XXIV

“Come into the garden, Ida, just for ten minutes, before it gets dark,” said Juliet, leading the way, as she spoke, through the open French window into the shadowy garden. “Oh, father and Peggy will entertain each other right enough; one will go to sleep in one corner, and one in the other, I dare say. I’ve ever so much to say to you. I hardly know where to begin.”

It was Ida’s first day at home after a lengthened absence. Two years had passed since the tragedy in the Calabrian mountains, which had made her widow, and had avenged Violante’s broken heart.

And the whole of those two years, with but brief interludes, Ida had passed in Devon with Sefton’s aged mother, ministering to her as a daughter might, and doing her utmost to render her closing days days of peace, if not of happiness. Not until the aged sufferer had passed away to her rest did Ida consider her obligations to her at an end, and return to her home.

In all respects, during those two years, Ida had carried herself as a widow might⁠—a widow, too, whose conscience was not altogether clear of remorse.

For, reason with herself as she might, she could not divest her mind of the idea that she herself had been instrumental in bringing about her husband’s death.

The terrible night when Francesca sternly summoned her to the gates of the Palazzo “to receive her husband,” and she stood there to see his lifeless body brought in by the two muleteers, seemed printed on her memory in colours that could never fade.

Her remorse had preyed upon her heavily, and had sent her down into Devon to lead a life from which she rigorously excluded all the fun and frolic in which hitherto she and Juliet had gone shares.

And not once during the whole of those two years had she and Clive met or exchanged a letter.

At Naples, by her wish, they had parted with scarce a word of leave-taking. She had gone with her husband’s body straight to his home in Devon; and he had remained in Italy, doing his utmost to facilitate the discovery of the murderer by the offer of large rewards alike to the police and to the peasantry of the district.

It was all in vain, however. The bullet could be traced to no one of the party of men who had gone forth with their guns in the gloom of that summer night.

Off and on Juliet had spoken her mind very freely to Ida about what she called her “conventual life.”

“Come home for a time,” she had written to her, “and let us just for a week or two make believe to be young and lighthearted girls once more.”

And again and again in blunt, sisterly fashion she had attacked Ida’s resolution to hold no communication whatever with Clive.

“Even supposing,” she had written, “that you have ruined one man’s life⁠—a fact I by no means admit⁠—I don’t see that that is a reason why you should ruin another man’s. Use your common sense, my dear⁠—There’ll have to be some plain speaking between you and me sooner or later.”

Juliet’s remonstrances, however, had been all in vain. Ida had held to her purpose, and it was not until death had released her from her obligations to Sefton’s desolate mother, that Juliet found her opportunity for “plain speaking.”

She had seized it so soon as Ida had entered the house.

“You’ll please to sit down in white to dinner tonight, not in that ugly black dress,” she had said, minutely criticising her sister’s toilette.

And when Ida had yielded compliance, and had gone back to her room to don the white gown, she had found waiting for her a half-wreath of wine-red roses, which Juliet herself had twined, and which she insisted that her sister should wear as a throatlet.

So soon as dinner had come to an end, she had, as she phrased it⁠—when telling the story to Goody afterwards⁠—“hunted” Ida out of the drawing-room into the shadowy garden, as the more appropriate place in which to begin her plain speaking.

In most characteristic fashion it was begun. For a few minutes the two had wandered in silence down a by-walk, where beds of heavily-scented carnations were “giving back to the earth in fragrance all that they had taken out of it in nourishment”; and where tall marguerites were shining like so many stars from out their mist-like foliage. Then Juliet suddenly announced, with a heavy sigh, that she felt herself to be “a blot upon the face of creation.”

Ida started.

“A blot!” she exclaimed.

“Yes. I feel to speak poetically⁠—as if I were a flower without its scent; or a star without its light. Or⁠—to speak prosaically⁠—as if I were a cow without its horns; a gnat without its sting; a table without its legs; a dish with nothing upon it!”

“All that!” cried Ida. “What a conglomeration of experiences!”

“I haven’t half done yet. Or a pen without nibs; a pencil without lead; a pin without a head; a needle without an eye; a⁠—”

“Oh, sum it up in a word, and be done with it, Juliet!”

“Well, then, in a word, ‘my occupation’s gone!’ During the two years you have been away, and things have been so slow, I have improved the occasion to the best of my abilities. I have tamed Peggy utterly, and have reduced father to a state of abject submission; and now the raison d’être of my own existence has come to an end.”

“I should get another raison d’être, and go on living, if I were you. What about Arthur Glynde?” said Ida, archly. “Is he as utterly tamed and subjugated as father and Peggy?”

Juliet stooped and gathered a long fern-frond, which she waved in front of Ida and herself to keep off the dancing twilight gnats.

“It doesn’t in the least matter to me what Arthur Glynde is or is not,” she answered, sentimentally. “When we next meet we shall require an introduction to each other.”

“Juliet!”

“I mean it. We shall have passed entirely out of each other’s recollection. I’ve told him that I never wish to see him again until⁠—”

“Oh, Juliet,” interrupted Ida, in great agitation, “don’t say that! You can’t mean it. Pray, pray, my darling, don’t trifle with your happiness⁠—with his!”

She spoke vehemently. The days when she herself might have talked in the same wilful fashion had long since gone by. She had learnt at what a cost wilfulness might be gratified, and she trembled lest Juliet might buy her experience in a similar manner.

“You won’t let me finish what I was going to say,” said Juliet, pathetically. “I told him I didn’t wish to see him again until the day I fixed my wedding-day.”

Ida drew a long breath of relief.

“That will be soon, dear, won’t it? Aunt Sefton’s death need not prevent a quiet, a very quiet wedding.”

Juliet shook her head.

“When Arthur and I meet again he will be thinking of going into a churchyard, not into a church to be married. He’ll be bald, with a high, shiny head, and grey whiskers, and he’ll think a great deal more of his cook than he does of his tailor. And I shall be stout, and wear glasses, and a cap, and a great grey chignon. And I shall be ‘given up to works of charity’⁠—going out ‘slumming’ in the East End of London; be perpetually writing to the newspapers for money to give the babies in Bethnal Green a day of fresh air; or else⁠—”

“Oh, have mercy, Juliet! Why and wherefore is all this to come about?”

“The why and wherefore can be put into a nutshell,” answered Juliet, with great solemnity of manner. “I told Arthur⁠—and he knows I mean it⁠—that I would never⁠—never fix my wedding-day till you fixed yours. Now do you understand why Arthur and I will need an introduction to each other when next we meet?”

“Oh, Juliet, you pain me!” cried Ida. And then, for a few minutes, there fell a silence between the sisters.

As they walked thus side by side in the gloaming, it was easy to note the difference that two years of a diverse experience had wrought in each. Juliet had blossomed into the very perfection of her delicate, dainty beauty, her colouring of eye, lip, cheek, was at its freshest and best, and it would have been difficult to have found a more perfect model for an embodiment of the goddess of perpetual youth and beauty.

Not so Ida. In the two years that had passed she had lived ten, and her face showed it. Her beauty of feature remained, but it was a beauty of outline, not of colour and ever-varying tint. No one would take her for Juliet’s twin-sister now, no one would ask her to stand as a model for the goddess of perpetual youth, although she might well have posed as a classic embodiment of stately dignity.

As they had talked they had wandered to the edge of the garden, and were now brought to a standstill by the little iron gate which separated it from the park.

It was a glorious evening. July was at its greenest and best. The sun had gone, the afterglow was dying, in a wonderful succession of opaline tints, into a pale green sky that threw into bold and sombre relief the grand old oaks and elms of the park. The air was alive with insect life. Birds were fluting to each other daintily and dreamily from out their leafy hiding-places, and ever and anon the rustle of the bracken below told that the rabbits were astir for their evening gambols.

It was the time, the place for confidences. Juliet felt it, and was the first to break the silence.

“I wish,” she said, speaking very slowly as if she were thinking out her thoughts as she spoke them, “that you would tell me what it is poor Clive has done that you should keep him at arm’s length as you do? Why won’t you see him?”

Ida’s pale face grew a shade paler.

“You pain me in asking these questions,” she said, in a low tone; “don’t you know I have begged you again and again never to allude to the past?”

“Yes; but here’s the difficulty! I can’t allude to my future without alluding to your past. I’ve told you over and over again, and I thoroughly mean it, that to the very end of my life I intend to be your shadow. If you die an old maid, I shall die an old maid. If you marry, I will marry⁠—same day, same church, everything precisely the same, except, the bridegroom.”

Ida’s eyes swam with tears.

“My darling,” she said, brokenly, “your future will, I hope, be a far brighter one than mine. You haven’t that on your conscience that I have on mine.”

“Ah, well, there’s one thing, at any rate, I wouldn’t have on my conscience if I were you, and that is the responsibility of ruining Clive Redway’s health and happiness. He looked frightfully ill when I saw him last week.”

“Ill!”

“Oh, yes; halfway into a decline. He said he was going away, and I suppose it is to Madeira where all the consumptive people go. And I dare say he’ll never get there, but will die on the voyage, and be buried in the sea.”

A great tear fell on Juliet’s hand as it rested on the rail of the iron gate. Juliet felt that her words were telling, and went on even more energetically.

“And he has a mother, you know, and she’s not so young as she was, and I dare say it’ll kill her as well. And she’s such a darling⁠—has such a lovely smile, and such beautiful white hair⁠—”

“Oh stop, stop, Juliet, I can’t stand it!”

“Oh, well, if you can’t bear to talk about it, how will they bear to do it⁠—die, I mean?” said Juliet, with a little confusion of meaning. “And what poor Mr. Redway will do, with his wife and son both dead, I can’t imagine. Why, his life won’t be worth having, and I dare say he’ll do something foolish⁠—marry again, or go to the Arctic regions and shoot Eskimo⁠—reindeer, I mean⁠—”

“Juliet,” interrupted Ida, “tell me honestly, is Clive ill, or looking ill? Don’t torture me in this way.”

Juliet gave a little laugh.

“You can judge for yourself, if you like,” she said, calmly. “Do you see that dark figure coming towards us from under the beeches? That is Clive Redway.”

“Juliet! this is your doing,” cried Ida, indignantly.

“Why, of course,” answered Juliet, unabashed. “I should be very angry if it were anyone else’s. Since I have put father and Peggy into their right places, I do all the inviting that has to be done. Young men and maidens, old men and children⁠—none of them dare come near the house unless I invite them.”

And before Ida had time to recover from her surprise, Juliet had disappeared, and there was Clive leaning over the gate, looking down into her eyes, and saying:

“I have come for the last time to learn my fate. Will you give me five minutes⁠—just five minutes⁠—I don’t ask for more?”

“Lovers’ hours are long, though seeming short.” Lady Culvers, with a start, awakened from her after-dinner nap, and looked up at the clock on a corner bracket. Its hands pointed to half-past two! That could not possibly be the hour. She rubbed her eyes, doubting their evidence.

“No, that’s not the right time,” said Juliet, coming out of a shadowy corner of the room. “Time was going so slowly I thought I’d jog it on a little, and so put the hands forward an hour or so.”

“My dear love! Then what is the time? And where is Ida?”

“Well, judging from my own feelings, I should think it was going on for sunrise. I seem to have been sitting here for half a day, at least, doing nothing.”

“And on the tiptoe of expectation,” she added to herself, sotto voce.

“But where⁠—where is Ida?” repeated Lady Culvers.

And Lord Culvers, entering the room at that moment, echoed her question.

“Ida at the present moment,” answered the ever-ready Juliet, “is engaged with a professor of dancing⁠—to whom I telegraphed this morning⁠—making arrangements for a course of lessons in the Scotch reel, which is generally danced at Irish funerals. I left them in the garden together. Possibly, when they’ve arranged terms, they’ll come in hand in hand.”

She walked to the window as she finished speaking, and shadowing her eyes with her hand to shut out the lamplight, looked adown the dim walks.

Bird-notes had ceased now; the mother-o’-pearl sky had given place to the sapphire-blue of night. A moon in crescent had risen high above the trees in the park, and “dimly rained about each leaf twilights of airy silver.” Two figures were emerging from a sidewalk, and making for the patch of light which the drawing-room window threw upon the terrace.

Juliet, with a bound, went to meet them. “Where is Lord Culvers?” asked Clive, with a ring in his voice that had not been there for many a day past.

“Juliet,” whispered Ida, tremulously, “since you will be my shadow, send for Arthur Glynde, and fix your wedding-day at once!”