’s nurse, though endowed with quite as much patience as the rest of her kind, grew restive, and told Fulvia one day that as a rule she could stand any kind of patient by simply taking no notice of his ‘tantrums,’ as she was pleased to call them; but that with Mr. Marchmont this was impossible, as he had a way with him more irritating and obnoxious than that of anyone whom she had ever nursed before.

His man also, a valuable servant, and one who knew that he had in some respects a very good place, became rebellious about the same time. Somehow or other the[Pg 70] domestic phalanx had got wind of what Mr. Brownrigg had said—that the invalid was not in the least likely to die, only to grow more obnoxious—and somehow it then dawned upon them all that, whether they said so or not, this was a great and bitter blow—a terrible disappointment. They did not speak it out, no one spoke it out; but they showed it by short tempers, irritability, and a general air of disgust and tendency to mutiny. Morrison and the nurse chose the same day on which to utter their respective protests. Morrison said that his post would be a hard one at any wages, but that when he was told by his master that he was worth nothing, and that the wages of a stable-boy would more than pay for his services, he felt that it was not worth his while to remain.

Fulvia listened to them both, giving[Pg 71] them their interviews one after the other. She heard with grave dignity what they had to say. She found their complaints perfectly rational, and told them so. She asked the nurse to remain as long as she could, and then she would be relieved in the order of things, according to the rules of her institution. To Morrison she simply explained the case, and said openly that it depended on his goodwill whether he endured it any longer.

‘If he ever gave one word of thanks, ma’am,’ said the man, ‘or ever spoke pleasant to me, I could do anything, for it must be awful to be laid on your back in that way, so helpless, and he’s younger than I am. But I have to wait on him hand and foot, and then be abused for it. It’s more than flesh and blood——’

‘He will never thank you,’ said Fulvia calmly. ‘You have been with us ever[Pg 72] since he began to be ill, and you must know that. He will never thank you. There is only me to do that, and I can assure you I appreciate all you have done to lighten my anxiety in the matter. I am very much tied as it is. If it were not for you, I should be very badly off. I shall be extremely sorry if you go, and you may be sure that everything you do for your master you do in a sense for me. I cannot say any more. If you will go you will go. I cannot help it!’

‘Well, ma’am, to accommodate you, I’ll try again. You are a very good mistress, so just and so liberal—all say that in the servants’ hall, and we all feel it,’ said Morrison handsomely. ‘From Mrs. Perkins down to the scullery-maid, not one of us ever thinks that you want to do us a wrong.’

‘I am glad to hear it. You have[Pg 73] guessed my feelings, at any rate, correctly. I wish all to be satisfied and happy as—possible.’ The words on her lips had been, ‘as I am sad and hopeless,’ but she stopped in time. Morrison retired, conquered, and Fulvia was left to realize that the words of praise given her by a domestic servant afforded her about as much pleasure as any she was likely to experience within the walls of her own house.

Left alone, she sat still for awhile, and then, lifting her arms, clasped her hands above her head, saying to herself, ‘How long will it go on? How long shall I be able to endure it?’

For ever, seemed to be the answer. Had she not asked that very question of Minna in the days before her marriage? ‘Do you think I can go on living in this way for three weeks longer? Don’t you[Pg 74] think something is sure to happen?’ Yet nothing had happened. Everything had gone on to its bitter end. She had been married, and had not died. She had been carried about in the company of Marchmont, hating him more and more every day, but she had survived it. She had not wasted away in a consumption, nor grown silent and wretched and broken in spirit. On the contrary, she had grown more and more beautiful, as she knew. As a girl, immediately after her marriage, she had seen both men and women look at her with undisguised delight, as something most beautiful and most charming. The admiration, then, had been as much what one gives to a beautiful child as to a woman.

Now she never went anywhere without seeing that deeper flame come into men’s eyes as they beheld her, that sudden[Pg 75] gravity settle over women’s faces as they scrutinized her, and saw in her as powerful a rival as they could possibly encounter. And while all this went on, there went on in her heart pari passu the endless dreariness and barrenness and disgust to which she had never tried to put any stop or any limit, but which she had allowed in silence to eat away at her inmost soul. She allowed it almost unconsciously, but in her heart was the deep conviction that to do otherwise, to ‘make the best of things,’ as the happy-go-lucky saying has it, to attempt to reconcile herself to her lot and her husband, would have been moral degradation beyond words to describe. Her ennui, her scornful silent endurance, were not petulance—they were religion. Such a thing as had happened to her might happen to fifty women of weak or shallow or vain nature, and they might[Pg 76] have come to accept the inevitable, and lived lives of almost contented respectability, the loss of their latent finer feelings compensated for by the possession of the money and place for which their bodies had been sold. She was not one of the fifty; she was the fifty-first, the exception, and the slow tragedy in which she lived was just as inevitable and as natural as that sunset succeeds sunrise, and sunrise sunset.

She did not acquiesce, she did not submit, she did not content herself. She endured, and resented. But that did not kill her, either. She told herself that she was as bad as the worst of them; she just lived on and slept when she was not prevented from doing so, and ate, and did not become melancholy; she read books and newspapers, and remembered what was in them, and was, when she came to[Pg 77] think about it, very much surprised at herself for doing so.

‘How long can I endure it? For ever.’ Thus, so far, had run the question and answer. But to-day, when she asked the question, there was not cold, fastidious disgust in her mind, but raging rebellion, and the question, ‘How long can I?’ seemed to turn into, ‘Why should I?’

It was early in the forenoon when the unpleasant interviews with the nurse and Morrison had taken place. It was still considerably before twelve when she rose from her chair, went into the hall, took a broad straw hat from the hook on which it hung, and went out into the blazing August sunshine.

The grounds of Yewridge Hall were of considerable extent—they were varied by nature, and had been judiciously manipulated by a good landscape gardener.[Pg 78] Fulvia took her way to that part of them most remote from her own house and Minna’s, to where a small lake, partly natural and partly artificial, made a cool retreat in the summer heat, and a most useful skating place in winter. There was a boat-house, with a little boat in it, and there was a kind of summer-house made of rough logs covered with bark, such as may be seen in many a park and garden in the country. To this part of the grounds Minna and her party never penetrated unless by invitation. Minna had a wholesome conviction as to the value of the adage, ‘Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour’s house, lest he grow weary of thee, and so hate thee.’ Moreover, Fulvia had once said to her that she found the solitude of the spot a great boon, and often went there to be alone.

She did not hurry this morning, but walked slowly towards the spot, clad in her cool-looking white morning gown, with its fresh simplicity and plainness. It took her ten minutes to reach the place she was going to. Though her face did not change, her eyes dilated as she came along between the trees towards the side of the pond, and saw Hans there, with his easel and other artist’s apparatus, though he had not apparently fixed upon the spot on which to plant the easel.

She had come along noiselessly. His eyes were cast down, and he seemed to be lost in reflection when she first saw him, but as she drew nearer, slowly and ever more slowly, he raised his eyes and bent them full upon her. Fulvia stopped. Hans laid down all the things that were in his hands, and went to meet her,[Pg 80] removing his cap as he did so. He took both her hands into his own, and looked at her without speaking.

‘I was, and I was not. I thought I should never see you, and yet I was absolutely certain that something—probably something disagreeable—had prevented you from coming. What has happened?’

‘Oh!’ she said in a prolonged tone of weariness and exasperation, ‘that which is always happening. It is the same story over and over again. A miserable, sordid bother. I have been begging a servant man to try if he can’t stay with us a little longer, just to make life endurable to me. He has kindly consented[Pg 81] to do so, and I am much in his debt.’

‘Mein Gott!’ exclaimed Hans, between his teeth. He had not let go of her hands. He drew them together, now, to his breast, and held them enfolded there, and looked down into her face with an expression of longing which seemed to say, ‘I will force you to smile, and to look different.’

‘This cannot go on,’ he said at last with low-voiced anger. ‘You are worse each time I see you—more sad, more hopeless and lifeless-looking. You will not look into my eyes now. You will not see how I love you, or you could not look so stern and immovable. If you would smile as you always have done before——’

Fulvia without a word raised her eyes and looked straight into his. There was not the shadow of a smile on her face;[Pg 82] there was not the least sign of relaxation in what he had truly called her ‘stern’ expression.

‘No, you don’t smile! What is the meaning of it? The last time we met you told me you had lost that despair, that carelessness whether you lived or died. You looked quite glad, Fulvia mia. But to-day it is all there again, and I believe you will dare to tell me that I do not love you enough, could not make you happy.’

‘No, no, no; it is not that! I get depressed oftener than I used to do. I feel very miserable this morning. I can’t cast it off all in a moment. But I want to live,’ she whispered, in a passionate abandonment of eagerness—‘I want to live. To die now, after all the death I have lived through, with life just breaking, just holding out its hand to me—oh, by all the gods![Pg 83] it surely cannot happen—such a thing cannot happen!’

‘It shall not happen; I will not let it happen!’ said Hans, and had any keen observer been there—one who could have listened unmoved to the passionate utterances, and impartially weighed the meaning and value of both—that observer must have been struck with the thinness and impotence of the man’s utterances, as compared with those of the woman.

He it was who counselled hope and spoke of happiness, and would hear nought of despondency, nought of doubt or difficulties. She it was who was stern and sad, and, in the midst of her agonized debate with her love, contemplated the possibility of bitterness and dissatisfaction even in the fulfilment of it. The view which each took was sufficiently typical of[Pg 84] their respective characters. Hans would have none of disaster, none of doubt or difficulty, because he could not or would not have fronted them, had they come. She spoke of them, discussed them, expected them, because she had within her the stuff with which to battle with them. Of course, the lighter, more sanguine strain sounded the stronger at that stage of the proceedings. It made more noise, and was set in a more effective key. It imposed upon even her.

‘To live merely as you have been living, and are living just now, is a simply intolerable idea,’ he said, with considerable passion in his tones. ‘For you, it is hideous to be in that house; for me, it is like hell, only to think of your being there.’

For the time being there was no more firmness nor decision left in her aspect. Her lips trembled, her eyes sank and wavered, her voice shook.

‘Leave it at once and come with me. I will take you away. Listen. That journey I was talking of—we will take it together, you and I. First we will go to Italy, very, very far South—to Sicily, to some place where no foreigners ever go. Think of it now, at this moment—the life, the sunshine, and the glory of it; then think of this bleak place and this bleak life; this cold air, that chill gray sea, those cold purple moors. We will hide nothing. In a very short time everything will be quite right. He’—he nodded in the direction of the Hall—‘will have applied to the law for redress of the wrong you have done him, which, as you are the sinner and he the saint, with all the good[Pg 86] and pious world on his side, will be quickly accorded to him. Then you are free, and then you are my wife, who shall never know a grief or a pain or a harsh word or a humiliation again. That is what I want you to do.’

‘There is only one thing that prevents me from doing it,’ said Fulvia quietly, more quietly than he liked.

‘Loss of position and consideration, I suppose you mean—all the precious whited sepulchre business in which society deals. It is a mere prejudice, as you know. You are at present on the right side as regards that.... What pleasure has it ever brought you? What good has it done you?’

‘I don’t mean that at all. I have tried that, and I find that, though it has its value—there is more in it, Hans, than you will own—yet one may pay too high a[Pg 87] price for it—when you are an exceptional case’—she spoke bitterly. ‘You see, caro mio, society is arranged to meet the needs of the many who don’t think, and who only want to have things made easy for them. The few, who have not been lucky enough to make themselves fit into it, must suffer the consequences of their stupidity.’

‘Don’t taunt me with abstract reasoning when I am dying to hear a word of kindness from you,’ he besought her. Indeed, abstract reasoning in any shape was distasteful to Hans.

‘Well, I will be very concrete, very prosaic, and very narrow,’ said she with a faint smile. ‘It is not the fear of losing my distinguished position in society, nor my spotless reputation, which really is a perfectly negative kind of good. I am thinking of what all of them down there would feel.’

‘What utter nonsense! They know; they are not children, they are not puritans. I believe Minna would rather see you happy than what people are fools enough to call blameless, any day.’

‘You do not know Minna, then. Her love is very dear to me. Sometimes, in my wretchedness, I think I am past caring for anything of the kind. But when I think of Minna heartbroken, I can’t bear it. And worse than that—Signor Oriole.’ She whispered his name.

Hans was not without the coarseness which comes, not of wilful malice, but of utter incompetency to distinguish between what may be said and what may not.

‘Did I say he would blame me? Shall I break his heart because he would have no right to blame me for doing so?’

‘They cannot wish you to go on leading this hell upon earth existence any longer,’ said Hans savagely. ‘Sit down here, on this bench beside me, and let us see the thing fairly, from all sides.’

‘My friend, why fatigue ourselves with anything of the kind? There is only one side from which to see it. Shall I leave my husband, whom I hate, with right and reason, and my friends whom I love, to go away with you, whom I adore, and of whom I know nothing?’

‘Know nothing of me!’ echoed Hans, forgetting his rapture in his surprise at her words. ‘Why, Fulvia, you have known me for six years—six whole years.’

‘Don’t leave me in this awful suspense,’ he besought her. ‘Tell me now when you will come. Tell me that you will come.’

‘I can’t now,’ said Fulvia simply. ‘I am quite decided about one thing. I will not make up my mind when I am vexed and angry, and jarred to my heart’s core, as——’

‘As I have been this morning. What I do I will do deliberately. Then I shall be strong enough to go through with it.’

‘My darling!’ he whispered again. Fulvia’s eyes wavered at the words. ‘Promise me, then, when you will come. Tell me when you will tell me.’

‘You must give me three days. This is Friday. On Monday I will meet you here again. I promise you that I will have made up my mind.’

‘Yes,’ replied Fulvia. ‘It is a terribly short time in which to decide that one will——’

She paused. Hans did not press her farther. He made no complaint. He had marked her words. She did not say, ‘to decide whether one will,’ but ‘that one will.’ The victory was his.

‘Do not let us talk about that any more,’ said Fulvia; ‘it only brings back again all the horrors I have gone through. But do talk of something else.’

‘About anything that you like,’ replied Hans, who was sitting beside her on the bench, and, with one elbow on his knee and his cheek pressed upon his hand, was[Pg 92] looking at her with, as it seemed to Fulvia, all his soul in his eyes. There was all of her soul, at least, in the full gaze which returned his.

It would have been very difficult to say in what way their friendship had begun; how the acquaintanceship of their youthful days had been renewed, and how it had grown and developed silently and almost imperceptibly through a thousand subtle delicate changes into the present stage, when all talk of ‘friendship’ and sympathy was discarded and the words ‘I love you’ had been many a time exchanged on both sides. Fulvia said the least, showed the least; with her it had gone too deep for words. The very fact that all these instincts of her nature had been so crushed, martyred, and repressed, ever since the day on which her mother had handed her over to Marchmont, gave them additional[Pg 93] strength and energy now that they had been aroused. In the warmth of this love, which expressed itself in terms of the most delicate homage, all the warmth and passion of her own nature came to life, grew, expanded, developed into an overmastering love, which, however reticent on the outside, within knew no bounds. Almost had she grown to think it well that, if she and Hans were to be united, it would have to be at the cost of her outside glory.

No price seemed too great to pay for the experience of a natural love, a spontaneous, mutual delight, an exchange of soul. This was Fulvia’s inner conviction, and with all the strength of her nature she gloried in it; and in all the knowledge of the bitterness of that Dead Sea fruit upon which she had so long been trying to nourish herself, she could not have enough of the sweetness of this. She[Pg 94] was reckless of the consequences; her whole emotional system was strung up, goaded to rebellion against her present situation; she often marvelled herself at the thin thread which held her back from responding to Hans with all the eagerness which he showed himself.

Yet, thin as that thread was—woven out of shadows and cobwebs, as it appeared to her, the memory of certain faces, the echo of certain voices—it did hold her back, and kept her grave and reticent where Hans was wild and impassioned. He spoke out his feelings, raged against her unhappiness, and the cause of it, kissed her hands and her feet: one day he had found her alone in the afternoon, resting on a couch, and, maddened by the oppressed silence with which she listened to what he had to say, had knelt down beside the sofa, and covered those little[Pg 95] feet with adoring kisses. Hans it was who did all this, and gazed at her in a rapture of love, and spoke words to her whose adoration drowned the somewhat false ring which sometimes sounded through them. Fulvia it was who was calm and almost silent, receiving it with a passion of inner gratitude, but seldom speaking, seldom giving expression to her feelings. It was as if her daily life made such expressions almost trivial, so stern was the wretchedness she felt at home. Nevertheless, there were now and then, very rarely, moments in which she broke this austere gravity, and gave him a look or a word which repaid days or weeks of waiting and severity.

This morning, when they had been sitting for a long time almost silent, she turned to him, laid her hand for a moment upon his, and said:

‘Hans, it is since I knew you that I feel I have a right to live. I never have lived. I will live; I will not die without having lived.’

His heart sprang to his mouth. What was this but a promise? He lifted her hand to his lips, saying nothing audibly. He did not even wish to convey too much by a look, lest she should be startled, or begin to repent her of her decision. He asked no more, and did not even thank her—in words.

The sun grew hotter as mid-day was passed, and cast a warm glow into even this shady corner, and the lights and shadows played about and chequered the surface of the water, and danced on the footpath, and flitted over Fulvia’s face, under the shadow of her large hat. It was a brief dream of rest and repose, of ease from pain, and of hope for the future.

‘Someone is coming!’ exclaimed Hans suddenly, in a tone of startled annoyance, as he raised himself and looked in the direction of the footsteps which he heard.

‘Well,’ said Fulvia, with a superb, almost dreaming indifference, ‘let someone come.’

‘You do not mind this being interrupted: I do,’ said Hans angrily. ‘Confound him! whoever he may be.’

‘No—not him. I’m glad to see him,’ Fulvia retorted, looking quietly forwards towards the figure of Signor Giuseppe, who was advancing up the path.

He lifted his hat. Hans could not conceal his annoyance and vexation. Fulvia, on the contrary, rose and walked towards him with a gracious willingness to meet him.

Minna had often noticed this profound respect in the bearing of the young woman[Pg 98] to the old man. It spoke volumes to her.

‘Good-morning!’ said she. ‘I am glad you have found your way here. Did you know I was here?’

‘No; I was strolling through the woods,’ said Signor Oriole, ‘and I came round this way—that is all.—Ah, Riemann,’ he added, with a glance more piercingly keen than he had ever bestowed upon that young man, ‘you are here, then! I thought I heard you telling Mrs. Hastings you were going to sketch by the river?’

‘I changed my mind. It was so blazingly hot by the river. Mrs. Marchmont once kindly told me I might come here when I liked, and I availed myself of her permission.’

‘I have not yet decided. Would you have me turn my back upon Mrs. Marchmont, and sink myself in a sketch?’ asked Hans, in even a worse humour.

Fulvia had become very grave. Her natural spirit of truth and frankness liked not these evasions and subterfuges. Why need he have told anyone where he was going? He was a free agent. Then she felt sure that he had done it out of consideration for her. He did not know how perfectly indifferent she felt to all outsiders and what they thought. He wished to shield her. It was all right. It was his true and noble self.

‘I am going away now. I am wanted at home, and cannot stay longer,’ she said. ‘Good-morning, Mr. Riemann.—Will you come with me?’ she added, turning to Signor Oriole.

‘Women will be women to the end of the world,’ he told himself with the conviction of one who has made a discovery. ‘Worship them, and they insult you. Bully them, and they worship you. That has always been my experience.’

‘She has just gone out with her brother and the bambina. I trust,’ said Signor Giuseppe, ‘that you were not as displeased with me as Riemann evidently was, for intruding upon you. I assure you it happened entirely by accident.’

‘Do not speak to me like that!’ she exclaimed[Pg 101] in a hurried voice. ‘I am always glad to see you—everywhere, and at any time. You have the right to come where I am.’

‘As for rights, we will say nothing,’ he said sadly. ‘I know you used to be glad to see me in the old days—when you used to penetrate into my little dark room, and sit upon my bed, cross-legged, like a tailor, seize upon one of my books, and ask questions. Do you remember?’

‘No matter what I was doing,’ he pursued with a smile, ‘your questions began. You would read aloud; you would know the meaning of everything; you——’

‘I must have been a dreadful little nuisance,’ said Fulvia, in a voice that was not quite steady.

‘Ah, repeatedly!’ she exclaimed, suddenly seizing his arm in her hands, as she had so often done as a child, and smiling at him with a child’s delight. Then, with a sudden revulsion of feeling: ‘Don’t, don’t! Do not talk to me about those days, Beppo. I am miserable enough, without having my former happiness recalled to me.’

He came to a pause, took her hands in his, and looked into her face with an expression which, she told herself, was almost divine, in its immense love and tenderness, its sorrow, its yearning.

‘Carissima mia, I recall your former happiness because I would save you from future misery. Speak to me face to face! The man there, who was with you, is dear to you?’

‘I say nothing about it. I have lived my life, and others will live their lives, and no experience of others can save them from walking straight up to their fate. That you should encounter some such experience was absolutely inevitable. Only listen to me. Suppose that characters could be taken in the hand like oranges, and weighed in a balance like any material thing; suppose I held the scales, and placed your character on the one side, and his on the other: do you know what would happen?’

‘Why, his would kick the beam,’ said Signor Oriole, with a scornful laugh. ‘My proud Fulvia in love with a thing of straw—at the mercy of a farceur.’

‘You are utterly mistaken,’ she said very coldly. ‘I know him; you do not. You have no right to speak of him in that way. As for future misery’—she laughed—‘no misery could be greater than that which I have endured, and which I am enduring at present. I am going back to it now at once. Good-bye.’

She snatched her hands out of the clasp of his, and, without giving him a look, sped on in the direction of the house.

Arrived at the house, Fulvia was met almost at once by a servant, who told her that her husband was very ill and in severe pain.

‘I will go to him,’ she said in a perfectly unmoved voice, and when the servant had gone she closed her eyes for a moment, as if to shut out what was immediately around her.

In truth, she needed all the strength that lay in her nature to give her the courage, coming from the interviews she had just had, to encounter what she knew lay before her.

Marchmont, as an invalid, was not agreeable to talk with. Tortured with pain, to which he brought no sort of self-control or resolution to endure, his incessant cry was for morphia or chloral to drown his sufferings, and although utterly dependent on the kindness of those about him for help, for relief, and for attention, he never attempted to conciliate any one of them, but, losing all sense of decency, would shriek at them all manner of accusations—that they wished for his death, and had endeavoured to compass it; that they had purposely given him something to put him into this state of torture; everything, in short, that a good man who is being martyred could possibly throw at a set of miscreants who were taking advantage of his weakness to murder him was hurled by Marchmont at the heads of his attendants, who, if they had spoken out their[Pg 107] minds, would have told him that only self-control on their parts prevented them from doing what he accused them of, and so getting rid of him for ever.

If the attack lasted only a short time, perhaps the nurse and servants would hold out without bursting into open rebellion; if it endured long, Fulvia generally found herself left at the end of it in almost sole attendance. The servants were free: they did not receive their wages and render their services in order to be abused and maltreated; but a wife must surely succour her husband, must be devoted to him in sickness and in health. Very faithfully, very coldly, very determinedly, had she, so far, performed her duty. The attack this time was an even worse one than usual. Mr. Brownrigg became uneasy, and at last said to Fulvia that further advice would be desirable. The invalid, he plainly[Pg 108] intimated, besides being so very ill, was so captious and dissatisfied that he, Mr. Brownrigg, would be glad that his treatment should have the approval of a high authority. Fulvia at once agreed—anything that Mr. Brownrigg thought desirable. She would beg him to telegraph to Sir Simon Sykes, the specialist whom Marchmont had already seen. They arranged this, and Mr. Brownrigg rode away. Then Fulvia went to Marchmont, and told him what had been settled. At first he seemed satisfied, then suddenly, with a vicious snarl, exclaimed:

‘It’s all rubbish. He’ll want at least two hundred guineas for taking such a journey here and back to London.’

‘Quite, I should say,’ replied his wife coldly. ‘And what difference can it make to you if he wanted five hundred guineas?’

‘Trust a beggar to be apt at spending other people’s money,’ was the gracious retort.

Fulvia did not speak. She slightly shrugged her shoulders, without any perceptible change of countenance, only her whole aspect expressed a supreme disdain, which Marchmont himself saw. Absorbed, however, in the wrongs which were being done to him and his money, he proceeded, after a glance at her:

‘And he’ll sit here for ten minutes, and tell us nothing that we didn’t know before, and then he’ll go away, and jabber with you in the drawing-room. You are all in league against me—every one of you.’

‘Do you think we should find it very difficult to dispose of you if we were?’ she asked, with icy contempt. ‘As you do not wish to have Sir Simon, I will send a[Pg 110] man after Mr. Brownrigg, and ask him not to telegraph.’

‘Do if you dare!’ almost shrieked Marchmont. ‘I’m ill, I dare say, but I have the use of my brains yet, and I know what I am doing. You want to leave me in the hands of this wretched village ignoramus, so that I may get partial recovery, and then you will be satisfied.’

‘You credit me with complicated motives. I am quite sure of this, that if you don’t behave more civilly to the “village ignoramus,” as you call him, he will refuse to come near you any more; and you will have to trust me alone as your physician. Of course no man, not to mention a gentleman, will stand being spoken to as if he were a thief and an impostor. I really think you had better try to understand that thoroughly.’

Marchmont subsided a little. There[Pg 111] was nothing he feared so much as being left alone with his illness; rather than suffer that, he would have grovelled before the meanest apothecary and would have implored him not to leave him to his fate.

That afternoon an answer came from Sir Simon to say he would come on the following afternoon. Fulvia had promised Hans to meet him on the morning of that day, but she sent him a note to say:

‘I cannot leave the house this morning, nor at all till evening. But I must see you before I try to sleep to-night. I have much to explain to you. All scruples have disappeared. I cannot live in this any longer. Meet me after nine, at the same place. I will come and will tell you what I have arranged.’

The day wore on. She scarcely left Marchmont’s side, sitting near him, ministering[Pg 112] to him during the hours in which the nurse was to take her rest; looking at him every now and then, with a strange, sombre light in her eyes, the inner glow of all the suppressed passion and wrong, and injustice and wretchedness, which for five years had been accumulating in her heart—the only light which can be given by the eyes which belong to a ruined life. All the day she was saying to herself, with fixed, immovable resolution:

‘Only this day more—then an end of it. I will wait till it is over. I will see this man, who will tell me just what they have all told me—the same wretched platitudes, meaning nothing; trying to cover up the one word, “hopeless,” trying to conceal the fact that it is death coming on. It has begun—it will be a long time before it is over, and I will not wait all that time. To-night, oh,[Pg 113] Dio mio! to leave the house, and never to return to it—never, never! Never to see this thing again, nor to hear his voice, nor to feel the shudder which comes whenever I go near him. I will tell Hans everything when I meet him to-night. Then I shall make him take me to the inn in the village, and leave me there till to-morrow. I won’t go to Minna—oh no, impossible! I would not pollute—no, pollute is not the word: it is remaining here which is pollution. I would not deceive her—that is it. I would not tell her one thing while all the time I was meaning to do quite another. That is a sort of pollution—yes, it is the kind at which I have never yet arrived. I will stay at the inn till to-morrow morning, and then he will come for me, and we will go away together. I shall make no secret of it.[Pg 114] He can do as he likes. He may tell them or not. It is nothing to me now. My life has been so ruined that, if I am to keep my friends who have never gone through this fire, I must live in undying misery and inward degradation. If I choose happiness and freedom, I must lose all my friends. Some lucky people can keep both. I have tried the one thing, and as long as there was nothing else I could just live in it—only just. But now ... one may be good when one does wrong sometimes. I can see that very plainly. One may be doing everything that is right and proper, and at the same time be a very bad person.

‘Wrong and right—what is wrong, and what is right? Because I was sold shamefully when I could not help myself, and could see no way out of it, does that[Pg 115] deprive me of the power of judging, when I am older and have had much experience? Who is to settle for us, if not ourselves? Oh, how wrong I was not to go away with Beppo—to run away, when he said he would take me with him! Now people will all say I have done wrong, but I will live rightly. It is quite right. I am not afraid. I wonder why I stay here now? Oh, it is better, I think. I will go on till night—till I have said good-night to him. He will expect to see me again in the morning, and time will pass, and I shall not be there. I shall not take any notice of him at all. It is not necessary. He may wonder and inquire and speculate, and say what he pleases. He may learn all his humiliation in public, for aught I care. It does not matter ... what time is it now, I wonder? Lunch-time, nearly.[Pg 116] Then there is the afternoon, and it will be almost evening when the doctor comes, and—he will stay all night, I suppose.

‘Well, I will give orders that all is to be ready for him. I shall dine with him, and talk to him, in that awful room, which is just like a sepulchre. The servants will be about, behind our chairs, waiting upon us, just as usual. The doctor will think me a very charming woman, and will be quite pleased to talk to me. We shall not mention him’—she cast a side-glance towards Marchmont, who, under the influence of a morphia injection, was now lying still, with eyes closed and yellowish, waxy-looking face, like a dead man. ‘We shall both know that there is no need to say anything; talking about unpleasant subjects is not appetising. Nothing will make any difference. In his heart the[Pg 117] doctor will say to himself: “I wonder what she married him for—money, I suppose. He must have been a horror when she first met him. Women will do anything to get money and money’s worth.”

‘After dinner I shall say that I am going to see my husband; that I am very tired, and shall not see him again to-night; that he is to ask for everything he wants, and that I have given orders that he is to be attended to. Then we shall shake hands, and I shall leave him in the dining-room with the dessert and the wine. Then I shall come back here, and shall make inquiries, and shall speak to the nurse, and shall say, to her more than to him, “Well, I hope you will have a good-night.” I shall then look round as one does before one leaves a room in which someone is ill, and I shall repeat,[Pg 118] “Good-night,” and shall go.... In ten minutes more I shall be on the path to the pond, breathing.’ She suddenly lifted her arms above her head, and stretched them out wide and high, as if to take in a deep draught of air, then heaved a huge sigh, and slowly let them fall again. The sigh was repeated, and her face looked worn, and almost desperate. Almost mechanically her thoughts went on, and with none of the excited hope which had heretofore floated them through her mind: ‘I shall breathe—oh, to breathe again, after being stifled for five years!’

She sat motionless again, until a servant came and told her that lunch was ready. Marchmont was still sleeping or stupefied. She went away, leaving the nurse, who had just come in, to take her place. In the dining-room she dismissed the servant[Pg 119] who was in waiting, and sat down alone in the immense, rather light, cold room, at a great table spread with snowy linen and glittering with silver and glass. There was perhaps no need for her to endure this solitary, cold, and comfortless splendour; but it is happy people who think of comforts and who arrange pleasant places in which to eat and drink and chat, not those whose lives are spoiled by a great wrong, so that they have no energy to attend to such trifles.

‘Am I excited, feverish? How ridiculous’ she thought, shrugging her shoulders and realizing for the first time that her lips were dry and her mouth parched. She took a draught of water, and sat looking at the untasted food, and thinking of quite other things.

‘How hungry I used to be once! How delicious everything tasted! How well I remember one day when Beppo took me! We walked—we could not afford carriages, not even a little carriage for a franc, to the gate—we walked on to the Appian Way. How beautiful it was! It was a spring morning. How the larks sang! how the little flowers gleamed in the grass, and the lizards ran in and out of the crevices of the tombs! and how the aqueducts marched away over the campagna towards the hills—those hills! How many things he told me! I put my arm through his, and we went on, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, looking at things and talking about them till we got past Casale Rotondo. There I grew impatient, and said it was time to have our lunch. We sat down by the roadside and ate. What had we? Each a hard-boiled egg and some of[Pg 121] the household bread, without any butter; an orange or two, and a little bottle of red wine, with a tin cup from which to drink it. When it was done I was still hungry, and said so. He looked at me suddenly—I remember it well—with a cloud on his face.

‘“Ma che! why did you not speak?” he said. “I would have given you mine.”

‘How I laughed! I was a mere child, and I thought a man like Beppo, so strong and so big compared with me, must be much more in need of food than I. Then he told me, I remember, how people like me, who were growing still and to whom all the world was new, needed so much more nourishment and so much oftener than those who were quite grown up and established, and who were not surprised at anything any more—like him. I said, “How could being surprised make one hungry?” and[Pg 122] I told him he was silly. He said, “Wait, my child. By the time you are ready to tell me that you understand what I say, I shall be dead; but I think, if you come to my grave and tell it to me there, I shall hear it.” Oh, how awfully sad were the things he sometimes said—all mixed with curious, funny observations at the same time! For the rest of our excursion he kept regretting every now and then that I had not had the other egg, and at the first little shop within the gate, as we returned, he bought me a panino with butter. It was very good.’

Fulvia had forgotten in her reminiscences the meal that actually stood before her. She had scarcely tasted food, but rose suddenly from the table, and very soon went back to her charge.

Presently he awoke from his drugged sleep to fresh pain, fresh fury, to ever[Pg 123] more exacting demands and wilder accusations. The hours dragged on until about six o’clock, when a servant came and told her that Sir Simon Sykes had arrived, and was in the library with Mr. Brownrigg. She went towards the room slowly, saying to herself, as if it were not really clear in her own mind:

‘It is coming nearer now, much nearer. There are not many hours more. Six o’clock, seven, eight, nine; in three hours I shall be free.’

She lifted her eyes towards the open hall door; the sunshine streamed in. All without was light and bright and warm. That was freedom.

Very late that night Signor Oriole sat in the room which was called his study, quite alone. He slept less and less as he grew older, and he was left, as usual, with all the lower part of the house to himself in a dead silence. His books and papers and writing materials were all around him. His study was removed only by a narrow little anteroom from that of Minna—her sitting-room and studio combined. These three rooms were old, with low roofs, and beams across the ceilings; but the original windows, small and high up in the wall, had been removed, and French ones opening[Pg 125] to the ground substituted for them. Of course the three windows all commanded the same view, of a woodland glade and a broad slope of grass like an avenue between thick walls of dark trees which sloped upwards, climbing a hill. It was a portion of the park belonging to Yewridge Hall—a part which the inhabitants of Minna’s house were free to wander in as much as they chose.

After Minna and Rhoda had gone upstairs Signor Oriole went to his study. The lamp was lighted, but the window was still open, and he went to it, and stood there, looking out. The yellow lamplight was behind him. Before him was the dark solemnity of the glade and wood, but that, too, soon began to take a darkly silvery appearance. A strange light, at once deep and pale, began to palpitate in the sky. His eyes were riveted on the summit of the[Pg 126] little hill, for the awakening, if one may so call it, in the sky seemed to proceed from there. Whiter and whiter it grew, clearer and clearer, till all nature seemed to wait breathlessly for the visitor whose advent was thus foretold.

She came at last; the outline of the hill-top grew suddenly sharp and clear, then a crisp white spark glittered on it—spread, grew, dilated, enlarged into a gradually growing silver disc. All above, below, around, is glorified, regalized, resplendent, as the moon floats up with majesty into the clear dark spaces of the heavens.

‘Ah!’ said Signor Giuseppe to himself, as he watched the spectacle with the beginning of a smile, and with the matter-of-fact eyes of a child of the South, ‘it is a fine night.’

He nodded his head, whose white hairs[Pg 127] had taken a reflected glitter from the light without, and, leaving the blind up and the shutters open, he turned again to his writing-table, took up his pen, and resumed his work. He was writing about days long gone by; about old Rome, and things that had happened in her. It was an employment in which he succeeded, almost always, in finding repose for his mind, peace for his thoughts.

He had written on for some time when he heard the hall-door open and shut. He had no doubt as to who the visitor might be, but as a matter of precaution he got up, opened the door, and looked forth into the hall, where the light was still burning.

He had been right. Hans Riemann was there, hanging up his little woollen cap upon a peg of the hatstand. His face was pale and angry. When he saw Signor[Pg 128] Giuseppe, he did not speak, but looked at him with a curious expression.

‘Yes, I’m off to bed. I think I shall be off altogether, very soon. This is a dull hole when all is said and done.’

‘In the name of our hostess and her family I thank you for your kind expressions,’ replied Signor Giuseppe, very politely and very cuttingly.

‘Did it sound rude?’ he asked, in a tone of indifference which heightened the said rudeness. ‘I’m sorry if it did. Good-night.’

He ran quickly up the stairs. Signor Oriole, shrugging his shoulders, returned to his study and his work. After some time—he knew not how long—the first sensation stole over him of something which[Pg 129] he took for weariness. At first he did not heed it, but wrote on, wishing to finish a long paragraph in which he was engaged. The curious sensation continued. He laid his pen down, and, resting one elbow on the table, propped his head on his hand, and meditated a little. As he meditated, he gradually grew conscious of the intense silence and stillness which prevailed both inside and outside—conscious of it, and impressed by it. It must have been working itself into his senses and his brain all the time that he had been writing, and most likely irritating him. Signor Giuseppe was a true Roman; he could work better, play better, think, philosophize, yea, even sleep better, in a noise than in the most idyllic silence ever known. Just now he shrugged his shoulders, and muttered to himself: ‘Per Dio! what a deathly silence!’

Oppressed by it, he knew not why, he went towards the window with the half-formed intention of closing it. It was as if the immense silence of the night flowed in through the open window, and imposed itself upon that which reigned in the house also, and made it almost intolerable to him.

Standing there near the window, and looking out, and again oppressed by the silence, he recalled to himself the walk home with Minna one night, from her studio to Casa Dietrich, when she had spoken to him of the noise of Rome, and of how she delighted in it.

To Casa Dietrich that night the signora had returned, had summoned him to her rooms, and had told him that Marchmont had spoken to her about Fulvia, and that she intended to marry her to him. She had told him with the most[Pg 131] accurate foreknowledge of the horror it would inspire in him; she had listened with smiling obstinacy to all his expostulations, reproaches and accusations, and had then told him:

‘You have yourself to thank for it. You have known for many years that I was not a woman to be played with with impunity. You have refused my reasonable wishes and demands; you must not be surprised and angry that when the time comes I act in the manner most convenient to my interests and to those of my daughter. Mio caro, I have waited a long time for freedom. This man offers it to me—freedom and independence. I shall take it. You can do what you like.’

‘You say I played with you!’ he exclaimed. ‘And you—what have you done with me? You say I have myself to thank for it all; and you—whom have you[Pg 132] to thank, that you are now in this position, that you must sell your child disgracefully to get what you call your freedom? Bianca, give the child to me. I will work for her; I will provide for her. She shall be no burden to you.’

‘And I?’ she asked. ‘My daughter is no burden to me. She is the most valuable piece of property I have. No; I have made up my mind. Do not trouble yourself in the matter. It is all right.’

All this scene came back to him with the utmost vividness as he stood there in this English house, looking forth upon this English park, with the fresh damp English air blowing upon his forehead and face. He felt it not.

He was again steeped in a totally different atmosphere, in the soft, deliciously enervating air of Rome—the odour[Pg 133] of the streets, of the houses; that peculiar, half-pungent, half-debilitating perfume which assails the senses there, and bathes them, and takes them captive, pervading everything, and which is like no other atmosphere in the world—this ichor he felt and imbibed now, and it was like new life to him.

The past, dark and mysterious beyond all words to describe, with its processions of Caesars, its armies of trained fighting men, its dream of fair women of every shade of vice and virtue, its holocausts of human victims—the blood-soaked, sun-soaked, art-soaked past; the vivid, noisy present, full of life and action, of battles fought and of grand hope for the future, in which his life had been passed—all these were summed up and concentrated as it were in that wondrously scented air of Rome, and in Rome he now was, with a[Pg 134] fever in his veins, a passion of longing which tore his heart-strings, parted his lips, and drew from his heart a slight sound, between a groan and a sigh.

‘I must go. I must breathe that air once again before I die—all the agony and all the rapture of it. I must pace those streets again, and feel those stones beneath my feet, though every one were a burning coal that blistered them.’

The air blew in upon him in a rougher gust, both keen and damp, from the mountains of the North and her wild wastes of moorland; from her gray, monotonous sea, ‘the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea,’ and the nerves of the man of the South shuddered[Pg 135] under its alien breath. It had awakened him from his dream; he opened his eyes and brought his thoughts once more to reality.

He laid his hand on the window to push it to, and as he did so it seemed to him that there was a slight sound outside it. Not a sound whose nature he could have specified—not a sigh, not a groan or a sob, and certainly not a cry or a spoken word, but perhaps something of them all. Nothing deterred by the eeriness of the thing, for he knew not fear, he drew the window more widely open, instead of closing it, and looked forth again. The scene had become even more beautiful than before. Arrested, he still looked, half gazing at the view before him, half listening for that indescribable sound to come again, when his eyes, long-sighted and keen, detected at some little distance[Pg 136] from the house, moving hesitatingly and uncertainly along, and emerging from the shadow of the wood into the moonlit grass, a slight, ink-black woman’s figure. It paused suddenly, and perhaps turned. Of that he could not be sure in the uncertain light, but the figure was there. It moved about now quickly, now slowly. Now it looked as if its head were bowed; again, as though its face were raised; and once certainly it stretched its arms out with the gesture of one who wrings hands in dire distress.

Signor Giuseppe stood riveted to his place, not in the least afraid, but very curious. Now the figure had disappeared again into the shadow of the wood. He saw it no more, though he strained his eyes to discover it. He stood for some time, and was about to turn away—so dense are our outward senses, so doth this[Pg 137] envelope of flesh conceal one spirit from another, though that other may be calling upon us, with agony unspeakable to bear, to help and to comfort.

Thus he stood, when, coming from his right hand, from under the shadow of the house, the figure in one second stood immediately in front of him, with the light of the lamp from within falling full upon its face.

That face was very pale, very drawn, very much worn with anguish and pain; the eyes which plunged themselves into his were haggard and glazed, and weary beyond description.

It was Fulvia’s face; those were Fulvia’s eyes, and Fulvia’s hands they were which were suddenly stretched out towards him; but it was no voice he had ever heard before which, in a hoarse, broken whisper, groaned forth:

For a moment he stood motionless—petrified; then, stretching out his arms too, and making a step towards her, he finished the tearing asunder of the veil which she had at last rent.

‘Oh, help me! help me!’ she said, in the same unnatural voice, as she fell, with the heavy gesture of one whose will no longer controls his movements, into his arms, broken, desperate, recking nothing of showing her mortal anguish, caring no more to hide anything from his eyes, at any rate.

He held her up in silence. Neither of them spoke for a long time after they had uttered those fateful words. Her hands grasped his shoulders with the clinging of one who has nothing else to hold by. Her head was prostrate, low upon his breast.

Signor Giuseppe’s white hairs mingled with the bright waves and coils of golden brown; his lips touched them, moved, but he uttered no words, till at last, as she raised her face, furrowed with suffering almost out of resemblance to her natural one, he said in a deep voice, coming from his inmost soul: ‘Mia figlia, stand here no more. Come in and tell me what has happened and what you wish.’

‘Oh, I believe you can do nothing, nothing for me, padre mio! I do not know why I am here—I did not mean to come. I did not mean to leave the side of the pond alive, and yet I came on and on here, because I have something to tell—there is something that someone must know. I am frightened! I had such a horrible dream. At least, I think it was a dream. Well, I will come in. No one will disturb us?’

‘No one; I am alone. There will be no interruption,’ said he. ‘Come in. Tell me your dream. Perhaps it was no dream after all.’

He drew her within the room, and closed the window at last. Fulvia gazed about her as if bewildered by the lamplight, and by the walls which surrounded her. He took her to a couch which stood against the wall, placed her upon it, and seated himself beside her. She took one of his hands between hers, and, drawing a long sigh, said:

‘How strange this all is! Father, my father, my father! There is someone, after all. Padre mio, what will you do for me?’

‘Child, anything—anything in the world, when you tell me what it is,’ said he, with love and anguish in his voice. There was something in her whole aspect[Pg 141] which frightened him, or, rather, which filled him with vague alarm and apprehension.

Signor Giuseppe was not one of the people who are easily frightened. There was, however, something enigmatical in Fulvia’s demeanour—in her great excitement and breathless haste, and in the sudden strange pauses she made, when a curious, bewildered look came over her whole face, and her eyes looked as if they were seeking backwards in her heart for some clue, or purpose, or intention, which she had formed and then lost.

‘Two in the morning! Well, I want you to take me away, now at once, from this place. Isn’t it cruel of me to ask such a thing of you? But I cannot help it. I have been here long enough—too long. I[Pg 142] have been here so long that I have—nearly—committed a frightful sin. It is late—it is a strange time to be getting up and going away, I know; but I will go, I must go—and you will come with me.’

She looked at him with an attempt at a smile, and pressed his hands convulsively. Signor Oriole had lived through many strange experiences, through scenes of ‘battle and murder and sudden death,’ through perils of every description, both active and passive. Many a thrill had shot through him in moments when his life had hung on a thread—thrills of excitement, thrills of nervous tension, of fierce exultation, of forlorn hope; but never had he experienced this thrill before—the thrill which is at the same time a cold chill, and which is fear.

‘I will go with you when you have told[Pg 143] me one thing,’ he said, and all the blood left his face. ‘You were desperate to-night when you left your husband’s house. How did you leave it? Have you killed him?’

Fulvia rose erect from the bowed-down, crouching position of hopeless misery in which she had been sitting, rose as if electrified; he saw that her whole frame stiffened and grew rigid. Her eyes became fixed, her lips parted; she looked as if her spirit hung in the scales between reason and madness, and as if the balance might incline to madness at a second’s notice. There was some recollection of freezing horror in her soul, which his question, prompted by a flash of inspiration as to the worst that might have happened, had roused again in its full strength. He almost repented him of having asked it, and looked at her, trying to put an[Pg 144] expression of tender kindness into his eyes while the awful fear tugged at his heart.

Suddenly the expression which so froze him relaxed. Her physical rigidity also gave way. Her very hands became limp and nerveless, and she replied, as if in answer to some everyday question:

‘No. I thought I would. I told him I was going to—and then—I did not. I came away. Now, father, let us go away—quite away.’

‘At once, with all my heart,’ said he promptly, as he rose and looked about him. The ghastly uncertainty was gone from his heart. The light of reason was in Fulvia’s eyes. He knew she had spoken the truth to him. He was now ready to give himself up to her lightest wish, but, as his eyes fell upon his work and papers, upon the quiet, almost solemnly peaceful room, as his ears again became[Pg 145] conscious of the silence which had at first annoyed, but which now soothed them, as he saw, in a side-glance, the broken figure of Fulvia, a load like lead settled on his heart.

Then he took heart again. There had been no crime, let the wretchedness be what it might. His practical sense came forward once more; and began to grapple with the real and almost grotesque problem, ‘What am I to do with her? Where am I to take her?’

‘You will not see Minna?’ he asked. ‘I could awaken her and bring her down here in a minute.’

She was dressed, as he now observed, as if for travelling, in a very plain, but[Pg 146] trim, elegant black walking-dress, a small, closely fitting, black straw bonnet trimmed with velvet; a so-called dust-cloak which was in reality a costly thing of silk and lace, was hung over her arm and had remained there through all the agitation and tragedy; long soft gray gloves fitted her hands closely, and wrinkled over her wrists and arms; everything she had on was quiet and unobtrusive to the last degree theoretically, but elegant, fashionable, and noticeable from its perfect fit and style, and from the beauty and individuality of the woman who wore it.

And nothing that she had put on could have been otherwise. We may change our clothes, we may transform ourselves as to outer covering, we may exchange the masterpieces of a Worth for the botched performances of a village Miss[Pg 147] Smith, but if we are Fulvia Marchmont we can be no one else. The reverse holds equally good. Signor Oriole was troubled, not so much by the elegance and distinction which made itself apparent through all the seeming simplicity of the costume—he was troubled to know why she had that costume on at all.

‘Very well,’ he said, in answer to her last words. ‘You must excuse me an instant, while I put one or two things in a bag and get some money. And you—have you anything? Are you prepared? I hope at least you have none of his money with you.’

‘I have not a penny, carissimo. All that I have of his are these clothes which I have on, as one may not go about the world without them. As soon as we get somewhere where you can buy me some others, I will be without these too. I[Pg 148] have nothing—absolutely nothing. I will sit here and wait for you.’

He went out of the room, and softly upstairs, along a long, rambling passage which led to his own room, and another, both of which were rather remote from the rest of the house. The other room was that occupied by Richard Hamilton, and upon its door Signor Oriole knocked softly.

Hamilton appeared to be a light sleeper, for his answer came at once, ‘Who’s there?’

‘I,’ said Signor Giuseppe, opening the door, which was not locked, and going just within the room. ‘Hamilton, I want to speak to you.’

‘You—are you ill, sir?’ asked the other, in quick alarm. He struck a match, lighted a candle, and sat up in bed, looking at his visitor.

‘No, I am not ill. Listen, and speak softly. Something has happened, as to which it pleases me to take you into my confidence. I can trust you.... My daughter is downstairs——’

He paused for a moment; Hamilton stared at him as if fascinated, and then said, almost in a whisper:

‘Yes, Fulvia; she is in dire distress. Something which she does not choose to explain to me yet, or which she cannot explain, has happened. She has left her house; I do not call it her home——’

‘She has chosen to break down the barrier which has always hitherto been between us. She has claimed my help, and has required that I shall take her away from here at once, now, you understand.[Pg 150] It is her right, and it is my pleasure to do it. She refuses to see Minna. I think she is too much broken to be able to endure even Minna’s sympathy. I leave everything loose that belongs to me. I look to you to make all clear, and to explain to your sister why I leave thus.’

‘But where are you going? What are you going to do?’ asked Hamilton in his clear tones, which always sounded so cold, and which yet were so much to be trusted.

‘That is madness. Look here: you must do something, or she will be worse off than ever.’

‘I shall take her to Italy,’ said Signor Giuseppe, after a moment’s pause.

‘No, not to Rome. I will take her to[Pg 151] Sicily, to my home there which she has never seen.’

‘That is right—yes, that is the right thing to do; and to set about it you must go to London; and there is a train to London in two hours from now, at —— Junction, which is six miles away. I will drive you there,’ said Hamilton with utter sang-froid, as he cast the bedclothes from him and prepared to get up. ‘Do you go and pack up whatever you may wish to take, and in five minutes I will be ready. This is a business which needs speed.’

‘You are right. Your head is clear,’ said Signor Oriole, with the ghost of his old smile, at once sarcastic and approving. He left the room and went to his own, where he collected all he could think of into a small portmanteau, stowed away his pocket-book, some notes and gold, and a[Pg 152] cheque-book on his London bankers, and was ready. As he emerged from his room after this occupation, Hamilton came out of his, looking as cool, as self-possessed, and as fit as if he were going down to breakfast in the everyday way.

‘I have written a note to Minna,’ he said: ‘I will put it outside her door, so she will have it when she is called. Now let us go downstairs. Of course Mrs. Marchmont will hate me for being in at this, but there’s nothing else for it.’

Softly they went downstairs, and the slumbering inmates of the rambling old house knew nothing of what was going on. Without hesitation or explanation they went straight to Signor Oriole’s study.

There the lamp was still burning; there Fulvia still sat, her hands folded one over the other on her knees, her eyes fixed on the opposite wall. She looked up with a[Pg 153] hungry eagerness to be gone as they came in, and her eyes dilated with a haughty displeasure as she saw Richard Hamilton.

‘Mrs. Marchmont,’ said he in the most matter-of-fact tone, ‘Signor Oriole tells me he is taking you to Sicily, and that you have excellent reasons for wishing to set off at once. If you will have a few moments’ indulgence for us, we will harness the little carriage, and I will drive you to—to catch the London mail.’

‘I will wait, but you will be quick?’ she said, as her expression again grew quieter. ‘I don’t want to be here when the day really begins, that is all.’

‘When the day really begins I hope to be putting you in the train for King’s Cross,’ said he, as he left the room with Signor Oriole.

How the thing was done with such incredible[Pg 154] speed and silence and accuracy they never knew. Circumstances were favourable. All the household were in their deepest sleep. The stable and offices were away from the house. The matter was accomplished very soon. Signor Oriole returned to the house, took his daughter’s hand, and said ‘Come!’

She rose and followed him. In the yard they found Hamilton throwing some shawls and rugs into the carriage, which was a low, open one, but had a box for the driver.

‘Here,’ said he, ‘get in, Mrs. Marchmont. Put on your cloak—so; and wrap all these things about you’—he was doing it himself as fast as he could—‘for the morning air is sharp, and it will be cold on the open road.’

He helped her in, and she mechanically submitted to everything he did. Signor[Pg 155] Oriole got in beside her. Hamilton wrapped him too in a rug, got on to the box, and, not much caring now how much noise he made, whipped up the horse. In ten minutes they were nearly a mile away from West Wall, and by dint of good driving arrived at —— Junction with ten minutes to spare, just as a wild primrose and purple sunrise was flaming over the violet wastes of the German Ocean, which rose and fell and sobbed and moaned under it like some living monster disturbed in its sleep.

The few last hurried words were exchanged. Signor Oriole promised to write from London and tell all he intended to do. He swore that he would never lose sight of his friends in this Northern land; he would not forget them, he would not be silent to them. As for seeing them, that time alone would[Pg 156] decide, and—he gave a quick side-glance at Fulvia, who was pacing about with head downcast and in utter abstraction, her only glances being occasionally in the direction from which the express ought to come.

It did come at last. It made only a very brief stoppage at that small junction. There was an empty first-class compartment, into which the travellers got. At the last moment, as Hamilton, standing with bared head, looked at Fulvia and wished her good-bye, without even holding out his hand to intrude upon her grief, she roused for a moment, held out hers with an impulsive movement, and said:

‘Good-bye, Mr. Hamilton. You have been a true friend to me to-day. I’ll never forget it.’

‘Then say “a rivederci,”’ he besought her, with a sudden change of expression.

He clasped her hand, and looked into her eyes, and dropped from the footboard, as the train was in motion. Soon it was out of sight.

As he turned again to the outside of the station, the fleeting glory of that sunrise was over. The heaven was gray; every splendour had departed. From the leaden sky, a drizzling rain had begun to fall into a slate-coloured sea which moaned and growled like the ‘fierce old mother’ that she was.

Hamilton collected all the rugs and shawls, folded them neatly into a bundle, and covered them up with a mackintosh. One he reserved to fold round his own knees as he drove back, in the teeth of a raw wind which not even August could make warm. His face was as[Pg 158] gray as the day; his thoughts resembled both.

‘So! She is gone! And gone for what, and to what? If only that d——l would die! But he won’t. I wonder what happened—I wonder what drove her to this? Something horrible, I haven’t a doubt—not a doubt! Oh, Lord, what a world it is—what a world! And how we are handicapped who have scruples about playing off our own bat and letting all the rest go hang. Hans didn’t mind, and so perhaps she is lost to me for ever.’

It was seven o’clock when he drove into the stableyard of his sister’s house, and confronted the astonished youth who was Minna’s only man-servant, and whom horror and amaze at what he believed to have been the stealing of the property committed to his charge had reduced to such[Pg 159] a state of imbecility that its reappearance only served to more thoroughly bewilder and terrify him. Hamilton threw the reins to him, bade him look to the horse, and went into the house, leaving him to recover as best he might from his stupor.

It was still long before noon when Signor Oriole and his charge arrived in London. Some little conversation they had had on the journey on the most prosaic, matter-of-fact details, as to where they should go, and when, and how. They had decided upon travelling by train to Naples, and thence taking the steamer to Catania, a little to the north of which lay the small estate which had come to Signor Giuseppe. They were to stay in London for the rest of the day, and for that night. It was with some little difficulty that he persuaded Fulvia to do this; her wide-open eyes[Pg 161] betrayed no look of drowsiness, and he at least could see the expression of suspense and restrained excitement on her face. She had told him nothing of what had finally driven her to him, and made her so firmly bent on escaping from her husband’s house, from West Wall—yea, even from England. When he suggested the rest in London a blank look came over her face.

‘Could we not take the tidal train to Calais to-night?’ she asked imploringly.

‘We certainly could, but I do not wish either you or myself to break down on the journey,’ he said; ‘and, mia cara, if you will let me sleep for a few hours, I am at your service.’

‘Oh, forgive me, padre mio! Do not let us speak of it again. We will stay here all night and leave to-morrow morning.’

Thus it was arranged. Signor Giuseppe employed part of the day in certain business transactions with his bankers, and in laying in a stock of some travelling requisites whose very existence Fulvia appeared to have forgotten. She went with him everywhere; she seemed nervous and afraid to be left alone in the hotel, and told him she could not possibly sleep, even if she tried to do so. He let her have her way, and the long day wore on, and he insisted upon her going to bed early and trying to sleep.

Their rooms were next door to one another, and he promised that when she was in bed he would go and say good-night to her. She presently called him through the door which joined the rooms. He wondered whether she would tell him now, as he went into the room and saw her lying still and white-looking,[Pg 163] still with those eyes so painfully wide open.

But Fulvia did not speak on that subject. She held his hand for awhile, as he sat beside her bed, and looked at him, and said:

‘I don’t think I shall go to sleep. I wish I had gone to a doctor and asked for a sleeping-draught. Promise not to shut that door, will you?’

‘Certainly, darling. It shall be open all night,’ he assured her, and in a few minutes, to his profound relief, he saw the eyelids, heavy and purple with grief and long vigil, fall. Once or twice she raised them again. Once she pressed his hand, and carried it to her lips. Then the clasp of her fingers upon his gradually relaxed. By-and-by he saw that Fulvia slept—a natural sleep.

‘Thank God!’ he said to himself. ‘I[Pg 164] should have been afraid to leave London if I had known she had had no rest.’

Still without any explanation having been made, they left London on the following morning. Now that she had rested, and looked strong and steady, if pale and unspeakably sad, he was ready to agree to her request that they should only break the journey once before getting to Naples—at Milan. She never swerved from this resolution, and they were, as it seemed, very soon far away from England, had traversed France, had travelled through the snows of Switzerland, all crowded with tourists of every description, had at last reached the southern side of the Alps, and heard their own tongue again. As the heat grew greater, the number of English and American excursionists diminished. The burning plain of Lombardy was behind them, and on a still, breathless, sultry[Pg 165] evening they entered the great desolate space of the Milan station, coldly orderly under a glare of electric light.

It was after they had dined that evening, and had left the coffee-room and were seated in Fulvia’s room, with windows open to let in any stray breath of air which might be wandering about, that she said to him deliberately:

‘Padre mio, I am going to tell you about it. I could not speak before, and I do not wish to speak now, but still less do I wish to have to speak after we have got home. Let us leave all this behind us, and begin everything afresh.’

‘It was thus, then. You know the kind of life which for five years I had led and had made no sign—no outward sign, that[Pg 166] is. I thought I was so strong. I began to pride myself upon it, and to feel a brutal gladness in it, as if I were above and outside the world of other people and might despise them. I did despise a great many of them, women especially, whom I used to hear loudly mourning and lamenting because they had not got everything they wanted, not because they were like me, without anything I wanted, and forced to live a life I hated. I used to wonder how they would conduct themselves if they were really tried. I believed that I had been so tried that there was nothing in the world to move me, or tempt me, or make me waver from the path on which I was walking. Then——’

‘No, he did not come and make love to me. If he had done that at once, and had[Pg 167] really begun to make love to me, as so many others had tried to do, I should have smiled, as I always did, and brushed him away at once, as such creatures always can be brushed away by the women who do not want them. But it all grew so gradually that I did not know what was coming. I really was blind for a long time. I swear to you that until he came to West Wall, quite unexpectedly, he had never spoken a word of love to me. There was something—something deep down in my heart. I thought it was gratitude to him for his kindness, his services, his perfect delicacy during a very miserable illness of my husband’s when we were on the Riviera, before we came to England in the early spring.

‘I should have loved him, I think, and should have confessed it to myself, if he had never said anything, just because it[Pg 168] would have been much more respectful and chivalrous than the conduct of those other creatures who think a miserable woman can cure her misery, and wishes to do so, in their society.... But that did not last long. I don’t know how it came about in the end, only I found that he did love me, though he had been so long without saying anything about it. I wasn’t shocked—somehow, I was not even surprised, but the horror of it was that, instead of being utterly contemptuous, as I always had been before, I was glad: heaven seemed opened to me.

‘It went on—of course it was easy for it to go on, after it had once begun; and insensibly I began to think, not that it was impossible, but to ask myself why there should be anything wrong in it—why I should not have done with all that—and go away with him, as he wanted me[Pg 169] to, and travel with him, and share his life, and know some happiness, and feel what it is to live, before I should have grown too old to care about anything. What is the use of telling lies about such things? Besides, I never could tell lies, either to myself or to anyone else. I knew that it was impossible to be more unhappy and dissatisfied and hungry for everything I could not get than I was then, living an exemplary life, doing my duty and earning the respect of all who knew me. What was their respect to me? I am sure I did not care anything about it. As for resignation, that is utterly unnatural, and even wrong, for anyone in my position. But I need not tell you all I thought. It would take hours, and do no good, and not explain anything, after all. The more I argued with myself, the more convinced I grew that there would be nothing wrong[Pg 170] in reversing the picture, and trying what going away and leaving my duty undone might bring for me.

‘Then he became ill—you know. I had borne a great many of these illnesses before. I don’t know that this was any worse than the others had been, or any different. It was much the same as usual, I believe. It was I who was changed, and to whom everything which had so far got to seem deadly indifferent, beneath the trouble of noticing, now seemed like stabs, like stings, like mortal insults and wounds—intolerable tortures which no one was called upon to endure, who could escape from them. I quite made up my mind. I was perfectly reckless. I resolved to do it. I had to put off a promised meeting with Hans from the morning of that day—you know which—till the evening. I told him to be at the pond after nine. I did not[Pg 171] know what would happen before then. The doctor came—you know, the man from London. I knew what he would say.

‘I did not know what he would do, whether he would stay all night at the Hall, or go to Mr. Brownrigg’s, or go home again. I had ordered a room to be got ready for him, in case he should stay. He decided in the end to dine with me and Mr. Brownrigg, whom I invited to remain, and to stay all night at Mr. Brownrigg’s. There was nothing interesting at the Hall, as he soon saw. They saw my husband, and had a consultation, and then called me, and went through all that solemn farce again which they always play. He was very ill, but they did not think him in immediate danger—the chief thing was to keep his mind tranquil, and let him feel as little depressed as possible—amuse him, in[Pg 172] short, as well as might be! Padre mio, I ask you, what did I, what could I, care whether he were tranquil or agitated, cheerful or depressed? I said nothing to them, of course. They knew all about it.

‘They cast down their eyes as they spoke, and did not look at each other, nor very much at me. I said yes and no, and felt such an immense ennui—indescribable. Then we dined together. They knew all about the skeleton belonging to me, which was not even in a cupboard, but quite visible, in a room only a few doors away; but we talked and laughed. Is there any moment in our lives in which we cannot talk and laugh? Sir Simon Sykes is quite witty; he told us some most laughable stories about patients and doctors in London, at which even I was amused, and which made Mr. Brownrigg cry, “Capital![Pg 173] capital!” and laugh till the tears ran down his cheeks. Dinner lasted rather a long time. I intended to go to him before I went away for ever. At last they had gone away, and then I turned into his room, to give the usual look round, so as to get it done with, without seeming remarkable. It was nearly ten o’clock. “In a few minutes,” I thought, “all will be settled, and I can go.”

‘In his room I found the nurse, to whom I had had almost to go on my knees a few days before to prevail upon her to stay. She had moved as far away from him as she could, and was sitting, where he could see her, with her fingers in her ears, looking sullen and obstinate. She had often complained, but I had never seen her look like that before. As soon as I came in, she got up, and said:

‘“Mrs. Marchmont, I am sorry to inconvenience you, but I have to tell you that I cannot remain any longer to nurse Mr. Marchmont. I don’t know what he is or where he comes from, but though I have nursed all kinds of men of the roughest sort—navvies, and coal-heavers, and drunkards, and as bad as bad can be, in the hospitals, I never in all my time have heard such words as he has been pouring out upon me for the last hour. I leave to-morrow. I shall explain to my matron, and if she dismisses me I can’t help it. I will not stay here!”

‘Of course, there was only one thing that I could say to her. I knew she spoke the truth; I could not be angry with her. I believe I spoke with a smile, for the thought in my heart was, “Then we are both going away. How happy we are!” I said, “I am very sorry you have[Pg 175] had such an unpleasant experience. I do not ask you to remain. You can go. Good-night.” She looked at me for a moment, and then went away. He had not spoken. As soon as she had gone, and the door was shut, he turned to me and asked where I had been all that time. With the doctors, I told him. They had both gone.

‘“Ah! and have you decided on a plan for my destruction?” he asked me, with the sort of laugh that he had sometimes.

‘“I am sorry to say that, when we did speak of you, the only thing that was discussed was the best means for prolonging your life,” I replied. I had never felt like that before; I had never felt him to be so wicked, nor myself so wronged, as I did at that moment. In the next everything was changed.

‘“You hate me—me, who have done[Pg 176] everything for you. You wish me dead. And I married you when no one else would have married you. I raised you from beggary—practical beggary—to this!” I heard what he said, and, though it is so monstrous, I knew in an instant that he believed what he said—he was firmly convinced of it. He was sure that he had really done me an unexampled benefit in taking me away from my shabby, poverty-stricken home and my equivocal surroundings, and in making me a rich man’s wife—his own legal, unassailable wife.’ She laughed, and there was a sound of bitter tears in her laugh.

‘I laugh now. I laughed then, too. I could not help it. It was all so—funny, in a way. I had intended to answer him, to pour out upon him the whole torrent of my wrongs and my sufferings and my martyrdom; but as soon as he had spoken[Pg 177] those words, and I saw that he really meant and believed them all, I knew it would be utterly useless. It would only waste time, and wear out my energies, so I said nothing of all that. I resolved that he should think me as bad as possible, that he should have every ground for appealing to the world and the law, when I had gone, and saying, “See how she has betrayed me! Set me free from her at once.” So I gathered myself together, and said,

‘“You are perfectly right. I do hate you. I loathe you, and I wish with all my heart that you were dead. Then I should have a chance of being happy before I have grown too old and too warped and too ill-tempered to be capable of feeling what happiness is.”

‘“Happiness—oh!” said he: “which of them is it, pray, whose sighs you wish to[Pg 178] reward? That painter-fellow, with the sentimental eyes, or the Englishman with the starched cravat—your dear friend’s brother? It’s a race between them, as I have seen for some time, and I only am in the way.”

‘I did not understand him altogether. I suppose it was just an additional insult thrown in. He wished to drag in Minna’s name because I love her, and say something offensive about her or about someone who belonged to her. I do not know whether I turned red or pale with anger. I felt a hot glow all over me, like a breath of air from a furnace. “I could be happier with a ploughboy, who was honest, than with you,” I said, “if one must have someone to be happy with. I don’t know why one should not be happy alone, feeling free and decent, and able to respect one’s self again, mind and body.”

‘“You will never be happy, then, either with or without someone,” was his answer. “Never, while I am here. I am not dead yet, and I’m not going to die, whatever you may think; and as long as I live here, you are my wife—and here you have to stay. You can do nothing to help yourself—nothing at all.”

‘Two thoughts came into my mind at the same moment, I think. First, that I had so behaved that this creature trusted me; despite all he had done to crush every good feeling in me, he had not been able to crush out my truth and my honesty. While he accused me in one breath of wishing him dead and of being in a plot to bring about his death, in the next he told me I could never be free while he lived, because he took it for granted that I should never desert him. That was one thought, and the next was, as my eyes fell[Pg 180] upon a table on which stood some drugs, that in one moment I could put him out of the way, still his horrible voice, kill his abominable power for ever.

‘I did not speak for a moment. The two thoughts were fighting together in my mind. I went up to the table, and took from it the bottle of morphia and the little needle for injecting it, and I went up to him.

‘The last thing the doctors had said was that he was to have morphia in moderate quantities. I knew exactly how much. So long as the paroxysms of violent pain lasted it was to be administered. I went up to him, as I tell you. I suppose there must have been some change in my look or on my face, for he suddenly said, in a voice of suspicion and fear:

‘“What have you got there? What do[Pg 181] you want? Why do you look at me like that?”

‘“You know what this is,” said I; “it is the morphia which they have been giving you, to take away your pain and make you sleep. You have behaved in such a manner to Nurse Agnes that—you heard what she said—she has gone away, and does not intend to enter your room again. You have treated your servant Morrison so that he is in much the same frame of mind. I do not know whether he will come, even if I were to go to him and beg him to do so. You have, as usual, left it all to me, because no one else will come near you. Do you think that I have a spirit more slavish and more contemptible than that of these servants? I have just told you that I loathe you and wish you were dead. By the order of your doctors, and especially of this great[Pg 182] authority from London, you are to have an injection of this stuff in your arm every night at bedtime, and as much oftener as may be necessary. You think I shall endure everything, I see. You think I shall only talk about my unhappiness—never rebel against it. You are forced to honour me and trust me in your heart, you horrible coward! while you abuse me and tell shameful lies of me with your lips. Do you think I shall bear it for ever? What if I choose to put an end to it now? You could not prevent my doing so. You are weak and helpless and paralyzed. I am strong and young and able to move where I will and do all I wish to, physically.

‘“I can do just what I like with you as you lie there. I can fill this syringe with the quantity of morphia prescribed by the doctor, and so secure you some hours[Pg 183] of rest and forgetfulness of your pain, or I can put into it three times as much as the doctor ordered, and so put you into a sleep from which you will never awaken. Do you understand? Now, this instant, I can do it. Reflect well and speak honestly, if you can, for once in your life. Do you think it would be very strange if I decided to give you too much? Do you really think I am incapable of it? Do you think also that I am not quite clever enough to escape any disagreeable consequences of doing it? Bah! speak the truth. Tell me, which do you think would be my best plan—from my point of view, not from yours?”

‘Then he was really terrified, and showed the abject coward which in his soul he is. He began to whine and cry and whimper, and to tell me how he loved me, and that it was because he saw that other people loved me also, and he could[Pg 184] not bear it, that he was jealous and fretful and irritable. He said he had always adored me from the very first; he said a great many things the hearing of which made me sick with rage. Then he whined and prayed and cried, and begged me to spare his life, and then he said he trusted me and always had trusted me. He was so pitiful, so abject, so utterly contemptible, that I began to feel as if killing him would be like stepping on some crawling beetle or caterpillar and killing it—an ugly, repulsive little object, padre mio, but quite pitiably helpless when confronted with a human being.... And then it was true: he did trust me. I never yet deceived anyone who trusted in me. I became recklessly contemptuous of all that might happen. I took my resolution. Physically I would spare him, morally I would slay him. I was a little mad, I think, or[Pg 185] was I sane then, and am I a little mad now?’

‘You are sane enough now, carissima, and you were sane then. I see nothing mad in anything you have said or done,’ her father told her.

‘Perhaps.’ She sighed profoundly, then went on: ‘I said to him, “Listen; I am going to give you the hypodermic injection; just as much as the doctor has ordered, and no more. It appears to me that I am weak and foolish to neglect the opportunity which the gods afford me, but I will do it. Then, as soon as you are asleep and unable to insult anyone, I will call your servant and ask him to sit with you, and then I shall leave this house, never to return to it. I will not tell you where I am going, nor to whom. I am going to be happy. In spite of what you[Pg 186] say and of what you think, I am going to be happy and free, even though you are here, alive, and I am married to you.”

‘He stared at me, and said: “I will not have any of your morphia. I choose to be awake. I do not want my servant; I want you, and you must sit with me, not he. I won’t be drugged to sleep that you may go to your lover.”

‘“You cannot help yourself, mio caro,” I said to him. It was the first time in all those years that I had called him so. “I am going to leave you; that is all you need to know.” I took his arm, and he could not resist. I could have shrieked and shuddered merely to touch him, but I went through with it all. I measured the dose, and my hand did not shake for an instant. “You see,” I said, “so many drops: watch me while I drop them—so.”

‘And when it was ready I inserted the[Pg 187] needle, gave the injection, and replaced the things on the table. Then I waited a little while. That was the worst of all. It was hideous. He tried to awake, not to succumb to the dose. He could not. He talked to me quickly and angrily, and I did not stop my ears. In spite of his efforts, the words began to stammer on his lips, his eyes glazed and closed. He was asleep—unconscious.

‘“Good-bye,” I said to him mockingly. Then I rang the bell, and Morrison answered it. “Can you sit with Mr. Marchmont for a few hours, Morrison?” I asked. “He will now sleep for some time, and I must have rest, if I am to remain with him while he is awake.”

‘Morrison at once agreed, and took his place by the bedside. I wished him good-night and went away.

‘I went to my room, rang for my maid,[Pg 188] and told her she could go to bed. I did not want anything more, and would undress myself. Then the moments seemed hours, while I tore off my ornaments, and my evening dress, and my satin shoes, and seized upon these dark things, and this bonnet and veil—I will buy some other things here, carissimo, and give these to the chambermaid. I was in a wild fever. I saw that it was nearly half-past eleven. Hans must have been waiting two hours and a half. Never mind. He would forgive me as soon as he knew, and his recompense should be my whole life. Why do you look at me in that way?’ she added quickly.

‘His recompense!’ Signor Giuseppe repeated after her, and laid his hand for a moment on her head.

‘Don’t, darling, don’t!’ said Fulvia, almost sharply. ‘Wait till I have done,[Pg 189] or I shall not be able to finish it. Though it seemed an eternity, I don’t think I was five minutes in undressing and redressing, and I did such a lot of things: locked up all my jewellery and put the key of my dressing-case into an envelope and addressed it to—its owner, and several other things. Then I stole downstairs, and got out of the house, and flew along the park towards the boat-house and the pond. The moon had come out, and gave me some light. I was bent upon getting there, hearing his voice, throwing myself into his arms. And yet, even as I flew along the path, even in that short time, there came a thought into my mind which all at once caused me to stand still. It was this, that I was going to give away what was not mine—my name and my fame, my honour and my honesty. They were not his—my husband’s—oh, don’t[Pg 190] suppose that I was ever weak enough for one moment to think that they were! If there had been only him to consider, or only me! But there are always so many things. I don’t know why it came to me then; but I knew all at once that this self of mine, of which I was going to dispose so arbitrarily, was not really mine. Nothing is really ours to which we have given others a claim by a certain way of living and behaving and conducting ourselves. It was not my own thing—it belonged to you, and to Minna, and to poor little Rhoda even, and to everyone to whom my life heretofore had said, “This is what I am—you may trust me,” and who would ever after be obliged to feel and say, “She lied to us.” Perhaps my being able to stop and think of that, and consider about it, then, showed me to be a cold-hearted creature. I don’t think I am cold-hearted[Pg 191] by nature,’ said Fulvia, in a voice whose pathos wrung her hearer’s heart. ‘But—well, I put it away from me. I went on; I said, “I have promised Hans too. He has a claim as well.” But the eagerness was gone. I felt the taste of the dust and ashes. It was not that I was afraid. I don’t know how to explain it; I will not try. I will tell you what happened. I arrived at last at the place. I did not see anyone, though the moon was up. A terrible fear took possession of me. It was all so horrible. Where was he? Certainly not outside. I went into the boat-house at last. It was so dark there that I could see nothing. I called, “Hans!” I had to call once or twice, before at last he answered. He had been worn out with waiting, and had fallen asleep. At last I heard a movement, and his voice said, “Yes?” “Come outside,”[Pg 192] said I, “where it is light. I must explain to you.” He rose from the bench on which he had been lying, and followed me outside. “Hans!” I said, and held out my hands. “You told me to be here after nine,” he said. “I was here before. I had given you up. I thought you were fooling me.” “Oh, Hans, I could not help it. It has been so awful,” I told him. “Don’t look at me like that—so coldly, so cruelly. What have I done?” I asked, and my heart was growing every moment colder. He shivered too. I was frightened.

‘“Why did you not come sooner?” he asked. “How can one arrange anything at this time of night?”

‘“Oh, darling, there is nothing to arrange,” I exclaimed. “I am here. I have left him for ever and ever. I shall never go back there any more. It is all over. I[Pg 193] have no one but you. Listen, Hans!” and then I told him, in a few words, what had happened. He grew quite still and cold as I spoke, with that stillness which one feels all through one, and which is so terrible. When I had done, he looked at me, and said in a strange voice, “You thought of murdering him? Good God!” and no more.

‘Then I knew that my hour was come. I knew I had risked everything, cut myself off from everything, and broken with everything, to be, as you once said to me, at the mercy of a farceur. I did not wait; I suddenly pushed him away from me, and stood straight up, and said “Go! You are no better than he is. You are just the same. Leave me. Go home, and leave me here.”

‘He was very much startled. He seemed to awaken from a dream, and[Pg 194] a flash came into his eyes, and he sprang towards me again, and would have taken me in his arms.

‘“Leave you, Fulvia! Never, by God! Come to me. Come away with me. I care for nothing if I have you.” Never had I heard his voice with such a tone. Never had I seen his eyes with that look in them. Had he so met me at first, I should have been his beyond recall and beyond repentance. But it had all gone—all the belief, and all the love, and all the dream had vanished. They were no more. He begged, he prayed, he entreated, he conjured me. If he had never loved me before, he did then. Nothing that he did or said made me waver. It was no virtue of mine—there was no more passion left in me. There was no answer in my heart. I scarcely spoke, till at last I felt I must make an end of it, so I said a few cutting words,[Pg 195] and asked if he were a poltroon that he tormented me so, after what I had said. At that he seemed at last to understand. He turned on his heel and went away. I was alone—quite alone. I don’t know what time it was. I don’t know how long I stayed there. I am sure I don’t know what I thought. Everything seemed to have come to an end, and I said to myself, “Ah, if I could lie down here and die.” But I knew that if I did lie down I should not die, because I am strong; I should only sleep, and waken again to the bitter world, and all its lies and all the horror of having to act a part. Life plays with us as a cat plays with a mouse. It torments us as long as it can, and at last strikes us down, and opens the grave for us.

‘It was after a long time, I suppose, that I at last thought of you, oh Beppo![Pg 196] and the thought was like a ray of light in the blackness. One moment before I had been standing by the side of the water, feeling that there was nothing for me to do but to plunge into it. Because, what could there be for anyone like me? Unless I had someone to go to?’

She stopped and looked at him, all the horror of that moment reappearing in her eyes. Signor Giuseppe knew very well what must have passed through her mind as she stood there, fully conscious of all the pitfalls which this naughty world prepares and has in readiness for such as she, if such as she once break through the ring-fence of conventional propriety which fences them in. Spoiled for humble work, not in will, but by the hothouse life of luxury, which had stamped her with the stamp of fashion and distinction in outward appearance, devoid of friends,[Pg 197] without money, without ‘reference’—where could she have hidden her misery? Where would she not have been speedily reduced to the alternative of starvation, suicide, or dishonour? Society makes no provision for exceptional cases—its code is that there must not be any exceptional cases, and that such cases have themselves to thank for their situation.

‘For all my awful wretchedness, I shuddered at the thought of killing myself,’ Fulvia went on. ‘Have you not noticed, padre mio, how much more ready these still, cold Northerners are to put an end to themselves than we, who seem to feel so much more? Our thoughts and our feelings are so much less complex than theirs, and violence and interference with the course of nature are so much more foreign to us. Don’t you think so?’

‘Oh yes, child! It is so much of a fact[Pg 198] to me that I have ceased even to think of it as remarkable. Well?’

‘Well, it all comes to an end: nothing grand, nothing heroic, or violent, or tragic. I thought of you, as I said, and I asked myself, “Would Beppo rather that I should go to him and cast myself on his care and love, and shake him out of his quiet, contented life, and drag him about with me—a wretched, ruined, unhappy woman—or that I should bring all to an end now, in this pond?” In an instant, in a flash of light, I knew what you would think and would feel. I turned away. I felt so bruised, so broken, so crushed, that I could hardly crawl along. I wandered about, looking at the house till I saw the light in your window and knew that you were up. And at last I took courage to go up to where I saw you standing, and—all the rest you know.’

Fulvia was leaning back, utterly exhausted, in her chair. He stroked her hands softly, and there was a long silence, till at last she opened her eyes, and, looking at him fully, and with love unspeakable and trust unbounded, said:

‘I will try to make you as happy and as contented as you were with Minna. I will never think of anyone else. You know I can carry things out when I wish to do it; and, oh, how I wish it now!’

Quite overcome, Signor Oriole had risen from his chair, and was walking about the room, clearing his throat every now and then. Fulvia suddenly sprang from hers, and interrupted him in his walk to and fro, put her hands on his shoulders, and said:

The next moment she was lying in his arms, weeping in one wild, unquenchable flood all the tears due to her outraged innocence, her blighted youth, her darkened future; and in spite of it all—in spite of the agony, of the hopelessness, of the bitter hardness of it all—there was, deep down in both hearts, the consciousness, unspoken, unformulated, but felt, that at this moment the healing of the gaping wounds had begun, and that the future might bring entire restoration.

Only three years have passed since that night when Fulvia made confession to her father of what had happened. They pursued their journey South on the following day, and presently arrived at what was to be their home.

There, in profoundest quiet, they live, returning more and more to the customs and the habits of their own land, throwing off more and more the stamp of foreign life and an existence amongst aliens. They are not without their joys, and they have at least rest for their souls.

Marchmont still lives; still hangs on to[Pg 202] his fretful, joyless existence. No word has ever passed between him and his wife. She has not asked for a separation; he has not dared to suggest her to return to him. Neither money nor written words have ever passed between them. He has had himself conveyed to London; and his house is presided over by a widowed sister, from Australia.

Letters pass between the Sicilian castello and the old English country house, and Minna thinks, from the tone of them, that perhaps after a little time she may broach the project which is at present the desire of her heart—a journey to Catania, and beyond, to see those two who hold in her heart the same places as her brother Richard, and her niece Rhoda, to whom she has to be mother. Up to now she has not dared to hint at it, so intensely strong was the desire for solitude[Pg 203] and rest breathed through every one of Fulvia’s infrequent letters, and echoed by those of her father. But Minna waits, and says, ‘The day will come.’

Hans Riemann started off rather abruptly on his tour to the Caucasus, with the firm intention of remaining away for a long time.

Signora Dietrich is noted for her works of charity, and for her rigid, unbending adherence to the most strictly religious life which can be led by one who is not actually in a cloister. Her house is a resort of some of the most accomplished of the Roman clergy, and it is known that, in a quiet way, she does an immense amount of work for the Church. She is a clever woman, and her life at present is a highly successful one. Intrigue, and the management of other people’s affairs, and interference with them, are[Pg 204] dependent on their subjects’ characters; undirected, they are apt to get into narrow grooves, and the result of their labours is not, in that case, productive of unmixed good—at least, to the mind of the vulgar—but manipulated by the hands of authority, by such a Church as that of Rome, with proper consideration and proper discipline, there is no knowledge of what value they may become to their superiors, nor what satisfaction and content they may secure for themselves.

For such a road in life Signora Dietrich was born; if she entered the right path somewhat late, she at least strives to make up in zeal and mature intelligence the wasted years which slipped by before she had found her vocation.

The Books mentioned in this List can
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PAGE

Alexander, xiii
Arbuthnot, viii
Atherton, xiii
Baddeley, iv
Balestier, xiii
Barrett, ix
Behrs, iii
Bendall, xvi
Björnson, xi, xiii, xv
Bowen, v
Brown, viii
Brown and Griffiths, xvi
Buchanan, viii, ix, x, xiv
Butler, v

Caine, viii, xii
Caine, xvi
Cambridge, ix, xii
Chester, vii
Clarke, ix
Colomb, iii
Compayre, iii
Couperus, xi

Davidson, v
Dawson, xvi
De Quincey, vii

Eeden, vii
Ellwanger, vii
Ely, viii

Farrar, vii
Fitch, v
Forbes, iii
Fothergill, ix
Franzos, xi
Frederic, vi, xii

Garner, vii
Garnett, vi
Gilchrist, ix
Gore, xvi
Gosse, vii, ix
Gray, vii
Gray (Maxwell), ix
Griffiths, xvi

Hall, xvi
Harland, xiii
Hardy, xii
Heine, vi
Henderson (Major), iii
Henderson, xiv
Howard, x
Hughes, v
Hungerford, x, xiii

Ibsen, xv
Irving, xv
Ingersoll, viii

Jæger, vii, xv
Jeaffreson, iii

Kimball, xvi
Kipling and Balestier, ix

Lanza, xiii

Le Caron, iv
Lee, x
Leland, xvi
Lie, xi
Lowe, iii, vi
Lynch, xiii

Maartens, x
Maeterlinck, xv
Maude, iii
Maupassant, xi
Maurice, iii
Mitford, xiii
Murray, iii

Norris, ix

Ouida, ix

Palacio-Valdés, xi
Pearce, x
Pennell, vi
Philips, xiv
Phelps, xiii
Pinero, xiv

Rawnsley, iii
Renan, iv
Richter, vii
Riddell, ix
Rives, x
Roberts (C.G.D.), viii
Roberts (F. von), xi
Robinson, xiv

Salaman (M. C.), vii
Salaman (J. S.), vi
Scudamore, iii
Serao, xi
Sienkiewicz, xi

Tasma, ix, x, xii
Terry, xv
Thurston, xvi
Tolstoy, iii, xi, xv
Tree, xv

Valera, xi

Warden, xii
Waugh, iv
Weitemeyer, viii
West, v
Whistler, iii, vi
Whitman, vi, viii
Williams, vii
Wood, ix

Zangwill, vii, ix
Zola, xiii

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[Pg viii]

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IN GOD’S WAY. From the Norwegian of Björnstjerne Björnson.

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FROTH. From the Spanish of Don Armando Palacio-Valdés.

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FOOTSTEPS OF FATE. From the Dutch of Louis Couperus.

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PEPITA JIMÉNEZ. From the Spanish of Juan Valera.

New Review (Mr. George Saintsbury):—“There is no doubt at all that it is one of the best stories that have appeared in any country in Europe for the last twenty years.”

THE COMMODORE’S DAUGHTERS. From the Norwegian of Jonas Lie.

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THE HERITAGE OF THE KURTS. From the Norwegian of Björnstjerne Björnson.

National Observer.—“It is a book to read and a book to think about, for, incontestably, it is the work of a man of genius.”

LOU. From the German of Baron F. v. Roberts.

DONA LUZ. From the Spanish of Juan Valera.

WITHOUT DOGMA. From the Polish of H. Sienkiewicz.

[Pg xii]

CAPT’N DAVY’S HONEYMOON, The Blind Mother, and The Last Confession. By Hall Caine, Author of “The Bondman,” “The Scapegoat,” &c.

THE SCAPEGOAT. By Hall Caine, Author of “The Bondman,” &c.

Mr. Gladstone writes:—“I congratulate you upon ‘The Scapegoat’ as a work of art, and especially upon the noble and skilfully drawn character of Israel.”

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DESPERATE REMEDIES. By Thomas Hardy, Author of “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” &c.

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A MARKED MAN: Some Episodes in his Life. By Ada Cambridge, Author of “Two Years’ Time,” “A Mere Chance,” &c.

Morning Post.—“A depth of feeling, a knowledge of the human heart, and an amount of tact that one rarely finds. Should take a prominent place among the novels of the season.”

THE THREE MISS KINGS. By Ada Cambridge, Author of “A Marked Man.”

Athenæum.—“A charming study of character. The love stories are excellent, and the author is happy in tender situations.”

NOT ALL IN VAIN. By Ada Cambridge, Author of “A Marked Man,” “The Three Miss Kings,” &c.

Guardian.—“A clever and absorbing story.”

Queen.—“All that remains to be said is ‘read the book.’”

UNCLE PIPER OF PIPER’S HILL. By Tasma. New Popular Edition.

Guardian.—“Every page of it contains good wholesome food, which demands and repays digestion. The tale itself is thoroughly charming, and all the characters are delightfully drawn. We strongly recommend all lovers of wholesome novels to make acquaintance with it themselves, and are much mistaken if they do not heartily thank us for the introduction.”

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PRETTY MISS SMITH. By Florence Warden, Author of “The House on the Marsh,” “A Witch of the Hills,” &c.

Punch.—“Since Miss Florence Warden’s ‘House on the Marsh,’ I have not read a more exciting tale.”

[Pg xiii]

NOR WIFE, NOR MAID. By Mrs. Hungerford, Author of “Molly Bawn,” &c.

Queen.—“It has all the characteristics of the writer’s work, and greater emotional depth than most of its predecessors.”

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DAUGHTERS OF MEN. By Hannah Lynch, Author of “The Prince of the Glades,” &c.

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A ROMANCE OF THE CAPE FRONTIER. By Bertram Mitford, Author of “Through the Zulu Country,” &c.

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LOS CERRITOS. A Romance of the Modern Time. By Gertrude Franklin Atherton, Author of “Hermia Suydam,” and “What Dreams may Come.”

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A MODERN MARRIAGE. By the Marquise Clara Lanza.

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Page numbers in the Index of Authors have been changed from Arabic to Roman because they duplicated page numbers in the work itself.

The ⁂ character was originally printed as an inverted asterism.

In plain-text version, showed italics as _, and ignored boldface and small caps markings.

Changes made to text:

On page 66, changed “improve ” to “improve.”
On page 75, changed “sold” to “sold.”
On page 148, changed “you.” to “you.’”
On page x, changed “origina talent” to “original talent”

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Oriole's daughter, a novel, Volume 3 (of 3)

ORIOLE’S DAUGHTER

NEW LIBRARY NOVELS.

ORIOLE’S DAUGHTER

CHAPTER XIX.

CHAPTER XX.

CHAPTER XXI.

CHAPTER XXII.

CHAPTER XXIII.

CHAPTER XXIV.

CHAPTER XXV.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Index of Authors.

Fiction.

The Crown Copyright Series.

Heinemann’s International Library.

Popular 3s. 6d. Novels.

Popular Shilling Books.

Dramatic Literature.

Poetry.

Heinemann’s Scientific Handbooks.

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