THE WINDS OF MARCH

5

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE. THE WINDS OF MARCH.
CHAPTER		PAGE
I.	A Curse and a Song	9
II.	“In Faëry Lands Forlorn”	25
III.	A Sortie and a Repulse	33
IV.	Saint Antony	40
V.	The Church Militant	55
VI.	An Unrepentant Magdalen	63
VII.	“Red-clay and a Breath”	71
VIII.	Barbara, M.D.	79
IX.	An Open Window	86
X.	A Piece of Eve’s Flesh	94
XI.	A Desperate Rally	117
BOOK TWO. AN INTERLUDE OF STORM.
I.	The Three Tribunes	127
II.	The Madness of a People	137
III.	Defeat	146
6 BOOK THREE. THE RENDING OF GOSSAMER.
I.	Eros and the Church	153
II.	A Grey Dawn	173
III.	“The Desire of Thine Eyes”	180
IV.	A Magical Night	186
V.	The Rubicon	209
BOOK FOUR. AN INTERLUDE OF TOIL.
I.	A Child’s Kiss	219
II.	La Pucelle	225
BOOK FIVE. THE GREAT DEEP.
I.	“Canst thou bind the Sweet Influences of Pleiades?”	233
II.	“It is not Good for Man to be Alone”	244
II.	A Rank Materialist	248
BOOK SIX. THE COMMON DAY.
I.	Homespun	261
II.	The Beloved	268

9

THE WINDS OF MARCH.

CHAPTER I.
A CURSE AND A SONG.

“And teach us who survive, in this and other like daily spectacles of mortality, to see how frail and uncertain our own condition is, and so to number our days, that we may seriously apply our hearts to that holy and heavenly wisdom, whilst we live here, which may in the end bring us to life everlasting, through the merits of Jesus Christ, Thine only Son, our Lord. Amen.”

The Reverend Antony Magnus, senior curate of the parish of St. Mark the Evangelist, in the city of Liverpool, lifted his head from his hands and looked at the dying man. He had been a dock-labourer, and of a splendid physique; but age and phthisis had left him as fragile as an ailing woman.

“My feet are very cold,” he muttered slowly. 10 The words seemed to force themselves in syllables through his yellow teeth and thin grey beard.

The curate’s eyes met those of the three children gathered at the head of the bed on the far side by the fire. An elder girl stepped softly forward and laid an old skirt across the bottom of the dirty counterpane.

The sick man opened his eyes and saw her.

“Is she coming yet, Meg?” he demanded, with the querulous impatience of the weak.

The girl went through to the lobby, and looked out into the street.

The sick man waited, and with him waited the two other children and Antony Magnus.

Presently Meg came back, a negative plainly written in her eyes of pert hazel.

“Not a sign?” the dying man asked again.

“Not one, gran’dad.”

“Whom does he want?” inquired Antony Magnus.

The child Meg nodded mysteriously, and whispered to him as she stood by his side.

“It’s Auntie Pollie.”

“Is she from home?” pursued the curate, rising; “can I telegraph or send?”

“She went away with Tom Austin,” answered Meg, importantly, “and we don’t know where she 11 is. Mother has gone to see Tom’s father to try and find out.”

The man in the slovenly bed tossed and moaned.

“Parson,” he said faintly, “am I going?”

“Our Heavenly Father, who doeth all things well, my dear brother,” returned the curate, after the manner of his kind, “is taking you to Himself, to be at peace for ever.”

The sick man sighed.

“I suppose I’d better believe it,” he remarked; “it seems the only thing to do.”

The curate evaded the cynical rationalism of the sentence.

“You are disquieted in mind, my brother?”

The other glanced with difficulty at the children on his right hand.

“Workhouse for them, I suppose?” The them was indicative.

“I will see what can be done elsewhere,” promised Antony Magnus.

“That’s good of you, parson,” murmured his departing parishioner, a grateful gleam in his fading eyes.

“You are quite easy now?” inquired the curate, after a pause.

The well-nigh fleshless forehead wrinkled dissent, and the head rocked slightly.

12

“Tell me the trouble,” said the curate, soothingly.

There was no answer. The breathing of the dying man came in short gasps.

Antony Magnus knelt down again by the bed, and began to pray.

“Oh, blessed Lord, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comforts, we beseech Thee, look down in pity and compassion upon this Thy afflicted servant. Thou writest bitter things against him; Thou makest him to possess his former iniquities; Thy wrath lieth hard upon him——”

A little shiver shook the bed, and the curate looked up. A sudden change had crept over the white face on the bolster. Antony Magnus passed to the end of the prayer.

“Deliver him from fear of the enemy, lift up the light of Thy countenance upon him, and give him peace.”

“Meg,” broke in the dim voice.

“Yes, gran’dad.”

“Not coming yet?”

The child’s light steps crossed to the window. There was a pause.

“No, gran’dad.”

The sick man rose upon his elbow.

“Damn her!” he burst out; “damn her for a ——”

13

The curate put his hand against the purple lips, and laid the quivering figure back.

The child Meg spoke gravely.

“It’s Auntie Pollie he means,” she elucidated contemplatively.

Antony Magnus stooped over the head of the bed, stayed so a moment, then drew up the sheet.

Suddenly the latch of the distant yard-door spoke sharply. A moment later footsteps sounded in the kitchen.

The curate stood with his hand on the sheet, and the children listened. The murmur of voices penetrated the flimsy lath-and-plaster partition.

“It’s mother and Auntie Pollie,” observed Meg, and stepped forward to pass out. Magnus set his hand on her shoulder, and she stayed.

The door from the kitchen to the lobby, hung at an obtuse angle with that of the parlour-bedroom, opened, and two women came through—the first, tall and stout, with red cheeks and dark hair; the second much younger, and verging upon her twenties—a slim girl, with blue eyes and a mass of fair braids tied with ribbon of the same colour, but a different shade. Both were poorly dressed, in the shawl and skirt habit affected by their sex among the lower working-class. The eyes of the elder 14 were swollen and inflamed with tears; those of the girl were dry and sullen.

“S-sh!” said the curate.

The two women looked at him and understood.

“Gone?” asked the elder of the women.

“As you came in,” answered Magnus.

“Do you hear that, Pollie?” cried her sister, turning upon her. “Not only did he die without seeing you—shameless girl that you are!—but he died without me near him, that always did my best by him, though he loved me least.” She wiped her eyes with her apron. “Did he suffer, Mr. Magnus?”

“Not at all, I think,” responded the curate, a tremor of hesitation in his voice.

“And gran’dad swore,” volunteered the child Meg, eagerly. “He ast me if you was comin’, and when I said ‘No,’ he said ‘Damn her!’—just like that—‘damn her for a ——’”

“Silence!” commanded Antony Magnus.

The child shrank back, abashed.

Her mother faced the girl Pollie with triumph in her bearing.

“That was you, Pollie,” she explained vindictively. “What else did gran’dad say, Meg?”

Antony Magnus drew himself up, his face stern and forbidding.

15

“Nothing, woman,” he told her solemnly; “God smote him, and he died.”

Pollie’s countenance lit with smothered pleasure.

“I’m sorry he’s dead,” she conceded grudgingly; “but he were always cruel to me, the hard old man! Melia, there, she were always his favourite, for all she denies it so pat; and little enough of food and fire I’d ’a had if it hadn’t been for Tom.”

“Mention his name here, if you dare, you wicked girl!” interrupted Melia.

“Mention it! Of course I will,” flaunted Pollie. “The best fellow as ever stepped, and the kindest. He done me no good with the old man, thanks to you, Melia, but he loves me, and loves me yet, though his child won’t own his name in law, and the folk down here call foul names after me in the road. Mention his name, the fine lad, will I? Damn me, indeed, that haven’t worn stitch of his buying since I was a dot like Meg. Wanted me back, did he! What for? To damn me to my face as he did behind my back. I know him.”

Magnus watched the two with contracted brows. At length he spoke.

“Silence, Pollie, and you too, Mrs. Reeves. He was your father, and he is dead.”

He turned back the sheet. The withered face 16 lay pallidly amid its dingy calicoes, wearing an expression of petulant anger.

Melia threw herself down by the bed and sobbed.

Pollie stood and watched her dispassionately. A moment elapsed, and she turned upon her heel, a nail in the leather shrieking against another in the bare floor.

“Well, good-bye, Melia,” she observed curtly. “I’m not wanted here, I guess. Good day, Mr. Magnus. You don’t know me, but Tom comes to St. Mark’s sometimes. When the beauty his old man tied him up to has drunk herself to death, you shall marry us—eh, Melia? Goodbye, Meg. Kiss your Auntie Pollie.”

Melia sprang up and pushed the child behind her. Pollie laughed.

“Oh, very well,” she yielded; “so-long,” and went out through the front.

Magnus took up his soft hat.

“I will call again to-night, Mrs. Reeves,” he remarked; “perhaps you would rather be alone for the present.”

He went out into the lobby, closing the room-door decisively. A group of curious neighbours were hanging about the steps leading from the street.

“Is the ould man gone, sorr?” queried a middle-aged 17 Irishwoman, whose breath reeked of spirits. Pollie had refused to accede to their request for a bulletin.

Magnus shut the door, which lacked a central knob, and spoke sharply to them.

“Be off,” he said; “all of you. Mary Halloran, no drinking with Mrs. Reeves, now, or I will speak to the Father about you.”

“Sorra a dhrop, sorr!” chorused the women.

Magnus’s lip curled as he walked away.

Turning the corner into the road he saw the delinquent Pollie, and overtook her.

“Well, Pollie,” he began sombrely; “so you want me to marry you?”

Pollie’s eyes filled with sudden tears.

“It’s my dearest wish,” she confessed; “but Tom’s wife is alive, sir.”

The curate’s mouth set harshly.

“And you live with him?” he asked.

Pollie nodded.

“You know that you are living in sin,” he said.

Pollie shrugged her shoulders.

“It’s easy to talk, sir,” she rejoined shortly, “but maybe there’s more than one side to the matter. Where’s Tom to live, and who’s to fend for him? There’s his mother drinks, and the old man drinks, and his wife—the publican’s daughter that old 18 Austin married him to for her bit o’ money—she drinks. Tom arrns fifteen bob a week at the docks, and we live in Howe Street, in Mrs. Morris’s top front. I can manage with the fifteen bob—sometimes ’tis less, sir—but Tom couldn’t live the life of a dog by himself. Besides, sir, the lad has tas’es, and likes a fireside and a table of his own. No, I can’t leave him. It’s just waiting till the old —— dies.” Pollie’s plainness of speech was merciless.

Antony Magnus pondered.

“You could keep house for him,” he suggested, “and get your food in payment.”

Pollie stared at him. Then she comprehended, and laughed gaily.

“Not much,” she demurred; “you don’t know Tom.”

Magnus frowned.

“I love him,” added Pollie, “and will I send him away to be like Jim Foster and Willie Fellowes?”

She shivered with dislike at her own image. Magnus knew the men to whom she referred—two low-class roués of the Road.

“You have taken him from his wife,” he objected, trying another line of appeal.

Pollie sniffed scorn.

“Did he ever go past the altar with her?” she demanded indicatively.

19

Magnus gave up.

“It’s sin, none the less, Pollie,” he persisted steadily.

“Then there’s plenty bigger,” concluded Polly, and went her way.

The curate turned up the queerly-shapen hill towards his lodgings. Some fifty yards from the summit an acute and irregular slope, paved with “cobbles,” met it on the left, ran across it obliquely, and curved up again into a cramped outlet. The topographical scheme was really a distorted capital Y, the left arm and the leg being St. Mark’s Hill, the right St. Mark’s Terrace. The land embraced by the shallow mouth of the Y ran up to the lofty plateau of St. Mark’s Road, whereon, at the corner of a short street joining the Road and the Hill, stood the church of St. Mark the Evangelist. This triangular wedge of stark hillside was occupied by two or three decayed mansions, one of which, standing at a much greater altitude than its companions, was known locally as the “High House.” On a fine day the flare of the sunshine on its windows might be seen from the river. The “High House” was reached by four flights of steps—some seven in a flight—with dwarf terraces intervening. A “garden”—being, in fact, a species of desolate “rockery”—bordered 20 each side of the stairway, on the left narrow, on the right broad. Absurdly enough, at the summit this quadruple flight of steps shot out a path at right-angles to reach the hall-door, which was on the far side of the house-front. Thus the steps themselves merely brought the visitor to a blank wall of stucco, view of the doorway being cut off by a deep bay window. From the garden-gate the hill and the terrace ran down in the combined leg of the Y—a dangerous incline of about one foot in three.

As Magnus faced this ascent in the hot August afternoon, his mind was full of the perplexing problem in ethics set him by Pollie Jeffries. He was conscious of a strong bias in Pollie’s favour. Man-like, he admired the pluck and verve of her defence, and unconsciously coveted for himself just some such indignant champion as Pollie had shown herself to be in Tom’s cause. Once he muttered to himself as the sunshine fell warmly across his face between two roofs of unequal height, “Neither do I condemn thee,” and then a cold shadow plunged him into pessimism once more. By long training a woman-hater, the sudden recollection of Mary Halloran’s face—hot, greasy, and circled with an invisible spheroid of London gin, stirred him to physical disgust, and 21 nipped, in the moment of its efflorescence, his sentimental sympathy with the heretic Pollie.

He mounted the precipitous steps of the “High House” with a despondent air, and rang the bell dispiritedly. When he turned about to beguile the inevitable wait with something more attractive than the study of four oaken panels, the river was gleaming below him, a steel-blue blade in the late sunshine. A liner lay in midstream, and a full-rigged ship swept down towards the Bar at the tail of a fidgeting tug. Between was a dense warren of roofs, intersected with sloping streets and narrow lanes.

Antony Magnus sighed heavily, and turned to enter as the door opened. He had taken it so entirely for granted that he would come face to face with Miss Cameron (the unbending single lady who permitted him to occupy her front parlour and bedroom—in view of his peculiar respectability, for a smaller consideration than usual) or with Susie, her maid-of-all-work, that he fairly staggered when his eyes met a pair of wide grey ones, and travelled thence to their owner, a very small and dainty person in a grey serge frock.

He bowed instinctively.

“I am——” he began.

22

“Mr. Magnus,” she said coolly—“Auntie is out. I have just put some coal on your fire.”

The idea of such a being condescending to anything so mundane as the task in question took away the curate’s breath.

He went in with a conventional “Thank you,” sat down by the newly “tidied” grate, and fell upon the revision of a blotted proof. When next he looked up his pen marked the period of an elaborately judicial dictum.

“It is, alas! too true,” he had written, “that for long there has been tacitly levelled at the sister sex a contempt which would have been more justly directed at the insatiable sensuality of our own. But, on the other hand, one cannot ignore the all-too-frequently evil nature of that feminine influence, which ‘not once or twice in our rough island story’ has blighted the noblest minds among her poets, her soldiers, and her statesmen.”

At this point his labours were disturbed by the sound of a violin played softly in the adjoining room. It was an enticing little air that the unseen musician was discoursing—a waltz-like prelude with snatches of a broader melody in it. Presently the playing ceased, and someone began to sing. The air was full and sustained, the words pretentious—

23

A ruthless summons interrupted the song.

“Miss Bab!”

“Yes,” called the singer, good-naturedly.

“Ask Mr. Magnus if he wants any tea.”

The next moment the curate’s door opened quietly, and “Miss Bab” stood before him.

“Will you want any tea, Mr. Magnus?” she inquired.

“Not just yet, thank you, Miss——”

“Cameron,” supplied the interrupted vocalist.

“Miss Cameron; thank you. I am just finishing this. In about half an hour, please.”

Antony Magnus took up his pen as the door closed, and re-read the last clause of the 24 printed sentence: “Has blighted the noblest minds among her poets, her soldiers, and her statesmen.” He crossed out the conjunction thoughtfully, inserted the phrase “and her preachers” after the word “statesmen,” and went on with his work, not in the least conscious that he was wondering how “Miss Bab’s” song ended.

25

CHAPTER II.
“IN FAËRY LANDS FORLORN.”

When the curate of St. Mark’s awoke next morning the sunshine was pouring a broad plane of golden-yellow rays across the room, and the sparrows were gossiping in the rusty city ivy about his window. He had been dreaming, and as his glance travelled drowsily up the ethereal causeway of quivering motes, it seemed to be part of the dream. He had worked hard at his sermon the previous night—worked till he could see the dawn from the deep bay of his study, a shallow band of meagre radiance nestling in the lowest east, and had fallen asleep almost before the chill of the enfolding linen had ceased to oppress him with a feeling of scarcely defined discomfort. This vague sense must have persisted into his dream, for the restless eyes of fantasy had opened upon a vast deep, landless and infinite, the sight of which had filled him with 26 a brooding sense of apprehension. From what point of vantage he first looked upon it he could not tell—it might have been from behind the optic lens of some circling sea-mew, for he could discern, as though poised a mere foot above the surface, every curl and swing of the tossing water; he could hear the lapping of the waves, as their white crests fell over upon the glassy green slopes below; he could see the lift and heave of the rollers, and catch the salt scent of the invisible spray flung up into the racing wind. Then, without warning, the timbers of an open boat, undecked, broad-beamed, grew about him out of vacancy. Four crimson prints glared upon the straining lug-sail, as if a giant finger had made thereon the Sign of the Cross, and great gouts dropped from them to clot upon the thwarts. The hurrying seas flung their glittering crests aboard, and his fingers froze upon the sheets and the tiller. Then, in the swirling wake that churned away behind, a face shaped itself—laughing, elfish, half-familiar—with lips pouted for kisses. The rise and fall of the bubbling foam showed a tender throat that was whiter than itself. And Antony Magnus, curate of St. Mark’s, would have stretched out his hands in the dream to touch the lovely thing that swam in his course, but they were bound 27 to the stiffened ropes and the shaft of the rudder with fetters of glittering ice. The boat plunged giddily from one mass of rolling emerald water to another in the maddening tumult of wind and deep, and the falling blood-drops from the Sign upon the sail, flung by the reverberating flap of the canvas, spattered his senseless fingers. They were warm, and his involuntary grasp loosened. He threw himself down in the stern, and clutched at the foam. Two small hands clasped his, dragging him out of the little vessel; then unclasped again.

The huge green rollers curled over his head and stunned him with their deluging tons, but he battled to the surface. It was night, and the stars were shining. Far off in the west a halo of golden glory streamed up against the sky. He cried out upon God, and struggling, cried again and again. It was no use: he failed; he felt himself sinking, overcome by the paralysing chill of the water. A faint memory shot up in his brain—a vision of a sick room and a dying man. A curse rang in his ears and pressed on his lips, fitting itself to the situation.

“Damn the cold!” he ejaculated, and shuddered to hear his own voice in the profanity.

While he said it he rose lightly as though he 28 were treading shallow water. A kindlier breeze was blowing, and the sea lapped his limbs warmly. It was flowing steadily to the West. The rays grew larger and brighter. A white beach appeared, level with the water, a line of palms beyond. He was swept towards it as if in the grasp of a mill-race. Beyond the palms a golden plane like a distant stairway ran up into the clouds. A shadowy mountain seemed to sustain it.

“Parnassus,” something said within him, “this is the land of song.”

As his mind shaped the last word, the wind loaded itself with melody that became articulate speech, and yet did not cease to be melody.

29

“Those were the missing lines,” thought the curate, and he stepped out on to the beach. A glassy pool lay before him, and he saw himself in it—a bedraggled-looking figure in clerical costume. He tingled with annoyance. Suddenly a peal of laughter set the air dancing. The curate looked up and saw “Miss Bab.” She wore a short skirt of plaited grass, that came only to her knees, and a hundred long and gaudy necklaces flung over her bosom, which was tanned with the tropical sun.

The curate blushed with delicacy and embarrassment—the former for “Miss Bab,” the latter at his ungraceful attire.

As he stood wondering what he should do, a young man came from behind a neighbouring bush. He wore the ordinary costume of a South Sea savage, and moved with the grace of a young hart. He crossed to Miss Bab, and put his arm about her shoulders. Then they both looked at the curate and laughed.

The curate opened his mouth to speak, when he recognized in the stranger his own lineaments, fainted with shame and horror, and awoke with the sound of a violin in his ears.

It was being played in the room above, and the strings, probably out of regard to the slumbering 30 household, were evidently muted. The first thought which diverted the curate from his dazed contemplation of the sun-rays was one of wonder at the purity and sustained quality of the tone produced under such an exacting condition as that of comparative silence.

Shaking himself free from the enervating influence of his dream, he rose, opened the window, and made his toilet in the full draught of the cool morning air. His waking eyes seemed to see in his clerical garb somewhat of the visionary disfigurement wrought in his exploits of the night, and he was vaguely conscious of disliking its fit, or style, or some less definite factor of its appearance. After no little fidgeting over the details of his costume, he descended, proposing to take his usual walk. At the foot of the stairs he met Miss Bab, dressed in the grey serge frock in which she had stooped to “mend” his study fire, but wearing, in addition, a small cloth shoulder-cape.

“Good morning, Miss Cameron,” he said, a feeling of embarrassment stealing over him as he remembered the improprieties of his dream. “You are abroad early.”

“I have been up for an hour or more,” returned Bab, demurely.

31

“Then it was you I heard playing,” he hazarded, glancing at her curiously.

“Scraping on the fiddle,” corrected Bab; “I am the most restless of mortals. And now I am going for a walk, while you, I suppose, are going to study?”

“No,” replied Magnus, looking for his hat upon the rack; “it has always been my habit to go for a walk on Sunday morning.”

“Wet or dry!” marvelled Bab, mischievously.

Magnus assented.

“Ugh!” pouted Bab, “how awful it is to be the slave of habit!”

The curate looked round sharply, but her face did not waver.

“It is a very healthy habit,” he observed, with lame brusquerie. “However, this particular morning is exceptionally beautiful, so no doubt you will have a pleasant walk.”

He took his stick, bowed, and went out.

“Well,” said Bab, and sat down on the stair, “that is cool. And I wanted to talk to him. I suppose I’m snubbed. One to the Reverend Magnus. It’s the first time any one ever succeeded in snubbing me.”

She felt for her gloves in the pocket of an ulster hanging on the rack, put them on—sitting down 32 again on the stairs to do it—and followed the curate, shutting the door softly behind her.

She paused on the step a moment. Below her lay the second city of the Empire, grimy in its cloak of soot. The air was clear as it can only be on a bright Sunday morning in summer. Pale cloudlets of smoke ascended here and there from domestic chimneys, but the lofty stalks of mill and factory were inactive, to the great advantage of the atmosphere. She looked at the mass of cramped houses, bounded by the low-lying river, and sighed.

“Poor people,” she soliloquized, “what a terrible hole to have to live in! I wonder if there’s a park about here, and a green thing or two?”

She went cautiously down the long and awkward stairway, and out on to the middle of St. Mark’s Hill. Just turning on to the upper level was the curate.

Bab laughed, waited till he had disappeared, and then walked rapidly in the same direction.

33

CHAPTER III.
A SORTIE AND A REPULSE.

Though Bab had never walked up St. Mark’s Hill in her life before, and knew nothing even by hearsay of its environs, she held Antony Magnus in sight without being seen, by means of many skilful diversions from his own line of route, which yet kept her fairly parallel with it. Why she had elected to track him she herself scarcely knew—she had always gratified her whims, and her present whim was to know more about him. Besides, he had snubbed her, and Bab, like all women of her stamp, was childish enough to be petulant and therefore persistent.

At last the curate’s course led him into the open, and Bab despaired of cover in the great deserted streets which he seemed bent on traversing. Presently a tall railing came into view, ending a short vista. Down this Magnus turned, crossed the road, and entered a park-like enclosure. 34 Immediately beyond the only visible gate he took a seat, drew out a book, and began to read. Bab stamped irritably. How was she to get into the place and so encounter him without betraying that she had followed so closely upon his heels as to spoil the apparent innocence of the meeting? A tan gallop marched with one side of the silent park. The road without it was deserted and shady. Bab hurried along it—fearful lest Magnus’s sharp eyes should have seen her—and turned into the ride. No one was about. She scanned the high lance-headed palings and anathematized them mentally. At intervals they were strengthened by a strut, each with a shoulder at about three parts of its height. Bab’s eyes gleamed. She swung herself up to this shoulder, with a glance over the empty drive, got one foot firmly planted upon the convenient ledge, and gathering her skirts tightly about her, stretched out the other foot to the top bar of the lofty fence.

Her experiment warranted a sigh of relief; the thing was just possible. She clutched the spears, drew up the foot resting on the shoulder of the sloping strut, lifted her skirts free of the entangling points, and plunged down into the shelter of the plantation, in blissful ignorance of the fact that a grim official had watched her every proceeding.

35

When next Antony Magnus beheld her, she was strolling calmly towards him down the yellow gravel path, and reading a letter. In her wake came the park-keeper.

The official caught up with the unconscious Bab before she reached the curate’s seat.

“Beg pardon, miss,” he observed gruffly, yet quietly, “but do you know that clim’in’ the railings is not allowed?”

Bab flushed. Magnus would wonder what schoolgirl sin she had been committing.

She glanced at the man’s face. It was kindly, and expressed, moreover, an obvious admiration, for he had just perceived that she was a lady, and a pretty one at that. Her glance became a significant one.

“I mustn’t walk on the grass?” she remarked easily and aloud. They were not now more than a yard or two from the bench of dingy iron slats on which the curate sat. “Thank you; I was not aware. I am a stranger here. But it is as well to know, for I shall be in the park often.”

The keeper fathomed the meaning of the glance, cast about for the reason of her anxiety, perceived the curate of St. Mark’s, and smiled pleasantly.

“Any day will do, miss,” he replied considerately, below his breath, and, touching his hat, 36 departed, wondering what the indulgence would be worth when next he saw the young lady.

Magnus rose and bowed to Bab as she passed him. She was relieved at escaping from an awkward situation, and pleased at her own presence of mind. Besides, she had been walking fast, and the August morning was warm. For all of which reasons she was looking her best—no trifle to any woman, Dame Venus herself not excepted—when she returned the curate’s bow, and added a bright little smile of her own.

Magnus would have been nothing less than adamant if he could have suffered the gay vision thus presented to pass out of sight without an effort to detain it.

“We seem unable to escape one another,” he began, with a slip into clumsiness, due to a haunting recollection of his past discourtesy. “Won’t you sit down? This is one of the most comfortable of a very indifferent set of seats.”

“I shall disturb your meditations,” protested Bab, piously.

“Not at all,” he said. He did not in the least perceive the latent mischief of the demurrer.

Bab sat down gracefully, wondering, as she managed her skirts in her facile feminine manner, what he would have thought could he have seen them flying in the air ten minutes before.

37

“Do you preach this morning?” she asked, by way of appearing interested in him.

“Not this morning,” answered Antony Magnus; “but I must be present, of course. I preach this evening.”

Bab looked at him, and speculated on the possible and probable varieties of sermon that might fall from those sensitive mobile lips. She almost decided to go to St. Mark’s in the evening.

“You will not yet have settled down anywhere, I suppose?” inquired the curate. “Miss Cameron, your aunt is, I believe, a Presbyterian.”

“Can you imagine her anything else?” flashed out Bab, forgetting herself.

Magnus smiled, and answered her with a hinted question.

“I cannot quite guess what you are,” he admitted quietly. His tone reproved her flippancy.

Bab got worse.

“Neither can I,” she said, and showed her teeth in a snap of girlish anger.

The curate looked pained.

“You are not a Churchwoman?” he prompted.

Miss Cameron the younger shook her head.

“I go nowhere,” she confessed; “at least, not regularly.”

Magnus knitted his brows.

38

Bab flashed out again, knowing instinctively how she could hurt him.

“In London I used to go and hear Dr. Aubrey Harrison.”

“The Deist?” demanded Magnus. The question was in vocal italics.

“The Unitarian,” revised Miss Bab, wilfully.

“I wonder,” commented the curate—so much to himself that it was impossible for Bab to take the full measure of offence contained in the observation—“that her relatives did not interfere.”

“I have no relatives in London,” rejoined Bab, savagely; “and if I had they wouldn’t have been allowed to meddle with me in any such matter.”

“Harrison is a most dangerous thinker,” replied Antony Magnus, coolly, not in the least discomposed by her anger.

“I didn’t agree with him altogether,” admitted Bab, “but he is a good man and a fine preacher—better than any of the London Ritualists, for I heard them all; at least, all the ‘big-wigs.’”

“Whatever his personal qualities may be,” persisted Magnus, with a dogmatic note in his voice, and ignoring her spitefully vulgar allusion to the pulpit abilities of his religious clique, “he can hardly be regarded as a desirable mentor.”

“I know what you mean,” Bab informed him 39 hotly—“of course I do,” as the curate gave a gesture indicating his doubt on the point. “That book of his the Church Times reviewed so harshly. Well, I agree with it—the book I mean; preserve me from agreeing with a Church Times review.”

“We won’t discuss that, Miss Cameron,” said the curate, firmly.

“Am I a child, Mr. Magnus?” stormed Bab. “That may do for your Churchwomen; it won’t for me. I agree with Dr. Harrison, it’s positively absurd to say that the Song of Solomon is mystical; it’s just a passionate poem, not a bit better, except in morals, than much that Byron wrote. One would think, sometimes, that marriage is a bit of heathenism Christianity would like to get rid of altogether.”

Magnus rose.

“Let me see you home, Miss Cameron,” he remarked formally.

Bab bit her lip with anger.

“We are favoured in living so near the park,” Magnus went on conventionally.

Bab responded shortly, and after that neither spoke.

On the doorstep Bab turned to him. “You preach to-night, I believe, Mr. Magnus?”

“To-night,” said the curate.

“I will come and hear you,” answered Bab; and her eyes threatened him.

40

CHAPTER IV.
SAINT ANTONY.

When Bab got safely into the shelter of her own room, she sat down on the bed and cried. In the middle of this performance she began to laugh, and laughed till the tears dried upon her hot cheeks.

“Confound his impudence!” she said. Then she reflected that it is not considered respectable for a young lady to swear, even in such mild expletives as the one she had just employed, and her upper lip left her white teeth uncovered for a moment as she revenged herself upon the conventional by an unmistakable sneer.

“I wonder,” she remarked reflectively, “what Mr. Magnus would do if he heard me swear.” A wicked light came into her eyes. “Would he faint?” she asked herself, and made a contemptuous grimace.

She decided not.

41

“No, he would have the impertinence to lecture me again. Oh,” and she clenched her fists determinedly, “I should like to kill him! Lecture me forsooth!”

* * * * *

Antony Magnus sat down wearily in his study chair, and put his hands to his head.

“What an extraordinary species of girl!” he observed, half-amused. “I suppose she regards me in the light of a callow boy-priest, fond of millinery and worked slippers. She must have an active brain. What a pity she was not born a man!”

With which characteristic reflection he drew his notes for the evening to him, and began to amplify them.

* * * * *

Later on in the day Bab, upstairs, hunted out a Church-service, cut some sheets of notepaper to fit into the dumpy red volume, and sharpened two or three scraps of lead pencil.

“If the worst comes to the worst,” she considered spitefully, “I can caricature him. That will be some comfort.”

Then she dressed herself with elaborate care. When she had finished she looked in the glass and smiled as Eve did when she first saw her 42 face in the waters of the river, and as Eve’s daughters have done ever since before their mirrors. She was small, this Barbara, but it was with a diminutiveness attractive and dainty. She was not spare—spare women are seldom blithe, and Bab was—but boasted of tiny hands and feet, the former, as may, quite possibly, have been the latter also, azure-veined and pretty. Her blue-black hair was coiled low down at the back of her large, though graceful head, so that the shapely line of the crown was carried far back. Thick clusters of loose curls danced over her white forehead, her nose was blunt, though tenderly moulded and ample of nostril, her mouth was ripe and eloquent of line, her chin quaint and softly rounded. Her steel-grey eyes were wickedly arch as she surveyed herself in the half-light.

She laughed elfishly.

“Now I’ll go and hear him preach,” she said, and blew out her candle.

When Antony Magnus ascended the carved alabaster pulpit of St. Mark’s and opened his Bible at the Lesson for the evening, his mind was too busy with its forthcoming task—for he did not read his sermons, but spoke from notes—to have any room for thoughts of Bab and her threat to form one of his audience.

43

He read over the first few verses of the Lesson before he raised his eyes to meet those of the congregation. It was the ninth Sunday after Trinity, and the words ran:—

“But King Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh; women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites, of the nations concerning which the Lord said unto the children of Israel: Ye shall not go in unto them, neither shall they come in unto you, for surely they will turn your heart after their gods. Solomon clave unto these in love.”

He looked up and their eyes met—his, brown and stern; Bab’s, grey and laughing; his face, pale and ascetic; hers, flushed and eager.

The lights lowered, and the people settled themselves with a rustle. Antony Magnus turned the pages and read a second passage.

“Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman. . . . For the fashion of this world passeth away. But I would have you without carefulness. He that is unmarried careth for the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he 44 may please his wife. . . . The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit; but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband. And this I speak for your profit; not that I may cast a snare upon you, but for that which is comely, and that ye may attend upon the Lord without distraction.”

Antony Magnus began in a low key, simple and persuasive. They all knew of the greatness of Solomon—the splendid young man who had come to the leadership of a growingly powerful nation, to the government of a rapidly peopling country. Drawn with subtly appealing touches, the portrait stood out, vigorous, virile, actual. Statecraft invited him, this young monarch—that great game of chess which the kings of men loved to play at; the weapons of war were to his hand, the warder of peace was in his grasp. Commerce, that ever-widening circle of Jewish enterprise which was one day to hold the world in its net, clamoured for extension and defence; the Temple of the Most High demanded a very slavery of loving solicitude before it should round to the fulness of his father’s plans. And he—Solomon the Wise, whose glory had set a flaming page 45 in the history of the world that would always read like a fairy interlude, Solomon the Magnificent, Solomon the Great King—gave his diadem into the hands of the Keeper of the Harem, and became a slave of slaves, the puppet and the sport of alien women whom he loved.

Magnus paused, knitting his brows after the fashion of the orator who attacks a difficult sequence.

“Whom he loved!” He reiterated his last phrase, an inflection of intense irony mastering the repetition. It was not easy for him to translate his actual theme into conventional speech; his words came haltingly. Probably few of those who had listened to the story of King Solomon’s weakness and folly had discerned any parallel between it and the life of to-day (so he told them, hinting at the novelty of his forthcoming exegesis). And of those who had done so, doubtless the majority had turned for an analogy to the perennial tragedy of the Prodigal Son, and had thought of her whose ways go down unto death, and whose guests are in the depths of hell. To himself (he went on) the most obvious parallel seemed the least momentous.

“I fear I shall startle many of those who hear me,” he prefaced warningly; “but I confess that 46 I have seen in the sphere of legal and recognized marriage many life-dramas which recall this of the Jewish monarch. ‘For surely they will turn away your heart after their gods.’ That was the prediction of the Most High to the Chosen People. There is the same keen insight in the few sentences which I read from the Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians; sentences whose definite purport is utterly ignored (it may be excusably so) by present-day teachers of Christianity. With the significance of this latter passage I desire briefly to deal.”

Barbara opened her little red Church Service, adjusted the sheets of paper, and began sketching under cover of a conveniently sloping desk. The preacher’s complex countenance piqued her skill, and her small fingers stroked busily, transcribing it into line and shade.

When she caught the thread of his deliverance again, he was harping upon the Pauline epigram, “He that is married careth for the things of the world, how he may please his wife.” The argument hovered dangerously on the verge of the humorous, but the curate’s seriousness was enthralling. The world, that tireless enemy of all virtue, made constant war upon the Christian unit as upon the Christian faith, and the strength of 47 the unit lay in the solitude which threw it back upon God for solace and companionship. Love stepped in between the soul and God, and altered the values of the individual life. The spiritual waned, the physical waxed. It had been said, went on Magnus, that Paul’s counsel was one of peculiarly temporary application, that it must be viewed in the light of the desperate struggles which at the time lay before Christianity and its adherents. What, he asked, with a burst of energy, was there no longer the necessity for arduous and whole-hearted service—were there no longer battles to be waged, and waged almost single-handed—were there no longer evil interests to attack, unscrupulous antagonists to encounter, poverty and crime, impurity and suffering to remedy and mitigate? Had the work of the Christian and the Christian Church ceased in the earth, and was the singing of Te Deums the only occupation remaining for spiritual enthusiasm and lofty impulses? “I would have you without carefulness,” said Paul, and “that ye may attend upon the Lord without distraction.”

There was a curious note of suppressed feeling in the curate’s sermon, as though he were reluctantly limiting the expression of some conviction that fought for more explicit utterance. At 48 last Bab was galvanized into attention by a striking sentence.

“There can be no doubt,” said Antony Magnus, determinedly, “that this relationship has meant to many men and women (and those not seldom the most potent for good) the complete subversion of their noblest capacities. And knowing this, I am not ashamed to take my stand beside the great Apostle to the Gentiles, and in these latter days (when London and Liverpool emulate the historic infamies of Rome and Alexandria) to echo his appeal for an absolute and unremitting service. True, the appeal comes strangely to your ears; it was not so in the mightiest ages of the Church, when men and women consecrated themselves wholly to God, and put away from themselves those earthly ties which might unfit them for His service. ‘That ye may attend upon the Lord without distraction,’ said Paul, and our own Prayer-book is loyal to his teaching, and tells us that marriage is a state of merely comparative desirability, and that only those who needs must should enter into it.”

Bab sniffed contemptuously, and fell upon irreverent sketches of jovial monks and saucy nuns. When Magnus again took possession of her mind it was with the closing portion of 49 his utterance. Oh, the nobility of a life unhampered by the most materialistic of earthly relationships! Jeanne d’Arc among women, the white flower of France, the saviour of her people, the inspired of Heaven, the simple peasant turned warrior, and warrior wiser than the ablest generals of King Charles; Paul among men, he of the Damascene highway and the vision, small of stature, mean of aspect, a poor itinerant tent-maker, yet shrewder diplomatist, more eloquent dialectician, loftier statesman than Wolsey or Richelieu, Cæsar or Napoleon;—these, and such as these, had been the noblest of His servants, and who that was ambitious of serving Him would not seek to be like them?

Bab gathered up her papers scornfully and put them away. She could tell what lay behind the sermon—the Anglican depreciation of marriage; and she scoffed inwardly as it peeped out still more frankly in the passionately mystical peroration. The concluding hymn angered her still more, albeit it is a noble religious poem—

The rows of rapt women-faces about her, and the 50 unanimous sigh which punctuated the preacher’s final benediction, betrayed her into a sneer, the point of which she scarcely dare translate to herself. Yet it bore hardly upon Magnus.

When the congregation broke up she walked slowly down towards the High House, pondering the curate’s austere harangue. Magnus, stalking homeward along the shadowy slope, overtook and saluted her. Bab turned and held out her hand. He took it coldly, and loosed it impassively. For a few moments they walked on together in silence. Antony Magnus was the first to break it.

“You would not approve of my sermon tonight, Miss Cameron?”

“No,” confessed Bab, straightforwardly.

“In what respects?”

“In all,” was the frank answer.

“Be a little more explicit,” desired Magnus. “I am interested in knowing——”

“I have been thinking,” returned Bab, “that it was just an insult to every mother in the place—an insult to your own in particular.”

Magnus started.

“Your appeal strikes a discordant note,” he retorted sternly. “My mother was not a good woman.”

51

“You wouldn’t have called mine good,” replied Bab, dauntlessly, “but she was, for all that. Mr. Magnus, is it wrong to love as Romeo and Juliet did?”

“No,” said Magnus, “it is humiliating.”

“To an essentially false dignity, yes,” thrust Bab; “and it is intended to be so.”

“You cannot imagine the Saviour of the world stooping to such a relationship,” said Magnus, irrelevantly.

Bab saw into his spiritual egotism, as in a flash of lightning one sees into the night.

“The theological Christ, no,” admitted Bab; “the personal one, yes. So much the worse for your theology.”

Magnus stopped at the gate and unlatched it.

“You appear to have studied the subject,” he remarked, as Bab passed in.

She smiled sadly; his condescension hurt her.

“I am an illegitimate child,” she said; “I have need of all my weapons.”

“I beg your pardon,” answered Magnus, unbending suddenly; “I am very, very sorry——”

“Not in the least, Mr. Magnus”—Bab rejected his apologies proudly, one foot on the stone stair, and glancing over her shoulder at him—“my father and mother loved one another.”

52

Magnus bowed as though to acknowledge her point of view, and they passed up the steps side by side.

At the top of the fourth flight the curate of St. Mark’s paused and faced about. The thousand lamps of the City twinkled below; here and there an electric light among the docks upon the river bank.

Antony Magnus sighed heavily. He lifted his hand and swept it, index fashion, from point to point.

“Down there next week, Miss Cameron,” he observed, a sad inflection in the voice worn with speaking, “there will be stark hunger for women and children, ay, and for strong men.”

“There is always some little of that in a great city like this,” remarked Bab, looking curiously at the shadowy panorama beneath.

“True,” he agreed; “but this is worse—much worse. Sixty thousand men will stand idle tomorrow when the whistles go, for at one o’clock yesterday the dockers came out on strike, and the principal employment here is by the river-side. What we are to do to find them bread I do not know—I do not know.” His voice trembled.

The tears rose in Bab’s eyes.

“I am sorry,” she said; “it is hard to see others suffer, and be powerless to help.”

53

“We can help,” dissented Magnus, “if we will but give our lives to God and to them.”

“That is a stab at my philosophy, I suppose?” parried Bab, not to be taken off her guard.

“I fear it is necessarily so,” returned Magnus. “If you could see the lives that humanity lives down there, you would feel its point more than at present.”

“Is that a challenge?” asked Bab, not to be set down.

“If you like,” was all she got.

“Then I will come and see,” she told him.

“To-morrow there is a business meeting of the dockers, which I must attend,” said Magnus, soberly; “I shall be glad to give you an object-lesson.”

“At——?” inquired Bab.

“At ten we should leave here.”

“I will be prompt,” Bab assured him, and rung the bell.

* * * * *

Magnus, sitting writing letters at his desk half-an-hour later, was startled by a knock at his door.

“Come in,” he called, and Bab entered. In her hand she carried an empty penholder.

“Can you oblige me with a nib, Mr. Magnus?” she asked with a friendly air.

54

He opened a drawer and took out a box.

“Please help yourself,” he desired abstractedly; “they are mixed.”

“Thank you,” answered Bab, and fitted one.

Magnus went on with his letters, while his visitor tried nib after nib upon a sheet of blank paper.

A sudden jerk of Bab’s elbow as a reluctant point parted from the holder—a jerk that shook the over-filled inkstand—splashed a drop of ink upon the curate’s half-written letter.

“Damn!” ejaculated Bab, apologized for the blot, and went on with her task.

“There, that will do, thank you, Mr. Magnus,” she said, and with something suspiciously like a mock curtsey, departed. But she had caught a glimpse of a horror-stricken face and shocked eyes.

When she reached her room she cast herself on the bed, and laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks.

55

CHAPTER V.
THE CHURCH MILITANT.

When Barbara and the curate met at the appointed hour neither exhibited any trace of the widely differing emotions kindled by their last interview. Magnus’s face, though touched with something of business-like animation, was as austere as ever; Bab was indescribably demure and self-contained.

The curate looked past her into space as he said “Good morning,” and when they had passed the garden-gate relapsed into the study of a sheaf of papers.

Bab walked silently by his side, and soon became absorbed in sensitive contemplation of the sights and sounds about her. At the foot of St. Mark’s Hill ran down, almost as steeply at its immediate junction, an extension of the road known to Melia and Pollie. Where this swept on to the level, a rather wide but unhandsome street left it for the City, prolonged by 56 more or less direct continuations to the river-side and the docks. The air of this quarter as they turned into it was, even in the August morning, stifling and heavy with a disagreeable odour of uncleanly animal life. A child ran past Bab, almost brushing her skirts—a tiny girl, scarcely more than a moving framework of bones. A ragged skirt and scanty bodice, coarse with dirt and thin with long wear, were her only garments. Bab turned to look after her. The opening of the bodice shook to and fro with the motion of the child’s trot. Bab could see that her skin was dusky with grime and scored with the thousand minute squares significant of exposure and foul living.

At the angle made by the road with a small side street a woman sat. Beside her was a camp-stool heaped with dried sea-weed. Bab wondered by whom and for what it was ever purchased. Halfway down the long street they were traversing stood a red brick music-hall, and beside it an erstwhile mansion bore the conspicuous sign “Loan Office.” Men, unshaven and out at elbows, lounged by public-house corners; a few chickens pecked and quarrelled in the roadway; from a Board School almost opposite the music-hall came the sound of childish voices in a distant monotony of aa‑b—ab, ea‑b—eb.

57

The curate walked on hastily, as one accustomed to the place, and Bab with difficulty maintained her position abreast of him. Through many winding and devious ways they approached a tall church, standing in a great flagged space—a church with four pinnacles at the corners of its square tower, and flying buttresses thencefrom to its thin central spire.

“St. Martin’s,” vouchsafed the curate briefly.

They crossed the wide quadrangle of uneven flags, and entered the church by a side door.

“We go down here,” explained Magnus, brusquely, as an inner door ajar on their right revealed a flight of spiral stone steps descending into the bowels of the earth.

Bab’s delicate little nostrils sniffed at the damp and vault-like odour which blew up the stairway, but she said nothing. Halfway down a torch of oiled rope was burning dimly, stuck into a ring upon the wall. A thick pungent smoke came from it.

“This church was built in green fields,” remarked Magnus—“long before gas came into general use.”

“Why did we not smell this upstairs?” inquired Bab, indicating the cloud of eddying smoke.

Antony Magnus seemed surprised at the 58 practical nature of the question, and paused to consider the matter.

“It blows out through some ventilating shaft,” he said, and pointed to a spot of white sky seen through a long and narrow piercing.

At the bottom of the steps he pushed open a third and heavy door, and went through into a dark passage.

“We come into the crypt proper in a moment,” he observed. “My friend Oswold has lent it to the strikers for their meetings. The docks are quite close at hand, so that it is very central, besides accommodating many hundreds of people.”

A second door brought Bab and her guide into a high stone vault, over which rose the body of the church and the mighty composite tower. A score of oil-lamps accentuated the darkness. At one end of the room a wooden dais had been roughly put together of forms and unplaned boards. At its side, round a table littered with papers, sat half-a-dozen men. In the main portion of the crypt, waiting patiently, as they had done for the best part of an hour, stood, shoulder to shoulder, a dense crowd of dockers—their strongly marked faces set and stern in the flickering yellow light.

“This is not a general meeting,” Magnus 59 notified her. “That has to take place in the open air. These are members of the committee, pickets and dockers of the north district generally.”*

* This was before the organization of the dockers in Liverpool had reached its present perfection.

He led Bab up to the table, where she was allowed to dispossess one of the committee of his chair. Though evidently an object of intense interest to the audience, not a man did more than glance at her courteously.

There was a movement among the dockers as the leaders mounted the platform and the speaking began.

As man after man stepped on to the extemporized dais and said his say in simple direct Saxon; as she watched the haggard, hungry faces in the strong shadows; as she heard the deep-chested murmur of sympathy or defiance which now and then rolled through the huge vaultings of the stone roof, Bab began to understand the basis of Magnus’s asceticism. She felt that if she had to minister to lives such as were represented around her, she too would begin to look upon the scheme of existence as a cold and joyless thing, and upon fierce self-sacrifice as the only comfort of the sympathetic.

She drew up a sheet of paper, and began idly 60 to sketch. Presently her attention was attracted by the sound of Magnus’s voice. His rising had been greeted with cheers, and out of the babel his quiet tones fell upon Bab’s ear with a sudden shock. His voice was almost strange to her. It had lost the semi-drawl which at times characterized it in the pulpit, and now found its way into quick and decided sentences full of fire and sense.

Bab moved her chair in a sudden access of interest. Magnus was like a new man. His arms were swinging freely, his face was alight, and the muscles of his mouth and throat were working easily, and with a strong, almost passionate play.

Bab began to sketch rapidly, and flung her favourite monosyllabic expletive at the lack of light.

“It is being charged upon us,” Magnus was saying, “that we are guilty of disorganizing, for selfish and personal ends, the labour of a great country. For selfish purposes—mark that! What is the life you live? I ask those here. Such as it is, God knows we priests who work among you live it too from sympathy. What is it? Twelve or fifteen shillings a week—perhaps not that!—and a wife and children to keep out of it. A room or two, seldom a house of your own; if you are 61 single, a bed in a common lodging-house. Working sometimes from five one morning to five the next on a ship, then perhaps no work again for a week—never certain of employment or a livelihood, always in danger from the rotten tackle of penny-wise employers; cruel suspense, arduous toil, scanty food, not even a share of the things which go to make existence honourable or decent—these make up your lives. You have been too long content to suffer it. There is a selfishness which is not only lawful and right, but whose absence is the stamp of a nation’s shame—the selfishness which asserts the right of every man to be a man, and to possess some little of the daily necessaries—not to speak of the refinements and the pleasures—without which manhood is an empty phrase, and life itself a ghastly mockery of being.”

Bab gasped. Was this the curate of St. Mark’s—the celibate, the priest, the Torquemada of black broadcloth and the nineteenth century? She contemplated her study of him, an eager enthusiastic profile.

“There’s something wrong with his full face,” decided Bab, sagely. “I wish I had yesterday’s scrawls with me,” and she tried to recall them.

There was a storm of clapping, and Magnus 62 dropped into a seat beside her. She crumpled up her sketches and slipped them into her belt.

“Are you impressed with this?” he asked. His voice had a little gasp in it, the echo of his recent passion.

“Thank you for that speech,” said Bab, cordially and inconsequently.

Magnus flushed up to the eyes with a pleasure that he was angry with himself for feeling.

63

CHAPTER VI.
AN UNREPENTANT MAGDALEN.

The crypt of St. Martin’s was disgorging its hundreds of anxious souls, and the great flagged courtyard, with its four entrance gates, displayed a broad Greek cross of moving men.

Barbara and Magnus stood at the south gate, waiting for the throng of strikers to disperse. Suddenly it parted, and a girl dashed up.

“Is Mr. Magnus here?” she demanded breathlessly of the cloven crowd, then catching sight of the person she sought, she slipped skilfully through and stood beside him. It was Pollie Jeffries, flushed and excited.

“Mr. Magnus,” she cried, “Melia’s husband’s back, drunk, and threatens he’ll break every bone in her body if she don’t give up father’s burial-money. Can you go, please? You can stop him; the police say it’s more his than hers, and they can’t do nothin’.”

64

Magnus glanced at Bab and Bab at him. Pollie saw that glance and interpreted it in her own fashion.

“Will you show this lady home, Pollie?” he said.

Pollie nodded.

“You’ll excuse me, Miss Cameron?” Magnus asked her.

“Decidedly,” Bab replied.

The curate of St. Mark’s went off at a run. Pollie turned in the same direction with Barbara.

Bab studied her guide silently for some few minutes. Her blue eyes were bright with the as yet unfaded excitement of the fracas at Melia’s, the flush on her checks showed a hectic red against the soft brown stipple of the skin. A grey-and-white check shawl was flung about her full bosom and drawn closely about her uncramped waist, her short skirt of dark maroon, striped with chocolate, swung easily from her hips. Her small red mouth was womanly and capable, her face mature and experienced. Bab was on the point of speech when Pollie inquired abruptly—

“Are you going to be married to the curate, miss?”

“I?” Bab laughed; “I have only known him a couple of days.”

65

Pollie smiled to herself.

“What made you think so?” pursued Bab, interested.

“The look you gave each other when I asked him to go up to Melia’s,” answered Pollie, sagaciously.

“He was only sorry that a lady whom he had invited out should have to go home by herself,” explained Bab, trying to hit the level of Pollie’s comprehension.

“He ast you out, then?” queried Miss Jeffries.

“Yes,” admitted Bab, feeling that it was scarcely the truth.

“Tom ast me first to go to the Haymarket,” reflected Pollie; “but I suppose Mr. Magnus, bein’ a curate, could only ask a young lady to a meetin’.”

Bab laughed, not exactly displeased.

“You’re mistaken, Pollie,” she retorted, mischievously. “Mr. Magnus isn’t a marrying man, and if he was he wouldn’t want a wife like me.”

Pollie’s eyes ran over her charge.

“He might do worse,” she decided, succinctly.

“But Mr. Magnus would want a wife like—like that,” concluded Bab, halting suddenly.

They stood in front of a low-class picture-shop. On one side of the doorway were cheap framed 66 copies of coarse German prints, on the other equally cheap religious pictures of an Irish-Roman-Catholic type.

Bab was pointing to a representation of a slim maiden in a blue-and-gold gown with an interminable train of jewelled splendour. Her long and taper fingers were clasped before her. Her eyes were raised to a flaming orb, surmounted by an irradiated cross.

Pollie considered the illustration for a while, then sniffed disparagingly.

“The curate may want that,” she said, with an insight that dazzled Bab into admiration, “but Mr. Magnus doesn’t. I’m married myself, miss—or as good as—and I know what a special look in a man’s eyes means. And Mr. Magnus’s can look that way for all his black coat and starched roundabout, or my name’s not Pollie Jeffries.”

“Pollie!” ejaculated Bab, between laughter and alarm.

“I’m not married to Tom,” went on Pollie, with spirit. “The old man Austin, he tied him up to Matt Cornish’s girl—Matt Cornish the publican—for her bit of money; him and old Austin being as thick as thieves. Not that Tom ever did more than say ‘I will’ before Father Corrigan, and lucky he didn’t, for Tilly Cornish, she’d been 67 carrying on with a steward out o’ one of Nimmo’s boats, and she put him in court for the five shillings only last Monday fortnight, for her child as isn’t none o’ Tom’s, and every soul in the Road knows it.”

Bab gasped. This was fresh light on Antony Magnus’s dictum, that even to share the capacity for love was humiliating.

“Mr. Magnus,” proceeded Pollie, “he said to me, when I told him that Tom had no home barrin’ what I kep’ over him, ‘You could keep house for him, and get your food in payment,’ says he. Now, miss, I ask you, wouldn’t a twelve-year-old in the Road there”—she pointed ahead with a wave smothered by the shawl—“know more of a man’s nature than to ask it. Mr. Magnus, he’s good enough, miss, but he don’t know what it is to love a man and say him nay.”

Bab felt that no self-respecting young woman could do anything at this juncture of Pollie’s confidence but maintain a discreet silence.

“‘It’s sin, all the same,’ he said,” concluded Miss Jeffries, “but I just answered him, ‘Then there’s plenty bigger,’ and I left him with it. Do you think it’s sin, miss?”

Bab considered the problem.

“This Tom Austin loves you?” she premised.

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“From that”—Pollie put out a small, strongly-shodden foot—“to this;” and she brushed back her tangle of fair hair from her forehead. “Why, miss, he’s not touched liquor since I said the word five months ago, and him a publican’s son-in-law. Show me a man in the Road or out of it with his chances that wouldn’t be drunk twice a week.”

“And he has never—never been anything to any one else?”

Barbara was a little put to it for choice English.

Pollie looked at her.

“I see you know your way about, miss,” she commented freely. “No, he’s kep’ as straight as me—ever since, by nature, there could be any question of straight and crooked with him.”

“And this other woman—his wife,” inquired Bab—“was she never anything to him?”

“Never,” averred Pollie, emphatically.

“And you?”

“If I was to die, miss”—Pollie looked up into the blue—“I was as proud as Lucifer till I met Tom.”

“And now?” persisted Bab, mercilessly.

Pollie’s head drooped.

“He can just do what he likes with me, for I might as well be dead as have him across with me.”

Bab decided definitely.

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“No, Pollie,” she gave her verdict, “I don’t think it’s a very great sin; but get married as soon as you can. It’s bad for other girls to see you as you are.”

“I know that, miss,” confessed Pollie, subdued; “but Tom, he’s more to me than any one.”

There was silence between them after that until they came in sight of St. Mark’s Hill. Then Bab spoke, inconsequently.

“Have you any children, Pollie?” she said.

Pollie fidgeted with her apron.

“N—not yet, miss,” she answered.

Bab’s eyes grew kind, and Pollie committed herself definitely.

“In about two months, miss.”

Bab glanced swiftly at her guide.

Pollie showed her white teeth.

“You wouldn’t have guessed.”

Bab coloured, a little maidenly blush, and shook her head.

“Tom’s quite pleased,” Pollie informed her confidentially; “but I’m afraid for it, seeing that we’re not properly married.”

“Whichever it is, Pollie,” besought Bab, earnestly, “a boy or a girl, tell it everything. Set yourself right in its eyes. Else, when the world hisses at it, it will curse you. Tell it you loved its 70 father, that he loved you, and that you were faithful to one another always. Tell it that, Pollie; don’t wait for others to call it——”

Pollie started as if she had been stung, and stopped Bab with a gesture.

“I will, miss,” she said; “oh, I will; and thank you for telling me.”

“Pollie,” Bab went on, “my father was not married to my mother; but they loved one another, oh, so very, very dearly—always, no one can ever say anything but that. But if my mother had not taught me to understand and defend her, I should have hated her, the world is so cruel. As it is, I am proud, but I might so easily have been ashamed.”

“Thank you, miss,” murmured Pollie, and greatly moved, turned away.

“That’s why he won’t marry her,” was her thought as she went up the road on her way home.

71

CHAPTER VII.
“RED-CLAY AND A BREATH.”

The sound of the violin roused Magnus next morning from a heavy and dreamless sleep. He did not see Bab about the house, and went out early to ascertain how the affairs of Melia Reeves were progressing.

On his way he met Pollie, striding along the Road with a bundle under her arm.

He stopped her, and asked after Tom Austin.

“He’s on strike with the rest of the lads,” replied Pollie. “If he wasn’t, I’d know the reason why. But Tom, he’s a delegate. Uncle Benjamin down the street here’ll be busy if the strike las’s. I’m goin’ there myself.”

“What’s Tom doing at present?” inquired the curate.

“Off down to St. Martin’s in an hour. He’s minding Mrs. Morris’s chickens now.”

“Her what?”

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Pollie stared.

“Her youngsters.”

“Oh,” said Magnus, “is he a good nurse?”

Pollie glowed with pride.

“As tender-hearted a lad,” she answered, “as ever took a child in his arms; fond of them as a girl of a dolly.”

A sudden thought made her blush crimson.

“Mr. Magnus——” she began shyly.

Bashfulness was a new feature in Pollie’s character, and the curate marvelled.

“How long before a baby is born,” she went on nervously, “can its father and mother marry?”

“To legitimize the child?” queried Magnus.

“To give it his name, I mean?” explained Pollie.

“Any time before the actual birth of the child,” returned the curate, gravely.

Pollie clasped her hands.

“Please God, please God!” she murmured.

“Please God what, Pollie?” Magnus asked her.

“Oh, sir, is gin deadly?”

“Fairly,” opined Magnus, wondering.

“Tilly Cornish, sir—Tilly Austin that calls herself—is drinking gin hard, and to my knowledge she’s far gone, what with her ways and the drink, sir.”

“Well?” parried Magnus.

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“I can wait two months,” said Pollie; “do you think she’ll die?”

“I hope not,” declared the curate, conventionally.

Pollie tottered.

“Don’t say that, sir,” she besought. “She’s nought but a curse, and it would give my child a name.”

Magnus saw this time.

“We will leave it to God, Pollie,” he said soothingly.

“And that Cornish waters all his spirits, the thief,” Pollie added with a sob.

“You would want a license to be married at short notice,” Magnus told her, “but the registrar might be a little quicker than the banns.”

“How much would a license cost?” asked Pollie.

“About three pounds,” answered Magnus.

Pollie sighed.

“It’s a lot of money,” she said, “and there’s a strike on.”

“We must hope for the best,” Magnus advised her cheerily, staggered by his own paganism.

“Thank you very much,” concluded Pollie, and went her way.

* * * * *

The strike swallowed up Antony Magnus for 74 the best part of two days, after which it collapsed in an ignominious return to the status ante quo, and he stepped again into the wonted tenor of his methodical existence. During the whole of the time he had not seen Bab once; in fact, he had not set eyes upon her since he had handed her over to the care of Pollie Jeffries at the south gate of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields. He remembered the frank warmth of her compliment on that day, and began to wonder what had become of her.

He tried to settle down to his next Sunday’s sermon—to be preached, this time, in the morning—but only fidgeted aimlessly over his papers, and failed to secure a single idea. At last he convinced himself that he was in need of some book of reference, and went upstairs to an ancient lumber-room, where, by gracious permission of Miss Cameron the elder, he kept his newspaper files and such proportion of his bulky theological library as was not in frequent use. It was a long narrow room, nearly all windows, for it ran across the whole front of the High House. From a corridor behind it a couple of doors gave access to various small chambers at the back. The whole of the story was in complete disuse, being too lofty and inconvenient.

Antony entered it with a sigh of pleasure, 75 for the sunlight was aflame in every corner, and, ascetic though he was, he loved the golden glory, both for its heat and radiance.

He crossed to the shelves by the far window, upon which his books were piled. His awkward files hung in a row by the wall.

Halfway across he paused. An easel rose angularly in a patch of grey light flung from a slip of brickwork, two of which separated the large windows. On it was a canvas, the paint still glistening.

The curate stood petrified with astonishment. Two ovals, roughly drawn with charcoal, elbowed one another on the canvas—two ovals occupied by two portraits. It was these latter which had so astounded Antony Magnus.

One was that of a monk—a grave, austere face, with vigil and fasting written in the lank planes of the cheek, and dogma in the cold mouth. The tonsure had torn its ruthless way through a mass of fine curls that the scissors could not wholly subdue, and a haughty throat rose out of the coarse frieze of the grey frock, which showed at the bottom of the sketch. But the eyes were the picture, and they blazed with humanity. They might have been the eyes of some indomitable martyr, so full of tragic sacrifice and suffering were they.

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The same face looked out from the other oval, but in a different guise. The light, winged helmet of a viking surmounted the close curls, the mouth was red-lipped and joyous beneath its crisp moustache, the cheeks were brown and tanned with the winds of the North Sea, a mail shirt clung about the proud neck. The eyes were full of wild light and fierce exultation—the eyes of Harold Hadrada, or Hereward the Wake.

And the face of each was the face of Antony Magnus.

He stood and looked at them, dazed with the multitude of his thoughts. So this was what she had seen in him—this quiet, observant child-woman, with her independent shrug of the shoulders and her cool keen glance. Priest or Warrior, Warrior or Priest—he knew that she had seen into him aright—who should conquer, the Magnus of the Pulpit or the Strike? Something within him said “neither,” and his heart fluttered with a vague consciousness of prophecy.

He turned away, then faced about and looked at the portrait again. His glance travelled over the room, noting the open box of tubes, the still moist palette and sheaf of brushes, the violin leaning in a corner, the bow on a dusty ledge, the book on the camp-chair. He crossed, picked up 77 the volume, and glanced at the title-page. It was Mrs. Barrett Browning’s “Drama of Exile.” On the fly-leaf, done in sepia, was a sketch, “The Man Adam”—a rough strong face, with scornful mouth and tragic eyes. He laid the volume down, and went across to the rack for his forgotten Gregory Nazianzen. He took it from the shelf; a thin pamphlet came with it. He turned it over. “With Jules Detigny’s compliments and regards.” “Ducretel on the Rapier.” A memory of his schooldays came back to him in a flash. The sunlight dazzled into a vignette—a vignette of recollection. The small class-room cleared of its benches, the lounging scholars, the faces of the less privileged lads at the window, the little Frenchman, fallen maître of some forgotten salle d’armes. He could hear the “Sa-ha!” of Monsieur Detigny, as he stamped and pirouetted. “Bravo, bravo,” he would cry, as Magnus’s clever wrist and skilful forearm engaged with some stronger, though less expert, foeman, “bravo, bravissimo, mon fils!” as the glancing foil would fly out of the clumsy fingers and scatter the amused onlookers. How it all came back, even to the old throb of the heart and the veins in the temples!

Magnus put the book away, and, with his Gregory Nazianzen in his hand, crossed over to 78 the window. Below him lay the city in a shimmer of golden haze. A fleet of newly liberated craft were going down with the tide. It was an absolute token of the collapse of the strike, and he winced.

“I ought to have been a fighter,” he said to himself sadly, and flung the top sash down to breathe the summer air. A liner in the river trumpeted loudly; the brazen roar sounded like a pean of triumph.

The curate sighed.

“Better to have been a soldier,” he mused, “or to have gone with Stanley when the dear old dad forbade it.”

The liner bellowed again.

The curate looked at the swarming streets, and listened to their drowsy roar.

“‘How often would I have gathered thee—!’” he said with another sigh, drew up the window and went downstairs.

When he had gone, the door of a small cupboard in the far end of the room opened cautiously, and Bab emerged, rosy and mirthful.

“How thoughtful he was!” she remarked: “I wonder if he’s offended?”

Then she took up her brush and went on with her work.

79

CHAPTER VIII.
BARBARA, M.D.

Late the following evening Magnus ran up the low steps to the hall door and rang the bell impatiently. Bab acknowledged the summons.

“Is Miss Cameron in—your aunt?” he asked hurriedly.

“No,” said Bab; “will I do?”

The curate frowned and turned on his heel.

“A poor woman has been suddenly taken—ill,” he explained, facing about again, “and I wanted your aunt to go down. There is no help there.”

“I will go,” volunteered Bab, and went to the rack for her hat and ulster.

Magnus stepped into the hall.

“Thank you, Miss Cameron,” he said, “but there is more than one life at stake.”

“Then why waste time?” inquired Bab, with a hat-pin in her mouth.

Magnus grew annoyed.

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“The woman is on the eve of her confinement,” he informed her bluntly.

“Well?” returned Bab, and looked at him.

He hesitated.

“I’m an M.D.—New York—if that’s any comfort to you,” said Bab, pulling the straps of her ulster tight and buttoning them. “Stop till I get an apron.”

Magnus fretted under her tone of command, but complied nevertheless.

In another moment Bab had joined him upon the complaining gravel of the pathway. Arrived at its extremity, she ran lightly down the steps and awaited him in the road below.

“Those steps are the plague of my life,” she observed flippantly. “How far do we go?”

“Howe Street,” responded the curate, keeping abreast of her with long strides.

“That is close to,” remarked Bab, fastening one glove and pulling the other on.

“Quite,” he assured her.

Bab looked up at the stars, and wondered what he was thinking of.

Howe Street was a double row of small houses debouching from the Road. It ran parallel, in fact, with that in which Melia Reeves resided. The curate knocked, and a child opened the door.

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Barbara entered without hesitation. In the tiny lobby she put a curt question—

“Is the doctor here?”

“Charlie went for him,” answered the mite, “but he wasn’t in. They said they would send him as soon as he got back.”

“I will go up and see,” determined Bab, and went softly up the narrow staircase.

In five minutes she was down again.

Magnus was sitting in the dark little parlour.

“Why didn’t you tell me,” demanded Bab, “that it was Pollie Jeffries, and that the case was premature?”

He stammered something in reply. Bab put a key-ring into his hand.

“That doctor hasn’t come—probably won’t,” she said briefly. “I know those dispensary folk. Will you please go up to the Hill and into the long garret—perhaps you know it; it’s a kind of lumber-room. Open the big box by the fireplace—this thick key—upside down. In the bottom left-hand corner you will find a cloth bag and a flat leather case. Bring them as quickly as you can.”

Magnus obeyed her without demur.

When he got back Bab met him in the passage and took her requisites from him.

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“You will wait, I suppose?” she concluded over her shoulder.

“Certainly,” replied Magnus, and returned to the parlour.

How long he sat there he could not tell. Feet trod across the floor overhead, once a woman moaned. Then, for a long time, all was still.

Someone knocked at the street door. Magnus went and opened it. Tom Austin stepped in. When he saw Magnus his face went white.

“Is anything wrong—with Pollie?” he asked dryly.

“Nothing very serious,” answered Magnus, trying to speak firmly. “We hope she may do well. Come and sit down; you are faint.”

Austin stumbled into the room, and sat down slowly upon the sofa. He did not speak, but breathed heavily.

Presently Bab joined them. Magnus explained.

“There’s nothing the matter with Pollie at present,” intimated Bab, cheerfully, “so don’t look so sad, Mr. Austin. Will you let me speak to Mr. Magnus a moment alone?”

Austin assented awkwardly, and left them.

“Mr. Magnus,” said Bab, “that woman upstairs, by sheer force of determination, will not suffer her child to be born because she is not properly 83 married. She expected to be able to buy a license in time, and now she cannot.”

“But Austin’s wife is still alive,” objected Magnus.

“She died last night,” returned Bab. “Meg, Pollie’s niece, brought her the news this morning.”

“What do you want me to do?” asked Magnus.

“Marry them,” she said decidedly.

“Without a license?” he urged doubtfully.

“You’ll have to read the ceremony,” insisted Bab. “I’ll explain it to Austin. Pollie believes you can do anything now Tom’s wife is dead. When Pollie is better they can be really married by license. But nothing must be said about it till she is quite well. And she must never know that the child won’t have a right to Tom’s name.”

Magnus felt in his pocket for his Prayer-book.

“Shall I come now?” he inquired.

“I will go and see Austin first,” decided Bab, “and prepare Pollie.”

* * * * *

In five minutes a strange group had clustered round the bed of Pollie Jeffries; Magnus quiet and alert, Austin anxious and tender, Bab self-possessed and watchful. Pollie lay among her pillows, a great light of content in her eyes.

The curate wisely omitted all superfluous 84 ceremonies and exordia, and confined himself to simple question and answer and the exchange of vows. As he spoke the coveted words, “I pronounce you man and wife,” Pollie sighed deeply and stirred her hand in her husband’s.

“As quickly as possible, Mr. Magnus,” said Bab.

* * * * *

Austin and Magnus went into the darkness of the sitting-room and sat down side by side upon the worn horsehair sofa. Neither had spirit to talk, both listened for the sounds from upstairs. For a long time they sat there in silent suspense, and then there came a wail of pain, succeeded by another and another. Austin buried his face in his hands, the light footsteps passed and repassed overhead, and the thin boards cracked.

A shuddering sigh broke from the docker’s lips. Magnus put out his hand and clasped the other’s—fingers hardened with excessive toil. The agonizing man returned the clasp, but did not speak.

Soon the wailing began once more, and came intermittently from the room above. It climbed up to a pitch of inexpressible agony, and drowned itself in a sudden silence, broken occasionally by a heavy moan. Then in the stillness arose a tiny piping cry. Austin clutched the curate’s 85 thin fingers, and they hearkened together. The child cried again, and there was the murmur of a voice—a young voice, soft and tender. Once there was a clear little ripple of laughter. It cheered the two men, sitting there in the darkened room, like a ray of sunshine.

“Seems to be awl reet upstairs, Mr. Magnus,” ventured Austin, in his broad Lancashire.

“I think so,” agreed Magnus, and sighed gustily with relief.

Before long there was a step on the stairs, and Bab, looking tired and exhausted, came in with a lamp.

Austin sprang to her.

“Your wife is quite safe and well, Mr. Austin,” said Bab, trying to be bright, “and your little son is not less so.”

Austin kissed her hand. Bab snatched it away.

“Don’t be silly,” she adjured him; “come and see your wife, and don’t talk or stay long.”

* * * * *

It was full daylight when Bab walked home with Antony Magnus, and her hand lay on his arm.

86

CHAPTER IX.
AN OPEN WINDOW.

Magnus did not go to bed upon his return home; it struck him that the early summer morning afforded an ideal atmosphere for work. He said “Good night” to Bab, with a laugh at the inappropriateness of the phrase, as she went upstairs in the silence of the slumbering house. Bab glanced at him as she returned the salutation—a glance dove-like, maidenly, appealing. It said plainly: Forget the last few hours as soon as possible; I am really only a girl, after all. Magnus’s mouth softened. He had forgotten all about those two pictures up there in the garret.

In the study he flung open the great shutters, and raised the sash an inch or two. There was a shrill chirp, and a distracted fluttering set the ivy ashake. A few pansies, purple and white, were growing in the window boxes—full borders of Virginia stock sheltered them from the sun. 87 The peculiar scent of the small pink flowerets rose to his nostrils—an odour fascinatingly fresh, yet bizarre. Some marigolds flamed brazenly in the “garden” below, their insolent orange paling the faint radiance of the young day. An elder bush swayed by the window, creamy-white with its expansive heads of tiny feathery blooms. A breath of wind stirred softly and died away.

The curate drew up the couch and sat down. The gossiping of the sparrows sounded dreamily in his ears. From some room on the same floor came the muffled scherzo of a canary.

He picked up his Bible from the desk at his elbow, and scanned its pages idly. It was a very plain volume, in its brown leatherette covers, having cost something like tenpence new. It was not a reference Bible, but was duly ornamented with the column headings and index commentaries to the chapters, which have come down to us from the days of King James. These, however, have the grace to leave the text itself unbroken (to wit, by the complex sprinkling of italic letters and mystic signs which, in the majority of versions, reduces Holy Writ to a level of obscurity entirely its own), so that Magnus found in this, his pet copy, something like the lucid continuity afforded to an ordinary novel.

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He rustled the leaves in his aimless preacher’s fashion, looking for an interesting phrase. It caught his eye at the top of an outside column:

God’s Providence over All.

He ran down the column. The first verse was a turn-over; he skipped it. The next bore the paragraph sign after a verse number, and he began to read:

“For to him that is joined to the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun. Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun. Whatsoever 89 thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

Magnus stopped reading, and glanced at the pansies nodding over the edge of the inner sill.

There came up from the river the roar of a liner’s steam-pipe. The sound passed on waveringly; she was going down stream on her outward passage. He seemed to see her beyond the dancing pansy blossoms, the vignette of heaving water, and sunlit, photograph-like line of docks and masts, the sharp prow sloping slightly outwards with the sheering mound of bubbling green at its foot, the rows of circular windows along her side, the pouring bilge-pipe, the trailing smoke, the last coal-barge dropping astern. Before her was the changeless, illimitable sea; before her, perhaps, a fortunate voyage, perhaps her last trip.

The idea recalled a haunting stanza. It was years since he had read the author of “King Olaf.”

He remembered learning it at school. Why, part of the very passage in Ecclesiastes, which lay 90 open on his knee, had been a Scripture lesson at St. Dunstan’s in distant Norwich, where he had learned the a b c’s of life and language. He could hear the childish voices in concerto:

“For there is no work—nor de-vice—nor know-ledge—nor wisdom—in the gra-a-a-ve whither thou goest.”

That was the way they used to say it, with a very long pause on the a in grave, and a scurry over the last quintet of syllables.

Again there came the scream of the liner’s whistle, and again a vision of her sprang up across the pansies—about her a boundless sea and sky. What a toy she was!

There were people on her; he could see them in the steerage and on the saloon decks. Children chattering to their fathers, couples spooning together, men in camp-chairs smoking over novels—he could catch the scent of their cigars. The sailors were working at coils of rope, passing here and there about the ship, with kindly words to folk aboard.

Well, let her! It was a good death. She had 91 painted him with Harold Hadrada’s eyes—the eyes of the Wake:

But she would not go down, she would reach her haven in safety. The moon would rise and set, the stars wheel over her in their courses, the lovers linger on her decks and whisper—more softly than the waves about the prow. Some of them would climb up to the forecastle deck itself in the hot noons, and gaze out over the dance and hiss of the parted waters. Her hair would fly loose over her shoulders and brush his cheek, they would kiss behind its blue-black cloud, they would slip over the side and go down into the sea—

He stirred and smiled. He had been slumbering in the sunshine.

He roused himself and turned a couple of leaves. The Song of Solomon. Miss Cameron, the little Yankee doctor, she had quarrelled with him over it. The pages were quite clean. Most of the Bible was scored with marks and notes. He turned back, then forward. Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Song; he had read them little or none. Was it an index to some mental bias?

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The book slipped down to his knee—open at the last of the three. He looked at it. A phrase stood up—its felicity appealed to his literary sense:

“Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet.”

He began at the beginning of the chapter.

“Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes. . . . Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep . . . which came up from the washing. . . . Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet.”

He read on and flushed. Then the voluptuous melody of the delicate English softened his resentment at finding himself responsive to its note of rapt physical passion. The softly stirring wind brought the strong scent of the elder to his nostrils, and his brain clouded momentarily with the perfume. He passed from column to column, noting the exquisite lyric quality of the translation.

“Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south. . . . I sleep, but my heart waketh. . . . Oh, thou fairest among women.”

Again the scent of the elder-flowers eddied in the air.

“Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved?”

The book dropped from his hand. A sudden thought had stung him. In the shimmer of the 93 sunlight he seemed to see a little figure—walking side by side with someone. That someone had a gallant and soldierly air; and Bab hung upon his arm, set her little head on one side, and peeped up to him to laugh and chatter.

A phrase that had lingered upon his drowsy optic nerve reached its destination, and remarked triumphantly:

“Jealousy is cruel as the grave!”

The absurdity of the development annoyed the curate. He shut up the book with a jerk, and lay down on the sofa to sleep.

94

CHAPTER X.
A PIECE OF EVE’S FLESH.

The sound of the bell roused him—a faint tinkle in the distant kitchen. No one answered it, and the summons was repeated. Magnus rose and went to the door, thinking that probably no one was up save himself. A small boy stood on the step.

“These for Miss Cameron,” he said, and put Bab’s medical paraphernalia into the curate’s hands.

Magnus gave him a penny, and asked after “Mrs. Austin.”

“They say she’s all right,” was the answer; “I haven’t seen her.”

Magnus stared.

“I’m Tom’s brother,” added the youth in explanation, and departed.

The curate took Barbara’s properties into his study and laid them on his desk. Then he 95 thought that she might have risen early and gone down to Howe Street, to assure herself of Pollie Austin’s progress. He went upstairs as the idea grew, intending to put his dress in order and follow her.

As he set his hand on the balustrade to descend the stairs, some ten minutes later, he heard the sound of Bab’s violin from the top story, and went up.

She sat at her easel in the grey patch of neutral light. Her back was towards the canvas, her side-face towards the door. Her instrument was raised to her cheek, her small slippered feet were crossed one over the other. A big apron of brown holland enveloped her, the straps crossing over behind to reach the deep band. She wore loose half-sleeves of the same brown holland. Two or three damask roses were stuck into her belt, their dark hearts showing an inky velvet beside the light tint of the imprisoning material.

Magnus came in and crossed over.

“Good morning,” he remarked.

The playing ceased, and Bab spun round.

She transferred the bow to the hand which clasped the neck of the violin.

“Good morning,” she said.

“I believe,” she went on before he could speak. 96 “that I am infringing upon your preserves. This is your library, is it not? You will accept my apologies, I trust.”

She curtseyed almost imperceptibly. The violin and the bow jarred against one another.

“Miss Cameron!” replied Magnus, appealingly.

His eyes met hers.

“I have a message for you,” he pursued, leaving her to appreciate his view of her trespass from his glance and half-sentence. “Mrs. Austin is going on as well as——”

“As well as can be expected,” concluded Bab, taking the words out of his mouth. “They all do—ninety-nine out of a hundred. And yet it’s always a surprise to us.”

“The messenger brought back your instruments,” he said, passing over the daring jest.

“That’s a blessing,” returned Bab. “I should have remembered them; they were a present from Mrs. Anna Cleveland Gould, M.D., Principal of the Harrison Medical College for Women.” Bab’s voice rang nasally through the title. Then she laughed. “‘Mother Gould,’ we medicals used to call her.”

“That was in New York, I presume?” observed the curate.

“When I was studying for my degree—yes,” 97 said Bab, pulling up an empty packing-case and sitting down on a corner of it.

She pushed the camp-stool towards him.

“Sit down and talk,” she commanded; “we earned a holiday by last night’s work.”

The reference to the preceding day recalled to Magnus the fanciful character-sketches which had occupied the easel when he last entered the room.

He sat down and looked round. Another canvas had displaced them.

“That is Pollie Jeffries,” he said.

“From memory only,” qualified Bab. “Is it like?”

“Very,” decided Magnus.

It was the little street-girl to the life—the same riotous blue eyes, the same fair curls, the same full, capable mouth, the same graceful bust, the same cool demeanour.

“That was Pollie on Monday,” predicated Bab, and took up her palette.

She slewed the easel round so that he could watch her without interfering with the light, and filled her brush.

“Not enough oil,” she pronounced, slanting the palette and examining the narrow-mouthed vessel clamped to it; “the large bottle, please.”

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Magnus carried it across, drew the cork, and replenished the cup by Bab’s small flexed thumb.

“Thank you,” acknowledged the artist, tempering some cool tints for her shadows.

He stood watching her.

The swift brush travelled over the lines of the pictured face, deepening, widening, softening. The firm mouth became benignant, the rounded cheeks a little less full; the eyelids drooped the merest trifle, the nostrils dilated. Bab took up a bigger brush and went over the shadows of the shawled bosom. Then she flung down mahl-stick and palette athwart the colour-box and stepped back.

“Pollie—this morning,” she said.

Magnus turned to her with honestly admiring eyes.

“You are a genius, Miss Cameron,” he commented.

“Of the earth, earthy,” she stipulated, stabbing him slyly. “I cannot paint altar-pieces nor Madonnas.”

“What is that?” asked Magnus, pointing to the sketch of Pollie.

Her eyes shot fun.

“An unrepentant Magdalen,” she retorted.

He understood her mood, and it hurt him.

“You think hardly of me, Miss Cameron,” he 99 propounded dejectedly, setting down the oil-bottle.

She dissented eagerly.

“Oh no,” she said, “I respect you—I do indeed. Remember your speech at St. Martin’s.”

“You think that there I departed from what you would call my harsh philosophy of life—in standpoint at least.”

He picked up her square of linen, splashed with oil and parti-coloured from the cleansing of many brushes, chose a comparatively unused corner, and dried his finger-tips.

“Well, perhaps I did,” he continued thoughtfully, before she could speak. “Not for myself, though; for others.”

“The philosophy we make for others,” rejoined Bab, “is the only safe one.”

He looked up.

“That is very true,” he confessed.

Bab did not hear. She was lifting from its shelf a gaily papered biscuit-tin. Halfway down it slipped, and scattered a dozen sugared confections on the floor.

Bab swore under her breath, but the curate did not avail himself of the opportunity to lecture her. Instead, he picked up the biscuits.

“Thank you,” said Bab. “Only two are dusty; 100 those can go on the sill for the sparrows. These”—she suited the action to her decision—“can go back.”

She lifted a large cocked-hat made from thickly folded newspapers. Beneath was a small black teapot. Bab had recourse to the shelf once more, and set beside the tea and biscuits a dumpy tin of condensed milk. The lid was a wildly shapeless mass of crumpled metal.

“I opened that with an old palette-knife,” explained the hostess, regarding it critically. “It took me about an hour and a half on Friday afternoon. I daren’t for shame give in. The man said I couldn’t open it myself.”

She mounted to the shelf again, searched diligently for a spoon, then tossed it down to him without the formula of asking permission. He rose to the occasion and caught it.

“Good,” criticized Bab, and jumped down. “Have some tea.”

“Some what?” inquired the curate, astonished.

“Some tea.”

Bab pulled out her watch and dangled it before him by its short tassel-chain.

“Half—past—three,” she told him, staccato.

“Good heavens!” ejaculated the curate. “Have I slept so long?”

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“H’m!” reflected Bab the observant, “that’s worse than ‘damn’ for a curate.”

She poured him out a cup of tea, reaching down the china from that inevitable shelf.

“I often have tea up here,” she intimated amusedly. “Aunt Bilhah is a perfect ogress about sugar, and I like a lot. Also, I like goodies, which she will not, under any circumstances, purvey for me. Do you like sweetie-biscuits? I have only one sort.”

“Excellently,” said the curate. He tasted the tea and looked comically at her.

“Oh,” cried Bab, “I forgot the sugar,” and once more she appealed to the shelf.

“That is very convenient,” remarked Magnus, looking up at it gravely. It had only two supports, and those of the most rickety description, but it was laden to bending point.

“I make the most of it,” admitted Bab. “Some day I may be on it.”

Magnus regarded her uncomprehendingly.

“I’m twenty-three,” she elucidated.

“I am thirty,” he declared, getting hold of her meaning.

“Only thirty!” Bab was incredulous. “There is grey on your temples already.”

The curate put up his hand.

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“It is not conspicuous, I hope?” he said.

“Oh no,” she conceded, amused at his anxiety, “but, you must understand, I have the professional eye, and see everything.”

“You know,” expounded Magnus, “a grey-haired curate——” He shrugged his shoulders.

“I suppose so,” agreed Bab.

“Aren’t you going to have some tea too?” he asked suddenly.

“After you,” she reassured him, laughing. “That is, if you don’t mind my using your cup. I have only one.”

Magnus flushed with embarrassment.

“I should have noticed that,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” desired Bab, peremptorily. “I want to clean these brushes.”

She set to work rapidly and skilfully.

“You play as well as paint?” inquired Magnus, watching her.

She glanced at her violin.

“Yes,” she admitted. “About as badly.”

“I like your bad playing so much,” replied Magnus, with a gallantry new to him, “that I wish you would play to me. You are like a celestial echo in the house. I am fond of good music—it was my father’s one passion.”

Bab’s eyes sparkled with pleasure. She tossed 103 the finished brushes on one side, and scrubbed her fingers with the universal duster.

“My father was a musician,” she answered, “and blind, so that it was all in all to him—beside my mother. I will play you my favourite; he wrote it for her, and always called it his love-song. I have been told that it is his finest composition—the only one which has a chance of fame. But he made me promise never to publish it or play it in public. He loved my mother, you see.”

“I am greatly privileged,” said Magnus.

She stood up before him, tried the strings, and glided into the andante of a sonata. Its theme was the air to which she had sung the lines beginning—

Magnus watched her clastic figure swaying almost imperceptibly to the music. As she played, his vision of the great ocean and the boat with the bleeding cross on its sail seemed to grow up around him again. Bab’s face was dreamy and absorbed; her bow swept out the long delicate notes, and dropped semi-quavers of liquid melody from its point—the musician had her own fashion of taking difficult phrases. He started when she stopped.

“That is beyond praise,” he began.

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“Wait; there is more,” Bab warned him, and clashed her bow on the strings. She glanced at Magnus over the bridge of her instrument. Her fingers were flying upon its ebony keyboard, and the violin quivered with fierce passion. There were the sounds of battle, the crash and tumult of armies, the clang of contending hosts in the hurrying movement, and they passed into Magnus’s face as figures pass into a mirror.

Bab lifted her pretty shoulders, despite the difficulties of the situation.

“I thought he wasn’t all milk and water,” she remarked mentally, between two complicated passages. “That’s a wonderful face of his.”

She finished the sonata with a broad, sweet adagio, more melodious than brilliant. In the middle of the last few bars she stopped abruptly, and dropped the bow to her side. A little cloud of resin-dust flew out.

“My father played this the last time he ever touched the violin,” she explained, “and when he got so far, the fourth string snapped. I was sitting reading by the fire, and looked up. Something in his face frightened me, and I cried out, asking what was the matter.

“He did not speak for a moment, and then with difficulty.

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“‘Your mother touched my arm,’ he said.

“I was startled, for my mother had died a year before—in the winter time.

“‘You are faint,’ I answered, and took the violin—this one—from him. He put his hands on my head.”

Bab’s voice was dim with the tears of recollected grief.

“‘God be good to you, Barbara,’ he whispered; ‘God be very good to you,’ and went upstairs. On my mother’s birthday, in Christmas week, he died.”

Bab forced back the sob that rose in her throat, and lifted the bow.

“It finishes—like this.”

She played a few bars preceding the break, and passed on. The bow, pressing the third and fourth strings, gave out a series of notes that rose in a diminishing succession of difficult intervals, and died into silence at the topmost limit of the keyboard.

Bab laid the instrument down.

“It sounds to me like their voices in a world of sunshine,” she said simply.

Magnus bowed his head. Neither spoke for several moments.

“I heard you singing the first morning you were here,” he observed after a pause. “Did I 106 not catch a suggestion of the air just now when you were playing?”

Bab nodded. Her flush of deep emotion was giving way to the coquetry which was her ruling passion in Magnus’s presence. She took up the violin, and ran carelessly over the melody. It was little more than a few stately phrases, almost sacred in character.

“And the words?” asked Magnus.

“My mother wrote them,” answered Bab. “I have them somewhere among my music.”

She reached down a portfolio from the crowded shelf, turned its contents over, and handed him half-a-dozen sheets of music-manuscript, brown and faded. They were bound up the back with a strip of blue ribbon, finely stitched.

“They are both there,” added Bab—“the air, which came first, and the sonata, which came much later. The air, of course, was written for my mother’s poetry.”

She showed him the front page. It was covered with a multitude of small pin-pricks, done from the reverse side.

“It is my father’s writing,” explained Bab, and then Magnus remembered that her father had been blind.

She ran her fingers over the raised hieroglyphics.

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“‘To my dear love, Barbara Vaughan,’” she read. “That was my mother’s name,” she commented, glancing up.

She turned the leaf. On a sheet of notepaper, gummed in by its double edge, were written the words which had haunted Magnus ever since Bab had sung them on the other side of a frail partition the previous Saturday afternoon. The writing was graceful and pointed. The “fly” half of the sheet bore a mass of pin-pricks, like those on the front of the music-manuscript.

“That is my father’s copy,” remarked Bab. “My mother always wrote for him with a big pin instead of pen and ink.”

“Will you read the words?” asked Magnus.

Bab complied, entirely unembarrassed.

“Stop,” said Magnus.

Bab looked up, startled.

“I will finish the verse for you,” he told her, and went on—

“Did you see?” inquired Bab.

Magnus shook his head.

“No,” he replied; “I heard the poem for the first time in my life in your song on Saturday. You remember, you were interrupted in the middle of the last verse.”

“Yes,” rejoined Bab, wondering.

“Well, I dreamt the last two lines the same night,” said Magnus.

Bab looked interested, and put the music away.

“I know,” she commented, “people do those queer things sometimes in dreams. Now, I have met you before, in a dream.”

“Tell me about it,” asked Magnus, eagerly.

Bab blushed, and shook her head.

“Tell me your dream,” she suggested.

Magnus flushed in his turn, and made the same gesture of negation.

“I cannot,” he said.

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“No more can I,” avouched Bab.

There was an awkward silence, and Bab, to relieve it, caught up her violin, and dashed into mad waltz music.

Suddenly she stopped, and set it down.

“This is an interesting room,” she observed. “I like to work in it, but I should be afraid to sleep in it. Those windows have seen too much. Just think of standing on this hill a hundred years, and watching great sulky Liverpool grow up and spread like a disease. Ugh! Suppose I could wave this bow, and command all that these panes have ever seen to reappear in them!” Bab struck a quaint attitude, and waved her violin bow. “Abracadabra,” she began; and then, laughing, laid the slender thing on its accustomed ledge.

“Seriously, though, Mr. Magnus, supposing we could see again all that has ever happened in this room. I suppose children have been born in it—up here to be out of the way. You remember Black Darrell?—

A hundred years isn’t long enough ago for that, though, is it? Heigho, it seems long enough for anything. But children must have played here, 110 and lovers stolen up to these windows in the moonlight, all shivery for fear of ghosts.

It wouldn’t take much fancying to bring them all up, would it?” she asked.

She put the edges of her palms to her temples, and shaded her eyes. The grey pupils dilated widely.

“There, in that band of sunlight, pale and slender, might walk the faint spirit of a girl, who—

Fancy how she has watched him from these windows go down the hill there, and never once look back to blow her kisses, or let her see that he was sorry to part from her! No wonder that she stands there by you in the sunshine; you may be like him.”

Magnus started forward.

“Miss Cameron, Miss Cameron! are you not well?”

Bab contracted her great eyes and laughed outright at him.

“I am a good actress, am I not, Mr. Magnus?” she said merrily.

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He touched the violin as it lay on the packing-case. It was old and brown, and so light that he could almost feel the sounding-board give beneath his finger. She had alarmed him by the cleverness of her assumed romantic hysterics. To hide the extent of his feeling he trifled with the thing. Bab watched him.

“Let me play you something more,” she offered, struck by a sudden thought.

He handed her the violin. The slight touch of her warm fingers thrilled him pleasantly.

“These are my mother’s words also,” she said, as she tucked the instrument under her arm and ran her bow over a yellow square of resin fished from her apron pocket. “The music, such as it is, I invented myself.”

She struck a note with her finger, took it with her voice, ran up the scale, and came down with an emphasized flatness. She shook her head in disgust, and screwed up the strings, trying them with her finger. Then she took the note again, lifted the violin to her shoulder, and essayed the difficult task of accompanying her own song upon the instrument.

It was an unexpected kind of melody—a still more unlikely song. Bab’s pose meant mischief; her little foot tapped the floor. One of the 112 damask roses had slipped from her belt, and lay beside the slippered baton.

The accompaniment ended with a vicious snatch at a shrill harmonic.

“I’ve no doubt,” observed Bab, by way of 113 epilogue, “that I’ve nicely shocked——” She checked herself. “S—sh!” she whispered, and laid her hand on his wrist; she could feel the blood thumping at it in piston-strokes.

There was the sound of a footstep on the stair—the solid, unromantic footstep of Miss Cameron the elder.

Bab giggled.

“Now you’re caught,” she told him beneath her breath.

“Caught!” He repeated the word in wonderment.

“My aunt has only just come in,” said Bab. “She has been out since morning. Do you think that it’s proper for us to be up here alone—even if you are a clergyman?”

Magnus turned his honest eyes upon her, and she quailed inwardly. The footsteps came nearer.

Bab darted to the cupboard whence she had watched Magnus studying her two fancy portraits of himself.

“Quick, in here!” she desired sibilantly.

He hesitated.

“In the name of Christian charity,” besought Bab, mockingly.

He stepped in. She latched the door, and with a rapid movement set her easel against it, 114 transferred her camp-stool and paint-stand to its immediate vicinity, and set to work upon Pollie the Magdalen.

Miss Cameron pushed the door open and came in.

“Oh, so you’re up here.” The salutation was not unkindly. “Anybody been while I’ve been out?”

“Mr. Magnus,” said Bab, audaciously. “I let him in myself, but he may have gone out again.”

“Oh,” returned Miss Cameron the elder; “who is that vixen?”—with a wave indicating Pollie.

“A protégée of Mr. Magnus,” answered Bab. Then saucily—“He showed her to me on Monday. I think he’s quite smitten with her.”

“For shame, Barbara!” said her aunt. “You malign Mr. Magnus.”

“Do I?” parried Bab. “You don’t know him, auntie.”

Miss Cameron snorted.

“I know all I want to,” she retorted. “He is a quiet, decent young fellow who pays his rent regularly, and gives himself no airs.”

Bab smothered a laugh.

“All right, dear,” she replied soothingly. “I say no harm of Mr. Magnus; I don’t know enough of him.”

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Miss Cameron departed, not seeing the double entente of Bab’s last remark.

“I’m going to lie down,” she intimated sleepily from the door. “I’ve a fearful headache.”

Bab painted on for five minutes after she was gone, and then opened the cupboard door an inch.

“I’ll see if she’s asleep,” she announced, and glided downstairs noiselessly as one of her own ghosts.

She came back triumphant.

“Sound as an eight-day clock,” she said. “Mind my paints.”

Magnus stepped out into the late sunlight, and stood brushing the dust off his coat.

“There’s no one else in,” Bab told him. “Susie the maid’s on her day off. You can go down and begin to study. And remember, you’ve not been out since I let you in.”

He started to go without speaking to her.

“You’ll have to take your boots off,” commanded Bab, with secret amusement.

“Why?”

“Auntie’s an awfully light sleeper,” she answered. “Take them in your hand.”

Magnus stooped and drew off his shoes.

“Good-bye,” said Bab. “I hope you enjoyed your tea.”

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He turned on her a face of such shame and sorrow that her conscience smote her. Then, like Pharaoh of old, she hardened her heart.

“Good-bye,” she badc him again.

He opened the door and went noiselessly out.

When he had been gone a moment, she ran to the balusters and looked over. He was picking his way down the last flight with steady caution.

Bab clapped her hands noiselessly, but there were tears in her eyes. She brushed them away.

she adapted, humming the air to herself.

The curate of St. Mark’s walked vaguely into his study and restored his shoes to their proper position. Then he crossed to his desk, sat down, and in the same vague fashion commenced to write.

Suddenly he scanned what he had written—mere aimless scratchings of the pen.

He dropped his face into his hands and began to weep with great convulsive sobs.

117

CHAPTER XI.
A DESPERATE RALLY.

Bab was writing a letter in her own room when she heard Magnus pass her door.

“He’s going upstairs,” she remarked to herself, with her head on one side. “I wonder what for?”

It was the day after the one on which her mischief had so trampled upon the curate’s self-respect.

Bab rose from her correspondence, caught up a stray mahl-stick as a cover to her curiosity, and followed him.

She stepped in with a characteristic assumption of bright unconsciousness.

He stood by the window with a book in his hand. The volume was closed, and he was contemplating the confused expanse of roofs that went down from the base of St. Mark’s Hill. The weather had broken, and a mournful rain showered haltingly between earth and sky.

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Bab went to her easel.

“Good morning, Mr. Magnus,” she said.

He returned the conventional salutation without moving.

Bab pursed her lips.

“In the sulks,” she commented, sotto voce, slipping her brushes into her small fist through the hole of the palette. “Well, my lord, it shan’t have its dignity spoilt, then.”

If Magnus, in his present mood, could have heard the little coo of tantalizing tolerance with which Bab delivered this inaudible shot, he would merely have ejaculated a modern version of “Retro me, Sathanas.”

If he had been in his five human senses, instead of that hypothetical sixth one, tentatively called the spiritual, he would have taken the author of the impertinence into his ecclesiastical arms and heaped her saucy lips with kisses.

As it was, not hearing the observation at all, he continued his gloomy regard of the dripping panorama.

He turned suddenly.

Bab was painting away for dear life, wielding that most irritating feminine weapon, indifference. Pollie’s liquid blue eyes gazed out of the picture, looking down on Bab with the divine tenderness 119 of the mother, the proud purity of the married wife.

“I brought your things upstairs,” Magnus informed her.

Bab got off her tall camp-stool and crossed the room. By him, upon the window-seat, lay the articles which, a couple of days before, he had taken to Howe Street at her bidding.

“Let me put them away in the name of goodness,” she adjured brusquely, “or Aunt Bilhah and her world of Pharisaic saints will find them, and imagine unutterable things.”

He gave her the cases mutely. Bab’s humour changed suddenly, and her eyes danced.

“That was a narrow escape we had yesterday,” she said, stepping on to the packing-case to reach the shelf.

He did not speak, and it angered her. She jumped down, clicking her heels petulantly upon the bare boards, and took up her mahl-stick and palette.

“That cupboard thing was awfully like Dumas’s Margot,” she observed, the extravagance of her irritation peeping through the adverb.

Magnus spun sharply about.

“You have shamed me to the core,” he exclaimed fiercely.

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Bab executed a pert volte-face, and surveyed him leisurely.

“I, a priest!” he said, “to creep downstairs like a——!”

“Burglar,” concluded Bab, with a fling.

“Like an adulterer,” he corrected sternly, and winced at the word.

Bab went on painting at Pollie’s blue eyes.

“I despise myself,” he pursued, bitterly. “I cannot look my people honestly in the face. I, to stand up in the pulpit of St. Mark’s and proclaim His gospel who was born of a Virgin.”

Bab laughed derisively, and shrugged her shoulders.

“Miss Cameron, you blaspheme,” said Magnus icily.

The tears welled up into Bab’s grey eyes. She studied the canvas to hide them.

“I have sinned! I have sinned!” he murmured, dropping into an aside of querulous self-reproach:—

“I say unto you: He that looketh upon a woman . . . .”

A thrill of fiery triumph made Bab start. Pure though a woman may be, and void of passion as a child, to be desired by the man she loves is the insignia of her empire over him, and 121 unconsciously she crowns herself with it as with a diadem. Bab flushed, and took another brush. She did not know that she loved Magnus; she did not actively recognize to herself that she knew what he meant.

“It was only fun,” she protested weakly. He has struck a chord that made her like wax in his hands.

“Fun!” he repeated scornfully. “Look at that great turbulent city, wherein there are thousands that know not their right hand from their left, and men living the lives of cattle.”

He pointed out of the window.

Bab glanced through the pane next her, and returned to her work.

“Have His priests time for ‘fun,’” he queried peevishly, “when He was moved for the multitudes of Palestine because they were as sheep having no shepherd? Below there, they are as lambs in the fangs of wolves.”

He had Bab under his foot by now. The priest she could front with an intense physical enjoyment of her own impudence; before the human and genuine, if somewhat flamboyant, democrat, she was perfectly willing, within limits, to abase herself. Nevertheless, at that moment she held on, being roused, and therefore perverse.

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“Christ took supper with Simon,” she demurred characteristically; “and I gave you all I had.”

“Like the Magdalen,” he added, hardly gauging the force of the repartee.

She threw down her palette. It missed the packing-case corner, and fell to the floor, the oil spattering her dress. She faced him, her bosom heaving.

“For shame!” she cried.

He looked at her coldly.

“No heroics,” he said. The blood had ebbed from his heart, and his fingers were numb with a painful chill.

“You have eaten my bread,” she told him; “and you compare me to——”

He lifted his shoulders brutally.

“I had rather be a gentleman than a priest,” she declared, and brushed the curls out of her blazing eyes.

He bowed contemptuously.

The gesture struck to Bab’s heart.

“I beg your pardon,” she began.

He moved his head, and she stopped.

“I am come to myself,” he said, “and perhaps I owe you a useful experience.”

“Forgive me,” besought Bab. There were tears in her voice.

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“Willingly,” he assured her, colourlessly. She would rather have had him denounce her. “I am beyond your power now.”

“Mr. Magnus!” interrupted Bab, astonished at the candour of the man.

“I marvel,” he said, “that I ever fell beneath it.”

He was exalted into a realm of feeling real enough to his unhealthily introspective mind, but none the less essentially fantastic. Bab understood, but, woman-like, persisted.

“You are talking nonsense,” she averred, stepping down to the terra firma of the commonplace. “We have only known one another a week.”

He sneered bitterly, the sensitive upper lip straightening over the line of teeth in the protruded jaw.

“‘He goeth after her straightway as an ox to the slaughter,’” quoted he sardonically. “Yet my mother’s son should have known the ways of a daughter of shame.”

“Silence!” said Bab, and looked at him with the eyes of a fiend.

He hesitated. The insult had seemed much less gross in conception than in utterance.

“Now go,” commanded Bab. “You have said enough.”

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He lingered.

“Go!” she stormed, and he went.

Bab cast herself down on the floor and burst into frantic weeping.

Pollie the Magdalen gazed at her comprehendingly. Bab’s latest touches had given to the eyes a world of womanly tenderness that looked like pain.

Bab stirred on the floor, and laughed through her tears.

“I wonder if he has read Dumas?” she said spitefully.

* * * * *

When Magnus got back from a long vigil in the unlighted church, a note lay on his desk. He tore it open. It was only a line—

“Good-bye.—Barbara Cameron.”

127

CHAPTER I.
THE THREE TRIBUNES.

In the first dawn of the Sunday morning the bell of the house on St. Mark’s Hill pealed violently. Miss Cameron knocked at Magnus’s door, beseeching him fearfully to answer it.

He flung his dressing-gown about him, slipped his feet into his shoes, and went down. A slight though manly figure stood at the threshold.

“Austin?” guessed Magnus.

“Ay,” said Pollie’s husband.

“Is Mrs. Austin not going on well?” asked the curate, opening the door for him to enter.

“Ay, alreet,” returned Austin, and fumbled in his pocket.

“They’re posting this abeawt the docks,” he began, producing a roll of coarse paper. “Hev yo a leet?”

Magnus stepped into his study and felt for the matches.

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“Come in here, Austin,” he desired.

Tom followed, opening the sheets to their full extent. There were a couple of them, joining across the centre. He laid them on the floor, adjusting them to read consecutively, and Magnus scanned them, fastening, the while, the cord sash of his gown. It was an intimation that Nimmo Brothers, the largest shipowners of the port, had flung up the Union, and henceforth would employ only free labourers.

“Nimmo’s hev only one beawt i’ dock at present, bud t’other fowk’ll follow this loike a flock o’ sheep,” remarked Austin, despairingly. “We hev news that there’ll be another o’ these things out to neet fro’ the Shippers’ Federation.”

“It’s bad, Tom,” said Magnus, ruffling his unbrushed hair; “very bad.”

“There’s a meetin’ o’ th’ Executive for haf’-past fower to-day,” Austin went on; “bud can yo not do summat to help us i’ meantime?”

“I ought to preach this morning,” answered the curate, “but Morell will take my place. I suppose you will stop this ship of Nimmo’s, and picket the wharf? Where is she?”

“I’ Coburg,” said Tom.

“Good for picketing,” observed the curate.

“Magistrates be hard upo’ pickets deawn here.” 129 Austin shook his head gravely. “I’ Lunnon’, neaw——”

“Well,” decided the curate, with a sigh, “this isn’t London, Tom, so we must just make the best of it. Can you hold in your men if the Federation import labour?”

Tom’s face darkened.

“Theer’s a risk, sir,” he replied.

“I know,” said Magnus.

“That Nimmo’s upo’ Watch Committee,” pursued Tom, savagely, “an’ mark me, sir, theer’ll be military i’ this befoor our lads hev so much as lifted a han’. An’ if theer is, theer’ll be bloodshed, as yo’ kneaw, sir; th’ lads’ll not stan’ bein’ shoved abeawt bi th’ redcoats. It’s different wi’ bobbies.”

Magnus nodded. All his quick executive faculty was grappling with the situation.

“Come to me in a couple of hours,” he said. “I will get free for the rest of the day.”

Austin gathered up the ominous placard, thrust it into his pocket, and went down the long steps in the light of the growing dawn.

* * * * *

When the August sun went down, the thousand and one byways of the huge dock estate, quiet in their Sunday calm, had each its couple of posters—one 130 white, one yellow—flinging down the gage of battle to the dock-labourers of the port. There was a strange calm in the air, like that which lies over the mountains before the first peal mutters among their summits. In a hurriedly-opened printing-office in an insignificant thoroughfare, a rickety Wharfedale thundered its heavy carriage to and fro under the flaring gas-jets. Magnus and Austin stood beside it, watching the battered “fliers” as they flung copy after copy of the Union’s defiance upon the growing piles of “double crown.”

A gang of men, each with paste-bucket and brush, lounged about the doorway of the quivering “works,” waiting for their supply of posters. As they were given out, each man sped away, working con amore.

* * * * *

In the drowsy wakening of a glorious day, a small trap, drawn by a fleet pony, raced rapidly through the labyrinthine mazes of the docks. The sloping rays of sunshine cast cool shadows from the clustering masts and cordage across wharves and roadways as the trap passed along them. Here and there the clanking of a windlass came sharply across some sheet of silent water.

“Aw’ve sent reawn t’ awl th’ ships ’at wur 131 warkin’ Sunda’ neet,” said Austin to Magnus, as they sped along, noticing with vigilant eyes the Union poster completing the triplet of bills on every blank wall and hoarding.

He pulled up in front of a roadside cocoa-room.

“Coom in here an’ hev summat,” he said, “thou’lt be nigh on famished, sir.”

Magnus went in and ate a stale cake of plain bread, gulping it down with draughts of muddy cocoa. He did not so much as taste it. His mind was on the immediate future. All the warrior in him burned for the contest.

They sat on the rough bench, waiting silently. At length Austin looked at the clock.

“Neaw, sir,” he said, and went out to the pony’s head.

Magnus paid the trifling bill, and went after him into the strengthening sunshine. As they got into the trap, the groups of men, gathered about the dock gates at the four corners of the square, began to sway and push.

Austin whipped up the pony.

“Yon’s th’ Coburg,” he said, with a slant of his whip-stalk, turning across the wide square, “and yon’s th’ Glasgow.”

As the trap jolted over the stones, a group of men ran up.

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“Where’s the secretary, Austin lad?” the foremost shouted.

“Up at th’ Alexandra,” said Austin, drawing rein.

“There’s a gang of free labourers comin’ from the Central, with a file of slops,”* said the docker, stopping by the wheel.

* Police. Liverpool provincialism, of uncertain derivation.

Austin leapt out.

“Race up to th’ Alexandra for Will Roberts,” he said hurriedly to the curate. “Powney’ll go loike th’ wind wi’ a loose ’ead.”

Magnus caught up the whip and dashed off.

Roberts, the secretary, was stamping up and down among the timber piles and cursing the tardiness of his scouts.

“Good morning, sir,” he said. “Any free labour down there?”

“They’re going to try the Glasgow at the Coburg,” Magnus told him.

Roberts got in.

“Jim,” he shouted through his hands to an aide-de-camp sitting on a baulk of fir—“I’m down to the Coburg.”

Magnus lashed the wiry black pony, and they galloped off. The trap swayed from side to side dangerously; the swift trot of the fleet 133 creature became a species of stampede. The sun was shining, the irrepressible gaiety of an August morning was in the air, a puff of wind ruffled the grass-blades growing by the roadsides, whither the corn grains had blown from many a tattered nosebag. Roberts’s strong brown hand clasped the edge of the trap, the sinews alternately tightening and relaxing in impatient anxiety.

When they turned into the square of the Coburg there was no little need of them. A bank of dockers, four deep, had set themselves across the gateway, shutting off all access. A small mob of “blacklegs,” encircled protectingly by police, stood before them, hesitating to force an entrance.

Austin sprang to the pony’s rein.

“Thank God,” he said. “Will, are they to go in?”

Roberts stood up in the trap.

“No fighting, lads,” he shouted. “Constables, you may let them go on bail—’twon’t be the first time.”

The crowd grinned. Some of the guarded toilers murmured angrily.

“If they like to be ‘scabs,’” said Roberts, “let them, but argufy a bit with them first.”

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He got down and, followed by Magnus, pushed his way in among the non-unionists.

“Here, lads,” he said good-humouredly, “what are you coming to take the bread out of honest fellows’ mouths for?”

There was a protesting grumble.

“We’re fro’ Yorkshire,” said a voice, “and we were na told what we were wanted for.”

“Then you are wanted to help the shippers of Liverpool to sweat their brothers,” said Roberts, sombrely.

“Hold ’ard, sonny,” said another of the men at Roberts’s elbow, “we have na touched a pick yet.”

“Good God,” said Roberts to Magnus, “hear that, sir—a pick!” Then he added aloud, “We’ve no quarrel with you, lads. We’ll give you your train-money back again.”

“But we’ve signed on,” said a voice.

“It’s illegal, lads,” said Roberts, “and they can’t make you.”

There was a whisper of consideration among the non-unionists.

“We’ll goä back,” said the spokesman.

“Come up to the station,” said Roberts.

Magnus could hear that the last word fell off into a sigh of relief.

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The secretary stepped out into the open.

“They’re going back, boys,” he shouted.

There was a great cheer.

“Here, come out,” said Roberts, cheerily, pulling a constable out of the girdling line, with a covert wink of reassurance. “We won’t hurt a hair of their heads.”

The men mingled—dockers and blacklegs shaking hands and chattering.

A man on a horse came up at a wild gallop.

“Rob-erts!” he yelled at large.

“Here,” said the secretary, and went to his stirrup.

“Free labour down at the Wapping,” he gasped. He was not used to riding, and had little breath left in him.

“Come on, sir,” said Roberts, and darted to the trap. “Same game.”

They went through the same programme with the gang of imported labourers gathered at the Wapping gates, and with equal success.

“Send them all back by the first train,” said Roberts; “they’ll help to check the invasion.”

“Come up to the Exchange, lads,” he called to the men.

They formed up and walked off.

“Show them the way, Austin,” said Roberts. 136 Austin had swung himself into the trap as it left the Coburg.

Roberts got in beside Magnus, and drove up to Tithebarn Street. He ran across the flags to the booking-office; then he came back.

“They won’t take the Union’s cheque,” he said.

“Bevan will advance it for me,” said the curate. “His office is in the next street.”

“Hurry,” said Roberts; “the train goes in twenty minutes.”

Magnus drove off.

In ten minutes he was back again, a bag of gold in his hand. The Yorkshire men had gathered on the platform by this time, the public staring at them wonderingly.

Magnus joined the secretary, who stood apart, fidgeting uneasily.

“Seven hundred pounds,” he said. “I’m to advance up to a quarter of your funds. Repay to-morrow. What is your bank balance?”

Roberts whispered in his ear, and they went together to the office.

In five minutes more the long train steamed out of the station. Austin threw up his hat and cheered. Roberts smiled indulgently with the abstracted gravity of a general, and went back to the trap.

137

CHAPTER II.
THE MADNESS OF A PEOPLE.

All day long the work went on, and by nightfall eight hundred free labourers had gone back to their homes in the Midlands and the East. But Magnus’s limit was soon reached, and there was strike-pay to be thought of, so the game, clever though it was, had perforce to be abandoned at the very height of its success. Wherefore, the next day and the next, the free labourers poured unchecked into Liverpool, and took up their quarters at the docks under the guard of large bodies of police. Roberts at first held his men superbly, and Magnus harangued the seething groups of strikers till his voice gave way. But steadily there rose the lava flood of wrath, born of hunger and fed by excitement, till the strike leaders trembled, and Magnus prayed in his saddle. For his passionate eloquence could keep the rioters in check when Austin’s friendly bonhomie and the secretary’s keen blue eyes alike failed before the 138 brainless vehemence of the mob; and he swept from end to end of the long river-front like a black-garbed angel of peace. Often the fine network of vein and artery stood out on the satin skin of Francis Bevan’s thoroughbred roan, as though the superficial tissues had been dissected from her graceful frame, and her wide nostrils rose and sank, sheer pits of starting red.

“Take her, Tony, my boy,” the catholic-minded stockbroker had said when Magnus returned the borrowed £700, and further begged the loan of a mere hack from the Grange Stables; “she’s the best bit of horseflesh I ever owned, but not a bit too good to be hobby-horse to Tony Magnus. I’m everlastingly confounded by these social questions myself, but I’ll put a thousand to one on you any time, my lad, with my eyes shut.”

For which reason it had come to pass that Lucille, out of Damaris by Salvator, the three-hundred-guinea hack of the wealthiest stockbroker that ever set foot on the Liverpool Flags, battered her delicate hoofs against the brutal cobbles and coarse setts of the dock estate on the turbulent missions of democracy.

But all was in vain. In the afternoon of the Friday there was heard the sound of heavier hoofs than Lucille’s, and the jingling of noisy 139 accoutrements. The shippers had taken fright, and Nimmo of the Watch Committee had used his weighty influence with the powers that rule such things. Wherefore a squadron of cavalry were sent off in hot haste from Preston, and rode down from the London and North-Western Station, to find a rapidly growing crowd in the Coburg Square, with Roberts and Magnus in their midst beseeching, storming, threatening.

Some foolish spirits had mooted the idea of setting fire to the Glasgow, the great steamer of Nimmo Brothers, which had been the first to occupy the hands of the free labourers, and the suggestion had been taken up with delirious enthusiasm by the few, and met with half-hearted opposition from the many.

Magnus was standing in the trap, his voice shrilling high over the din, calling upon them by their love for the cause, by their hopes of victory, by their loyalty to their leaders, to disperse and go home to bed. No, they would not; they would not be driven by a parson and an agitator. The shippers should see what it was to starve men.

On such ears as these fell the metallic jingle and thud indicating the approach of the soldiery. Each man looked at each in fierce anger—anger struggling with fear.

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The cavalry formed a deep semi-circular cordon across the conjoining wharves from gate to gate, and swept the mob out. Then they reduced their lines to two deep, and the remainder settled down to bivouac in one of the dock-sheds in the rear.

The crowd of strikers withdrew to the far side of the square outside the gates, and muttered curses among themselves.

So the night wore on.

In the clear pale morning Roberts crossed to Magnus, and whispered in his ear.

“It’s God help us if the lads get out of hand with the soldiers here,” he said. “The major in command is as drunk as an owl, and with champagne. They’ve been simply swilling it in there—the officers.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

“What regiment is it?” asked Magnus.

“The 10th Dragoons,” said Roberts.

“Good heavens!” returned Magnus. “Charlie Wallace is a captain in the 10th.”

“Do you know him?” whispered Roberts.

A flood of recollection poured into Magnus’s mind. The restless tossing of the roan’s head, as she twitched at the reins flung over his arm, recalled him from the thronging memories which Wallace’s name brought with it. His brain staggered as it contracted into focus upon the 141 present. The dim world about him stood out with painful distinctness—the shadowy troopers, the lowering crowd of silent, hungry men at his back, the dawn in the East.

“We were at Oxford together,” he answered Roberts, in the same low murmur that the latter had used.

“Then try and catch his eye when they come out to relieve,” said Roberts, “and point to the major. Surely they will not obey the orders of a drunken man.”

“I’ll try,” said Magnus, “but I’m afraid it’s no use.”

Magnus gave the mare’s reins to a considerate delegate, and began to stroll arm-in-arm with the secretary, the two talking below their breath and studying the temper of the sullen crowd.

Suddenly a red flame shot up in the circle of docks just behind the cordon of cavalry.

“By God!” said Roberts, “that’s the Glasgow. Some one’s got at her.”

Magnus muttered a curse on the folly of the incendiary.

The red glare grew, and the horses of the Dragoons stirred uneasily. The crowd of strikers watched with a fierce delight as a long tongue of flame spurted up the thin masts of the Glasgow, 142 visible over the shed roof. An orderly ran out with a message, and a private galloped off to the fire-station.

A shower of stones followed him from the clustering figures in the shadow.

In the dire glory of the crimson light that fought with the waxing day, the cordon of cavalry was relieved. A stalwart young officer took charge.

“That’s Wallace,” said Magnus, and stepped out into the roadway.

The new commander started in his saddle. His horse swerved under his knee, and his spur jingled.

Magnus stepped back. He had been seen.

As he did so, a small stout officer, flushed with wine, rode out clatteringly from the shed and into the shallow half-moon of soldiery. By him, on a grey cob, rode Edward Nimmo, J.P., merchant-prince of Liverpool.

“I’m damned!” said Roberts to Magnus. “He’ll read the Riot Act himself.”

It was evidently true. In Nimmo’s fingers was visible a large sheet.

Roberts strained his eyes.

“The infernal hound!” he said; “he’s had it typed ready for use.”

The sibilant of the last word was cut short by the sound of distant firing—a series of crackling 143 detonations away to the left. As they stood listening fearfully, Austin tore up in the trap.

“For God’s sake,” he said, “leave th’ parson here, Will, and go to th’ Brunswick. Theer’s a company of infantry theer, and they’re firing on wor poor fellas wi’ ball.” He held the near shaft with one hand, the reins with the other. “Th’ mear’s fresh,” he said; “she’s Fred’s grey.”

Roberts went off like the wind, his face pallid.

An ever-increasing proportion of women had by this time joined the crowd, drawn by the double anxieties of the firing and the continued absence of husbands and sons. Among them, to his astonishment, Magnus recognized Pollie Jeffries, now Pollie Austin. He turned to point her out to her husband, but Austin was gone. He felt a throb of pain as he noticed her baby clasped to her breast. He did not know that the throb meant Bab; but it did, and the unidentified association haunted him amid the terrors of the moment.

The warehouse by the Glasgow had caught fire. It was on the far side of the dock, and was soon ablaze up to its third story. The grey irregular space between the soldiers and the strikers looked lurid and lonely in its glare.

A tail of the crowd began to throw paving-stones, 144 plucked surreptitiously from underfoot. The women shrank back up the side streets.

A small square block of rough-hewn granite struck the Major of the Dragoons, slid off and rattled on his sword-hilt. He tore the blade out in drunken fury.

“Damnation!” he howled. “Read the Act—read the damned Act.”

Nimmo ran over it, each word clear and distinct, with the sputter of burning wood for an aërial background. The engines had gone round, and the hiss of the first stream of water sounded like that of a demon serpent.

As the formal words of the statute ceased, the Major waved his sword.

“Roust them out of that, the damned brutes!” he screamed hoarsely.

The captain next him gave the necessary orders. The ranks closed up, and the sabres gleamed in the crimson flare.

“Charge!” shouted the Major, with a hiccup.

Magnus had mounted the roan, and flung himself into the square. He could see nothing but the boyish face of Charlie Wallace. The Dragoons were now flush with the Coburg gates, and coming on at a trot, the Major reeling in his saddle on the right of the front rank.

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“Halt!” cried Captain Wallace, loud above the clatter of hoofs.

The squadron stopped, well pleased.

Not so the major. Dragging his heavy charger upon its haunches, he launched it at Magnus’s light mare.

Magnus pulled her head round and bent. The iron-shod hoofs missed his skull. The major slashed down at him with his sabre.

The onlookers were paralysed with astonishment.

Magnus threw himself over, clutching the major’s waist, and the blade cut deeply into the crest of his saddle. He snatched at the drunkard’s wrist, and with a savage wrench sent the weapon flying. The major fumbled for his revolver.

“Tom, Tom, mind the pistol,” screamed a woman’s voice—the voice of Pollie Jeffries. It reminded Magnus of her cries of travail; and again the thought of Bab troubled him as the two horses swung madly together.

Austin leapt across the square, and seized the breech of the small-arm as the major struggled to bring the barrel into position.

The trigger slipped, and Austin fell back, the revolver in his fingers and a bullet in his heart.

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CHAPTER III.
DEFEAT.

Magnus, hardly knowing what had happened, but seeing dimly through dust and sweat that Austin was under the feet of the major’s charger, forced his own back with rein and heel, carrying the plunging brown brute with it.

The major resisted stubbornly, and Magnus found his voice in a terrible oath.

“Back, you devil, back; or, by God, I’ll kill you!”

The major shrank from the frenzied man who clung to his belt and saddle-bow. The two horses jostled backwards, the accoutrements of the brown charger clattering dissonantly. Pollie Jeffries ran in under its feet—her baby clasped in the hollow of her arm—and fell on her knee beside her husband.

Magnus heard her cry and tore himself round to glance at her. Austin lay prone, motionless, 147 and silent. Charlie Wallace had ridden up and dismounted. He took off his helmet and knelt down.

Magnus jammed his heels into the mare, shot clear of the drunken commander, and leapt from the saddle, kicking his feet clear of the stirrups.

Pollie rose and drew her shawl about the child.

“He’s gone, sir,” she said, dryly.

Magnus burst into tears, and covered his face with his hands.

“God, God, God!” he chattered to himself.

Pollie’s eyes moistened.

“Don’t take on, sir,” she said, touching him. The motion brought the small pink face upon her bosom quite close to his own. “Tom’s rare and proud, I’ll warrant, to have paid you a bit of our debt.”

Magnus looked at the woman who could so speak in that hour of crushing sorrow. Her eyes shone, a proud heroism conquered her grief. He choked himself under control.

Wallace came up, his helmet in his fingers, its plume dangling lankly.

“God forgive us!” he said to Magnus.

Magnus held out his hand.

Wallace looked at his own. His mouth twitched sorrowfully, and he shook his head.

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Magnus took the brown fingers by force.

“We owe you our lives,” he said, and looked about him for the first time since the words of the Riot Act had fallen on his ear.

The roar of the flames behind was fiercer than ever, but the daylight had killed the lurid glow. The Dragoons stood motionless in a double rank some thirty paces from the dead body of Austin. In the foreground the major cowered on his horse; within reach Magnus’s mare nibbled inquisitively at a piece of rustling paper, her reins trailing the ground. The crowd of strikers had fled up the side streets. The morning air was cool; a light breeze blew in from the river.

Magnus shivered.

“Take your men away, Wallace,” he said. “All the heart is gone out of us.”

He looked down at Austin. The red blood had soaked through his woollen shirt and rumpled, dingy collar.

“He was one of our best,” he said sorrowfully.

A spark of passion flashed into his eyes—the frenzied glitter came back. He stamped his foot.

“Go,” he said, “take them away, before the fit comes on us, and we strew the ground with their brains.”

He touched a loose boulder significantly with 149 his foot. It was the one whose impact had so enraged the major.

Wallace bowed silently and went.

Magnus stooped and lifted Austin’s slight figure. He walked stiffly across the square towards the small oblong hut of the cocoa-rooms. Pollie caught her husband’s swaying forearm and walked by his side.

Wallace got into the saddle and rode to his superior.

The major put his gloved hand on his hip and regarded his subaltern with drunken dignity.

“Wa-Wallace,” he said unsteadily, “consider yourse’f und’ ar-rest.”

Wallace bent his proud young head, gave his sword to an orderly, and rode off into the extempore barracks.

* * * * *

An hour later Roberts drove up to the cocoa-room door and went in. Magnus was walking up and down. Pollie sat dry-eyed by her husband’s side, her baby at her breast, a soiled handkerchief flung between its lips and her bodice.

Roberts held out his hand to the curate.

“I’ve heard,” he said.

“The strike, man, the strike,” said Magnus 150 impatiently. What were death and loss to the issue of the industrial battle raging over three miles of docks and quays?

“A thousand free labourers went down half-an-hour ago to go in at the Waterloo, the Trafalgar, and the Victoria,” said Roberts, his face working. “They were good hands—from Hull. Our lads knew that there would be no shifting them when they once got hold, and went in instead to spite them.”

“Failure,” said Magnus.

“From the Herculanean to the Hornby,” said Roberts. The great tears rolled down his face. “Magnus,” he said, “do you believe in God?”

Magnus turned and pointed to the dead body of their fellow-leader.

“I can’t think,” he said.

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Note.—Some liberty is hereafter taken with the functions and admin­istrative methods of a great religious order. The same applies in a lesser degree to a detail or two of ecclesiastical architecture.

153

CHAPTER I.
EROS AND THE CHURCH.

The failure of the strike for the second and most disastrous time, filled Antony Magnus with mingled shame and anger. Both were the more abiding because so sternly repressed, and being complementary, fed one another from day to day and waxed rather than waned. He went steadily through the sad routine of the appeal to popular indignation from the pulpit and by means of the press; the coroner’s inquest upon poor Austin, and his impressive public funeral; the Home Office inquiry into the employment of the military; the court-martial of young Charlie Wallace—with a heart numb in his bosom. In his proud austerity he fancied that the murder of a comrade and the defeat of the workers had stricken it to the death, and, indeed, the wounds made by these two catastrophes had not been 154 slight. In reality, however, the fatal stab from which it bled hourly had been inflicted by a scrawled farewell over a woman’s signature. But Magnus went his way unknowingly, ate and drank moodily, and slept at night fitfully, like a sick man.

The vicar of St. Mark’s—a genial Oxonian, of breadth and culture, marked for a deanery, and proud of his popular and eloquent young aide—saw that something was wrong with Antony Magnus, dubbed it “brain-fag,” and set him free, for a time, from all compulsory work. Wherefore the curate fretted in comparative ecclesiastical idleness, through the strain of the weeks that followed the tragedy of the Coburg Square. Then, one Saturday evening, the Echo briefly reported the tacit acquittal of Charlie Wallace from the charge of insubordination. Magnus breathed a sigh of thanksgiving—all the more heartfelt because unaddressed to any power in particular.

His relief was suddenly dashed. In a neighbouring column the decision of a special Board of Inquiry characterized as “groundless and unfair” the allegations that the Watch Committee had precipitated disturbance by an unnecessary introduction of military force.

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Magnus folded the pink sheet. That chapter was closed. What would the next bring him?

* * * * *

The following evening he was suddenly minded to go to St. Mark’s. Seeing him in his place, the vicar motioned him to read the Lesson. The people stirred with pleasure as Magnus crossed to the lectern; they were glad of the chance to hear his voice.

It was the nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, and there was a choice of chapters. Mechanically he took the last selection—the first had probably been read much oftener.

He put up his hand and moved the light; it dazzled his eyes. His face was thin and drawn with weariness. He coughed deeply as he began—an unusual thing, for he was the possessor of a clear strong baritone.

“Also the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, behold, I take away the desire of thine eyes at a stroke; yet neither shalt thou mourn nor weep, neither shall thy tears run down. Forbear to cry, make no mourning for the dead, bind the tire of thine head upon thee, and put on thy shoes upon thy feet, and cover not thy lips, and eat not the bread of men. So I spake unto the 156 people in the morning, and at even my wife died!”

Magnus stopped, and the congregation hushed into a death-like silence.

“And the people said unto me,”

read Magnus with difficulty,

The curate’s voice broke, and his audience murmured sympathetically.

“So I spake unto the people in the morning——”

He had lost the place, and had gone back to the words which had so unnerved him—

“And at even my wife died!”

Magnus clasped the top of the great Bible with his left arm, and put his head down on the pages. He could not go on.

The vicar glanced at the choirmaster, and lifted his eyebrows in suggestion. The choir rose to sing the Magnificat—the Song of the Virgin. It fell on Magnus’s ears like a sneer.

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“An insult to every mother in the place,” came as an echo in his brain; then an elfish ripple of defiant laughter, and, “Miss Cameron, you blaspheme.”

The Magnificat was ending when the curate raised his head. As the choir sat down he crossed the chancel and took his place by the vicar, whose blue eyes regarded him kindly. At the end of the service Magnus rose abruptly, and departed without speaking.

“What’s the matter with Magnus to-night?” asked the choirmaster of the vicar.

The blue eyes twinkled.

“Cherchez la——!” he said, for he was a wise man, and knew the human heart. “As it was in the beginning.”

The choirmaster stared.

* * * * *

When Magnus got home he opened a drawer in his desk and took up a tiny silver coffer, in shape like a pill-box. The top of the lid and the bottom of the box overlapped the deep embossed ring which formed the sides—projecting as do the ends of a silk-bobbin. He pulled at the lid. It came off with a sound like the yielding of a leathern sucker. The box was full of large glycerine capsules charged with a white powder 158 that showed dimly through its transparent cloak. He put one in his mouth.

“Like father, like son,” he muttered to himself. “I’m a fool to begin, but I must sleep to-night.”

He went for a short walk up St. Mark’s Hill. The evening was dark and lowering—the middle of October. The wind had been blowing steadily from the north-east for many hours, with an occasional burst of stormy strength. The equinoctials were due, he thought, as a flaw pressed coldly against his temples. Yes, it was October—

How the time had flown since——! He tossed his head impatiently in the freshening gale, as if to banish the train of reverie that had been struggling to assert itself ever since he had read that unlucky chapter in Ezekiel. What a fool he had made of himself, to be sure, and about nothing! It was a fit of faintness, he told himself.

He passed a pair of lovers sheltering from the wind with their arms round one another, nestling into a dark corner. The murmur of their voices came to him. A gust of wind brought a sentence.

“Did it want a kiss?”

It was a young girl’s voice—the coo of love’s 159 sweet childishness, an echo in it of mirth at its own delicious folly.

Magnus sneered, and the wind roared a thunderous counterpoint—

“And at even my wife died.”

Was it the gale at his ear, or some trick of memory? It sounded like his own voice in a phonograph—a voice full of emotion, broken by tears.

He must have read it like that from the lectern of St. Mark’s. He shivered with dislike—so jejune, so undignified. It came again, fainter this time, but as peculiarly distinct—

“And at even my wife died.”

He bit his lips with anger at the persistence of the mood. It seemed beyond his power to control. He had the reins of his intellect in his own cold fingers, and the curb held like a vice. But something seemed to be pressing upon his heart—it beat with difficulty in slow thuds of muffled suppression; he felt sick. What was the matter with him? His head was clear; it was his body that was failing. Could it be the sulphonal he had taken?

The faint voice at the centre of his brain began again, rhythmically this time, as though some one were jolting the speaker, and with a chant-like singing sound in it—

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“I take away . . . with a stroke . . . the desire . . . of thine eyes.”

The chant skipped to a higher musical initial, and gave it to every fresh sentence.

It was the low note this time.

“I take away . . . thy desire . . . from thee.”

It stopped abruptly, and the metallic voice spoke again, slowly, and as though at a great distance—

“And at even my wife died.”

He had turned up Cochrane Street, over the steps on to the level, and had followed the line of St. Mark’s Road till he had almost reached the church. Few people were about, the night was too stormy. In the shadow of the schools he stopped and drank deeply from the wall-fountain, then drew his soft hat over his eyes and walked on. A light was still burning in the church, throwing a stained radiance across the dark from the Gothic window of St. Mark the Evangelist. He went in by the side-door, and through to the vestry. The sexton was moving noisily in the body of the church, and did not hear him. Magnus took his 161 long grey ulster from the cupboard, a dark peaked cap from a nail, and went out.

He passed on up the road. The land hereabouts varies strangely in conformation, and in a stride or two he was over the brow of another hill and going down, this time into the plains which stretch away in stair-like plateaus to the flats of the river-side. On the right ran a long sandstone wall, bare and shadowy. He crossed and went along at its foot. A closed door broke the surface of the wall; then a second, with a plain Gothic arch and nail-studded leaves; finally a third and open one. A ray of light streamed to its threshold from an inner doorway, and swelling chords of melody came with it. He stepped in.

He stood in a sort of courtyard, across which was the low transept of a simply-built church. The music came from the door into the transept, which stood open. He went to the other side of the courtyard and looked into the church. A tonsured priest sat at the organ playing. Magnus noticed that there was no music in front of him.

He recognized the air. It was the chorale out of Mascagni’s Rusticana. The atmosphere of the opera came with the memory, and with it the contempt of women which the story breathes, came also into his mind. He faced the fact that 162 it was the recollection of Bab which was troubling him. But he thought of her as Lola, as the gay, ruthless, mocking coquette of the empty heart and faithless vows. “Strong men have been slain by her,” memory quoted, out of the Proverbs of the King of Judah. His heart hardened, and he despised himself. Also, a little, he pitied himself.

He stole into the transept, and sat down. The priest turned on the organ-bench and looked full at him. With a swift motion Magnus tossed the hood of his ulster over his head and drew it about his face.

The priest looked at him, but no change came into the quiet eyes. He was blind.

“Who is there?” he inquired gently. “A stranger, or one of the brethren?”

Magnus looked at the face of the player in the high light of the small electric globe pendant by the withered cheek. It was kindly and pale, but worn with years. The fringe of hair about his ears was white and scanty.

The curate of St. Mark’s hesitated, glancing awkwardly about. Suddenly he started. Beside him rose the gaunt wooden ark of the confessional. At the sight of it a strange impulse sprang upon him. He advanced to the choir-railing, noticing 163 as he did so that the blind player wore the frock and hempen girdle of a Franciscan friar.

“I am in great mental trouble,” he said. “I am not of your faith; I have no one to speak to of my own.”

The sightless musician rose from his instrument.

“I will call for a brother from the College,” he answered kindly, and took down a tube.

“No, no,” protested Magnus, hurriedly, “I have been listening to your playing. I could talk to you, not to any one else.”

The other hung up the tube.

“I am the Lord’s poor servant,” he replied; “it is a command.”

“Will you come into the vestry?” he added, opening the gate in the choir-railing to pass out.

“Let me go to the footstool of the penitent,” said Magnus, giving his mood the rein. “I am an unfaithful disciple of the Master you honour.”

The friar bowed his head, and went across the transept to the confessional.

Magnus followed, closing, as he passed it, the door of exit into the courtyard, and dropping the latch. He did not desire, even in his present temper, any eavesdroppers.

He knelt down wearily by the small grated window. The gloom was pleasant to his aching 164 eyes, and the side of his character for the present in the ascendant was soothed by the impersonal dignity of his self-elected mentor, and by the atmosphere of solemn permanence which brooded in the dusky church.

“Peace descend upon your troubled soul, my son,” murmured the friar. He was very old, and his voice trembled. “Is it committed sin that has cast its shadow over you, or, as God grant, only temptation that presses?”

“Temptation,” said Magnus, slowly.

He hesitated, wondering how much to tell.

“I am a priest of another communion than yours,” he began.

The grey head bowed assent.

“I have chosen to live, as few men choose”—he faltered a moment—“I am virgin.”

The word fell reverently from his lips; it came with the modest hesitancy a woman would have given to it, had circumstances compelled the use of a term usually expressed by a periphrasis. The fact itself was the keystone of that arch of spiritual pride which he had built over the morass of the senses.

The quivering mouth of the confessor softened.

“It is much, my brother,” he returned. “I am seventy and five, yet have I kept my body as a 165 temple of the Holy Ghost. Not that I was always a priest. I was a deacon of the English Church. Cardinal Newman was my friend.”

A curious thrill passed over Magnus as the blind man’s personality shot out this connecting link with the past.

“Then you are tempted in respect of a woman?” pursued the Franciscan, tenderly.

The question set Magnus face to face with the situation. He decided upon mental honesty.

“Against the desire of my spirit,” he answered.

“The flesh is oft-times strong,” commented the old friar, tolerantly. “Is the woman fair?”

It was a shrewd question, and it brought up before Magnus a vision of Bab’s debonair head and shoulders. Her wide grey eyes seemed to gleam through the shadow—humorous, comprehending, rallying.

“Not as convention calls women fair,” he replied discriminatingly, thinking of the sisterhood omnipresent in art and the thoroughfares—large of bone, animal of outline. “She is little and clever, with the grace of a child and the tongue of a wit.”

The old friar’s mouth flickered.

“I understand,” he said. “And she loves you?”

Magnus hesitated and thought, far down in a 166 secret corner of his soul, that he would like to be sure.

“I don’t know,” he responded.

“You love her?” was the inevitable question.

He bent his head.

“I—I fear so,” he admitted. “But I——”

His graceful English failed him for once. He felt a schoolboy.

“I would rather not,” he said.

The withered face wrinkled tightly. It was so familiar a story. Had he not been young also—this friend of Newman’s?

“Can you go away?” he asked practically.

“She has gone,” explained Magnus, with an uncontrollable accent of regret in his voice.

The Franciscan smiled outright. She was no mean foe, then, this woman—she had been skilful enough to open the wound of absence—the hurt that only the inflicting fingers can staunch.

“Forget her,” he said. There was nothing else to say.

“I can’t,” confessed Magnus, with a throb of feeling. “‘Though I should take the wings of the morning——’”

A fragile hand drew back the grating, pushed through the pigeon-hole, and laid itself on Magnus’s brown curls.

167

“Pray.”

“So I can—to God to give her to me.”

“Fast.”

“I have eaten a meal a day for six weeks, and worked from dawn till dawn.”

“Study.”

Magnus shook his head.

“I will try.”

“History and science,” advised the soft voice. “Avoid poetry and fiction. Do you understand mathematics?”

“I worshipped the science,” answered Magnus, “once.”

“Practise the most difficult forms.”

His mentor paused.

“Work among the poor.”

“I have done nothing else for five years.”

Magnus looked up. His eyes were wet.

“She helped me.”

The grey head wavered.

“Is—the woman pure?”

Magnus hesitated again. The question involved more than frankness; it involved a decision. A burning flush stung him suddenly from knee to crown. He plunged to conviction.

“As snow,” he said. “But——”

“A woman,” finished the friar. “And you are—a man.”

168

Magnus winced.

“Is it not so?” asked the old priest, and he put his cold finger-tips to Magnus’s check. It was aflame. The thin hand slipped up to his clustering curls and fondled them. A sob rose in Magnus’s throat—a sob of human yearning begotten of the unfamiliar caress.

There was silence.

“You have vowed celibacy?”

It was a difficult question. Magnus met it honestly.

“I always so purposed.”

“You will pledge yourself?” The whisper was inexpressibly tender.

He wavered.

“You will honour her more by—by chastity than marriage.”

The old ecclesiastic, subtle by long habit and knowledge of men rather than by personality, had ascertained the character of the penitent while merely suggesting expedients for the carrying out of a voluntarily expressed desire. At last he had taken up a probe that fitted the wound. He went on, less tentatively—

“Now she calls to you,” he said, “as Beatrice called to Dante out of paradise. Be worthy of her purity by being pure—be purest by leaving 169 her pure. Think of her as of some sweet saint——”

The rhetorician had got the better of the diplomatist. He had gone too far with his note of spiritual ecstasy.

The face of Bab leapt up before Magnus, dancing with solemn fun. A background sprang into being—the corner of a packing-case, with a black teapot perched thereon, a small tin with a battered lid elbowing it. “The man said I couldn’t open it myself,” whispered Memory, for a motto to the picture.

The confessor felt his loss of rapport.

“It is not forbidden to love,” he stipulated, coming back to the level whispering tones of his habitual speech. “St. Paul says only that it is good for a man not to touch a woman.”

The suggestion was weighty. It appealed to Magnus’s austere spirituality, which was reasserting itself, after the douche administered by the friar’s misconception of Bab.

“Omnipotence chose a virgin and wrought a miracle in the Immaculate Birth,” murmured the old priest, half to himself. “Was there no tender bias in the choice of Mary? Who knows but that the Son of Our Blessed Lady Himself may, after a chaste fashion, have loved the Magdalen? The 170 legends of the Church hint something of the sort.”

He had hit the mark this time with his fantasy, and he knew it. Bab, to Magnus’s distempered view, had in her considerably more of the Magdalen than the saint.

“You will pledge yourself so to honour her?” insinuated the persuasive mouth. “No? Is it so much, then, to swear eternal continence?”

The sneer galled Magnus’s pride. He part his dry lips.

“I swear,” he said, a faint empressement stealing into his voice, as he thrust his rallying sanity from him, “to live in perfect chastity, touching no woman after the flesh, all the days of the years of my life. And in this I beseech Thee to help me——”

His vow was to God, not to the friar.

“For the sake and through the mediation of the Blessed Mary, Thy Virgin Spouse,” added the Franciscan, softly.

Magnus did not move for a moment. Then he looked up with white lips.

“If I break my vow?”

The blind eyes gleamed sternly at the very mention of retreat. Then a tender recollection glowed in the ancient mind, and before it faded, the answer was given—

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“God Himself must judge.”

* * * * *

Magnus rose.

“My son!”

He knelt again.

“If the world be too strong for thee, there are these walls. The Franciscans are a lax order, and surely thou art not far from us. Then thy poor could be thy care still, and ours also. I will speak of thee to the Superior. I am not without power in the Order, having been Provincial in the time of Bernard Camillo. If I am dead when thou comest, ask for the Guardian, and speak of Father Cuthbert. Farewell, my son, and peace be with you.”

“What church is this?” asked Magnus.

“Part college, part church—the former is St. Edmund’s.”

“The latter?”

“You came led by God’s hand—Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. Adieu, my son.”

“Good-night,” said Magnus, and was gone.

* * * * *

The old priest began to chant the psalm Exaudiat te Dominus as he went back to his instrument. He pulled the electric lever and lit the organ lights. He was blind, but he liked to feel the slight warmth 172 of the globe by his cheek, and the mechanism amused him. The switch was new, and he was growing toward the grave.

* * * * *

When Magnus stepped out into the road the wind had gone down, and the night was cold and raw. He looked up into the blank sky and shivered. The cheerless infinitude about him seemed to mock his exalted philosophy with the fleshless amusement of a death’s-head. He felt a wave of sleep strike against his brain, and flood it with drowsiness. Then he remembered the sulphonal, and that he must hasten homewards.

173

CHAPTER II.
A GREY DAWN.

The thresh of the rain against his window was the first sound that fell upon the ears of the Curate of St. Mark’s as he emerged from the death-like sleep into which the sulphonal had thrown him. He raised himself on his elbow and opened his eyes. The outlines of the furniture in the room were faintly visible, the dressing-table and mirror most distinct against the background of neutral light which stood from the dawn. His brain stirred with difficulty, as the fingers of one’s hand stir after slumber. As it regained the tone of normal consciousness, he became aware that he was intensely thirsty, and rose to reach the carafe. It was empty. Something very like tears of vexation lifted themselves to Magnus’s feverish eyelids, and he lay down again, moistening his parched lips with his tongue.

He drew the counterpane up about his shoulders 174 and tried to sleep; then he remembered his vow of celibacy. How puerile, how theatrical, it all appeared, looked back upon out of the chill dawn; he hated his childish sentimental folly. What a boy he must have seemed to that shrewd old Franciscan who had known Newman! Bah! he writhed under his own contempt, as his drying lips touched again unfamiliarly. How he longed for a draught of water! The haunting thought of the cool fluid brought back his dream of the great sea and the boat with the bleeding cross. He could almost see it gliding down the cloven darkness, with the siren face in its bubbling wake. How cold the waves had seemed in the dream, and how pleasant their sudden change to warmth. The recollected fantasy sent a flood of imagined heat over him that passed into a shiver. He wished that the raw October morning were not quite so raw, and his teeth chattered. He relapsed into a blank—half drowsiness, half persistent, irremediable discomfort.

Without warning, a phrase of Bab’s song came back to him—arrived at unconsciously by a series of automatic mental strides, starting from the idea of the boat and the sea—

175

He heard himself, in a peculiar species of echo, repeating his vow. Its high-sounding sentences were graven on his brain as though in brass. “To touch no woman after the flesh . . . all the days of the years.”

His mind dulled a moment, then threw on to his retina a sunny picture. He could see an open window, the gay August morning outside—its fresh scents, stolen under the raised sash, started into his nostrils—the velvety pansies on the sill, the swaying elder by the perpendicular line of serrated brickwork. The old school chant began in his ears, and the picture faded.

“For there is no work . . . nor de-vice . . . nor knowledge . . . nor wisdom . . . in the grave whither thou goest.”

He rebelled against the relentless progression of the mood that leapt upon him, but with no avail. The subdued recitative continued—

“Behold, thou art fair, my love . . . thou hast doves’ eyes. . . . Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet. . . . O thou fairest among women.”

There was a halt, and it commenced again—

“Who is this that cometh up from the wilderness, leaning upon her beloved?”

He tried to think of something else, but failed; it marched on triumphantly—

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“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.”

Then it caught up a less familiar phrase in the same connection.

“Return, return, oh Shulamite!”

He flung himself irritably into another position, and succeeded for a quarter of an hour in being merely uncomfortable.

It was only a question of time, however. Another picture forced itself upon him.

Bab in the moonlight, her brown ulster, half buttoned, flapping at her skirt-hem, her small seal cap nestling on her unique blue-black hair; one glove properly on, the other unfastened. “Those steps,” said a far-away voice in his ear, “are the plague of my life.”

Memory skipped back again, and dragged in a cruel inconsequence. “Not to touch a woman . . . all the days of the years of my life.” “Have a sweetie-biscuit?” said a ghostly copy of Bab’s mischievously hospitable tones. It went on: “You don’t mind me using your cup? . . . Those two can go on the sill for the sparrows. . . . I had rather be a gentleman than a priest.”

He sprang up and pulled his dressing-gown about him. Would to God a man could live his life without thinking about it till he was half mad! 177 he grumbled to himself. How good it would be to live like the beasts, with no more of theology or ethics than go to the eating of lush grass and the enjoyment of the yellow sunshine. And how much more essentially delightful than a future spiritual salvation (surely his heathen frame of mind and body prompted the thought, and not the austere soul of Antony Magnus!) would be the present physical one of a glowing coal fire in the dismal grate. He sat down on the side of the bed and watched the dawn grow. A mood took him; he thrust his feet into his slippers and went softly upstairs into the garret. The moon was sliding down the pale sky—a beam or two slanted across the bare room. He went to the window and looked out at the city, silent and sombre, shadowed in impenetrable mist. The rain drove waveringly against the wide pane, and stole through the cracks of the sashes in sharp smoky vapour. He stepped back and glanced round the room. The easel stood there, a canvas, face-inwards, upon it. He reversed it and saw dimly the countenance of Pollie Jeffries. The eyes watched him as Bab’s eyes had done when she had turned from the picture to ask forgiveness at his hands—forgiveness granted with a sneer. The memory of that sneer hurt him like the 178 recollection of a blow given to a child since dead. He restored the portrait to its position.

His foot touched something, and he stooped. It was the withered remains of Bab’s red roses. A dim scent clung about them; it reproached him as Pollie’s eyes had done. He sighed, and left the crushed flowers where they were. By his elbow he noticed the paint-stand and camp-stool, the japanned tin case of tubes, the brushes stuck by their slender handles to the hardened colour of the palette.

On the packing-case, as she had left it, was the unwashed teacup, a spoonful of brown fluid in the bottom. A broken biscuit lay in the saucer. The childish question came back again: “Do you like sweetie-biscuits?” and then, “I gave you all I had.”

He lifted the cup and saucer, thinking how tiny, yet exquisitely bitter, was its stab of pathos. Under it lay half a dozen small sheets of paper. He strained his sight over them; they were pencil notes—in her handwriting—of his sermon on “Solomon the King.” How it had hurt him to preach it; yet he had had no thought of her, only of his duty and his ideals. He had not known why it hurt, only that it did.

He put the notes in the pocket of his gown, and 179 went downstairs to his study. There he felt in his desk for a square phial.

“Resource number two of the dear old dad’s,” he said. “Oh, for some sleep—some sleep!—without dreams.”

He measured three drops into a drain of milk from his untouched supper-table and swallowed it. Then he went back to bed.

180

CHAPTER III.
“THE DESIRE OF THINE EYES.”

Coming in to dinner the following day, Magnus found Miss Cameron the elder just dismissing a caller.

“Well, good-bye,” said the visitor, Miss Cameron’s chief gossip, with a bashful bow to the curate as he passed in and hung up his hat in the lobby. “Remember me kindly to Barbara when you write. I hope she’ll be better soon; but, as you know, Miss Cameron, this is not the weather for pneumonia, and Bab’s none too strong.”

“That mother of hers died of consumption,” remarked Miss Cameron. Her brother’s “wife” had been no favourite of hers.

“You don’t say so!” replied her friend, dismally, after the approved manner of gossips, and departed shaking her head.

Magnus went into his study and sat down to his meal. But the news he had just heard rang in his 181 ears; he longed to summon Miss Cameron and ask for particulars of Bab’s indisposition. But the memory of that journey—taken at her bidding—from garret to ground-floor in his stockinged feet closed his mouth. He could not openly display any interest in Bab; his domestic association with her ran on the verge of the vulgar.

Miss Cameron did not cross his path again that day.

“I’m going out,” she told Susie, the ‘general,’ “and mind you stop in. I shan’t be back till ten.”

Susie watched for a convenient opportunity, laid the curate’s tea, and ran off to pay her prospective mother-in-law a visit, with ulterior hopes of an encounter with her betrothed.

Magnus was left alone with his next Sunday’s sermon, for he had elected to preach, notwithstanding the vicar’s dispensation.

He wanted a book from upstairs, and went to fetch it. Coming down—he lingered no longer in the now dreary garret than was necessary—his eyes fell on a torn envelope lying upon the threshold of Miss Cameron’s room. He stooped with a sudden thought and picked it up. It was in Bab’s handwriting. The curate drew out the letter, carelessly thrust into the fragmentary envelope, and read it. She wrote shortly, thanking Miss 182 Cameron for forwarding certain matters, and remarking that her side ached badly; she thought she had caught cold.

Magnus pressed the signature to his lips, and in the next heart-beat sneered at himself convulsively.

Then he replaced the letter, tossed it to the ground, and went back to his sermon.

* * * * *

A day or two after, his suspense became unbearable, and he prayed for Miss Cameron to develop another fit of the visiting mania. What he expected to gain by it can scarcely be said.

When she failed to manifest any such inclination he discovered a hacking cough, and decided to remain scrupulously within doors for the next forty-eight hours. Then he asked Miss Cameron to call upon Pollie Austin and see how matters progressed with her since her husband’s death. Miss Cameron, much flattered, acquiesced. Susie departed simultaneously upon a mission for the purchase of sermon-paper, and Magnus, wise in the habits of housekeepers, descended into the kitchen to explore. To his most unclerical delight he discovered a batch of letters behind a massive brass ornament upon the tall mantel, and bore them off in triumph. He read them voraciously in 183 secret, and restored them at night when the household was in bed.

They were only short notes, but Bab was evidently loth to lose touch with Miss Cameron, for she wrote with little or no excuse in the way of news. Bab’s friends, in the quiet Cheshire village, lived uneventful lives enough. She painted and played, she said, then played and painted, that was all. The winter was very cold. There were one or two nice people in Parkgate; a younger son of the local squireen and his only sister spent evenings with them, also the unmarried vicar—quite a young man, and a writer of repute. Magnus winced, then started with pleasure. How was Mr. Magnus? she asked—only that; nothing further.

Her letters of recent date had reference to the cold—Parkgate was very cold, she said again and again. Then came the already familiar note having regard to the pain in her side. The last letter of the small pile, Magnus found, to his horror, was not from Bab at all, but from her hostess. Bab was rather indisposed; they feared she had caught a chill. They would write again soon. Magnus groaned; he could no longer deny to himself the tenderly protecting instinct of his love, its assertion at the moment seemed to render his 184 contempt of the passion as animal almost inhumanly ascetic.

* * * * *

No chance offered of obtaining news either the next day or the next. Magnus was almost insane with anxiety. Finally he summoned up courage to cross-examine Miss Cameron the elder.

“I learned by a casual remark of yours to a visitor,” he said, carefully and coldly, “that your niece, Miss Cameron, was unwell. I trust it is nothing serious?”

Miss Cameron shook her head.

“Pneumonia,” she answered forebodingly; “and Cheshire in this weather! They’re pretty anxious about her, I can see by their letters. She don’t write, which makes it look worse.”

Magnus gripped his tongue in the steel forceps of his will, and made it speak quietly.

“I’m extremely sorry to hear of Miss Cameron’s illness,” he returned. “I trust she may soon recover; she is too young and merry to lose.”

“Oh, Bab’s all right,” vouchsafed Miss Cameron the elder. “Though her mother wasn’t married to my brother Phil. However, it was naught to her shame, I dare say. Barbara Vaughan, Bab’s mother, was well-to-do, and Phil was a scapegrace musician. He capped his wilful life by going 185 blind, but Bab Vaughan fell in love with him, and as she’d have lost her fortune by marrying him she just went and lived with him. They had lawyers and papers in the business, and it was all fair and open. But I don’t hold with such heathenism. Good-day, Mr. Magnus;” and Miss Cameron rustled out emphatically.

Magnus went into his study, sat down and laid his head on his arms. In that position he sat for a long half-hour, then he started up, flung on his ulster over his clerical coat, took his soft felt wideawake from the rack, and ran down the long steps with the gait of a schoolboy.

Miss Cameron looked after him out of the window. It was about three o’clock, and the wind was rising.

186

CHAPTER IV.
A MAGICAL NIGHT.

A splash of rain came with the rising wind, and he got into the bus as it jolted past him townwards. Damp straw carpeted the grooved flooring, and he sat uncomfortably in his thin boots, listening to the irritating thump of the driver’s signal. The afternoon was gloomy, and the sky livid with approaching storm. He noticed a railway guide-book hanging from a nail in the window-corner, and consulted it. One of the tunnel trains ran out Chester way in an hour with a change for Parkgate. He looked for the Great Western trains; one left the Woodside Station on the far bank of the river in three-quarters of an hour. It ran on the direct line to his destination, and being a Parliamentary, stopped at all the stations en route. He decided to take it, and looked at his purse; he had half a sovereign in silver. The bus clattered on, 187 stopping occasionally to take up a drenched passenger. The rain had settled into a ruthless downpour, and the wind had strengthened to a gale. The interior of the vehicle filled, and he sat cramped in a corner, breathing evil air and fretting over the stoppages. He sprang out first when they reached the Pierhead, and ran down to the ferry.

A boat had just left, and the next one was being worked into her place against a chopping sea that spurted through the pontoons of the stage, and battered upon her side in dull thunders of bubbling surf. He turned up the collar of his ulster and waited.

The squat vessel discharged her passengers on to the glistening boards of the lamp-lit Stage, and Magnus went up on deck. The river lay before him, boiling with the broken rollers characteristic of the Mersey. The tide was on the ebb, and sucked viciously through the ironwork of the floating mass to which the steamer was moored. The smoke from her wide smokestack beat low into his nostrils, the wind was soaked with rain, the rain with city soot. He paced impatiently up and down until an imperative double clang in the engine-room below gave the order “half-speed astern.” They backed 188 out cautiously, grinding against the fenders, and headed for the Woodside shore.

How the river spat and swirled! A schooner hard by with two anchors down kicked to the rollers like a canoe. The sea-mist flung a sudden blanket over them, and the wind whirled it away again.

The steamer forged on, her paddles hammering the water dauntlessly. A man went to the side and lit the port-lamp, then the starboard. The dusk was growing. They drew clear of the shadowy bulk on the port-bow that meant the Woodside stage, dropped down and grated along the osier buffers into the steamer’s berth. The gangway dropped with a rattle and thud, and Magnus hurried up the covered way, paid his fare, and ran across into the Great Western Station. He was just in time; the train was moving. “I’ll pay the guard,” he shouted to the collector, and plunged into an empty compartment. The line of carriages swung round the bend of the platform. Magnus drew up the window.

* * * * *

At Parkgate he got out. The dusk had deepened to night, and the wind tossed his soft hat into the air. He flung the hood of his ulster over it, and went down into the road. Some half-mile 189 lies between the station and the straggling village, once a thriving health-resort on the banks of the Dee. He pressed on in the blinding deluge, his feet scattering the sodden leaves that strewed the plain earth sidewalk. As he turned the railway embankment under the bridge a train tore up out of the darkness, its long line of yellow windows shining wetly in a row, the tawny flames licking up from the funnel of the racing locomotive. The silence closed about her like a shroud as the roar vibrated into the distance. Then the wind clamoured again.

He passed through the square that debouches upon the southern extremity of the river-front, and went along it. The Dee had been driven by the gale and the tide high up over its huge sandy flats. A line of white foam whispered along the foot of the ruined esplanade. The curate of St. Mark’s fought with the striving storm, and flung the rain out of his eyes. Soon he stopped before a tall corner-house labelled “Parkgate College.” Here it was that Bab was staying with an old student friend, now a successful principal. His mind ran over her letters, the sight of which he had stolen so ingeniously. Yes, it was her room looking over the historic sands—unless, of course, they had moved her to the doubtless more sheltered rear. 190 He walked round. A trap stood at the side-gate, its hood raised, its lamps gleaming on the falling rain-drops, the tarpaulin cover of the brown cob giving a steady trickle of water to the saturated soil.

As he passed it, a door of the College opened suddenly. A small thickly-set man came out, putting up his umbrella. He strode rapidly down the path and put his foot on the step of the trap.

Magnus slipped his hood on to his shoulders and raised his hat.

“Can you tell me——?” he asked, and paused.

What in God’s name was he going to say? Memory inspired him with a long-forgotten address.

“How far Silvester Cottage is?”

The doctor looked him up and down.

“Few visit Silvester Cottage,” he said; “and none at such an hour as this.”

Magnus’s acute brain drew conclusions.

“What has happened?” he said tentatively.

“The old man is considered scarcely safe at times,” was the physician’s answer as he snapped the spring of his umbrella, studying his questioner.

“Sir Geoffrey?” Magnus asked.

“So they say he claims to be called,” said the 191 doctor. “Folk hereabouts know him as the ‘Housemaid,’ because he ‘fends’ for himself. His surname is not known.”

“How far is it?” asked Magnus.

The doctor went to the other end of the short street.

“See that light?” he asked succinctly.

Magnus nodded.

“Well, that lamp stands at the end of an avenue which goes direct to the Cottage.” The doctor was watching the thin face turned in the line of his forefinger.

“It would be about half-an-hour’s walk back to the station?” said Magnus.

The other agreed.

“Twenty minutes on a decent night.”

Magnus pondered. He had spoken to the doctor partly because he had guessed his profession, partly from sheer impulse. But his mind, flung abruptly upon its reserves of wit for an explanation, had recalled the fact that his mother’s seducer, Sir Geoffrey Veitch—the prefix by virtue of an ancient baronetcy—lived, or did live in Parkgate, and at the address he had asked for. His shot had proved successful. He had a colourable pretext for his presence in so out-of-the-way a place, and might either stay all night, 192 or come back later on and try to find out something about Bab.

The doctor thought that he was puzzling over some question of trains.

“Look here,” he said, “this patient of mine is in a rather critical condition.”

He jerked his thumb towards the College. Magnus’s heart gave a sick throb.

“I’m coming back in a couple of hours. That’ll be about nine o’clock. If you’re at the corner I’ll pick you up and drive you down to the station. I’m going past—see?”

“I am infinitely grateful,” said Magnus, with dry lips. He would be able to ask after Bab as a matter of simple courtesy.

“Don’t mention it,” said the doctor; “I’m bound that way now, or I’d offer you a lift to Silvester Cross. Nine o’clock. Au revoir.”

The trap splashed off through the rain-pools in the uneven roadway.

Silvester Cross lay well back from the river-front. The tall terrace houses of the esplanade cut off direct access, save from either end of a long block unpierced by streets. The Cross itself, with the triple-jetted lamp above it, stood in the middle of a semi-circular sweep of hard soil parapet where two lanes met. The turnpike, 193 running tangent-fashion past the edge of the parapet, completed the orthodox trio of cross-roads. The narrower of the two lanes led up to Silvester Cottage.

How it had gained its name no one knew—Silvester Cottage it always had been and always would be. Evidently not even the fame of its present occupant had sufficed to rechristen it.

Magnus went up the avenue. He was curious to see the place, not that he intended to do more than survey it, even should more prove to be possible. He wondered, as he looked at the low dark house, if the shadowy walls held his dishonoured mother. So completely had she passed out of his life and that of his father, that neither had ever known aught of her subsequent movements.

An iron wicket stood open, its outer upright sunken into the gravel path through long disuse. A dim lawn lay between him and a bay window on the ground floor; the only light visible gleaming through the slats of the obscuring venetians. The Cottage boasted but two stories; a deep verandah ran entirely round it.

Magnus crossed and peered in. A curtain hung between the blind and the pane. He trusted to it to shield the sparkle of his eyes from the glance of any occupant whom the room might chance to hold.

194

The dazzle of the transition from darkness to lamplight passed from his vision.

In the room, which was bare and comfortless, a wonderfully handsome man sat in a stiff wooden chair facing towards the bay-window. His hair was snow-white and flung back in an artistic shock from his low forehead, the face all nose and jaw, the eyes deep-set and faint-blue, the nostrils narrow, the teeth large and white, the skin grey with the pallid, velvety cast of wood-ash. He was dressed in a dark loose suit of some coarse stuff, a woollen shirt showed at his throat, tied with a black scarf. His hands were white, with a strange breadth of palm.

A mere handful of fire gloomed in the built-up grate. No pictures hung on the papered walls, no books or knickknacks lay about. A few chairs, a table with a heavy black cover, like a pall, a four-fold screen, and the silent man in the elbow-chair—these were an exhaustive inventory of the objects which met Magnus’s eye.

He listened and gazed. Nothing stirred around him except the wind and the rain as they drove in from the unsheltered estuary of the Dee.

Some instinct told Magnus that this was Sir Geoffrey, and he was disappointed to find that he felt no great emotion of hatred towards him.

195

He hesitated; glanced up at the livid sky, then at his watch. An hour and a half to wait before he could meet the Doctor and learn—what there might be to learn. He would go in.

He went round to the door and knocked. Then came a strong, slow tread in the hall, and the door swung open.

On the threshold stood the man he had been studying.

“Sir Geoffrey Veitch?” said Magnus.

The faint blue eyes shone.

“I am Sir Geoffrey.”

“I am Antony Magnus.”

The tall figure bent to look at him as he stood on the verandah.

“A son of Christina’s?”

“The same,” answered Magnus. A sense of tense anticipation took possession of him.

“Do you—do you mind coming in?” asked Sir Geoffrey. He drew back.

Magnus went up the steps and into the square hall.

“Come in to the fire,” suggested Sir Geoffrey.

Magnus followed him.

Sir Geoffrey motioned to a chair. Magnus yielded to the request.

“I was in the neighbourhood,” he began; “I scarcely know——”

196

The broad thin palm signified comprehension.

“My—your——” Magnus stopped.

“Christina,” offered Sir Geoffrey.

Magnus assented.

“She is here?” he said, interrogatively.

“You know nothing?” demanded Sir Geoffrey, searchingly.

“Not so much as a sentence would tell.”

“You had better go away ignorant,” advised the white-faced man, playing with the tassels of the table-cover. “Stay; are you married?”

Magnus shook his head.

“In love?”

The pale blue pupils scanned him acutely. The eyebrows rose.

“Unsuccessfully—I see,” Sir Geoffrey inferred calmly.

The curate was piqued into evasion.

“I am a priest,” he returned, “I cannot marry.”

“Indeed!”

Sir Geoffrey’s sensitive mouth—delicate beside the brute jaw—flickered slightly.

“Nevertheless, you are in love.”

Antony Magnus coloured, and cursed himself for it.

“Do you want to be cured?” propounded Sir Geoffrey, regarding him with languid scientific eyes.

197

Magnus’s lip curled.

“I am no magician,” pursued Sir Geoffrey, fathoming him, “but I can cure you if the disease be not past all remedy. Love when it is Love, and Death when it is Death, no physician can heal.”

Magnus was piqued once more by the tone of amused philosophy which the elder man had assumed.

“Then there is no hope for me,” he retorted, following up the delicate lips in their subtle imagery.

“So all men think,” observed Sir Geoffrey. “Come and see.”

He rose, took the lamp and went upstairs.

The flight was covered with linoleum. Sir Geoffrey looked down at it.

“These stairs need brushing,” he remarked. “I am a careless housekeeper. I will do them the first thing in the morning.”

Magnus marvelled, and then remembered what the doctor had said, and that Sir Geoffrey had earned himself the sobriquet of the “Housemaid.” He said nothing, but followed in the baronet’s footsteps.

“Hold this,” commanded his guide, and gave him the lamp.

198

Magnus held it while Sir Geoffrey unlocked a door and permitted him to pass in.

“Now give me the light,” desired the master of the cottage, and pushed the door with his foot. The latch clicked strongly in the socket as it closed.

Sir Geoffrey stooped down to a dark flat cabinet in the corner, and pulled something—something that moved with tension.

The room flooded with the radiance of a dozen electric lamps.

Magnus gazed about him. He stood in a square room, fairly large and lofty. The walls were papered with theatrical posters, set edge to edge, and crowded thickly over the whole space. All were of the burlesque school, and all were of women, the majority oblong panels, having their greatest length from top to bottom. He recognized the same face and figure in one and all.

Sir Geoffrey watched him; then went to the mantelpiece and touched a catch.

One of the small posters—a head and nude shoulders—shut up, drawn by a spring. Behind it there was set in the wall a plush frame, enclosing a portrait done in oils, yet of marvellously delicate texture and finish.

199

A cry broke from Magnus’s lips. It was the counterfeit presentment of his own mother, as she had left home some twenty years before. He looked from the portrait—full, animal, Rubens-like—to the posters. They were of the same woman. He covered his face in shame. The figure in the latter was scantily clothed in coloured stuffs. Every line and contour of a voluptuous feminine form were there, accentuated by the libidinous pencil of the theatrical artist.

“She began with this,” explained Sir Geoffrey, coolly, and indicating a page in long cloak and hose. “Then she went on to this”—he touched another. “And this”—he tapped a pantomime prince familiarly. “This, this, and this,” he signified one after another; and Magnus felt a sense of physical prostration keen as nausea.

Sir Geoffrey laid his hand on a cord.

“Finally she got to this,” he said.

A picture, mounted on canvas, ran down, map-fashion, from a hollow cornice. It was done by some exquisite photographic process, and represented “Love”—a naked woman. A thin wisp of dusky gauze fell diagonally across the picture, and the stars about her sparkled through it.

Magnus hid his eyes.

Sir Geoffrey allowed the canvas to fly up, and 200 crossed to a pedestal. A score of large picture-frames stood out from it, swinging loosely, the pivoted radii of a circle. He snapped a switch and lifted a long silk plait with an incandescent bulb at the end. Magnus noticed for the first time that the room had no windows, and understood the reason of the elaborate installation of electric light.

Sir Geoffrey held the small frosted flask, with its glowing filament of carbon, by a handle of ebony. In its soft light he pointed out print after print of Christina Magnus, all in her professional undress.

“Cut from the illustrated papers,” he commented. “We are a great nation, and our illustrated journalism is—what it is!”

He looked at Christina’s shrinking son.

“Rather not see any more?” he said, dryly. “I have a circular stereoscope, and a few score of photos. No?”

“Have mercy,” whispered Magnus, hoarsely. “She was my mother.”

Sir Geoffrey bowed, admitting the plea, and put out the light he held in his fingers.

“You comprehend,” he said. “We are men of the world, and there need be no ethics talked. I loved that woman”—he indicated the portrait—“and 201 I took her for myself. That inadvertently hurt you and yours. I assure you I regretted and still regret it.”

He bowed again.

“I loved her. She was the only woman to whom Fate had given the power to remind me that I am a thing of flesh and blood. Doubtless you are inclined to wonder if anything could so remind me. It is a tribute to Christina.

“I am proud, however, and even true love is a trifle humiliating. At least, it was so to me. That sharpened my pride. Soon ‘Chris’—pardon the liberty with your ears; unintentional, I assure you—tired of me and of my life, gay though I made it for her sake.

“Naturally, having left your father for me, she left me when she found me pall. I do not consider myself wronged. ‘They that take the sword’—you will remember, being a priest. She took up, did our esteemed Christina, with a peer—après moi promotion—young Peregrine Chesters, Viscount Lisle; after him, a real live prince. Then, like a feminine Alexander, she sighed for new worlds to conquer. We have no Georges of Hanover now, so la haute noblesse was exhausted. She appealed to Cæsar—Cæsar Imperator, the public, the British public!

202

“Christina, belonging to Christ! A vestal of the Anointed Nazarene, white robes, chaplet of myrtle, virgin limbs treading the arena—Ave Cæsar . . . te salutamus—the willing harlot!”

His shoulders dragged up to his ears in a sudden gasp. He put his handkerchief to his lips and took it away, stained with blood.

“This is daring, even for Chris,” he said, pulling the “Love” down an inch or two. He spoke thickly, but with a return to his cold cynicism. “She has achieved the high distinction of being the only Englishwoman who has ever posed in this tableau.”

He drew it to its full length.

“Touched up,” he said critically; “still, she wears distinctly well.”

“For God’s sake,” said Magnus, cowering before the metallic impersonality of the man, “have some mercy.”

The picture ran up to its place.

“I am sorry I hurt you,” said Sir Geoffrey; “but, unfortunately, there are no anæsthetics which render this operation painless”—he coughed slightly—“even to me,” he said.

He waved his hand, indicating the contents of the room.

“This is ‘Love,’” he said. “She wears those 203 dresses because the gallery and the stalls love her—with their eyes. One is a sixpenny look; one a half-guinea. It is a difference of distance, not emotion.”

He played with a ring on his finger.

“This was hers,” he said, holding out his hand—closed to show the small bright band of metal.

“I loved her in the same fashion,” he said, passing over his own interruption. “True, I loved no other woman—that is a mere matter of disposition. I loved her with the faculties of touch and sight; others employ the latter only. That is a question of opportunity.”

He paused.

“Voilà tout,” he said, in his bloodless way; “I have merely collected these toys to remind me. This”—he turned slowly upon the pivot of his heel and scanned the walls—“is Woman the Animal. The appreciation of Chris and of no other is the least vulgar form of the emotion predicated by——”

Once more he waved his broad white hand to the pictured figures.

“The appreciation of her as an expensive whim to be indulged for a few months, is a coarser, though more philosophic form. The appreciation of her—the substantive is something too refined—as a 204 half-clad puppet is,”—he shrugged his shoulders—“the reductio ad nauseam of the whole affair.”

He bent and looked up into Magnus’s eyes.

“You were born . . . of this,” he said, with the recurrent gesture of his right hand; “you love . . . this.”

Magnus’s eyelids rose in scornful demur.

“Sinner or saint,” said Sir Geoffrey, “the thing is the same at bottom. You want to own her, I suppose?”

Magnus flushed, and was silent.

“Come downstairs,” said Sir Geoffrey. “In a day or two you will know if you are cured.”

He switched off the lights, took up the lamp, and went out. In the corridor he turned and passed a yard or two along the narrow lobby. He pushed open another door.

“My workroom,” he said.

Magnus stepped in.

It was a wide rectangular apartment, empty, save for a large table and a chair. On the former lay some pieces of chalk. Around the room, at breast-height, ran a continuous blackboard. Veitch advanced and held up the light. Magnus saw that the board was covered with complex figuring and intricate geometrical theorems.

“Mathematics keep me sane,” said Sir Geoffrey; 205 “that hell”—his burst of passion was terrific—“keeps me contemptuous. So I live.”

He stopped dead. When he next spoke it was in his icily bantering tones.

“Go home, my young priest, go home. Forswear sack and live cleanly. Women are the devil’s pet lash for the backs of fools, and few skins are without wounds into which Time rubs the daily salt of Recollection.”

He looked at the ring on his finger.

“Go home,” he said, “and despise both the scourge and the scourged.”

He lifted the lamp to the board with a change of manner.

“You see, I have squared the circle,” he said. “I was resting after my Eureka when you knocked. I have produced the formula to nearly one thousand places of decimals. From the eight hundred and eleventh to the nine hundred and ninetieth inclusive—a phrase of one hundred and eighty figures—repeats. Expressed as a vulgar fraction it would have a denominator of one hundred and eighty nines followed by eight hundred and ten ciphers. I have not yet succeeded in ascertaining if there be a Greatest Common Measure whereby to cancel—the figures are so huge. But the discovery may revolutionize geometry, both plane and spheric.”

206

Magnus looked at the long lines of figures, and a great pity took possession of his soul.

“Swear by science,” said Sir Geoffrey, fantastically, “to leave love and live the life of a philosopher. I wronged you once without intent, now let me do you a service and persuade you to a vow. Swear by this squared circle to abjure Woman for ever. Swear! swear! We have squared the circle, and henceforth there shall be no more curves, no rounded bosoms, no shapely waists, no dimpled cheeks, no pouting lips—all shall be angular, and man be free. Swear, swear.”

Magnus drew back from the mad mathematician. Yet the fantasy came near enough to his mood to be taken seriously.

“I vowed celibacy to God,” he said. “I will not renew that pledge by any such absurd oath.”

Sir Geoffrey laughed, crisply and intelligently.

“You are not cured?” he said—“then nothing will ever cure you. I like you for it. My own case is hopeless. Good-bye. I will show you out myself, for the very good reason that I keep no porter.”

They descended the stairs together, and Magnus went forth into the deluging rain with a sense of escape.

* * * * *

207

He met the doctor’s trap driving up to the corner.

“Nasty weather,” said the doctor, eyeing his convoy, and wondering what sort of a reception Sir Geoffrey had given him.

“Terrible,” said the curate of St. Mark’s, collectedly. “And how is your patient?”

“Out of danger, thank Heaven,” answered the physician. “I am very glad; she is a bright young thing.”

Magnus breathed a sigh of irrepressible relief, and relapsed into his own thoughts. He sat silently beneath the stout hood as the slanting showers pelted shrewdly against it, and the wind lifted the off wheel at times bodily from the ground. When they reached the station he roused.

“A thousand thanks,” he said.

The doctor shifted the reins and held out his hand.

“Good-night,” he said. “I’m glad to have been—you know the rest.”

* * * * *

The doctor backed the high trap out into the roadway and turned homewards.

“I wonder who he is?” he said to himself. “I should know that face again among a million others.”

208

He pushed back the hood and whipped the cob into a sharp trot. The rain had ceased, and the wind was dying away.

* * * * *

When Magnus got home he threw himself face downwards upon the couch in his study, and lay without sound or motion for many hours. Then he rose, lit the lamp, and in the heart of the silent night wrote to Father Cuthbert.

209

CHAPTER V.
THE RUBICON.

Despite the threatening winds which blew over the Dee flats, Bab finally attained convalescence. When she donned her dressing-gown for the first time, and sat toasting her small toes by the fire, as an initial step in the opening exercises of “getting about again,” her friends perceived that she was not only slighter, but graver.

They had long been used to the wilful gaiety of her old moods, and grieved over the persistent melancholy of her present temper.

Dr. Fane laughed at their anxiety.

“She’ll be all right soon,” said he. “Depression of the system. Only natural.”

But though Bab grew strong again, and her figure regained its old fulness and elasticity, that arch childishness, which even the earlier stages of her sickness had failed to check, did not show any signs of return.

210

Dr. Fane wondered, but held his tongue.

One day he came in unannounced, save by a tap at the door, and found her alone in her warm bedroom, her easel set up by the window, painting.

“Can you stand that yet?” he asked.

Bab looked wistful.

“I like it,” she answered. “I fancied there would be no harm.”

“None at all, if it pleases you,” conceded the doctor. “Have your own way. What are you—what were you—doing?”

For Bab had whisked her subject off the pegs before he could look at it.

“No secrets from your physician,” he decreed, and held out his hand masterfully.

Bab yielded.

It was a little water-colour sketch, very roughly done, of a Stuart courtier—slashed doublet, gay cloak, plumed hat.

The doctor laughed.

“What a paradox!” he exclaimed. “The costume of a cavalier and the face of a priest. Good heavens!”

He was off his guard. He had recognized the face of the man whom he had directed to Silvester Cottage upon the night of the crisis in Bab’s ailment.

211

Bab looked out from under her brows.

“What’s the matter?” she demanded quietly.

“These confounded tacks of yours—excuse my swearing,” prevaricated the doctor, skilfully, sucking one thumb, and then shaking his hand vigorously.

He put a professional question or two, and departed.

Bab sought for the obtrusive tack. It did not exist. The short flat-headed nails which fastened her strained surface of Whatman paper to the thin back of white pine were driven in flush with the wood. Bab shook her head gravely.

When the doctor had gotten himself into his trap, he fingered the reins reflectively.

“Now, was that a coincidence?” he pondered.

Then he reached to the whip and drove off.

* * * * *

A month later, in bleak January, Bab packed up her belongings and said “Good-bye.” She must really go and pay her respects to her Aunt Bilhah, otherwise Miss Cameron the elder. So she told her friends, and drew, with vivacity, pencil caricatures of that lady until they let her go, from sheer dread of what might happen to her at the hands of the original, should she fail in the punctilious discharge of her devoirs.

* * * * *

212

In simple truth, Bab was hoist with her own petard. She had left St. Mark’s Hill to spite Antony Magnus, and she had cut into her own heart instead of—she would fain have thought “as well as”—his. She had not seen him now for some four months, and she longed, in a most unmaidenly fashion, for a glimpse of his ascetic, sensitive face. She did not use the word “love” in connection with him, even in her dreams; normally that must be said to a woman by speech or manner before she herself employs it even mentally. But Bab was a woman, and knew that she wanted to see Antony Magnus once more. So she took Miss Cameron’s name in vain, and used her angular person as a stalking-horse to evade the kindly restraint of her friends.

When she was set down at the gate of the High House her old merriment came back with a rush. She paid the cabman fare and a half immediately upon their arrival, and laughed with him over the unique difficulty of getting her boxes up the four flights of steps.

To her surprise a new maid opened the door.

“Miss Cameron’s away, miss,” she remarked. “She’s been in Manchester for a week.”

“H’m,” said Bab; “then there’s a letter from me somewhere.”

213

“A letter did come yesterday,” returned the girl. “I was only to send letters twice’t a week, to save postage.”

Bab was tickled.

“I’m Miss Cameron’s niece,” she explained. “I stay here sometimes. There’s a photo of me in the parlour. I sleep in the back bedroom, first floor.”

“Come in a moment, miss,” desired the guardian of the High House.

“Wait,” Bab commanded her cabman.

In the parlour the maid looked naïvely from the photo to Bab.

“Yes, it’s you, miss,” she allowed. “I’ll send up your boxes. Will you have some tea?”

Bab nodded gaily, and made merry with herself over the contretemps.

When the maid came back to lay the cloth for the offered meal, Bab asked innocently—

“How is Mr. Magnus?”

The girl opened her mouth.

“The curate of St. Mark’s,” elucidated Bab. “He stops here, does he not?”

The other shook her head.

“I’m only here a month,” she intimated. “I haven’t heard the name.”

“You are alone in the house, then?” queried Bab.

214

“My cousin, he comes in at nights sometimes,” said Phyllis, with simplicity.

Bab smiled, but her heart sank.

* * * * *

After tea she went into the front room. It held the same familiar furniture, but Antony Magnus’s pedestal desk was gone, with its heaped books and papers. No litter lay upon the side-table or the spindle-legged escritoire. The shelves were empty, save for a few toppling novels and magazines.

Bab sat down on the sofa. Her whole frame was dazed into collapse. So he had gone, and she not there to hold him captive with her whims, or lure him back with dainty penitence. For a moment her thoughts escaped from the tether of conventionality. Then she frowned at herself in the pier-glass, and went upstairs to the garret.

It was absolutely unaltered. His books were piled on the corner-shelves, his papers stacked in a huge pigeon-hole built up of commentaries, the red tape fastenings dangling in airy festoons.

All her own properties were there—the easel, the paint-stand, the brushes, and mahl-stick. She noticed the teacup and broken biscuit, the crumbs on the floor and the rough surface of the packing-case. The canvas reversed on the easel must be her study of Pollie Jeffries. She stepped 215 across and turned it round. The blue eyes regarded her gravely; the tears sprang into Bab’s own as she remembered the agonized strokes that had set the expression there.

She went over to Magnus’s end of the room, and handled his books. A Gregory Nazianzen opened as she lifted it down, and a handful of paper slips fell out. They were her notes of his sermon on Solomon, stained with the brown ring of the wet saucer. Three crumpled roses were folded in them.

Bab’s heart gave a throb of unutterable gladness, and she kissed the dull ecclesiastical pages, indented deeply with the thick package they had imprisoned.

As she sat there, half crying with pain, half laughing with pleasure, at her discovery, she heard his familiar step and the voice of the maid.

“Well,” yielded the latter, “you can go up, but I’m bothered if missus shall go away and leave me again, to let I don’t know who ransack the house.”

Bab sprang up, shut the roses into the book, set it back on the shelf, and ran lightly across to the easel.

He opened the door and came in. Bab did not turn. She heard him stop, and there was 216 a great gulf of silence. Still he did not speak, and she glanced at him over her shoulder.

He wore the frock and habit of a friar!

Neither spoke, but Magnus bowed sadly. He looked away from her, crossed to the shelf, and took down a volume. Then he bowed again, and went out silently.

Bab stood as if turned to stone. Her heart beat in fierce convulsions, each with the dull shock of a muffled explosion.

A sudden thought (the pathetic persistency of hope!) grew up in her stupor, and she walked slowly to the bookshelves.

He had taken the Gregory Nazianzen.

219

CHAPTER I.
A CHILD’S KISS.

The long night had passed. There were dark circles about Bab’s eyes, and so dilated were the pupils that the irises were entirely extinguished. The interminable hours had rolled over her, second by second, and their dread round had set fear in her heart—that sickening fear of the remorseless, inevitable future which comes to humanity in its darkest agony—and her sensitive being had hardly gasped its way through the giant storm of passionate despair which had seized upon it. Still weak from her long illness, she had thrown herself upon the primly appointed bed, dragging the counterpane down to plunge her cheeks, burning with unwept tears, into the cold pillows, and had lain there, shaken with rebellious grief. The whole universe had swung away from her, leaving her solitary in a huge void of sombre nothingness. Then, towards morning, the welcome tears had 220 flooded to her eyelids—it was at the thought of those poor dead roses, which he had cherished for her sake! And she had risen and undressed herself in the darkness. Shuddering with cold and the extremity of her desolation, she lay down again miserably—a sight to move Omnipotence itself to tears of human sympathy. At last, in the dreary dawning of a new day, she fell asleep.

* * * * *

The sound of the school-bells floating up the Hill aroused her, and she got up and dressed herself, fragile and heavy-eyed.

Miss Cameron’s maid marvelled silently at the havoc a single night had wrought upon her merry guest, but, having taken a fancy to her, prepared her breakfast with kindly care, and sorrowed to find it left untouched.

Taking down her hat and cloak from the remembered peg with a stab of pain, Bab went out, and turned her steps toward Howe Street. She wanted to see Pollie Austin.

When she knocked at Mrs. Morris’s door it opened to reveal Pollie herself.

“Eh! Come in, miss,” she cried, eagerly. “You are looking poorly. Come right in and sit down at once.”

221

Bab followed her into the small, scantily-furnished room. Her eyes ran over Pollie’s dress.

“You are in trouble,” she said, wearily. “Is the black for the child? I am very sorry; it seemed strong.”

Pollie sat down by the table, put her bare arms on it, and laid her head upon them.

“Don’t you know, miss?” she asked brokenly. “It’s Tom. And three months ago—more, by two weeks.”

Bab went to her, and put an arm about the weeping woman. Sorrow of her own had made her wise. In a moment Pollie looked up, shaking the tears out of her eyes.

“Then you don’t know nothing,” she inquired, comprehendingly, “about the strike and all?”

“Nothing, Pollie,” answered Bab. “But surely you have the child?”

Pollie pointed to the cradle.

“Tommy’s asleep,” she said. “God in heaven thank you, miss, for my being able to call him Thomas Austin, and him to have the right to it.”

“Tell me about your husband, Pollie,” parried Bab, stricken with a feeling of involuntary guilt at the remembrance of their kindly deception, and sat down by her.

Pollie began at the beginning and told all.

222

As she talked, the light of a great pride grew up in Bab’s soul. This, after all, was the man Antony Magnus, in whom she had believed. And he—this Antony, this man!—loved her, and had hidden her away in his priest’s heart, as he had hidden her roses in the pages of his Gregory Nazianzen.

“They took him to St. Mary’s,” said Pollie, through the tears that choked the last of the tale, “and the lads walked in a procession half a mile long. Mr. Magnus buried him, and cried like a child when he came to ‘ashes to——’”

Pollie stopped in a sob. The two women clasped hands.

“An’, Miss Barbara,” said Pollie, huskily, “I am glad he saved the minister, because——”

The eyes of the two women met—in such fashion as they had met once before, when Pollie the Magdalen-Madonna had looked down out of her canvas on Bab, the Child of Lawless Love.

“I was Tom’s wife, an’ they called me Mrs. Austin. Fancy if they hadn’t been able!”

She shivered.

“An’ I owe it to you, miss,” she said, “for Tommy was only a week when Tom died. An’ there’d have been no thought of marrying those 223 awful days, even if Tilly Cornish had a’ died three times over.”

Bab kissed her mutely.

The baby cooed softly in its cradle. Pollie ran and lifted it out.

“Isn’t he a bonny lad?” she demanded, the mother in her comforting the wife.

Bab took the child of the dead man into her arms, and put her lips to its cheek. The small head moved on her shoulder, and the tiny lips met her own.

“He kissed you back, miss,” cried Pollie, delightedly.

Bab flushed with an unreasoning pleasure. A thought took sudden shape in her mind.

“Pollie,” she said, “I have no one in the world that really loves me. Will you let me stay with you?”

Pollie Austin flushed redly.

“I live by charing,” she explained, “and I’m cruel short o’ things for a lady, miss; but you’re very welcome.”

“I have enough for both,” urged Bab. “We’ll have a house of our own, and we’ll see if we can’t do something for the women about here. Remember, Pollie, I’m a first-class doctor, and it’s a shame not to do some good in the world.”

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Pollie pondered.

“There’s No. 17 just empty,” she said, “and the Thompsons were clean people in their ways.”

“We’ll take it,” decided Bab, briskly.

Pollie started at her own thoughts.

“You know that Mr. Magnus has joined the Catholics, miss?” she asked softly.

“I know, Pollie,” said Bab, and looked away from her.

Pollie sighed, and kissed the child.

225

CHAPTER II.
LA PUCELLE.

“We can help,” Magnus had said, “if we will but give our lives to God and to them.”

Bab thought but little of God; she was not irreligious, but a broad furrow ran transversely across her crown, well back from the arch of the forehead. She could love, being a woman; and foster, being potentially a mother; she could respect—occasionally—being a reasoning animal with ethical perceptions, but she could not venerate. Therefore God with her was pretty much of a synonym for the order of the Universe, as that would exist, planned on fairly ideal lines. Veneration is the passion for God, belief in Him merely an intellectual attitude. Bab had no religious passion; she had plenty of the human and feminine varieties. For which reason, when she set out to organize her life on the basis of Magnus’s theorem, she made it read, “If I give 226 my life to Him and to them.” The capital H to the pronoun did not stand for Divinity, it stood for a woman’s love; she had dedicated herself body and soul to Magnus, and, for his sake, to the women of Howe Street.

In the course of a few weeks she had settled down with Pollie Austin and her child in one of the small tenements that formed that narrow thoroughfare. Pollie no longer went out to “char,” but kept house for Bab, as once she had kept it for Tom—saving that she had more of pounds, shillings, and pence at her disposal.

Bab was a wise little soul, and began her work quietly. Melia Reeves, who had reconciled herself to her drunken husband, was approaching the time of her annual trial, and Bab, by Pollie’s persuasive mouth, tendered her services for the occasion.

Melia sniffed, after the manner of the Jeffries women.

“Mine was a seven months’,” boasted Pollie, “and she brought me through like a house afire. She has a ‘crackly’ paper with writing on it that no one can read. She’s a real doctor.”

Melia yielded, and Pollie intimated that Bab would “look round.” Bab did, and steered Melia safely into haven. No sooner did Melia begin to think, in the energetic fashion of the poor, of 227 “getting up,” than Mary Halloran’s daughter—a frail girl, with her father’s strumous diathesis, and her mother’s wild blood—began to think about facing her “trouble;” and, alas! in this case, her shame also, for Willie Fellowes, the wastrel whom Pollie hated, had stalked and brought her down. Poor Norah Halloran was trembling with hourly increasing fear, and in a fair way to become a suicide or a murderess when Bab stepped in, coaxed Father Corrigan to frighten Norah’s mother into temporary decency with a threat of utter excommunication, and herself softened Norah into something of resignation and tenderness. Nevertheless, even tender-hearted Bab was thankful when the child was born dead.

Norah was pathetically satisfied, and more than half inclined to thank Bab for the desired consummation.

Bab was horror-stricken, and bullied Norah into remorse.

“Howsom’iver, miss,” she said, with irrepressible Irish humour, “it’s not onconsolable Oi am.”

* * * * *

Bab sickened a little at the atmosphere, as work crowded upon her. For the Howe Street neighbourhood was degraded in many fashions, and not least in respect of the elementary moralities. 228 Marriage—the ceremony—was indispensable to the respectability of Howe Street—in the event of “accidents”—unless the involved hazard should snuff out the scarcely-lighted taper of a puny life. That was “good luck,” and the recipient to be envied. Childbirth was an annual event in the lives of its women, and of those of the Road generally, and, as a consequence, the childhood of the place was sordid and mean—childish in nothing save years and stature. The halo of romance thinned from the Grand Passion, and that Barbara Cameron who, one summer morning in Stanley Park, had defended to an ascetic the mystic fervour of Canticles, became a creature of the departed Past. Howbeit, the new Barbara was aware of a strange sense of loneliness at her heart, which found no small comfort in the tiny soul that knit the life of Pollie Jeffries with that of her dead husband. Her ardent womanhood, driven out of Eden as by an encroaching sewer, buoyed itself, like the child Moses, upon an ark of wickerwork—the cradle of Tommy Austin.

One evening, as they sat together in a rare interval of calm, Bab turned to Pollie, and broke a long pause of silence.

“Is the fire smoking, Pollie?” she asked.

Pollie started.

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230

“No, miss,” she answered, studying Bab, who was gazing strainedly into vacancy.

“The room seems full of mist.”

Bab put her hands against her knitted brows. Presently she looked up and laughed.

“Something must have got into my eyes,” she decided, “but it’s gone now,

“You’ve been working too hard, miss,” said Pollie, anxiously.

233

CHAPTER I.
“CANST THOU BIND THE SWEET INFLUENCE OF PLEIADES?”

Antony Magnus had fled to the shelter of the Roman Church from no clearly defined religious motive. His self-reliance had been completely undermined by his failure to free himself from the haunting memory of Bab. He no longer trusted his moral judgment or his physical control. He had undertaken an almost impossible task—to conquer a pure passion for a woman, who, he knew almost to a certainty, returned it, and he had paid the double penalty of a body so overcharged with emotion as to be incapable of assiduous labour, and a brain so overwrought with tragic pondering that it could no longer discharge its functions with any degree of temperateness and decision. As a consequence, he had fallen into the Doubting Castle of bodily ill-health, complicated by brain-fag, and clung more and more to Father Cuthbert, whom he saw often. At last, envying increasingly the quiet life of the Franciscans and their freedom from the mental 234 and religious stress which was desolating his own, he put himself unreservedly into the tender hands of his blind mentor, and entered the Order. Some few difficulties stood in his way, especially that of the prescribed two years’ novitiate; but the strong hand of authority overruled them, and within a couple of months from his strange visit to the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, Antony Magnus, late curate of St. Mark the Evangelist’s, had become a Franciscan friar of the second degree.

At first his existence was a singularly happy one. The absence of unrest, the tranquil monotony of the days, the austerity of the unvarying régime, all soothed his perturbed spirit. The memory of Bab became a hectic glimmer upon the dusky horizon of his Past.

But, unfortunately for his peace of mind, Fate ordained that he should see Bab once more, and in the lofty garret of the High House he had met her by chance that January day. He had not forgotten her before that, by no means, but it was so long since he had seen her, and so much of tragedy lay between, that the colour had died out of his thoughts of her as the red bloom had died out of the rose-leaves between the pages of his Gregory Nazianzen, up there on the shelf in the corner.

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The sight of her brought all his tempestuous passion back upon him, but in a subtler form. She looked so fragile, so dispirited, so weak after her suffering! He hungered to take her in his arms, to smooth her hair from her forehead, to beguile her weariness with lovers’ babble. He wanted not so much to possess her—that was an emotion of health, his health and hers—but, in his present distempered state and her weak one, to protect, to fondle, to comfort her sorrowful little heart, to guard her drooping little body from fatigue and harm. He was in the gossamer mesh again, and it held him more firmly than ever.

A fortnight after, when Bab had left it for No. 17, Howe Street, he went to the High House for some books, and slipped a volume of Tennyson into his pocket. It was a small volume, on India paper, bound in maroon cloth, holding “Maud,” “In Memoriam,” and a score of minor poems.

He put the majority of the books into the College library—he, of course, could hold no private property—but, with an independence which he had actually abdicated, kept the Tennyson for himself.

In his cell he read it voraciously, for poetry had been the very breath of his nostrils. He devoured “Maud” with a reckless delight in its passion that set him quivering from head to foot. The 236 Guardian, passing his door, looked in and confiscated the book, imposing a sharp penance for the possession of it.

Antony Magnus had made a mistake. He was no monk, as Bab the Artist had seen. The blood rushed to his heart. Forfeit his liberty! not read what he liked! He bit his lip to control the rising storm, and turned away. When the Guardian had gone he sat down and wept. The doubt and fear which the sight of Bab had brought back into his life gave sudden place—not to the brainless ease of the past few months, but to the stern self-confidence inherent in his proud blood. He cast himself down on his pallet, and gave the rein to his thoughts about Bab. It was one thing to put her from him himself, it was another to be ruled by a shaveling priest—he forgot his own tonsure—to be treated like a salacious lad, to be even forbidden to read poetry lest it should remind him of her.

Bah! he would think of her, of the bonny oval of her face, with its squirrel-like alertness of expression, her red lips, her great grey eyes, her dancing curls, her tiny hands and feet.

The night was very quiet; he could hear pealing of Father Cuthbert’s organ from church. An echo of “Maud” sprang into his ears from some pigeon-hole of his brain—

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It tripped airily—setting at nought the solemn chords of the distant organ. The blind friar in the gloomy church was playing a kingly Magnificat, but the rhythmic lines defied it blankly—

The inaudible word-dance was distracting, voluptuous, fantastic. He tried vainly to sleep. Suddenly Bab’s song rose to his mind. It set itself to the Magnificat:—

He said it over to himself, and was vaguely comforted. As he wavered on the edge of slumber, he heard the Tennyson jingle begin again, far off and dim—

He felt that he was somehow unwell. Great flushes of heat ran over him, followed by intervals of deadly cold.

* * * * *

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When he rose with the next day he remembered that he had to participate in a great function which was to take place at noon in the church. A young curate of the Establishment, a scion of a historic Liverpool commercial house, was to be initiated into the Order, and the public ceremony was to be splendidly ornate. He felt weak and ill, his eyeballs seemed to shiver internally every few minutes, and his head ached dully. He went to one of the superior brethren, who had some knowledge of medicine, and took a strong dose of quinine. Then he went out about the concerns of his poor. He had kept upon good terms with the folk of the Scotland and Everton districts of his old parish, but the erstwhile favourite portion—that embracing the road from Howe to Roscommon Street—he had shunned persistently. Today, however, he went that way. Passing the base of St. Mark’s Hill he saw Bab, walking slowly in the sunshine, and stepped into a doorway to watch her unseen. How pale she looked, and how hollow-eyed! A lump of misery rose in his throat, his eyes were wet. He clenched his teeth to keep from calling to her. When she had passed out of sight, he tottered and would have fallen had he not grasped the door-posts for support.

“I must be ill,” he thought confusedly, went 239 back to the college, and lay down till the time for the initiation ceremony should come. He grew steadily worse, but he had already provoked the Guardian’s displeasure, and dare not risk incurring it again.

He staggered to his feet and put on the full investiture of the Order. Then he went out into the church, feeling like a drunken man. No one spoke to him, and he took his appointed place in the choir. The slant April sunshine streamed through the windows, and glorified the solemn scene that followed upon the stroke of noon. The stately ceremony of the Franciscan initiation dragged its sonorous and musical length along; the organ pealed, the choir intoned, the incense floated up white upon the flooding radiance flung from the great windows against the spring sun.

At length the people hushed into the silence of anticipation, and the neophyte came out into the choir, gowned and bare-headed. The attendant friars closed up about the Guardian, and the singing began again, tender and throbbing.

The bright steel of the scissors flashed in the sunlight as the tonsure cut its way through the novice’s fair hair. Magnus felt a sense of mad disgust as the bald crown made its appearance. He forgot once more that he had submitted to 240 the same operation, and only thought of Samson. Then he remembered that it was a harlot who shore the locks of power from the head of the Nazarite. A vague recollection of the Apocalypse and the Scarlet Woman, and a fancy that the parallel was somehow complete, lifted its head in his imagination. He held the scapular, or sleeveless coat of the Franciscans, the final investiture of the initiated friar.

The scissors were laid aside, and the rope was knotted about the novice’s waist—knotted with the triple knot of obedience, poverty, and chastity. Then the cadet of a great mercantile house knelt, put his hands in those of the Guardian, and recited his vow. He would submit himself in all things to the Superiors of the Order, and obey unquestioningly their commands; he would accept poverty, and receive gladly whatsoever the Order should provide for him; he would live in chastity both of body and of heart.

A fierce laugh burst from Magnus’s lips, and he tore the scapular which he held in twain down the middle.

The brethren sprang forward; but he turned on them like a stag at bay, and broke into peal after peal of racking merriment, terrible to hear. He put his hands to his head, flinging it back till the 241 muscles of the throat stood out convulsively, and laughed in great peals of frantic amusement, whose colossal mirth made itself a background of startled silence in the sunny place. Suddenly he broke out into jarring recitative, beating time in airy bars to the musical pulse of the words—

He dropped his voice to a clear, soft whisper, and bent forward. The lines came with a thrill that sent a shiver through the audience, though the sun was all ablaze in the high windows of the apse—

The Guardian gave a covert sign, and the brethren advanced stealthily to seize him. He caught at the rent scapular as it dangled from his arm by a surviving strip, dragged the halves apart, and tossed the fragments of cloth under their feet. They spread out into a small semicircle, and came steadily across the marble flooring.

He ran up the altar-steps and tore the tall rood down. The priests shrieked in horror, and rushed on him. He caught it by the short stem above the transverse bar, and raised it, as a Scotsman 242 would have done his two-handed broadsword. His strained fingers clutched the very thorn-wreath of the Christ. The heavy ebony staff swung in a threatening crescent. A friar dashed in, it caught him, and he fell howling. A second clutched it, and hung on heavily. The end dropped, forced to the floor, and the others flung themselves on it. Magnus hurled it bodily over—a giant lever—and they reeled down the steps, a struggling heap.

“Ahoi!” he shouted in barbaric triumph, and leapt to the altar-top, sending the tapers flying. He threw himself into a defiant pose—lithe flesh and bone, in a quivering backward curve. Then he dashed his hands to his head, and burst out laughing—long waves of resonant natural gaiety—thrusting back the crisp curls from his temples. His voice was that of a riotous boy. He flung an arm above him, pointed a coarsely shodden foot, and began to sing a snatch of foreign speech—

He was swaying to the melody, his hand marking the rhythms in the air over his head—

They fell on him suddenly, having climbed up behind the altar, and dragged him away, laughing and babbling. The congregation began to break 243 up, horror-stricken. Few had heard clearly, none—save one—had understood. Was the man mad or possessed by the fiend?

Father Cuthbert, at his organ, listened and wept. He could not wholly comprehend, but he had caught the ancient Gallic couplet, and knew that the heart of the man had proved too strong for the bonds of the Church.

He sighed deeply, listening to the departing footfalls of the people. Then he began to play softly, quaveringly chanting a psalm. It was the De Profundis, and the cracked voice stumbled haltingly through the priestly Latin—

“De profundis . . . clamavi . . . ad te Domine . . . Domine . . . exaude . . . vocem . . . meam.”

They had taken Magnus into an adjoining vestry on the right of the choir. His wild singing dominated the whispering pipes.

The blind friar recurred to the familiar phraseology of the opening verse—

“De profundis . . . clamavi . . .”

Magnus’s song rang out in the sunshine—

244

CHAPTER II.
“IT IS NOT GOOD FOR MAN TO BE ALONE.”

When the night fell on St. Edmund’s College and on the Church of our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, the soul of Antony Magnus had struggled to the furthest stretch of the invisible cord which bound it to the racked clay. He had been placed in a small hospital cell, the Order giving him the benefit of their perplexity as to whether he were possessed or merely in the grasp of a fever. To make sure, he had been subjected to a solemn process of exorcism and a strong opiate. Both had failed to produce any noticeable effect. The latter, however, dulled the violence of his mood, but he chattered on wildly and incessantly for many hours. They marvelled how any frame could endure such prolonged and severe delirium, and expected him momentarily to fall into a state of coma. As he showed no signs of doing anything of the sort, his attendants began to incline towards the theory of possession.

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As the weak sunshine of a new day streamed into the grey little cell, Magnus suddenly quieted, but consciousness and lethargy alike seemed as far off as ever.

All the night he had stormed in unintelligible fury, writhing and plunging to rid himself of imaginary bonds. Occasionally they could distinguish the words which had interrupted the reverend ceremony of the preceding day—

A world of fantasy was sweeping through Magnus’s brain; the darkened mind played with its baubles of fancy in such fashion as did distraught Ophelia with her flowers!

Roses . . . damask roses, with great hearts of inky crimson . . . roses everywhere, springing out of the roadways of the city where she had trodden, leaning down out of heaven to kiss her dainty head. And the scent of them!—it swam through his sick being, heavy and passionate.

That was in the garden of “Maud.” They had 246 taken it from him, thrust him out of the garden as they did Adam and Eve. No, no, that was kind, that was tender—God Himself had not the heart. These priests had cast him out alone, and she walked solitarily among the roses.

How the elder flowers danced above the line of the sill; their feathery flowerets dropped silently upon the pansies in the window-box! “There is pansies, that’s for thoughts.” Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, nothing but thoughts—oceans and oceans of them, flooding in on him, from north and south, from east and west, rolling in, in, in, like the Sea of all the seas.

In the early morning all this terror died away from him, and his voice fell to a more natural key, a tenderer intonation. The priests sitting about him understood for the first time what he was saying, and for the moment thought him conscious.

“Bab,” he was murmuring, “my pretty little Bab, don’t be angry. I was mad, but I am sane now. Look at me, Bab; put your hands on my forehead. How cold they are—like the hands of a corpse. Are you dead, Bab? It is my fault, and now it is too late. ‘For there is no work, nor 247 device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave whither thou goest.’ Kiss me, Bab. They have not buried us properly. Put your head down and try to sleep—it is rough for your velvet cheeks, this curst monkish frock. They took my books from me—Gregory Nazianzen and the roses—and ‘Maud,’ Bab darling; they took it away from me also. I could not see you walking in her garden any longer. How everything swims! There is too much love in my heart; it is spinning like a wheel.

The priests looked at one another, and Father Cuthbert smote his breast.

“Mea culpa, mea culpa,” he said quaveringly. “God be merciful to me, a sinner.”

248

CHAPTER III.
A RANK MATERIALIST.

Father Cuthbert sat at his organ. Long vigils by Magnus’s side had unnerved him, and he had stolen away to rest a few moments in his own fashion. It was the first of May, and a radiant forenoon. The shouting of the children in St. Mark’s Road came over the high wall and through the transept door. At heart—this friend of Newman’s—he was a poet and a musician; and his tremulous fingers—still strong by force of habit upon the triple keyboard—were translating the passionate sorrow of Antony Magnus’s delirium into haunting harmonies. The old friar’s brain was strung up to a high tension, partly by sympathetic suffering, partly by a sense of personal culpability, and he was playing with a strangely fluent power. The organ was an electric one and an ideally perfect instrument, the blowing apparatus hydraulic.

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Magnus’s pathetic raving had struck a chord of most unpriestly feeling in the withered bosom beneath the brown frieze frock. The last few months had brought Father Cuthbert with long strides towards that second youth which holds the soft hand of the first, and dreams its dreams. He began to think in broken snatches of melody—songs of the common people in long-forgotten years. Father Cuthbert became Cuthbert O’Neill once more, and the ballads of his native land came to his fingertips and thrilled unspoken in his ear—

The slippered feet thrust the pedals down in the staccato lilt of the line—

How the organ sobbed out the long pause upon the word, and hung over it with a passion of regret.

Crash! pealed the coupled octaves, and the triumphant pedals—

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He ran a finger over the electric stop-levers, and put on a tender combination. The flute and the vox angelica trembled together—

He heard a footstep, and drowned his profanity in a deluge of stern chords, like distant thunder.

“Thanks, my father,” said a cool, unfamiliar voice in his ear.

The blind eyes raised themselves to the sound.

“May I trouble your reverence a moment?” the voice went on. “I am a doctor. I saw the—the contretemps here yesterday. I know a little of the man who occasioned it.”

(Mendacious Dr. Fane, to see a muffled curate once in the dark of a Cheshire lane, and to call it knowing him “a little!”)

“Is he any better?”

Father Cuthbert shook his head.

“He is still very sick. He raves.”

“H’m!” pursued Dr. Fane, looking at the softened face of the friar as the May sunshine glorified it. “I sat just below here.” At the 251 present moment he was standing close to the organ, having actually vaulted the shallow chancel railing. “I heard his—his raving, as you put it.

Wasn’t that the way it went?”

“Peace,” desired Father Cuthbert. “Respect the place. This is the Church of Our Lady.”

The doctor whistled. It was a long, sibilant whistle of amusement, and it became the musical equivalent of

“You monks are a funny lot,” he observed. “Reverend sir, is it permitted to a priest to desecrate his own sanctuary?”

Father Cuthbert bowed his head in shame.

“Can I see this man?” asked the doctor, shortly.

“It is not allowed,” said the blind friar.

“Surely it can be overlooked for once,” urged the cool rallying voice. “Surely it would not be so great an infringement of the rules of the Order as is involved in playing—

The doctor stopped in his whistle:

“In the shrine of her Blessed Majesty in question!”

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Father Cuthbert flushed redly to the roots of his white hair.

“I will see what can be done,” he returned, and went slowly away.

The doctor strolled up and down the transept with his hat on, whistling the “Kerry Dance.” Then he went up to the organ, setting the chancel gate ajar this time, looked for the wind-switch, and set it over. He slid carelessly on to the stool, poked half-a-dozen stop-levers, and played a few bars.

“Poor little woman!” he remarked meditatively; “why would she fall in love with a priest? why couldn’t she marry a soldier?”

He struck a note idly, and ran into a bar or two of “The Old Brigade.”

piped the keys.

“Nice little girl!” he soliloquised, kicking the pedals till the organ spat anger up aloft—“very nice. I could easily have fancied her myself. Lucky I didn’t; she was simply gone on that curate. However,

It was probably the first time that the Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception had heard even a scrap of light opera.

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The doctor had a firm tenor voice, with a quizzical little ripple in it. He swung into position on the organ-stool, and began romantically, playing a roughly-vamped accompaniment, bravura fashion—

“Here’s old Ignatius,” he interpolated irreverently, and jumped over half a dozen bars, stabbing the keys to find the opening of the phrase he wanted—

The flourish stopped at the end of the keyboard.

“Will you come this way?” asked Father Cuthbert.

The doctor put the switch back, and followed, shutting the chancel gate with an air of elaborate tidiness.

* * * * *

Magnus lay babbling upon his low, comfortless bed, his eyelids blue with the distension of the capillaries, the veins of his temples knotted into prominence, his rough bed-gown open at the throat, a 254 piece of ice tied upon his flushed forehead by a broad loose band of tape.

He was praying in his delirium. The phrases came gaspingly. The priests were whispering horror at the speech of the evil spirit, the Guardian stood by the doctor’s side, frowning perplexedly.

Magnus’s words came slow and distinct, like those of one who is offering impromptu supplication in public—

The doctor listened, and touched the hot wrist.

“Religious unhingement,” he said, coining a phrase, for he himself was puzzled at this new vagary of the sensitive human brain; the lucid monologue of the unconscious man seemed hardly canny, even to the physician.

The Guardian raised his brows. It was a confirmation of the devil-theory. The doctor saw it.

“A rare species of mental derangement,” he added, promptly—“brought on by some emotional shock of great intensity, probably following a long and wearing strain.”

The Guardian nodded. The rapid sentences confused him, as they were intended to do.

“In plain English, a broken heart,” finished the doctor, under his breath.

The Guardian motioned to the brethren to withdraw.

“Can he recover?” he inquired softly.

“Not within these walls.”

The shrewd ecclesiastic looked the self-possessed medical man carefully over.

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“It is impossible to move him,” he explained, colourlessly. “We have no other establishment.”

“Then order a coffin,” advised the doctor, brusquely.

“We desire no scandal, of course——”

“Then send him away to get better. Otherwise——” A shrug of the frock-coated shoulders finished the sentence.

“It is absolutely impossible.”

“Give him up to me.”

“It is against the rules of the Order.”

“Five feet eleven by a foot and three-quarters,” decided the doctor, “a foot deep. To-morrow night at latest”—most mendacious of physicians!—“funeral Sunday afternoon. You’ll just have nice time to get ready.”

The Guardian of the College of St. Edmund’s, under the rule of the Order of St. Francis, pondered the situation, not without a secret appreciation of his vis-à-vis.

“You know him well?” he propounded.

“Better than you or he could possibly be aware,” was the enigmatic response.

“You are discreet?”

“As His Holiness himself.”

The Guardian shuddered at the blasphemy, but yielded.

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“This cell will be open to-night after eleven,” he conceded, without looking at the doctor. “Entrance is speediest through the courtyard by the chancel side-door. When will he occupy this”—he indicated the low couch with its coarse blankets—“again?”

“Never.”

The Guardian’s face set.

“Then the cell will not be open.”

“Yes, it will,” insisted the doctor.

The cold eyes flashed anger.

“Then,” observed the doctor, examining his thumb-nail, “I shall be under the painful necessity of interfering in certain matters much more important to Mother Church than the loss of a beggarly Franciscan friar.”

The Guardian looked at him.

“I shall go from here to the Reverend the Marquis of Trafford, who is my very good friend,” said the doctor, pushing back the scarfskin from the root of the nail with the powerful phlange of his other thumb, “and who is thinking of joining your Communion. I shall tell him all about this poor devil here. That will put a spoke in the wheel of his spiritual parent, Cardinal Boyle, who will probably get the Most Sanctified Pius to put a spoke in yours. Come now”—he met the 258 Guardian’s eye suavely—“be a wise man. The cell will be open?”

The ecclesiastic laughed tactfully.

“Would to the saints we had you for a cardinal!” he answered.

“You will make a most excellent substitute,” answered the doctor, with a bow.

261

CHAPTER I.
HOMESPUN.

Antony Magnus walked slowly along the Landing-stage in the warm August morning. He wore civilian costume: a dark frock-coat and trousers, and a soft narrow felt hat, American fashion. He had come in from distant Parkgate by the Great Western and the Woodside boat. What he proposed doing on the first day of absolute liberty which Dr. Fane had permitted him, he did not quite know. He strolled along the Stage, taking great draughts of the sea-air that rolled in with the tide, and sunning himself like the vertebrate mammal God made him.

Some one touched his arm. He turned and saw Will Roberts, the secretary of the Dockers’ Union. They had not met since that day on which half a mile of “the lads” had followed Tom Austin’s coffin to St. Mary’s Cemetery on the busy Walton Road, and Magnus had broken down over the grave of their dead comrade.

The hands of the two men grasped warmly.

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“You’re looking very pale, sir,” said Roberts. His own squat strong figure was as elastic and vigorous as ever, and his face bore the dark bronze of robust masculine health.

“I’m out alone for the first time for months,” answered Magnus, trying to smile. “I’ve been very ill.”

“You should sit down in the sun,” returned Roberts, touching his arm with the sudden tenderness of a woman. “Walking’s bad for invalids. Are you not going anywhere in particular?”

“No,” confessed Magnus. He had only come out for the pleasure of being his own man once more.

“Then come home with me,” suggested Roberts, hospitably. “We’ll get a bus at the top of this gangway. I’m on a loose end to-day.”

He helped Magnus to the top of the covered passage, and held up his hand to a passing bus. They got in, Roberts’s strong hand under Magnus’s elbow.

“How is the Union?” asked Magnus.

“Better than ever,” said Roberts. “We have twice as many members, and our bank-balance is——” he whispered in Magnus’s ear, as he had done some eleven months before in the Exchange Station.

“Very good indeed,” commented Magnus. He felt his old interest in life returning.

Roberts went on chattering about casual matters. He was too courteous to hint at Magnus’s personal 263 affairs, though rumour had been busy with them. Of Bab, as an individual, however, he knew nothing.

The bus passed a short street of respectable little houses, and Roberts stopped it with a nod to the guard and a sharp jerk of the signal-strap where it ran over his head. The sound brought back to Magnus the memory of his journey to Parkgate in the preceding autumn, and he thought of Sir Geoffrey Veitch.

“It’s a bit early for Jeanie,” remarked Roberts, as they got out, “but I think she’ll forgive us.”

Magnus protested, but the door at which Roberts had tapped opened abruptly. In the narrow lobby stood a small, wiry woman, tidily dressed in a black gown and huge apron. Her sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and her arms were covered with flour.

“I’ve brought Mr. Magnus to see you, Jeanie,” said her husband, stepping aside to allow Magnus to pass in. “He’s been very poorly, so he’ll be glad of a cup of tea.”

Jeanie’s sharp face lit.

“Come yer ways in, Mr. Magnus,” she bade him in her bright Scotch accent, diluted with the Liverpool English, “and sit down. I’m verry proud to see ye. My husband’s told me sae much aboot ye that I’m fair fain to know what manner o’ man ye are.”

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Her husband laughed. His voice betrayed his pride in Jeanie’s deft welcome.

“Not in there, Jeanie,” he demurred, as his wife laid her hand on the parlour knob. “A fire would be best for Mr. Magnus.”

“Oo ay,” agreed little Mrs. Roberts, and went on into the kitchen.

“Take the armchair, Mr. Magnus,” said Roberts through the doorway, as he hung up his peaked cap in the lobby. He came in cheerily. “Let me have your hat and gloves.”

The secretary drew up his own old-fashioned “gudeman’s seat” to the fire, and installed Magnus in it. Jeanie pushed back the table.

“I’m juist aboot makin’ a bit apple-pie,” she explained, putting the kettle on the fire, “but dinner itsel’s a’maist ready i’ the oven.”

She moved noiselessly about, setting a teapot on the hob, catching the kettle at the critical moment when the water began to boil, “massing,” as her housewife’s tongue had it, “juist a cup to put him on,” sweeping her cooking into the tiny pantry and laying the table, keeping meanwhile a shrewd eye on the conversation, and a still shrewder one on the fire and “dampers.” There was a red-clay pot or two of musk on the window and a shelf of books and papers by it.

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“Have you any olive branches, Roberts?” inquired Magnus. He was feeling the better for Jeanie’s cup of tea.

That observant auditor coloured.

“Will there has three,” she said merrily.

Magnus looked at his host.

“I did not know you had been previously——”

He paused, embarrassed.

Jeanie’s husband went into a long peal of laughter.

“That’s Jeanie’s stock joke,” he gasped, with tears of exhaustion in his eyes.

“Ye’ll no believe him, Mr. Magnus,” urged his wife, with a sly glance at her visitor. “I may be Scotch, but I ha’ mair than one joke.”

They went on bantering each other like children.

Jeanie dragged up the laden table.

“Ye’ll juist have a bit dinner before the bairns come in fra the schule,” she said. “Ye’ll no be a family man, Mr. Magnus, and the bairns’ll maybe annoy ye.”

Magnus flushed.

“I never thought about it, Mrs. Roberts,” he replied, “but I think I am fond of children.”

“Will detests them,” said Jeanie, and went off into merriment.

“I appeal to Mr. Magnus,” parried her husband. “Turn the edge of your scepticism against Jeanie 266 this time, sir, if only for the sake of our common sex.”

Magnus studied the two for a little, and then fell into their manner.

“Jeanie, there, is a working-man’s daughter born and bred,” observed Roberts, as the talk turned on Socialism and the improvidence of the working-classes. “She was a hand in a Dundee mill, and got little schooling enough, didn’t you, lassie? But I’ll back her sharp wits and clever fingers against those of any lady in Britain.”

“Ach!” cried Jeanie, evading the compliment dexterously; “d’ye hear onything, Mr. Magnus? He’s an Englishman, and says Britain ’stead o’ England: I taught him myself. Here are the bairns.”

Roberts went to the door and opened it. Two boys tumbled in pell-mell. A slight girl, like her mother, followed primly.

“Willie and Allan’s awfu’ boyish, mamma,” she complained, putting her school-satchel on the nail.

Roberts laughed, and introduced them to Magnus.

They settled down at the table, and their mother served them rapidly while they chattered to her about their own especial world. Soon their father joined in, discussing the points of a disputed grammar lesson.

Magnus sat and watched, a little ache of loneliness at his heart. He pushed back his chair.

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“I’m afraid I must say good-bye,” he began.

“Oh, but ye’re no goin’,” said Jeanie, solicitously. “An’ ye’ve eaten scarcely onything.”

“I have eaten more,” he answered her gravely, “than I have done at any two meals for five or six months—nay, for twelve.”

“Lord preserve us!” exclaimed Jeanie; “what a wearin’ husband ye will make. I always know something’s no richt wi’ Will if he eats only twice what ye’ve done, Mr. Magnus.”

The children clattered applause with their spoons, and the secretary protested.

“You will be going straight back, sir?” advised Roberts. “The nights are none too warm for an invalid, though the weather does call itself August.”

“I want to see Pollie Austin,” Magnus told him, “then Parkgate and home—all the home I have, that is. Good-bye, Will”—the kindly Christian name slipping from him in his spasm of loneliness—“and good-bye to you, Mrs. Roberts.”

They shook hands, and Magnus departed.

“Yon’s an awfu’ sad face,” said Jeanie to her husband in the passage.

“A’ weel,” sighed Roberts, mimicking her Scotch, “it’s aboot yin o’ yer ain bothersome sex, woman.” Then, relapsing into English, “At least, so folk say.”

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CHAPTER II.
THE BELOVED.

Magnus bent his slow and difficult steps to that dingy tenement in Howe Street where Pollie Jeffries had kept house for Tom Austin, and in whose dark little parlour he had sat—first in tense solitude, then by the side of an agonizing man—while Bab upstairs had waged fierce war with Death to keep one soul and gain another. He had walked home with her from its shallow doorstep to the long stone flights of the High House, and her hand had lain on his arm. How tired she had been!—the little fingers had clung quite heavily.

He knocked at the battered door. An unkempt girl answered it.

“Mrs. Austin? No. 17.”

The door slammed.

Magnus crossed the road to No. 17, noticing its white curtains, cleanly scrubbed window-sills, and tiny grass-plat behind the cramped railings.

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The door stood open, and he laid his hand on the knocker. He raised, but did not use it. A faint strain of music floated to his ear—the sound of a violin. A sense of impotence stole over him, and he set the knocker softly back. His arm dropped to his side. It must be Bab playing—it could be no other. Father of Tenderness!—that was her voice.

The shrilling of the violin had ceased. A tremulous contralto was murmuring brokenly (it seemed for the singer’s ear alone) a snatch of song—

The line halted abruptly. He remembered how it ended—

He had denied her love—that was what the break meant. More welcome thought!—it meant that she still grieved over the denial.

He stepped in, and went silently down the passage. The door into the kitchen stood open, and Bab sat facing him across a square table covered with an ordinary striped tablecloth—such as the poor affect. It had been Pollie’s 270 first gift to the household stock, and Bab would have died rather than admit her detestation of it.

But Magnus did not know that much, and the drearily-commonplace bearing of the table, as she sat by it, gave him a stab of pain, swallowed up instantaneously by a thrill of surprise at the discovery that, though Bab was gazing straight before her, and therefore in his direction, she appeared to be absolutely unaware of his presence.

She put her instrument to her cheek, and drew the bow across the strings.

Without altering the position of the violin, she lowered the bow and began to croon to herself once more—scarcely above the level of her own soft breathing—

She turned sorrowfully to the window as she sang the last word, and he saw that she was blind! In a flash he fathomed her thought: she was remembering that she herself would never look again upon the rosy West. Poor sightless 271 eyes of grey! He stepped into the kitchen, but stopped short as she moved to her old position. She suffered the violin to swing from her shoulder to her knee, and sat listening.

He feared to startle her, and stood motionless.

Bab strained her ears to catch some fancied sound, then made a despairing gesture over the helplessness of her maimed faculties. Suddenly she laid the violin upon the table, flung her arms out in an abandonment of grief, and dropped her head upon them. The slight wrists fell across the strings of the instrument; the third and fourth snapped with a quivering sob. The bridge gave way, and the violin rang with discordant vibration. To the watcher it sounded like the irrevocable loosing of the Silver Cord. He sprang forward, impelled by a fear that turned the flooding sunlight to black darkness, and, with a great cry, fell on his knees by her side.

Bab put out a groping little hand and touched his face. Then, with a sigh like the last moan of a woman in travail, she bent her arms about his head and drew his face against her bosom.

* * * * *

“And you are really going to marry me?” she asked him, the old mischievous daring dancing in her tone.

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He had risen to his feet, and she stood within the circle of his arms, her head thrown back, her blind grey eyes dilated in a pathetic endeavour to look upon the face whose glory of disciplined manhood she could never behold.

Antony Magnus loosed the fervent little figure and dropped upon his knee.

A spasm of humility came over him; he bent to the hem of her dress, and put his lips to it.

Then, from without her darkness, she heard his voice, shaken by a passion of inexpressible tenderness—

“With this body I thee worship.”

THE END.

Jarrold and Sons, Printers, Norwich, Yarmouth, and London.