# Out of due time/Part 1

PART I.
I.
I am the elder of the two daughters of Mary Fairfax, widow of Richard Fairfax, Esq., of Thornly Hall, Sussex. My mother was his second wife, a good deal younger than her husband and almost a contemporary of her stepson, the present owner of Thornly. The children of such a marriage fall between two generations. Our Thornly first cousins are old enough to be our uncles and aunts, and we are only just old enough to avoid being of the same age as our half-nephews and nieces at Thornly Hall. Mary and I used to tell each other that this, and the fact that my mother had been an only child, accounted for the lack of companions of our own age. But there were other reasons, simple enough though unknown to us then, why our lives were somewhat isolated.
My father must have been a delightful man. I regretted his early death profoundly, in an abstract reflective sort of way. I had none of the personal grief of remembrance, and my mother never mentioned him to her children. His death was the whole story of her after-life, and that life was sheathed in a complete silence. I think that much of her vitality and almost all her powers of expansion were buried with him. Her life was lived by routine, and I never remember to have seen her without a tired look on her thin beautiful ​features, which were a little negative in expression. She did all her duties very carefully and somewhat emphatically, and I think her dependants were always afraid of her. She took short—very short—walks in the sunshine and she read a novel in the afternoon. There were fortunately a few poor people to visit in the neighbourhood, and our priest was a man of culture, a Conservative with whom she could occasionally talk politics and condemn Mr. Gladstone. Through this dim shaded life we children never lost sight of the presence of the strong, brilliant personality we had never known. Our father's handsome face, its noble features and ethereal eyes looked down upon us from over the drawing-room fireplace; a young old man full of life and the power of enjoying all things pure, true, and of good report. We had another picture of him out hunting, a miniature in court dress, a bust in bronze: of these things we never spoke, but they made their impression. I used to feel wicked when I reflected, as we passed our monotonous days, on how good a time our mother must have had when she first married. What journeys abroad, what company at home! It seemed as if they had known everybody and seen everything! They did Italy in driving tours; they went to Greece and Constantinople; they loved Paris in the winter and saw much of its varying worlds. They had heard Lacordaire and Ravignan in the pulpit of Notre Dame: they had dined with Madame Swetchine and Lord Granville. I must stop, I must stop—all the old rebellious feeling will even now wake up if I don't. And yet I know now that my poor mother could by no means have revived that past for us. But if only she had told us something of her difficulties, and taken us a little more into her confidence, I should never have known those temptations to revolt.
It was on a moss-grown wooden bench with an outlook over a wide view of a domestic English landscape lying in the spring sunshine, farms and cottages, hayricks, little ​copses, sluggish ditches, white thorns and stunted yews that I first remember this temptation. Something in the spring stirred me to discontent. My mother had been speaking of the time of the Vatican Council in Rome, to the priest who had stayed to breakfast after saying Mass in our little chapel. She had said enough to fill me with interest and to make me feel how much she had not said that she could have told me. So, in the sunshine, at the age of sixteen, I wrestled with the temptation to revolt against the long quiet years that I saw before me.
I think I did conquer. I prayed to my dear father, who would have understood me so well, I thought, who would surely have taken me away from Crowfield sometimes, who had liked my mother to have pretty frocks—whereas mine were hideous—and who would surely have wished me to see some people of my own age. And there is the pathos of it! My mother never told us of her difficulties simply because they were my father's fault. All through that brilliant young married life of hers, she had struggled in vain, gently and worshipfully, to make her dear husband spend a little less money. She knew all the time, though she would not own it to her stern stepson, that Thornly Hall was being steadily but surely impoverished. No tradesman suffered, no pensioner had less, but each year a couple of thousands were sold out and were hardly missed. Poor father, he died leaving a beautiful will, and a handsome jointure for my mother, but for my half-brother there was a fine old property gone to rack and ruin, and the sound investments, independent of land, that had been the mainstay of the family since the days of the East India Company, had simply ceased to exist. My half-brother John was not exactly a chivalrous character, and he certainly had his trials. There must have been much that was painful, but nothing coarse or angry could be associated ​with the broken-hearted widow. She waived her jointure, which would have eaten up the remains of the Thornly income, and left Thornly a month after the funeral. Nor did she so much as inquire who would send her things after her, or who would disentangle her wedding presents from amidst John's possessions. She went to the small dower-house in Surrey, which was damp, and buried in conifers, and had a very indifferent water supply. But within its territory was a little wood, with a moss-grown bench commanding a glorious view, on which I was twelve years afterwards to wrestle with the demon of revolt.
In those days widows lived in retirement, following a great example, and they thought it a duty. Now they think it a duty not to retire. Then such unfortunate little extras as Mary and myself were still looked on, chiefly, as being likely to prove a comfort to the mother in her retirement. Now everything would be arranged with a view to their opening lives. Oh, but as the years went on at Crowfield life was dull, dull, dull! The governess, dear little Miss Mills, was dull, the lessons were dull, the meals were deadly dull. And the life had no outlet! It was the want of hope that made even my limbs ache that spring morning on the mossy bench. I had sat down cheerfully enough to arrange a bunch of primroses with some young green, forgetting the irritation I had felt at the talk at breakfast. The spring smell wrapped all my physical consciousness in pleasure; the birds were crying to each other in busy exultation and serene joy. I leant back and then caught my breath at the sudden glory of the fresh green and the blue sky, in mosaic above me. Surely it was a goodly world, and it was good to be in it.
Yet why is it that, as we get older, spring becomes a more true and resting joy to us? I suppose because in youth we cannot be impersonal—we bring ourselves into everything. After the first glow and joy in the intense vitality of nature ​we turn restless, our own vitality needs its outlet, and our minds demand a reason for the hope that is without and within us. At sixteen I had lost my old resource, a daydream of the frankly unattainable, a fairy tale about myself, I wanted to be able to look forward to a life rich in this world's joys, lighted by the highest of human feelings, and blessed by God. Instead, it seemed as if my life were to be lead-coloured in dulness, with no intensity of feeling, and with a revolt at heart that would leave it unblessed of God. But one bird's song, I remember, was to bring me another note of feeling. I had been some half-hour glowering and angry, curled up on that bench, a dark-eyed, skinny, wriggling Backfisch of a girl, when there came a lull amongst the birds, almost a silence in the near wood. It seemed as if the chorus had made way for its prima donna, as there rose a high soprano note trilling heavenwards. The sound caught me out of myself for a moment, and as it dropped suddenly, flinging a last gift of a specially Divine note to the earth, I was reminded of the refrain of an old song I used to hear when a child, trilled in a clear, thin, sweet soprano:—
Loyale je serai durant ma vie.
Yes, it was like that, and I kept murmuring the words: "Loyale je serai durant ma vie". A clear, a full, a complete sermon, from a preacher whose life was the best of examples. I got up presently, a smiling, though tearful girl, with a new thought and a new hope. Dull or not, flat or not, despised or not, "Loyale je serai durant ma vie". I went in and abruptly asked my mother if I could be of any use to her that morning. She was mildly surprised and mildly snubby, and said it would be much better for me to spend my free time out of doors. This a little quenched my glow of enthusiasm, but I went to my neglected garden and treated it with more zeal than discretion. Anyhow, I had got hold of something new. I might put it up on the shelf, but it ​was a real gift my bird had given me. It got dusty at times as life went on, but then it came to be washed in tears. There is sunshine about it now and there has been for years. I wonder, but I cannot tell, what storms it may yet have to bear, but I pray that it may pass through them unbroken.
II.
Still, if that day I had passed through something of a spiritual crisis, if I had got a new treasure, I had also defined a temptation, and thus made it more living. I fancy that my mother saw a good deal more than I thought she did, and I think she was decidedly worried about me three years afterwards, when another spring had brought new blossoms, new birds, and old temptations. The result of her trouble amazed me beyond measure. She told me a little solemnly one morning, after breakfast, that she wanted to speak to me in the drawing-room in an hour's time. Good Heavens! how shy I felt, how intensely embarrassed, as I walked down the length of the narrow sunny drawing-room to her arm-chair where she sat sewing something large and plain. Well, she told me in a voice of mingled severity and kindness—I think she was very shy too—that she had had an invitation for me to stay at Thornly, and that, as I was now nearly nineteen, she thought it would be right for me to go. It seemed that my brother's wife was giving a ball, and it would be a good opportunity for me to begin to go out as a grown-up young lady. I felt frightened, and I longed to ask my mother if she would not take me herself; but I dared not do it, I felt it would be sacrilegious.
I was to go to Thornly in three weeks from then. Those three weeks were spent in constant preparation. My mother, it seemed, had been putting away very small sums of money for several years against the time when I should come out. ​And oh, dear me! it was all spent in getting me clothes for that wretched visit.
Well, I went on the date fixed, but in two days I was back again, to the astonishment of the world at home. I was very miserable, but I held my head high, and before the parlour-maid could leave us, I said in a high staccato voice:—
"The Duchess and some of the party were coming away to-day, so I thought I might as well come too." But I felt that they knew the truth, that I had run away from Thornly.
My mother was just like herself outwardly, but I think she was agitated, and my sister Mary's eyes were intolerably large with curiosity. But it was to her two days later that I told my story.
I can see my little sister so vividly now as she sat on the grass that afternoon, in the flickering shadows of an apple-tree. She had no hat on her golden hair, and her pretty little white and pink face was much the colour of the apple blossoms that occasionally fell on her head and knees, and dropped on her pert little nose. We were both dressed in what we called our "butcher" frocks of deep blue cotton. Mary was always tidy, and her white hands, that were now clasped round her knees, were never red and scratched like mine.
"But, Lizzie, why did you come away so soon?" asked Mary suddenly, after we had been quite silent for some minutes.
"Because they said horrid, wicked untruths about father."
"Then of course you could not stay."
"I will just tell you all about it," I said, and my heart was immensely lightened at having got even so far.
Mary put her arm in mine; the sense of comradeship and oneship between us two was very soothing. There were nearly four years between us, a space of time which had ​seemed immense a few years before, but which was dwindling rapidly as she made progress in her teens.
"Do begin at the very beginning, and tell me all about the visit."
"No, I'll tell the horridest thing first," I said firmly. "It was the last night, after dinner, and everybody was playing cards. As I didn't want to play I slipped behind a screen with a book. Presently Mrs. John and another woman, Lady Hornbrook, sat down on the other side on the sofa and began to talk. After they had talked a little about their intolerable governesses, Mrs. John gave a fat sigh and said: 'I envy them playing cards, but I don't care to play now that I can't afford to do it properly'. 'But, my dear, with your fortune!' 'My fortune goes to keeping up my husband's place,' in a martyr sort of voice. 'It's not John's fault,' Maud went on, 'it was all spent by his father, and then people talk of Mr. Fairfax as if he were a saint! He denied himself nothing, but he built a church and pensioned lots of people long before they ought to have stopped work. He and Mrs. Fairfax enjoyed themselves in every expensive hotel in Europe. Now, besides having to do up the house, and keep the place going, and pay for everything, I'm thought stingy if I don't carry on all the ridiculous, extravagant charities. One man had the impertinence to tell me that if I kept fewer hunters, I could provide for more orphan children.'
"Of course the other woman went on saying it was all too bad and atrocious, but I liked her the best, and she said rather kindly: 'What will become of the shy little sister? Mr. Sutcliffe says that Miss Lizzie Fairfax is very pretty and the cleverest girl here, but then, you know, she had read his article in the Nineteenth Century.' 'There won't be a penny for her and her sister,' said Mrs. John, with a sort of vicious satisfaction. 'I suppose I shall have to do something for them.' I nearly screamed out 'Never!' I was ​so very angry, but I was too frightened, and just as Lady Hornbrook said, 'That would be rather too much, with your own children to think of,' the card-players got up. In a few minutes the Duchess told Maud that she must go to bed, as she was leaving early. Then I slipped out of the room, dashed upstairs and packed like mad—and you know the rest, Mary."
"Of course we can neither of us go there again," said Mary, in her most woman-of-the-world manner; "but I wonder if there's nothing else to be done?"
Poor little Mary, she spoke bravely, but she was terribly troubled. Our own saintly father's memory smirched and spoilt by the odious untrue talk! How hard we tried to think that it was all untrue! But the sting of it was that we could not prove it even to ourselves. It seemed a horrible, intangible cloud darkening the shrine of our home life. I think I was more crushed, Mary more cynical. And to us both it all assumed such gigantic proportions. I felt as if I could never hold up my head again, while Mary became defiant, and had a touch of defiance about her for years. Looking back, after knowing something of the rough give and take of the world's talk, of the bony excrescences protruding out of so many domestic cupboards, my father's financial wrong-doing, and, the way he had wronged John, takes its place as a mysterious blot on what was otherwise a beautiful character. Let those who neglect the poor, and drive hard bargains, and fail to pay their debts, dare to throw a stone at my father, because he did not realise that those harmless little sellings-out, thousand by thousand, were spoiling John's property.
But of course there were other things to say about that visit. My first glimpse of the world was full of matter for endless discussion. We used to start in a sort of rush on our country walks as if we had no time to spare, and then we would discuss all those twenty folk I had met at Thornly. ​The wife of a great traveller once said to me in all simplicity, that every time her husband recounted his adventures in the East, he remembered something new; so I think under stress of Mary's questions, I grew to know more of the party as the summer wore on. At last we frankly invented much about them, and made matches between them, and otherwise made them work out the characters we had discerned them to possess.
Then occasionally we saw their names in the papers, and oh, what an excitement that was! Even to this day I can't see the death of one of that party at Thornly announced in The Times without a pang.
Then "the man who said you were pretty and clever"—which was Mary's stock description of Mr. Sutcliffe until I got sick of my one compliment—continued to write articles in the Nineteenth Century. It was thrilling! We read them, and we read all the books he quoted when we could lay hands on them.
"The man who said you were pretty and clever," said Mary, in a most aggravating voice, "is becoming a liberal education to us both. I only wish he were handsome."
"But he isn't at all; he has rough, big features, not well finished off, and his eyes are amusing but not large, and they are half-hidden by his heavy, shaggy eyebrows."
"But he is tall, isn't he?" said Mary, with a sigh.
"Oh, yes; but he is too broad, and he rolls along like a sailor. I told you that he left the navy because of his elder brother's death."
"So he will be Lord Sutcliffe some day," Mary observed, with satisfaction, "as he is the eldest son." Nothing is so aggravating as the peculiar worldly wisdom of a girl of fifteen, and nothing so transient. It is only one of the endless, and constantly varying, forms of mimicry.
​"He is perfectly miserable about his brother's death, "I cried hotly.
"I never said he wasn't," said Mary. "I don't mean anything horrid, so you needn't pretend that I do. I only mentioned an obvious fact."
III.
It is not good to be as much alone as we were in those days. In a solitary life anybody may make an impression, almost anybody becomes important, and young people especially are too much at the mercy of books. The monotony of our days went on, almost unbroken, for nearly three years. It was tacitly assumed that I had come out, and that my one party had been a foretaste of gaieties to follow in some vague future. The schoolroom had become more and more of a fiction even for Mary, who was almost eighteen. My mother and my governess let me go my own way in my studies, and I spent whole days in reading. I asked my mother long afterwards why she had let me read one or two books that I should hesitate to give a girl now.
"You were much older for your age than girls are now," she said, and then with her sweet, wan smile she added, "To tell the truth, I thought it would be more dangerous for you not to have them than to have them."
How hard a question it is! I am sure she was right, and I believe I got no harm; yet one would fain postpone for a girl something of the pain of the riddle of this painful earth.
More than two years after my Thornly visit—"we date from the first social war," Mary used to say—our parish priest fell ill, and was sent abroad for six months' change. In his place came a young man, who was very much out of health himself and, as I think now, in rather a queer state of ​nerves. He preached very well, we girls thought. Mother did not agree. He read immensely, he wrote for magazines, and he knew my one intellectual acquaintance, Mr. George Sutcliffe. This was a pleasant change after old Mr. Thompson, who had nothing newer in his library than The Life of Milner and Lingard's History, books which I therefore never appreciated until late in life. Father Colnes belonged to the generation of secular priests who began to be called Father instead of Mr., thus abolishing the old distinction between secular clergy and those belonging to religious orders. I see now that he regarded Mary and myself as being most unkindly buried by my mother. He jumped to the conclusion that she was a dévote, who thought that her daughters could only reach another world safely by seeing nothing of this one. That he was very sensitive could easily be seen from a first glance at the pale, thin features and transparent eyelids and nostrils. His eyes were pale too, and his large mouth was weak. Some conditions of nerves sharpen the perceptions, and Father Colnes knew what people felt towards him almost as acutely as if he had been a dog. He saw that my mother did not like him, and I think, unconsciously, he returned the feeling.
It would be most unfair to Father Colnes to suppose him to have been in any way the cause of the troubled state of nerves I fell into, but his influence was not bracing. It is very delicate work to give wise sympathy to those who suffer negatively. It is much more simple to help those who are in pain, than to help those who simply lack joy. Somehow, after he had been talking with Mary and me, I used to feel stifled; nothing in my daily life was quite interesting.
"But why not finish your essay?" queried Mary one day after he had left us.
"What's the use? Father Colnes evidently thinks all my authorities old-fashioned. Besides, I've had no training."
"Then do go on with the story; I'm sure that's very good."
​I was leaning back on a garden chair with my arms hanging listlessly by my side.
"My dear, how can I write stories when I have seen nothing of life? It may interest you, but——" I stopped. I did not want to make Mary unhappy. I could see that she was troubled about me; the pretty little white forehead was puckered in a frown. There was a maternal instinct in this younger sister of mine that might have touched me if I had not been too self-absorbed. It was not that I suffered from my old temptations to rebelliousness—I felt altogether more listless and depressed than rebellious. I had not enough to do, enough to take me out of myself. I had been feeding on shadows and fancies, and I got my punishment. The greatest realities were losing their place in my mind, their outlines were dimmed by the fog.
I remember at this time moments on the old bench in the wood, wild walks on the common, and slow pacing of the garden plot in front of the house, dull with mental pain. A mist had come over my prayers; I lay awake at night, and could not eat, which was for me the most surprising symptom of all. It was soon after Father Thompson came back, and perhaps at his suggestion, that my mother and old Miss Mills, the governess, first spoke of tonics and then of a change. I felt entirely indifferent as long as I was not again to be sent to anything like the party at Thornly.
Then at this moment of need, as at the other moment, my mother received an invitation for me. She instantly decided that I ought to accept it, although it was entirely surprising that I should be asked, and that I should go to stay with complete strangers. It came about in this way: The Comtesse de Pourcelles had been, by her first marriage, the second wife of a friend of my father's, the Comte d'Etranges, whose first wife had been an Englishwoman. He had had a son, Paul, by the first marriage, and a daughter, Marcelle, by the second. The young d'Etranges', half-brother ​and sister, had decided to make their home together when Madame d'Etranges had married again. Madame d'Etranges after she became Madame de Pourcelles parted very unwillingly with her daughter, and did all she could to take care of her from a distance. Marcelle d'Etranges, after a couple of years spent in Germany with her brother, came to England, which was Paul's maternal country, with him. Madame de Pourcelles had in vain tried to make some social relations for her daughter in Germany. She and Paul were determined to be independent, and to mix with a world quite unknown to her mother—a world of savants, of thinkers, and of students.
Madame de Pourcelles saw some hope of better things when they came to England, and she wrote a crowd of letters to her friends and acquaintances, admirably expressed, to let them know that her daughter Marcelle d'Etranges would be living within reach of many of them. One of the first to whom she applied as a social godmother was my mother.
"How little Madame de Pourcelles knows how useless I am become! She thinks, of course, that I am still at Thornly," said my mother, with a sad smile; but the letter pleased her. It was reminiscent of a happy past. Even the shape of the sentences and the look of the writing was a pleasure. She paraphrased it for me after I had made a vain attempt at reading it for myself.
"Paul d'Etranges has come into a little property in Derbyshire, Peak Hall, 'très ancienne et très romantic,' Madame de Pourcelles understands it to be. It has been left him by his mother's sister—his mother, you know, was a Miss Lake. Paul and Marcelle d'Etranges are there now, and Madame de Pourcelles is very anxious for you to go and pay them a visit. Knowing the independence of the English character, and particularly of the 'jeune demoiselle' in England, and her habit of constantly going 'en voyage' by herself, she does not hesitate to make the request. But, my ​dear," here my mother put down the letter, "it does seem a very long way for you to go alone."
That was years ago it must not be forgotten, at least twenty years ago (I'm not in conscience bound to be more exact as to the date). I felt then that such a journey would be a bold measure, and my heart sank. But Miss Mills rose to the situation, and it was agreed that her proposal to take me to London, and see me into a ladies' compartment direct to Glossop, was quite fitting.
"The comfort is," it was Mary who spoke, "both as to your clothes and your not having a maid, that Mademoiselle d'Etranges is new to the country, and will take for granted, knowing who you are, that it is all right according to English ideas."
"She won't if there are really smart people in the house too," I said, ruefully surveying the frocks that had been so costly a part of the visit to Thornly three years before. "Besides, you know, there is something like a smell—a smell to the eye—in old smart frocks—a Frenchwoman's instinct would detect it at once."
Mary sighed deeply. "Then you know," I went on, "for the moors it ought to be so very different, tailor-made things, yachting clothes——"
"My dear!" said Mary, "you don't expect to yacht on the moors, do you?"
"No, but there ought to be something very tailor-made and very blue sergey, and that makes me think of yachting."
"But do take consolation from her Frenchness," persisted Mary. "You will probably find her in a sort of Watteau muslin effect, or in a Trianon cotton edged with priceless lace. Those two frocks really are nice and summery, and will do quite nicely with hers."
Mary saw that I was really depressed with the malaise of worldly anxiety, and her pride and her tenderness made her anxious to drive it away. "I wouldn't change them," she ​said, when Miss Mills came in with a paper pattern of an up-to-date sleeve from a weekly journal of fashion; "they were made by quite a good woman, and there is a sort of idea in them, something about youth and innocence——"
"Oh, do for Heaven's sake stop!" I cried, "and come out into the garden; you're quite cracked to-day."
But Mary had to read with Miss Mills, not having finished that process of not being educated, which was considered to be complete in my own case.
I went into the garden with Pascal's Pensées determined to rise to a higher level, but I couldn't. I was really not well; the air of the place was soft, and we were buried in fine conifers, great brutes of evergreens that are bad for body and soul. I could not understand a word of Pascal, and I was annoyed with myself for minding so very much about the frocks. Gradually my nervous enemy, a sense of unreality and unbelief, crept out from the dark shadows of the great trees, and got its grip on me again. How could I rise to higher things if I didn't believe? and how could I make myself believe? I understood how to fight a bad temper or many other temptations, but how could I think it a sin to think things were not true if I could know nothing positive about them? And as to loyalty, my old stay-by and strength, how be loyal to what did not exist? The world was painful to me; there seemed a chasm between me and my home, while the warm, heavy air grew denser, and the shadows deepened. All the time I knew that a great part of my troubled state of mind had come, in the first instance, from those frocks. Oh, what to do? what to do?
I walked round the field to the little dark, stuffy church and knelt down; there was only the dim light of the sanctuary lamp. How could one be disloyal even to what was most sacred, if what was most sacred was a delusion? Loyalty, in such a case, would only be a delusion about a delusion.
​What haunted me was a nervous suspicion that, if I had really studied modern thought, I should know that science had in fact in these later days exploded the faith in which I had been brought up. I had not any knowledge of the real problems at issue, but my imagination was haunted. Some verse from Matthew Arnold, or a few lines from Clough, mourning delicately for the loss of Christianity, affected me much more than any facts of science, or any gibes or insults from violent foes, could have done.
But I was kneeling in the right place. Presently out of a poor little paralysed imagination came the thought: If it still be true, if my past strength and my past joy are only hidden for a time, what am I losing if I am not loyal? Could I not take the risk of walking onward in the dark? Was it not of the essence of loyalty to be ready to take the risk? At the worst what was it I sacrificed? Only myself and my life.
The readiness to make any sacrifice to duty calmed and braced my nerves. The mists slowly lifted. The dim sense of the reflection of the infinite in my soul deepened. And then was restored, as in a wave of peace, the dependence on Him who loved me better than I loved myself. Pascal believed because he had known Him in Whom he believed. It was to One I knew and loved, not to a set of abstract propositions, that my loyalty was due. I could not realise my past love, without recognising that it still lived within me. To that love, which was the highest thing in myself, I would not, by the grace given to me, be disloyal. My head sank, and the hot tears of joy and relief trickled through my fingers. "Loyale je serai durant ma vie".
When I came into supper, I could think with brightness even of the unfashionable gowns.
IV.
After a long hot journey, how delightful was my first drive across the moors to Peak Hall. "It would be about twelve miles," said the cheerful red-faced driver, speaking in soft North-country accents, as he handed me into the dogcart. There had been some moments' delay, as there were no preparations for my luggage, and we had to inquire for a cart to follow with my boxes.
Twelve miles before I need think of being shy or self-conscious, or afraid of my hosts; twelve miles of rough jogging down hills and slow crawling up, each kind of motion carried to an extreme that suggested some personal eccentricity in the pony or the driver. We were soon between glowing purple hills on one side and great grassy ones on the other, very curious and individual in formation, sometimes crowned with huge blocks of rocky stone massed in weird shapes on the summits. Several of these rocks were objects of affectionate pride to the driver, who pointed them out as we got further into the valley. There was one especially striking isolated mass of rocks. "They do call those the 'Coach and Horses' on this side, on the other they calls them 'The Old Woman and her Cakes'." Both names were curiously fitting; the grey coach always seemed to me, when I became familiar with it, to be carrying the phantoms of some evil great men lost out on the moors. It was a mail-coach with four horses and a large boot, all heavily made of eternal rock, and yet evidently moving in a shadowy, ​ghost-like movement. After long walks on our way home to the Hall we saw the coach, but if we were outward bound as we sprang up the heather-covered hills, the great grey boulders, curiously rounded and smoothed by the mighty winds and rains that swept over the higher moors, were then intensely and obviously a giant's wife stretching out a plate of cakes to put them in the oven.
Dear old lady, you are still at it, but I don't think I could bear to go and see you now. The phantom coach caught my imagination, but it does not hurt me to think of it. You were more human, and are more mixed up with old thoughts—old recollections.
I think I can recall the first moment when I became really aware of the river; the valley had grown narrower, and the road, taking a sharp turn across a low stone bridge, ran along for a time by the river's side. The water came to meet us tumbling over the stones, brown, hasty, noisy, but wonderfully musical, fed by the endless silver threads that had hurried down the moors as winter melted into spring. Do trees growing beside other rivers bend quite so low, and so persistently keep their branches in the water, like children leaning over a boat's side for the pleasure of the trickle through their fingers? Do other rivers have such clear mossy holes and corners filled with green and gold and brown light, and such deep mysterious pools filled with trout? I have had a river for a friend which spoke to me when men were dumb, which dried tears on the eyes that looked into it, which did not reason with an unsatisfied heart, and made no reproach to want of courage. Its voice has been to me the handmaiden of religion, soothing what was strained in nature, and the gentle companion of sorrow, when the human voice would have been intolerable. My first introduction to this river was simply exhilarating: life flowed out of it, and its waters bubbled with delicious nonsense, as if it were chaffing, in schoolboy fashion, the old grey silence of the hilltops who ​loved its impertinence. It did not talk to me that evening, but I seemed to be drinking it in. Meanwhile the sky was flushing a deep rose, and the grass fields on either side were bright green, and the heather—the hills above on both sides were clad in heather now—glowed with its own wealth of colour that grew shadowy under the great stony masses higher up the ridges. The valley closed in upon us, and presently a church nestled among some trees, and we were driving on a narrow, well-kept road between the river and a high old stone wall—I saw then that we had passed through an open gate and were in private grounds of some sort. My shyness had been forgotten in enjoyment, but I breathed one wild wish that I could have this exquisite spot to myself, without disturbing, alarming, human beings to spoil my pleasure. I am afraid it is a wish I have known later in life when approaching a country house.
Peak Hall was the end and ultimate object of the road. Beyond it, bridle and foot paths led up to farmhouses and keepers' lodges, but here the road proper came to an end. The house and garden were raised a good deal above it. The walled garden was divided into three squares, making one long oblong by the river side. The wall, beneath which I drove, rose to an old coping, strong enough for defence, and making sharp right angles with the low walls that cut across the garden in its three divisions. At the far corner an old man in a cocked hat held a sundial on his chest, and at other corners stood great balls of stone; and one or two carved heads crowned the angles. In the garden nearest the house there was a raised stone terrace, and one could sit on the top of the outer wall, and look down on the river. I suppose there are people sitting there now. I wonder what manner of folk they are?
The first garden was herbaceous; the second was in two long kitchen garden beds bordered with flowers; the third was a bowling-green. Under the great elms at the far end ​of the bowling-green was a wrought-iron gate, with great stone pillars. Beyond rose the first green slope of the hills to the west, and on this slope was the village church.
I saw all this afterwards. At first I was conscious only of the dark wall, and then that the wall turned sharp at right angles, leaving an open space before the house. It was all on quite a small scale—a little old hall of some quiet country squire, not a county magnate who numbered it among many other possessions. I supposed it was Jacobean; I knew it was beautiful. It was built of grey stone, green with little lichens. There were two large stone gables and several small latticed windows with heavy stone mullions. One great stone over the perfectly plain front door bore the date and initials of the squire who had built it. The front door opened on to a wide flagged terrace bounded by a low wall; then came another narrow terrace below. Two great stone gateposts stood on the higher terrace opposite the front door, one of which had sunk so that their elaborate moulding came unevenly to the eye, and the great stone balls that crowned them were of unequal height. From this gate spread out in half-circles some very shallow steps, breaking into the lower terrace and going down to the road. Across the road was a group of tall, red-trunked Scotch firs, and immediately below you heard the river, and could just see the water when it was full after rain. Beyond the river, closing in the view, there rose abruptly a bold green hill. I tripped up the little well-worn shallow steps, clothed in moss and tiny wild strawberry plants which had pushed their way between the chinks. As I stood facing the front door I had the garden on my right, and could see over the low wall that divided it from the terrace on which I stood, a bright vision of flowers, then the elm trees, the church tower, and, rising high above all, the purple moors crowned by the sunset.
I turned to the driver to see what he expected me to do, ​as there was nobody in sight. I understood that his whip which he waved towards me, indicated a bell that hung outside the door under a tiny pent-house. After that he drove on into what I judged to be a paved stable-yard from the clattering noise that followed. I tried the stiff, rusty chain of the bell, but with no result. I put down my bag—it was really Mary's, lent to me because it was new and smart—and I tried again with both hands. There was again no result. A chink of the front door was open. I pushed it timidly, and got a glimpse of a large dark room, old oak benches and some distorted human figures in grey-green tapestry on the walls. I dared not go in, so I went back to the bell. To ring must be the only right and conventional method of effecting an entrance. I was getting red with my exertions when a shrill voice behind me said, "The bell has not been rung since Adam or Eve put it there". I turned round and saw before me a tallish, stoutish young woman, of about my own age or a couple of years older. I had a general impression of a dark complexion, dark eyes, and black hair rising high above the forehead; on her head hung awry a pink cotton bonnet with long strings, and she wore a loose shapeless yet shapely yellow cotton blouse. Blouses were not worn then, and it looked to me more like a housemaid's morning cotton than it would now. She had a short stuff brown petticoat, and the whole of her attire was gathered and kept together in almost classic simplicity by a leather belt. Her feet were bare. She wore large gauntlet gloves, and she carried a pail of milk.
"Are you Mademoiselle d'Etranges?" I stammered stupidly.
"Yes," she said curtly, and her black eyes looked hostile. "You are of course Miss Fairfax."
Somehow the "of course" conveyed to me that the fact was a most uninteresting one.
"You will be tired," she said, leading me into the low, ​dark, rambling hall, and then she stopped, put down the pail, and shrieked, "Jacques, Jacques!" A small, olive complexioned, nondescript man came from behind the tapestry in a far dim corner. "This is all the milk the stupid cows have given me, take it and boil it tout de suite, then take up Miss Fairfax's boxes to the yellow room—I don't know why yellow," she went on, turning to me, "it is a hideous magenta—affreuse!;" she spoke very stiffly, and I felt horribly embarrassed. Then she moved on and I followed her. She lifted a heavy piece of tapestry and held it back for me a moment, and I passed under it murmuring "thank you". I never felt a more glacial manner than hers. We were now in a low, narrow passage. She opened a door, and a flood of rosy light burst into the darkness. At the same moment there was a crash of chords from a piano. The sound was somehow familiar, and most pleasant to me as I followed her into the room. It was also low, and roofed and panelled in old oak, and there were many flowers in it.
"What is the use of staying indoors in such weather?" said Mademoiselle d'Etranges, now in a quite human tone.
"What is the use of milking the cows when somebody else could do it better?" answered a man's deep voice. Mr. George Sutcliffe rose and came from the piano as he spoke. He was as surprised to see me as I was to see him, and I fear that owing to my sense of loneliness I gave him a beaming, too glowing smile of relief. I was certainly not a woman of the world. His very usual, very polite greeting felt a little flat after the warmth of mine.
"So you know her," commented our hostess.
"Yes, we met, but some time ago, isn't it?" said Mr. Sutcliffe.
"And then only for two days," I answered, and to my unutterable disgust I began to blush. Something in Marcelle's black eyes seemed to say, "Dear me, how English!" She lit herself a cigarette, and then looked down at her bare feet.
​"I must change them," she said.
"The sooner the better," said Mr. Sutcliffe severely; "but why, since this new fancy, do you go barefoot out-of-doors and wear shoes indoors?"
"Why, because of needles,—cows don't drop needles," retorted Mademoiselle d'Etranges as she left the room. Mr. George Sutcliffe looked at her retreating back with the sun-bonnet hanging over her shoulder and then at me, and smiled and almost winked. "But you are too tired to enjoy any of it yet," he said. "By this time she has probably forgotten all about us, and the main fact is that you must have some tea. Tea is by no means easy to get here. It's of no use ringing any bell, but I will make a try at finding somebody." He disappeared; the result of his researches was the appearance of a large, motherly, delightful North-country woman with a sun-bonnet on her head exactly like that worn by Mademoiselle d'Etranges. This charming person took me up to the yellow room, where everything was magenta, but so faded as to be harmless. Ah, the joy of stretching myself on that old, four-post bedstead, and the relief of shutting my eyes! A quarter of an hour later the man I had seen in the hall looked in with the faintest premonitory knock, bearing a tray of tea in a gigantic silver teapot and a wonderful Sèvres cup and saucer. It proved to be so disgusting a beverage that I could not force myself to drink it, so I emptied the cup into the ivy outside my window. Happily there was a caraffe of gloriously cold water and some essence of orange flower on a side table. After half an hour, in which I realised that I had been tired into a splitting headache, I got up and began to unpack. What on earth should I put on? What would be appropriate to a bare-footed hostess in a sun-bonnet? Just as I had chosen my plainest tea-gown there came a knock at the door, and in answer to my "come in" there appeared a tall dark lady, most beautifully dressed in yellow satin, altogether en grand tenue, and until she ​spoke I had some difficulty in recognising Mademoiselle d'Etranges.
"Mr. Sutcliffe thinks you won't be able to come down to dinner, is that so?"
"No, not at all. I would rather come down, thank you."
"Don't think of the trouble," she said. "Go to bed if you are tired, and Jacques can bring you your dinner. There are several things to eat—I forget what—but he will know."
There was a more kindly ring in her voice this time. I protested that I would rather come down, which was not strictly true.
"Ah, you have had tea," she said, only half-listening to my remarks. "The English always love tea;" then with a little shriek, "but it is my best Sèvres cup," and snatching it up she hastily left the room. When I got downstairs I heard her scolding Jacques in the dining-room. I made my way to the dusky drawing-room. Mr. Sutcliffe was leaning his broad shoulders against the chimney-piece with his head bent forward to listen to his companion. As I came in a man taller than he, and thin, very thin, rose from a chair, making Mr. Sutcliffe look more thick-set and more muscular by the contrast as they stood together.
"Will you present me?" said a low penetrating voice.
I shook hands with the Comte d'Etranges, meeting for the first time those strange, piercing, cold grey eyes of his. The face was clean-shaven and very thin—I never saw anybody so thin who was not actually ill. Grey and black would be the only colours needed by an artist to paint the Count's portrait. It was only at moments that he showed his full height, as he seldom held himself up properly. I think he was dressed for dinner that evening, but his clothes always seemed to me much the same, and had at least the merit of passing unnoticed.
"You have had a long journey," he said.
I was at once reminded as he spoke of the fact that the ​Count's mother had been English, and that he had been to an English school. He was twenty years older than his half-sister at the least, and curiously old at that. I came to see that quite unconsciously he took the part of the aged in the house. He laboured not, neither did he lack anything he needed. As we settled down he realised the place of the aristocracy in our small party. He ruled us, and in return we were grateful, and we gave him of our best. He did not know it himself, and by the time I came to recognise our mutual relations I acquiesced in them heartily. I have read aloud to the Comte d'Etranges until my throat was sore, and I have copied his impossible writing until my eyes were dim, but I only felt how stupid it was of me to have tonsils that would swell and eyes that could not work without pain after midnight with even three candles.
I can't be clear now as to what I thought of him then; I can't now dissociate his personality from the influence I grew to feel later on. It certainly seemed natural that our hostess apologised to him and not to her guests for making dinner late. It seemed natural, too, that during most of the meal the conversation consisted of George Sutcliffe talking to and for our host, asking his opinion on things as if it were decisive, and presenting his own as if of necessity an inferior article. I felt nervous and tired, but I enjoyed myself all the same. I don't know now what they talked about; partly, I suppose, because I had not then any clue to much of what they said. I remember that Marcelle hardly listened, and that she had at moments a look of being bored, quite fiercely bored, in her dark eyes. The Count's hands struck me as something unusual; I think I gave him a decanter and our fingers touched, and in spite of the heat of the room his fingers were very cool, almost cold.
I had an odd little thrill then, and I recall it now. He was always the same, independent of what affected other people; hot rooms left him cool, and icy weather made him no ​colder. I felt as if I had got out of school or out of church when we left the dining-room and found ourselves on the terrace.
"We follow the English custom and leave the men to themselves," Mademoiselle d'Etranges explained. "I find it barbaric, but it suits Paul. I suppose that wine leaves people open to influence."
I shivered slightly at this allusion to the mysterious Count.
"And you know Mr. George Sutcliffe?"
"Only a little," I said quickly. I wanted to do away with the impression of that blush. "I met him at my first party."
"Tiens! and you made great friends?"
"No," I said, "it wasn't that; but I was unhappy at my first party and I ran away."
"Ran away," cried Marcelle, "because you were not happy; how amusing! Comme c'est gentil de dire cela! and where did you run?"
"Why, I ran home," I said, opening astonished eyes at her.
She laughed heartily, and the unfriendliness I had felt before somehow suddenly vanished. "And Mr. Sutcliffe, did he run too?"
I sat down on a stone seat against the wall and laughed helplessly. "I don't believe that he even knew I ran away."
"Oh, that's dull; you might at least have told him. But then, why did you blush when you met him to-night?"
"Only because I wondered if he knew how I had behaved then." I feared she would detect that I was not speaking the truth, for in reality I could not explain to myself that idiotic blush.
"And you have been a great deal in the world since then?" she asked.
"Oh, no," I said; "I have never been in the world since."
​She sat down on the bench beside me and laughed heartily. "How amusing! how nice! I thought you were going to be one of the horrid, smart, stupid, detestable girls"—her voice rose with her adjectives in singularly vituperative effect—"whom Maman tries to send here, and who understand nothing and care for nothing and tire Paul. Do you know," she went on, with a delicious child's expression in her face, "that was why I put on my very best gown, and oh ciel! I forgot, I am spoiling it on this bench. And you are really quite nice, and my yellow satin wasn't needed!" she added to herself. "It is too late to make it worth while to change, but why spoil it on the mossy stone?"
We got up, she took my arm and we strolled on.
"You see, my mother will bother me with people who don't really want me, and who are of no use to Paul, and I can't stand it; I had enough of the world, bien assez, at home. I shall go back to it some day, but not now. We have come to England for a purpose, and we don't want to be bothered."
I felt a little jarred by something in these last remarks. How Marcelle jumped at things! She seemed from this moment to take for granted that I knew nothing of the world she had abandoned, and my poor little vanity did not quite like it. Still there was something winning in the amazing candour with which she registered each impression. We chattered away happily after that for a longish time, strolling up and down the stone-flagged terrace that lay on one side of the house and ran along the river side of the first garden. Leaning over its low parapet, and looking across the road some twenty feet below us, we could just distinguish the white foam of the brawling stream as it broke over the stones. The long, northern summer twilight had faded at last, and there was darkness clinging about the old walls. Deep shadows without edges lay about us, and clear skies that lit us dimly without rays of light drew our eyes to the ​skyline of the moors high above us on either side of the valley. We were sitting on the moss-grown top of the wall, Marcelle having forgotten the yellow satin, when we looked round and found the Count standing beside us. She shrieked.
"Don't, Marcelle; think of the stillness," he said in a low voice.
"But you surprised me, Paul. And do you know that we are already great friends, and I have adjusted my mind to a new set of ideas about Miss Fairfax, and she is to call me 'Marcelle' and I her 'Lisa'—it is not ugly like 'Lizzie'. But where is your Sutcliffe?"
"He is going to play, and you must come and sit outside the drawing-room window with me and listen."
She jumped up exclaiming, "Delightful! and do you know, Paul, that Miss Fairfax—c'est à dire, Lisa—says that your Sutcliffe is a well-known author, and that half England talks about him? Isn't it amusing? And she and her sister have formed their minds on his books, or his articles, or his something and——"
Paul's voice sounded faintly irritable as he answered, "But I told you——"
"You told me that he was intelligent and far above the average English Catholic—mais tiens—he will hear me if I go on"—a discovery which she might have made sooner, as we were by now close to Mr. Sutcliffe, who was standing in the long window of the drawing-room with the end of a cigar in his mouth. I swore mentally that I would never tell anything to Marcelle again, and with hot cheeks I sank into a garden chair near the window. The Count sat down and told her to stop fidgeting, and Mr. Sutcliffe went to the piano.
"Whatever else he is," murmured the irrepressible lady by my side, "he has some true musical talent."
"Silence!" commanded Paul, and silence followed, only once broken by Marcelle exclaiming in a loud whisper that ​she had stained her yellow satin, upon which the Count again said "silence!" in his imperious voice, and silence again followed. I thought our host had chosen the music beforehand, for there was no pause in the programme. I'm not really musical or music would make me deaf and blind to other things, whereas it generally makes me acutely conscious of everything about me even at the height of enjoyment. And there is no joy comparable to that joy, even for such as me. It all comes back to me now—the stillness, the darkness, the murmur of water, the Count's face, intensely white, his grey eyes still and fixed, Marcelle's beautiful countenance and the hungry soul that looked out of it, drinking greedily of the eternal harmonies. I leant back, very still, in a luxury of enjoyment that was not without the young element of surprise. "After all," the music seemed to say, "this world is not always dull, work-a-day, matter of fact, and the men and women in it are in reality beautiful. This great earth can be very still, and music is the soul of it." At last the sleepy head of Jacques put itself in at the drawing-room door.
"Night prayers," said the Count rising.
"Oh, dear!" said Marcelle, "must there always be prayers?"
George Sutcliffe came out on the terrace. "Don't let her go to prayers," he said, looking at me.
"I don't want her to go, I don't want to go myself," said Marcelle. She threw back her head and clasped her hands behind it as she spoke. "Ah, the stars!" with a deep sigh of enjoyment; "but," she muttered in a low voice, "it is mean not to say 'thank you,'" and quickly followed her brother indoors.
My eyes met Mr. Sutcliffe's, and we half-consciously told each other how beautiful she had looked at that moment.
"But you should hear her sing," he said, "only she won't do it when her brother is here."
"But why not?"
​"Oh, because she thinks it upsets him or excites him or something. She has quite a fine contralto, only she never gives herself time to practise. But you ought to go to bed. Don't wait—our hostess often forgets to say good-night."
I went upstairs slowly, and as I reached the second landing the music was crashing away in the drawing-room. Relieved of the black and white Count, Mr. Sutcliffe was singing something boisterous from an opera buffa.
V.
Next morning I came down to breakfast, having slept like a top, feeling all the freshness and delight of the glorious climate and the glorious sunshine. I felt a little anxious as to whether coffee and rolls would satisfy the appetite that had come back to me.
"We make the English breakfast from the orders of Mr. Sutcliffe, and Paul has coffee in his room," Marcelle explained, and she certainly did justice to what she had provided. "I have heard of a dreadful thing," she went on, between mouthfuls of ham and sausage. "Imagine! there is in this country, in this nineteenth century, a witch, or so the people here imagine"—she put down her knife and fork and clasped her large white hands in horror,—"and she is starving. They think she has been the cause of the death of a bull, of a very prize bull, in the next farm, so now they have what you call in Ireland boycotted her; isn't it shocking?"
"Is it also true?" said Mr. Sutcliffe, who had provided for all my wants at breakfast, unregarded by my hostess.
"Oh, but of course, or I should not tell you," Marcelle went on; "well, figurez-vous, she is almost starving, and I want to take her food. Could you go a very long walk indeed, Miss Fairfax?"
"I should love it," I answered.
"And Mr. Sutcliffe would carry the food for the witch and for us. We shall want some luncheon, shan't we?"
​"I should like it of all things," said Mr. Sutcliffe, with a mock, mendacious smile, "but I want to work at an article for the Quarterly."
"So," said Marcelle rising, "you will leave the poor old witch to starve, and you will be embarrassed with questions about her at the Last Day, all on account of an article for one of your wretched English reviews, with no real science or thought in them. I should like you to hear what they think of your reviews in Germany." She walked to the window flushed with her protest, and leaning out pulled at the petals of the blush roses growing on the wall. She was dressed in some rough white stuff that suited her. George Sutcliffe rose and followed.
"It may make little difference to the world of thought," he said, standing behind her, "but it makes a difference of £40 to me."
Marcelle turned round delighted. "Tiens, comme c'est Anglais, you are the most material people; fancy Paul remembering £40,—ah, mais c'est trop fort, another £40 to you is to mean another day's starvation to the witch."
"I wish you could just send her something, and let me do my work," said Mr. Sutcliffe weakly.
"Send!" she cried, "why it is twelve miles off at the least; besides, it is so beautiful, I have wanted for so long to see that valley."
"And Miss Fairfax is to walk twelve miles?" he said.
"No, no, that won't do; of course we must take the donkey for her to ride, and the donkey will do instead of you to carry the lunch."
"Thank you; then as there is another donkey, I may stay and finish my article."
"No, no, did I say anything like that? so very polite—I beg your pardon——" she held out some roses to him—"take these and forgive."
"Yes, if I may stay at home," he said, holding out his hand.
​She tried to snatch them away. "Oh, these ungallant Englishmen!"
"I've got them," he said, "but they are so spoilt they are not worth keeping; however, it's such a fine day I will come, and finish my work to-night."
"Paul mustn't miss his music," she said, becoming suddenly serious.
"But I may miss my sleep," he observed half to himself, as he went out of the room with the remains of the roses in his hand.
Marcelle stood for a moment by the window smiling, then she turned to me.
"You won't be afraid of coming to feed the poor witch, will you? Mr. Sutcliffe will take care of you."
So I went up to get ready. I thought I should not have the fatigue of having to join much in the conversation while we three went to feed the witch.
"I was convinced from the first that there was 'no sich person,'" said Mr. Sutcliffe. He and I, and the donkey, were waiting in a steep street of a nominal village of scattered grey stone cottages and innumerable low walls of reddish brown stones without mortar. A little crowd of children gathered about us as Marcelle dashed in and out of cottages trying to make a few dull old people she could find direct us to the witch's cottage. Happily we knew also that the witch bore the very ordinary name of Mrs. Brown.
"It is part of a plot," she exclaimed to us in French as she came out of the last cottage; "they will not let us find her and help her." Marcelle was flushed and almost tearful. At last she allowed Mr. Sutcliffe to make the inquiries, and he made out our way to a lonely, miserable cottage, high up among the hills. By the time we got to the cottage Marcelle's benevolence was at a white heat. The door was opened by one of the sternest and most forbidding old ​women it was ever my lot to see. She demanded our business, and was obviously divided between resentment at our good intentions and a determination to keep whatever Marcelle had brought her without saying "thank you," or asking us into the cottage.
"You can put down the hamper," was her most cordial observation. Her only human inclination was to describe the very painful disease from which she was suffering, and the appalling treatment which she had given herself. After this she abruptly inquired how long we should be staying, and I with difficulty persuaded the discouraged Marcelle to retire.
"And I am to leave my good things, my meat pie, my very best cognac, and not even have a thank you? Non, c'est trop fort, je ne veux pas, I will not; I will have the things back."
"You had better not try," said George. "I heard her bolt the door the moment we turned away. Besides, what's the matter? she was starving, and you have fed her. Wasn't that your object?"
"I don't believe she is starving a bit," said Marcelle, white with anger; "she looks quite fat, quite covered; what a horrid, odious, diseased woman! It was absurd to come, un procédé tout-à-fait ridicule."
Then seeing that we were laughing she abruptly recovered her temper, and laughed too, and said we were "très gentils" and "très bons" to take it like that.
It was a glorious evening full of light and air as we came back over the moors. There was such lightness of breathing, such full peace in seeing, as I have only known in a few days in my life. Marcelle became very quiet, our laughter had died down, but the merriment of it underlay our growing restfulness of spirit. Marcelle took her turn on the donkey, and I strode on with an energy I had not known for many a long day, "stepping westwards" towards the setting ​sun. At the foot of the hills we turned into a little dark wood, and from that we emerged on to the high road between the station and Peak Hall, a narrow and rough one. A dogcart came suddenly clattering round a sharp corner close beside us. Marcelle cried, "It is Arcot and Sharpe; they will miss the train". She jumped off the donkey, and at the same moment the man who was driving pulled up a few yards farther on. Marcelle hurried towards them, and Mr. Sutcliffe said to me in a quick, low voice, "Get on the donkey and don't notice them, I hate that man". He busied himself helping me to mount, and Marcelle called out at the same moment to tell us not to wait. So we went slowly on our way. Mr. Sutcliffe was silent for some minutes.
"Who is it?" I ventured at last.
He gave one of his big laughs, but he looked annoyed all the same, and his forehead was frowning ominously. He rubbed his hands against each other with great vigour before answering.
"'Why he, a harmless necessary cat;' and I Arcot? But you know that was why we were sent to hunt the witch."
"Why, who sent us?" I said innocently.
"The Comte d'Etranges." He looked back along the road to see if Marcelle were near. "You see," he went on, "the Count will hobnob with intriguers of that description. One of those is a seedy American who lives in Rome to make mischief or money, and the other is the journalist who publishes the same mischief to enlighten the British public. I don't know that any of it much matters, only I can't get Paul d'Etranges to see that such men are fatal to any cause."
I pulled up my slow-moving donkey and said: "But do explain to me what is the 'cause' and what is the object for which they have come to England. Mademoiselle d'Etranges spoke of this 'cause' last night."
He laughed this time until the sound echoed about us.
​"That is just the point I want to settle myself. Is it a real cause or is it moonshine? and whichever it is, what is the good of dragging in the scum of the earth to help him and then pretending that he hardly knows them? He meant them to get away before we got back."
Again silence, while he walked on one side of the road and my donkey on the other.
"How long have you known the Count?" I asked at length.
"Almost a year. I met him at the house of an old friend, a parish priest in the East End; a man of an extraordinary brain; a perfect mass of useless learning. He was quite excited at giving me a chance of meeting the Count, and I, in my insular ignorance, had never even heard of him then. Well, we made a night of it, the most amazing night. That fellow, sitting in the stuffy little room, talked philosophy till four in the morning, and—I hardly believe it now—but instead of being bored I was in a whirl of excitement. It was amazing, astonishing. That death's head of his never moved nor his skinny hands; he sat stock still, he might have been a lay figure, even his lips hardly moved. I was too excited to sleep that night, and I was wild to see him again. After that we took long walks all over London, and my goodness, how he talked! It was real stuff too. I know just enough to be sure that his philosophy is quite first-rate. He knows his Kant and his Hegel as well or better than anybody in England. They think no end of him in Germany among the sets that know him."
"Well, but what's the 'cause,' the object?"
"You will have to swear by those donkey's ears that you won't be as indiscreet as I am."
"Most solemnly."
We both, and the donkey, paused and looked behind to see if Marcelle were coming.
"It is, as far as I can make out, the reform of the ​intellectual condition of the Church Catholic and Universal. I smell something of Christian Socialism in the business, which is not much in my line, but it is what attracts his sister. He regards Catholicism as the one hope for religion and order in the future—as the one effective defence against infidelity and anarchism. But the Church cannot triumph unless it assimilates modern science, and keeps its hold on the people. It must be scientific and democratic. One of the first articles of the Count's creed is death to Scholasticism, and there I'm partly with him. He is to bring the seminaries up to date in historical criticism, and there I say 'chi va piano va sano,' for after all it is a science in its infancy. But then, Miss Fairfax, he is the most unpractical man on the face of the earth, and the most amazingly self-confident. Here's a business that is to affect part of the inhabitants of every spot on the globe. It is no mere local or national or even European controversy, but the handling of the intellectual life of the mightiest religious polity the world has ever seen. Take it in his own favourite way, and call it the largest, the deepest, the widest expression of the religion of the human race. And to him, all he wants done is so perfectly simple. He knows so little of human nature; he has no philosophy of action, he leaves everything to ideas. Teach the young priests philosophy up to date, shake the Vatican like a bottle of medicine till you get the right things at the top, and you will have a Catholic Church made in Germany, and fit, according to him, to guide and to embody the thought of the human race. Mind you, all the same, the man has so much force, so much power of infectious thought, that it is amazingly interesting to watch him and to see what will come of him. I conclude that you don't know his story from the way you speak."
"No, indeed, I don't."
"Well, he is now, I suppose, forty-five. About fifteen years ago he came to the front as a politician in Paris, ​and great things were expected of him. He was known to be a complete unbeliever, a strong thinker, and expected to prove a leader of men. He was the heir to the great properties he now owns, but he always seemed quite aloof from the considerations of wealth and ease. He had admirers, but not, I think, many friends. It was for a very brief space that he was in men's minds. Then he announced that he did not feel his intellectual position to be sufficiently well reasoned, or his opinions on a clear enough basis, for him to come forward as a politician. His sister showed me the other day a witty article in the Figaro, laughing at the young aristocrat who had played at patriotism and appeared to have the earnestness of a young English nobleman embarking on political life, but who then withdrew with the remarks of a German philosophical student. 'While Mons. le Comte is finding a logical basis for action, true Frenchmen have to act, not to dream,' was the conclusion. The outcome of the next five years, during which Paris forgot his existence, was that the Count emerged a professed Catholic, and announced that in the Church alone could modern thought and religious faith 'make one music' in a world fast hurrying to destruction. Neither the Church nor the world paid much attention to what he had to say. The world does not listen to the Church, he wrote, because the Church does not fulfil her true mission; she lives and works in the present hour, but she does not look forward. If she did, she would not ignore the thinkers who, obscure or unpractical as they may be, are in reality preparing a public opinion which will take the Church by surprise. He certainly thinks it his mission, as I was just saying, to rouse ecclesiastics in authority to the intellectual situation. By now, although he is barely thought of in public life, he has a very large following among intellectual people on the Continent. You will soon notice what an immense correspondence he carries on; and at least he has proved his sincerity by giving up all that the world ​values for his object. His life is almost alarmingly complete; he sleeps, and eats, and walks, simply to keep the machine in better order to subserve his mission. And yet"—and Mr. Sutcliffe sighed and looked half-humorously perplexed—"sometimes I think his ideas are all sheer moonshine, and a form of madness that may spoil one's own small bit of work for the Church in helping to reconcile the new learning of these days with the eternal truths she has to guard. At other times I feel as if he were the God-sent thinker to do that very work. I have sat listening to him and watching the singular gleam when he seems to have an eye within an eye which sees a vision not granted to others—the vision of a Church, glorious and conquering, the expression and the crown of a complete world of knowledge, where the human and the Divine clash no more even seemingly. I don't know why I should say all this, only that we are thrown together in this strange house, and I feel that you will understand. But then, Miss Fairfax, if d'Etranges is the man providentially sent to us at this moment, why has he the strange element that makes him seek out these unprincipled journalists? And why has he such an unshrinking touch when he would handle the Ark of the Lord?"
The last words were spoken in such a low voice that I could hardly hear them. It was a curious little outburst, very unlike Mr. Sutcliffe as I got to know him afterwards. Perhaps it is easier to be unreserved with an almost total stranger, than it is later on when further intimacy has revealed to us the complications that divide all minds, unless there is a special union of the heart. We were silent, and I felt a friendly glow towards the man at my side as we went slowly forwards until Marcelle overtook us.
I wish I could draw a distinct portrait of George Sutcliffe as he was then—it might make my story clearer—but there are reasons not to be given here why it is especially difficult for me to see the clear outline of such a picture.
​Mr. Sutcliffe was at this time about thirty, and as I had told Mary three years before, he could not be said to be handsome. His figure was tall, broad and muscular, the arms a little too long and the head decidedly too large to be in proportion. His features were squarely cut and rather heavy, and the eyes were small, but the glance was full of life and he had a sweet smile. We used to tease him, when I knew him better, about a certain unconscious ferocity of expression he sometimes fell into. We declared that he was the image of a most ferocious and prominent figure in an old picture hanging in a passage at Peak Hall, representing a press-gang going about to devour the harmless countrymen during the Napoleonic wars. Marcelle once said that when he came into the room giving a big laugh at some joke of his own, he made her think of a group of Englishmen in Shakespeare's historical plays. "Enter the Earls of Suffolk, Gloucester and Hereford." That Mr. Sutcliffe had been in the Navy was proved by his walk, but he had not the preciseness and neatness of a sailor, and he was curiously indifferent to big or small possessions; he had not even a favourite pocket-knife or an old watch. Yet there was much about him of the schoolboy, and at times it seemed impossible to make him serious. He would have jested on the scaffold, like Sir Thomas More, and have gone there quite as readily. As a Catholic he was indeed in the true English style. For if he would have died with More for the Papal prerogatives, he would have died as willingly in the defence of his country against the Spanish Armada. Very humble and very independent, he owed both characteristics to the absolute clearness of his faith.
Mr. Sutcliffe was by nature a man of action. But circumstances had made him realise that the field for action in the present day for all who are interested in religion is an intellectual one. If he had lived only among his own kinsfolk, or if he had continued in the Navy, he would never ​in all probability have become interested in the subjects that drew him into friendship with the Comte d'Etranges. In a most impressionable moment, not long after his eldest brother's death, and when he was burdened with too many empty days, he made a friendship which had a singular effect upon him. His parents had persuaded him to leave the Navy, yet in practical matters he was not really needed in his own home. He could not leave his parents in their time of sorrow, and his only sister's marriage soon made them lean on him the more. He determined to study hard to make up for what he had lost during his life at sea, although even then he had always managed to read a good deal. He had a turn for science, which was the immediate occasion of his making friends with Professor Telles, a young man of already European reputation. This friendship became the chief interest of his life. When Telles married the friendship only deepened. It was an ideal marriage; both were young, handsome, with great gifts, unworldly, loving work and loving each other in an absolute union. "They had," Mr. Sutcliffe said afterwards, "the riches of nature showered on them,—were her complete children. They were pagans, not in the sense of worshipping idols, but in their entire ignoring of a supernatural world. There was no apostate touch about them; they did not dislike religion; they had never been brought across it, and they did not trouble their heads about it."
After three years of married life, while travelling with Mr. Sutcliffe in the North of Spain, Professor Telles died of diphtheria after three days' illness, in agonies of pain. Nature in the end seemed brutal to her spoilt child. No one, I think, has ever known what Mr. Sutcliffe saw, and suffered by seeing, while he was the only companion of Mrs. Telles. It was the end of his youth.
When he came home his mother was startled and alarmed. His brother's death had made no such mark on him. The ​next three years were to him the story of the sorrow and the illness of Mrs. Telles. His parents thought he was in love with her; he and she knew better. It was a great friendship. It was on his part a great agony to comfort her. He blamed himself intensely that his friend had died without any religious help. He would fain have brought some hope to the widow. But soon he realised—bit by bit was forced to realise—that he might as well read Shakespeare to a Red Indian as talk religion to this cultured Englishwoman. It never even dawned upon her that there could by any possibility be any rational side to Christianity. She had learnt it in early life in a form which made it quite incredible to her and had thenceforth shut it out for ever from her mind. Their worlds of thought were miles asunder. He would have had far more in common with a Chinaman or a Hindoo. For three years he studied, he prayed, he devoted himself to Mrs. Telles and then she died; glad, she said, unutterably glad, that it was all over. This long absorption had no doubt kept him from public life and from marriage. Indeed, at the latter part of it he was almost a sick-nurse.
This experience gave a bent to his activities which they would not naturally have had. As some men who have been thrown across physical horrors give up their whole lives to the struggle to diminish, however little, the misery they have seen, George Sutcliffe, after his friendship with Mrs. Telles, threw himself heart and soul into the controversies between the Christian ethics and the pagan. He was haunted by her three years' agony; he had sounded the depths of a soul without hope in this world or the next. And he found his co-religionists immensely blind to what he wanted them to do. He wanted them to understand that there was a world of thought, and of thinkers, almost unknown to them as they sat at home at ease in faith and plenty. He wanted them to understand how the ​usual text-books used by Catholics in this country, were not only inadequate to express the great truths of religion, but were almost unintelligible to those who had been educated in the language of a new civilisation. That that civilisation might be decadent and morbid was not the point, the point being that it was in possession of the minds of men. Greek may be a finer language than English, but it is not usually of so much use in dealing with the inhabitants of the British Isles.
His practical English mind demanded that something should be done to bridge the chasm between the very rich in spiritual gifts and the very desolate. If he had found and realised the prevalence of some horrible disease he would have said: "What's to be done now?" and in the same way he demanded of busy, tired, parish priests and comfortable, quiet old laymen, "What's to be done now to make faith intelligible and reasonable to the minds of such people as the Telles?"
Some years before they met the Comte d'Etranges noticed two articles by George Sutcliffe, which struck him by their rare gift of intellectual common-sense and the author's sympathetic treatment of his opponents. He had been on the look-out for the writer from that time onward, and spared no pains to annex him when they were thrown together.
VI.
After my talk with Mr. Sutcliffe that afternoon, I listened more attentively to the Count's conversation during dinner. To me my host was courteous, but as if he were not quite conscious of my being there at all. To George Sutcliffe he talked of Church history, and to me the vividness of his word-pictures was astonishing. I remember wondering if it were with intention that he so often alluded to the use which great rulers and leaders made of the baser kind of humanity.
"You are such an Idealist," he said to George, "you should realise that in all ages there has been some one equivalent to the modern journalist. At one time he was a letter writer, at another a playwright, often a poet. At all times there needs must be interpreters between the thinker and the crowd."
"No, I'm not an Idealist," laughed the other, "I'm a practical man, therefore I see more of the proportion of things. You, being an Idealist, when you condescend to practical matters deal with everything in a mass without discrimination. You don't realise journalism as a profession embracing heights and depths. You don't care to know if the man who advertises your ideas is a serious, conscientious man of honour or a mere gossip. You are too much above and apart from the world of practical life to deal with it successfully."
"Perhaps there is something in what you say," said the ​Count frankly, and he looked a little depressed. "But how is mind ever to do its work, how are ideas ever to gain ground, if you do not try to deal with the practical world?" There was a marked melancholy in his penetrating voice: something pathetic, too, in the luminous eyes: something of solemn sadness as he looked beyond us, as if seeking for a vision not far off. It was the look Mr. Sutcliffe had described to me that afternoon.
"I really don't know," said George laughing; "but I don't believe it pays to press into the service of ideas men who are incapable of understanding them. You will be astonished by the travesty of your philosophy which they will give to the world. If you want to destroy a man's character, or preach revolt, or get up an enthusiasm for individuals, low instruments may be of use; like a noisy drum, they call attention. But don't put anything too precious in their hands."
Next morning I was sorry to find that our host had gone to London for several days. But what delicious days those were which put him out of my mind! What glorious long hours on the moors when I drank in beauty, joy, peace, and assimilated the summer brightness with the facility of youth. Joy, peace and health may, often do, come later in life, but never again the clearness of a pleasure that is unhaunted by memory or unshadowed by fear.
The Count came back late one night after we had gone to bed. The next morning Marcelle came into my room before I was even thinking of getting up. I noticed at once a suspicion of tears on her eyelashes. Marcelle's dark eyes were not hard and inexpressive, as black eyes too often are; it was a clear lucent darkness suggestive of simplicity and receptivity, not of dull resistance.
"I am distressed," she said, sitting down on my bed. "I have made a confusion, I have forgotten to copy Paul's article for the Allgemeine Zeitung, and it will now be too ​late. It is serious for many reasons. I have been too much amused, too forgetful. Could I not have spared just one hour a day and copied the article? Then, too, I forgot to practise some music for Benediction. I am discouraged with myself."
She looked quite forlorn.
"When ought the article to have gone?" I asked.
"It ought to go at half-past ten o'clock this morning."
"And now it is half-past seven. How long is it? May I help? Could we not manage it between us?"
Marcelle leapt up at the suggestion, and ran screaming about the house demanding coffee and rolls, demanding Paul, and even the sleeping Mr. Sutcliffe. By half-past eight we four were sitting at a big oak table in the Count's study writing for dear life. I was immensely excited. George was obviously bored, but worked doggedly, and Marcelle was in the fever of repentance. Happily for me, my German was the best part of my education. At first I hardly noticed what I was copying; but as I went on the words caught hold of me. There was a cold passion about them, a curiously abstract fervour. They had an intensity of feeling for ideas so abstract that the feeling became a thing too mental to be called feeling. The article made on me a new impression; it touched some facet of my young mind that had never reflected anything before. I looked up, half-puzzled, half-admiring, wholly happy in the sense of expansion, and glanced towards the Count. I expected to see nothing but his forehead and hair as he bent over his copying, but I found, to my surprise, that he was watching me. I coloured, but he did not look away; his quiet scrutiny rested on me as if he were quite indifferent to any sensation it might produce on my part. To relieve myself I looked quickly at the others and saw that they too had become excited. Marcelle made one or two incoherent mutterings.
"I would put the reference to Comte here," George ​said presently. The Count rose, took down a book and looked out the passage. It was getting near to ten o'clock and I was becoming anxious; but by a quarter-past ten it was obvious that we had succeeded. By half-past ten Jacques' announcement that the post had arrived was received with a loud "Hurrah!" echoed by us all, even the Count, although he did not raise his eyes from a volume of Hegel he had taken up after finishing his copy.
"Now for more breakfast!" cried George.
"There are heaps of ham and things," said Marcelle; "we will devour them all."
They went off to the dining-room noisy and cheerful, and I was left with my host.
"That line of thought is new to you?" he said, looking up from his book.
"All thought is new to me, I think," I said humbly.
"No," he said, "it is not so, or you could not have responded like that. How many English or French girls would have found such an article in the least interesting!"
"But I don't understand it," I said, flattered, but trying to be sincere.
I certainly did not then, and do not now comprehend all he said to me that morning, but the mental sensations were wonderful. He talked to me at first of Kant, then, I think, of Hegel, and lastly, and most of all, of Comte. I can only compare the effect on my young mind to the effect of stretching on an india-rubber band. And yet, although I was taken much too far and left slack afterwards, I was intensely happy.
We wandered out into the garden. I might have been an old philosopher, a thinker and student; he treated me exactly as an equal, and to a girl uneducated by poor Miss Mills it was absolutely intoxicating. It added to the excitement that it was the first time he had taken any notice of me. I knew from Marcelle how rarely he was seen before ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/61 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/62 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/63 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/64 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/65 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/66 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/67 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/68 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/69 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/70 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/71 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/72 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/73 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/74 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/75 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/76 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/77 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/78 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/79 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/80 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/81 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/82 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/83 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/84 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/85 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/86 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/87 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/88 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/89 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/90 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/91 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/92 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/93 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/94 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/95 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/96 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/97 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/98 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/99 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/100 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/101 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/102 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/103 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/104 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/105 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/106 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/107 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/108 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/109 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/110 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/111 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/112 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/113 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/114 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/115 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/116 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/117 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/118 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/119 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/120 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/121 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/122 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/123 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/124 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/125 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/126 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/127 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/128 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/129 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/130 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/131 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/132 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/133 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/134 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/135 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/136 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/137 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/138 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/139 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/140 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/141 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/142 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/143 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/144 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/145 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/146 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/147 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/148 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/149 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/150 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/151 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/152 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/153 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/154 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/155 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/156 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/157 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/158 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/159 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/160 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/161 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/162 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/163 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/164 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/165 ​Page:Out of due time, Ward, 1906.djvu/166 ​life's painful circumstance, does from time to time obtain a complete holiday for her children.
"I have never seen Paul enjoy a feast like this before; it is your doing, Lisa." We were coming out of the chapel as Marcelle spoke. A glow of hope and joy filled my mind. As she spoke Paul came towards us. We went to meet him and he took my hand in his.
"Tu es contente?" he said, quite tenderly, and in his native tongue for the first time to me.
Marcelle called, "George, where are you?"
He came to us in the dark passage, and I smiled my happiness to him. He took Marcelle's hand, and we stood for a moment opposite to each other, we two couples.
"Gaudeamus omnes in Domino" "Let us all rejoice in the Lord," sang George in a sudden outburst, from the Introit of the Mass, which we had just sung together in the chapel. Gaudeamus, we all sang together once again.
"Let us spend every Feast of the Assumption here together," said Marcelle. "May we not, Paul? May we not? And sing Gaudeamus and Assumpta est Maria just we four together. Paul, do say that we may."
I can hear her voice close to me now. And we were in fact never to sing Gaudeamus together again.