A Bride of a Summer’s Day

By Catherine Louisa Pirkis.

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I

Crash went the bells from All Saints tower; “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,” jangled the bells of old Saint Clement’s in response; and then All Saints fired off its volley again.

The crowd parted, the children scattered their flowers, and the bride passed out of the church leaning on the arm of her newly-made husband.

Very fair to look at was this bride. She was tall and slender in figure, and owned to features that might have been chiselled out of a block of marble, for their faultless regularity. Her complexion was a pure white, with scarce a vestige of colour. Hair of a bright, dark brown; eyes of a deep grey, overarched with long, sweeping eyebrows, that finished in a delicate line on the temples, completed the picture.

This was Ida, elder daughter of George, fifth Baron Culvers, on the day that she was married to her cousin, Captain Sefton Culvers, late of the Royal Hussars.

Between the bride and bridegroom there was just that amount of likeness that might be expected between such near relatives; that is to say, he owned to a figure as tall and lithe as hers, a nose as straight, eyes as large and luminous. But there likeness ended. The look from the girl’s eyes was clear and straightforward; the look from the man’s was neither the one nor the other, and could the long, dark moustache, which hid the lines and curves of his mouth, have been removed, the receding chin and long, uncleft upper lip, which mark the pleasure-loving, vacillating nature, would at once have stood revealed.

“A very suitable marriage; she has the money, he will have the title,” said certain of the wedding-guests, as they settled themselves in the carriages that were to convey them from the church to the house, two miles out of the town, which had been lent to Lord Culvers for the occasion.

And then they fell to discussing sundry scraps of gossip afloat in society respecting the bride and her family; how that since Lord Culvers’s second marriage, his home had not been exactly a paradise to him, for Ida, in spite of her loveliness, had a temper and a will of her own, and had known how to stand up not only for her own rights, but also for those of her twin-sister, Juliet.

“To think of a man in his position marrying his daughter’s governess and chaperon,” said an elderly dowager, who would not at all have minded being the second Lady Culvers herself.

And from that they drifted on to the discussion of other items in Lord Culvers’s family life, his own placid, easygoing temper as compared with the restless, excitable temperament of his first wife⁠—a temperament which there could not be a doubt she had bequeathed, together with her beauty, to her daughters.

“If they were not beauties and heiresses,” said one, “no one would put up with their odd whims and fancies.”

“To think,” chimed in another, “that Ida chose to be married at Hastings for the whole and sole reason that her mother lies buried in All Saints churchyard! If she had been my daughter I would not have given way to such a ridiculous whim. But there, everyone knows how completely Lord Culvers is ruled by his womenkind.”

Assuredly it seemed an odd fancy for a bride to choose the church for her wedding, for the reason that the funeral service had been read over her mother’s coffin in the chancel of that church, some twenty years back.

A second strange fancy was to be announced by the bride before the day was over.

To the surprise of everyone, when she came downstairs equipped for travelling, in a neat grey dress and hat, her beautiful bouquet of orchids and orange-blossoms was still in her hand.

“What are you going to do with it, Ida?” asked one of the bridesmaids, coming forward; “you surely don’t mean to carry it away with you?”

But that was exactly what she did mean to do. She stooped⁠—for he was a short man⁠—and kissed her father, then she shook hands rather formally with her stepmother, then passed on to her sister, to whom she gave one long kiss, a kiss that was in very truth a farewell and a “Heaven bless you!” though not a word was spoken by either.

It was at the door of the carriage that stood waiting to convey her and her husband to the railway station, en route for the Swiss lakes, that the destination of the bridal bouquet was to be revealed.

“Sefton,” said the girl, turning to her husband, and speaking in a tone that had more of a command than a request in it, “will you tell the coachman to drive first to All Saints churchyard⁠—I want to lay these flowers on my mother’s grave.”

The guests assembled under the porch, with their rice and old satin shoes, exchanged glances. It was like the sound of a funeral-bell in the midst of a feast.

“My dear love!” cried Lady Culvers, rustling forward in her silks and velvets, “let someone else do that for you!” then, as Ida deigned no reply, and the coachman touched his horses with the whip, she turned to Juliet, who was standing at her elbow straining her eyes to see the last of her darling sister, and exclaimed, “Oh, what odd fancies she has! Where can she get them from?”

“From my father, of course,” answered Juliet, promptly; “his odd fancies are only too well known.” And the tone in which she spoke the words gave as their undercurrent of meaning: “If it had not been for my father’s odd fancies, you would be Miss Pigott at the present moment, our devoted and obedient chaperon, writing our letters for us, doing everything in fact that we didn’t feel inclined to do, and showering gratitude upon us in return for our odds and ends of silks and laces.”

These two sisters resembled each other in face and figure as only twin sisters could; Juliet, in fact, might have been called the replica of Ida, with license, however, given to the artist to repeat his original design with a lighter brush and in slightly brighter colour. And not alone in face and figure was their twinship proclaimed, in temperament and character the same striking resemblance was apparent. Each was bright, gay, imaginative, quick-tempered and quick-witted, and, as a rule, the wishes and opinions of one might have been taken without a question as the wishes and opinions of the other. What of seriousness, if any, might lie beneath their apparently reckless gaiety of mood and manner would have been a difficult question for even their most intimate friends to determine.

The cloud that had gathered on Juliet’s face as she had kissed her farewell to her sister disappeared with the sound of the carriage wheels that bore her away. She looked around at the guests. To her fancy they all more or less appeared bored or triste. Even her father’s placid face, with its benignant smile, had an unmistakeable look of weariness upon it⁠—a look which said plainly as words could: “I wish to goodness all this fuss and botheration were over, and I could quietly slip away to an easy-chair and a cigar.”

It was too tempting! Something she must do, someone she must stir into animation, or she would become drowsy and stupid, like the rest.

So she crossed the room to her father’s side, a vision of poetic loveliness in her soft, white silk robes, with their maize trimmings and tea-roses, but with a smile on her lip, and mischief in her heart, that would have suited sprite Puck himself.

“Father,” she said, in the quiet, cooing voice she generally affected when one of her most tricksy moods was upon her, “about twenty names have just come into my head⁠—of people who ought to have been asked today. And they all begin with an N! Is it possible that when Ida and I made out the list we turned over two leaves of the visiting-book together, and so went on from M to O? There’ll be no end of botherations when we get back to town.”

Lord Culvers’s benignant smile vanished. Nature had sent him into the world with a disposition as peaceful and placid as a still lake amid mountains, and Fate had linked his lot with temperaments as restless and turbulent as the ocean itself. Was life for him to be forever whirlpool and worry?

An exclamation of annoyance rose to his lips. A voice, however, over Juliet’s shoulder intercepted it.

“Juliet,” it said, “come into the garden a moment. I want specially to speak to you. I haven’t had an opportunity before.”

The speaker was a man of about eight-and-twenty, a tall, well-built young fellow, with crisp, curly hair of a reddish-brown, and very prominent, very bright, brown eyes. His face was of the type one sees in classic pictures or Roman sculpture, and that one associates with the helmet, spear, and shield of Mars, or of Hector, or Achilles. And lo! he came of a race that had been moneygrubbers for generations⁠—the Redways of London, Liverpool, and New York, world-renowned as merchant-princes, and of late years as financiers and bankers.

This was Clive Redway, Juliet’s affianced lover, only son of Joshua Redway, the present representative of the firm, and the owner of large estates in two English counties, a deer-forest in Scotland, and one of the most palatial of modern houses to be found in London.

Juliet followed her lover into the garden.

Glynde Lodge, the house that had been lent to Lord Culvers for the wedding, was small and unpretending, and stood in a few acres of land abutting on the high-road between Ore and Hastings.

The trees it owned to were ill-grown and but few in number, consequently, although the rays of the June sun were already beginning to slant, the unshadowed lawn and gravelled walks did not look attractive as promenades.

“Oh, my complexion!” cried Juliet, holding her bouquet of tea-roses slantwise over her face, and leading the way across the lawn to a small arbour at its farther end.

“Never mind about your complexion just for once,” said the young man, almost irritably; “I want to know about this wedding. Last night, you know, I couldn’t get you alone for five minutes. I was never more astounded in my life than when I had your letter, six weeks ago, just as I was starting for home. Why, when I left for the Cape, it was not even talked about. You knew next to nothing of this cousin of yours.”

“That was because he was always away with his regiment, you know. But we had always heard that he was charming, and delightful, and fascinating”⁠—this with a mischievous side-glance at her companion⁠—“and when father asked him to spend Christmas with us, at Dering, I jumped and clapped my hands, and ordered the loveliest tea-gowns and ball-dresses, and⁠—”

“Do be serious a moment, Juliet; I want information. Remember, I know next to nothing how the thing came about.”

“Oh, well, I suppose it came about in the usual way. I’ve no doubt he asked her and she said ‘Yes.’ I don’t suppose she asked him.”

Clive made a gesture of annoyance.

“To think that Ida should throw herself away on such a man as that!” he said in a low, constrained tone.

Juliet arched her eyebrows at him.

“Why, what is the matter with him?” she exclaimed. “Our first cousin, next heir to the title, handsome, good talker, plays tennis delightfully, sings divinely! Why, I nearly fell in love with him myself.”

Here she threw another mischievous side-glance at her companion, a glance, however, which was lost on him. They were now seated side by side in the arbour, and Clive was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his hands half covering his face.

He did not speak for a minute or two. Juliet began beating a tattoo with her satin slipper on the floor.

Presently, he had another question to ask. It was:

“What was it brought Ida home from Florence in such a hurry? When I started for the Cape, if you remember, she had just taken it into her head that she must be an artist, and had flown off to study in the Florentine Galleries.”

“There go the Bethunes,” said Juliet, “in the brightest of grass-greens⁠—to match the buttercup tint of their complexions, I suppose. And there go the Murrays, in bluish-green and yellow, like so many tomtits.”

From the arbour in which they were seated they could get a clear view of the drive, adown which the carriages of departing guests were now beginning to roll.

Again Clive made an impatient movement.

“Will you mind answering my question, Juliet?” he said in a tone that showed his annoyance.

“Oh, what was it? There go the St. Johns, in salmon-pink, both of them, and they’re fifty if they’re a day! Oh, I beg your pardon. What brought Ida back from Florence, did you say? My letters, I suppose. I used to fill pages with rapturous accounts of Sefton and his many good qualities, and I dare say she thought she would like to come and see him for herself. Oh, then, too, I told her how disagreeable Peggy had been over one or two things, and I suppose she thought she had better come home and take her in hand for a time.”

“Peggy” was the nickname that the young ladies had bestowed upon Miss Pigott in the days of her chaperonage and general usefulness. They preferred to retain the name now that Miss Pigott had become Lady Culvers, and occasionally brought it out with admirable effect.

“And I suppose,” said Clive, slowly, “when she came back that man was staying down in Northamptonshire with you, she was caught by his surface attractions, and before anyone could say a word the thing was done. It’s a marvel to me that your father did not put his veto on it at the outset.”

“Father!” exclaimed Juliet. “Why, he was delighted. He knows that Sefton must sooner or later come in for the title, and for Dering, too, and that he hasn’t money enough to keep it up, and it seemed to him a splendid arrangement that Ida’s money should be kept in the family. There go the Conroys! Oh, that girl has been lead-pencilling her dimple again, one can see it a mile off! Everyone’s going, I think. I’d better go back to the house now. Peggy will be thinking too much of herself if I leave her to say the goodbyes entirely on her own account.”

They both rose. Juliet made one step forward, then paused.

“One moment, Clive,” she said, “you’ve been asking me no end of questions⁠—oh, I couldn’t count them on my fingers⁠—will you mind just answering one? What makes you dislike Sefton as you do? Do you really know anything against him?”

Clive flushed a deep red, and for a moment did not speak.

“According to your own showing,” the girl went on, “you have only occasionally met him in society. There really can be nothing to bring against him, or, depend upon it, our kind friends, one way or another, would have been sure to have done so when they congratulated us on the marriage.”

Clive drew a long breath.

“No,” he said, slowly, “I suppose there is really nothing that I can bring against the man, although it has never been clearly explained why he sent in his papers to the Horse Guards. Your father knew of his debts, no doubt. All the world knew of them; but debts, though bad enough, are scarcely enough to condemn a man utterly. The only thing⁠—”

He broke off abruptly, his face growing white and drawn as of a man in pain. But Juliet did not note his change of expression. Her eyes were fixed on a distant view of an elaborate arrangement of peach-coloured satin and velvet, out of which looked the round red face of Lady Culvers.

“Oh, look at Peggy trying to do the dignified,” cried the girl, laughingly. “Those are some of Ida’s greatest friends, and my lady is bowing them out with stately dignity. I must go and detain them and gush over them for at least half an hour under her very eyelids!”

Clive did not follow her across the lawn to the house, but went his way along a narrow path which led circuitously through the orchard to another entrance, thereby avoiding a series of friendly recognitions from the departing guests; recognitions for which he felt strangely disinclined that day.

He drew his hat lower over his eyes; his face still looked white and drawn.

“There’s no one who walks this earth good enough for her,” he muttered to himself as he went along; and his eyes assuredly were not turned in the direction where Juliet, in her pretty white robes, stood “gushing” over guests whom Lady Culvers would fain have kept at a distance.

II

Five o’clock chimed from All Saints tower as Captain Culvers handed his bride from the carriage at the churchyard gates. It was now over three hours since the wedding had taken place, and the neighbourhood had returned to its normal quietude. When Hastings is crowded with holidaymakers, this unfashionable quarter of the town is comparatively deserted; and in June weather it is forsaken even by its inhabitants for the breezier hills and Marina. A shabby “fly” went crawling along; a few curly-headed, unwashed children came trooping forth from one of the alleys leading off the old-world street; a fisherman in a blue jersey strolled down from the Tackleway and paused for a moment to look at the handsome equipage drawn up alongside the pavement. Otherwise, Captain Culvers and his bride had the street to themselves.

A double flight of steps leads from the pavement to All Saints churchyard, which runs up the side of one of the two hills that dominate the old town. At the foot of these steps Ida paused.

“Let me go alone to my mother’s grave, Sefton; I particularly wish it,” she said; and once more her tone appeared to have more of command than of entreaty in it.

But it was not a request to be met with a demur, so Captain Culvers drew back, and allowed her to pass on alone.

Although the street was in shadow, the churchyard, on higher ground, lay in sunlight still. Very peaceful and picturesque it looked in the silence and brightness of the summer afternoon, with its gravestones gleaming white from out the greenness of the hillside.

The path which Ida followed took a sharp curve at the east end of the church, and she was very quickly out of sight. Captain Culvers stood watching the tall, graceful figure, in its soft grey draperies, till it disappeared, saying to himself what a lucky fellow he was, after all his ups and downs in life, to have fallen on his feet at last.

Then he took out his cigar-case, and telling the coachman to walk the horses up and down, strolled down the street towards the sea.

He knew so little of Hastings, that the fish-market and the tall, black, shiny rope-houses came upon him as a surprise. The odours of the place, however, at the close of this summer’s day were intolerable; so he turned his back on it, and the loitering fishermen, and the lazy, lapping summer sea, and returned to the shadow and quaintness of the old street, with its ancient overhanging houses, and queer byways.

Quarter-past five struck.

“The Captain will be getting impatient, I take it, soon,” said John to Jehu on the box of the carriage, as they saw Captain Culvers pull out his watch and time it by the church clock.

“It’s a big churchyard; there are a mighty lot of tombs there, perhaps the lady has lost her way,” answered Jehu, lazily flicking the flies from his horses’ manes.

Half-past five struck.

A little Italian boy with a barrel-organ and monkey rounded the corner of the street, and began grinding a feeble, droning sort of version of Garibaldi’s Hymn, to which the monkey beat time with toy cymbals, much to the delight of the urchins, who now came trooping forth from all corners.

Jehu pulled up his horses with a jerk at the churchyard gate, saying that half an hour was time enough and to spare for the lady to have lost her way and found it again, deposited her flowers, and returned.

“They’ll lose their train,” whispered John, with a grin. “And then the Captain will lose something else, I take it⁠—his temper.”

Possibly Captain Culvers’s fears had flown in the same direction, for, as he came sauntering up the street, he suddenly paused, pulled out his timetables, and began consulting them with something of a frown gathering on his brow.

A quarter to six struck.

The little Italian boy ended his droning ditty, shouldered his organ and monkey, and departed, followed by a detachment of the admiring urchins.

Captain Culvers threw away his cigar, opened the churchyard gate, and began with rather a hurried tread to mount the steep flight of steps. It had not been swept since the wedding, and Captain Culvers as he went along crushed under his feet the remnants of the rosebuds and daisies that had been scattered for his bride.

Precisely at that moment Juliet, at the garden gates of Glynde Lodge, was saying a laughing goodbye to some of her girl friends, who were telling her that they hoped shortly to be called upon to officiate as her bridesmaids.

“I’m not sure that I hope it,” she answered. “A wedding like this, where everybody does what everybody else has done for generations, would be intolerable to me. I told Ida last night I wondered how she could endure it. No; when I’m married I must do something to make a sensation⁠—wear a nun’s dress, or a riding-habit, or⁠—”

“Juliet!” exclaimed her friend, “if you’re going to do that sort of thing, I shall make a point of getting up in church and forbidding your banns!”

Juliet clapped her hands.

“The very thing! That would be heavenly!” she cried. “I only wish father would do it instead of you, and then there would be some fun in getting married. But there’s no such luck in store for me. Father always approves our choice so exasperatingly, it takes all the delight out of getting engaged. I should adore, positively adore, Clive⁠—not just like him, as I do now⁠—if only everyone in the house would run him down, and tell me I’m throwing myself away on him!”

And Clive was at her elbow, and distinctly heard her closing remarks⁠—heard, but paid no heed to them⁠—assuredly not the lover-like heed that might have been expected from a man just returned to his affianced bride after six months’ absence at the Cape.

“Juliet,” he said, as the girlfriends waved their farewells, and drove away, “tell me a little about your arrangements. How long do you stay here? Remember, I know nothing about anything. Your letters were always so short⁠—”

“So short?” interrupted Juliet, making her eyes very round. “Why, I remember distinctly that the very last letter I sent you covered the whole of a sheet of notepaper!”

“Yes, and from its first to its last word was nothing but a description of a young lady’s dress that had excited your wrath at a fancy-dress ball. You did not answer any one of the questions I asked you.”

“That was her fault for wearing such a dress. It was pink chiffon over⁠—”

“Oh, spare me, Juliet, I’ve had it once! Now will you answer my question? When do you return to town?”

But instead of answering him, Juliet fixed her eyes full on his face and said:

“How white and tired you look! What have you been doing with yourself?”

He gave a little forced laugh.

“Well, you know, a sea voyage isn’t always the most exhilarating thing in the world. One gets awfully bored sometimes, shut up from morning till night with the same set of people.”

“I couldn’t stand it for a week even. I should jump into the sea before I was out of sight of the land. Arthur Glynde has written some lovely verses about what he calls the ‘changeful, restless ocean’; but⁠—”

Clive interrupted her impatiently.

“Never mind about what an incipient young poet has written, just tell me, Juliet, what I want to know. When do you go back to town?”

“Oh, but I do mind very much what this special incipient young poet writes, because he brings his verses to me at least twice a week, and reads them aloud. Yet we are friends!”

The last sentence was added in a seriocomic tone, with a marked emphasis on the conjunction.

Clive bit his lip.

“Once more, Juliet, will you⁠—”

“Oh, don’t say it again,” interrupted the girl. “Well, father and Peggy intend returning tomorrow in time for a luncheon somewhere or other. Some of the servants return tonight, because, of course, Mrs. Glynde’s servants are here, and the house isn’t large, and⁠—oh, by the way, wasn’t it kind of Mrs. Glynde to lend her house in this way for the wedding, and to leave her horses and carriages behind⁠—oh!”⁠—here she broke off abruptly, with a little start⁠—“I have an idea, Clive. A lovely one!”

“Let’s have it. Something sensational of course?”

“Of course, or how could it be lovely? It’s just this. Father and Peggy have set their minds on a quiet early dinner tonight, and have made all their arrangements for returning tomorrow. Now, wouldn’t it be delightful to swoop down on them and insist⁠—yes, insist⁠—on going back tonight? Oh, the battle-royal there would be between me and Peggy! And I should be sure to carry the day. They’re both tired out limp as can be with the fuss of the wedding, and I feel as lively as a cricket and equal to anything.”

“I believe it! But if I were you I wouldn’t go out of my way to have battles-royal with Lady Culvers. They’ll come without any seeking, depend upon it. No, let your father have his dinner in peace tonight. There’s ever so much I want to talk to you about⁠—no end of adventures to tell you. Let us go for a stroll in the orchard⁠—that is the orchard over there, isn’t it?⁠—and then we can talk without fear of interruption.”

But if he had no end of adventures to relate, assuredly she did not hear them that evening as they strolled in the golden haze of the slanting sunlight among the low-growing apple and pear-trees.

“Now I must be on my guard against compliments,” Juliet had said to herself as, side by side, they wandered along the narrow walks.

Her fears were needless. Compliments of the lover-like kind were evidently as far from his thoughts as adventures; for, from the time they swung back the orchard-gate till the clanging of the dressing-bell sent them back to the house, his talk was wholly and solely of one person, one thing⁠—Ida, and her choice of a husband.

In fact, his conversation was simply a continuation of the one begun in the arbour in the early part of the afternoon. His questions were so many and so minute that Juliet at last threw back her head, held her chin very high in the air, and surveyed him with half-closed eyes, as she was in the habit of surveying her stepmother when catechised by her on matters which the wilful girl deemed outside parental jurisdiction.

“Really, Clive,” she said at length, “if you had Ida’s welfare so much at heart you should have managed to arrive a day or two sooner, and have cross-questioned her yourself as to Sefton’s character and the state of her feelings towards him. I can only repeat that Sefton seemed to me very delightful, and I don’t think Ida will ever feel dull with such a charming companion. I don’t know what you mean by being ‘devoted to him.’ She certainly was never enthusiastic in his praises. But then, as you know, Ida and I both take our love affairs calmly.”

While they had been talking, the sun had sunk behind a bank of apricot clouds, and the golden haze which had formed, so to speak, the atmosphere in which they had been walking, had changed in subtle mystic fashion to the silvery mist of twilight.

The clanging of the dressing-bell intercepted Clive’s reply.

With the sound of the bell came the crunch of carriage wheels along the gravelled drive.

“Visitors! How delightful!” cried Juliet. “Goodbye, after all, to the quiet dinner father was counting on. Could anything have happened more propitiously?”

But when they rounded the corner of the house and came in sight of the front door her delight changed to amazement, for there, descending from the carriage, was no chance guest, but the bridegroom of the morning, Captain Culvers himself.

III

“Impossible!” cried Lord Culvers, rubbing his forehead as if to waken his brain to something it refused to take in.

“Incredible!” echoed Lady Culvers, throwing up her hands, and standing in an attitude of amazement in the middle of the room.

“Did not return, did you say?” exclaimed Juliet, with wide-open eyes, advancing slowly, step by step, towards her cousin.

And then Captain Culvers had to tell his story all over again. It was to the effect that after waiting patiently for three-quarters of an hour for Ida’s return from her mother’s grave, he had grown slightly uneasy as to what might be detaining her, and had gone in search of her; but that, although he had found the bridal bouquet lying on the marble slab which marked the first Lady Culvers’s resting-place, Ida was nowhere to be seen. There was not a soul in sight of whom he could make enquiries, so, after scouring every corner of the churchyard in vain, he had thought it best to return, to consult with her father and friends before he took farther steps in the matter.

Assuredly a strange story this! Captain Culvers told it with more of coherence than might have been expected of a man in the circumstances. But then Captain Culvers had something of a reputation for coolness at a crisis when most other men would have lost self-control. Some ten years back news of the sudden death of his father had been brought to him as he was in the very act of taking aim at a partridge, and he had carefully brought down his bird before he had turned to the messenger for farther tidings.

But for all his calmness, his face looked white and anxious, and it was difficult to believe that he was the man who had stood, only a few hours before, in that selfsame room, receiving with triumphant pride the congratulations of his friends.

When he had finished his tale, for a moment everyone looked in everyone else’s face, saying never a word.

Clive was the first to break the silence.

All this time he had been standing a little apart from the rest, with his back to the light. Now he came forward, speaking hurriedly nervously, one might say.

“Something must have happened to her. There is no time to be lost. Search must be made in all directions before night. If you’ll allow me, Lord Culvers, I’ll go at once to the local police office.”

Perhaps Captain Culvers thought that the expression “If you’ll allow me,” ought to have been addressed to him. The frown on his face deepened.

“If there is a hue and cry to be made, it will be my business,” he said, curtly. “But it occurs to me that there may be another explanation to the affair. It is possible that Ida, with her love of fun and sensation, may be playing off some trick on me. Do you remember”⁠—here he turned to Juliet⁠—“what happened a month ago when you and she promised to meet me at the St. Maurs’, to join a party to Henley, and you took it into your heads to make a fool of me, and instead spent the day attending a succession of services at Westminster Abbey?”

Juliet’s reply was prevented by the entrance of a servant, with a note which he presented to Lord Culvers⁠—an odd little twist of paper with ragged edges, that appeared to have been torn out of a pocketbook.

Lord Culvers’s hand trembled as he opened it.

“Ida’s writing!” cried Juliet, looking over her father’s shoulder.

There fell a moment of silence, and then Lord Culvers read aloud in a quaking voice:

“Do not be uneasy about me. I am with friends. I will write shortly.⁠—Ida.”

“Thank Heaven!” exclaimed a voice, so charged with deep feeling it was scarcely possible to recognise it as the voice of Clive Redway.

Captain Culvers started, and looked at him.

Clive did not trouble to acknowledge the look. In hot haste he followed the servant out of the room, to enquire by whom the note had been brought, and getting the reply, “an Italian organ-boy,” he had set off at once, as with seven-league boots, in pursuit of the messenger.

Captain Culvers turned sharply to Juliet.

“You know something of this,” he said, his suavity of manner for the moment entirely gone.

Lord Culvers came forward in great agitation.

“Is it possible that you and Ida together can have planned this piece of folly?” he exclaimed.

Lady Culvers came forward, ostensibly in even greater agitation.

“It is all of a piece with what has been going on for the past two years,” she said, forgetting her usual dulcet tones. “Whenever one has taken a foolish idea into her head, the other, instead of helping me to reason her out of it, has joined in league against me.”

“You! you! you!” exclaimed Juliet, turning her head from one to the other, and arching her brows at each in turn. “How can you imagine such nonsense! What fun should I get out of frightening you all into fits, with Ida not here to enjoy it with me?”

The argument on her lips seemed an unanswerable one.

“No,” said Captain Culvers, slowly, “I can’t fancy you helping to organise such a piece of folly unless you expected something in the shape of fun by way of payment.”

“With friends,” said Lord Culvers, looking down on the scrap of paper which he still held in his hand; “who can those friends be, I wonder?”

“Ah,” said Lady Culvers, in a soft, sad voice, “the girls have many friends that I should not have chosen for them.”

“That goes without saying,” said Juliet, promptly and sarcastically.

Then, in succession they ran over the names of those on their visiting list whom it seemed probable Ida might have selected as her colleagues.

But it was all the wildest conjecture, and no definite conclusion could be arrived at.

“Well,” said Captain Culvers, “all I can say is, whoever has arranged or connived at this piece of absurdity, shall not have the pleasure of seeing me raising a hue and cry over it.”

His face was very white. He set his teeth over his last words.

“That’s right, Sefton, that’s right,” said Lord Culvers, eagerly, “there must be no hubbub, and a hundred thousand tongues set going over this affair. No, no, it mustn’t get into the papers, and my little girl be made the talk of the town.”

In a flash of fancy the unlucky father saw a long string of carriages outside his house in Belgrave Square, and heard an uninterrupted succession of knocks, rings, and enquiries for the missing bride.

“It would be terrible! We should all have to take flight somewhere,” he went on, answering as it were his own thoughts. “It’s disturbing, very. I’m altogether bewildered. I can’t see what I ought to do.” Then he turned suddenly to Sefton. “Tell me, what do you intend doing?” he asked, with great energy.

Sefton’s reply was one word.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

Lord Culvers stared at him a moment, and then began slowly to walk up and down the room with his hands behind his back.

“After all, perhaps that will be the wisest course,” he said, at one end of the room; “things must come right if we let them alone. She is with friends; she will write, she says. Yes, yes, better be patient, and let things alone to take their course,” he finished, at the other end of the room.

It had ever been the habit of his life thus to attempt a compromise between himself and life’s difficulties.

“You won’t even make an effort to find out where she is staying?” asked Juliet.

“My dear, she says she is with friends. I wish certainly she had chosen another time for her visit; but⁠—but don’t you remember once before she did something of the sort⁠—started off to stay with the Murrays at Deeside without saying a word to anybody?”

“And don’t you remember, dear love, how she and Juliet once packed up their boxes, and said they were going to keep house together in the village, and sent off the gardener’s boy to look out for a cottage for them?” said Lady Culvers, sweetly and sadly.

“Ah, yes, yes, and they both went off to town alone, one day, and arranged for a week’s lessons in elocution and acting so that they might both go on the stage the week after!” said Lord Culvers, his memory, jogged by his wife, suddenly becoming lively.

Captain Culvers cut the reminiscences short by a sudden question.

“Had Ida much money with her, do you know?⁠—on that will very much depend the length of time her whim will last,” he asked, curtly.

“I paid her her three months’ dividends in notes last night,” answered Lord Culvers, “and told her to put them away carefully. I dare say, however, she stuffed them into her pocket after the manner of girls, and pulled them out with her pocket-handkerchief five minutes after.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Juliet, feeling herself called upon to take up the cudgels on Ida’s behalf, “I saw her put the whole of the notes most carefully into a letter-case which I gave her last week, and then put that also most carefully⁠—into her pocket when she changed her dress.”

“That means,” said Sefton, “that Ida, if she is so disposed, can carry on her whim, or whatever you please to call it, for another six months.”

Juliet narrowed her eyes and looked at him. It seemed to her that the deserted bridegroom was scarcely exhibiting the alternate fury and despair that might have been expected of a bridegroom in the circumstances.

He certainly had a white, beaten, crestfallen look on his face; but otherwise he was clearheaded and prosaic to a degree.

“No, no, my boy,” interposed Lord Culvers, “don’t take such a gloomy view of things. She isn’t likely to do that. Take my word for it, she’ll write tomorrow, and come back the day after. Yes, depend upon it she will.”

He recommenced his slow walk up and down the room, then suddenly paused in front of Sefton.

“An idea has come to me,” he said, in a tone that might almost be called cheerful. “I’m sure you’ll fall in with it, every one of you.” And then he stated his idea in as few words as possible.

It was that Sefton should start at once for “anywhere”⁠—that is to say, some place where he could live quietly and unnoticed for a time, and thus give the impression to “society” that he and his bride were on their wedding tour. So soon as news was received from Ida, Lord Culvers would himself go to her, and at once insist on her joining her husband.

The scheme approved itself to the family party, who grew prosaic in the discussion of its details.

“The ‘anywhere’ will be Paris; it is easier to hide in a crowd than in a wilderness,” said Sefton, readily.

And once more Juliet narrowed her eyes and looked at him.

Outside the twilight was rapidly changing to night. A servant coming in to light the lamps was peremptorily dismissed. It seemed to the disturbed family conclave easier to discuss their difficulties in the semi-gloom than with the glare of lamps lighting up their troubled faces.

But the entrance of the servant turned their thoughts to a necessary detail of Lord Culvers’s scheme⁠—what reason should be circulated in the household to account for Captain Culvers’s sudden return to the house without his bride.

Here Lady Culvers came to the rescue, and proved herself a mistress of the art of glib fibbing to an extent that surprised even Juliet, who had been in the habit of saying to her girl friends what a mercy it was that apostles no longer walked the earth, or “Peggy” would assuredly have been wound up and carried out like Sapphira.

The story which Lady Culvers said she would herself put into circulation among the domestics was to the effect that Ida, overdone with the day’s fatigues, had fainted on her mother’s grave; had been thus found by the verger of the church, who had escorted her to his cottage at the back of the churchyard, there to rest and recover herself. There Captain Culvers had found her, and there he had left her while he had gone back at her request to tell her father that she did not feel equal to undertaking the proposed wedding tour, but instead would, after a day’s rest in Hastings, go down to Devon on a visit to Captain Culvers’s mother.

Thither Ida’s maid, who was at that moment waiting at Saint Leonard’s railway-station with trunks and boxes innumerable, was to be at once sent, and there she was to be told to remain awaiting farther orders.

“Of course,” said Captain Culvers, “such a story won’t bear criticism, and there isn’t a servant in the house who’ll be fool enough to believe it. But I can’t concoct a better, so I suppose it must do. Now I’ll ring for the cart to be brought round.”

“One thing is certain,” said Lady Culvers, her aptitude for fibbing far from exhausted, “the story will grow into something quite different long before it reaches town, and then we can correct and modify it according to circumstances. But it seems to me to suit our present disgraceful necessity.”

Captain Culvers had a word to say to Juliet as he bid her goodbye.

“It was an immense relief to me to hear your energetic disclaimer of connivance with Ida in her folly,” he said, looking at her steadily.

She gave him look for look.

“I made no energetic disclaimer, as you call it,” she replied. “I would not condescend to such a thing.”

For a moment they looked each other full in the face; but no more was said.

As Captain Culvers drove out through the lodge gates, Clive, weary-footed and dispirited, was coming in. His tramp along the high-road had been an unsuccessful one. The little organ-boy had disappeared as completely as if the earth had opened to receive him.

IV

“It’s a puzzle, Clive, from first to last. I feel as if we were trying to reason the matter out from an insufficient statement of facts. Come, have you nothing more to tell me?”

So spoke Joshua Redway, and then, leaning back in his chair, with eyes steadily fixed on his son’s face, he awaited Clive’s reply.

They were seated in a private room, opening off the offices of the firm in Lombard Street; a room in which big loans had been negotiated, and contracts of worldwide importance had been signed and sealed; a room, too, to which others beside Clive were in the habit of resorting in times of perplexity for wisdom and counsel from the successful financier.

For Joshua Redway had a great reputation for shrewdness and clear-headedness not only within but beyond the limits of his home circle; and when Clive had asked Lord Culvers’s permission to take his father into his confidence respecting Ida’s strange disappearance, the permission was not only readily granted, but Lord Culvers had added that counsel from Mr. Redway at such a juncture would be most highly esteemed by him.

Three days had passed since the wedding. No letter had been received from the missing girl, nor had tidings of her reached her people from any quarter.

The Culvers’s family had returned to town, and had resumed the even tenor of their way; or, perhaps it would be more correct to say “the busy tenor of their way,” for the London season was in full swing, and the Culvers family were, as the phrase goes, “very much in the vortex.”

Clive answered his father’s question with another.

“Do you not think that the Culvers’s, one and all, take the matter very coolly?” he asked.

“I do. So far, however, as Lord Culvers is concerned, I’m not surprised. Do you remember the fire at the back of his house in Belgrave Square?”

The incident alluded to had exhibited Lord Culvers in a most characteristic light. Two or three frightened servants had rushed into his room in the dead of night, exclaiming, “A fire, my lord, in the mews at the back of the house; pray get up.” “A fire,” Lord Culvers had repeated, calmly, without opening his eyes; “well, I dare say it will go out again,” and he had turned over on his other side to finish his night’s rest.

“The impression in the house seems to be,” continued Clive, “that Juliet knows more than she feels inclined to tell.”

“Can’t you induce her to speak?”

“Not about Ida; although she’ll talk by the hour about the brute Ida has married.”

The father for a moment looked keenly at his son.

“Let me see,” he said, after a moment’s pause, “you are not taking up this matter out of friendship to Captain Culvers?”

“Good heavens, no!” cried Clive, hotly. “I’ve not spoken to the man half-a-dozen times in my life.”

“Then I suppose it is because she is Juliet’s sister that you have thus thrown yourself heart and soul into the affair?”

There came no reply from Clive. His face flushed crimson. His lips tightened.

Mr. Redway’s eyes did not lift from his face.

“Clive,” he said, after waiting in vain for an answer, “you are only giving me a half confidence. Why did you not marry this girl yourself?”

Then Clive’s words came in a torrent.

“Because,” he said, passionately, “she would have nothing to do with me treated⁠—me as if I were something too vile for her to notice. When I went into a room she would walk out of it; if I joined a game of tennis in which she was playing she would immediately lay down her racket; she would not even dance in a set in which I should have been her vis-à-vis, and have had to touch her hand.”

The father looked his surprise.

He was a tall, handsome man, with a fine head, and eyes that pierced like an eagle’s. He drew his brows over them, and thought for awhile, giving Clive time to cool down.

“Had she always treated you in that fashion?” he presently asked.

“No,” said Clive, bitterly, “when I was first introduced to her at the Gordons’, where we were both staying, she seemed to⁠—to like me; at least, I thought so. Then Juliet joined her there, and everything at once seemed changed.”

“Ah‑h, Juliet. I suppose you quickly transferred your devotion from one sister to the other.”

“I scarcely know how it came about,” said Clive, miserably. “Juliet was so kind and sympathetic, Ida so strange and cold; and they were so much alike in their faces and their ways! Sometimes when I was talking to Juliet I could fancy she was Ida! And then before I well knew how far I had gone, the thing was done.”

“Ah‑h, and then Ida rushes off to Florence to study art; you go to the Cape on a mission for me; Captain Culvers comes upon the scene and flirts with Juliet; home rushes Ida, and throws herself once more into the breach, marries her cousin; and Juliet is kept true to her absent lover. Then, having married a man for whom possibly she had neither liking nor esteem, she finds it impossible to carry her self-sacrifice farther, and so takes sudden flight. Clive, there is my solution to the whole mystery.”

And Clive, with eyes opened too late, had the conviction forced upon him that this solution was most probably the true one.

Ida’s devotion to Juliet had never been open to doubt, and she had sealed that devotion by giving up her lover in the first instance to the sister’s whim. Then when a lover less worthy had come upon the scene, and Juliet’s fancy had seemed to waver, she had put the question of the capricious girl’s happiness beyond a doubt by another act of self-sacrifice⁠—a marriage with the less desirable suitor who might otherwise have fallen to Juliet’s lot. Read in this light, the wedding at the church where the funeral service had been read over her dead mother, the laying of her bridal flowers on that mother’s grave, could be easily understood.

Clive groaned aloud.

“What a fool⁠—a miserable fool I have been!” he exclaimed, clenching his fingers into the palm of his hand. “I could blow my brains out!”

“In your love affairs I’ll admit they’ve been of very little use to you,” said his father, drily.

Then there fell a pause, during which the father’s heart must have ached for the look of dumb, hopeless misery which settled on his son’s face.

“If I could only know that she is safe and well, I should ask nothing more,” said Clive, presently, in a voice that matched his face.

Assuredly at the moment news of her health and safety compassed the whole of his desires. He could not have framed his lips to the prayer that she might return and be planted in Captain Culvers’s home as his wife.

Mr. Redway did not heed the remark; absorbed in thought, he leaned his head upon his hand.

“The only objection,” he said, slowly, after awhile, “that I can see to my version of the affair, is that it is too simple a reading of the mystery. In real life, as a rule, the solutions to mysteries are nearly as mysterious as the thing itself. Human motives and feelings are so complex, that when they are revealed to us, it is often difficult to believe that they stand to action in the relation of cause to effect. And when a woman’s motives and feelings are concerned, the whole thing becomes a thousand times more complex.”

“But no other solution presents itself; I wish to Heaven it did!” said Clive, passionately.

“Lord Culvers appears to be without ideas or theories on the matter?”

“Absolutely. His one endeavour is to keep the matter quiet till Ida writes. I’ve begged him again and again to let me run over to Florence to question Madame Verdi⁠—the lady with whom Ida stayed when there⁠—as to whether she knows anything of Ida’s movements. But no! he will not have the affair made public. He says Ida will be sure to write in a day or so.”

“Her promise to write may have been only a blind to keep them all quiet while she arranged her plans.”

“Exactly; and meanwhile we are losing precious time. And as for hushing the matter up, the thing will soon be impossible. Already people are beginning to talk. I was asked only this morning if it were true that Ida and Culvers had quarrelled on their wedding tour, and that Ida had returned to her home. I dare say the servants have set the wildest stories afloat.”

“What is Juliet’s theory? Of course, if my solution of the mystery is correct, it is impossible to believe that Juliet knows any more than we do.”

“Juliet is altogether an enigma to me. To all appearance she takes the matter as calmly as her father.”

“And you say you have cross-questioned her yourself?”

“Tried to. But you might as well try to cross-question the wind or the waves as Juliet when she has a mind to be silent. With all her gaiety and capriciousness, she can keep a secret if she is so disposed. I know perfectly well if Ida had tied her down with any promises, there’s no power on earth would make her break them. Those sisters are loyal to each other to an altogether remarkable degree.”

“Did you ask her, as I suggested, what jewellery her sister was wearing when she left home?”

“I did so this morning. She is not at all sure what rings Ida was wearing; but she knows for certain that she had on the diamond hawk brooch that had been her mother’s, for she saw her fasten the band of her dress with it under her shoulder-cape when she changed her dress for travelling.”

“Ah‑h, that’s something to note!”

“I should think so,” said Clive, gloomily; “there are over fifty diamonds in that brooch. It must be worth several thousands; and, if Ida is so disposed, would give her the means of roaming the world and keeping us all in suspense for goodness knows how long.”

“And gives, also, her friends the means of tracing her. No woman could wear such a brooch as that without attracting attention, let alone attempt to raise money on it. Take my advice, Clive: get Lord Culvers’s permission, and run out advertisements and handbills for that brooch without a moment’s delay; of course offering a suitable reward for it. Where that brooch is, there is Ida. If we get news of the one we get news of the other.”

V

Lord Culvers did not offer any opposition to Mr. Redway’s suggestion. Off and on the girls lost a good many articles of jewellery in the course of a year, and an advertisement more or less, for one of their brooches, would not be likely to attract much attention among their friends. So, on the day after Clive’s consultation with his father, the following advertisement appeared in the leading London and provincial journals:

“Five hundred pounds reward will be paid for information that will lead to the recovery of a diamond brooch, missing from a lady’s jewel-case. It is formed as a hawk with outstretched wings, holding in its beak a spray of emeralds. The eyes are composed of two large rubies.

“Information to be given to Messrs. Hunt and Locke, Chancery Lane, London.”

The Messrs. Hunt and Locke thus mentioned were not Lord Culvers’s family lawyers, but a firm of solicitors noted for their successful conduct of complicated criminal cases.

Simultaneously with its publication in the London newspapers, the advertisement appeared in the principal Continental journals.

Captain Culvers, lounging over his breakfast and matutinal cigar, in his rooms in a quiet street in an unfashionable quarter of Paris, had his eye caught by it.

This visit of his to the gay capital did not promise to be either a pleasant or a profitable one to him. It was beyond measure irksome to him to shun all possible rendezvous of his countrymen of his own social standing; to remain within doors the greater part of the day, and to issue forth only when the fashionable world, to which, of right, he held entrée, were safely shut in at their dinners, their opera, or their balls. Yet this was what circumstances compelled him to, unless he was prepared to run the gauntlet of all sorts of questions and conjectures respecting his private affairs and sudden change of plans.

Society, to a man of his temperament, is as absolute a necessity as his cigar and his game of baccarat. He was consequently driven to seek it in haunts and among associates of a lower grade. He thus became once more the habitué of a sporting, drinking, card-playing set, that, in view of his approaching marriage, he had vowed should know him no more.

He read the advertisement offering the large reward for Ida’s brooch with an anxious, startled look on his face.

“The fools!” he muttered. “Who has set going this piece of folly? It must be put a stop to without a moment’s delay.” He went at once to his writing-table; but the letter which he there set himself to write was not finished without many a pause to his pen and much careful thought.

Eventually it ran thus:

“Rue Vervien, 15.

“My Dear Uncle⁠—I have this moment read your advertisement offering a reward for Ida’s brooch. At least, I judge it to be yours from the description of the brooch, which I recognise as one that Ida was very fond of wearing. Will you mind my asking you if you are quite sure she had it on when she left home with me? I saw nothing of it.” This was underlined. “Are you acting upon information given you by Juliet? If so, may I ask whether her statement is confirmed by Ida’s maid? If this is not the case, pardon me if I say that I think you are being misled to follow a wrong scent. Take my word for it, Juliet knows more than any of us”⁠—this was also underlined⁠—“and my belief is that if you concentrate attention on her you’ll come upon traces of Ida far sooner than by offering rewards for a brooch which may possibly be all the time safely hidden in a young lady’s jewel-case. I beg of you at once to withdraw the advertisement, whose only result may be to lead us a long way out of our road and land us in the mire at last.

This letter, as ill-luck would have it, fell into Juliet’s hands before it reached her father’s. Recognising the handwriting, she at once ran with it to her father’s study.

“From Sefton, father; he may have something to tell us,” she exclaimed, as she entered the room.

Lord Culvers, in spite of his repeated hourly assurances to his wife and daughter that “things” were bound to come right if they were only let alone, was far from feeling confident that his words would be verified, and would occasionally give way to those little outbursts of irritability to which placidly-disposed people are prone when the tranquil surface of their existence is broken.

“From Sefton⁠—why wasn’t it given me before?” he said, irritably. “I’ve waited in the whole morning for the post⁠—now where are my glasses?”

Juliet picked up the glasses, and perched them on her own little, straight nose. “Now, if you don’t worry, I’ll read it to you,” she said, patronisingly. Then above the rims of the glasses, without pause or exclamation, she read aloud the letter from beginning to end.

Before Lord Culvers had time to pass comment upon it, she had torn it in two, and tossed it into the wastepaper basket.

“That’s the only place for such a letter as that,” she said, taking off the spectacles, and looking at her father with flashing eyes. “Of course you won’t dream of replying to it, will you, father?” She spoke very slowly, her small lips tightening, her head very high in the air.

“Eh, what, my dear?” said Lord Culvers, turning round in his chair and facing her. “I’ve hardly taken in what he says. I should like to have read the letter once again.”

“I’ll repeat to you what he says,” said Juliet, in the same slow, quiet tones as before; “he says you are to get a maid⁠—a maid, do you understand, to confirm my words before you believe them. He advises you to set a watch on your daughter⁠—someone, I suppose, to follow her about and peep into her letters⁠—and asks you to take his word⁠—his word after doubting mine⁠—that I know more than I choose to tell!”

“Eh, my dear, are you quite sure he meant it to be taken that way?” asked Lord Culvers.

He sighed wearily.

“It’s such a painful affair! Why⁠—why doesn’t Ida send us a line and end our suspense?” He broke off again, then looking full into Juliet’s face as if hoping there to read confirmation to his words, he added: “No, no, my dear; I don’t believe that you are keeping anything back from me⁠—you couldn’t be so heartless and cruel.”

But it was said a little dubiously.

“May I come in?” said a voice at that moment. Then, without waiting for a reply, the door opened, and Clive Redway entered in the easy, familiar way which his relations with the Culvers family warranted.

“I’ve come once more to beg permission to start for Florence,” he began, and then broke off abruptly, looking from Juliet to Lord Culvers, from Lord Culvers to Juliet, the faces of both so evidently bearing the marks of a disturbing subject of thought.

Juliet was the first to explain: “A letter has come from Sefton⁠—there it is in fragments in the wastepaper basket⁠—and I am accused by him of knowing more than I have told about Ida and her movements. It’s true in one way, I do know more than I have told about Ida⁠—and about Sefton also. I could, if I had chosen, have told you things that would have startled you.”

“Eh, what?” cried Lord Culvers, looking scared.

“I mean it. I could have told you that he and Ida had some desperate quarrels. Once Ida told him to his face that she hated him⁠—at least he told me so, and begged me to make peace between them. I made things straight, and then Ida to seal their reconciliation paid off his debts⁠—all, at least, that he told her of.”

“Paid his debts!” echoed Lord Culvers, his face showing simple blank astonishment.

“Yes,” continued Juliet. “Do you remember three months back you paid Ida a good deal of money⁠—dividends or something or other⁠—and told her she had better collect her bills in and pay them? Very well, those bills are still unpaid; every penny of that money went to Sefton.”

“Is it possible?”

“Yes. Ida rolled the banknotes up into a ball, and they played tennis with it one afternoon. She won the game, and then tossed the ball over to him as she left the ground⁠—I can see her now⁠—just as you would toss a ball to a lapdog.”

All this time Clive had been standing a little apart, his face growing whiter and whiter, his brow knotting into an ugly frown. Now he advanced a step, and laid his hand on Juliet’s arm.

“And you let your sister marry such a man as that⁠—without a word of remonstrance,” he said, in a low, constrained tone.

Juliet felt herself now on the defensive all round. She held her head very high, half-closed her eyes, and her face slightly⁠—very slightly⁠—flushed.

“Without a word of remonstrance!” she repeated. “Off and on Ida and I had a good many words about Sefton, though whether they were words of remonstrance is another thing. You see I liked him⁠—I dare say it was very absurd of me, but I did like him, and more than once I said to Ida, ‘What a pity it is you and I cannot change places, and you marry Clive, and I marry Sefton!’ ” This was meant as a counterthrust; but it didn’t strike quite as she meant it should.

“I wish to Heaven⁠—” broke in Clive, hotly. Then he checked himself, biting his lip to keep back words that would have fallen with evil grace upon the ear of his betrothed.

Lord Culvers rose excitedly from his chair.

“It’s too much! Too much!” he exclaimed, in a piteous tone. “Why, why is all this told me now when I am absolutely powerless to remedy the evil? Gracious Heaven what have I done that my life should be filled with turmoil from year’s end to year’s end?”

As if magnetically drawn to it, he finished his sentence with his eyes uplifted to a picture hanging over the mantelpiece.

It was that of the first Lady Culvers. One glance at it sufficiently answered the question what he had done that his life should be filled with turmoil and worry. The beautiful eyes and mouth, the very turn of the head, the droop of the eyelid, the crisp, curly hair, expressed in every line and tint the vivacity, waywardness, and love of fun which in Ida and Juliet had fascinated their friends and lovers, and had made their father’s life off and on a burden to him.

Juliet did not heed her father’s outburst. She remained standing facing Clive, and, narrowing her eyes, steadily surveyed him.

“It is very good of you to show so much interest in Ida and her affairs,” she said, sarcastically; “but I do think a journey to Florence to cross-question Madame Verdi will be a work of supererogation. You had far better run over to Paris and keep your eye on my cousin Sefton.”

“What makes you say that?” asked Clive, curtly, peremptorily.

Her words struck a sudden and most painful keynote to his mind. Was it possible that Ida’s disappearance was the result of some prearranged plan between herself and Sefton, and that the latter, after all, had but acted the part of a forlorn bridegroom? Did Juliet know of any circumstances that gave warrant to such a supposition, or was she merely speaking as she often did⁠—at random? Or was it possible that this enigmatical girl, after all, was seeking to divert suspicion from herself by throwing it upon Sefton, and thus pay him back with interest for the insult he had offered her in his letter?

From his knowledge of Juliet’s character the last supposition seemed the most feasible.

He carefully watched her face as he waited for his answer.

But the piquant, girlish countenance was as unreadable as the massive, stone-cut features of the great Sphinx itself.

She only slightly curled her lip.

“From what I have told you of the footing on which Ida and Sefton stood to each other, you can form your own opinion on the matter,” she answered, calmly.

Lord Culvers laid his hand upon her shoulder.

“Juliet,” he said, “you are driving me to the verge of distraction with your hints and prevarications.”

Clive’s temper gave way utterly.

“It is simply your duty,” he said, hotly. “You are bound to speak out⁠—to tell everything, small or great, that you know of Ida’s possible intentions.”

Juliet kept her coolness still.

“If I don’t know anything of her intentions I can’t speak out, as you call it,” she answered, in perfectly level tones. “And supposing I did know more than I have said, and Ida had not given me permission to speak, not you, not my father⁠—no, not wild horses, even, should drag it out of me!”

VI

Clive obtained a reluctant permission from Lord Culvers, and set off for Florence, to interrogate, under a seal of secrecy, Madame Verdi as to her possible knowledge of Ida’s movements.

It must be admitted that his hopes did not rise very high as to the results of his journey. Nothing better, however, at the moment presented itself, so it seemed a thing to be done.

Lord Culvers multiplied injunctions to the young man as to caution and secrecy.

“You’ll bear in mind,” finally he said, by way of summing up his hundred-and-one instructions, “that Ida may write at any moment. If not this week, next week, perhaps, or the week after. And I don’t want tongues set going in Florence, any more than in London, over my daughter’s eccentricities, and so increase difficulties in the way of her return to her husband. Heaven knows, it’s bad enough to endure such wild whims, without having all the world talking about them.”

His powers of endurance were, however, to be still farther taxed. Clive was no sooner out of sight, so to speak, than another “wild whim,” as Lord Culvers phrased it, was started⁠—this time by Juliet.

With the season at its height, with her card-rack literally stuffed with engagements, and with Goodwood as yet in the far distance, the young lady suddenly made the announcement that London was stifling, simply unendurable, and that she thought it would be heavenly to throw over all engagements and get back to Dering at once.

Exclamations from father and stepmother greeted her announcement. The former immediately rose and quitted the room, knowing that “battle-royal” between his wife and Juliet was bound to ensue.

He was right. The “battle-royal” in this instance lasted about twenty minutes. Lady Culvers retired from the contest with a very red face and vibrating with excitement; while Juliet, calm and cool as ever, went up to her room, rang the bell for her maid, and in a tranquil tone gave many and minute directions as to the packing of her wardrobe, and the “things” to be supplied to it before she left town.

“We shall leave in a day or two, without doubt,” she added; “for whenever I set my mind upon a thing it invariably comes to pass.”

Assuredly the maid knew that well enough, as also did every member of Lord Culvers’s household.

It must be admitted that Fortune, in her dealings with Lord Culvers, had justified her reputation of never coming with both hands full. With one hand she had bestowed upon him health, wealth, and a placid temper; with the other she had filled his life with worries and anxieties from year’s end to year’s end.

Perhaps, however, if in addition to his easy, placid temperament, he had been endowed with an average amount of common sense and an eye for character, one-half of his worries might have been spared him. His first wife had captivated him with her beauty and grace of manner, and he had married her without so much as a thought whether her disposition was likely to harmonise with his own; his second wife captivated him with a smooth tongue and a sympathetic manner, and he married her without a thought as to her capability of doing that of which he felt himself incapable⁠—controlling his wayward, wilful young daughters.

It was true that Miss Pigott had remained longer than any other of the governesses who, in a quick succession, had tried and failed to “govern” the young ladies; but he did not set his mind to account for the circumstance, and so failed to discover that the secret of Miss Pigott’s success with them lay in the fact that she never openly opposed any piece of folly they might plan, although privately, to their father, she might condemn it vigorously.

Miss Pigott was a wise woman in her generation; she had come into Lord Culvers’s house with the intention of remaining in it, and had steered her course accordingly. She had easily read the characters of her pupils, and had found out that, although they were quick-tempered and self-willed, they were goodhearted and generous; that, though they might nearly worry the life out of her one day with their vagaries, they would do their best to make atonement the next by loading her with presents and kindnesses⁠—provided always they were allowed full license to carry out every whim that came into their heads. With this secret in her hands, she quickly saw her way to an easy life and a good income; and when, later on, by dint of soft words and a sympathetic manner, she succeeded in ingratiating herself into Lord Culvers’s favour to the extent of becoming his confidante on all matters relating to his daughters, she saw her way to something else beside a good income⁠—an assured position as Lord Culvers’s wife.

In age she was about forty-five, in appearance she was short and stout, with a red face, and a quantity of white hair, which she piled on top of her head⁠—à la Marie Antoinette⁠—in order to increase her height. Ida and Juliet would as soon have thought of looking for their future stepmother in one of the maids of the household as in their useful “Peggy.” So it came about that while they were alternately worrying and caressing her, and in all respects, as they imagined, turning her round their little fingers, she was stealing a march on them, and saying to herself: “By-and-by the tables shall be turned, and all debts be paid off with interest.”

When, however, after a certain ceremony in a certain West End church, the tables were turned, and she began the attempt to pay off her debts, she found it was not quite so easy a task as she had anticipated. Ida and Juliet, individually, were a host in themselves; combined, they appeared to be invincible. They always seemed to be on the alert, and any attempt of hers to assert herself, or to stand on her dignity, was promptly nipped in the bud. They would allow her to spend an hour or so daily with the housekeeper, and to regulate generally the household routine, because that had been her province as Miss Pigott in the days of her general usefulness. When, however, it came to the issuing or accepting of invitations, the family exits from town or country houses, the annual visits to the moors, or to the sea, they simply ignored her, carried their wishes, or, rather, their commands, as of old to their father, bent him to their will as easily as one can bend a willow wand, and poor “Peggy,” whether she liked it or not, was obliged to follow their lead.

And they did it all so lightly and easily, without so much as a flushed face or a heightened voice. She, poor soul! with much travail of thought, and many a sleepless night, would concoct some elaborate plan for self-assertion, and the girls, with a little curl of their lips, a little arching of their brows, and some quick, bright speech, would bring it all to nought in a moment, and she would think herself fortunate if she were allowed to acknowledge her defeat, and withdraw from the scene without having been made to look foolish before a roomful of people.

It was all in vain for her to appeal to her husband. Alone with her he would be sympathetic, and vow that his authority should support hers. Brought face to face with his daughters, however, he would at once surrender mutely, and then get out of the way as quickly as possible.

The chances were that Miss Pigott would never have become Lady Culvers if Ida and Juliet had not, at their own request, gone without their chaperon on a three months’ visit to friends in Ireland, thus giving their father time and opportunity not only to woo and to win his bride, but also absolutely to fix his wedding-day without let or hindrance.

VII

“O wild western light in a winter’s sky,
I have watched your radiance flame and die,”

read Arthur Glynde, in the impassioned tone which poets, as a rule, reserve for their own productions.

Juliet held up her hand.

“No,” she said, languidly, “I can’t realise a winter’s sky on this sultry morning. Besides, Peggy and I have just had⁠—well, a passage of arms, call it, and your second line too painfully recalls Peggy’s face a moment ago.”

The two were seated in Lord Culvers’s study, a quiet, cool room, at the back of the house, where they were not likely to be disturbed by untimely callers.

These tête-à-têtes with the young poet had, in a measure, been forced upon Juliet. With that craving for an audience which goes hand in hand with authorship, he had come to the house early one morning with a roll of manuscript under his arm, and, taking Lord Culvers by surprise, had asked permission to read to him “a stanza or two,” as he was anxious for the opinion of a competent critic as to whether the poems were worthy of publication.

Lord Culvers had listened patiently for twenty minutes, then he had recollected an engagement.

“Excuse me, Glynde,” he had said, noting that the packet of manuscript was far from exhausted, “if you don’t mind, I’ll send Juliet to hear the remainder. She is a much better critic than I am⁠—reads Browning, you know⁠—and her opinion will be worth having.”

Arthur Glynde did not demur to the change of audience, and from that day forward, whenever he made his appearance with a few quarto sheets under his arm, Lord Culvers invariably found that he had a pressing engagement, and resigned his easy-chair to Juliet.

Notwithstanding his poetic tendencies, Arthur Glynde was a very general favourite on account of his happy, genial temper. In appearance he was fair and the reverse of robust. His skin was white as a girl’s, and he had the large, dreamy, changeful grey eye of the poet. His voice in speaking was soft, low, pathetic.

He laid down his manuscript at Juliet’s behest with a little sigh. He would so much have preferred in fancy to watch a winter’s sunset “flame and die,” than to conjure up the image of the commonplace “Peggy.”

“You came off victorious, I hope?” he presently asked.

“That goes without saying,” answered Juliet. “It was all about a letter of mine. Peggy has been at her old tricks of opening letters⁠—by mistake, of course. ‘The Hon. Juliet Culvers’ on the back of an envelope could so easily be mistaken for ‘Lady Culvers,’ could it not?”

And then she went on to relate a little scene that, in one form or another, must have been of daily occurrence in the Culvers household. She had come down late that morning, and on seating herself at the breakfast-table, had seen in Lady Culvers’s hand a letter in the writing of a girl friend⁠—one of those “greatest friends of Ida’s” whose intimacy the stepmother would have fain put an end to. Before, however, Juliet had time to claim her property, Lady Culvers, with a sweet and very humble apology, had handed the letter to her, saying that she had mistaken it for one of her own.

“It’s a mistake that has occurred before, Peggy, and that I beg will not happen again, or the consequences will be serious,” Juliet had replied, in lofty, stately fashion.

Upon this Lord Culvers very mildly had expressed a wish that Juliet would cease to address her stepmother by the obnoxious nickname.

“Doesn’t she like it?” Juliet had said, half closing her eyes, and surveying Lady Culvers. “Then I’ll address her as Margaret, it’ll do just as well⁠—it’ll suggest the other name to her mind.”

A threat which the young lady had not hesitated to put into execution.

“I think, after all,” she continued to Arthur Glynde as she finished her narration, “pussy would be a far more appropriate nickname⁠—she is so emphatically of the cat tribe. Don’t you know ‘The velvet paw, and the hidden claw’? Oh, how stifling it is this morning⁠—please give me that fan.”

Arthur did not give her the fan; he preferred to retain it, and save her the trouble of using it.

Juliet smiled up at him as he bent over the capacious and very easy chair in which she reclined.

“Thank you, that is delightful. Now if I had asked Clive to hand me a fan, he’d have done it nothing more. It would never have occurred to him to save me the trouble of using it.”

This was dangerous ground to take with a man who would have given ten years off his life to stand in Clive’s shoes. But dangerous ground had always a strong attraction for Juliet.

Arthur’s face changed, his arm fell to his side.

“That man has more luck than he deserves,” he said, in a low tone.

“I don’t think he appreciates his luck either, and sometimes I think I’ll take it away from him,” she said, drooping her full white lids till the shadow of her long lashes fell upon her cheek.

“And bestow it upon another man!” cried Arthur. And then before she could realise what was coming, he was down on his knees beside her with a passionate declaration of love on his lips.

Possibly, however, if she had known what was coming, she would have made no effort to prevent it. She took his protestations and despairing entreaties very calmly.

“Please get up off your knees,” she said; “the words were no sooner out of my mouth than I regretted them. After all, I prefer being engaged to Clive!”

Arthur rose from his knees ruefully. He folded his arms, and stood a little distance off looking down on her; his fair, boyish features telling only too plainly his tale of love and disappointment.

Juliet smiled up at him again.

“Oh, don’t look so rueful⁠—there’s a bright side to everything,” she said, cheeringly.

“A bright side to this!” he exclaimed.

“Yes. Don’t you see so long as I’m engaged to Clive I want to marry someone else? But the chances are, if I broke off my engagement with him, that I should immediately fall in love with him all over again. Oh, no! Pray⁠—pray don’t go down on the carpet again.”

In order the more effectually to prevent such a catastrophe, she left her chair, and walked away to the window. It opened over a miniature rockery planted with ferns and sweet-scented flowers. She plucked a spray of heliotrope, and began toying with it.

“Clive has never said to me one-quarter of the sweet things that you said just now,” she said, softly, meditatively.

Arthur abruptly turned his back on her, and, as if afraid to venture once more within range of her coquetries, looked for his hat and made for the door.

“There’s not a man living who could stand it,” he muttered, almost fiercely.

“You’ve left your ‘Wild Western Light’ under the table,” she said, not moving from her place at the window.

He stooped to gather the loose sheets of manuscript which, in his ardour, he had let fall.

“Arthur,” she said, in a low, persuasive tone, “are you in a great hurry to go? I wanted to ask you to do something for me.”

Down went the loose sheets of manuscript to the floor once more, and back to her side he went in a moment.

“Do something for you!” he exclaimed. “What is there I would not do? You know I would lay down my life for you any hour, any day!”

“Oh, it’s nothing half so bad as that,” she answered, smilingly; “I wouldn’t trouble you at all if I had a brother, or a cousin, or anyone of whom I could ask a favour.”

She seemed utterly to ignore the fact that she had a betrothed lover.

Arthur reminded her of it.

“You forget,” he said, bitterly, “the man who doesn’t appreciate his good luck, and who doesn’t know how to say sweet things to you.”

“Clive, do you mean? Oh, it’s something I couldn’t possibly ask him to do.”

Arthur’s face flushed with a real happiness. For the moment he felt himself exalted on a pinnacle to which his rival had never attained.

Only for a moment, however. Juliet knew how to read the light of pride in his eyes, and forthwith set herself to quench it.

“I ought to apologise for troubling you in this way,” she said, sweetly; “but since Stacy⁠—she was my maid forever so many years, you know⁠—married, there is no one I can ask to do anything for me.”

The flush of happiness died out of his face. So then, after all, he only stood on a level with Stacy, the maid, in his goddess’s estimation. He drew just one step nearer to her.

“Juliet,” he said, in low, pained tones, “if you were not so exquisitely, so daintily beautiful, I could find it in my heart to say bitter things to you.”

He was right in his estimation of her beauty. She was lovely, with a grace that might well be called exquisite and dainty. To his fancy, as he stood there facing her, the exquisiteness and daintiness had never been more markedly apparent.

She was dressed in some light summer robe of the palest possible shade of mother-of-pearl green, a shade that threw into vivid relief the delicate colouring of her skin, the warm brown of her hair so tightly coiled around her small head. The upper panes of the window at which she stood were filled in with a mosaic of painted glass, whose varied tints the quivering morning sunlight threw like a changeful rainbow about her light draperies, and on the ground at her feet.

She gave a little sigh.

“I suppose, then, I am to understand that you would rather not be troubled with my requests?” she presently said.

He did not at once reply. He was still feasting his eyes on her loveliness, enjoying the beauty of lines and tints in a manner possible only to an artist or a poet.

“Your name by rights should have been Iris,” he said, at length, under his breath, and almost solemnly.

And forthwith his muse awakened, and began to sing in his ears some wonderful invocation to the rainbow messenger of the gods, which no doubt, in due course, would take its form in the orthodox iambics.

Juliet had to repeat her question before she could get it answered.

“Refuse!” he exclaimed. “Refuse you anything! Talk of the sea refusing to follow the moon before you talk of my refusing request of yours.”

“Oh, but there’s nothing half so complicated as tides and moons about what I want done,” said the girl, with a light laugh. “I only want an advertisement inserted in all the English and Continental papers⁠—all the papers, that is, that ladies and gentlemen would be likely to read.”

The young man looked his astonishment. Then, recollecting the reputation which Juliet and Ida had for careless custody of their brooches and bracelets, asked:

“Is it emeralds or diamonds this time?”

“Neither,” answered Juliet. “And you must not ask me a single question. And, above all, you mustn’t let a single person know⁠—no, not even your own mother⁠—that either you or I have had anything to do with the advertisement. Promise me.”

“I promise a thousand times over. You may rely on me as you might⁠—” He paused a moment, and then added, with as much of sarcastic bitterness as he was capable of levelling at his goddess: “On your maid Stacy.”

“Ah, you don’t know how much that says,” said Juliet, in no wise disconcerted. “Stacy was true as steel, and”⁠—this added with a little laugh⁠—“pliable as whalebone.”

“I’ll try and be the steel and whalebone combined,” he said, taking up his hat, as if ready to depart that very minute.

“Oh, please wait,” she exclaimed; “there’s no such hurry; I don’t want it inserted today, or tomorrow, but on the very day we leave town. I suppose you know that we go to Dering at the beginning of next week?”

Into the dim distance at once vanished all the pleasant meetings with his divinity at balls and theatres, dinners and garden-parties, which he was wont to say were his daily manna while he sojourned in the wilderness.

“Yes, I’ve teased father into it; I knew I should if I persevered. Peggy was furious at first⁠—I knew it, because her manner grew so alarmingly sweet and insinuating; but it was all of no use. I told father that everything had lost its charm since Ida had married, that I was pining for country air, and, finally, that my boxes were packed, and that if they didn’t come with me I should start off by myself. That made them give in at once. I think they had visions of my turning the Hall upside down in their absence, inaugurating tennis-parties without chaperons, and so forth.”

“The beginning of next week!” was all that he could find to say, in a tone almost comic from its overweight of pathos.

“Yes. And the very day we leave town I want my advertisement to appear. Pray, pray don’t forget! It is most important. Yes, I know I haven’t told you yet what the advertisement is to be. I’ll write it down, so that there’ll be no mistake.”

She went to her father’s writing-table, and wrote on the back of an envelope just five words, which she handed to him.

Those five words were:

“Sub signo et sub rosa.”

VIII

The “beginning of next week” saw Clive on his way back from Florence, and Lord Culvers and his family comfortably settled in their country house; but it brought never a word of tidings of or from the missing bride.

There could be no doubt about it, Lord Culvers was beginning to get seriously uneasy; his geniality of manner appeared to be departing from him; he began to grow silent and abstracted; he would fall occasionally into deep reveries, from which he would awaken with a start, and give short, sharp answers to anyone who chanced to address him.

Juliet also seemed to be losing a little of her brightness. During the last few days of their stay in town, she had taken interest in nothing save the preparations for their departure.

If the truth were told, their leaving town, after all, came as something of a relief to Lord Culvers. Wild and unreasonable as Juliet’s proposal had at first seemed to him, he was at heart uncommonly glad to get away from the embarrassing enquiries of a large circle of friends as to the bride and bridegroom, who were supposed to be at that moment at the height of their felicity among the Alpine lakes and mountains.

On the morning after their arrival at Dering, a letter was received from Clive, which told that his journey to Florence had been a lost one, Madame Verdi having neither seen nor heard of Ida, and knowing nothing whatever of her intentions.

The letter, although addressed to Juliet, was brief and formal in tone, decidedly not the sort of missive that a betrothed damsel would read in an ecstasy of smiles and tears, carry about with her all day long, and hide under her pillow at night.

Neither its brevity nor its formality, however, seemed to trouble Juliet. She took it at once to her father, and read it aloud to him, word for word. There was added a postscript to the letter, in which Clive said that, mindful of a certain suggestion of hers, he intended to break his return journey at Paris, and would be glad if she would send to him at the Hôtel Bristol the present address of her cousin, Captain Culvers.

“What has he got into his head now?” said Lord Culvers, irritably, turning to his daughter. “Juliet, take my word for it, if those two men meet, mischief will come of it. What could have possessed you to make such a foolish suggestion?”

It was beginning to dawn upon him that Clive was throwing, not too much energy, but energy of not quite the right kind into his search for Ida.

“Dear love, is it possible that such a suggestion came from you?” said Lady Culvers, looking up from her embroidery-frame, and throwing a glance at her husband, which said, plainly enough, “Oh, these girls, when will they cease to get us into hot water?”

Juliet narrowed her eyes and looked at her. Then, with polite circumlocution, told her to mind her own business.

“Embroidery, Peggy,” she said, “requires an undivided attention. Otherwise you will be turning your daisies into dandelions.”

Then, before “Peggy” could recover herself, or her father find words in which to mark his sense of her employment of the objectionable nickname, the girl had taken her hat from a side table and had wandered out into the garden, through one of the open French windows.

“Don’t expect me back till luncheon,” she said to her father, as she passed. “I’m going to have a long talk with Goody.”

This was said by way of adding fuel to fire.

“Goody,” or, to call her by her right name, Margaret Pearson, had been in her young days nurse to the first Lady Culvers, and subsequently had officiated in the same capacity to Lady Culvers’s twin daughters. Her devotion to her mistress and to her mistress’s children had known no limit. The latter, so to speak, had never grown out of her care. When they quitted the nursery for the schoolroom, she had acted guardian-angel to them still; and woe to the governess who was rash enough to assert her authority against “Goody’s.”

She could never bring herself to forgive Lord Culvers for his second marriage; and when the new Lady Culvers wished to take the management of affairs entirely into her own hands, it became necessary to find a cottage for Goody, and to pension her off. Otherwise, the house would have been kept in an even worse state of ferment than it actually was, for the girls espoused Goody’s cause heartily, and thoroughly enjoyed playing the champion to her at their stepmother’s expense.

They were in the habit of styling Goody’s cottage “The Sanctuary,” and their “refuge in times of persecution.” That meant that to Goody were carried reports of their skirmishes and their victories, their flirtations and their love-affairs, in the full assurance that all would be viewed with eyes that could not see fault or folly in her darling nurslings.

Juliet had a pleasant half-mile down shady lanes to go before she could reach her “sanctuary” that morning.

A quaint, pretty little cottage it was, with a great, glorious tea-rose smothering its porch, running riot up its redbrick front, and peeping, unrebuked, into every one of its diamond-paned windows. Surrounding the cottage was a garden planted thick with old-fashioned flowers, where sweet-peas and mignonette mixed their fragrance with that of cabbage-roses and carnations, and tall sunflowers stood like sentinels on either side of the rose-covered porch.

A great, sleepy, black cat aroused itself from a bed of purple thyme, and came down the path to meet the young lady as she swung back the garden gate. From out the open cottage door came a bright-faced little country lass⁠—Goody’s great-niece⁠—dragging by one arm a much-battered wooden doll; and following her came Goody herself, tall, trim, and comely, in lilac cotton gown, and white cap and kerchief.

The greeting between nurse and nursling was more than cordial⁠—affectionate.

“No end to tell you, Goody. Let us go into your little parlour; it’s too hot to talk out here,” said Juliet, putting her arm within the old body’s. “No, don’t ask after Clive, he’s out of favour now,” she said, as she seated herself in the cool little room, as fragrant of flowers as the outside garden. “He has had his day, and his sun has set. By-and-by I shall talk to you about someone else; but not yet awhile. No, and you mustn’t ask after Sefton⁠—he’s out of favour, too. I used to like him; but I hate⁠—yes, hate him now. Today I’m going to talk about Ida⁠—no one but Ida from first to last.”

This was tantamount to granting Goody license to ask any amount of questions upon a subject that lay very near her heart “darling Miss Ida’s wedding-day.”

Juliet answered them everyone in her liveliest fashion, and with many a little passing touch of humour at the expense of “Peggy,” and some of “Peggy’s” friends. Then she glanced at the little girl playing in a corner with her big wooden doll.

“Send her away, Goody,” she whispered, “I’ve something very special to say to you now.”

So the little one was sent into the garden, the cottage door was closely shut, and for nearly an hour Juliet held undisturbed conference with her humble friend.

Through the open window, however, there were borne now and again to the little girl, odd fragments of their talk.

“Ida and Sefton had a desperate quarrel overnight,” once she heard Juliet say.

And as the child stood on tiptoes to peep at an Emperor butterfly which had settled on the great golden disc of a tall sunflower, there came to her the words from Juliet in a slightly contemptuous tone:

“Peggy has begun her old trick of peeping into my letters, and⁠—”

But here Goody’s voice interposed with, “Hush, my dearie, not so loud,” and then Goody’s hand showing amid the flowers on the sill closed the casement.

IX

Juliet went sauntering home under the shadow of the high hedgerows, pink now with trailing wild rose, and half-opened buds of honeysuckle.

It was a delicious day, with sun enough to suggest the tropics, breeze enough to make one think of the Alps. The air seemed absolutely laden with flower-scents; a distant sharpening of a scythe, the faraway tinkling of a sheep-bell, were the only sounds that broke the stillness of the summer air.

Juliet had many subjects for thought that morning. A little absentmindedly she turned the corner of a lane that led her at least a mile out of her way, and brought her back to the Hall by the park gates opening into the high-road.

A carriage and pair on the point of driving out pulled up at her approach.

“At last!” exclaimed a voice from out of the carriage. “You naughty child, where have you been?”

Juliet looked up to see a very tiny, very golden-haired, and very fashionably attired lady closing her sunshade, and extending a hand in greeting.

“Mrs. Glynde!” she exclaimed, “have you dropped out of the clouds? When, where, and how did you get here?”

“I caught the first train down this morning, arrived at Dering station three hours ago, called at the MacNamaras’ on my way here, and they were good enough to let me have their carriage. No, I won’t go back to the house; I’m sure your father and mother⁠—”

“Wha‑t?” exclaimed Juliet, making round eyes at her.

“Oh, I beg your pardon⁠—your father and Lady Culvers, I mean⁠—have had more than enough of my society; they have been entertaining me for the past hour and a half. If you don’t mind I’ll take a stroll round the park with you, I’ve something very special to tell you.”

She alighted as she spoke.

Juliet led the way down a cool avenue where young lime-trees arched their boughs above, and tall bracken waved its graceful fronds on either side of a stretch of greensward, smooth and springy with its undergrowth of moss.

“I’m miserable, brokenhearted, desolate!” exclaimed Mrs. Glynde, so soon as she saw that she and Juliet had the solitude to themselves.

But whatever her misery and desolateness might have caused her to neglect, it assuredly was not her toilet. That suggested, alike in its elaborateness and finish, the most artistic of Parisian modistes, and the most skilful and assiduous of maids.

Mrs. Glynde’s friends were thoroughly aware of the fact that at its lowest computation her age could not be far off fifty. Dress, however, and the use of toilet accessories, reduced it in appearance to about five-and-thirty.

“I could easily make myself look as young as she does, if I chose to spend a fortune on cosmetics,” sometimes her friends would say ill-temperedly to their husbands.

“I would much rather you did not, my dear,” those husbands as a rule would reply.

But, all the same, when the choice was offered to them, they generally preferred Mrs. Glynde’s society to that of the more sober-minded matrons, for in conversation she was invariably lively and entertaining, and in manner sympathetic.

Juliet racked her brains to find out what could have broken Mrs. Glynde’s heart.

“Let me think. You have seen someone in a bonnet that must have been ‘created’ in Paris at the same time as yours⁠—twin-sister to it, in fact.”

“Juliet, it’s far worse than that. It’s about Arthur.”

“Oh‑h! only touches you at second hand, then. He can’t find a rhyme to some pet word of his, and he scorns to pilfer one, I suppose?”

“Cruel child! Do you think a trifle like that would have made me get up at six o’clock in the morning, and sent me flying down into the wilderness when I’m due today at a luncheon, a flower-show, a dinner, and a ball afterwards, at which the Royalties will be present? Give me credit for devotion to Arthur, if for nothing, else.”

“Oh, yes, I’ll give you credit for devotion to Arthur, and for a good many other things,” answered Juliet, lightly, and with a side glance at the golden hair which appeared to have “Auricomus” written upon it.

“What sacrifice will not a mother make on behalf of a son, and an only son, like my Arthur?” continued the lady.

“What, indeed! Luncheons, flower-shows, dinners, balls, and Royalties included.”

“Juliet, you have no heart. You are a second Lady Clara Vere de Vere, and I believe if my poor Arthur were going to commit suicide, you’d⁠—”

“ ‘Hold your course without remorse, and slay him with a vacant stare,’ or something like that. But is he contemplating anything so terrible as bullets, or knives, or prussic acid?”

“Something quite as terrible. Only yesterday he came to me and announced his intention of joining an expedition to Central Africa. ‘I have lost heart, I have lost hope!’ he said. ‘Something I must do to fill my life!’ ”

She ended her sentence with a heavy sigh.

“Oh‑h, is that all he is going to do?” And Juliet drew a long breath that seemed to imply surprise and disappointment commingled.

“All! What could be worse?” cried Mrs. Glynde, despairingly.

“A great many things. Now if I were Mrs. Glynde, and Arthur were my son, I should feel that it would be a good deal worse if he had come to me and announced his intention of⁠—well, going into Parliament, or of playing first violin in the Albert Hall orchestra, because I should know that in either case his intentions would be doomed to disappointment.”

“Juliet!”

“I should, indeed. But a trip to Central Africa! Why, anybody can accomplish that. Is it a Gaze’s or a Cook’s excursion party?”

“You have a heart of stone! But I can’t believe you understand me. This is an expedition got up by a number of dreadful men⁠—the Harkers, the Ottleys, and that set⁠—who have made up their minds to ‘penetrate into the interior,’ as they call it. That means go farther into the dreadful hole than anybody has ever yet gone, and get eaten up by flies, or cannibals, or lions⁠—”

“Or ostriches, or monkeys. They all live in that part of the world, don’t they?”

“Make as much fun as you like, Juliet; but, take my word for it, if Arthur goes out with these dreadful men, he’ll never come back again.”

“Well, but other people go, and come back again, and seem to like it rather than otherwise. I should enjoy a trip there myself. I think I’ll get my future husband to promise to take me there for our wedding tour.”

The last words were said with a side-glance at Mrs. Glynde to see their effect.

They acted like a match to tinder. Mrs. Glynde came to a sudden standstill on the smooth greensward, her face the colour of the scarlet sunshade she carried.

“Juliet,” she said, excitedly, “that engagement is still ‘on,’ then? I hoped⁠—I was told, that is, by friends of yours a day or two ago, that they felt confident it would all ‘come to nothing’; one need only to see you and Mr. Redway together to make sure of it, they said.”

Juliet flushed a little.

“Dear me! How good it is of people to take such an interest in my affairs! Will you kindly tell those friends of mine that I intend to be engaged to Clive Redway till⁠—” She broke off for a moment, exclaiming: “Hark! Was that a cuckoo? What a belated little bird! Surely it’s time it went back to Central Africa.”

“Juliet, finish what you were going to say,” cried Mrs. Glynde, excitedly. “Till when do you mean to be engaged to Clive Redway? Can you fix a date for the ending of your engagement?”

“Why, of course⁠—till my wedding-day, I was going to say,” answered Juliet, coolly.

Whatever might be her opinion of Arthur Glynde, she had only one opinion of Arthur Glynde’s mother. The little lady had a reputation, which Juliet was not inclined to gainsay, of being one of the cleverest matchmakers that Society numbered in its ranks. She had married off in succession three penniless nieces to wealthy scions of aristocratic houses; and now she was spreading her toils to catch an heiress and a beauty for her son.

“How can one small head carry such a multiplicity of plots?” thought the girl, with a far-off memory of the parson of the “loveliest village of the plain.”

“Till your wedding-day!” repeated Mrs. Glynde, slowly. “Then my poor Arthur has no chance?”

She felt for her pocket-handkerchief, and for a moment it went to her eyes.

With her handkerchief, however, she pulled from her pocket a half-sheet of paper. With a sudden movement she stooped and picked it up.

“You ought to see this, Juliet,” she said, handing it to the girl. “I picked it up yesterday in Arthur’s den; it speaks for itself. If you read it you’ll see how deeply in earnest my poor boy is.”

Juliet unfolded the half-sheet, and read as follows:

My love hath solemn eyes,
Eyes that would make you weep,
Bright with the light of stars
That midnight vigil keep.

My love hath soft, cool hands,
To smooth hot, aching brows,
Soft as a plumèd breast,
Cooler than winter snows.

My love hath silent feet,
Silent as passing breath
Or sailing summer cloud;
My love’s sweet name is⁠—death.

Juliet folded and returned the half-sheet to Mrs. Glynde.

“Eyes, hands, feet! Now why did he leave out the fingernails? Tell him to add another verse something like this:

My love hath inky nails,
Nails that would make you weep.

Oh, what a lovely parody could be made out of it!”

Mrs. Glynde, with a sigh, put the verses into her pocket again.

“I can see how it will end,” she said, sadly. “My poor boy will go to Africa and never come back. You and I will say goodbye to him, and never see him again!”

“Oh, not at all,” said Juliet, cheerfully. “If I go for my wedding-trip to Central Africa, we should be sure to meet⁠—don’t you know, just as Stanley and Livingstone met in the middle of the desert. And he’d exclaim ‘Juliet,’ and I should reply, ‘I’m no longer to be called Juliet, but⁠—’ Ah! I wonder what my married name would be!”

Again Mrs. Glynde came to a standstill on the greensward.

“Why, you said only a minute ago that you intended to marry Mr. Redway.”

“I said so!” exclaimed Juliet, her manner expressing the utmost of astonishment.

“You said your engagement to him would end only on your wedding-day!”

“Ah, yes, that’s another thing. I mean to be engaged to him till the very last moment, and then I shall be sure to marry⁠—someone else. I couldn’t endure being engaged to the man I meant to marry.”

Mrs. Glynde’s face grew radiant.

“Ah, I see! I understand! Juliet, you are one of the most enigmatic of girls; but I think I’m beginning to understand you. Now will you send me back with a message for Arthur?”

“Oh yes, with a dozen, if you like! Tell him, from me, on no account to⁠—” again she broke off. “I’m confident there’s the cuckoo again! It’s quite too ridiculous!”

“On no account to start on this miserable expedition⁠—it sets off on the twentieth of next month,” said the eager mother.

“On no account to attempt to enter Parliament, or the Albert Hall orchestra; perhaps he might pass muster at the ‘Saturday Pop⁠—’ Oh, there’s a Camberwell Beauty, I declare! I wonder if I can catch it,” and off she started in pursuit of the brilliant butterfly, leaving her companion to get over her chagrin as best she might.

When she came back presently a little out of breath, Mrs. Glynde, with a very grave face, was retracing her steps in the direction of the park gates.

“I see it is useless for me to stay any longer,” she said; “will you like to keep these verses of Arthur’s?⁠—I don’t suppose he will ever send you any more.”

“Ah, yes, I may as well keep them. Tell him if I don’t see him again I will write, ‘In memoriam of A. G.’ across the top of the page; but⁠—”

“Juliet, I shall take no messages to my poor boy that will drive him to despair. If you have anything to say that will give him hope I’ll carry that.”

“You wouldn’t let me finish what I was going to say⁠—I declare there is that lovely butterfly again!”

And once more she would have started in pursuit if Mrs. Glynde had not absolutely taken both of her hands in hers and kept her rooted to the spot.

“I insist on knowing what you were going to say,” she exclaimed. “I will not stand here to be tortured as you torture Arthur.”

“Dear me,” said Juliet, in mild astonishment; “first you won’t let me speak, and then you hold both my hands, and ‘insist’ on my saying what I was going to say when you prevented me.”

“You said if you didn’t see him again you would write ‘In memoriam of A. G.’ across the top of his verses; but⁠—” said Mrs. Glynde, anxious to bring her back to the point.

“But it will give me very great pleasure if he’ll come and see me here on the twenty-first of next month. That was all I had to say when you interrupted me.”

“All!” cried the delighted Mrs. Glynde. “It is quite enough! I understand! Goodbye to the expedition that starts on the twentieth, if you want to see him on the twenty-first.”

She tiptoed, and insisted on kissing Juliet on both cheeks⁠—an embrace which Juliet received very coolly. Then she quickened her footsteps. “I must get back as soon as possible,” she said, “I told the MacNamaras I wouldn’t keep their carriage for more than an hour, and I’ve kept it for nearly three.”

It was easy to see that her haste to get back was stimulated by her fear lest the wayward girl might, in another minute, so qualify her message as to render it not worth delivering.

In order the more effectually to prevent such a catastrophe, she hastily turned the talk on other topics⁠—a recent wedding, the newest mode in hairdressing, the latest piece of gossip that had reached her ears.

“The way people talk is beyond everything⁠—no one is let alone in these days,” she said; “do you know, Juliet, actually last night when I was dining at the Adeanes, I was asked⁠—you’ll scarcely believe it⁠—if there was any truth in the report that Ida and her husband had quarrelled on their way to the station, and that Captain Culvers had gone off to Paris alone, and that Ida had returned home, and was staying with you at Dering?”

She said this with her eyes fixed on Juliet’s face.

And if she had spoken out all the truth, she would have said not only that she had been asked the question at her dinner-party of the previous night, but that her own maid that very morning, as she had assisted in her toilet, had told her of Captain Culvers’s sudden return to Glynde Lodge without his bride, and of Lady Culvers’s strange story to account for the fact.

Juliet’s calm, pale face gave no sign.

“It’s perfectly true, every word of it,” she answered, coolly; “Ida is at the present moment at the Hall⁠—in a padded room on the top storey, contrived expressly for our family lunatics of a previous generation. And Sefton has been sent to prison for marrying her, whence in due course he’ll emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis, shake his beautiful wings, and float straight away to heaven. Goodbye, Mrs. Glynde, give my love to Lily MacNamara. Tell her next time she wears that apple-green dress of hers not to put so much Condy’s flaid to her hair. The contrast of tints is quite too appalling!”

X

The next day was to bring news of a startling kind to the Hall. Juliet was spending a lazy morning feeding the waterfowl on the lake, and making believe to read Red Cotton Nightcap Country, when a message was brought to her that Lord Culvers wished to see her in his study at once. She went back to find her father waiting at the hall-door for her with an open letter in his hand, and a look on his face which said “something to tell” plainly as words could.

“News of Ida’s brooch,” he said, so soon as her feet were inside the door. Then he led the way into his study, spread the letter before her, and bade her read it.

It came under cover from Messrs. Hunt and Locke, of Chancery Lane. The writer was an English priest⁠—Baldwin by name⁠—who officiated at the church of the Carmelite Friars, in the Rue Bellarmine, Paris, He stated that on the previous Sunday at the midday celebration of mass a diamond brooch, answering in all respects to the one described in the advertisement in the daily papers, had been dropped into the offertory bag. By whom⁠—whether by a penitent as an offering, or by a thief in order to escape detection⁠—he could not say. The church was crowded at the time, and the brother who had collected the alms had not noticed anything unusual in the manner of giving in any part of the church.

The writer concluded by giving his address in the Rue Bellarmine, and stating that the brooch was in his possession awaiting identification from its owner.

Juliet’s face grew as white as her father’s as she read the letter.

“Oh, father, what does it mean⁠—what can it mean?” she cried, in a quaking voice, as she read the last word. “Ida has not dropped that brooch into the bag, why should she?”

Her thoughts flew to the worst.

“Can something terrible have happened to her, and some thief have⁠—Oh, no, no, it cannot be!” And then she broke down utterly, and sank into a chair, covering her face with her hands.

Lord Culvers, though scarcely less agitated, did his best to calm her.

“Now, now, Juliet,” he said, tremulously, “if you give way like this you’ll unnerve me and make me unfit for what I’ve got to do.”

Neither of his daughters were of the weeping, hysteric order; tears with them, after childish days were past, were of rare occurrence; when they did break down it meant something more than a headache or an attack of nerves, and carried weight accordingly.

For one thing, her outburst of grief entirely dispelled from his mind any lingering suspicion that she was in some way cognizant of her sister’s movements.

Juliet calmed herself with difficulty.

“What have you done? What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Well, my dear, you see I must start for Paris at once, in order to identify the brooch. I’ve already ordered the carriage, and if I catch the next train from here I shall save the night boat, and⁠—”

“It may not be Ida’s brooch after all,” interrupted Juliet, eagerly.

“Exactly, my dear,” said Lord Culvers, almost cheerfully, and glad to have a chance of putting a bright face on matters. “Before we allow ourselves to imagine that the worst⁠—the very worst has happened, we must make sure that the brooch is Ida’s. I’ve telegraphed to Sefton, and⁠—”

“Oh, why not have telegraphed to Clive? he has a thousand times more energy!” again interrupted the girl, feeling instinctively that the one man was as a rock and the other but as a reed to depend upon.

“Now, now, my dear,” answered her father, deprecatingly, “Ida’s husband is the right person to act as my coadjutor in this matter. But will you come with me?⁠—that is, if you can get ready in five minutes⁠—I shall be glad to have you.”

Juliet thought for a moment.

“No,” she answered, slowly, “I must stay here for the present. I may have to follow you, I cannot tell.”

“Well, well,” answered Lord Culvers, a little puzzled, “it doesn’t matter much. I take it no one can identify this brooch but me; there’s a flaw in one of the emeralds in the spray that will enable me to swear to it, and⁠—”

“But, father,” interrupted Juliet, “you won’t try to hush the matter up any longer, will you? You must⁠—you will apply to the police now. We must move heaven and earth to end this suspense.”

“Yes, yes, of course; that is, provided the brooch is really Ida’s,” he answered, clinging desperately to the last shred of hope that there might yet be a possibility of avoiding the publicity which calling in the assistance of the police would involve. “You see,” he added, reprovingly, “you are taking the worst possible view of things. Ida herself may be in Paris⁠—Heaven only knows where she is⁠—and may have read the advertisement for her brooch; and, fearing lest it may draw attention to herself, may have⁠—”

“What!” interrupted Juliet, “you think Ida capable of giving away mother’s brooch in that fashion!”

“My dear,” said Lord Culvers, with a sigh, “Heaven only knows what you are both capable of. I could never find where to draw the line.”

And then the carriage was announced, and Juliet, all nervous terror for fear her father should miss his train, and so lose the night steamer, did her best to control her agitation, and to expedite his departure.

Lord Culvers had a characteristic farewell speech to make to his wife and daughter as they stood saying their goodbyes to him under the porch. It was:

“You two won’t quarrel more than you can help while I’m away, now will you?”

Lady Culvers’s reply was characteristic also. It was:

“Dear love, if Juliet is ever so trying, I shall put up with it all for your sake.”

And Juliet’s reply was also characteristic:

“Quarrel with Peggy⁠—at such a time!” she exclaimed. “I should as soon think of quarrelling with the flies on the ceiling!”

So soon as her father was out of sight, without even calling her stepmother into council, she despatched a telegram to Clive, telling him of the finding of the brooch, and asking him to meet her father in Paris on the following day. She felt quite equal to doing this on her own responsibility. It was all very well for her father to preach deference to the proprieties of life, and select Sefton as a suitable coadjutor; she felt that the proprieties of life had already had too much deference paid to them, and that it was time now to make all considerations bend to their one pressing necessity of ending a terrible suspense.

After she had despatched her telegram, she went wandering out into the garden, and thence into the park beyond; her mind capable of holding one thought, and one thought only: “Ida, Ida, where is she?”

At every turn of her footsteps a shadowy Ida seemed to meet and confront her. There, a cool patch of green in the afternoon sun, lay the tennis-court where she and Ida had had such glorious combats, and where, if she closed her eyes for a minute, she could see her in her white tennis-dress, tossing, in semi-contemptuous fashion, her ball of banknotes to the willing recipient. There, on the margin of the lake, which glistened like silver between the shifting boughs of the intervening trees, stood the drooping willow that had been their “wishing willow” from the days of short frocks and strapped shoes upwards. There, too, in an out-of-the-way corner of the garden, lay the little flowerbeds they had delighted to call their own in their days of mischief and mud-pies, and which the gardener had carefully “set to rights” every evening, and their tricksy fingers had as carefully “set to wrongs” the next morning. Why, the very birds as they piped and twittered in and out among the shrubberies seemed to sound Ida’s name in her ears as they recalled the long, happy, lazy mornings they two had spent under the shadow of the big flowering rhododendrons, embroidery in hand, listening to the sweet, wild notes.

“Oh, it is too much, too much!” exclaimed the girl, covering her ears with her hands as if to shut out a chorus of voices that cried aloud to her. “All that is past and gone forever. Ida, Ida, where is she now!”

She went hurriedly back to the house and straight to her own room, where she shut herself in with her pen and ink.

The sun went down, the dinner-bell clanged through the house, the moon rose high above the oaks and elms in the park, but still Juliet sat writing there, slowly, carefully, painfully, as if each word she wrote held a life’s sentence in it.

And if one had looked over her shoulder he would have seen that her letter was addressed to Clive, and that from its first to its last line it was about Ida, and Ida only.

XI

Clive did not need to wait for Juliet’s reply to his letter in order to obtain Captain Culvers’s address. On the day of his arrival in Paris there was delivered to him a letter from his father, which made him feel that he had done well to break his journey there.

“Since I said goodbye to you last week,” Mr. Redway wrote, “a strange circumstance has occurred. A lawyer⁠—Phillips by name⁠—with whom I have been casually brought into contact, told me, in the course of conversation, of a curious letter that he said he had received from a member of a family in which he knew that I and my son were interested.

“This letter, which he subsequently showed me, was dated from 15, Rue Vervien, Paris, and was signed Sefton Culvers. In roundabout fashion the writer asked for advice for a friend, who he said wished to borrow a few thousand pounds on a clause in his wife’s marriage settlement, which provided that, if she died childless, her whole fortune over one hundred thousand pounds⁠—would revert to him. There were no children, Captain Culvers went on to say, nor any likelihood of any, as the husband and wife had quarrelled and separated, and he had now every reason to suppose that reconciliation between them would be impossible.

“Captain Culvers further stated that his friend’s need for money was immediate and pressing. He was willing to pay a high percentage for even a small loan so long as it could be had at once, and without the trouble of legal formalities that might necessitate negotiation or correspondence with his wife’s family.

“Now it doesn’t require a wiseacre to come to the conclusion that the friend, for whom Captain Culvers made these enquiries, was the best of all his friends⁠—himself; and that the letter would never have been addressed to Phillips if Culvers had known that I was likely to have dealings with him.

“But the most important part of the whole letter, to my way of thinking, is the phrase, ‘the husband and wife have quarrelled, separated, and there is now every reason to suppose that reconciliation between them would be impossible.’

“Of course, the most charitable supposition would be that Captain Culvers made use of these expressions wholly and solely for the purpose of facilitating and expediting the loan of which he is so much in need, that there may not be a grain of truth in them, and that he may be as much in the dark as to his wife’s movements as we are.

“On the other hand, there is the possibility that in speaking thus, he was speaking of matters within his knowledge. Juliet has, you say, spoken of serious quarrels that took place during the engagement. Some such a quarrel may have occurred on the day before the wedding⁠—which, to save an open scandal, was allowed to go on⁠—it may even have been continued during the drive from the house to the graveyard, and Captain Culvers may thus have been in some sort prepared for his wife’s disappearance. Subsequently she may have written to him, and his words, ‘there is now every reason to suppose that reconciliation between them would be impossible,’ may point to the fact that he will not consent to certain conditions his wife wishes to impose upon him, or that she refuses consent to terms proposed by her husband.

“I confess that from the first my suspicions have pointed in this direction rather than towards Juliet, who I think has been somewhat unjustly suspected on the matter. If you remember, she hinted to you that it would be as well to keep an eye on Captain Culvers, who probably knew more than anyone imagined of her sister’s movements. His letter to Phillips, to my way of thinking, gives colour to the idea, and allows us to conjecture that, negotiations with his wife having come to nothing, he has tried to raise money on her property without her knowledge. If I were in Lord Culvers’s place I would let every other theory go and concentrate attention in this quarter. It would not in the least surprise me to learn that Ida, as well as her husband, is in Paris. My own belief is that she is safe and well wherever she may be, and is only deterred from communicating with her own people by the fear that they may compel her to make terms with her husband, and to live with him as his wife.”

To this letter was added a postscript, which ran thus:

“By the way, I am told on good authority, that the house where Captain Culvers has taken up his abode No. 15, Rue Vervien⁠—does not bear a very good reputation. It is kept by a Russian⁠—Ivanoff by name⁠—and is the resort of all sorts of shady people, British and foreign⁠—gamblers, sporting and betting-men, in fact of adventurers of every class.”

Before Clive had time to shape his thoughts to a clear judgement on this letter, Juliet’s telegram, despatched immediately after Lord Culvers’s departure, was brought to him, and then, hey presto! the father’s letter was read upside down, and a clear judgement on that or any other matter for the time became an impossibility to him.

Juliet’s telegram ran briefly thus:

“The brooch has been found in Paris. Father crosses tonight. Pray meet him at the station tomorrow morning.”

The news, coming on the heels of his father’s letter, for the moment startled and bewildered him. The telegram, read side by side with Mr. Radway’s conjectures, called forth speculations as to probabilities as wild as they were vague.

The finding of the brooch in Paris no doubt confirmed Mr. Redway’s surmise that Ida had been in Paris, and in communication with her husband; but to Clive’s way of thinking did not give the slightest support to his conjecture that, “wherever she might be she was safe and well.” On the contrary, to his mind it seemed to point to a directly opposite conclusion, that is to say, if the brooch had been found, as he surmised, in a stranger’s hands.

And his brain, once set going in this direction and stimulated by his hatred of his successful rival, soon refused to be trammelled by the probable, but ran riot among the wildest possibilities.

His father had stated the case far too leniently for such a scoundrel as Culvers, who, no doubt, throughout had been acting on a settled plan. Ida’s fortune⁠—over one hundred thousand pounds⁠—had from the very first been always before this man’s mind, and he had set his wits to work to get it entirely into his own hands. He was beset by creditors. He knew that a girl of Ida’s high spirit could never, under any circumstances, be likely to enact the part of a patient Griselda and hand her property unreservedly to his keeping, and so he had done his best to render the clause in her marriage settlement, which provided that, if she died childless, her fortune should pass to him, “un fait accompli.” Ida had most likely been inveigled from her mother’s grave into some place where she would be surrounded by Captain Culvers’s creatures. The letter to her father had without doubt been written under compulsion, in order to throw her friends off the scent, and she had been kept to all intents and purposes a prisoner until means had been found to end her life without detection to the criminals. There were plenty of people who could be found to do such things, and plenty of places where they could be done both in London and Paris. Why, No. 15, Rue Vervien, might even have been selected for the purpose.

Of course, at present he knew nothing as to the where and how the diamond brooch had been found; but he had not the slightest doubt that when fuller information came to him it would confirm his terrible suspicions. Great heavens! And they had been all sitting still with folded hands while such a piece of iniquity was being perpetrated!

And when Clive had got so far in his thinking, his brain seemed to reel, and he felt as if all power of reasoning had left him.

Inaction seemed impossible. An hour of black temptation came to him.

The wild beast instinct to tear, to kill the thing he hated, grew strong in him. Now why should he not that very minute take a pistol in his hand, go straight to 15, Rue Vervien, and put a bullet through the brain of the man who, according to all acknowledged principles of right and wrong, was fit for the hangman’s hands?

His mood of fury did not soon spend itself. While it lasted, his revenge, or, as he phrased it, “the act of retributive justice,” seemed to him sweeter than anything else life could offer him; sweeter far than would be the discovery of Ida and her possible reconciliation to her husband.

If only the bitter suspense could be ended, and he could know that she was peacefully laid to rest in her grave, he felt that he could kneel down and thank Heaven for her deliverance from the keeping of such a man as Captain Culvers⁠—a gamester, an unprincipled roué, no doubt; a man, in fact, who had naught to recommend him but a handsome face and certain showy personal accomplishments.

Side by side with this image of Captain Culvers came a vision of Ida; not the marble-faced, self-repressed bride of three weeks back, but a girl who had quick blood coursing in her veins; eyes that lighted up with every passing thought; lips that knew how to speak those thoughts in a voice that vibrated to every changeful mood. Out of the shadowy past stepped this Ida, in the white fluttering robes in which he had first seen her at the country house of a friend. How well he remembered the day! It seemed but yesterday, although nearly a year had since slipped away. It was the close of a hot August day, the golden glamour of a setting sun was falling on greensward and terrace, a thousand birds were carolling their hymns to the dying day. A tall queenly figure, she had stood before him, with eyes looking straight into his own, lips parted and half-smiling, and pure pale brow that seemed to demand a crown of lilies as its right.

The wave of memory quenched the fury of his thoughts. Sefton Culvers even was forgotten in the bitter recollection of a cup of happiness held close to his lips and then forever denied to them.

He bowed his head upon his hands; hot, passionate tears forced themselves from his eyes.

“Oh, my darling, my darling!” he cried, brokenly, “why did I let you go! Why, why did I suffer myself to be fooled out of my happiness?”

And hand-in-hand with the bitter recollection of the easy manner in which he had allowed himself to be blinded to the real state of Ida’s feelings towards him, came the thought that perhaps, after all, the bullet intended for Captain Culvers’s brain might more fitly find its home in his own.

XII

In his softer mood the voices of common sense and reason made themselves heard once more, counselling a suspension of judgement as well as of action, until the morrow put him in possession of the news that Lord Culvers would bring.

The circumstances under which the brooch had been found might possibly have thrown a fresh light on the whole affair, might have already swept away Lord Culvers’s wish to hush the matter up, and it might be that even now the whole machinery of French and English police had been set to work to trace the missing girl.

The hours that must intervene before his conjectures could have yea or nay given to them, stretched before him like so many months. It was all very well for common sense and reason to say, “Do nothing till you know what turn affairs are taking.” Inclination whispered, “There can be no harm in your taking a survey of No. 15, Rue Vervien, from the outside, and if by any chance you and Captain Culvers should meet face to face, and you⁠—well, should have something to say to him, no great damage could possibly be done.”

So he took his hat, and, after despatching a telegram to Juliet, saying that without fail he would meet Lord Culvers on his arrival the next day, he turned his steps in the direction of the Rue Vervien.

It was nearly six o’clock in the evening, and the Boulevards were beginning to look somewhat deserted, cafés and restaurants to be somewhat thronged.

He had to ask his way once or twice, for he was not sure in which direction lay the Rue Vervien. He was directed down the Avenue de l’Opéra, and thence into a narrow street lined on either side with cafés and restaurants. Off this street at right angles led the Rue Vervien, a quiet, old-fashioned thoroughfare, with tall but irregularly-built houses, that were evidently occupied by tenants of various degrees of social rank.

There was not much traffic here, the street was a byway, and seemed to lead nowhere. Two girls in muslin caps were carrying between them a basket of well-starched linen; a nursemaid and some much be-frilled children went sauntering past. Two men were coming up the street at a somewhat rapid pace, and were talking loudly and excitedly as they came along.

It did not need a second glance at these men to discover their nationality; the cut of their clothes, the very tie of their cravat, proclaimed them Englishmen⁠—Englishmen, too, of a type to be found mostly on the racecourse and in the betting-ring, and best described by that untranslateable word, “horsey.”

As they passed Clive he distinctly heard Captain Culvers’s name mentioned. Upon which one of them exclaimed:

“It’s the two B’s⁠—baccarat and brandy⁠—that’ll do for him. I doubt if he’ll be fit for play tonight.”

And then their voices passed out of earshot.

The remark did not strike pleasant keynotes of thought. They had most likely just come away from an interview with Captain Culvers, and no doubt had spoken with the veracity of eyewitnesses. Clive scowled at the row of tall houses now beginning to throw long shadows across the street. Now which was No. 15?

Here his attention was arrested by little Italian organ-boy, who, with a monkey mounted on his shoulder, was grinding out some doleful melody in front of one of the larger and more pretentious houses.

With the recollection of the little messenger of whom he had gone in pursuit still in his mind, he said to himself: “It will be strange if that boy is playing in front of No. 15.”

He went on a few paces and surveyed the house before which the boy stood. It was tall and narrow, with iron balconies, and windows filled in with fluted muslin blinds, much yellowed with sun and dirt.

And over its green-painted door, in brass figures, stood its number⁠—15.

It might be nothing more than a strange coincidence, or it might be one of those “momentous trifles” which, in the annals of crime, have times without number led to the detection and punishment of criminals.

With his thoughts in their present condition, the latter supposition seemed the more probable.

He steadily scrutinised the boy’s features, so as to have them by heart in case of future need.

The child was of the usual type that one associates with a monkey and an organ⁠—large-eyed and olive-skinned, with full, pouting lips and straight black hair.

He touched his slouching felt hat, and droned away more vigorously than ever when he saw that he had attracted the gentleman’s attention.

The well-trained monkey pulled off his little tasseled cap and presented it. Clive dropped a coin into it, and, accosting the lad, asked him in the best Italian he could command how long he had been in Paris, and if he had ever been in England.

The boy’s reply was voluble enough, but was given in a patois whose only word intelligible to Clive was “Signor.”

So Clive tried him with the same questions in French, only, however, with a similar result. Then an idea struck him, and taking a half-sovereign out of his purse, he held it up to the boy and beckoned to him to follow him.

The child, with something of wonder showing in his big black eyes, followed him out of the quiet thoroughfare into the street of many restaurants. Among these Clive selected one that had an Italian name over its doorway, and where the faces of the waiters, as they bustled in and out among their marble tables, proclaimed their nationality.

He called a waiter, and desired him to bring to the boy whatever he chose to have in the way of refreshments.

Then while the little fellow, with evident enjoyment, disposed of a plate of maccaroni and cheese, he desired the man to question him, find out his province, and whether he had recently come from England.

The waiter did his best as interpreter, but said that the child’s patois was all but unintelligible to him, it being one of the mountain dialects of Calabria or the Abruzzi, while he himself was a Milanese. He could, however, just make out enough to know that the boy denied ever having been in England, and stated that this was his first visit to Paris.

A question as to where the child lodged in the big city elicited the answer that might have been expected: He had no settled place of abode, even at night; cellar, an arch, or the porch of a church, was all that he asked for by way of shelter.

With so much of information Clive had to be content.

“After all,” he said to himself, “it most probably was nothing more than a coincidence that an Italian organ-boy should bring Ida’s note, and an Italian organ-boy be found playing outside the house where Captain Culvers lodged⁠—a coincidence so trivial that no one but himself would have dreamed of laying stress upon it.”

Nevertheless, as a matter of precaution, in case it might be of importance to keep the boy in view, he desired the waiter to give him the change from the half-sovereign, and to make him understand that if he came to the restaurant at the same hour the next day there would be another supper for him.

The child, with a profusion of bows and smiles, shouldered his organ and monkey once more and departed, this time turning his steps in an opposite direction to the Rue Vervien.

Clive watched the little fellow out of sight, doubtful still as to whether he had let slip an opportunity, or had magnified a “trifle light as air” into a matter of moment.

XIII

“Yes, yes, my boy, I’m quite well. Don’t trouble about me,” said Lord Culvers, as he shook hands with Clive. “I’m a trifle worried, that’s all, and a little tired. Juliet sent you to meet me! Ah! very thoughtful of her, I’m sure⁠—But⁠—but where is Sefton? Have you seen anything of him?”

They were standing within the station, just outside the barrier, through which a motley crowd of passengers of many nationalities was passing.

“I have not seen Captain Culvers, and know nothing of his movements,” answered Clive, curtly. “I have a carriage waiting for you; where will you like to drive? I suppose your man will look after your baggage?

“Ah yes, he’ll look after my portmanteau, and send it on to your hotel. But⁠—but where can Sefton be? He must have had my telegram. He must be ill, surely.”

“That’s very likely,” said Clive, coldly, and thinking of the two B’s.

“Then I think I’ll drive first to the Rue Vervien and look him up. Poor fellow, he may be frantic to learn the news I have to tell him.” Then he paused, with his foot on the step of the voiture, looking dubiously at Clive. “I⁠—I⁠—don’t think it will be necessary for you to go with me, Clive⁠—Don’t mistake, I’m only too glad of your company at such a time; but⁠—but you know you two don’t quite hit it off together.”

Clive could have laughed at any other time at the old gentleman’s nervous anxiety to keep him and Sefton apart. But the present was no time for smiling, even, so he answered, gloomily:

“I’ll walk up and down the street, or wait for you anywhere you like, while you call on Captain Culvers. But if you don’t mind, we’ll drive together to his house. There’s a great deal I want to know that you can tell me.”

So it was on their way to the Rue Vervien that Clive had the letter of the English priest read to him, with its story of the strange finding of Ida’s brooch.

Read one way, it seemed to confirm Mr. Redway’s supposition that Ida was in Paris at the present moment. Looked at in another light, it seemed to give a basis to their gloomiest fears.

“I suppose,” Clive said, savagely, “you feel bound to look up Culvers, otherwise I should say don’t lose a minute in going to the house of this priest, see the brooch, and drive straight away to the Palais de Justice.”

“Ah yes, my boy, I feel bound, as you say, to look up Sefton. You’re very good to⁠—to give me the pleasure of your company. But Sefton, as you know, is the right person to act with me in this matter. And⁠—and if you get tired of waiting, and go back to your hotel, I⁠—I shan’t feel affronted.”

Clive bit his lip to keep back an angry word. Lord Culvers had as good as dismissed him; he paused, even, on the doorstep of No. 15, as if expecting him to shake hands, and say that, as he was no longer of any use, he’d go back at once. But Clive did not choose to be dismissed. Instinctively he felt that they might be on the very verge of a crisis, that a single false step might ruin all, and that Lord Culvers, advised only by his nephew, might very easily take that false step.

So at the risk of being thought de trop, and of having to hear Sefton use that odious expression, “my wife,” again and again in his most offensively possessive tone, he told Lord Culvers that he would wait for him as long as he pleased, but at the same time he thought that three minutes was enough and to spare for Captain Culvers to get his hat and walk down the stairs into the street; nothing more than that was required of him.

It was, however, more than three minutes⁠—nearer quarter of an hour⁠—before Lord Culvers came out of the house and reentered the carriage. And when he did so it was unaccompanied by Sefton.

“I can’t make it out⁠—I’m bewildered utterly,” he said, when he had directed the coachman to drive to the Rue Bellarmine. “Sefton has behaved in the most extraordinary manner, refused point-blank to go with me to identify Ida’s brooch; that is, if I adhere to my resolve of driving to the Prefect of Police afterwards. He said the most outrageous things to me; claimed the brooch as his property; said that he would have no confounded fuss made over his wife’s diamonds.”

Clive’s remark on this was a short, sharp expression which, if Sefton had heard, he might have felt disposed to resent. Lord Culvers’s face grew more and more distressed as he went on with his story.

“It’s mystery upon mystery. I can’t think that Sefton altogether knew what he was saying; his face was flushed, his manner very excited. When I went in he had a newspaper in his hand, and he drew my attention to an advertisement which he said had appeared in several English and French journals, and asked me if I had had anything to do with its insertion. He’d teach people to meddle with his private affairs, he added. Such an extraordinary advertisement it was, ‘Sub signo et sub rosa,’ nothing more. My head is going round, Clive. Can you see a meaning in all this? I don’t like to say it, but the impression left on my mind is that Sefton had had a little more wine than was good for him, and did not quite know what he was saying.”

Then they had pulled up at the priest’s house in the Rue Bellarmine, and the task of identifying the brooch for the moment drove Sefton and his extraordinary conduct from their thoughts.

Father Baldwin did not keep them waiting. He entered the room brooch in hand.

“This is the exact condition in which it was when taken from the offertory bag,” he said as he handed it to Lord Culvers.

Lord Culvers took out his eyeglass and closely examined it. Then he started and turned a shade paler.

“Ida’s brooch, not a doubt. There is the emerald with the flaw in it; but it was not in this condition when she wore it last,” he said, as he passed it to Clive for inspection.

Clive saw at a glance that the brooch had been tampered with. The ruby eyes of the bird had disappeared; from its body here and there diamonds had been abstracted⁠—abstracted, too, with a rough hand, and some, no doubt, rough-and-ready tool⁠—assuredly not with the hand and the tool of a skilled jeweller. Also, sundry of the emeralds in the spray which the bird held in its beak, were missing, and the pin of the brooch was broken.

Questions addressed to the priest elicited no further information than that he had already given in his letter. He, however, strongly advised that the Commissaire of Police should at once be consulted on the matter.

There seemed to be no other course open to them now. So Lord Culvers, after writing his cheque for the promised reward and desiring Father Baldwin to pay it to the credit of any charity he pleased, ordered the voiturier to drive at once to the Palais de Justice.

XIV

Wearied and dispirited, Lord Culvers leaned his head upon his hand.

“It’s altogether too much, Clive,” he said. “I’m not a young man. I feel all to pieces. Life is a little too hard for me just now.”

They had returned from their interview with the Prefect of Police, and now sat in Clive’s sitting-room at his hotel, trying to “face the worst and act for the best.”

That interview had been a long and painful one, and the two men had come away from it fully convinced that they had acted the part of imbeciles in allowing a fortnight of precious time to slip away without making an effort to track the missing girl.

As a matter of course, in order to give full emphasis to the mystery of the recovered brooch, it had been necessary to relate to the Prefect the story of Ida’s marriage and subsequent disappearance; also, the full history of her engagement, together with the footing on which she had appeared to stand towards Captain Culvers, as stated by Juliet.

An interpreter, fortunately, had not been required, for although the Prefect had preferred to speak in his own tongue, he had a perfect knowledge of colloquial English.

Lord Culvers’s narrative, in all its minute detail, had been taken down in writing by an official, who, as a matter of course, was present.

On the disappearance of the young lady the Prefect had declined to express an opinion, stating that he could not possibly form one until he had given most careful thought to the case in all its bearings.

He had, however, said that in so serious a matter they could not afford to neglect any detail, however alight, and, therefore, he proposed at once instituting a search for the little organ-boy, of whom mention had been made. He had also proposed sending one of his officers to wait at the Italian restaurant that evening, in the hope that the promise of a supper would be inducement enough to take the little fellow there.

Here Clive had supplied a full and minute description of the boy.

Then they had come to the finding of the brooch in the offertory bag, and the damaged piece of jewellery was handed to the Prefect for his inspection.

Upon this, his questions had set in one direction and centered entirely upon Sefton Culvers, his past and his present career.

Lord Culvers, a little astonished, had done his best to answer these questions. Of, his nephew’s career during the past six or seven years he could give but little information. Captain Culvers had had a good deal of foreign service, had returned home with his health impaired about eighteen months back, and had thought it best to send in his papers to the Horse Guards. This was about the sum total of all Lord Culvers had to tell.

The Prefect had laid stress upon Captain Culvers’s resignation of his commission, and had asked if no other reason than enfeebled health could be assigned for it.

Lord Culvers had replied that if any other reason existed he did not know of it. He had surmised, and knew now for certain, that his nephew was heavily in debt; but, so far as he was aware, there had never been a whisper against his private character.

Then had succeeded a number of questions as to Captain Culvers’s doings in Paris at the present moment, and the attitude he had assumed since the disappearance of his wife. Upon this there had followed the description of Sefton’s present surroundings and most likely associates, together with the account of Lord Culvers’s interview with him that morning, the young man’s extraordinary manner, the excitement he had shown over a chance advertisement, and, finally, his peremptory wish that the attention of the police should not be drawn to the recovery of the brooch.

Here the Prefect had asked for and had taken down in writing the advertisement referred to.

Then Clive had leaned forward and had asked one or two eager questions. Did the damaged condition of the brooch of necessity point to robbery, and its broken pin to violence? Was it presumable that such robbery and violence had taken place in Paris?

The Prefect had answered in cautious fashion, that, although in so serious a matter they could not afford to disregard any circumstance, however slight, they must yet be on their guard to prevent the main facts of the case from becoming entangled with side issues, which should be classified and treated as things apart. To his way of thinking, the disappearance of the lady was one thing, the finding of the brooch another. He was not prepared to say that Captain Culvers’s wife had not fallen into bad hands, and been⁠—well⁠—robbed, if nothing worse, and that such robbery with violence had not taken place in Paris. All he said was, that neither the condition of the brooch nor its recovery in Paris went to prove the one thing or the other. If that brooch had been in the possession of professional thieves, they would have known perfectly well how to dispose of every one of the stones, which would have been removed with the finest of jeweller’s tools, and the skeleton of the brooch would have been then dropped into a smelting-pot, not into an offertory bag. Here, however, was a brooch that had been tampered with by an amateur, who had evidently, before he was halfway through his task, become scared, and had got rid of it in the readiest way that offered. The broken pin to his mind did not of necessity point to a struggle or violence of any sort; it quite as much pointed to an accident. A broken brooch-pin and a lost brooch were matters of everyday occurrence.

In conclusion, the Prefect had asked for permission to put himself at once in communication with the English police, in order that the highest professional skill in both countries might be brought to bear on the affair, which, to his way of thinking, was beginning to assume a most serious aspect.

It was no wonder that Lord Culvers and Clive should have come away from such an interview with their hopes at their lowest, their fears at their highest; nor that the former should lean his head upon his hand declaring that life was a little too much for him just then, and that Clive should have never a word to say by way of comfort.

But if there were little to say by way of consolation, there was plenty to discuss in the arrangements of the details of the course of action which the Prefect had recommended for their adoption.

With these details Clive strove to arouse Lord Culvers from his lethargy and depression, wishing heartily, however, meanwhile, that a younger and more energetic coadjutor could have been assigned to him.

“It will be best,” he said, “for you to return to England⁠—to London, of course; while I will remain in Paris. There should be someone in either place who can give authority or bear responsibility at a moment’s notice.”

Lord Culvers gave a heavy sigh.

“That should be Sefton’s duty; he ought to be in the front now, doing his part and helping us to do ours,” he said, querulously.

Clive could hardly trust his tongue to speak Sefton’s name.

“That man must simply be ignored; he drops out of the affair. We can do without him,” he said, curtly.

“Supposing,” said Lord Culvers presently, with a little attempt at a smile, “that Ida should write in a day or two, and tell us where she is staying, we shall all feel such fools for the fuss we have made.”

“I wish to Heaven we could be made to feel fools in that fashion,” answered Clive, vehemently, and trying his hardest to repress the feeling of irritation that was beginning to grow up in his mind against the man who could entertain such a thought at such a time.

Yet it must be confessed that Fate was dealing a little harshly with Lord Culvers at the moment.

Fancy setting an egg on end, and bidding it run about and crow like a chicken. When the poor egg rolled over and fell helplessly to the ground, one would feel bound to admit that a little too much had been required of it.

All Lord Culvers had ever asked of Providence was a quiet life in which to enjoy the good things bestowed upon him. And a quiet life was just the one thing that Providence persisted in denying to him.

But, whether able to comply with them or not, demands upon Lord Culvers’s energies were from this point to follow thick and fast.

He did his best to acquiesce heartily in Clive’s practical suggestions, and expressed his willingness to return to England on the following day. To return sooner he feared would be an impossibility; he felt that a night’s rest on a featherbed before undertaking a second journey was an absolute necessity to him.

Then, with another feeble little attempt at a smile, he wondered if a cutlet and a glass of claret would put a little strength into him.

Clive, with a twinge of remorse, recollecting that the old gentleman had had nothing in the way of food since his arrival in the morning, at once ordered the much-needed refreshment.

He himself, however, at the moment, felt eating to be an impossibility. The heat was intense; a thunderstorm seemed threatening; he felt stifled within four walls. There was yet an hour to be got through before he kept his appointment at the Italian café with the little organ-boy. He thought he would take a turn in the Champs Élysées and see if the fresh air would clear his brain and put some fresh ideas into it.

Ideas, however, are among the many things for which the demand does not create the supply. Clive wandered along the sultry, dusty road in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne, his brain meantime, instead of grinding out fresh ideas, working incessantly at the old treadmill of anxieties, perplexities, and distresses which for him from the very first had gathered round Ida’s disappearance.

Half past five sounded from a clock-tower, and he turned his steps towards the street of many restaurants, hoping to find his little black-eyed friend awaiting him there.

He found the usual number of people assembled in the café round the marble tables, eating their ices or drinking their chocolate; but never a sign of the little organ-grinder.

He questioned the waiter who had attended to him on the previous day as to whether he had seen anything of the child, and received a negative in reply.

Then he was himself addressed by a thin, wiry little man, whom he had noted as he had entered the café, seated in a corner, to all appearance absorbed in the perusal of his Figaro.

Clive guessed in a moment that this individual was the detective whom the Prefect of Police had promised should be in attendance at the café.

They had a little talk together.

The detective expressed his conviction that they were both on a lost errand. He was convinced that the boy would not make his appearance; although when pressed by Clive to do so, he declined to give the reasons for, his conviction. He stated further that his orders were to remain in or outside the place until it closed at midnight. There was therefore no necessity for “M’sieu” to remain unless he felt so disposed.

Clive, however, did feel so disposed, and he lingered about the restaurant until daylight waned and gas-lamps were lighted.

Then he thought it best to return to his hotel, in case the evening mail might have brought news of any kind, or information that called for immediate action.

On the steps of his hotel he was met by a chance acquaintance, who detained him a few minutes in conversation. This chance acquaintance was a member of the Alpine Club, en route for the Swiss mountains, and was eager to detail to Clive a new line of road that he had mapped out for himself. Clive had but a scanty attention to give him, and shook him off as soon as possible. During the few minutes that they stood talking together, Clive had his attention arrested by a sister of the Salvation Army, who came out of the hotel and passed down the stops close to his elbow.

He caught a glimpse of her face under its black poke-bonnet as she went by. She was a woman of about twenty-five years of age, English not a doubt, with a pale, careworn face, that was nevertheless rendered attractive by its remarkable sweetness of expression.

He gave a passing wonder to the thought what could have brought her, without her colleagues, into so uncongenial a neighbourhood, and then went on to the room where he had left Lord Culvers.

He found it in utter darkness, save for a single candle which burned upon a side-table that they had given up to their writing materials, and a patch of gaslight, which an outside lamp made upon the wall.

It seemed strange. The unlighted lamps could be easily accounted for by the fact that Lord Culvers, fast asleep, reclined in a comfortable easy-chair, with his feet resting on another chair.

But the one candle on the writing-table! It seemed to suggest that someone had entered while Lord Culvers had slept, and had made use of the pen and ink.

Clive crossed the room to the small table, and there found his suspicions confirmed. A pen was in the inkstand, a sheet of notepaper was laid obtrusively athwart the blotting pad. And on this sheet of notepaper was written in ink, not yet dry:

“A poor penitent, lying at the point of death at No. 11, Rue Corot, has a story to tell that may interest Lord Culvers.”

XV

Clive stood staring blankly at the mysterious words.

“A poor penitent!” “A story to tell!” What in Heaven’s name did it mean?

Who could have entered the room while Lord Culvers slept, and have left a message whose full import it seemed impossible to gauge?

For that the story which might “interest Lord Culvers” had reference to their one pressing cause of anxiety, he did not for a moment doubt.

All his wonderings, however, had to be swept on one side unanswered, to make way for the more practical question, What was to be done for the best?

And to this question there seemed but one answer: “Go yourself without a moment’s delay to No. 11, Rue Corot.”

He threw one glance at Lord Culvers as he slept. His face, fitfully lighted by the one candle and the patch of light thrown by the outside gas-lamp, showed painfully worn and aged. It did not need a second glance to convince Clive that to awaken him and explain matters to him would mean not only delay in setting forth, but impediment to progress afterwards if, in his present nerveless, spiritless condition, he should insist on accompanying him.

“And how thankful he will be to be spared as much exertion as possible!” thought the young man, as having folded and put away the sheet of notepaper, he softly closed the door behind him, and made his way down the stairs.

He did not stop to interrogate the waiters as to who had entered his sitting room during his absence.

“Where would be the use?” he said to himself, as he called a voiture, and desired the man to drive him to the Rue Corot; “the message was the thing, the messenger mattered but little.”

Oddly enough, with the thought of the messenger there came into his mind a recollection of the sweet, careworn face of which he had caught a passing glimpse under a Salvationist poke-bonnet.

With his curiosity intensified to burning point by his anxieties, the wings of the wind would have seemed a tardy means of conveyance to his destination; so it was scarcely surprising that the jolting voiture with its sorry horse taxed his patience to its utmost limits.

The Rue Corot lies in the unfashionable quarter of the Porte Saint Martin, in close vicinity to the Théâtre Beaumarchais. It is a narrow and somewhat noisy thoroughfare of tall seven-storied houses that are let and sublet to all sorts and conditions of men.

Clive dismissed his voiture at the corner of the street, and found No. 11 for himself. The door was open, no porter was in attendance, and the entrance seemed all in darkness.

It was not until he had his foot absolutely on the first of the narrow flight of stairs, that he realised the awkwardness of his position in coming to a house to enquire for a sick person without knowledge of either the name or the sex of the individual.

Halfway up the stairs he had to draw back to the wall to allow a young woman to pass. She appeared to be of the sempstress or shop-attendant class, and was smartly dressed, as if for a café chantant, or some other bourgeois place of entertainment.

Clive seized his opportunity, and, lifting his hat, asked the girl if she could tell him if anyone were ill in the house.

“Mais oui, M’sieu,” she replied; “c’est la pauvre Marie Schira qui va mourir.”

“Marie Schira.”

Clive repeated the name to himself once or twice, and then remembered that he had seen it frequently on Parisian playbills.

Now what in the name of all that was wonderful could such a person as Marie Schira know or have to tell about such an one as Ida Culvers?

He ventured to address another question or two to the girl, and elicited the fact that Marie Schira, while dressing in her tiny dressing-room behind the scenes at the Théâtre Beaumarchais, had set her gauze sleeve on fire with the candles on her table, and, before assistance could be procured, had been so severely burned that her life was despaired of. This had happened three nights ago.

It was an awkward place for a colloquy this, on a small landing in the middle of a flight of stairs lighted only by a dim oil-lamp on a very high bracket. Yet Clive hazarded one more question.

“On which floor were Mademoiselle Schira’s rooms? Was there anyone there who could receive him?”

The young girl eyed him dubiously for a moment, as if wondering over the motive for his questions concerning a person of whom he evidently knew next to nothing.

She, however, answered him politely that Marie Schira’s rooms were on the floor above the one on which they stood; that Marie had a sister who had been summoned from England, and who was in attendance on her night and day. This sister was a member of a religious order, and wore a big “chapeau comme ça”⁠—here the girl with her finger as nearly as possible described the shape of a coal-scuttle in the air. If she were out there would be sure to be someone else in attendance on Marie, for she was never left alone.

Then the girl wished him good evening, and passed down the stairs.

The “chapeau comme ça” at once conjured up to Clive’s fancy a vision of a Salvation Army poke-bonnet and a sweet, careworn face beneath it. He wondered if the bearer of the mysterious message stood revealed.

When he knocked at one of two doors that faced him on the second floor, the “someone else” left in charge of Marie Schira proved to be an elderly woman of most untidy appearance, with a yellow handkerchief tied over her head.

Her French was alarmingly bourgeois, and her sentences ran one into the other with such rapidity as to be almost unintelligible.

Clive could just make out that Marie was suffering agonies; that delirium had set in, and that it was not likely she would live till morning.

Would M’sieu enter and sit down in the salon? Marie’s sister, who had gone out early in the afternoon, would no doubt soon return and be able to answer any questions.

As she finished speaking the woman opened a door adjoining the one at which she stood, and showed Clive into a room dimly lighted by a single candle in a girandole over the mantelpiece.

He conjectured that a door on one side of the fireplace led into the room of the sufferer, for he presently heard the woman’s voice on the other side of it, together with what he fancied to be the creaking of an iron bedstead. It seemed as if the poor girl were tossing restlessly on her couch of pain, for presently he heard a faint moan, followed at an interval by a low, incoherent muttering.

It was a dreary waiting-time, this, that had its dreariness doubled and trebled by the fear lest even as he sat there the dying girl might pass away with the story it behoved him to hear untold.

His eye wandered round the dimly-lighted room. It was of the type one might expect as the half-salon, half-salle-à-manger of an actress not at the head of her profession.

A general air of gaudiness prevailed. There was plenty of gilding and bright colour in the furniture, but nowhere the touch of daintiness and order that proclaims the gentlewoman’s sitting-room.

Side by side with the gaudiness and untidiness, there lingered pathetic traces of the sad episode that was ending poor Marie’s career. A heavy cloak flung over the back of a chair, with its lining burned away, proclaimed the last service it had rendered to its owner. A pair of tiny, silver trimmed slippers, scorched and blackened, lay beside it on the floor. A portrait of Marie Schira, that of a beaming, brilliant brunette, smiled down from an opposite wall on these tokens of the last tragedy in which she had played her part; and on a table immediately beneath this portrait the light of the one candle found out the diamonds in a massive gold bracelet, which lay side by side with a broken fan and a withered bouquet of carnations.

A step on the outside landing made Clive turn his head towards the door, which he had left slightly ajar. Presently a man’s head, with a hat on, looked in, and as hurriedly withdrew. Clive had a good memory for faces, and, slight as was the glimpse he had of this one, it recalled that of one of the two men who had passed him on the previous day in the Rue Vervien, and whose remark respecting Captain Culvers he had overheard.

The fact struck him as strange. He might have doubted the evidence of his eyesight, if it had not, a moment after, been corroborated by a voice in the adjoining room, whose tones he at once identified with those of the man who had animadverted upon Captain Culvers’s liking for the “two B’s.”

“Who is that man in there?” were the words that Clive heard in French, that had an unmistakeable English flavour to it. “Has Mattie sent for him or what does he want?”

The woman’s reply did not reach Clive’s ear.

Then the opening and shutting of a door, and the sound of heavy footsteps descending the stairs, told him that the man had departed.

Half an hour, marked by the jarringly merry chimes of a showy ormolu clock on the mantelpiece, slowly told itself out, and then there came the sound of other and lighter footsteps on the outer landing, followed once more by the opening and shutting of the door of the adjoining room.

“Mary, my poor child!” were the words that reached Clive now; “let me raise your pillows. It is I⁠—your own Mattie back again.”

It was said in English, and in sweet, low tones, that might have been a lady’s.

Three minutes after, the door that divided the salon from the bedroom was softly opened, and Clive, looking up, saw standing, framed as it were in the doorway, the figure of a woman in a straight black gown, and with a black poke-bonnet on her head. Beneath the bonnet showed the sweet, careworn face of which he had caught a glimpse at the door of the hotel.

The woman closed the door behind her, and advanced into the dim room.

“Are you Lord Culvers, sir?” she asked. “It is very good of you to come. I suppose you saw my message on the writing-table? I did not like to disturb the gentleman asleep in the easy-chair, so I ventured to make use of the pen and ink I saw there.”

Clive explained that he was not Lord Culvers, but one of his most intimate friends, and that any story Marie Schira or her friends might have to tell, they might rely upon it would be faithfully and literally transmitted by him to Lord Culvers.

The woman kept her eyes fixed on him as he spoke.

“I fear it is too late, sir,” she said, sadly. “Since I went out this afternoon a sad change has set in, and I fear my poor sister will carry her story into the grave with her. Something has been preying on her mind for days past⁠—something in connection with the name of Culvers, which has been very often on her lips in her delirium. I would have gone to you sooner if it had been possible.”

“But have you no idea what has been preying on her mind?” asked Clive, eagerly. “Can you conjecture nothing, absolutely nothing, as to the story she wished to tell Lord Culvers?”

“I will tell you all I know, sir, with pleasure,” she answered. “But it is very little. Till I was fetched from my work in London the other day I had not seen Mary for years. I had prayed night and day that the lost sheep might be brought back to the Fold; but⁠—”

“Can you tell me who the man was who came in and went out about half an hour ago?” interrupted Clive, eager to snatch at any and every scattered thread that presented itself, in hopes that thus he might unravel something of the mystery which seemed to deepen at every turn.

“My brother John, sir, I suppose,” she answered. “There are three of us⁠—Mary, John, and Martha⁠—that’s me. Holy names these, sir; but, alas they have been but unworthily borne.”

It was between pious ejaculations so charged with deep feeling, that on her lips they became a prayer, that Clive gathered fragments of the family history of the bearers of these “holy names” that enabled him to understand something of the condition of things he was now called upon to face.

John had begun life as a stable help, from that he had risen to be a head groom. After that his career had become dubious. He had fallen into bad company, taken to gambling and betting, and for years his family had seen nothing of him.

Mary, a beautiful but frivolous girl, had run away from home, when little more than a child, to join a company of strolling players, and for years she, too, had been a stranger to her family and friends. Subsequently, John, in his somewhat vagrant career, had lighted upon her on the racecourse at Chantilly with her first name Frenchified, and the family patronymic of Skinner Italianised into Schira. Under this nom de guerre she had made something of a reputation as an actress of low comedy parts at an inferior theatre.

Of herself Miss Skinner said nothing. Her straight black gown, and poke-bonnet, seemed sufficiently to tell her story.

She ended her fragmentary scraps of her family history in a faltering voice, and with eyes that swam in tears.

“I pray for the two night and day, sir,” she said, clasping her hands together, “without ceasing, I beseech the Good Shepherd to⁠—”

“But,” interrupted Clive, anxious to bring her back to the point where his interest was keenest, “did your sister on your arrival here give you no hint as to what was on her mind?”

“I know up to a certain point, sir. When I first arrived here, although she was suffering terribly, there was no fever on her, and she could talk calmly at intervals. In her sleep she used to mutter a good deal about some diamonds which, she seemed to fear, might get her and someone else into trouble.”

Clive gave a great start.

“Diamonds!” he ejaculated.

“Yes, sir. So once, when she seemed suffering a little less, I asked her if she had anything in her possession that did not rightfully belong to her. At first she refused to answer; but when I spoke to her about the great judgement seat before which she must shortly stand, she grew frightened, and told me to fetch her a certain box out of one of her drawers. I did so, and found in it a magnificent diamond brooch that had had some of its stones removed. This she desired me to take to the church of the Carmelites on Sunday, and put into the offertory bag. It would then, she said, no doubt, get back to its rightful owner, for there had been advertisements out offering a large reward for it.”

“But did she give you no idea how the brooch came into her possession?” exclaimed Clive.

It was hard to be brought thus to the edge of an explanation, and then be left as much in the dark as ever.

“None whatever, sir, and she grew so rapidly worse that it became impossible to question her. In her delirium the name of Culvers was very often on her lips. I spoke to John about this, and told him also about the brooch, and what I had done with it. Upon this he was very angry; he called me a fool, and said that if I had given the brooch to him he would have returned it to Lord Culvers, and had five hundred pounds for his pains.”

“And does John know nothing of how your sister obtained the brooch?”

“He says not, sir, and flies into a passion whenever I mention it to him. And although my poor sister has again and again in her delirium muttered the name of Culvers, she has never again alluded to the brooch. Last night, as I watched beside her, she muttered once or twice, ‘send for him⁠—send for him.’ I could think of no one but Lord Culvers that she could wish sent for; so the first thing this morning I went to John, and asked him if he knew Lord Culvers’s address so that I might telegraph to him Mary’s wish to see him, for I could not tell what might lie behind it. John was rough, and refused me any information. One of John’s associates, however, a man who once or twice has been moved by the Lord to show me a kindness, followed me down the stairs from John’s rooms, and told me that Lord Culvers would be in Paris today, and most likely at the Hôtel Bristol in the afternoon.”

Mystery seemed increasing upon mystery.

“Who was that man? How on earth could he know anything of Lord Culvers’s movements?” exclaimed Clive.

“I don’t know, sir. His name is Johnson; off and on he is a good deal with John. I wish I could tell you more, sir. Mary seemed slightly better, and was sleeping quietly when I went out this afternoon, and I was hoping that she might have rallied enough to explain matters to you; but alas! while I was away a change set in, and I fear now that she will carry her secret into the grave with her.”

It was a long story. Clive had listened to it with the closest attention, summing up, meanwhile, in an undercurrent of thought, its many and diverse details, weighing them, as it were, in order to discover what bearing they might have on the main facts.

“I must see your brother,” he said, as she finished speaking, “and ask him a few questions. Give me his address, that is if you do not expect him back again here shortly.”

Miss Skinner shook her head.

“I may not see him for days, sir,” she answered, “unless I go to him, and then, most likely, I shall find him sound asleep, for he is up half the night and in bed half the day.”

Then she fetched pen and ink and wrote her brother’s address upon a slip of paper.

“I have done my best, sir,” she said, as she handed it to Clive and noted his dissatisfied expression of countenance. “I have felt all through that a great deal lies behind all this; but how to get at it I do not know.”

Clive needed no telling that a great deal lay behind the story he had just heard. Mystery seemed accumulating upon mystery; clouds seemed thickening, not lifting.

“I must go back to the sickroom now, sir,” she said, after waiting a moment for an answer. “My poor Mary may want me. And I must pray⁠—pray for the poor lost lamb to the very last. Will you care to wait here on the chance that a moment of consciousness may come to her, or will you go back?”

There could be but one answer to this from Clive: he would wait hours, days, if need were, on the faintest chance of a word being spoken by Marie Schira that might throw light on her possession of Ida’s diamonds.

There was, however, Lord Culvers to be thought of. So he borrowed pen and paper, and asked if a trusty messenger could be found.

Miss Skinner answered him that the watcher beside Marie’s couch, who was going off duty now for the night, might be trusted to carry a note for him.

Clive, therefore, sent by her a brief line to Lord Culvers, telling him not to expect him till he saw him, as he had been detained on a matter of importance.

A dreary night’s vigil he was to keep in that dim, silent room. The doctor came and the doctor went, saying that another six or eight hours would see the end of it, and telling Clive, as he passed through the outer room on his way downstairs, that, if he wanted to speak with Marie Schira, he might as well go home at once, for she would never again recover consciousness.

Nevertheless, Clive remained. After midnight outside noises died down and the silence deepened on the house within, a silence which, so far as he was concerned, was broken only by the merry chimes of the showy clock on the mantelpiece, the creaking of the bedstead in the adjoining room, and the moans of the poor sufferer.

And through it all⁠—running, so to speak, as a soft, sad accompaniment to those moans of pain⁠—went ceaselessly the prayers of the Sister kneeling beside the dying girl: “Spare her, good Lord! Have mercy upon her, a miserable sinner!”

XVI

So Marie Schira passed away with her story untold.

The air struck chill to Clive as, weary and sad at heart, he made his way down the stairs and out into the silent streets in the grey of the early dawn.

In spite of the early hour, he found Lord Culvers dressed and seated at breakfast when he got back to the hotel. To Clive’s fancy he looked far less dejected and spiritless than when he had left him overnight. To say truth, the old gentleman had ventured to build on Clive’s prolonged absence hopes that the circumstances scarcely justified. He was naturally enough eager for an explanation. The long, dreary explanation that Clive had to give killed those hopes one by one.

When it came to an end the two found themselves precisely where they had been on the preceding day, so far at least as the mystery of Ida’s disappearance was concerned⁠—at the end of a blind alley, as it were, with a blank wall facing them.

“The thing we have now to decide,” said Clive, as he finished his story, “is whether it will be better for me to see and question this man, John Skinner, or whether it will be best to leave him to the police.”

The matter was to be decided for them, for even as Clive said the words the door opened, and a waiter entered to say that a man, by name John Skinner, was below, and wished to see Lord Culvers.

“We must be on our guard against fraud with a man of his stamp,” said Clive, as the waiter departed to show the man in.

Assuredly the personal appearance of John Skinner was not such as to inspire confidence. With his hat removed, he looked even less attractive than he had on the previous night. He was short in stature, with a flat head, small eyes, and hair, complexion, and whiskers of a sandy hue. The expression on his face was that of cunning of a low type combined with servility.

He looked from Lord Culvers to Clive, from Clive to Lord Culvers. Then he turned to the latter, saying:

“I was told you wished to see me, my lord.”

Lord Culvers looked helplessly at Clive.

“Yes,” said Clive, coming forward, and going straight to the point at once. “We have a question to ask you. How did a diamond brooch, the property of Lord Culvers’s daughter, pass into the possession of your sister?”

The man did not immediately reply. A look of low cunning settled on his face. He made one step towards Lord Culvers.

“My lord,” he said, “I have a question⁠—an important one⁠—to ask before I speak. I know that a handsome reward has been offered for the brooch, I want to know if there will be a reward⁠—in proportion to that very handsome sum⁠—for relating how that brooch got into a certain person’s possession, and how it passed out of that person’s possession into someone else’s?”

“Oh‑h,” said Clive, contemptuously, “it’s a case of how much down, is it?”

Lord Culvers became greatly agitated.

“Speak out, don’t talk in enigmas,” he said. “Of course I’ll pay for information that may be worth having. Who is that ‘certain person’?”

“But we’ve yet to learn that this man’s word is to be relied on,” said Clive, even more contemptuously than before. “A man who sells information for so much down, is likely to manufacture as much as he can find a market for.”

Again the man declined to answer Clive, and addressed Lord Culvers.

“You can test the truth of my statements in any way you please, my lord,” he said; “but I don’t open my lips till I find out if it’ll be worth my while.”

“How much do you want?” asked Lord Culvers, his agitation increasing on him.

For answer Skinner drew from his pocket a letter-case, from which he took some four or five slips of paper. These he spread before Lord Culvers, pointing with his finger to the name which signed each slip.

One and all these papers were headed with the formidable letters “I.O.U.,” one and all they were signed with the name “Sefton Culvers.”

“A mere bagatelle, my lord,” he said, flippantly; “in all something under five hundred pounds. But, small as it is, there’s no chance of my getting it out of the Captain. He has threatened more than once to pitch me out of the window, or kick me downstairs, just for asking for it.”

“I suppose there can be no doubt that this is Captain Culvers’s writing?” said Clive, turning to Lord Culvers.

Lord Culvers vouched for the genuineness of the signatures.

“And not a doubt, sooner or later,” he added, “I shall have to discharge these and considerably heavier liabilities for my nephew.”

It was scarcely the time for parleying and bargaining; it seemed the wiser course to cut short delay and write a cheque at once for the amount.

“Now for your story,” said Clive, impatiently interrupting the man’s profuse and somewhat servile thanks.

The story was simple enough, and was given in one sentence:

“I was in the room when Captain Culvers took the brooch out of his pocket, and gave it to Marie Schira, after a theatrical supper which the Captain gave in the Rue Vervien.”

“Ah‑h!”

And Lord Culvers’s face expressed great amazement.

“Was anyone else present?” asked Clive, thinking it might be as well to get the man’s words verified.

“Only my chum, George Johnson, sir, who’ll vouch for the truth of what I say. Marie went into raptures over the brooch, and asked the Captain where he had got such a pretty thing from. The Captain, half laughing, said that he had found it on the floor of a carriage, with its pin broken as she saw it. Upon which Marie laughed, and said whoever had dropped it would never see it again.”

“On the floor of a carriage!” repeated Lord Culvers. “That may have been on his way back to Glynde Lodge after Ida left him.”

“Marie was deeply in debt,” Skinner went on, willing to tell any amount of secrets now that it had been made “worth his while” to do so. “I suspect that she herself removed the stones from the brooch, and disposed of them as best she could.”

The explanation seemed feasible enough. It made plain to Clive that the name of Culvers so often on poor Marie’s lips represented to her mind Sefton, not Sefton’s uncle.

Lord Culvers, in great agitation, paced the room.

“I couldn’t have believed it of Sefton⁠—no, not if anyone had sworn it!” he exclaimed. “One’s own flesh and blood! After this, what may we not expect to hear?”

“So ends the episode of the diamond brooch,” said Clive, bitterly, with an irritating recollection of the manner in which his father’s sagacity had been led astray on the matter.

Then he turned to Skinner.

“You can go,” he said, a little sharply. “Of course, we shall take care, one way or another, to get your statements verified.”

But how much of verification either he or Lord Culvers judged necessary, may be gathered from the fact that, as the door closed on the man, they exclaimed simultaneously, as with one voice:

“Police enquiry on this matter must be stopped at once.”

Personally, it would not have troubled Clive one jot to have seen Sefton Culvers pilloried before the world, if only the man himself could have been detached from the name he bore. That name, however, at all costs had to be kept untarnished.

XVII

When the English mail came in that day, it brought with it for Clive the letter over which Juliet had spent so many hours.

He read it aloud to Lord Culvers from its first to its last word. It commenced with an earnest⁠—one might almost say a heartbroken⁠—entreaty that Clive would use his utmost endeavour to persuade Lord Culvers to call in the aid of the police, and to move heaven and earth to discover her darling sister. Her lips, unsealed now by terror as to what might be that sister’s fate, told fully and freely the story of her own conjectures and fears, and then went on to explain the part she had already played in the matter.

“My impression, at first,” she wrote, “was, that Ida and Sefton had had some desperate quarrel on their way to the churchyard, and that Ida had made the visit to mother’s grave an excuse for escaping from him. I fancied that she had gone to the house of some people whom she had met in Florence, and whose exact address I did not know. I thought that possibly she was corresponding⁠—circuitously, not giving her address⁠—with Sefton, trying to make him come to terms⁠—that is to say, trying to make him consent to her living apart from him, provided she handed over to him a large portion of her fortune. I fancied she would not write to father, for fear he should interfere, and insist on her giving in; but I expected a line from her at any moment, telling me what part I was to take in the matter. When none came, I concluded that she was afraid to write for fear Peggy or father might get hold of her letter, and so trace her out. Then there occurred to me a safe way in which we might carry on our correspondence⁠—a way, indeed, which we had planned together in the old days, when we found out how fond Peggy was of peeping into our letters. You know our dear old Goody lives in a cottage overgrown with a big yellow rose. She hates Peggy like poison, and would lay down her life for Ida and me. More than once we have had our letters addressed to us at the cottage under cover to Goody.

“When Ida went off to Biarritz two years ago, we agreed on a signal that would tell her when we were at Dering, and she could write to me at Goody’s cottage. It was that I should seal a letter or newspaper wrapper, or, in fact, anything I liked to send, with our grandmother’s seal. That seal I always keep in my writing-desk and carry about with me. It is an amethyst, cut with a rose surrounded with the motto: ‘Sub signo et sub rosa.’ It is horrid to be driven to such devices, but, as you know, we girls were never safe from Peggy’s prying eyes. I’ve known her take my blotting paper to the looking-glass, and, in that fashion, read what and to whom I had written. So the idea occurred to me now, that, as I couldn’t send Ida a letter sealed with grandmother’s seal, if I put the motto of the seal as an advertisement in all the newspapers, it would be sure to catch her eye, tell her that we were at Dering, and that she could write to me anything she pleased under cover to Goody as before. This advertisement Arthur Glynde inserted at my request⁠—you may have seen it⁠—in all the leading English and Continental journals. No letter, however, has as yet come to me through Goody, and, though I stay on here on the chance of getting one, little by little all hope is leaving me. I am convinced now that my theory, from beginning to end, has been all wrong, and that Sefton is as much in the dark as I am as to Ida’s fate. I am all terror and anxiety as to what has become of my darling sister.

“Oh, Clive, dear, dear Clive, I beg, I implore you, do not let my father hush the matter up any longer! I entreat you give him no rest till he has called in the aid of the police, and left not a stone unturned to end this fearful suspense.

“Only do this for me, and I shall be everlastingly grateful to you. I will do anything and everything that lies in my power to make you happy. I will⁠—what more can I say⁠—at once release you from your engagement to me. I will promise never, under any circumstances, to become your wife; but will remain,

Clive folded the letter and laid it on one side.

The writer and her more than half ironical promise of reward dwindled in importance before the communications she had had to make.

“The advertisements, of course, are accounted for now,” said Clive, slowly; “but not Captain Culvers’s keen interest in them. There’s something that wants explanation there.”

Lord Culvera grew thoughtful.

“Let me think,” he said, presently. “Juliet’s grandmother and Sefton’s are one and the same person⁠—my mother.”

“Ah‑h,” said Clive, drawing a long breath, “and, naturally enough, to Sefton, as well as to Juliet, would come some of her jewellery. That is suggestive.”

“I had entirely forgotten,” Lord Culvers went on, “the seal to which Juliet refers. It was given to the girls, with a number of old trinkets, when they were little more than children.”

“Similar trinkets may have been given to Sefton by his father.”

“No doubt. Now I think of it, there was a ring⁠—what became of it, I wonder? It was a jasper set with diamonds, a long, coffin-shaped thing. Let me think who had that?”

Not for worlds would Clive have interrupted Lord Culvera’s train of thought now.

“Yes, I’m sure it was given to my brother⁠—Sefton’s father, that is,” he said, after a moment’s pause, “and now I think of it, there was some device on it⁠—a rose, I fancy; but I can’t be sure what the motto was. It would be very likely to be the same as on the seal. No doubt there was some reason for my mother’s fancy for the device, or it may have been handed down to her.”

“Sefton most probably received that ring from his father,” said Clive, slowly summing up the case, as it were, and thinking out his ideas as he spoke them. “Now it is possible that he, in his turn, may have given the ring to someone else under circumstances that made the gift of importance;” he broke off for a moment, then added, with a sudden energy, “there is a great deal behind all this, I am convinced. I should like amazingly to know to whom, and under what circumstances, Captain Culvers has given that ring.”

The questions to whom, and under what circumstances Sefton Culvers had given the ring, with its device of a rose, were to be answered in a manner Clive little expected, for at that moment the door opened, and Sefton himself entered the room.

Entered, not in his usual slow, languid manner, and with eyeglass ready to uplift wherewith to stare out of countenance anyone who presumed uninvited to address him; but with a hurried step, and with a white face, and eyes with a startled look in them as of a man suddenly sobered by astounding or terrible news.

He lost no time in greeting or handshaking, but going straight to Clive, laid his hand upon his arm, saying:

“Help me! I want your help.”

Clive stared at him, his bright, prominent eyes seeming almost to start from his head. Help him! Why, if he had entered the room pistols in hand, and said, “Choose your weapon!” it would have seemed far more natural.

Sefton did not give him time to speak his astonishment. He drew a letter from his pocket, and bade him read it.

Its seal, though broken, showed plainly enough the device of a rose, surrounded by a motto. The envelope bore no postmark, and it was addressed to “Captain Culvers,” in Ida’s handwriting.

“It was left at my rooms about half an hour ago⁠—but by whom I haven’t the remotest idea,” continued Sefton.

Clive tore the letter from its envelope, and read as follows:

“Alta Lauria.

“Come without a moment’s delay, and receive back your ring from dying hands.

The paper dropped from his nerveless hand.

“Does it mean⁠—” he began, hoarsely, and then his own words seemed to choke him.

Lord Culvers picked up the letter and read it, then he, too, turned a white, stricken face towards Sefton.

“Tell us, quickly, for Heaven’s sake!” cried Clive, “does she refer to her wedding-ring, or to what?”

He had thought that the mere sight of Ida’s writing once more would be bound to send them all down on their knees in gratitude to Heaven; but there was nothing to thank Heaven for in such a letter as this.

Sefton answered slowly and gloomily:

“I know no more than you do to what ring she refers, whether to her wedding-ring or to the ring which sealed that letter, and which was given by me to⁠—to someone else. Nor do I know whether the dying hands she speaks of are her own or that other person’s. I only know for certain that Alta Lauria is the last place in the world for my wife to be in⁠—for special reasons⁠—reasons that you must know now⁠—that I must tell⁠—”

He broke off abruptly, he was evidently driving himself to speak.

“Never mind about your special reasons,” said Clive, brusquely, “tell us where this place is, and how we can get to it without a moment’s delay.”

“Unfortunately there must be hours of delay before we can even start for it. It is in Calabria, among the mountains, and not a train will leave for Naples before six tonight. I know the road to that accursed place only too well,” said Sefton, gloomily as before.

“Sefton, answer me this,” said Lord Culvers, in an agitated tone. “Was the person to whom you gave that ring a woman, and was your faith due to her?”

Sefton turned and faced him defiantly.

“Don’t ask me any questions,” he said, fiercely. “I’ll tell you all⁠—all, that is, you need know. It’s a long story; but, unfortunately, there’s time enough and to spare to tell it before we can start.”

But Clive had to be convinced of this⁠—had to fetch and to study railway guides, and maps, and lines of route before he could be persuaded that a weary three hours must elapse before they could so much as take the first step in a journey that might end Heaven only knew how.

XVIII

Sefton’s story, told in short, abrupt sentences, and with as little detail as possible, was, after all, nothing more than the old one of plighted faith and broken troth, that the world has heard so often.

It dated eighteen months back, when Captain Culvers had returned with his regiment from India. He had arrived in England in the middle of a bleak English March, and had been advised by his doctors not to attempt to face it in his enfeebled state of health, but to start at once for the south of Europe. Accordingly, with a brother officer, he had set off on a tour through south Italy, intending to make Naples his headquarters, and thence diverge a little out of the beaten track of the tourist into less frequented regions. At Naples, however, his brother officer had caught the Neapolitan fever, and, after a time, had been compelled to return to England. So Sefton continued his excursions without companionship. After scouring the Abruzzi, he had diverged into Calabria, and, in spite of bad roads, miserable inns, and fever in all directions, had penetrated into the mountainous region of La Sila.

And here, in the heart of the country where the bandit, “Peter the Calabrian,” self-styled “Emperor of the Mountains, and King of the Woods,” had held alike his camp and his court, and where Peter’s descendants and representatives lead as marauding and indolent a life as modern Italian civilisation permits, Sefton fell ill with fever, and went nigh to losing his life. His quarters were a miserable hut⁠—miscalled inn⁠—on the edge of the forest whence Peter and his co-marauders used to emerge to strike terror into the heart of wayfarers. There was no doctor within twenty miles⁠—a distance doubled by the rocky roads. The people of the inn, therefore, called in to his aid the wise woman of the place⁠—a certain Francesca Xardez, who, with remedies assuredly not to be found in any modern pharmacopoeia, brought him back to health.

This Francesca Xardez was a person of no small importance in Alta Lauria, the mountain-hamlet where Sefton had fallen ill. To begin with, chance had put her in the way of receiving a better education than generally falls to the lot of the Italian peasant. Also in her young days she had been something of a traveller, and had visited several of the cities of Continental Europe.

Thirdly and lastly, and what added most to her prestige among the rough mountaineers, she was foster-mother to the only child of the chief landowner in the place, the Marchese da Nava; her husband was the Marchese’s head-bailiff, her six sons were shepherds, vinedressers, or in some other way employed upon his estate.

In addition, her nurse-child, Violante, was devotedly attached to her.

This Marchese da Nava was a widower, and a man close upon seventy years of age, when Sefton visited Alta Lauria. Late in life he had married a peasant girl in the place, who had died, leaving him with this one child, Violante.

Although feudalism has been banished from Italy, the feudal spirit survives in the wilder and more mountainous regions. The bond between peer and peasant in parts of Calabria is of a kind to which northern Europe offers no parallel. The Marchese was poor as a Marchese could well be, for his large estates consisted to a great extent of exhausted mines, hill pastureland, and mountains, sloping down in ridges to the dense forests of gigantic oleander, arbutus, and wild olive, which cover the sites of forgotten battlefields. He was also a man of ungovernable temper; his household was ill-arranged and disorderly, and his sense of obligation as a landowner nil. Nevertheless, the devotion of the peasantry to him was unswerving, and his will as much a law to them as if it had been passed into one by Senate, and would be put into force by Carabinieri.

As for Violante, she was simply the darling and the idol of these rude mountaineers. With a temper nearly as violent as her father’s, she combined a beauty met with nowhere save in the mixed races of Magna Græcia. Ill-trained, and all but uneducated, she had grown up among them half-princess, half-peasant, related on her father’s side to some of the noblest houses in Italy, and owning on her mother’s side to near relatives among the poorest and most debased of the vinedressers and shepherds of Alta Lauria. She was one with the peasants in all their joys and sorrows, and it was no unusual thing for this last representative of a race that had held sway in the district for centuries, to be seen in her foster-mother’s cottage eating macaroni and drinking wine side by side with her foster-brothers, Giorno the vinedresser, or Pippo the little goatherd.

It was no wonder that when Francesca was called in to administer her remedies to the handsome young Englishman, Violante should accompany her, nor that, later on, when the Englishman, restored to health, called on his skilful doctress to offer her his thanks, Violante should have been found in the cottage eating eggs and vermicelli with her peasant foster-brothers.

On the fascination which this beautiful half-educated girl soon grew to have for him Sefton touched but lightly. It was, on his side, a delirium that came to an end with the summer’s moon under which it had had its birth. While it lasted, however, it led him over the bounds of prudence, and he accepted an invitation from the Marchese to make the Palazzo his headquarters, and thence visit the places of interest in the neighbourhood.

And before the first week of his visit had come to an end, he had made Violante an offer of marriage which, with her father’s approval, she had accepted.

Then with a start he had awakened from his dream of passion, and told himself what a fool he had been to think of introducing the ill-trained, half-educated, and penniless Violante to his aristocratic English friends as his wife. He set his wits to work to find a way out of the entanglement, and could see one only⁠—flight. That even to be accomplished successfully had to be craftily contrived, for he had no mind to run the gauntlet of the stilettoes or bullets of Violante’s numerous foster-brothers or half-savage cousins. So, under pretext of a journey to England to prepare his mother to receive his beautiful bride, he had said goodbye to the Marchese and Violante, begging them during his absence to make all preparations for the wedding-day, and promising a speedy return.

That promise, it need scarcely be said, had never been fulfilled.

After his flight from Alta Lauria, Captain Culvers had remained for some months in Paris, and there had drifted into dissipations that had left an indelible mark on his character. For some time after his return to England he had lived in the expectation of the story of the Calabrian episode in some way or other becoming known, and of his character suffering accordingly.

It was under the influence of this feeling that he had resigned his commission. When, however, a year passed by, and Violante’s friends made no sign, he concluded that the matter had blown over, and did his best to dismiss it from his thoughts.

He ended his story, saying that he had never in remotest fancy connected Ida’s disappearance with this episode in his life; nor could he in any way explain how nor by whom she had been inveigled into that “accursed Alta Lauria⁠—a nest of wild, hot-blooded ruffians.”

With reference to Ida’s disappearance, his impression from first to last had been either that she and Juliet were playing off some trick on him, doing their utmost, in fact, to make him look like a fool, or else that Ida, having come to the conclusion that married life with him would be an impossibility, had taken the first step in a plan which she and Juliet had arranged together, and of which he would hear more anon. He would give his “word of honour” that this was the simple truth so far as he was concerned.

The phrase, his “word of honour,” came jarringly as “Finis” to such a narrative.

For a few minutes there fell a dead silence in the room⁠—a silence, however, which, to Sefton’s fancy, seemed charged with the contempt and scorn that not a doubt his two hearers felt for him.

Lord Culvers was the first to break that silence.

“My dead brother’s only son!” was all he said by way of comment on the tale.

He did not hurl the words at his nephew, challenging reply and defence; they came rather as the words of a sigh that could not be repressed.

Sefton turned upon him fiercely.

“Surrounded with such a set of desperate ruffians, there was no course but flight open to me. You, yourself, in the circumstances, would have done precisely the same thing.”

Clive felt that it was not the time for either attack or defence. His business training and daily companionship with his father had taught him one thing if nothing else: that to lose self-control at a crisis in affairs, meant to let go the helm and let the vessel drive.

“The most terrible part of the whole thing is that Ida should be in the midst of such a den at the present moment,” he interposed, hurriedly. “We must put every thought but this out of our minds.”

Personally he felt such a course to be imperative. Here was he compelled, by force of circumstances, to act the comrade to a man whom he would have delighted to call a scoundrel to his face. Once give his tongue license, and that comradeship must collapse.

Lord Culvers made no reply. He was wandering slowly, helplessly almost, round the room, collecting papers and other of his possessions, with which he had littered Clive’s sitting-room earlier in the day.

It was easy to see his intention.

“You wouldn’t be fit for it. You’d break down before we got across the frontier,” said Sefton, a little roughly, but not unkindly.

“It will be easy to telegraph to you daily⁠—every few hours, if you like⁠—and then you can follow us step by step, as it were,” said Clive.

And then, taking out his pencil, with Sefton’s aid he jotted down various stations from which they could despatch their telegrams, and where also they could receive them should need arise.

Lord Culvers allowed himself to be persuaded. To impede the young men at such a time would have been sheer folly; and it was impossible to disguise even from himself the fact that in his present depressed and nervous condition, he could be nothing but an impediment to them.

“And there is something to be done in Paris,” pursued Clive, anxious once more to rouse Lord Culvers from his depression by turning his attention to the practical details of the “situation.” “The Prefect of Police, not a doubt, must be told of the turn affairs have taken; he may have suggestions to make that may be of value to us⁠—you can telegraph them to us, you know, at one of the stations we have named.”

Sefton, at any rate, had a suggestion to make to Clive as he strapped together his hand-portmanteau, and he made it in a voice so low that it did not reach Lord Culvers’s ear. It was:

“Whatever you do or don’t take with you, don’t forget your revolver. Mine is in my breast-pocket.”

As the train by which Clive and Sefton started on the first stage of their journey was about to move from the platform, two persons, hurriedly passing through the barrier, swung themselves into a third-class compartment. One of these two was a man of about five-and-twenty, a handsome, reckless, insolent looking young fellow, wearing a slouch hat and a gay necktie; the other was a black-eyed, olive-skinned boy, with a barrel-organ and a monkey.

XIX

“Mother, it is done⁠—Juliet will be happy. Oh, that I could lie down to rest beside you now!”

These were the words with which Ida laid her bridal flowers on her mother’s grave.

Then bowing her head on a corner of the marble monument, her tears fell thick and fast upon the white slab on which it rested.

The sacrifice she had planned was finished; her nerves had been as steel and her heart as stone till her self-imposed obligation had been fulfilled to its uttermost letter. Now the inevitable reaction was setting in, and she was beginning to count the cost of what she had done.

And the cost, when counted, could be summed up in a sentence⁠—the happiness of her life to its very last hour.

The renunciation of Clive and his love had been bitter enough; but even that to her fancy now counted as nothing beside the terrible bondage into which she had voluntarily entered by becoming the wife of a man for whom she had neither liking nor respect.

When she had played the part of a scornful, cold-hearted maiden, and had sent Clive from her side to pay court to Juliet, and also, later on, when, in order to put Juliet’s happiness beyond a doubt, she had consented to marry Sefton, she had said to herself:

“What does anything in life matter, so long as those two are happy!”

Now, however, as she faced the fact that nothing but death could release her from the fealty which she had just vowed to a man whom she thoroughly despised, her heart failed her, and she stood appalled at the thought of the dreary years that stretched before her⁠—a “life of night with never a hope of dawn.”

It was no wonder, with thoughts such as these, that her tears should fall thick and fast; nor that she should moan to the mother who had been laid to rest so long ago: “Would that I were lying beside you now!”

The sunshine gleamed whitely on the many tombstones. A light breeze, fresh with the salt of the sea, fanned the hillside, and ruffled the long grasses amid which she stood. A lark rose from the turf, and went soaring upwards into the “living blue,” high and higher, till it became literally a “sightless song.” A woman rose slowly from a gravestone on which she was seated a few yards distant, and, with a slow, hesitating tread, drew near the sorrowing girl.

Ida had been so absorbed in her own sad thoughts as she had made her way towards her mother’s grave, that she had not noticed a group of three persons seated among the tombstones, who had started, and then exchanged glances one with the other at her approach.

A picturesque group these three made among the white tombstones and tall, flowering grasses. The woman, who was about forty-five years of age, was dark-skinned and handsome, with the beauty of South Italy; she was dressed in a pretty peasant’s costume⁠—a dark-blue skirt with broad orange border, and wore on her head a white panni-cloth. Beside her, lounging on the grass, was a fine-featured, insolent-looking young man, with gay necktie, and slouch hat tilted over his eyes to keep out the dazzling sunshine. A little in the rear of these two, a black-eyed, olive-skinned boy stood resting his barrel-organ against some iron railings that enclosed a monument, and on his organ was perched a monkey, gravely munching a green apple.

These three persons were Francesca Xardez, Giorno her eldest son, and Pippo her youngest.

Pippo had leaned forward, touched his mother’s shoulder, and whispered in her ear as Ida approached, and passed within a few yards of them. Upon which Francesca had started, and exclaimed, “O gran cielo! Non è possibile!” and then she had risen to her feet, and with slow, hesitating steps, had made her way towards the young lady.

Ida did not turn her head until she heard a deep voice saying, at her elbow, in Italian:

“This is fate! Signora, can you understand me?”

Ida understood her easily enough. Her recent frequent visits to Italy to study art had familiarised her with the Italian language.

She naturally enough concluded that the woman was begging, and, wishing to keep her own sad solitude unbroken, took out her purse at once, and offered her some money.

Francesca shook her head.

“Not that from you!” she exclaimed. “It is not possible. I saw you married this morning to a man who⁠—” she broke off abruptly, then again asked the question: “Signora, do you understand me?”

Ida was startled, her curiosity was excited to a painful degree.

“A man who⁠—what?” she asked, continuing the conversation in Italian. “Yes, I understand you easily⁠—finish what you were going to say.”

Francesca looked at her steadily.

“Yes, it is fate,” she said, in the same slow, deep tones as before. “I saw you this morning in your beautiful white dress, and I said to myself, ‘I see her once now, and I see her no more again forever,’ and lo, Fate sends me here to rest among the graves, and then sends you here with your beautiful flowers, and we meet!”

Ida grew impatient.

“If you have anything to say to me you must say it quickly,” she said, “for I cannot spare you many minutes.”

“And when you have heard what I have to tell, you will say, ‘would that Heaven had smitten my ears with deafness before they had listened to such a tale.’ ”

Ida grew white.

“What is it tell me quickly,” she said; “is it anything about⁠—Captain Culvers?”

The words “my husband” would not come to her lips.

Francesca’s swarthy face flushed with anger at the mention of the name. “Signora,” she said, in low but vehement tones, “if that man had his due it would be a stiletto into his heart. Ah, I would that I had dealt him his deathblow, instead of bringing him back to life to play the lover and the traitor.” She spoke in such hurried, passionate tones, that it was with difficulty that Ida caught her meaning.

“You must speak slowly and quietly if you want me to understand you,” she said, feeling that behind all this passion and vehemence there no doubt lay something which it behoved her to know.

Then Francesca, controlling herself with difficulty, told the story of Sefton Culvers’s visit to Calabria.

It was carried beyond the point at which Sefton had left it in his narrative to Lord Culvers and Clive, and told of events that had occurred after his departure from Alta Lauria.

First in order had ensued the death of the Marchese. This had happened within a month after Sefton had left the place, and had overwhelmed Violante with grief; a grief that had increased upon her to the detriment of her health as the weeks passed by and there came no tidings of her absent lover. Sefton had been very cautious in giving information to Violante and her father respecting himself and his family, and the only address he had left with her was at an hotel in London where he occasionally stayed. To that hotel again and again Violante addressed imploring letters, to which, as a matter of course, there came no reply.

At first the girl had found it impossible to realise that the man in whom she had so implicitly trusted had proved false, and that deliberate insult was intended to one of her name and race. She insisted on believing that some accident had befallen him, and announced her intention of setting off for England to ascertain if such were the case. Illness prevented her putting her intention into execution; malarial fever, always prone to attack the weak and ailing, seized her, and for some time her life was despaired of. Even after the fever had run its course and she had been pronounced convalescent, it did not need a skilled eye to see that her constitution had been seriously undermined. A great lassitude took possession of her; she ate next to nothing, living entirely on granita and fruit; took no exercise, and showed no interest whatever in the people and things around her. Then it was that Francesca had thought that the time to act had come. She had been the one who had brought the man back to life to act the part of lover and traitor, she would be the one to hunt him down, find out the truth about him, and⁠—Here Francesca broke off abruptly, furtively glancing into Ida’s eyes, which, during the whole of the story, had not once been lifted from her face.

She resumed her narrative at another point, telling of the difficulty with which they had got together sufficient money for the journey. How that Violante had given her every penny she had in the world in order to buy Pippo an organ, with which it was hoped the scanty purse might be eked out, and how that Giorno’s passage to Inghilterra had been clubbed together for by his fellow vinedressers, who one and all would willingly have laid down their lives to give their darling young lady the desire of her heart.

Francesca had a relative in London who was an ice and sweetmeat seller. To his house the three made their way first on their arrival in England, and, thanks to his good offices and the use of an Army List and a Burke’s Peerage, they succeeded in coming upon the traces of Captain Culvers. At least, so far as to ascertain that he had resigned his commission in the Army, and that he had near relatives who owned to a country house at Dering and a town house in Belgrave Square.

Then it was that Pippo and his organ had become useful. The little fellow, with his handsome face and merry ways, managed to win favour with the servants of Lord Culvers’s town household, and found out through them that Captain Culvers would shortly be married at Hastings to his cousin.

After ascertaining full particulars of this wedding, the three had started for Hastings. They did not, however, succeed in reaching the church until the service had begun and the doors were closed. So they had stood in the porch waiting till the ceremony was over, and there had seen the bride pass out of the church and down the steps to her carriage.

Then they had wandered away among the tombs at the back of the church, there to eat their frugal meal of bread and cheese. And to hold council with each other, too, it seemed, for, until Ida’s unexpected appearance, they had been absorbed in earnest, low-voiced talk, in which Giorno’s deep bass voice seemed to take a leading part.

“We will not lose sight of him. If she dies let him look out⁠—that’s all,” Giorno was saying at the moment that Pippo touched his mother’s shoulder and warned her of Ida’s approach.

“His bride,” thought the woman. “Shall they love, shall they be happy? Ah, I will plant the seeds of strife between them, and, please the saints, they will grow!” And then she had crossed the churchyard and had accosted the young lady.

Ida had listened to the tale, saying never a word, her face growing white and whiter, her features seeming to harden as if they were being turned into stone.

Then a great wave of indignation swept over her.

This the man whom she had vowed to love and honour, to cleave to till death parted them! Impossible! If there were no other way, death should part them at once.

But there was another way. It did not for a moment occur to her to go back to her father and insist on a separation from her newly-made husband.

No, she could not see her father arranging such a separation, although easily enough she could picture him endeavouring to patch up a peace between Sefton and herself, and doing his utmost to induce them to live together as husband and wife.

Her hope of deliverance seemed to lie in another quarter. She would go at once straight to Alta Lauria to the discarded Violante, and ask her to receive as her guest one who was more unhappy in her wifehood than was the girl in her slighted maidenhood. To Violante’s presence she would summon her father to hear the girl’s story from her own lips. And Sefton likewise should be summoned, and there, face to face with the two women he had wronged, he should be made to sign a deed of separation that would guarantee to his wife her freedom to the last hour of her life.

The mere thought of her possible release from bondage set the blood dancing in her veins, and brought back the colour to her cheek.

Francesca heard, with unconcealed amazement, of the young lady’s resolve. For a moment she said nothing. Then, pointing to Giorno, still lying on the grass with his hat tilted over his eyes, she said that she must go and consult her son as to whether the thing were possible.

There had followed a short whispered colloquy between the two, at the end of which Francesca had come back, saying respectfully that if the young lady would trust herself to her guidance, she would conduct her safely to Alta Lauria.

Then had succeeded a necessary arrangement of plans. Pippo was despatched to see if Captain Culvers were still patiently awaiting his bride in the street below, and Ida and Francesca, leaving the churchyard by its back entrance, had made their way along by-streets to the church of “Saint Mary, Star of the Sea,” whither Pippo had directions to follow them.

It was in the church of “Saint Mary, Star of the Sea,” that Ida, tearing a leaf from her notebook, had written the hurried line to her father which Pippo had carried to Glynde Lodge.

There, too, they had arranged the successive steps of their journey. Ida would travel alone to London, leaving by a train from Hastings station, not Saint Leonard’s, where her maid was awaiting her. An excursion train, Francesca said, left in an hour or so, and in the crowd and hurry that usually attends the departure of such a train, it was not likely that the quietly-dressed young lady would attract attention.

Once in London, with a thick veil, a long cloak, and⁠—necessary item!⁠—a full purse, no difficulties in the way of a journey to South Italy had need to be anticipated.

XX

Ida’s spirit and determination held out as far as to Naples. Then the fatigue and excitement of the journey began to tell upon her, her strength gave way, and she was confined to her bed for nearly a week in the quiet hotel where she had taken up her quarters.

Throughout that week Francesca waited on her with unremitting attention and the respectful solicitude of an attached maid.

During the long hours of the wakeful nights the girl’s resolution began somewhat to waver, and she asked herself one or two questions, to which it was not easy to find satisfactory answers. Such as:

Was this hurried flight and impetuous action altogether the best way of meeting difficulties which she could not deny she had brought upon herself? Would it not have been wiser to have taken time to consider the matter, and have called into counsel some older and wiser head than her own?

It seemed impossible, however, to answer these questions with either a yea or a nay; so she put them on one side, telling herself that she had gone too far to retreat now. It was altogether too late to think of retracing her steps. It would seem puerile to her father and her friends if she were to return, having accomplished but half of her journey and her purpose. It would be, in fact, tantamount to a confession of her own inability to manage her own affairs; and she must be prepared to see them taken out of her hands and managed for her.

So as soon as her strength rallied somewhat, she set off on the other half of her journey, making Francesca understand that the more quickly it was got through the better pleased she would be.

From Naples they went direct to Cosenza, and thence they diverged through a nest of small villages into the district dominated by the Sila Mountains, among which Alta Lauria is situated.

The country through which she travelled was new to her, and at any other time she would have been enchanted alike with its majestic grandeur and its desolation. Now, however, with the pressure of conflicting thoughts distracting her, both were lost upon her.

Three days of continuous and tiring travel gave her her first view of the Palazzo of Alta Lauria, crushed in, as it were, between stupendous rocks, high over a well-wooded ravine, in which lay hidden all that called itself the hamlet.

Violante having been warned by telegram from Naples of her intended visit, Ida confidently expected, so soon as the courtyard gates of the Palazzo opened to receive her, that there would be its girl-mistress awaiting her, and that then together they would exchange confidences and sympathy.

No such result ensued. She was ushered into a small, scantily furnished, and decidedly untidy room by a bare-legged peasant boy, and there Francesca left her to her own devices for nearly an hour, while she went to Violante’s apartment.

The ill-kept exterior of the Palazzo did not promise much in the way of comfort for its interior. Ida was nevertheless struck with astonishment at the poverty and disorder which on every side proclaimed itself. A third-rate albergo would have supplied better entertainment than was to fall to her lot during her sojourn in that ancient Palazzo.

Francesca, returning from her long colloquy with her young mistress, apologised somewhat for the condition of things; but then, she said, what would you have? The honoured Maestro of the house was dead, and its young mistress⁠—ah, she was so ill, so ill! She had thought for nothing; she could not even see the English Signora⁠—not that day, at least⁠—but tomorrow, next day, perhaps. Would the Signora have patience and wait a day or so?

And then Francesca had again disappeared, and her place was taken by an untidy little maid, who spoke an odd patois utterly unintelligible to Ida, and seemed at a loss to understand Ida’s Italian.

This was the case with the other servants of the house. They were but few in number, and they one and all presented the appearance of untidy, ill-educated peasants, assuredly not that of trained domestics. And they one and all spoke the odd mixture of Italian and Greek known as Calabrese.

To add to the discomfort of the whole thing, the fare was of the coarsest and most frugal, and the sleeping accommodation corresponded in quality. The rooms were small; the heat was intolerable; the buzzing of the insects and the noise of the cicale alone were sufficient to prevent sleep.

On the third day after her arrival Ida began to feel that the journey so impetuously undertaken was a mistake from first to last, and bethought her of writing home to her father and Juliet stating the facts of the case, and explaining her reasons for not writing sooner.

First, however, she thought she would finally ascertain if there were any likelihood of obtaining an interview with Violante.

To this end she despatched the untidy little waiting-maid in search of Francesca, who had seemed oddly enough to have purposely kept out of her way since the day of her arrival. But before the little maid could have had time to deliver her message, Francesca herself, agitated and weeping passionately, entered the room.

Violante was dying⁠—could not live more than a week, if that said the doctor, who had been hastily summoned from Cosenza.

She wished to see the Englishman who had broken faith with her once more, give him back his ring with her own hand, and bid him an everlasting adieu. Would the Signora send him a letter that would bring him without a moment’s delay?

Ida at once consented to do so. To summon her husband and her father to the bedside of the dying girl would be one step in the programme she had planned. So she wrote a hurried line to her husband, and immediately after a second and longer letter to her father explaining matters, and begging him to accompany Sefton to Alta Lauria.

Francesca did not see any necessity for posting the letter to Lord Culvers, so it was torn in fragments and tossed into the kitchen fire.

The letter to Sefton, however, she carefully sealed with Violante’s ring in order to render it the more impressive, and then transmitted through the post to Giorno, who, with Pippo, remained in Paris, keeping an eye on Captain Culvers.

XXI

To the last hour of his life Clive will never forget that swift yet tedious journey to the south undertaken under such strange conditions. Had anyone said to him only yesterday, “Out of the whole human race can you single out your enemy?” he would at once have replied affirmatively with the name of Sefton Culvers. Yet here was he today playing the part of a sworn friend to this man, the part, indeed, that could be expected of none but a sworn friend, starting, at a moment’s notice, on a quest out of which all he could hope to receive by way of payment would be the pleasure of looking upon another man’s happiness.

For, stifle the thought as he might, again and again would it present itself: “By-and-by you will have to stand by and see this husband and wife kiss each other on the lips, and join hands in reconciliation, and then nothing more will fall to your share but to drop out of their lives forever.”

During the long night hours of their journey, with his nerves strung to their tightest, and his brain active in conjuring up terrors and horrible possibilities, Clive tried to face this thought in its bare hideousness, and, as it were, look it out of countenance. The effort was futile. Face it as much as he liked, he could never look away its ugliness. The mere endeavour to do so was something equivalent to running the point of a stiletto into his flesh, and crying out, “See here! The farther I send it in the less I shall feel it.”

Perhaps, after all, what gave the sting to these bitter thoughts was the knowledge of Sefton Culvers’s unworthiness. Clive’s worst enemies had never accused him of priggishness, he had been known to stand up for more than one man who had, as the phrase goes, “gone under,” and plead “extenuating circumstances” where most men would have said “serve him right.” Those, however, had been cases which had not come so nearly home to him. He had seen the unworthiness of other men, he felt the unworthiness of Sefton Culvers⁠—therein lay the whole of the difference.

It was not, then, surprising that with thoughts such as these he could throw but little warmth into his intercourse with the man to whom he had been thus suddenly called upon to act the comrade.

Sefton, on his part, showed no disposition to bridge the distance between them.

His demeanour throughout the journey was gloomy and abstracted, broken now and again by sudden fits of stormy, reckless defiance, in which he talked a good deal about being a first-rate shot; and threatened to teach those skulking, cowardly vagabonds a sharp lesson. These fits, however, grew rarer as the journey progressed, and his demeanour became less that of a man nerving himself to meet a crisis with energy and decision, than of one compelling himself to stoicism and despair.

Clive noting this change of manner set it down to the conviction⁠—gaining strength in his own mind⁠—that it was to Ida’s dying bed they had been summoned, and that the ring to be resigned was a wedding-ring which she judged ought never to have been placed upon her finger.

A wild, irrepressible feeling that could be called exultation compared with other moods filled his mind at the thought. To see Ida on her deathbed resigning a ring she had never prized to its unworthy donor, would be to see her soul set free from bondage. That would be a sorrow that became a joy beside the thought of a peace patched up between this uncongenial husband and wife, and years of dreary companionship to be passed together.

“The fever is the greatest danger she runs, there can be no other,” he blurted out once, impetuously, as he and Sefton paced the platform at Naples waiting for the train that was to bear them on the latter half of their journey. “She is an Englishwoman⁠—the daughter of an English peer. She is staying in the house of an Italian nobleman. They would never dare to offer her insult or even annoyance.”

Sefton’s reply contradicted every one of his suppositions.

“To my mind,” he said, gloomily, “fever is the very least of her dangers. Take the facts of the case and judge for yourself. Supposing that you had offended past forgiveness, not one person only, but a whole community, a set of lawless, insolent, ill-conditioned people, glad of any excuse to execute a vendetta⁠—a vendetta, believe me, is far from being a thing of the past in Italy, in some places the authorities take no notice whatever of its perpetration. Tell me, would you like the person who had partly been the cause of this offence to be planted in the midst of such a set of ruffians without any protection whatever?”

There could be but one answer to such a question, and for a few minutes there fell a pause, which the two men made busy with gloomy thoughts.

“Then,” said Clive, presently, “you imagine Ida’s letter to you was written under compulsion? I imagined it to be⁠—”

He broke off abruptly, remembering to whom he was talking.

The finish of his sentence would have been:

“The natural outburst of indignation that a high-spirited girl would feel at a sudden revelation of treachery.”

“Perhaps written under compulsion, or perhaps under persuasion, for they are a wily people these south Italians,” answered Sefton. “But, in any case, however written, it serves their purpose⁠—”

He broke off abruptly; his face, on which a gas-lamp overhead threw a flickering light, showed white and rigid.

“What purpose?” asked Clive, for Sefton’s voice had an odd, jarring note in it.

“Of a decoy,” answered Sefton, shortly; and then he turned on his heel, and left Clive to ruminate over a new train of thought.

It was a train of thought which stirred the very depths of his nature, and made him feel that the angels of darkness were coming about him in new shapes now. Great Heavens! The monsters with which the Greek heroes did battle in old time were comely compared with these.

He rallied his forces, and resolved to beat them down.

“I am a man,” he cried, in spirit. “There is such a thing as duty! I will sweep my heart clean of all thoughts rather than entertain such monsters as these. If danger threaten Culvers I will stand by him as if he were my dearest friend.”

And it so chanced that at the very moment that Clive was making up his mind, in spite of all temptations and adverse circumstances, to listen to the voice of duty, Ida, by another road, was arriving at the conclusion that life was intended to be something other than a playground where people could pluck flowers and chase butterflies to their hearts’ content.

Death had speeded more quickly on his way to Alta Lauria than had these travellers on theirs; and as the two men stood waiting for their train at Naples, Violante’s wayward, lovesick soul had struggled forth from its worn and wasted tenement.

Her eyes had been fixed upon the door, waiting for it to open and admit the man who had played her so ill a turn, and her ears had strained for the sound of his footsteps to her very last breath.

Francesca’s grief took a strange form. She was a passionate, impetuous woman, apt to speak her thoughts as they rose in her mind, and noisy alike in grief and in joy, yet when she stood beside the white, lifeless form, not a sound passed her lips, not a tear stood in her eye.

She went silently from the chamber of death to the room where Ida was preparing to go to rest for the night, and laying her hand on the girl’s arm, said only:

“Come, see his work!”

Ida understood her, and silently followed the way she led.

It was the first time the girl had ever stood beside a bed of death, and a great awe filled her soul as she stood looking down on the beautiful, rigid face, and thin hands clasped as if in prayer. The priest had administered the last rites of the Church early in the day, and naught remained to be done but to dress the maiden for her last long sleep.

The great candles placed on either side of the bed had not yet been lighted; nevertheless, the room was not dark. A glorious summer’s moon, which filled in the windowpanes with a landscape of sky and mountain of surpassing grandeur, poured a flood of silver light on Violante’s girlish features, impressing upon them a supernatural and spiritual beauty that in life they had never known.

“How beautiful! How awful!” exclaimed Ida.

Then, moved by a sudden impulse, and heedless of Francesca’s presence, she knelt down beside the dead girl, covering her face with her hands.

It was an act of homage⁠—of submission alike to the great law and to the greater Lawgiver.

And as she knelt thus in that dread presence, with senses sealed to all outward things, a rush of thoughts came to her.

How vain seemed life with its passions and longings! This girl was but one of thousands who, as it were, beat out their souls with their hopes and dreads. Had not she herself been doing the same thing, though in another fashion? Were not her feet bent on running much the same course? Where would it land her at last? To gratify her pride⁠—her dignity, as she had called it⁠—had she not in a moment of passion tossed all her solemnly-undertaken obligations to the four winds of heaven?

Now when Death came to her side⁠—as come he must⁠—with his weights and scales, how light and poor a thing that pride and dignity would seem! Ah, how poor and contemptible everything in life would seem, except that which, begun in Time, finds its fruition in Eternity⁠—duty!

XXII

The news of Violante’s death met Clive and Sefton at Caréno, one of the nest of little villages they had to pass through on their way to the Sila Mountains.

From Naples they had travelled to Buffaloria direct, there they had changed trains for Cosenza, and at Cosenza they had again changed for Caréno, a tiny place that had been half-wrecked by the earthquake of 1870.

They arrived here in the middle of the night, and found the one little inn astir to meet the arrival of passengers by that train. The landlord, an energetic little man, was profuse in his recommendation of his sleeping accommodation, which he said had been expressly arranged to meet the requirements of English travellers.

Clive and Sefton had, however, taken all the sleep they intended to take as they had jolted in their train over the marshes and across the plains of tamarisk.

Supper they must have⁠—yes, that was a necessity; and also provisions must be put together for their tramp through the Sila Mountains. Also mules and guides must be found for them; but beyond this they would not trouble the landlord of the albergo.

While the little man busied himself in carrying out their directions in these respects, the two men arranged their plans for the continuation of their journey.

Sefton, who had travelled the same road before, laid down the law on the matter.

“The sooner we start the better,” he said, “if we wish to reach Alta Lauria before nightfall. It is at least twelve hours from here on the best of mules. We have over six thousand feet to mount; the mountain paths are atrocious; we can’t do with less than two mules each.”

“And we have to think of the return journey,” said Clive. “If Ida should be well, and able to travel, the less delay in getting back the better.”

He spoke moodily. The nearer it came, the harder seemed the necessity of seeing Sefton and Ida side by side as husband and wife once more.

Sefton did not for the moment reply. When his answer came, it was a gloomy one.

“Let the return journey alone,” he said; “the getting there is all we can think of now. It will be impossible to arrange the details of our return till we know what awaits us there.”

The landlord came in to announce that he had succeeded in procuring for them two of the best guides the district could supply⁠—Ditta and Andrea Capelli. He had sent and roused them up from their sleep, and they would be ready to start so soon as the sun rose. But the mules! There were only two in the place that a gentleman could ride, and one of these had lamed himself only yesterday, and would be fit for nothing for more than a week. He would have to send all round in search of others. Now would the gentlemen be pleased to wait and rest while he did so?

And then, to deprecate the angry impatience which he could see in the faces of his guests, the little man proceeded to retail a few scraps of gossip which he thought might be likely to interest them.

The gentlemen were going to Alta Lauria to the Palazzo, not a doubt. Now had they heard the sad news which had been told him only yesterday night, that the Marchese’s only daughter was dead? The Marchese himself had died only a year or so ago, and now his daughter was dead. Was it not sad? And the Palazzo and all the Marchese’s land would go now to a distant relative who had been born and brought up in Naples, and knew nothing of Calabria and its people.

Violante dead! Sefton’s face grew white. He rose a little unsteadily from the table and walked away to the window. The landlord seemed to feel that he had somehow conveyed unwelcome news, and, after asking Clive if he would like to see the guides so soon as they arrived, he discreetly left the room.

Clive drew a long breath.

“This explains Ida’s letter,” he exclaimed. And at the moment he could not have said whether the thought brought him the most of joy or of pain.

Sefton made no reply. He was standing at the half-open casement, his head thrown back, his arms folded on his breast, his eyes, with a strange, unseeing look in them, fixed upon the distant landscape.

The inn stood on rocks a little above the small cluster of houses dignified by the title of village. Below these the valley lay in depths of purple gloom; straight in front towered the ridges of La Sila, crag over crag, spire over spire, till they lost themselves in the clouds.

The moon had set, and above these fantastic crags and spires faintly showed the beautiful white light which precedes the dawn.

On this Sefton’s unseeing eyes seemed fixed.

A remark which he presently made seemed to show that he was following a curious train of thought.

“I dare say, after all,” he said, in a vague, dreamy tone, “a man never gets anyone to love him better than his mother does. Now if anything were to happen to me, no one would grieve for me like my poor old mother!”

Assuredly Captain Culvers’s late associates at No. 15, Rue Vervien, would have found some difficulty in identifying this absent, gloomy man, with their débonnaire if somewhat haughty companion of two or three days back.

Clive was puzzled. What did this new mood taking possession of the man mean? The entrance of the guides⁠—the brothers Capelli⁠—at this moment prevented further talk.

They presented a somewhat ferocious appearance with their guns and tall, brigand hats. Their faces, however, were prepossessing, their manner respectful. The elder brother, Ditta, was a man of about forty years of age, Andrea some six or eight years younger.

Sefton interrogated them as to their knowledge of the mountain passes, and whether it would be possible to arrive at Alta Lauria before nightfall.

They shrugged their shoulders. If they set off at once it would be possible; but where there were mules to find! And then they shrugged their shoulders again. Clive, standing near the open window, had his attention for a moment diverted from these men by a voice which reached his ear coming up out of the darkness in the courtyard below.

“Have those Englishmen gone on yet,” it said, “or do they stay here for sunrise?”

The landlord’s voice replied telling the story of the search for mules, and that most probably the travellers would be delayed for an hour or so.

Then followed an animated colloquy⁠—sympathy on one side, complaint on the other respecting the hard fate of innkeepers who had to keep their houses open all day and all night to meet the uncertain hours of the trains.

Clive, leaning slightly forward, saw a man emerge from the courtyard, and turn his steps towards the road that wound upward to the mountains. He could just make out in the semidarkness that his figure was young and slight, and that he carried a gun.

Knowing the fondness for gossip which exists in Italian villages, he laid no stress upon the circumstance.

Later on, however, it was to be recalled to his memory.

XXIII

The delay in procuring the mules retarded their journey by three or four hours, and in spite of their urgency, and the offer of double and treble pay alike to landlord and muleteers, Clive and Sefton did not get away from the inn till close upon eight o’clock that morning.

By noon, however, thanks to the good pace of the animals when found, they succeeded in reaching the pasture tablelands of La Sila, which in the summer is the scene of a vast migration of shepherds and their flocks from the plains below.

The hour of Ave Maria found these plains with their meandering streams and shadowy beech forests some three thousand feet below them, and entirely hidden from their view by the intervening perpendicular rocks.

A white pebbly fiumara, or dry torrent course, then became their road. It wound away steadily upward for some three or four miles; the rocks on either side of it closing in, near and nearer the higher they went, until at length little more than a broad ribbon of blue sky seemed left to them overhead.

Landscape there was none. Where the sharp perpendicular rocks on either side split, as it were, and the eye wandered there for a glimpse of surrounding scenery, or, as in the case of Clive and Sefton, in hopes of catching a distant view of Alta Lauria, it was met only by other sharp perpendicular rocks, or perhaps by some ravine choked with earthquake-riven blocks of granite; or some yawning chasm showing black now in the fading daylight.

And everywhere silence, solitude⁠—intense, profound. It seemed a place for shades and ghosts to wander in, rather than men endowed with senses that loved light and colour, glow and variety in beauty.

“They’re taking us all right, I suppose; this path seems endless,” said Clive, addressing Sefton in English.

Sefton made no reply. He had descended from his mule, which he was leading over a rough part of the road. His head was bent, he seemed lost in thought.

So Clive addressed an equivalent question in Italian to Ditta.

“How much more of this? How many kilos?” he asked.

The man shrugged his shoulders, and answered that another two hours would bring them in sight of Alta Lauria.

After all, hours measured their road better than kilos. Their day’s march, so far, could have been accomplished in less than half the time along an English country road.

It would have been useless to deny, young and muscular though they were, that the fatigue of their day’s mountaineering following on the heels of their rapid travelling from Paris was beginning to tell on them.

Clive noticed that during the last two hours of this seemingly endless pass, Sefton’s brandy-flask went very often to his lips.

Their strip of blue sky overhead presently told them that the sun was setting, the deep, level blue catching all sorts of wondrous tints, changeful, oscillating, undefinable as the colours in a dove’s wing.

Then these, too, in their turn vanished, leaving what had been level blue before level grey now, deepening in parts into the night blue of an Italian sky.

And then a slow, white radiance spreading athwart this, told them that the moon had risen.

Straight in front of them their path took a sudden sharp curve.

Sefton and Clive were walking side by side now, and the guides were following with the four mules.

“When we round that curve we get in sight of Alta Lauria,” said Sefton.

He stood still for a moment, leaning his back against a huge block of granite which might have suggested the thought that the Titans, when building the mountains, had let fall one of their bricks.

“Better mount,” said Clive; “you’re getting footsore.”

During this, the last day of their journey together, his heart had softened towards his companion in a way that, taking all things into consideration, seemed even to himself unaccountable.

Sefton, however, had no intention of mounting. He let the guides with their mules pass on ahead, then he lowered his voice almost to a whisper.

“Redway,” he said, “I’ve been thinking over a good many things during the last half-hour, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’ll be of no use for either of us to show fight.”

“Show fight! Where, when, how?” asked Clive, looking all round as if in search of some hidden foe, and feeling instinctively for his revolver.

“That’ll be of no use to you,” said Sefton, noting the movement; “if one of those skulking cowards attacks us there’ll be at least half-a-dozen in hiding to back him up. Besides⁠—” here he broke off with a short laugh, “we won’t have unnecessary bloodshed. They’d rather not touch you if it can be helped⁠—it’s me⁠—my life they want⁠—not yours.”

“Why must there be any attacking?” said Clive. “We’ve got so far on our journey unmolested. Alta Lauria is almost in sight now. There’s no sign of anyone skulking about.”

His eye scanned the rocks right and left of him as he ended his sentence.

“They wouldn’t be such fools as to attack us here,” replied Sefton; “there’s no hiding-place out of which they could take sure aim. It would be a case of fair fight, man to man, face to face. No, wait till we’ve rounded that point there, straight ahead of us, and you’ll see what I mean.”

Clive suddenly paused, looking Sefton straight in the face.

“Do you suppose,” he cried, with a fierce impetuosity for which the other was not prepared, “that I’ve travelled with you side by side all these miles, and then intend to stand by and see you butchered? Do you imagine I’ve brought my revolver for nothing?”

Sefton grew excited also.

“That’s it,” he cried. “I knew that was in your mind. It would be madness⁠—sheer madness for you to attempt that sort of thing. Supposing you put a bullet into a man, what then? There’d be a dozen knives out at you at once. And then what becomes of Ida?”

That was a question not easy to answer. Clive remained silent.

Sefton went on:

“What are those fellows in front good for? Would they go on to the Palazzo and be a safe conduct for Ida back to England? No. They’d just run away as fast as their legs would carry them, or else fraternise with the scoundrels who had knocked us over. No, you must do as I tell you. Promise me.”

There fell a long silence. The crack of the whips of the muleteers, their loud-voiced “Hola, huepe!” to the animals, together with a jangling of bells, broke the intense stillness; but there came never a word from Clive.

Sefton went on impetuously as before.

“I want your word of honour⁠—nothing else will satisfy me⁠—that if I am attacked you won’t show fight, but will push straight on with the guides to the Palazzo, demand to see Ida, and then not trust her out of your sight till you get clear of this accursed hole. Will you do this?⁠—give me your word of honour that you will.”

“Upon my life, Culvers, I can’t,” Clive exclaimed, vehemently, “or if I did, it would be of no use. I’m confident if I saw a rifle pointed at you, or a knife raised, I should forget all about my word of honour, and out with my revolver at once.”

The two men had again come to a standstill in the narrow pass, and were now facing each other. On their right hand the rocks rose straight and sheer, with never a break in them; on their left a huge rift let in a gleam of the fast-fading twilight, showed a vista of fantastic yet still perpendicular rocks beyond, showed, too, the deep black chasm that their path was skirting.

“What is your revolver like?” asked Sefton. “Six-chambered, I suppose?”

Clive, thinking that he was weighing the chances of its being of use to them, drew it from his pocket and handed it to him.

“It’s simply perfect. I know of no better make,” he said.

Sefton looked at it critically, then he made a step towards the rift in the rocks which let in the twilight, as if to get a better view of the toy-like weapon.

And then, before Clive could realise what was in his mind, he had leaned over the blocks and boulders which separated their path from the precipice it skirted, and the revolver was flung into the darkness of the chasm.

Clive turned upon him furiously.

“You’d no right to do such a thing,” he cried; “it was treacherous of you. At least you should have given me a choice in the matter.”

Sefton, for once in his life, met anger with calmness.

“I tell you you have no choice in the matter⁠—the choice remains with me, and I have made it. Try and face the fact that we are in a position in which weapons are of no use to us. If we are not attacked, well and good, we don’t require our revolvers; if we are, all your revolver would do would be to sign your own death-warrant, it wouldn’t save my life. When we round that point, as I told you before, you’ll see what I mean. Don’t you see, man, what deadly earnest I am in?”

And “deadly earnest” was written on his white face, set teeth, and rigid, knotted brow as plainly as it could well be.

Then, in a silence that neither of the two men were in the mood to break, they made the rest of the distance that lay between them and the sharp curve of the rocks.

When they rounded that curve Clive saw in a moment what Sefton had meant.

The narrow mountain pass came to an end there, and the path wound steadily downwards into a dark, well-wooded ravine, in which lay hidden all that called itself the village of Alta Lauria. High over this ravine, on the farther side, straight in front of them, stood the Palazzo, crushed and squeezed, as it were, into a nest of whitely-gleaming rocks.

Higher still, over the Palazzo itself, hung a great, white, staring moon, cutting into sharp relief against the lucent night sky every fantastic crag and turret of the uppermost heights, and piling its shadows upon the dark, wooded ravine, till it showed like the Valley of the Shadow of Death itself.

And the path at the head of which Sefton and Clive now stood led straight into it.

A bare, pebbly path it ran for about twenty yards or so, then it sloped gradually downwards into what seemed a wood of ilex and wild olive, and where the only road appeared to be that which wayfarers themselves had trampled down into the semblance of one.

Ditta brought his mules to a standstill, to ask if the gentlemen would like to mount, or would they rather walk through the wood, and mount at the farther end.

“How far does this wood go⁠—how many kilos?” questioned Clive, trying to gauge the danger that might threaten now.

The man replied that it was something over two kilos; that it was easier to walk it, as there was so much scrubby underwood, in which the mules were apt to get entangled. On the other side the road grew rocky and steep once more, and then it might be as well to mount.

“We’ll walk,” said Sefton, with great decision. “Mules would be no good to us in that tangle.”

The muleteers went on ahead once more, with their cracking whips, and “holas,” and “huepes,” urging on their tired animals, till together they disappeared amid the shadows of the ilexes and wild olives.

Was it fancy, Clive asked himself, or did there come, together with the shouts and cracking of whips, a sound of movement, of trampling from out the shadowy depths of the wood, that seemed something other than the tramp of the mules and the muleteers?

Sefton heard it, not a doubt. With a sudden, impetuous bound he dashed ahead of Clive some half-dozen yards, then came to a standstill.

The moon lighted up his set, white face as he turned it towards the edge of the wood whence the sound had seemed to come.

“Here, you fellows in hiding there!” he cried in Italian, in a loud, ringing voice; “I’m a soldier, and an Englishman! If you want my life put a bullet into me! Don’t rush out at me with your confounded butchers’ knives as if I were a sheep!”

Swift and sharp there came the answer he expected; the click of a rifle, the whizzing of a bullet, and Sefton Culvers fell a dead man at Clive’s very feet.

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!”

Colophon

A Bride of a Summer’s Day
was published in 1891 by
Catherine Louisa Pirkis.

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In the Conservatory,
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