The Tyranny of Weakness

By Charles Neville Buck

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Title: The Tyranny of Weakness

Author: Charles Neville Buck

Illustrator: Paul Stahr

Release Date: June 6, 2007 [EBook #21689]

Language: English


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THE TYRANNY OF WEAKNESS

BY

CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK

AUTHOR OF

"THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS,"
"DESTINY," Etc.

Frontispiece by
PAUL STAHR

[Illustration: Publisher's logo]

NEW YORK
W. J. WATT & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

[Illustration: Stuart was a memory and she was trying very hard to make
him even less than that]

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
W. J. WATT & COMPANY

_OTHER BOOKS BY_ CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK

     THE KEY TO YESTERDAY
     THE LIGHTED MATCH
     THE PORTAL OF DREAMS
     THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS
     THE BATTLE CRY
     THE CODE OF THE MOUNTAINS
     DESTINY


PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN. N. Y.




THE TYRANNY OF WEAKNESS



CHAPTER I


They were types in embryo, but of course they did not know it. No more
would a grain of wheat and a poppy seed dropping side-by-side in a
fallow place reflect upon their destinies, though one might typify a
working world's dependence for bread; the other a dreaming world's
reliance for opium.

They were a boy and a girl stepping artlessly into the wide chances of a
brand-new and vastly interesting adolescence. Just now her young eyes
were provocative with the starry light of mischief. His were smoldering
darkly under her badgering because his pride had been touched to the
quick. His forefathers had been gentlemen in England before they were
gentlemen in the Valley of Virginia and his heritage of knightly blood
must not be made a subject of levity. But the girl reflected only that
when his dark eyes blazed and his cheeks colored with that dammed-up
fury she found him a more diverting vassal than in calmer and duller
moods. A zoo is more animated when the beasts are stirred into action.

"What was it that General Breckinridge said, Stuart?" She put the
question innocently. "When the Newmarket cadets made their charge?"

"He said--" Suddenly the boy caught the riffled mockery of her eyes and
abruptly his inspired recital broke off in exasperation, "May I ask just
why you find that such a funny story?" he inquired with ironical
dignity. "Most people seem to think it was rather pitiful than comic to
send to their slaughter boys almost young enough to be in the nursery."

The eyes of Conscience Williams twinkled. "Maybe it isn't the story
itself that's funny," she deigned to admit. "When your father told it, I
cried--but when you tell it your face is so furious that--that you seem
about to begin the war between the states all over again."

"Of course that makes it perfectly clear." Into the manner of young Mr.
Stuart Farquaharson came now the hauteur of dignified rebuke. He
enveloped himself in a sudden and sullen silence, brooding as he sat
with his eyes fixed on his riding boots.

"What did General Breckinridge say?" She prompted persistently. Such
sheer perversity maddened him. He had been reciting to her a story of
exalted heroism--the narrative of how the boy cadets had hurled their
young bodies against the Northern cannon and of how General Breckinridge
had prayed for forgiveness as he gave the command which sent this
flowering youth to its fate. And she found it amusing! He could not see
how genuinely comic was his own unreconstructed ardor--how exaggerated
was his cocksure manner--how thoroughly he spoke as though he himself
had bled on the field of honor.

From her hammock she watched him with serene and inscrutable
complacency, from under long, half-closed lashes. In his gaze was
inarticulate wrath, but back of that--idolatry. He had from birth
breathed an atmosphere of traditions in which the word "chivalry" was
defined, not as an obsolete term, but as a thing still kept sacredly
aflame in the hearts of gentlemen. To the stilted gallantry of his
boyhood, ideals had meant more than ideas until Conscience Williams had
come from her home on Cape Cod and turned his life topsy-turvy. Since
her advent he had dreamed only of dark eyes and darker hair and crimson
lips. He had rehearsed eloquent and irresistible speeches, only to have
them die on a tongue which swelled painfully and clove to the roof of
his mouth when he essayed their utterance. Then had come an inspiration.
The stirring narration of how the Newmarket cadets had charged the
Northern guns was to have been his cue, carrying him with the momentum
of its intrinsic heroism over the ramparts of tongue-tied shyness. That
was what he had essayed this morning, aided and abetted by the tuneful
fragrance of June in Virginia. The stage had been set--his courage had
mounted--and before he had reached his magnificent peroration, she had
laughed at him. Ye Gods! She had affronted the erstwhile Confederate
States of America and his spirit was galled.

Suddenly Conscience looked up and met his gaze penitently. It was a
change from mockery so swift and complete that he should have suspected
it, but he saw only a flash of sun through dark clouds.

"Do you like poetry?" she abruptly demanded.

"Like poetry!" Again the boy's countenance needed a twinkle of merriment
to redeem it from a too serious acceptance of self. "Not to like
poetry--if it's real poetry--is simply to be a plain clod." He spoke
with an oracular and pedantic assurance which challenged the girl's
mischief afresh.

"Shall I recite you something?" was her mild and seemingly placating
suggestion, "just to see if it is real poetry?"

"Will you? I wish you would." He bent forward in eager anticipation.
Verse should pave the way with music for the avowal which he had so far
failed to force across the barrier between heart and lips.

She rose from the hammock and stood beside one of the broad verandah
pillars, very straight and slender and flower-like, with the June sun on
her hair. Stuart's heart was conscious of a sudden glow. A boy new to
love, like a man new to drink, can recognize from a sip an elation that
the jaded taste has forever forfeited. Then in a rich voice with a
slightly exaggerated elocution, Conscience began:


     "Up from the meadows, rich with corn, clear in the cool September
       morn,
     The clustered spires of Frederick stand, green-walled by the hills
       of Maryland."


Those schools wherein the last of the Farquaharsons had derived his
primary education had not starred or featured the poems of John
Greenleaf Whittier. Stuart's eyes dwelt devouringly on the
elocutionist--as yet unruffled by suspicion. They were doing their best
to say the things at which his lips balked. But as the recitation
proceeded their light died from hope to misery and from misery to the
anger of hurt pride. He stood very rigid and very attentive, making no
effort to interrupt, but holding her gaze defiantly as she went on:


     "Up the street came the Rebel tread, Stonewall Jackson riding
       ahead.
     Under his slouch hat left and right, he glanced and the old flag
       caught his sight."


At these lines the boy flinched, but still he said nothing. Like a
soldier who stands at attention under the threat of a firing squad he
listened to the end--or rather to the stanzas which recite:


     "'Shoot, if you must at this old gray head, but spare your
       country's flag,' she said.
     A flush of manhood, a look of shame, into the face of their leader
       came...."


That was too much! The man of whom these impious words were spoken was
that gallant knight, without reproach, whose name is hallowed in every
Southern heart. Very slowly Stuart Farquaharson raised his hand.

"I think," he announced with a shake of repressed fury in his voice,
"I'll have to go home now. Good afternoon."

"Then you don't like poetry?"

"I don't consider that poetry," he said with a dignity which an
archbishop might have envied. "I consider it slander of a dead hero."

"You mean, then," Conscience seemed a little frightened now and her
utterance was hurried and fluttering, "that you are mad and are going?
You never go until later than this."

It was difficult to be both courteous and honest, and Stuart's code
demanded both.

"I expect there wasn't ever the same reason before."

This time it was the girl's eyes that leaped into flame and she stamped
a small foot.

"Did you ever have any _fun_ in your life?" she demanded. "You know
perfectly well that I teased you just because you were such a solemn owl
that you're not far from being a plain, every-day prig. All right; go if
you like and don't come to see me again until you get over the idea that
you're a--a--" she halted for a word, then added scornfully--"a
combination high priest and Prince of Wales."

Stuart Farquaharson bowed stiffly.

"All right," he said. "I won't forget. Good-by."

       *       *       *       *       *

At the dinner table that evening Mrs. Farquaharson noted with concern
the trance-like abstraction in which her son sat, as one apart. Later as
she mixed for the General the night-cap toddy, which was an institution
hallowed by long usage, she commented on it.

"I'm afraid Stuart isn't well," she volunteered. "He's not a moody boy
by nature, and he doesn't seem himself to-day. Perhaps we had better
send him to Doctor Heathergill. It wouldn't do for him to fall ill just
when he's starting to college."

The General studied the toddy as though it held the secrets of a seer's
crystal. "Your very good health, my dear." He raised the glass and about
his gray eyes came the star-point wrinkles of an amused smile, "I
noticed that Stuart didn't ride over to see the little Williams girl
to-night. Wasn't that unusual?"

Mrs. Farquaharson nodded her head. "He must have been feeling positively
ill," she declared. "Nothing less could have kept him away."

But the father, who had never before shown evidence of a hard heart,
permitted his quizzical twinkle to broaden into a frank grin, "With
every confidence in Dr. Heathergill, I doubt his ability to aid our
declining son."

"Then you think--?"

"Precisely so. The little girl from the North has undertaken a portion
of the boy's education which is as painful to him as it is essential."

"He's been perfectly lovely to her," defended the mother indignantly.
"It's a shame if she's hurt him."

The General's face grew grave.

"It's a God's blessing, I think." He spoke thoughtfully now. "Stuart is
a sentimentalist. He lives largely on dreams and poetry and ideals."

"Surely, General--" Sometimes in the moment of serious connubial debate
Mrs. Farquaharson gave her husband his title. "Surely you wouldn't have
him otherwise. The traditions of his father and grandfathers were the
milk on which he fed at my breast."

"By which I set great store, but a child must be weaned. Stuart is
living in an age of shifting boundaries in ideas and life.

"I should hate to see him lower his youthful standards, but I should
like to see him less in the clouds. I should like to see him leaven the
lump with a sense of humor. To be self-consciously dedicated to noble
things and yet unable to smile at one's ego is to be censorious, and to
be censorious is to be offensive."

"But he's just a child yet," argued Stuart's mother. "For all his height
and strength he's hardly more than a boy after all."

"Quite true, yet to-night he's tossing in his bed and breathing like a
furnace because his heart is broken for all time. It's all very well to
swear:


           "To love one maiden only, cleave to her
     And worship her by years of noble deeds,


but for him that day is still far off. Meanwhile he's got to have his
baptism of fire. It's a mighty good thing for a boy like Stuart to begin
taking a little punishment while he's young. Young hearts, not less than
young bones, mend quicker and better. He's over intense and if he got
the _real_ before he's had his puppy loves it would go hard with him."




CHAPTER II


When Stuart presented himself at breakfast the next morning his eyes
were black-ringed with sleeplessness, but his riding boots were freshly
polished and his scarf tied with extra precision. It was in the mind of
the youngest Farquaharson to attain so personable an appearance that the
lady who had cast aside his love should be made to realize what she had
lost as they passed on the highway.

Then he went to the stables to have Johnny Reb saddled and started away,
riding slowly. When he came in view of the house which she sanctified
with her presence, a gray saddle mare stood fighting flies and stamping
by the stone hitching post in front of the verandah, and each swish of
the beast's tail was a flagellation to the boy's soul. The mare belonged
to Jimmy Hancock and logically proclaimed Jimmy's presence within.
Heretofore between Stuart and Jimmy had existed a cordial amity, but now
the aggrieved one remembered many things which tainted Jimmy with
villainy and crassness. Stuart turned away, his hand heavy on the bit,
so that Johnny Reb, unaccustomed to this style of taking pleasure sadly,
tossed his head fretfully and widened his scarlet nostrils in disgust.

Ten minutes later the single and grim-visaged horseman riding north came
upon a pair riding south. Johnny Reb's silk coat shone now with sweat,
but his pace was sedate. The love-sick Stuart had no wish to travel so
fast as would deny the lady opportunity to halt him for conversation.
Conscience and Jimmy were also riding slowly and Stuart schooled his
features into the grave dignity of nobly sustained suffering. No
Marshal of France passing the Emperor's reviewing stand ever rode with a
deeper sense of the portentous moment. With his chin high and his face
calm in its stricken dignity he felt that no lady with a heart in her
soft bosom could fail to extend proffers of conciliation. In a moment
more they would meet in the narrow road. His face paled a shade or two
under the tension--then they were abreast and his heart broke and the
apple of life was dead sea fruit to his palate. She had spoken. She had
even smiled and waved her riding crop, but she had done both with so
superlative an indifference that it seemed she had not really seen him
at all. She was chatting vivaciously with Jimmy and Jimmy had been
laughing as raucously as a jackal--and so they had passed him by. The
event which had spelled tragedy for him; robbed him of sleep and
withered his robust appetite had not even lingered overnight in her
memory. The dirk was in Stuart Farquaharson's breast, but it was yet to
be twisted. Pride forbade his shaking Johnny Reb into a wild pace until
he was out of sight. The funereal grandeur of his measured tread must
not be broken, and so he heard with painful distinctness the next remark
of Jimmy Hancock.

"What in thunder's eatin' on Stuty--" (sometimes, though not encouraged
to do so, young Mr. Farquaharson's intimates called him by that shameful
diminutive.) "He looks like a kid that's just been taken back to the
barn and spanked."

"Did he?" asked the young lady casually, "I really didn't notice."

Ye Gods! He, wearing his misery like a Cæsar's toga, compared by this
young buffoon to a kid who had been spanked! _She_ had not noticed it.
Ye Gods! Ye Gods!


Ten days passed and the visit of Conscience Williams was drawing to an
end. Soon she would go back to those rock-bound shores of New England
where in earlier days her ancestors had edified themselves with burning
witches. She would pass out of his life but never out of his memory. His
heart would go with her, but though it killed him he would never modify
the rigors of his self-appointed exile from her presence until an
advance came from her.

Each night he secretly stole over to a point of ambuscade from which he
could see the shimmery flash of her dress as she moved about the porch,
cavaliered by the odious Jimmy and his fellows. On these nocturnal
vigils he heard the note of her heedless laughter while he crouched
embittered and hidden at a distance. There was in those merry peals no
more symptom of a canker at her heart than in the carol of a bird
greeting a bright day. She did not care and when the one maiden whom he
wished to worship by years of noble deeds did not care--again the only
answer was "Ye Gods!"

These were not matters to be alleviated by the comforting support of a
confidant and he had no confidant except Cardinal Richelieu. The
cardinal was more frequently addressed as Ritchy and his nature was as
independent of hampering standards as his origin warranted. The
Cardinal's face--a composite portrait of various types of middle-class
dog-life--made pretense useless and early in his puppy career he seemed
to realize it and to abandon himself to a philosophy of irresponsible
pleasure. But Ritchy's eye had taken on a saddened cast since the blight
had fallen on his master. He no longer frisked and devised, out of his
comedian's soul, mirth-provoking antics. It was as though he understood
and his spirit walked in sorrow.

A night of full-mooned radiance came steeping the souls of the young
Knight and the young Cardinal in bitter yet sweet melancholy. Two days
more and Conscience would be gone from the Valley of
Virginia--returning to Cape Cod. Then Stuart would write over the door
of his life "Ichabod, the glory is departed." To-night he would stalk
again to his lonely tryst beneath the mock-orange hedge, which gave
command of the yard and porch, and when she had gone to her room, he
could still gaze upon the lighted window which marked a sacred spot. At
a sedate distance in the rear proceeded the Cardinal, who had
judiciously made no announcement of his coming. He knew that there was
an edict against his participation in these vigils, based on a theory
that he might give voice and advertise his master's presence, but it was
a theory for which he had contempt and which he resented as a slur upon
his discretion.

When Stuart Farquaharson crouched in the lee of heavily shadowed
shrubbery the Cardinal sat on his haunches and wrinkled his unlovely
brow in contemplative thought. Not far away masses of honeysuckle
climbed over a rail fence festooned with blossom. Into the night stole
its pervasive sweetness and the old house was like a temple built of
blue gray shadows with columns touched into ivory whiteness by the
lights of door and window. A low line of hills loomed beyond, painted of
silver gray against the backdrop of starry sky and the pallor of moon
mists. From the porch came the desultory tinkle of a banjo and the
voices of young people singing and in a pause between songs more than
once the boy heard a laugh--a laugh which he recognized. He could even
make out a scrap of light color which must be her dress. Such were the
rewards of his night watch, a melancholy and external gaze upon a
Paradise barred to him by a stubbornness which his youth mistook for
honorable pride.

At last two buggies rattled down the drive with much shouting of
farewells and ten minutes later Jimmy's saddle horse clattered off at a
gallop. The visitors were gone silence was left behind them. But
Conscience did not at once turn into the house and close the door behind
her. She stood by one of the tall pillars and the boy strained his gaze
to make out more than the vague outline of a shadow-shape. Then slowly
she came down the stairs and out onto the moonlit lawn, walking
meditatively in the direction of Stuart Farquaharson's hiding place. The
boy's heart leaped into a heightened tattoo and he bent eagerly forward
with his lips parted. She moved lightly through the luminance of a world
which the moon had burnished into tints of platinum and silver, and she
was very lovely, he thought, in her child-beauty and slenderness, the
budding and virginal freshness that was only beginning to stir into a
realization of something meant by womanhood. He bent, half kneeling, in
his ambuscade with that dream of love which was all new and wonderful: a
thing of such untarnished romance as only life's morning can give to the
young.

Then into the dream welled a futile wave of resentment and poisoned it
with bitterness. She had played with him and mocked him and cast him
aside and to her he was less than nothing. A few moments ago her voice
had drifted to him in an abandonment of merriment though she was going
away without seeing him. Night after night he had come here, merely for
the sad pleasure of watching her move through the shadows and the
distance.

Now, unconscious of his nearness, the girl came on until she halted
beyond the fence, not more than ten yards away. Cardinal Richelieu
fidgeted on his haunches and silenced, with a difficult self-repression,
the puzzled whine which came into his throat. The tempered spot-light of
the moon was on Conscience's lashes and lips, and the boy stiffened into
a petrified astonishment, for quite abruptly and without warning she
carried both slim hands to her face and her body shook with something
like a paroxysm of sobs.

In a moment she took her hands away and her eyes were shining with a
tearful moisture. A lock of hair fell over her face. She tossed it back,
then she moved a few steps nearer and rested both arms on the top rail
of the fence. In them she buried her cheeks and began to cry softly.
Stuart Farquaharson could almost have touched her but he was quite
invisible. He felt himself an eavesdropper, but he could not escape
without being seen.

The case was different with Cardinal Richelieu. Repressed emotions have
been said to kill strong men. They did not kill the Cardinal, but they
conquered him. From his raggedly whiskered lips burst a growl and a yawp
which, too late, he regretted.

The girl gave a little scream and started back and Stuart realized it
was time to reassure her. He rose up, materializing into a tall shape in
the shadows like a jinn conjured from empty blackness.

"It's only me--Stuart Farquaharson," he said, and Conscience gave a
little outcry of delight in the first moment of surprise. But that she
swiftly stifled into a less self-revealing demeanor as she demanded with
recovered dignity, "What are you doing here?"

The boy vaulted the fence and stood at her side while the mollified
Cardinal waved a stubby tail, as one who would say--"Now you see it took
my dog sense to bring you two together. Without me you were quite
helpless."

"Why were you crying, Conscience?" Stuart asked, ignoring alike her
question and the rebuke in her voice, but she reiterated, "What are you
doing here?"

The moon showed a face set with the stamp of tragedy which he imagined
to have settled on his life, but his eyes held hers gravely and he was
no longer hampered with bashfulness. The sight of her tear-stained
faced had freed him of that.

"I come here every night," he acknowledged simply, "to watch you over
there on the porch--because--" He balked a moment there, but only a
moment, before declaring baldly what he had so often failed to announce
gallantly--"Because I'm crazy about you--because I love you."

For a moment she gazed up at him and her breath came fast, then she
suggested, a little shaken, "It isn't much farther on to the house. You
used to come the whole way."

"You told me not to."

"If you had--had cared very much you would have come any way."

"I've cared enough," he reminded her, "to sit out here every night until
you put out your light and went to sleep. If you had wanted me you'd
have said so."

Impulsively she laid a trembling hand on his arm and spoke in rushing
syllables. "I thought you'd come without being sent for--then when I
knew you wouldn't, I couldn't hear it. I wrote you a note to-night.... I
was going to send it to-morrow.... I'm going home the next day."

A whippoorwill called plaintively from the hillside. He had spoken and
in effect she had answered. All the night's fragrance and cadence merged
into a single witchery which was a part of themselves. For the first and
most miraculous time, the flood tide of love had lifted them and their
feet were no longer on the earth.

"But--but--" stammered the boy, moistening his lips, "you were singing
and laughing with Jimmy Hancock and the rest ten minutes ago, and now--"

The girl's delicately rounded chin came up in the tilt of pride.

"Do you think I'd show them how I felt?" she demanded. "Do you think
I'd tell anybody--except you."

Stuart Farquaharson had a sensation of hills and woods whirling in
glorified riot through an infinity of moon mists and star dust. He felt
suddenly mature and strong and catching her in his arms he pressed her
close, kissing her hair and temples until she, fluttering with the
wildness of her first embrace of love, turned her lips up to his kisses.

But soon Conscience drew away and at once her cheeks grew hot with
blushes and maidenly remorse. She had been reared in an uncompromising
school of puritanism. Her father would have regarded her behavior as
profoundly shocking. She herself, now that it was over, regarded it so,
though she wildly and rebelliously told herself that she would not undo
it, if she could.

"Oh," she exclaimed in a low voice, "oh, Stuart, what were we thinking
about!"

"We were thinking that we belong to each other," he fervently assured
her. "As long as I live I belong to you--and to no one else, and you--"

"But we're only children," she demurred, with a sudden outcropping of
the practical in the midst of romanticism. "How do we know we won't
change our minds?"

"I won't change mine," he said staunchly. "And I won't let you change
yours. You will write to me, won't you?" he eagerly demanded, but she
shook her head.

"Father doesn't let me write to boys," she told him.

"At least you'll be back--next summer?"

"I'm afraid not. I don't know."

Stuart Farquaharson drew a long breath. His face set itself in rigid
resolve.

"If they send you to the North Pole and stop all my letters and put a
regiment of soldiers around you, and keep them there, it won't alter
matters in the long run," he asseverated, with boyhood assurance, "You
belong to me and you are going to marry me."

A voice from the house began calling and the girl answered quickly, "I'm
just in the garden. I'll be right in." But before she went she turned to
the boy again and her eyes were dancing incorrigibly.

"You won't go out and join any Newmarket cadets or anything and get
killed meanwhile, will you?"

"I will not," he promptly replied. "And when we have a house of our own
we'll have framed copies of Barbara Freitchie hanging all over the place
if you want them."

To Stuart Farquaharson just then the future seemed very sure. He had no
way of knowing that after to-morrow years lay between the present and
their next meeting--and that after that--but of course he could not read
the stars.




CHAPTER III


The sand bar rose like a white island beyond the mild surf of the shore,
distant enough to make it a reservation for those hardier swimmers who
failed to find contentment between beach and float. Outside the bar the
surf boiled in spume-crowned, and went out again sullenly howling an
in-sucking of sands and an insidious tug of undertow.

One head only bobbed far out as a single swimmer shaped his course in
unhurried strokes toward the bar. This swimmer had come alone from the
hotel bath-houses and had strolled down into the streaming bubbles of an
outgoing wave without halting to inspect the other bathers. There was a
businesslike directness in the way he kept onward and outward until a
comber lifted him and his swimming had begun.

The young man might have been between twenty and twenty-five and a Greek
feeling for line and form and rhythmic strength would have called his
body beautiful. Its flesh was smooth and brown, flowing in frictionless
ease over muscles that escaped bulkiness; its shoulders swung with a
sort of gladiatorial freedom. But the Hellenic sculptor would have found
the head suited to his use as well as the torso and limbs, for it was a
head well shaped and well carried, dominated by eyes alert with
intelligence, and enlivened with humor.

As he rocked between crest and trough, the swimmer's glance caught the
shattered form of a breaker at the end of the bar. He liked things to be
the biggest of their sort. If there was to be surf, he wanted it to be
like that beyond, with a fierce song in its breaking and the foam of the
sea's endless sweat in its lashings.

When at last he let himself down and his feet touched bottom, he wiped
the brine out of his eyes and hurried up the shallow rise--then halted
suddenly. The bar had appeared empty of human life, but now he caught a
glimpse of a head and a pair of shoulders and they were feminine. A
normal curiosity as to further particulars asserted itself. He had a
distinct feeling of apprehension lest the face, when seen, should prove
a disappointment, because unless it was singularly attractive--more
attractive than wits warranted by any law of probability--it would be
distressingly out of keeping with the charm and grace of the figure
which came into full view as he waded ashore in spite of the masses of
dark and lustrous hair which fell free. The unknown lady was sitting on
the sand with her back half turned and, in the soaked and clinging silk
of her bathing dress, she had an alluring lissomness of line and curve.
If her face _did_ match her beauty of body she would have rather more
than one woman's share of Life's gifts, he philosophized, and by
Nature's law of compensation she would probably be vapid and insipid of
mind.

But while he was engaging himself in these personal speculations the
lady herself was obviously quite serene in her ignorance of his presence
or existence. She conceived herself to be in sole possession of her
island kingdom of an hour and was complacently using it as an exclusive
terrain.

She had removed her blue bathing cap and tossed it near by on the sand.
She had let her hair out free to the sun, in whose light it glowed
between the rich darkness of polished mahogany and the luster of jet.

After all perhaps he had better announce himself in some audible fashion
since, secure in her supposed isolation, the other occupant of the bar
proceeded to remove a silk stocking, which matched the cap in color,
and to examine with absorbed interest what he supposed to be a
stone-bruise on an absurdly small and pink heel. Discreetly he coughed.

The young woman looked quickly over her shoulder and their eyes met. A
perfunctory apology for invasion shaped itself in his mind, but remained
unuttered. He stood instead, his lips parted and his eyes brimming with
astonishment. The face not only met the high requirements set for it by
his idea of appropriateness, but abundantly surpassed the standard.
Moreover, it was a face he recognized. He was not at first quite certain
that her recognition of him had been as swift. A half dozen years,
involving the transition from boyhood to manhood might have dimmed his
image in her memory, so he hastened to introduce himself, striding
across as she came a little confusedly to her feet--one silk shod and
one bare.

"Heaven be praised, Conscience," he shouted with an access of boyish
elation in his voice. "This is too lucky to believe. Don't say you've
absolutely forgotten me--Stuart Farquaharson."

She stood there before him, dangling a stocking in her left hand as she
extended her right. Dark hair falling below her waist framed a face
whose curves and feature-modelings were all separate delights uniting to
make a total of somewhat gorgeous loveliness. Her lips were crimson
petals in a face as creamy white as a magnolia bloom, and her dark eyes
twinkled with inward mischief. It was a face which in repose held that
serenely grave quality which a painter might have selected for his study
of a saint--and which, when her little teeth flashed and her eyes
kindled in a smile, broke into a dazzling and infectious gayety. She was
smiling now.

"'Up from the meadows rich with corn'?" she inquired, as though they had
parted yesterday.

Stuart Farquaharson broke into a peal of laughter as he caught the
extended hand in both his own and finished the quotation.


     "Clear in the cool September morn, the clustered spires of
       Frederick stand,
     Green-walled by the hills of Maryland ...


By the way," his voice took on a note of sudden trepidation--"you aren't
married, are you?"

It was a point upon which she did not at the moment resolve his doubts.
She was standing at gaze herself, critically taking him in. She let her
appraisal begin at the dark hair which the water had twisted into a
curling lawlessness and end at his feet which were somewhat small for
his stature. The general impression of that scrutiny was one which she
secretly acknowledged to be startlingly, almost thrillingly, favorable.
Then she realized that while one of her hands continued to dangle a wet
stocking, the other was still tightly clasped in his own and that he was
repeating his question.

"Why do you ask?" she naïvely inquired, as she quietly sought to
disengage her imprisoned fingers.

"Why!" he echoed, in a shocked voice, pretending unconsciousness of her
efforts at self-liberation. "Why does one ever ask a vital question? The
last time I saw you I told you candidly that I meant to marry you. If
you're already married--why, it might complicate matters, don't you
think?"

"It _might_," the young woman conceded. "It might even alter matters
altogether--but don't you think that even for a reunion we seem to have
shaken hands almost long enough?"

With reluctance he released the captive fingers and reminded her that he
was still unanswered.

"No," she told him, "I'm not married so far--of course I've tried hard,
but the honest gander hasn't volunteered."

"Thank God!" was his instant and fervent comment.

Beyond her were the sands of the bar and the Atlantic Ocean stretching
unbroken to the Madeiras and a flawless sky against which the gulls
dipped and screamed.

She was straight and vivid, and his pulses quickened, taking fire. Sun,
air and water; sparkle, radiance and color--these things were about him
filling his senses with delight and she seemed to epitomize them all in
a personal incarnation.

"Don't let me keep you standing," he begged her, belatedly remembering
his manners. "You were taking your case when I came. Besides, Old
Neptune in person will be along soon to claim this sandbar for himself.
Meanwhile, 'The time has come,' the walrus said, 'to talk of many
things.'"

"As for instance?"

"As for instance that there's less of the fortuitous in this meeting
than appears upon the surface."

"Then you knew I was on the sandbar?"

Stuart Farquaharson shook his head. "I didn't even know that you were at
Chatham. I just got here this morning driving through to Provincetown.
But I did know that you were on Cape Cod, and that is why I'm on Cape
Cod."

She dropped lightly to the sand and sat nursing her knees between
interlocked fingers. Stuart Farquaharson spread himself luxuriantly at
length, propped on one elbow. He could not help noting that the bare
knee was dimpled and that the curved flesh below it was satin-smooth and
the hue of apple blossoms. The warm breeze kept stirring her hair
caressingly and, against the glare, she lowered her long lashes, half
veiling her eyes. But at his avowal of the cause of his coming her lips
curved with humorous scepticism.

"I'm afraid you acted very hastily," she murmured. "You've only known I
was here for about six years."

He nodded, entirely unruffled.

"I have only recently been promoted to the high office of 'Master of my
fate'--but before we get to that--where are you stopping?"

"Our party will be here at Chatham for several days. We're stopping at
The Arms."

"You speak of a party, and that makes me realize the imperative need of
improving this golden moment," Stuart Farquaharson announced urbanely,
"because I have certain rude and elementary powers of deduction."

"Which lead you to what conclusion?" She turned eyes riffled with
amusement from the contemplation of a distant sail to his face, and he
proceeded to enlighten her.

"To two. First, that in Chatham, Massachusetts, as in the Valley of
Virginia, there is probably a Jimmy Hancock buzzing about. Secondly,
that since 'misfortunes come not single spies, but in battalions,' there
are probably a flock of Jimmies. By the by, will you swim out here with
me to-morrow morning?"

"To-morrow morning," she demurred. "I believe I have an engagement for a
horseback ride with Billy Stirling. We're going to look at a wind mill
or something."

The man shook his head in mock distress.

"I knew it," he sighed, then his tone grew serious and he began to speak
rapidly. "You say I've known where you were for six years and that's
true. It's also true that until this summer, I haven't in any genuine
sense been the master of my movements. Four years were spent in college,
and two in law school. There were vacations, of course, but my mother
claimed them at home. She is dead now, and her last few years were years
of partial invalidism--so she wanted her family about her."

"Oh," the girl's eyes deepened with sympathy. "I didn't know that. She
was, I think, almost the loveliest woman I ever knew. She was everything
that blue blood ought to be--and so rarely is."

"Thank you. Yes, I think my mother was just that--but what I meant to
claim was that this summer is the first I have been free to use in
whatever way I wanted: the first time I've been able to say to myself,
'Go and do whatever seems to you the most delightful thing possible in a
delightful world.' What I did was to come to Cape Cod and why I did it
I've already told you."

Conscience studied his expression and back of the whimsical glint in his
eyes she recognized an entire sincerity. Perhaps he had retained out of
boyhood some of that militant attitude of believing in his dreams and
making them realities. She found herself hoping something of the sort as
she reminded him, "After I had outgrown pigtails, you know, they would
have let me read a letter from you--if it had arrived."

"Certainly. There were a good many times when I started to write; a good
many times when I got as far as a half-finished letter. But I always
tore it up. You see, it never appeared to me that that was the way. A
letter from me, after a long absence would have been a shadowy sort of
message. I couldn't guess how clearly you remembered me or even whether
you remembered me at all. You were a child then, who was growing into a
woman. Your life was an edifice which you were building for yourself.
What niches it had for what saints and deities, I couldn't hope to know.
I might have been scornfully thrust in among the cobwebs with other
promiscuous rummage of outgrown days. I might have been hardly more
important than the dolls that preceded me in your affections by only a
couple of years. How could I tell?" He paused and questioned her with
direct eyes. "No, I meant to come back into your life not as a ghost
speaking from the past but as a man intent on announcing himself in
person. It was no part of my scheme that you should say, 'Oh, yes, I
remember him. A long, thin kid with a vile temper. I used to love to
stir him up and hear him roar.' That's why I never wrote."

Her smile was still a little doubtful and so he went on.

"It would have been too easy for you to have simply dropped me cold. Now
it happens that in life I am endowed with a certain india-rubber
quality. I am practically indestructible. When you biff me into the
corner I can come bouncing back for more. In short, I am not so easy to
be rid of, when I'm on the ground."

Conscience laughed. They were still young enough to respond thrillingly
to the remembered fragrance of honeysuckle and the plaintive note of the
whippoorwill, and perhaps to other memories, as well.

She rose abruptly and went down to the water's edge where she stood with
the breeze whipping the silk draperies of her blue bathing skirt against
her knees and stirring her hair into a dark nimbus about her head. After
retrieving from the sand the blue cap and the blue stocking, her
companion followed her.

"Now that I'm here," he asseverated, "I hold that we stand just where we
stood when we parted."

But at that she shook her head and laughed at him. "Quite the reverse,"
she declared. "I hold that by years of penitence I've lived down my
past. We're simply two young persons who once knew each other."

"Very well," acceded he. "It will come to the same thing in the end. We
will start as strangers, but I have a strong conviction that when we
become acquainted, I'm going to dog your steps to the altar. I'm willing
to cancel all the previous chapter, except that I sha'n't forget it....
Can _you_ forget it?"

She flushed, but shook her head frankly, and answered without evasion,
"I haven't forgotten it yet."

He was gazing into her face with such a hypnotism of undisguised
admiration that she smilingly inquired, "Well, have I changed much?"

"You have. You've changed much and radiantly. Since you insist on
regarding me as a new acquaintance I must be conservative and
restrained, so I'll only say that you have the most flawless beauty I've
ever seen."

"The tide is rising," she reminded him irrelevantly. "We'd better be
starting back." She put her hands up to her wind-blown hair and began
coiling it into abundant masses on her head, while he was kneeling on
the sand and tying the ribbon of her bathing slipper.

They crossed the bar and went into the water, swimming side by side with
easy strokes, and when the return trip was half completed they saw the
head of another swimmer coming out.

"That's Billy Stirling," she told him. "He seems to have guessed where I
was."

"I was right," sighed the Virginian. "He out-Jimmies Jimmy Hancock. I
don't like this Stirling person."

"You don't know him yet, you know."

"Quite true, but I don't have to know him to dislike him. It's a matter
of general principle."

But in spite of his announcement, Stuart did like Billy Stirling. He
liked him from the moment that gentleman thrust a wet paw out of the
water to shake hands and tossed the brine from a grinning face to
acknowledge the girl's introduction. He liked him even better for the
Puck-like irresponsibility of his good humor as, later on, he introduced
Stuart to the others of the party.

"Now that you've met this crew, you are to consider yourself a member,"
declared Stirling, though he added accusingly, "I promoted this
expedition and used great discrimination in its personnel. It struck me
as quite complete before your intrusion marred its symmetry, but you're
here and we've got to make the best of you."

The women differed with Mr. Stirling and scathingly told him so, to his
immense delight.

"The difference between a party made up in handcuffed pairs, like this
has been, and one equipped with an extra man or two is the exact
difference between frugal necessity and luxury," protested Henrietta
Raven, sententiously.

"I suppose you get the fact that these guileless kids over here are our
venerated chaperons?" said the host with a pointed finger. "They are so
newly-wed that they still spoon publicly--which is disgraceful, of
course, but reduces the obnoxiousness of chaperons."

The week that followed in Chatham was a momentous time and a turning
point for the young Virginian. In a way it was epochal in his life.
Though he was assimilated into the party as if he had been one of them
from childhood, he found little opportunity to be alone with Conscience.
Indeed the idea came to him at first vaguely, then persistently, that
she herself was seeking to avoid anything savoring of the quality of a
tête-à-tête.

The realization haunted and troubled him because even in this general
association, her personality had flashed varyingly and amazingly from
many facets. The dream which had meant so much to his boyhood was
swiftly ripening also into the dream of his manhood, or, as he would
have expressed it, a fulfillment. His heart had been fallow when he had
first known her. It had not been subjected to subsequent conquest and
now its predisposed allegiance was ready to grow with tropical swiftness
into a purposeful and fiery ardor.




CHAPTER IV


Stuart Farquaharson had that habit of self-analysis which often
compelled him to take his own life into the laboratory of reflection and
study its reactions with an almost impersonal directness. That analysis
told him that Conscience Williams, had she chosen to do so, might have
imposed upon him the thrall of infatuation, even had there been no
powerful appeal to his mentality. Every fiery element that had lain
dormant in his nature was ready to leap into action, in response to a
challenge of which she was herself unconscious--a challenge to the
senses. And yet he recognized with an almost prayerful gratitude that it
was something paramount to physical lure, which beckoned him along the
path of love. Into the more genuine and intimate recesses of her life,
where the soul keeps its aloofness, she had given him only keyhole
glimpses, but they had been such glimpses as kindled his eagerness and
awakened his hunger for exploration. There had been candid indications
reënforced by a dozen subtler things that her liking for him was more
than casual, and yet she denied him any chance to avow himself, and
sometimes, when he came suddenly upon her, he discovered a troubled
wistfulness in her face which clouded her eyes and brought a droop to
the corners of her lips.

On one such occasion as he was passing an old house with a yard in which
the grass was tall and ragged and the fruit trees as unkempt and
overgrown as a hermit's beard he saw her standing alone by one of the
tilting veranda posts. The sunshine was gone from her dark eyes, so that
they seemed darker than ever--and haunted with an almost tragic
wistfulness. She had the manner of one facing a ghost which she had
vainly sought to lay. He came so close before he spoke her name that she
turned toward him with a start, as though he wakened her suddenly out of
somnambulism, but even as she wheeled, her face brightened and a
bantering merriment sounded in her voice, countering all his solicitous
inquiries with gay retorts.

When a week of charming but unsatisfying association had passed Stuart
Farquaharson felt that the time had come when he must talk with her less
superficially. It was as if they had only waded in the shallows of
conversation--and he wanted to strike out and swim in deeper waters. The
opportunity, when it came, was not of his own making. It was an evening
when there was dancing in the large lounge of The Arms. Farquaharson and
Conscience had gone, between dances, to the tiled veranda overlooking
the sea. The moon was spilling showers of radiance from horizon to
shore, and making of the beach a foreground of pale silver. The veranda
itself was a place of blue shadows between the yellow splotches of the
window lights. After a little she laid a hand lightly on Stuart's arm.

"Don't you want to take me for a stroll on the beach?" she asked a shade
wearily. "I'm tired of so many people."

They followed the twisting line of the wet sands and at last halted by
the prow of a beached row-boat, where the girl enthroned herself, gazing
meditatively off to sea.

"Conscience," he asked slowly, "you have used a diplomacy worthy of a
better cause, in devising ways to keep me from talking with you
alone--why?"

"Have I done that?" she countered.

"You know you have. Of course you've known I wanted to make love to you.
Why wouldn't you let me?"

"Because," she answered gravely, meeting his eyes with full candor, "I
didn't want you to--make love to me. I'm not ready for that."

"I haven't said I wasn't willing to wait, have I?" he suggested quietly.
"You don't appear to throw barriers of silence between yourself and
Billy."

"No. That's different.... I'm not--" Suddenly she broke off and laughed
at herself.

Then a little startled, at her own frankness, she admitted in a low
voice, "I'm not afraid of Billy's unsettling me."

The man felt his temples throb with a sudden and intoxicating elation.
He steadied himself against its agitation to demand,

"And you are--afraid that I might?"

She was sitting with the moonlight waking her dark hair into a somber
luster and a gossamer shimmer on the white of her evening gown. Her
hands lay unmoving in her lap and she slowly nodded her confession.

"You see," she told him, after another long pause, "it's a
thing--falling in love--that I should do rather riotously--if I did it
at all. I shouldn't be able to think of much else."

Stuart Farquaharson wanted to seize her in his arms and protest that she
could never love him too riotously, but he instead schooled his voice to
a level almost monotonous.

"I fell in love with you--back there in the days of our childhood," he
said slowly. "Maybe it was only a boy's dream--then--but now it's a
man's dream--a life dream. You will have to be won out of battle, every
wonderful reward does--but victory will come to me." His voice rose
vibrantly. "Because winning it is the one inflexible purpose of my life,
dominating every other purpose."

She had not interrupted him and now she was a little afraid of him--and
of herself. Perhaps it was only the moon--but the moon swings the tides.

"Stuart--" Her voice held a tremor of pleading. "If you do love
me--like that--you can wait. Just now I need you--but not as a lover. I
need you as a friend whom I don't have to fight."

The man straightened and bowed. "Very well," he said, "I can wait--if I
must. Your need comes first."

She gave him a grateful smile, then suddenly came to her feet and began
speaking with such a passionate earnestness as he had not before heard
from her lips.

"I think it's the right of every human being to live fully--not just
half live through a soul-cramping routine. I think it's the right of a
man or a woman to face all the things that make life, to _think_--even
if they make mistakes--to fight for what they believe, even if they're
wrong. I'd rather be Joan of Arc than the most sainted nun that ever
took the veil!"

The young man's face lighted triumphantly, because that was also his
creed. "I knew it!" he exclaimed. "I didn't have to hear your words to
know that marking time in an age of marching would never satisfy you."

"And yet every influence that means home and family seems bent on
condemning me to the dreariness and mustiness of a life that kills
thought. I've thought about it so much that I'm afraid I've grown
morbid." Once more her voice rang with passionate insurgency. "I feel as
if I were being sent to Siberia."

Stuart answered with forced composure through which the thrill of a
minute ago crept like an echo of departing trumpets. "Of course, I came
out here to declare my love. I had waited for this chance ... the sea
... the moon--well! It's rather like asking for a field-marshal's baton
and a curveting charger--and getting instead a musket and place in the
ranks. The man who doesn't serve where he's put isn't much good...." He
paused and then went on calmly, "What is this thing that haunts you?"

"When I finished at the preparatory school," she began, "father thought
I'd gone far enough and I _knew_ I needed college. At last I won a
compromise. I was to have one year by way of trial, and then he was to
decide which idea was right--his or mine."

"So now--"

"So now the jury has the case--and I'm terribly afraid I know the
verdict in advance. Father is a minister of the old school and the
unyielding New England type. I don't remember my mother, but sometimes I
think the inflammatory goodness at home killed her. In our house you
mustn't question a hell where Satan reigns as a personal god of
Damnation. To doubt his spiked tail and cloven hoofs, would almost be
heresy. That's our sort of goodness."

"And colleges fail to supply a course in the Chemistry of Brimstone," he
suggested.

"They don't even frown on such ungodly things as socialism and
suffrage," she supplemented.

He nodded. "They offer, in short, incubation for ideas questionably
modern."

Her voice took on a fiery quality of enthusiasm.

"Life was never so gloriously fluid--so luminous--before. Breadth and
humanity are being fought for. Men and women are facing things
open-eyed, making splendid successes and splendid failures." After a
moment's pause she added, wearily, "My father calls them fads."

"And you want to have a part in all that. You don't want only the
culture of reading the _Atlantic Monthly_ at a village fireside?"

"I want to play my little part in the game of things. The idea of being
shielded from every danger and barred off from every effort, sickens me.
If I am to lead a life I can be proud of, it must be because I've come
out of the fight unshamed, not just because no one ever let me go into a
fight."

She was standing in an attitude of tense, even rapt earnestness, her
chin high and her hands clenched. Her voice held the vibrance of a
dreamer and her eyes were looking toward the horizon as if they were
seeing visions off across the moonlit water.

"I might fail miserably, of course, but I should know that I'd had my
chance. The idea at home seems to be that a woman's goodness depends on
someone else keeping it for her: that she should stick her head into the
sand like an ostrich and, since she sees nothing, be womanly. If I have
a soul at all, and it can't sail beyond a harbor's breakwater, I have
nothing to lose, but if it can go out and come back safe it has the
right to do it. That's what college means to me: the preparation for a
real life: the chance to equip myself. That's why the question seems a
vital crisis--why _it_ is a vital crisis."

"Conscience," he said thoughtfully, "you have described the exact sort
of intolerant piety, which tempts one to admire brilliant wickedness.
You can't accept another's belief unless it's your own. That is one of
Life's categorical rules. It's not a problem."

"It's so categorical," she retorted quickly, "that there is no answer to
it except the facts. My father is old. He has burned out his life in his
fierce service of his God and his conscience. To tell him how paltry is
the sum of his life's effort, in my eyes, would be like laughing aloud
at his sermon."

"And yet you can't possibly take up the life of an outgrown age because
he prefers the thought of yesterday."

"I'm afraid I'll have to--and--"

"And what?"

"And I think--it's going to break my heart. I've got to live a lie to
keep a man, who regards a lie as a mortal sin, happy in the belief that
he has never tolerated a lie."

"My God, Conscience," Stuart broke out, "this is the New England
conscience seeking martyrdom. Life runs forward, not back. Rivers don't
climb hills."

"I have said that to myself a thousand times," she gravely replied, "but
it doesn't answer the question. There's no compulsion in the world so
universal as the tyranny of weakness over strength. Haven't you seen it
everywhere? Wherever people have to live together you find it. You find
the strong submitting to all sorts of petty persecutions, and petty
persecutions are the kind that kill, because the weak are nervous or
easily wrought up and must have allowances made for them. And the person
so considered always thinks himself strong beyond others and never
suspects the truth. Only the weak and foolish can strut independently
through life."

"And yet to draw the blinds and shut out the light of life because some
one else chooses to sit in the dark is unspeakably morbid."

Conscience shrugged her shoulders. "Sitting in the dark or living
righteously--there's no difference but point of view. My father has been
true to his convictions. The fact that his goodness is no broader than
his hymn book doesn't alter that." There was a pause, then suddenly the
girl laughed and stretched both arms out to sea. "Oh, well," she said,
"I don't often indulge in these jeremiads. Now it's over, and I've at
least got the summer ahead of me. I guess we'd better go back. I
promised Billy a dance."

She rose, but the Virginian stood resolutely in her path. "Just a moment
more," he begged. "It won't be love-making. The day we drove down to
Provincetown you were sitting on the sand dunes. For a background you
had the sea and sky--and they were gorgeous. But while I looked at it I
saw another picture, too. May I try to paint _that_ picture for you?"

"Surely, if you will."

"Well, I'm rather leaving the sunlight now," he admitted. "I'm painting
gray. I'm converting it into terms of winter storm and equinox. Last
year a ship was pounded to pieces in the bay while the people on
Commercial street looked helplessly on. It was the same sea, but it
wasn't smiling then. It wore the vindictive scowl of death. That's the
mood which has made this strip of coast a grave-yard of dead ships.
That's the mood, too, which has given color to the people's thought--or
taken the color out of it, leaving it stout and faded like weatherbeaten
timbers--making of it the untrustworthy thought of melancholia."

"And am I the spirit of that picture, too?"

"You are the exact antithesis of all that, but you are threatening to
fade into its grayness--and to deaden all the glow that was on the
palette with which God painted you."

They walked slowly back to the verandah, but paused a space before going
into the light and crowds where a waltz had just begun--and as they
waited a hotel page came dodging between the smoking, chatting loungers
calling her name--"Miss Conscience Williams--Miss Conscience Williams,"
and waving a yellow telegraph envelope.

The girl's face paled a little as she took the message from the urchin's
hand and her eyes widened in an expression of fear. But she tore the
covering and drew out the sheet deliberately, reading in the yellow
light that flooded through a window. Then an almost inaudible groan came
from her lips and she stood holding the paper so loosely that it slipped
from her fingers and drifted to the floor. Stuart retrieved it and
handed it to her, but she only commanded in a stunned voice, "Read it."

The man stepped from the shadow to the light and read:

"Your father had paralytic stroke. He wants to see you."

It was signed by initials which Stuart inferred to be those of the
elderly aunt of whom she spoken. He laid his hand very gently on her arm
and turned her a step to the side so that she passed out of the broad
band of window-light and stood in the shadow. The blaze from the
interior gave too much the effect of a spotlight playing on her eyes and
lips and brow, for him to be willing that the idling crowds of strollers
should read what he read there. He knew that in a moment she would
regain control sufficiently to face even the fuller publicity inside,
but during that moment she had the right to the limited privacy afforded
by the dark shadow of the tiled veranda.

She stood leaning against the wall for a moment, then she straightened
herself with an effort and pressed the tips of her fingers to her
temples.

"What can you get out of your car?" she asked. And the man answered
quickly, "As much speed as the roads let me--I have done sixty."

"Please take me home." The words came abruptly and with undisguised
wretchedness, "and take me _fast_."




CHAPTER V


Twenty minutes later Stuart Farquaharson swung himself to the driver's
seat of his low-hung roadster, and threw on the switch, while Billy
Stirling and the others stood at the curb, waving farewells and finding
nothing suitable to say.

The car went purring through the quiet streets where gabled houses slept
under the moon, but having passed the town limits, leaped into a racing
pace along the road for Orleans.

Stuart made no effort to talk and Conscience spoke only at long
intervals. She was gazing ahead and her eyes were wide and wet with
tears.

Once she leaned over to say: "If any of the things I said seemed
disloyal, please try to forget them. Of course, I'm only too glad he
wants me, and that I can help."

"I understand," he assured her. "I never doubted that."

The moon had set and it wanted only two hours of dawn when Conscience
roused herself from her revery to say, "It's the next gate--on the
right."

Wheeling the car into the driveway, he had a shadowy impression of an
old and gabled place, inky except for the pallid light of a lamp turned
low in an upper window.

As the girl hesitated on the verandah, he caught the complaining creak
of an old plank, and while she waited for her bag there came to his ears
the whining scrape of a tree branch against the eaves. The little voices
of the hermitage were giving their mouselike welcome.

With her key fitted in the door, Conscience turned and held out both
hands.

"You've been wonderful, Stuart," she said, with tears in her voice.
"You've understood everything and I want to thank you while we're here
alone. You'll come in, of course? I'm afraid it will be dismal, but the
hotel is worse."

The man shook his head. "No," he answered, as he pressed her hands in
his own, "I'll go back to the village and rouse up the hostelry, but I'm
coming to-morrow--to inquire."

Many dogs were aroused to a noisy chorus before his hammering on the
door of the old house which passed for a hotel received official
response, and the east was breaking into a pallid rosiness before his
thoughts permitted him to leave his seat by the window and stretch
himself wearily on his uninviting bed.

But when the sun had waked him at eight o'clock the landscape framed by
his window was a smiling one to which the youth in him responded and he
dressed clear-eyed and ready for a new day. In the hope that Conscience
had been able to sleep late, he meant to defer his visit of inquiry, and
in the meantime he breakfasted at leisure and went out to search for a
barber. The quest was not difficult, and while he awaited his turn he
sat against the wall, mildly amused at the scraps of local gossip that
came to his ears couched in homely vernacular.

"I heard that Eben Tollman cal'lates to jam Lige Heman with a
foreclosure on his mortgage. It's move out and trust in Providence for
Lige and Lige's." This comment came in piping falsetto from a thin youth
who had just been shaven raw, but still lingered in the shop, and it met
prompt reply from a grizzled old fellow with a wooden leg.

"Pshaw, Seth, that ain't no news. You can't scace'ly get folks excited
by a yarn about a shark's bitin' a cripple--but if you was to give in a
yarn about a cripple bitin' a shark--well, there'd be some point to
that. If you told where somebody had got a dollar away from Eben, now,
we'd call you a liar, I s'pose--and be right at that--but we'd listen."

"If you got a nickel from Tollman," retorted the first speaker, "you
couldn't put it in a slot machine. It would be squeezed till it was bent
double. Well, you can't blame him, I s'pose. He ain't got more'n a
million."

Just at that moment the door was opened by a gentleman entering from the
street, and Farquaharson was immensely diverted at the sudden hush in
which that particular vein of conversation died. It was an easy guess
that this was Eben Tollman himself.

The newcomer bore himself with a cold reserve of conscious superiority.
He might have been forty, though the humorless immobility of his face
gave him a seeming of greater age. In stature he was above the average
height and his eyes were shrewd and piercing. To the salutations of
those present, he responded with a slight, stiff inclining of his
head--and appeared to withdraw into the shell of self-sufficiency.

When Stuart, later, presented himself at the old manse, he found it a
venerable place, whose shingled roof was moss-green and whose gables
were honorably gray with age and service. An elderly servant directed
him to the garden, and elated at the prospect of a tête-à-tête among the
hedge rows, he went with a light step along the mossy path, noting with
what a golden light the sun filtered through the fine old trees and
flecked the sod. But inside the garden he halted among the flower
borders, for a glance told him that Conscience was not alone. She sat
leaning toward a wheel-chair, reading aloud from a book which he
divined, rather than recognized, to be a Bible. As he hurried forward
the girl looked up and rose to meet him with a swift eagerness of
welcome.

Because Stuart had catalogued Conscience's father, who was old enough to
be her grandfather, as a bigot and an obstructionist standing between
her and the sun, he was prepared to dislike him. Yet when he came up he
confessed to a sort of astonished admiration. He stood looking at a head
which suggested the head of a lion, full maned and white as a snow-cap,
shaggy and beetling of brow, and indomitable of eye. Such a man, had he
lived in another day, would have gone uncomplaining to the agonies of
the Inquisition--or as readily have participated in visiting
Inquisitional tortures on another. Yet it was a face capable of
kindliness, too, since its wrath was only for sin--or what it regarded
as sin.

He held out a hand in greeting.

"Conscience has told me how you rushed her home to me. It was very kind
of you. I was hungry to see her, but I hadn't dared to hope for her so
soon."

The old man spoke with a smile, but it was unconsciously pathetic.
Stuart could see that he was stricken not only in his useless legs but
also in his heart, though his eagle-like eyes were steady.

Conscience had been crying, but now she smiled and the two chatted with
a forced vivacity, pretending to ignore the thing of which each was
thinking and, though vivacity was foreign to his nature, the sufferer
joined in their conversation with a grim sort of self-effacement. Soon
they saw another figure approaching by the flagged path. It was the
figure of Eben Tollman and his manner was full of solicitude--but as he
talked with the father, Farquaharson saw him more than once steal covert
glances at the daughter. Obviously he bore, here, the relationship of
family friend, and though Conscience seemed to regard him as a member
of an older generation, he seemed to regard her as a contemporary.

In the days that followed Stuart Farquaharson's car standing at the
front of the old manse became a fixture in the landscape. The invalid
minister, seeking to accustom himself stoically to a pitiful anticlimax
of life, found in the buoyant vitality of this newcomer--of whom he
thought rather as a boy than a man--a sort of activity by proxy. He,
himself, moved only in a wheel chair, but Stuart could laughingly
override his protests and lift him with an easy strength into the seat
of the roadster to spin out across the countryside which he had told
himself he should hardly see again.

Even the spinster aunt, who had begun by regarding him with suspicion,
decided first that he was harmless, then that he was useful and finally
that he was charming.

Yet the young Virginian was not altogether beguiled into the hope that
this enviable status would be permanent. The talks and drives brought
incidental glimpses into the thoughts that had habitation under the
white mane and that came militantly out through the unyielding eyes even
in silence. Stuart winced often under the sting and irritation of a
bigotry which could, without question or doubt, undertake to rule
offhand and with absolutism on every question of right or wrong.

He was keeping and meant to keep a constant rein on his speech and
conduct, but he foresaw that, with all his restraint, a day might come
when the old puritan would divine the wide divergence of their thought
and have out upon him for one of the ungodly. Once he voiced something
of this to Conscience herself in the question, "How long do you think
your father will continue to welcome me here?"

Her eyes widened. "Welcome you? Why shouldn't he? He's leaning on you
as if you were a son. He declared his liking for you from the first
day."

Stuart shook his head in doubt and his eyes darkened with gravity. "It
never pays to blind one's eyes to the chances of the future," he said
slowly. "He won't continue to like me, I'm afraid. Just now he thinks of
us both as children. I am only your overgrown playmate--but realization
will come--and then--"

"You think that he will change?"

"I know it."

"Oh!" she exclaimed, and fell silent, but after a pause she spoke again
impulsively, with a note of fear in her voice. "You won't go away and
leave me here alone, will you--even if nobody else likes you?"

"No one but you can send me away--" he declared almost fiercely, "and
before you can do it you must prove yourself stronger than I."

She gave a little sigh of relief and fell to talking of other things. It
was when he rose to go and she walked to his car with him that he asked
with seeming irrelevance, "Has this Mr. Tollman ever--made love to you?"

She burst, at that, into a gale of laughter more spontaneous than any he
had heard since the telegram had sobered her. It was as though the
absurdity of the idea had swept the sky clear of everything but comedy.

"Made love to me!" she mockingly echoed. "Honestly, Stuart, there are
times when you are the funniest mortal alive--and it's always when
you're most serious. Picture the Sphinx growing garrulous. Picture
Napoleon seeking retreat in a monastery--but don't try to visualize Mr.
Tollman making love."

"Perhaps I'm premature," announced Farquaharson with conviction. "But
I'm not mistaken. If he hasn't made love to you, he will."

"Wherefore this burst of prophecy?"

"I don't have to be prophetic. I saw him look at you--and I didn't like
the way he did it. That man thinks he loves you."

"If so, he hasn't mentioned it to me."

"He will--I say 'thinks' he loves you," Stuart persisted in a level and
somewhat contemptuous voice, "because I don't believe he can really love
anything but himself and his money. But in a grasping, avaricious way he
wants you. His eyes betrayed him. He wants you in the fashion that a
miser wants gold. He wants you in the way a glutton wants a peach which
he has deliberately watched ripen until finally he says to himself,
'It's about ready to pick now.'"

A more intimate view of Eben Tollman failed to remove the initial
dislike, and yet Farquaharson acknowledged that nothing concrete was
added to the evidence of sheer prejudice. In his application to the
business affairs of the minister, he was assiduous and untiring, and the
invalid depended upon his advice as upon an infallible guidance. Stuart
told himself that to attribute this service of friendship to a selfish
motive was a meanness unworthy of entertainment, yet the suspicion
lingered. When they met, Tollman was always courteous and if this
courtesy never warmed into actual cordiality neither was it ever
tinctured with any seeming of dislike.

The summer had spent its heat and already there was a hint of autumn in
the air, but Stuart had kept his promise. There had been no lovemaking.

He and Conscience walked together one afternoon to a hill where they sat
with a vista of green country spread before them, just beginning to
kindle under the splendid torch of an incendiary autumn. Off beyond was
the sea, gorgeously blue in its main scheme, yet varying into subtle
transitions of mood from rich purple to a pale and tender green. The sky
was cloudless but there was that smoky, misty, impalpable thing like a
dust of dreams on the distance. The girl stood with one hand resting on
the gnarled bole of a pine. She wore a blue sweater, and her carmine
lips were more vivid because these months of anxiety had given to her
checks a creamy pallor. The man, standing at her elbow, was devouring
her with his eyes. She was gorgeous and wholly desirable and his heart
was flaming with emotions that ran the whole gamut of love's
completeness from clean passion to worship.

Yet he held his truce of silence and it was she herself who spoke at
last.

"The girls are all meeting on the campus--under the big trees about
now," she said, and her eyes held a far-away wistfulness. "They are
chattering foolishly and delightfully about their summer adventures ...
and the dormitories are being allotted. There'll be several new English
readers, I guess."

"Does it hurt as badly as that?" he asked, and her answer was a low,
rather hysterical little laugh, coming nearer bitterness than anything
he had ever heard from her lips before.

"You've been here. You've seen it all. Haven't you stopped instinctively
often when you broke into a sudden laugh with a moldy feeling around
your heart as if you'd shouted out in church? Haven't you watched
yourself and stultified yourself in every conversation, except when we
were alone, to keep from treading on the toes of some inch-wide
prejudice?"

"I've felt those things, of course--all of them." His reply was grave.
"But then, you see, you've been here, and that made the whole thing
lyric. The rest was just a somber background. It only made you stand out
the more triumphantly in contrast. It's like a Sorolla picture hung
against gray."

"We don't stand out against dull backgrounds--not for long," she
declared. "We fade into them." But after a moment she wheeled with a
sudden impulsiveness and gazed contritely into his face.

"Forgive me," she pleaded. "It's shameful and petty and mean to wreak
all my protests against you. You've been splendid. I couldn't have borne
it without you."

Stuart Farquaharson's cheeks paled under an emotion so powerful that
instead of exciting him it carried a sense of being tremendously
sobered--yet shaken and tried to the limit of endurance.

"You've forbidden me to make love to you," he said desperately, "and I'm
trying to obey, but God knows, dear, there are times when--" He broke
off with an abrupt choke in his throat.

Then Conscience said in a changed and very gentle voice, "You wouldn't
have me until I could be utterly, unmistakably sure of myself, would
you?"

"No," he replied uncompromisingly, "the very intensity of my love would
make it hell for both of us unless you loved me--that way, too--but I
wish you were certain. I wish to God you were!"

Again she turned her eyes seaward, and when she spoke her voice was
impersonal, almost dead, so that he thought, with a deep misery, she was
trying to make it merciful in tempering her verdict.

"I am certain now," she told him, still looking away.

He came a step nearer and braced himself. He could forecast her words,
he thought--deep friendship but no more!

"Your mind is--definitely--made up?"

Very abruptly she wheeled, showing him a face transformed and
self-revealing. Against her ivory white cheeks her parted lips were
crimson and her eyes dilated and softly black. "I think I've known it
from the first," she declared, and her voice thrilled joyously. "Only I
didn't know that I knew."

There was no need to ask what she knew. Her eyes were windows flung open
and back of them was the message of her heart.

"I don't know how you love me," she went on tensely, "but if you don't
love me rather madly, it's all one sided."

As his arms closed about her, he knew that he was violently shaken, but
he knew that she was trembling, too, through all the magnificent
softness and slenderness of her. He knew that the lips against which he
crushed his kisses were responsive.

Later he declared, with a ring of triumph, "I told you when you were a
little girl that they might take you to the North Pole and surround you
with regiments of soldiers--but that I'd come to claim you. I tell you
that again. _He_ wrote our two names in one horoscope and it had to be."




CHAPTER VI


In the library at the old manse that afternoon there was less of
sunlight and joy. Shadows hung between the walls and there were shadows,
too, in the heart of one of the men who sat by a central, paper-littered
table.

It was at best a cheerless room; this study where the minister had for
decades prepared the messages of his stewardship--and sternly drawn
indictments against sin. In the drawers of the old-fashioned desk those
sermons lay tightly rolled and dusty. Never had he spared himself--and
never had he spared others. What he failed to see was that in all those
sheaves upon sheaves of carefully penned teaching, was no single relief
of bright optimism, no single touch of sweet and gracious tolerance, not
one vibrating echo of Christ's great soul-song of tenderness.

Now it was ended. He had dropped in the harness and younger men were
taking up the relay race. They were men, he feared, who were not to be
altogether trusted; men beguiled by dangerous novelties of trend. With
worldliness of thought pressing always forward; with atheism increasing,
they were compromising and, it seemed to him, giving way cravenly, step
by step, to encroachment.

But the conversation just now was not of religion, or even dogma which
in this room had so often been confused with religion. Eben Tollman was
sitting in a stiff-backed chair across from his host. His face wore the
immobile expression of a man who never forgets the oppressive fact that
he is endowed with dignity.

"Eben," said the minister, "for years you have advised me on all money
matters and carried the advice into effect. You have virtually annexed
my business to your own and carried a double load."

"You have devoted your life to matters of greater moment, Mr. Williams,"
unctuously responded the younger man. "Your stewardship has been to
God."

"I could have wished," the minister's face clouded with anxiety, "that I
might have seen Conscience settled down with a godly husband and a child
or two about her before I go. Those are restless days and a girl should
have an anchorage."

There was a pause and at its end Tollman said hesitantly, almost
tentatively, "There is young Mr. Farquaharson, of course."

"Young Mr. Farquaharson!" The minister's lower jaw shot out pugnaciously
and his eyes flashed. "Eben, don't be absurd. The two of them are
children. This boy is playing away a vacation. To speak of him as a
matrimonial possibility is to talk irresponsibly. You astonish me!"

"Of course, in some respects it seems anomalous." Tollman spoke
thoughtfully and with no resentment of his companion's temper. He was
quite willing that any objections to Stuart which were projected into
the conversation should appear to come from the other. "For example, his
people are not our people and the two codes are almost antithetical. Yet
his blood is blue blood and, after all, the war is over."

"If I thought that there was even a remote danger of this friendship
ever becoming more than a friendship, I'd have Conscience send him away.
I'd guard her from it as from a contagion." The announcement came
fiercely. "Young Farquaharson's blood is blood that runs to license. His
ideas are the ideas of a hard-drinking, hard-gaming aristocracy. But
nonsense, Eben, he's a harmless boy just out of college. I like him--but
not for my own family. What put such an absurdity into your head?"

"Possibly it is an absurdity." Tollman gave the appearance of a man
who, having suggested a stormy topic, is ready to relinquish it. In
reality he was making Williams say everything which he wished to have
said and was doing it by the simple device of setting up antagonism to
play the prompter. "What put it into my head was perhaps nothing more
tangible than their constant companionship. They are both young. He has
a vital and fascinating personality. There is a touch of Pan and a touch
of Bacchus in him that--"

"Those are somewhat pagan advantages," interrupted the minister with a
crispness which carried the bite of scorn.

"Pagan perhaps, but worth considering, since it is not upon ourselves
that they operate." Tollman rose and went over to the window which gave
off across the garden. He presented the seeming of a man whose thought
was dispassionate, and because dispassionate impossible to ignore. "This
young man has in his blood bold and romantic tendencies which will not
be denied. To him much that we revere seems a type of narrowness. His
ancestors have made a virtue of the indulgences of sideboard and card
table--but the boy is not to blame for that."

Eben Tollman was playing on the prejudices of his host as he might have
played on the keys of a piano. He maintained, as he did it, all the
semblance of a fair-minded man painting extenuations into his portrait
of the absent Farquaharson.

"And you call this predisposition to looseness and license a thing to be
condoned, to be mixed with the blood of one's own posterity? Eben, I've
never seen you make excuses for ungodliness before." The fierce old face
suddenly cleared. "But there--there! This is all an imaginary danger.
I'll watch them, but I'm sure that these two have no such reprehensible
thought."

Mr. Tollman took up his hat and gloves. "I will see you again
to-morrow," he said, as he passed out of the library, leaving the old
puritan behind him immersed in a fresh anxiety.

It was not the intention of William Williams to act with unconscientious
haste--but he would watch and weigh the evidence. He prided himself on
his rigid adherence to justice, and escaped the knowledge that his sense
of justice was a crippled thing warped to the shape of casuistry. If he
had permitted the affliction, which God had visited upon him, to blind
his eyes against duty to his daughter, he must rouse himself and remedy
the matter. It was time to put such self-centered sin behind him and
make amends. In this self-assumption of the plenary right to regulate
the life of his daughter, or any one else, there was no element of
self-reproach. He held God's commission and acted for God!

The gradual, almost imperceptible change of manner was observable first
to the apprehensive eyes of Stuart Farquaharson himself. The Virginian's
standards as to his bearing in the face of hostility were definite and
could be summed up in the length of an epigram: Never to fail of
courtesy, but never to surrender more than half of any roadway to
aggression. Yet here was a situation of intricate bearings and a man
whom he could not fight. A brain must be dealt with, too old for
plasticity, like sculptor's clay hardened beyond amendment of form. A
man whose fighting blood is hot, but whose spirit of sportsmanship is
true, can sometimes maintain a difficult peace where another type would
fail, and that was the task Stuart set himself. That same spirit of
sportsmanship would have meant to Williams only a want of seriousness, a
making play out of life. But to Stuart it meant the nearest approach we
have to a survival of chivalry's ideals: a readiness to accept
punishment without complaint: a willingness to extend every fair
advantage to an adversary: a courage to strive to the uttermost without
regard to the material value of the prize--and paramount to all the
rest, a scorn for any meanly gained advantage, however profitable. If
there was any value in his heritage of gentle blood and a sportsman's
training, it should stand him in good stead now, for the sake of the
girl he loved.

One evening in the garden Conscience asked him, "Do you think I
over-painted the somberness of the picture? But it's a shame for you to
have to endure it, too. I think the confinement is making Father more
irritable than usual."

The man shook his head and smiled whimsically.

"It's not the confinement. It's me. He's discovered that you and I have
grown up, and he's seeking to draw me into a quarrel so that he can
tender me my passports."

Conscience laid her hands on his arm and they trembled a little.

"I'm sure it isn't that," she declared, though her words were more
confident than her voice. "You've stood a great deal, but please keep it
up. It won't"--her voice dropped down the key almost to a whisper--"it
won't be for long."

       *       *       *       *       *

The hills were flaming these days with autumnal splendor. Conscience and
Stuart had just returned from a drive, laden with trophies of woodland
richness and color. About the cheerless house she had distributed
branches of the sugar maple's vermilion and the oak's darker redness,
but the fieriest and the brightest clusters of leafage she had saved for
the old library where the invalid sat among his cases of old sermons.

"Stuart and I gathered these for you," she told him as she arranged them
deftly in a vase.

The old man's face did not brighten with enjoyment. Rather it hardened
into a set expression, and after a moment's pause he echoed querulously,
"You and Stuart."

His daughter looked up, her attention arrested by his tone. "Why, yes,"
she smiled. "We went for a drive and got out and foraged in the woods."

"How long has Mr. Farquaharson been here now?"

"Something over six weeks, I believe."

"Isn't it nearer two months?"

The girl turned very slowly from the window and in the dark room her
figure and profile were seen, a silhouette against the pane with a
nimbus about her hair.

"Perhaps it is. Why?"

For a while the father did not speak, then he said: "Perhaps it's time
he was thinking of terminating his visit."

The girl felt her shoulders stiffen, and all the fighting blood which
was in her as truly, if less offensively than in himself, leaped in her
pulses. Defiant words rushed to her lips, but remained unsaid, because
something grotesque about his attempted movement in his chair
accentuated his helplessness and made her remember.

"What do you mean?" she asked in a level voice, which since she had
suppressed the passion came a little faint and uncertain.

"I had no objection," he replied quietly enough but with that inflexible
intonation which automatically arouses antagonism, since it puts into
its "I want's" and its "I don't want's" a tyrannical finality, "to this
young gentleman visiting us. I extended him hospitality. I even liked
him. But it has come rather too much, for my liking, to a thing that can
be summed up in your words of a minute ago--'Stuart and I.' It's time to
bring it to an end."

"Why should it come to an end, Father?" she asked with a terrific effort
to speak calmly.

"Because it might run to silly sentiment--and to such an idea I could
never give consent. This young man, though a gentleman by birth, is not
our sort of a gentleman. His blood is not the kind of blood with which
ours can be mixed: his ideas are the loose ideas that put pleasure above
righteousness. In short, while I wish to say good-by to him as agreeably
as I said welcome, the time has come to say good-by."

She came over and sat by his chair and let one hand rest on his white
hair. "Father," she said in a low voice, tremulously repressed, "you are
undertaking to rule offhand on a question which is too vital to my life
to be treated with snap judgment. I've tried to meet your wishes and I
want to go on trying, but in this you must think well before you take a
position so--so absolute that perhaps--"

He shook her hand away and his eyes blazed.

"I _have_ thought well," he vehemently declared. "I have not only
thought, but I have prayed. I have waited silently and watched in an
effort to be just. I have asked God's guidance."

"God's guidance could hardly have told you that Stuart Farquaharson has
loose ideas or that he's unrighteous or that his blood could corrupt our
blood--because none of those things are true or akin to the truth."

For an instant the old man gazed at her in an amazement which turned
quickly to a wrath of almost crazily blazing eyes, and his utterance
came with a violence of fury.

"Do you mean that such an unspeakable idiocy has already come to
pass--that you and this--this--young amateur jockey and card-player from
the South--" He broke suddenly off with a contempt that made his words
seem to curl and snap with flame.

The girl rose from her place on the arm of his chair. She stood
lancelike in her straightness and her eyes blazed, too, but her voice
lost neither its control nor its dignity.

"I mean," she said, "that this gentleman who needs no apologist and no
defense, has honored me by telling me that he loves me--and that I love
him."

"And his high courage has prevented him from admitting this to me and
facing my just wrath?"

"His courage has been strong enough to concede to my wish that I might
tell you myself, and in my own time."

The library door stood open and the hall gave out onto the verandah
where Stuart Farquaharson sat waiting for Conscience to return.

The minister attempted to rise from his chair and fell back into it,
with a groan, as he remembered his helplessness. That helplessness did
not, however, abate his anger, and his voice rose as it was accustomed
to rise when, pounding the pulpit pillow, he wished to drive home some
impassioned utterance, beyond the chance of missing any sleepy ear.

"If what you say is true, this man has abused my hospitality and used my
roof as an ambuscade to attack me. He is not, as you say, a man of honor
or of courage, but a coward and a sneak! I have more to say, but it had
better be said to him direct. Please send him to me."

The girl hesitated, then she wheeled with flaming face toward the chair.
"I have been willing," she said, "to smother my life in an effort to
meet your ideas, though I knew them to be little ideas. Now I see that
in yielding everything one can no more please you than in yielding
nothing. If he goes, I go, too. You may take your choice."

But as her words ended Conscience felt a hand laid gently on her
shoulder, and a voice whispered in her ear, "Don't, dear; this will
always haunt you. Leave it to me." Stuart turned her gently toward the
door, then faced the irate figure in the chair. In a voice entirely
quiet and devoid of passion he addressed its occupant. "I thought I
heard you call for me, sir. I am here."




CHAPTER VII


For a little while the study remained silent, except for the excited
panting of the minister, whose face was a mask of fury. The passion in
Conscience's eyes was gradually fading into an expression of deep
misery. The issue of cruel dilemma had come in spite of every defensive
effort and every possible care. It had come of her father's forcing and
she knew that he would make no concession. When Williams spoke his voice
came chokingly.

"Conscience, leave us alone. What I have to say to this man is a matter
between the two of us."

But instead of obeying the girl took her place at Stuart's side and laid
her hand on his arm.

"What you have to say to him, Father, is very much my affair," she
replied steadily. "My action for the rest of my life depends upon it."

"Dear," suggested the Virginian in a lowered voice, "you can trust me.
I'm not going to lose my temper if it's humanly possible to keep it.
There's no reason why you should have to listen to things which it will
be hard to forget."

"No," she declared with a decisiveness that could not be shaken, "I stay
here as long as you stay. When you go, I go, too."

Farquaharson turned to the minister, "I believe you called for me, sir,"
he repeated, in a tone of even politeness. "You have something to say to
me?"

The old man raised a hand that was palsied with rage and his voice
shook.

"I fancy you heard what I said of you. I said that you had abused my
hospitality and that you are a coward and a sneak. You are worse than
that; you are an infamous scoundrel."

Conscience felt the muscles in the forearm upon which her fingers rested
grow tense and hard as cables. She saw the face pale to lividness and
the lips stiffen, but except for that, the man made no movement, and for
some ten seconds he did not speak. They were ten seconds of struggle
against an anger as fierce as it was just, but at the end of that time
he inquired quietly, "Is that all you meant to say to me?"

"No! There's much more, but for most men that would be enough. To let it
go unanswered is a confession of its truth."

"My invariable answer to such words," said Stuart Farquaharson slowly,
"is made with a clenched fist. The triple immunity of your cloth, your
age and your infirmity denies me even that reply."

"And what immunity makes a denial unnecessary?"

"A denial would dignify a charge which I can afford to ignore as I
ignore vulgar talk that I hear in an alley."

The old man bent forward, glaring like a gargoyle, and his first
attempts to speak were choked into inarticulate rumblings by his rage.
His face reddened with a fever of passion which threw the veins on his
temples into purple traceries.

"I repeat with a full responsibility--with the knowledge that the God
whom I have tried to serve is listening, that you _are_ what I have
called you, because you have come into my house and practiced a
continuous and protracted deceit. You have abused the freedom granted
you as a guest to try to win my daughter away from everything worth
holding to and everything she has been taught. I was a blind fool. I was
a watchman fallen asleep at the gate--a sentry unfaithful at his post."
The voice of the minister settled into a clearer coherence as he went on
in deep bitterness. "You say I have accused you sternly. I am also
accusing myself sternly--but now the scales have fallen from my eyes and
I recognize my remissness. God grant I am not too late."

He paused for breath and his fingers clenched rigidly at the carvings of
his chair arms. "You know that my daughter is young and
inexperienced--an impressionable child not sufficiently seasoned in
wisdom to repudiate the gauzy lure of dangerous modernisms."

"Father," broke in Conscience during his accusing pause, "you are
starting out with statements that are unjust and untrue. I am not a
child and no one has corrupted my righteousness. We simply have
different ideas of life."

The minister did not take his eyes from the face of the young man and he
ignored the interruption of his daughter.

"I could not blame her: it was the natural spirit of unthinking youth.
You, however, did know the consequences. Here in my house--which you
must never reënter--you have incited my family against me to serve your
own covetous and lustful interests." Again he halted while the young
man, still standing as rigid as a bronze figure, his flushed face set
and his eyes holding those of his accuser with unblinking steadiness,
made no attempt to interrupt him.

"What, indeed, to you were mere questions of right or wrong? You had a
world of light and frivolous women to choose from, your own kind of
women who could dance and fritter life away in following fads that make
for license--but you must come into the household of a man who has tried
to fight God's battles; standing against these encroachments of Satan
which you advocate--and beguile my only daughter into telling me that I
must choose between surrender or the wretchedness of ending my life in
deserted loneliness."

Farquaharson, despite the storm which raged in his heart, answered with
every outward show of calmness, even with dignity.

"You accuse me of having made love to your daughter. For that I have no
denial. I have loved her since she was a child. I have told her so at
every opportunity, but that love has been honorable and free of deceit
and I know of no law which forbids a man of decent character to plead
his cause. That I should win her love is a marvelous thing, but, thank
God, I have it and hope to hold it till death."

"You have filched it! You have it as a thief has another man's purse or
another man's wife. You have gained favor by arousing discontent for a
Godly home: a home where she is sheltered and where she belongs."

There was a tense silence and Farquaharson's voice was almost gentle
when he next spoke.

"There is more than one way of looking at life--and more than one may be
right. Conscience wanted the wider scope which college would have given
her. She wanted it with all the splendid eagerness of a soul that wishes
to grow and fulfill itself. That rightful privilege you denied her--and
she has not complained. Why shouldn't she want life's fullness instead
of life's meagerness and its breadth instead of its bigotries? Is there
greater nobility in the dull existence of a barnacle that hangs to one
spot than in the flight of a bird? I have sought no quarrel and I have
cruelly set a curb upon my temper, but I have no apologies to make and
no intention of giving her up. I should be glad of your consent, but
with it or without it I shall continue to urge my love. It would be a
pity for you to force a breach."

"There is no question of my forcing a breach." The first words wore
spoken sharply, but as they continued they began again to rush and mount
into an access of passion. "You are as insolent as your words prove you
to be reckless. You have tried to corrupt every idea of righteousness
in my daughter's heart. It would almost appear that you have succeeded.
But I believe God is stronger than Satan. I believe my prayers and the
heritage of Godfearing forefathers will yet save her. As for you, you
are to leave my house and henceforth never to cross my threshold."

"Very well," answered Stuart quietly; then he added: "To what extent am
I indebted to Mr. Eben Tollman for your sudden discovery that I am a
sneak and a coward?"

"That," shouted the invalid, "proves your meanness of spirit. Had Mr.
Tollman held a brief for you he could not have defended you more
stoutly. He, too, was deceived in you, it seems."

"Stuart," suggested the girl, "it's no use. You can't change him now.
Perhaps when he's less angry--"

"Less angry!" screamed the old man. "For almost seventy years my wrath
against the machinations of hell has burned hot. If God grants me
strength to the end, it will never cool. You, too, have turned to my
enemies in my last days. You would leave me for a young wastrel who has
sung in your ears the song of a male siren. But before I will surrender
my fight for the dictates of the conscience God has given me to be my
mentor, I will see you go!"

"Father!" cried the girl. "You don't know what you're saying."

His face had become frenzied and purpled, his hands were shaking. His
voice was a thunder, rumbling with its agitation. "I must have sinned
deeply--but if the Almighty sees fit to take from me my health, my
child, my last days of peace on earth--if He chooses to chastise me as
He chastised Job--I shall still fight for His righteous will, and war on
the iniquitous chil--"

The last word broke with a choke in his throat. The white head rocked
from side to side and the hands clawed the air. Then William Williams
hunched forward and lurched from his chair to the floor.

In an instant Farquaharson was at his side and bending over the
unconscious form and a few minutes later, still insensible, the figure
had been laid on a couch and the roadster was racing for a physician.

When Conscience came out into the yard later, where her lover was
awaiting her, her lips were pale and her eyes tortured. She went
straight into his outstretched arms and with her head on his shoulder
sobbed out a misery that shook her. At last the man asked softly, "What
did the doctor say?" And she answered brokenly.

"It seems that--besides the paralysis he has a weak--heart."

The man held her close. "I wish to God it could have been averted. I
tried."

"You did all you could," she declared. "But, Stuart, when he came back
to consciousness, his eyes were awful! I've never seen such terror in a
human face. He couldn't speak at first and when he could ... he
whispered in absolute agony, 'Has she gone?' He thought I'd left him
lying there--and gone with you."

"Great God!" It was more a groan than an exclamation.

"And when he saw me he stretched out his hands like a child and began
crying over me, but even then he said bitterly, 'That man's name must
never be mentioned in this house.'... What are we to do?"

"There is only one thing to do," he told her. "We are young enough to
wait. You can't desert a dying father."

While they talked the physician came out of the door.

"The patient will pull through this attack," he said briskly. "It's a
leaky valve. There is only one rule that I have to lay upon you. It is
absolutely vital that he shall not be excited. A blow with an ax would
be no more fatal than another such stroke."

Conscience looked desperately about her, as Stuart with the doctor
beside him started the car again down the drive. In a front window her
eyes lighted on a flaming branch of maple leaves. Only two hours ago she
and her lover had been watching the sunlight spill through the gorgeous
filter of the painted foliage. They had carried in their hearts the
spirit of carnival. Now the storm had broken and swept them.

She walked unsteadily to the veranda of the house and dropped down on
the steps. Her head was swimming and her life was in a vortex.




CHAPTER VIII


The days that followed were troubled days and they brought to
Conscience's cheeks an accentuated pallor. Under her eyes were smudges
that made them seem very large and wistful. The minister was once more
in his arm chair, a little more broken, a little more fiercely
uncompromising of aspect, but the one normal solution of such a spent
and burdensome life: the solution of death, stood off from him. Upon his
daughter, whose lips were sealed against any protest by the belief that
even a small excitement might kill him, he vented long and bigoted
sermons of anathema. In these sermons, possibly, he was guilty of the
very heresy of which his daughter had said he was so intolerant. He
seemed to doubt himself, these days, that Satan wore a spiked tail and a
pair of cloven hoofs. Of late he rather leaned to the belief that the
Arch-tempter had returned to walk the earth in the guise of a young
Virginian and that he had assumed the incognito of Stuart Farquaharson.

One refrain ran through every waking hour and troubled his sleep with
fantastic dreams. God commanded him to strip this tempter of his
habiliments of pretense and show the naked wickedness of his soul to the
girl's deluded eye. To that fancied command he dedicated himself as
whole-heartedly as a bloodhound gives itself to the man hunt.

To Stuart one day, as they walked together in the woods, Conscience
confessed her fear that this constant hammering of persecution would
eventually batter down her capacity for sane judgment and she ended with
a sweeping denunciation of every form of bigotry.

"Dear," he answered with the gravity of deep apprehension, "you say
that and you believe it and yet this same instinct of self-martyrdom is
the undertow of your life flood. If your given name didn't happen to be
Conscience your middle name would be just that."

"I suppose I have a conscience of a sort--but a different, sort, I hope.
Is that such a serious fault?" she asked, and because the strain of
these days had tired and rubbed her nerves into the sensitiveness of
exhaustion, she asked it in a hurt and wounded tone.

"It's an indispensable virtue," he declared. "Your father's conscience
was a virtue, too, until it ran amuck and became a savage menace. When
you were a child," he went on, speaking so earnestly that his brow was
drawn into an expression which she mistook for a frown of disapproval,
"your most characteristic quality was an irrepressible sense of humor.
It gave both sparkle and sanity to your outlook. It held you immune to
all bitterness."

"And now?" She put the query somewhat faintly.

"Now, more than ever, because the life around you is grayer, it's vital
that you cling to your golden talisman. To let it go means to be lost in
the fog."

They were strolling along a woodland path and she was a few steps in
advance of him. He saw her shoulders stiffen, but it was not until he
overtook her that he discovered her eyes to be sparkling with tears.

"What is it, dearest?" he contritely demanded, and after a long pause
she said:

"Nothing, except that I feel as if you had slapped me in the face."

"I! Slapped you in the face!" He could only reëcho her words in
bewilderment and distress. "I don't understand."

Laying a hand on her arm, he halted her in a place where the setting sun
was spilling streams of yellow light through the woodland aisles and
then her lips trembled; her eyes filled and she pressed both hands over
her face. After a moment she looked up and dashed the tears
contemptuously away.

"No, I know you don't understand, dear. It's my own fault. I'm a weak
little fool," she said, "But it's all gotten horribly on my nerves. I
can't help it."

"For God's sake," he begged, "tell me what I did or said?" And her words
came with a weary resignation.

"I think you had better put me out of your life, Stuart. I've just
realized how things really are--you've told me. I can't go because I'm
chained to the galley. While Father lives my place is here."

She broke off suddenly and his face took on a stunned amazement.

"Out of my life!" exclaimed the man almost angrily. "Abandon you to all
this abysmal bigotry and--to this pharisaical web of ugly dogmas!
Conscience, you're falling into a melancholy morbidness."

As she looked at him and saw the old smoldering fire in his eyes that
reminded her of his boyhood, a pathetic smile twisted the corners of her
lips.

"Yes--I guess that's just it, Stuart," she said slowly, "You see, I may
have to stay here until, as you put it, I'm all faded out in the fog. If
I've changed so much already there's no telling what years of it will
turn me into."

Stuart Farquaharson caught her impulsively in his arms and his words
came in tumultuous fervor.

"What I said wasn't criticism," he declared. "God knows I couldn't
criticize you. You ought to know that. This is the nearest we've ever
come to a quarrel, dear, since the Barbara Freitchie days, and it's
closer than I want to come. Besides, it's not just your laughter that I
love. It's all of you: heart, mind, body: the whole lovely trinity of
yourself. I mean to wage unabated war against all these forces that are
trying to stifle your laughter into the pious smirk of the pharisee.
There's more of what God wants the world to feel in one peal of your
laughter than in all the psalms that this whole people ever whined
through their noses. You're one of the rare few who can go through life
being yourself--not just a copy and reflection of others. A hundred
years ago your own people would probably have burned you as a witch for
that. They've discontinued that form of worship now, but the cut of
their moral and intellectual jib is, in some essentials, the same. Thank
God, you have a different pattern of soul and I want you to keep it."

She drew away from him and slowly her face cleared of its misery and the
eyes flashed into their old mischief-loving twinkle. "That's the first
real rise I've had out of you," she declared, "since Barbara waved the
stars and stripes at you. Then you were only defending Virginia, but now
you've assumed the offensive against all New England."

But even in that mild disagreement they had, as he said, come nearer
than either liked to a quarrel--and neither could quite forget it. Both
felt that the thin edge of what might have been a disrupting wedge had
threatened their complete harmony.

Because he could mark the transition of this thing called conscience
into an obsession, and because he, too, was worn in patience and
stinging with resentment against the injustice of the father, he fought
hotly, and his denunciations of various influences were burning and
scornful. So slowly but dangerously there crept into their arguments the
element of contention. Hitherto Stuart had made no tactical mistakes. He
had endured greatly and in patience, but now he was unconsciously
yielding to the temptation of assailing an abstract code in a fashion
which her troubled judgment might translate into attacks upon her
father. Out of that attitude was born for her a hard dilemma of
conflicting loyalties. It was all a fabric woven of gossamer threads,
but Gulliver was bound into helplessness by just such Lilliputian
fetters.

Late one night, when the moon was at two-thirds of fullness and the air
touched with frost, Stuart abandoned the bed upon which he had been
restlessly tossing for hours. He kindled a pipe and sat meditating, none
too cheerfully, by the frail light of a bayberry candle. Through the
narrow corridors and boxed-in stair wells of a ramshackle hotel, came no
sounds except the minors of the night. Somewhere far off a dog barked
and somewhere near at hand a traveling salesman snored. In the flare and
sputter of the charring wick and melting wax shadows lengthened and
shortened like flapping flags of darkness.

Then the jangle of the telephone bell in the office ripped the stillness
with a discordant suddenness which Farquaharson thought must arouse the
household, but the snoring beyond the wall went on, unbroken, and there
was no sound of a footfall on the creaking stair. At last Stuart,
himself, irritated by the strident urgency of its repetitions, reached
for his bath robe and went down. The clapper still trembled with the
echo of its last vibrations as he put the receiver to his ear and
answered.

Then he started and his muscles grew taut, for the other voice was that
of Conscience and it shook with terrified unevenness and a tremulous
faintness like the leaping and weakening of a fevered pulse. He could
tell that she was talking guardedly with her lips close to the
transmitter.

"I had to speak to you without waiting for morning," she told him,
recognizing his voice, "and yet--yet I don't know what to say."

Recognizing from the wild note that she was laboring under some
unnatural strain, he answered soothingly, "I'm glad you called me,
dear."

"What time is it?" she demanded next and when he told her it was well
after midnight she gave a low half-hysterical laugh. "I couldn't
sleep.... Father spent the afternoon exhorting me ... he was trying to
make me promise not to see you again ... and I was trying to keep him
from exciting himself." Her voice was so tense now as to be hardly
recognizable. "Every few minutes it looked as if he were about to fly
into a passion.... You know what that would mean ... and of course
I--I--couldn't promise."

She paused for breath, but before he could speak, rushed on.

"It's been an absolute reign of terror. Every nerve in my body is
jumping and quivering.... I think I'm going mad."

"Listen." The man spoke as one might to a child who has awakened,
terrified, out of a nightmare and is afraid to be alone. "I'm coming out
there. You need to talk to some one. I'll leave the car out of hearing
in the road."

"No, no!" she exclaimed in a wildly fluttering timbre of protest. "If he
woke up it would be worse than this afternoon--it might kill him!"

But Stuart answered her with a quiet note of finality. "Wrap up
well--it's cool outside--and meet me on the verandah. We can talk more
safely that way than by 'phone. I'm going to obey the doctor
implicitly--unless you fail to meet me. If you do that--" he paused a
moment before hanging up the receiver--"I'll knock on the door."

The moon had not yet set as he started on foot up the driveway of the
manse and the bare trees stood out stark and inky against the silver
mists. Before he was more than half-way to the house he saw her coming
to meet him, casting backward glances of anxiety over her shoulder.

She was running with a ghostlike litheness through the moonlight, her
eyes wide and frightened and her whole seeming one of unreasoning panic
so that the man, who knew her dauntlessness of spirit, felt his heart
sink.

"You shouldn't have done it," she began in a reproachful whisper. "You
shouldn't have come!" But he only caught her in his arms and held her so
close to his own heart that the wild palpitation of her bosom was calmed
against its steadiness. Her arms went gropingly round his neck and
clutched him as if he were the one stable thing that stood against an
allied ferocity of wind and wave.

"You needed me," he said. "And when you need me I come--even if I have
to come like a burglar."

The eyes which she raised to his face were tearless--but hardly sane.
She was fear-ridden by ghosts that struck at her normality and she
whispered, "Suppose he died by my fault?"

At all costs, the lover resolved, Conscience must leave this place for a
time--until she could return with a stabler judgment. But just now he
could not argue with her.

"We'll be very quiet," he said reassuringly. "If you hear any sound in
the house you can go back. You're overwrought, dearest, and I've only
come to be near you. Nobody will see me except yourself, but if at any
time before daylight you want me, come to your window and raise the
blind. I'll be where I can see."

For a while she clung to him silently, her breath coming fast. About
them the moon shed a softness of pale silver and old ivory. The silence
seemed to carry a wordless hymn of peace and though they stood in shadow
there was light enough for lovers' eyes. The driven restlessness that
had made Conscience doubt her sanity was slowly yielding to a sense of
repose, as the tautened anguish of a mangled body relaxes to the balm of
an anesthetic. Slowly the slenderly curved and graciously proportioned
modeling of her lithe figure quieted from spasmodic unrest and the wild
racing measure of her heart-beat calmed. Then she turned up her face.
Her eyes cleared and her lips tilted their corners in a smile.

"I'm a horrid little demon," she declared in a voice freighted with
self-scorn, but no longer panic-stricken. "I've always hated a coward,
and I'm probably the most amazingly craven one that ever lived. I do
nothing but call on you to fight my battles for me when I can't hold my
own."

"You're an adorable little saint, with an absurd leaning toward
martyrdom," he fervently contradicted. "Why shouldn't you call on me?
Aren't you fighting about me?"

Her dark eyes were for a moment serene because she was treasuring this
moment of moonlight and the respite of love against the chances of
to-morrow.

"Anyhow you came--" she said, "and since you did there's at least one
more fight left in me." Then her voice grew again apprehensive. "It was
pretty bad before ... just hearing you preached against and being afraid
to reply because ... of the warning. Now he wants my promise that I'll
dismiss you forever ... and the worst of it is that he'll pound on it to
the end. What am I to do?"

"Is there any question?" he gravely asked her. "_Could_ you make that
promise?"

"No--no!" He felt the figure in his arms flinch at the words, "There's
no question of _that_, but how am I to keep him from raging himself to
death?"

"Hasn't the doctor warned him that he mustn't excite himself?"

The dark head nodded and the fingers of the hands about his neck
tightened. "Of course," she said. "But there you have the tyranny of
weakness again. I must make the fight to keep him alive. He would
regard it as going righteously to death for his beliefs. That's just
the goodness-gone-wrongness of it all."

"Blessed are the self-righteous," mused Farquaharson half aloud, "for
they shall supply their own absolution." To himself he was saying, "The
wretched old hellion!"

"And then you see, after all," she added with the martyr's sophistry,
"in the fight for you, I'm only fighting for myself and in doing what I
can for him I'm trying to be unselfish."

"Listen," the man spoke carefully, "that, too, is the
goodness-gone-wrongness as you call it; the sheer perversion of a duty
sense. If it were just myself to be thought of, perhaps I couldn't fight
you on a point of conscience. But it isn't just me--not if you love me."

"Love you!" He felt the thrilled tremor that ran through her from head
to foot, and that made her bosom heave stormily. The moon had sunk a
little and the shadow in which they were standing had crawled onward so
that on her head fell a gleam of pale light, kindling her eyes and
touching her temples under the sooty shadows of her hair. Her lips were
parted and her voice trembled with the solemnity of a vow, too sacred to
be uttered without the fullest frankness. "In every way that I know how
to love, I love you! Everything that a woman can be to a man I want to
be to you and all that a woman can give to a man, I want to give to
you."

It was he who trembled then and became unsteady with the intoxication of
triumph.

"Then I'll fight for you, while I have breath, even if it means fighting
with you."

Suddenly she caught at his arm with a spasmodic alarm, and he turned his
head as the screeching whine of a window sounded in the stillness. The
effort to raise it cautiously was indicated not by any noiselessness
but by the long duration of the sound. Then a woman's head with hair in
tight pigtails stood out against the pallid light of a bedroom lamp,
turned low, and the whispered challenge came out to them. "Who's out
there?"

"Ssh!" cautioned the girl, tensely. "It's I, Auntie. Don't wake Father."

Grudgingly the window creaked down and for seconds which lengthened
themselves interminably to the anxious ears of the pair in the shadows,
they waited with bated breath. Then Stuart whispered, "You must go to
sleep now."

The rest of the far-spent night Stuart stood guard outside the house.
Once, a half hour after Conscience had gone in, her blind rose and she
stood silhouetted against the lamp-light. The man stepped out of his
shadow and raised a hand, and she waved back at him. Then the lamp went
out, and he surrendered himself to thought and resolves--and mistakes.
This submission to the tyranny of weakness had gone too far. She must go
away. He must take up the fight aggressively. He did not realize that he
who was fighting for her sense of humor had lost his own. He did not
foresee that he was preparing to throw the issue on dangerous ground,
pitting his stubbornness against her stubbornness, and raising the old
duel of temperaments to combat--the immemorial conflict between puritan
and cavalier.




CHAPTER IX


Stuart Farquaharson had tempered a dignified strength with a gracious
fortitude. He had endured slanderous charges and stood with the
steadiness of a reef-light when Conscience was steering a storm ridden
course, but the constant pressure on the dykes of his self-command had
strained them until they might break at any moment and let the flood of
passion swirl through with destructive power. He was being oppressed and
seeing Conscience oppressed by a spirit which he regarded as viciously
illiberal--and he accused Conscience, in his own mind, of blind
obedience to a distorted sense of duty. Unconsciously he was seeking to
coerce her into repudiating it by a form of argument in which the
graciousness of his nature gave way to a domineering insistence.
Unconsciously, too, that form of attack aroused in her an unyielding
quality of opposition.

When he saw her next after the mid-night meeting she had seemed more
normally composed and he had seized upon the occasion to open his
campaign. They had driven over and stopped the car at a point from which
they could look out to sea, and though the summer vividness had died out
of wave and sky and the waters had taken on a touch of a leaden
grimness, there was still beauty in the picture.

For awhile they talked of unimportant things, but abruptly Stuart said:
"Dearest, I told you that I meant to fight for you even if I had to
fight with you. That's the hardest form in which the battle could come,
but one can't always choose the conditions of war." He paused and,
seeing that his eyes were troubled, Conscience smiled encouragingly.

"At least," she laughed, "I believe you will wage war on me humanely."

The man went on hurriedly. "I've been talking with the doctor. He says
that your father's condition holds no immediate danger--danger of death,
I mean. Unless he suffers another stroke, he may live for years."

The girl nodded her head. "Yes, I know," she said wearily, "and for him
life only means continuation of suffering." She did not add that it
meant the same for her and Stuart, looking steadily into her face, said
with decision, "For awhile you must go away."

"I!" Her eyes widened with an incredulous expression as if she thought
she had misunderstood, then she answered slowly and very gently, "You
_know_ I can't do that, dear."

"I know that you must," he countered, and because he had keyed himself
for this combat of wills he spoke more categorically than he realized.
"At first thought, of course, you would feel that you couldn't. But your
ability to stand a long siege will depend on conserving your strength.
You are human and not indestructible."

She shook her head with a gentle stubbornness. "Stuart, dear, you're
trying to make me do a thing you wouldn't do yourself. A sentry placed
on duty can't go away until his watch is over--even if it's raw and
gloomy where's he's stationed."

"No, but soldiers under intolerable stress are relieved and given
breathing space whenever it's possible."

"Yes, whenever it's possible."

"It's possible, now, dearest, and perhaps it won't be later. You could
visit some friend for a few weeks and come back the better able to carry
on the siege. Otherwise you'll be crushed by the weight of the ordeal."

"Stuart," she began slowly, "who is there to take my place, even for a
few weeks?"

"And the whole intolerable situation arises," he broke out with a
sudden inflection of wrath, "from inert, thick-skulled bigotry. Thought
processes that are moral cramps and mental dyspepsia threaten to ruin
your entire life."

"Don't, dear--please!" She leaned toward him and spoke earnestly. "I
know it's hard to endure without retort, but please don't make me listen
to things like that about Father. It's bad enough without any more
recriminations."

Then logic retreated from Stuart Farquaharson. He, the gracious and
controlled, gave way to his first moment of ungenerous temper and
retorted bitterly.

"Very well, but it seems you can listen to his abuse of me."

Conscience flinched as if lash-stung and for an instant indignation and
anger kindled in her eyes only to die as instantly out of them, as she
bit her lip. When she spoke it was in an even gentler voice. "You know
why I listened to him, Stuart. You know that I didn't listen ... before
his stroke. I didn't listen when I told him that if you went, I went,
too, did I?"

The man's face paled and with a spasmodic gesture he covered it with his
hands. "My God!" he exclaimed, "I don't think I've ever said such a
damnably mean and caddish thing before--and to you!"

But Conscience bent over and drew his hands away from his face. "It
wasn't you. It was just the strain. You could make allowances for me
when I called you out to calm me in the middle of the night. I can make
them, too. Neither of us is quite sane."

But having had that warning of Stuart's slipping control, Conscience
kept locked in her own bosom certain fresh trials which discussion would
have alleviated. She did not tell him how she spent sleepless nights
devising plans to meet the grim insistence upon his banishment which
she knew the morning would bring. But she felt that the comfort of a
complete unburdening of her feelings had been curtailed and with a
woman's genius for sacrifice she uncomplainingly assumed that added
strain.

One afternoon Eben Tollman came out of the house, as she was walking
alone under the bare trees of the driveway, and stopped, hat in hand, at
her side.

"Conscience," he began thoughtfully, "Mr. Williams has just told me of
his insistence that Mr. Farquaharson shall not only be denied the house,
but sent away altogether. You must be carrying a pretty heavy load for
young shoulders."

The girl stood regarding her father's counselor gravely. He had never
appealed to her as a person inviting confidence, and she had thought of
his mind as cut to the same austere pattern as the minister's own. Yet
now his face wore an expression of kindliness and sympathy to which his
manner gave corroboration. Possibly she had misjudged the man and lost
his underlying qualities in her careless view of externals. Tollman
seemed to expect no answer and went on slowly, "I tried to point out to
your father the unwisdom of an insistence which must stir a spirit like
yours to natural opposition. I suggested that under the circumstances it
was scarcely fair."

"What did he say?" She put the inquiry with a level glance as if
reserving her right to accept or reject his volunteered assistance.

"He could only see his own side. He must do his duty, however hard he
found it."

Conscience remembered Stuart's warning that Tollman thought he loved
her, and smiled to herself. This voluntary championing of another man's
cause hardly seemed to comport with such a conception.

"I don't know what to do," she admitted wearily. "Obviously I can't make
the promise he asks and no more can I let him fly into a rage that may
kill him. I'm between the upper and nether mill-stones."

The man nodded with a grave and courteous comprehension.

"I hesitate to volunteer advice--and yet--" He came to a questioning
halt.

"Yes," she prompted eagerly. "Please go on."

"I had thought," he continued, with the diffident manner of a man
unaccustomed to proffering counsel before it was asked, "that, if you
cared to use me, I might be of some help--as an intermediary of sorts."

"An intermediary?" she repeated. Then more impulsively, because she felt
that her attitude had been wanting in graciousness, she added, "I know
you're offering to do something very kind, but I'm afraid I don't quite
understand."

"I think I am entirely in your father's confidence," he explained, "and
because, on many subjects, we hold common opinions, I can discuss--even
argue--matters with him without fear of antagonism or excitement to him.
Still I hope I am not too old to be in sympathy with your more youthful
and more modern outlook on life. If at any time I can help, please call
on me."

They had been walking toward his buggy at the hitching post--it was not
a new or particularly well-kept vehicle--and there they halted.

"This is good of you," she said, extending her hand cordially, and as he
took it he suggested, "Meanwhile an old man is not speedily weaned from
an idea which has taken deep root, and that brings me to another
suggestion." Once more he paused deferentially as if awaiting
permission, "if I may make it."

"I wish you would."

"It is the idea of Mr. Farquaharson's constant proximity and influence
which keeps your father's animosity stirred to combat. With a temporary
absence it would relax. I think it might even come to an automatic
end.... When Farquaharson returned Mr. Williams's mind might have lost
its inflammation."

He smiled and shook the reins over the back of the old horse and when he
drove away he left Conscience standing with her lips parted and her gaze
set.

Send Stuart away for a time! She had told that she could not stand it
without him, and now Tollman had expressed the unbiased view of one
whose personal desires were not blinding his judgment. She moved over to
the side of the road and leaned heavily against a tree. She felt as if
she were standing unprotected under the chilling beat of a cold and
driving rain, and her lips moved without sound, shaping again the three
words "send him away!"

She had been holding her lover at her side until she could see his
nerves growing raw under the stress of his worry about herself and the
temper which nature had made chivalric giving way to acerbity. Yes,
Tollman was right--it required a sacrifice to save a wreck--and because
he was right the sun grew dark and the future as black as the floor of
the sea.

But the next time she saw Stuart she did not broach the suggestion, nor
yet the next time after that. The man gave her no opportunity, so
indomitably was he waging his campaign to have her go. And as her
equally inflexible refusal stood impregnable against his assaults, he
grew desperate and reënforced his arguments with the accusation of
indifference to his wishes. In each succeeding discussion, his
infectious smile grew rarer and the drawn brow, that bore close kinship
to a frown, more habitual. His own talisman of humor was going from him,
and two unyielding determinations settled more and more directly at
cross odds.

When the breach came it was almost entirely the Virginian's fault, or
the fault of the unsuspected Hyde who lurked behind his Jekyll.

"Conscience," he pleaded desperately on the afternoon which neither of
them could ever remember afterwards without a sickness of the soul,
"you're simply building a funeral pyre for yourself. You're wrecking
your life and my life because of an insane idea. You're letting the
pettiest and unworthiest thing in you--a twisted instinct--consume all
that's vital and fine. You're worshiping the morbid."

"If I'm guilty of all that" she answered with a haunted misery in her
eyes which she averted her face to hide, "I'm hardly worth fighting for.
The only answer I have is that I'm doing what seems right to me."

"Can't you admit that for the moment your sense of right may be clouded?
All I ask is that you go for a while to the home of some friend, where
they don't rebuff the sunlight when it comes in at the window."

"Stuart," she told him gently but with conviction, "you have changed,
too. Once I could have taken your advice as almost infallible, but I
can't now."

The Virginian's face paled, and his question came with an irritable
quickness, "In what fashion have I changed?"

"In a way, I think I've recovered my balance," she said with deep
seriousness. "I couldn't have done it without you. You've taken my
troubles on yourself, but at a heavy price, dear. They've preyed on you
until now it's _you_ who can't trust his judgment. All you say
influences me, but it's no longer because of its logic, it's because I
love you and you're talking to my heart."

Farquaharson paced the frosty path of the woods where they were talking.
His face was dark and his movements nervous so Conscience would not let
herself look at him. She had something difficult to say and of late she
had not felt strong enough to spend vitality with wastefulness.

"You say I'm wrecking both our lives...." she went on resolutely. "I
don't want to wreck either ... but yours I couldn't bear to wreck. I
love you enough to make any sacrifice for you ... even enough to give
you up."

Stuart wheeled and his attitude stiffened to rigidity. The woods raced
about him in crazy circles, and before his eyes swam spots of yellow and
orange.

"Do you mean--" he paused to moisten his lips with his tongue and found
his tongue, too, suddenly dry--"do you mean that you've let this tyranny
of weakness conquer you? Have you promised to exile me?"

She flinched as she had flinched on the one other occasion when he had
accused her of a disloyalty which would have been impossible to her, but
she was too unhappy to be angry.

"No," she said slowly, "I haven't even considered such a promise. I said
just now that you had changed. The other Stuart Farquaharson wouldn't
have suspected me of that."

"Then what in Heaven's name do you mean?"

"I mean that you must go away--for awhile. It's only selfishness that
has blinded me to that all along. I'm killing all the best in you by
keeping you here."

"You are strong enough to bear the direct strain, I suppose," he accused
with a bitter smile. "But I'm too weak to endure even its reflection."

"It's always easier to bear trouble oneself," she reminded him with a
gracious patience, "than to see the person one loves subjected to it."

"When did you think of this?"

"I didn't think of it myself," she told him with candid directness. "I
guess I was too selfish. Mr. Tollman suggested it."

"Mr. Tollman!" The name burst from his lips like an anathema and a
sudden gust of fury swept him from all moorings of control. "You love me
enough to give me up--on the advice of my enemies! You are deaf to all
my pleadings, but to the casual suggestion of this damned pharisee you
yield instant obedience. And what he suggests is that I be sent away."

Her twisted fingers clenched themselves more tautly and had passion not
enveloped Stuart in a red wreath of fog he must have refrained from
adding to the acuteness of her torture just then.

"Why," she asked faintly, "should he be your enemy?"

"Because he wants you himself, because, with me disposed of, he believes
he can get what his unclean and avaricious heart covets as a snake
charms a bird, because--"

Conscience rose with an effort to her feet. Her knees were trembling
under her and her heart seemed to close into a painful strangulation.

"Stuart," she faltered, "if you think that my love can only be held
against any outsider by your being at hand to watch it, you don't trust
it as it _must_ be trusted--and it isn't worth offering you at all."

"You've fallen under the spell of these Mad Mullah prophets," he
retorted hotly, "until you can't trust yourself any longer. You've been
inflamed into the Mohammedan's spirit of a holy war and you're ready to
make a burnt offering of me and my love."

"Now," she said with a faintness that was almost a whisper, "you _must_
go, whether you agree or not. You distrust me and insult me ... and I
don't think ... I can stand many ... interviews like this."

But Farquaharson's curb had slipped. His anger was a frenzied runaway
which he, like a madman, was riding in utter recklessness.

"If I go now," he violently protested, "if I am sent into exile at the
behest of Tollman, my enemy, I go for all time, knowing that the woman I
leave behind is not the woman I thought I knew or the woman I have
worshiped."

Their eyes met and engaged in a challenge of wills in which neither
would surrender; a challenge which had built an issue out of nothing.
His burned with the moment's madness. Hers were clear and unflinching.

"If you _can_ go like that," she said, and the tremor left her voice as
she said it, "the man who goes isn't the man to whom I gave all my love
and to whom I was ready to give my life."

She straightened, sustained by a temporary strength, and stood clothed
in a beauty above any which even he had before acknowledged; a beauty
fired with the war spirit of a Valkyrie and of eyes regal in their
affronted dignity. "If you can feel about me as your words indicate, we
could never know happiness. The man whose love can make such accusations
isn't the Stuart Farquaharson that made me willing to die for him.
Perhaps after all I only _dreamed_ that man. It was a wonderful dream."

She carried the fingers of one hand to her temple in a bewildered
gesture, then shook back her head as one rousing oneself with an effort
from sleep. "If it was a dream," she went on with a forced courage,
"it's just as well to find it out in time."

"Then--" he made several attempts before he could speak--"then you are
sending me away. If that's true--as there's a God in Heaven, I'll never
come back until you send for me."

"As there's a God in Heaven," she answered steadily, almost
contemptuously, "I'll never send for you. You'll never come back unless
you come yourself--and come with a more absolute trust in your heart."

They stood under the leafless branches in a long silence, both white of
cheek and supremely shaken, until at last the man said huskily: "I
suppose I may take you to your gate?"

She shook her head. "No," she answered firmly, "I'm going across the
field. It's only a step." She turned then and walked away and as he
looked after her she did not glance backward. An erect and regal
carriage covered the misery of her retreat--but when she reached her
house she went up the stairs like some creature mortally wounded and as
she closed the door of her room, there came from her throat a low and
agonized groan. She stood leaning for a space against the panels with
her hands stretched out gropingly against the woodwork. Her lips moved
vacantly, then her knees gave way and she crumpled down and lay
insensible on the floor.




CHAPTER X


After awhile her lashes trembled and rose flickeringly upon the vague
perplexity of returning consciousness. Her head ached and her muscles
were cramped, because she had crumpled down as she stood, so that she
regained her feet falteringly and went with difficulty over to a chair
before the mirror of her dressing-table. For awhile she sat gazing dully
into her own reflected eyes. Under them were dark rings. Her cheeks were
pale and her whole face was stricken with the bleak hopelessness of
heartbreak. Her gaze fell on a framed photograph, just before her, and
she flinched. It was an enlarged snapshot of Stuart Farquaharson. But
other pictures more vitally near to her recent past were passing also
before her. She felt again the muscles of his forearms snap into
tautness as he stood silent under her father's insults. She felt the
strength of his embrace calming the panic of her own heart; the touch of
the kisses that had brought her both peace and ecstasy and wakened in
her latent fires. Surely if, at last, the hot temper had broken through
and blinded him with its glare of passion, it had not--could not--have
burned to ashes all the chivalric record of these trying months. Surely
it was a thing she could forgive. The man upon whom she had leaned so
long and whom she had known so well must be more real than this alien
revealed in an ungenerous half hour. The pale sunset died into the ashes
of twilight. Her bureau clock ticked out a full hour--and a second hour
while she sat almost immovable. She argued with herself that this
conflict which had so impalpably gathered and so suddenly burst in
storm was a nightmare coming out of the shadows and had no substance of
reality.

At last she lighted a lamp and moved wearily to her writing desk. Her
pen developed a mutinous trick of balking, and her eyes of staring,
unseeing, at the wall. But at last when she had torn up sheet after
sheet, she finished her task.


     "Dear Stuart," she had written. "You told me once that no one
     should send you away--not even I--unless I proved myself stronger
     than you. To-day you accused me of being the dupe of your
     enemies--and you are going--not because I am strong enough to
     banish you, but because you think me too weak to be trusted with
     your love. Without absolute trust we could never hope for
     happiness. So this isn't a plea, Stuart. It's not even an
     apology--except that I freely acknowledge a large share of
     fault--but I can't let you go without thanking you for all the
     gallant sacrifices you have made and for all the ways in which you
     have sought to stand between me and distress. Until to-day you
     have, under fire, proven true to your code of knighthood, and
     to-day I could forget--but could you? Of all the things I have ever
     said to you, of love, I have no syllable to retract. Even now I
     repeat it. I love you absolutely. When I suggested your leaving for
     a time I did a desperately hard thing--and you misunderstood it.
     Unless you can understand it, dear, it would do no good to come
     back, it would only mean other humiliating memories. This is not an
     easy letter to write and it's not well done. If your attitude of
     this afternoon is anything more than the delusion of anger--in
     other words, if your love is not one of complete trust, it's better
     that we shouldn't see each other again. If you can come in the
     spirit that I can receive you, to-day can be erased as if it had
     never happened--but until I have your answer (given after you have
     searched your heart) I shall be--but that is neither here nor
     there."


Tollman, who was taking supper at the manse that evening, noted the
pallor of her face, but made no comment. He had, in fact, already
divined a lover's quarrel and that was a thing into which even the most
friendly interference might well bring rebuff. But he was not surprised,
on leaving, to find Conscience waylaying him at the front door with an
envelope in her hand, which she asked him to post without fail in the
morning when after his invariable custom he drove to the village post
office. Within the last few days the invalid's irritability had taken
the form of intense dislike for the jingle of the telephone and in
deference to his whim it had been disconnected. Consequently the family
friend had of late both mailed and delivered notes between the lovers
and knew the handwriting of each.

That night Stuart slept not at all. For hours after he reached his room
in the hotel he paced it frantically. First cumulative anger, long held
in leash, swept him like a forest fire, charring his reason into
unreason. He had fought for Conscience and lost her. She had thrown her
lot with the narrow minds and cast him adrift. He had placed all his
trust in her and she had failed to rise above her heritage. But as the
night wore on a nauseating reaction of self-indictment followed. He saw
that he had grossly affronted her and brutally accused her. The
generosity and fairness he worshiped had had no part in his conduct. He,
too, spent hours writing, destroying and rewriting letters.

At last he let one stand.


     "But, dearest," he said at its end, "if you _do_ let me come back,
     you must still let me fight--not with temper and accusation, but
     patiently--against the strangling of your life. After this
     afternoon there can be no middle ground. I stand before you so
     discredited that unless you love me enough to forgive me you must
     hate me wholly and completely. If it's hate, I have earned it--and
     more, but if it _can_ still be love, I have a life to spend in
     contradiction of to-day. I shall remain here twenty-four hours
     waiting for my answer, and each hour until it comes will be a
     purgatory. I've forfeited my right to come to you without
     permission. I must wait for your verdict. I don't even claim the
     right to expect an answer--but I know you will give one. Not to do
     so would be to brand me, for life, not only with bitter hatred but
     bitter contempt as well."


At dawn, without having been to bed, he posted the letter and sat down
to wait with the anxiety of a defendant who has seen the jury locked
into its chamber of fateful decision.

When Eben Tollman came into the post office that morning, he called for
his mail and that of the Williams household.

Conscience's note to Stuart he did not mail. Stuart's letter to
Conscience he did not deliver, but later in the day he deposited both in
a strong-box in which he kept his private papers.

Three days Stuart Farquaharson spent waiting for an answer and while he
waited his face became drawn, and the ugly doubt of the first hours
settled into a certainty. There would be no answer. He had told her that
to ignore his plea would be the superlative form of scorn--and she had
chosen it.

Conscience, too, who had humbled herself, was waiting: waiting at first
with a trust which refused to entertain doubt, and which withered as the
days passed into such an agony that she felt she must go mad. If Stuart
had deliberately done _that_--she must make herself forget him because
to hold him in her heart would be to disgrace herself. The man, in the
hour of ugly passion, had been the real one after all; the other only a
pleasing masquerade!

"Did you mail my letter?" she finally demanded of Tollman, and he
smilingly responded. "I don't think I ever forgot to post a letter in my
life."

In a final investigation she walked to the village and inquired at the
hotel desk, "Is Mr. Farquaharson here?"

"No, Miss Conscience," the clerk smilingly responded, "he checked out
last night. Said he'd send his address later."

One afternoon several days later a stranger left the train at the
village and looked about him with that bored and commiserating
expression with which city men are apt to regard the shallow skyline of
a small town. He was of medium height and carefully groomed from his
well-tailored clothes to the carnation in his buttonhole and manicured
polish of his nails. His face, clean-shaven save for a close-cropped and
sandy mustache, held a touch of the florid and his figure inclined to
stoutness. At the livery stable where he called for a buggy, after
learning that no taxis were to be had, he gave the name of Michael Hagan
and asked to be directed to the house of Mr. Eben Tollman.

Mr. Tollman was obviously expecting his visitor, and received him upon
arrival in his austere study. Yet the fact that there was no element of
surprise in Mr. Hagan's coming failed to relieve Mr. Tollman of traces
of nervousness as he inquired, "You are Mr. Hagan?"

"Yes, Mr. Tollman, I came up in answer to your letter."

The stranger had no roving eye. He seemed, indeed, steady of hearing to
the verge of stolidity, yet in a few seconds he had noted and drawn
rapid conclusions from the environment. The cheerlessness of the house
had struck him and the somber room, decorated, if one calls it
decoration, with faded steel engravings of Landseer hunting dogs
guarding dead birds and rabbits, impressed him.

Mr. Tollman bowed coldly.

"The matter I wish to discuss with you is confidential," he began by way
of introduction, and Hagan smiled as he replied, "Most matters which
clients discuss with me, _are_ confidential."

Even with this reassurance, Mr. Tollman appeared to labor under
embarrassment and it was only after some thought that he suggested,
"This business is so new to me that I hardly know how to approach it."

"A man should be extremely frank with his physician or his lawyer,"
volunteered the newcomer. "It's even truer in the case of a detective."

"In this instance," Mr. Tollman proceeded with the wariness of one
wading into water of unknown depth, "I am acting for friends whose
business interests I represent, and who do not care to appear in the
matter. Therefore your dealings will be exclusively with me."

"Certainly, that's quite usual. Now, what's the nature of the case? Your
letter didn't indicate."

"Well, the fact is I wish to have a somewhat searching investigation
made into the personal character and conduct of a young gentleman, who
for reasons unnecessary to state, is of interest to my friends."

"Let me understand you clearly," prompted Mr. Hagan, with a briskness
that accentuated the other's air of secretiveness. "Is this man to be
shown up? Is that what you mean?"

Mr. Tollman stiffened. "I should suppose," he said with cool dignity,
"that would be dependent to a certain extent on the facts."

But Mr. Hagan had in his police-detective days made use of the third
degree, and when he next spoke his voice was firm almost to sternness.
"I thought," he reminded the other, "we were going to be frank."

Thus encouraged, Tollman proceeded slowly, "I'm not seeking to whitewash
the character of the gentleman, if that's what you mean."

"Good! Now, we're going somewhere. There are very few people who have no
skeletons in their closets."

The hand of the employer came up with fastidious distaste. "Let this be
understood from the beginning, Mr. Hagan, I have no wish to hear
anything but reports of results obtained. In the details of your work I
have not the slightest interest."

Mr. Hagan nodded, and inquired, "Is it with a view to criminal
prosecution, now, that this case is to be worked or--?" He paused
interrogatively.

"It is not. It is only necessary to convince a young lady, whose family
disapproves of the man, that their suspicions are based on fact. She is
so prejudiced in his favor, however, that the facts must be
substantial--and of a character calculated to weigh with a woman."

Hagan drew a cigar-case from his pocket, and proffered it, but his offer
being declined with a cold shake of the head, he settled himself as
comfortably as possible in his uncomfortable chair and engaged in
reflection. After digesting the preliminaries, he began to speak
musingly, as though to himself.

"Of course if the lady knew that detectives were working on the case,
the force of any disclosure would be discounted."

His eyes were on his employer as he spoke and he saw Tollman start.
Tollman's words, too, came with an impulsiveness which had been absent
heretofore.

"Neither of them must know, of course, that this investigation is being
made. Unless you can assure me on that point you mustn't undertake the
business."

With some difficulty the detective repressed a smile. "That goes
without saying, Mr. Tollman. Now if it could be shown that this man was
mixed up in some sort of a scandal--with a married woman, or a shady
one, for instance--that ought to fit the case, oughtn't it?"

"Precisely." Again Tollman's voice was tinged with an unaccustomed
quickness of interest, but at once, as though he had made a mistake, he
amended with a heavy gravity, "However, we can hardly forecast what you
will learn. I understand that he has directed his mail forwarded to an
apartment hotel near Washington Square in New York."

The two talked for perhaps forty minutes--though it must be admitted
that a portion of that time was devoted to a discussion of the terms of
employment. Mr. Tollman had never undertaken having a man shadowed
before and he regarded the fees as needlessly large.

Back once more in his office in a building on Forty-second Street, Mr.
Hagan cut the end from a cigar and gazed out across the public library
and the park at its back. The frosted glass of his hall door bore the
legend, "The Searchlight Investigation Bureau. Private."

"Well, what did you find out about this job?" inquired a member of the
office force who had entered from a communicating room, and the chief
wrinkled his brow a little as he studied his _perfecto_.

"It's a dirty business, Schenk," he replied crisply. "It's the kind of
thing that gives knockers a license to put detectives in the same class
as blackmailers--and the old Whey-face himself is a tight-wad. He
wrangled over the price--but I made him come through."

"What does he want done?"

"He wants a guy framed. You remember what the bulls did for Big
Finnerty, when Finnerty was threatening to squeal to the District
Attorney's office about police graft?"

Schenk nodded. "They pulled the old stuff on him. Sent him to the
Island a year for gun-toting."

"Sure, and he didn't have a gat at that--that is, not until the bulls
planted it in his kick on the way to the station house." The dignity of
Mr. Hagan's consultation manner had dropped from him, and he had
relapsed into the gang argot with which police days had given him an
intimate familiarity.

"Sure he didn't. That's the way they frame a man. It's the way they
framed--"

"Can the reminiscence stuff," interrupted the head of the Searchlight
Investigation Bureau. "The point is that it's just about the deal we're
being hired to put over on this Farquaharson person. He wants to marry a
girl and we've got to frame him up with a dirty past--or present. Our
respected employer is a deacon and a pious hypocrite. He wants results
and he wants us to go the limit to get 'em. But he must never know
anything that soils the hem of his garment. He has no interest in the
petty doings of detectives. His smug face must be saved. He didn't tell
me this, but I wised myself to it right away. He's got his eye on that
girl, himself."

The winter came close on the heels of a short autumn that year and it
came with the bluster and roar of squalls at sea and the lashing of the
woods inland. For some weeks Conscience followed the colorless monotony
of her life with a stunned and bruised deadness about her heart. She had
shed no tears and the feeling was always with her that soon she must
awaken to a poignant agony and that then her mind would collapse.
Mechanically she read to her father and supervised the duties of the
attendant who had been brought on from Boston, but often when he spoke
to her he had to repeat his question, and then she would come back to
the present with a start.

The invalid had learned from Tollman that Farquaharson had gone away
after a quarrel, and he piously told himself that his prayers were
answered and his daughter had been snatched as a brand from the burning.
But for once an instinct of mercy tinged his dealings with the
frailities of humanity. He refrained from talking of Stuart and from the
pointing of morals. That would come later.




CHAPTER XI


Thinking through days when a cold and tortured moisture would burst out
on her temples and through nights when she lay wide-eyed and sleepless,
only one answer seemed to come to Conscience. All Stuart's love must
have curled in that swift transition into indifference and contempt.

Admitting that conclusion, she knew that her pride should make her hate
him, too, but her pride was dead. Everything in her was dead but the
love she could not kill and that remained only to torture her.

The most paradoxical thing of all was that in these troubled days she
thought of only one person as a dependable friend. Eben Tollman had
evinced a spirit for which she had not given him credit. It seemed that
she had been all wrong in her estimates of human character. Stuart, with
his almost brilliant vitality of charm, had after a quarrel turned his
back on her. Eben Tollman, who masked a diffident nature behind a
semblance of cold reserve, was unendingly considerate and no more asked
reward than a faithful mastiff might have asked it. It contented him to
anticipate all her wishes and to invent small ways of easing her misery.
He did not even seek to force his society and satisfied himself with
such crumbs of conversation as she chose to drop his way in passing. If
ever she should come out of this period of torpid wretchedness, she
would owe Tollman a heavy debt of gratitude.

Three months after the day when Mr. Hagan returned from Cape Cod, that
gentleman called into his private office a member of his staff, who
responded to the name of Henry Rathbone, and put him through a brief
catechism.

"What have you got on this Farquaharson party?" he inquired. "Tollman
complains that you're running up a pretty steep expense account and he
can't quite see what he's getting for his money."

Rathbone seated himself and nodded. "Mr. Tollman knows every move this
feller's made. You gotta give him time. A guy that think's he's got a
broken heart don't start right in on the gay life."

"Why don't he?" inquired Mr. Hagan with a more cynical philosophy. "I've
always heard that when a man thinks the world's gone to the bow-wows
he's just about ripe to cut loose. Don't this feller ever take a drink
or play around with any female companions?"

"You ain't got the angle straight on Farquaharson," observed the sleuth
who had for some time been Farquaharson's shadow. "He ain't that kind.
I'm living in the same apartment hotel with him and my room's next door
to his. I don't fall for the slush-stuff, Chief, but that feller gets my
goat. He's hurt and hurt bad. It ain't women he wants--it's _one_ woman.
As for female companions--he don't even seem to have any male ones."

"What does he do with his time?"

"Well, he went down to the farm for a few weeks and closed up the place.
He studied law, but he's passed it up and decided to write fiction
stories. Every morning he rides horseback in the park, and, take it from
me, those equestrian dames turn all the way round to rubber at him."

"What else does he do?"

"He walks miles, too. I fell in with him casual like one day and tagged
along. Well, he hiked me till my tongue hung out. We started at the Arch
and ended up at Dolrandi's café at the north end of the speedway--it
ain't but only about a dozen miles.... During that whole chummy little
experience he spoke just about a couple of times, except to answer my
questions. Sometimes when he thought I wasn't looking his eyes would get
like a fellow's I seen once in death-row up the river, but if he caught
me peepin' he'd laugh and straighten up sudden."

"Well, I don't suppose you can get anything on him till he gives you a
chance," said Mr. Hagan grudgingly, "but what this man Tollman wants is
results. He ain't paying out good money that he's hoarded for years,
just to get merit reports. He didn't wring it out of the local widows
and orphans just for that."

"I get you, and I'll keep watching. Since Farquaharson got this bug
about writing stories he's taken to rambling around town at night. I
said he didn't seem to want companions, but when he goes out on these
prowls he'll talk for hours with any dirty old bum that stops him and he
always falls for pan-handling. Beggars, street-walkers, any sort of old
down-and-outer interests him, if it's hard luck they're talking."

But the face which reminded Mr. Rathbone of the man who was awaiting the
electric chair was the public face of Stuart Farquaharson. He did not
see the same features during the hours when the door of his room was
closed. The hotel he had selected, near Washington Square, was a modest
place and his window looked out over roofs and chimney-pots and small
back yards.

There, sitting before his typewriter, his sleeves rolled above his
elbows, he sought to devote himself to his newly chosen profession: the
profession which he had substituted for law. Through a near-by window he
had occasional glimpses of a girl who was evidently trying to be an
illustrator. Stuart imagined that she was poor and ambitious, and he
envied her the zest of her struggle for success. He himself had no such
incentives. Poverty was not likely to touch him unless he became a
reckless waster, and he fancied that his interests were too far burned
to ashes for ambition. It was with another purpose that he forced
himself to his task. He was trying to forget dark hair and eyes and the
memory of a voice which had said, "Love you! In every way that I know
how to love, I love you. Everything that a woman can be to a man, I want
to be to you, and everything that a woman can give a man, I want to give
you."

And because he sought so hard to forget her, his fingering of the
typewriter keys would fall idle, and his eyes, looking out across the
chimney-pots, would soar with the circling pigeons, and he would see her
again in every guise that he remembered--and he remembered them all.

She had been cruel to the point of doing the one thing which he had told
her would brand him with the deepest possible misery--and which pledged
him in honor not to approach her again by word or letter without
permission. But that was only because the thing which he conceived to be
her heritage of narrowness had conquered her.

On the floor below was a young man of about his own age, who was also a
candidate for the laurels in literature. Stuart had met him by chance
and they had talked a little. This man's enthusiasms had gushed forth
with a vigor at which the Virginian marveled. For him ambition blazed
like an oriflamme and he had dared to gamble everything on his belief in
himself. With scant savings out of a reporter's salary in the West he
had come to wrest success from the town where all is possible, but now a
shadow of disappointment was stealing into his eyes. A fear was lurking
there that, after all, he might have mistaken the message of the Bow
Bells which had rung to him the Dick Whittington message that the city
was his to conquer.

Perhaps because Louis Wayne desperately needed to succeed, while Stuart
Farquaharson wrote only as an anodyne to his thoughts, Wayne vainly
peddled his manuscripts and almost from the first Stuart sold his at
excellent rates.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Reinold Heath was rarely in a sunny mood at the hour when her
coffee and rolls came to her, as she sat propped against the pillows of
the elaborately hung bed in her French gray and old-rose room. The same
hour which brought the breakfast tray brought Mrs. Heath's social
secretary and those duties which lie incumbent upon a leader of
society's most exploited and inner circles.

Mrs. Heath, kimono-clad in the flooding morning light, looked all of her
fifty years as she nodded curtly to her secretary. It was early winter
and a year had passed since Stuart had left Cape Cod.

"Let's get this beastly business done with, Miss Andrews," began the
great lady sharply. "What animals have you captured this time? By the
way, who invented week-ends, do you suppose? Whoever it was, he's a
public enemy."

The secretary arranged her notes and ran efficiently through their
contents. These people had accepted, those had declined; the
possibilities yet untried contained such-and-such names.

"Why couldn't Harry Merton come?" The question was snapped out
resentfully. "Not that I blame him--I don't see why any one comes--or
why I ask them for that matter."

"He said over the 'phone that he was off for a duck-shooting trip,"
responded Miss Andrews.

"Well, I suppose we can't take out a subpoena for him. He's escaped
and we need another man." Mrs. Heath drew her brow in perplexed thought,
then suddenly demanded: "What was the name of that young man Billy
Waterburn brought to my box at the horse show? I mean the one who rode
over the jumps like a devil and blarneyed me afterward like an angel."

The secretary arched her brows. "Do you mean the Virginian? His name was
Stuart Farquaharson."

"Do you know where he lives--or anything else about him?"

"Why, no--that is, nothing in the social sense." Miss Andrews smiled
quietly as she added, "I've read some of his stories in the magazines."

"All right. Find out where he lives and invite him in Merton's place.
Don't let _him_ slip--he interested me and that species is almost
extinct."

As Miss Andrew jotted down the name, Mrs. Heath read the surprised
expression on her face, and it amused her to offer explanation of her
whim.

"You're wondering why I'm going outside the lines and filling the ranks
with a nobody? Well, I'll tell you. I'm sick of these people who are all
sick of each other. The Farquaharsons were landed gentry in Virginia
when these aristocrats were still grinding snuff. Aren't we incessantly
cudgeling our brains for novelty of entertainment? Well, I've discovered
the way. I'm going to introduce brains and manners to society. I daresay
he has evening clothes and if he hasn't he can hire them."

Decidedly puzzled, Stuart Farquaharson listened to the message over the
telephone later in the day, but his very surprise momentarily paralyzed
his power of inventing a politely plausible excuse, so that he hung up
the receiver with the realization that he had accepted an invitation
which held for him no promise of pleasure.

It happened that Louis Wayne, who had by sheer persistency seized the
outer fringes of success, had come up with a new manuscript to read and
was now sitting, with a pipe between his teeth, in Stuart's morris
chair.

"Sure, go to it," he exclaimed with a grin, as Stuart bewailed his lack
of a ready excuse. "It'll be a bore, but it will make you appreciate
your return to the companionship of genius."

"The Crags" was that palatial establishment up the Hudson where the
Reinold Heaths hold court during the solstices between the months at
Newport and the brief frenzy of the New York season, and the house party
which introduced Stuart Farquaharson to Society with a capital S was
typical. One person in the household still had, like himself, the
external point of view, and her ditties threw her into immediate contact
with each new guest.

"Miss Andrews," he laughed, when the social secretary met him shortly
after his arrival, "I'm the poor boy at this frolic, and I'm just as
much at my ease as a Hottentot at college. When I found that I was the
only man here without a valet, I felt--positively naked."

The young woman's eyes gleamed humorously. "I know the feeling," she
said, "and I'll tell you a secret. I took a course of education in
higher etiquette from the butler. You can't do that, of course, but when
in doubt ask me--and I'll ask the butler."

But it was Mrs. Heath's prerogative to knight her protégés with the
Order of the Chosen, and Stuart Farquaharson would have graced any
picture where distinction of manner and unself-conscious charm passed
current.

"Who is the girl with the red-brown hair and the wonderful complexion
and the dissatisfied eyes?" he asked Miss Andrews later, and that lady
answered with the frankness of a fellow-countryman in foreign parts:

"Mrs. Larry Holbury. That's her husband over there--it's whispered that
they're not inordinately happy."

Farquaharson followed the brief glance of his companion and saw a man
inclining to overweight whose fingers caressed the stem of a cocktail
glass, and whose face was heavy with surliness.

It subsequently developed, in a tête-à-tête with the wife, that she had
read all of Mr. Farquaharson's stories and adored them. It leaked out
with an air of resignation that her husband was a bit of a brute--and
yet Mrs. Holbury was neither a fool nor a bore. She was simply a
composite of flirtatious instinct and an amazing candor.

In the life of Stuart Farquaharson the acceptance of that invitation
would have passed as a disconnected incident had it been altogether a
matter of his choosing, but he had let himself be caught. Mrs. Reinold
Heath had chosen to present him as her personal candidate for lionizing
and whom she captured she held in bondage.

"Honestly, now, Miss Andrews," he pleaded over the telephone when that
lady called him to the colors a second time, "entirely between
ourselves, I came before because I couldn't think of an excuse in time.
Let me off and I'll propose a substitute arrangement. Suppose we have
dinner together somewhere where the _hors d'oeuvres_ aren't all gold
fish."

Her laugh tinkled in the telephone. "I wish we could," she said. "I knew
you let yourself in for it the first time--but now you're hooked and you
_have_ to come." So he went.

On later occasions it was more flattering than satisfying to him that
the beautiful Mrs. Holbury should drop so promptly into a sort of easy
intimacy and treat him almost from the start with a proprietary manner.
It soon became an embarrassment of riches. Stuart was thinking of
himself as a woman-hater, these days, and he held a normal dislike for
wagging tongues. Holbury, too, who was reputed to be of jealous
tendency, seemed to regard him unfavorably and took no great pains to
affect cordiality.

One day Wayne dropped, coatless, into Farquaharson's room and grinned
as he tossed a magazine down on the table. "_Sic fama est_" was his
comment, and Stuart picked up the sheet which his visitor indicated with
a jerk of the thumb. The magazine was a weekly devoted ostensibly to the
doings of smart society, but its real distinction lay in its innuendo
and its genius for sailing so close to the wind of libel that those who
moved in the rarified air of exclusiveness read it with a delicious and
shuddering mingling of anticipation and dread. Its method was to use no
names in the more daring paragraphs, but for the key to the spicy, one
had only to refer back. The preceding item always contained names which
applied to both.

Stuart found his name and that of Mrs. Holbury listed in an account of
some entertainment--and below that:


     "A young Southerner, recently arrived and somewhat lionized, is
     whispered to be complicating the already uneven balance of
     domesticity in the home of a couple whose status in society
     antedates his own. This gallant has all the attractiveness of one
     untouched with ennui. He rides like a centaur, talks like a
     diplomat and flatters as only a Virginian or an Irishman can
     flatter. The same whisper has it that the husband suffers in the
     parallel."


Farquaharson's face darkened and he reached for his discarded coat.

"Hold on; you have company," suggested Wayne placatingly. "Where do you
think you're going in such hot haste?"

Stuart was standing with his feet well apart and his mouth set in a
stern line.

"Wayne," he said with a crisp and ominous decisiveness, "I've never
slandered any man intentionally--and I require the same decency of
treatment from others."

"Go easy there. Ride wide! Ride wide!" cautioned the visitor. "That
little slander is mild compared with many others in the same pages. Are
the rest of them rushing to the office to cane the editors? They are
not, my son. Believe me, they are not."

"They should be. Submission only encourages a scoundrel."

"In the first place they would find no one there but a rather fragile
and extremely polite young lady. The editor himself doesn't sit around
waiting to be horsewhipped. In the second, society tacitly sanctions and
supports that sheet. Your fashionable friends would call you a barbarian
and what is worse--a boob."

Farquaharson stood in a statuesque ire, and Wayne went philosophically
on. "Take the advice of a singularly wise bystander. At least treat it
with the contempt of silence until you've consulted the lady. Caning
people in New York is attended with some degree of notoriety and she
would have to share it. When you're in Rome, be as Romanesque as
possible."

"For my part," declared Stuart, "I like another version better. When
you're a Roman, be a Roman wherever you are."

Yet after some debate he took off his coat again and announced
cryptically, "After all, the one unpardonable idiocy is sectionalism of
code--damn it!"

He knew that Marian Holbury and her husband were near a break and that
the husband's jealousy looked his way. But, conscious of entire
rectitude, he gave no thought to appearances and treated the matter
lightly. But the Searchlight Investigation Bureau, whose employment had
been discontinued as not paying for itself, was now re-employed and
instructed to send a marked copy of the weekly to Miss Conscience
Williams. That copy was anonymously mailed, bearing a New York
postmark, and its sending was a puzzle which its recipient never solved.

Spring came, and Stuart, who had begun the writing of a novel, took a
small house in Westchester County, where he could work apart from the
city's excitement. Had he been cautious he would not have selected one
within two miles of the Holbury country house, yet the fact was that
Marian Holbury had discovered it and he had taken it because of its
quaintness. He had been there several weeks alone except for a man
servant when, one night, he sat under the lamp of his small living-room
with sheets of manuscript scattered about him. It was warm, with clouds
gathering for a storm, and the scent of blossoms came in through the
open doors and windows. There was no honeysuckle in the neighborhood,
but to his memory there drifted, clear and strong and sweet, the
fragrance of its heavy clusters.

He sat up straight, arrested by the poignancy of that echo from the
past. The typewriter keys fell silent and his eyes stared through the
open window, wide and full of suffering. He heard himself declaring with
boyhood's assurance, "They may take you to the North Pole and surround
you with regiments of soldiers--but in the end it will be the same."

Then without warning a wild sob sounded from the doorway and he looked
up, coming to his feet so abruptly that his overturned chair fell
backward with a crash.

"Marian!" he exclaimed, his voice ringing with shocked incredulity.
"What are you doing here--and alone?"

Mrs. Holbury stood leaning limply against the door-frame. She was in
evening dress, and a wrap, glistening with the shimmer of silver,
drooped loosely about her gleaming shoulders.

"It's over," she declared in a passionate and unprefaced outburst. "I
can't stand it! I'm done with him! I've left him!"

Stuart spread his hands in dumfounded amazement. "But why, in God's
name, did you come here? This is madness--this is inconceivable!"

She went unsteadily to the nearest chair and dropped into it. "I came to
stay--if you don't turn me out," she answered.




CHAPTER XII


Except for the low yet hysterical moaning of the woman in the chair and
the distant whistle of a Hudson River boat, there was complete silence
in the small room, while the man stood dumfounded and speechless.

Marian's evening gown was torn and one silk stocking sagged at the
ankle. Stuart Farquaharson noted these things vaguely and at last he
inquired, "How did you get here?"

Her answer came between sobs, "I walked."

"You have done an unspeakably mad thing, Marian," he said quietly. "You
can't stay here. There is no one in this house but myself; even my
servant is away to-night. Why didn't you go to 'The Crags'?"

She lifted a tear-stained face and shot her answer at him scornfully.
"'The Crags'! I had to talk to some one who was _human_. They would have
bundled me back with cynical advice--besides, they're off somewhere."

"You're in distress and God knows I sympathize with you. I shall
certainly offer no cynical advice, but I mean to call your husband on
the telephone and tell him that you're here."

He turned toward the side table and lifted the desk instrument, but with
the impetuous swiftness of a leopardess she came to her feet and sprang
upon him. For an instant he was borne back by the unexpected impact of
her body against his own and in that moment she seized the telephone
from his hand and tore loose its wires from the wall. Then she hurled it
with a crashing violence to the stone flagging of the hearth where it
lay wrecked, and stood before him a palpitating and disordered spirit of
fright and anger.

He had sought in that brief collision to restrain her, but she had
wrenched herself free so violently that she had torn the strap which
held her gown over one shoulder. Then as she reeled back, with a wildly
ungoverned gesture she ran her fingers through her hair until it fell in
tangled waves about her shoulders. It was perhaps a full minute before
she could speak and while she stood recovering her breath, Stuart
Farquaharson looked helplessly down at the instrument which she had
succeeded in rendering useless.

With blazing eyes and quivering nostrils, the woman rushed headlong into
explanation, accusation and pleading.

"If you telephoned that I was here he'd try to kill me. I tell you I'm
done with him! I hate him--hate him; don't you understand? He's been
drinking again and he's a beast. That's why I came ... that's why I had
to come.... I came to you because I thought you'd understand ... because
I thought ... you ... cared for me."

"I care enough for you to try to prevent your ruining your life by a
single piece of lunacy," he told her as he sought to steady her with the
directness of his gaze. "You don't have to go on with Holbury if you
choose to leave him, but this is the one place of all others for you to
avoid." He cast a hasty glance about him and then, hurrying to the front
of the room, closed the door and drew the blinds. For a half hour he
argued with forced calmness, but the ears to which he spoke were deaf to
everything save the wild instinct of escape.

"Here you are in a house that sits in full view from the road: doors and
windows open: you with your hair streaming and your gown disordered;
hairpins strewn about: the telephone dead. Now, I've got to walk to
your house and tell him."

Under the level insistence of his eyes she had fallen back a pace and
stood holding the unsupported gown over her bosom, but when he finished
with that final announcement, which seemed to her a threat, she sprang
forward again and threw her arms about him, not in an embrace but with
the instinct of a single idea: to prevent his carrying out his announced
intention.

Stuart attempted gently to disengage himself, but the soft arms clung
and the figure was convulsed with its agitation. "No, no!" she kept
repeating. "You sha'n't go. You sha'n't leave me here alone.... I
couldn't stand it."

"You walked two miles to get here and that took you about forty-five
minutes," he reminded her. "You've been here a half hour. Do you fancy
your husband's jealousy won't tell him where you went?" But the idea
terrified her into such renewed hysteria that he broke off and stood
silent.

The gathering clouds had broken now into a wild spring storm and the
rain was drumming like canister on the roof of Stuart's cottage, so they
did not hear the purr of a motor which stopped outside. They were
without warning when the door suddenly burst open, and across the bare
shoulder of the woman, who still hung sobbing to him, Stuart saw the
bloated and apoplectic face of Larry Holbury and at his back the
frightened countenance of two servants.

The husband came unsteadily several steps into the room, and lifted a
hand which shook as he pointed to the tableau. He addressed his
retainers in a voice which trembled with drink and rage, but even in its
thickness it was icy by virtue of a fury that had passed through all
period of bluster.

"I want you to look well at that," he said. "Mark every detail in your
memories, both of you. There they are--in each other's arms. Notice her
condition well, because, by God--"

Marian's scream interrupted his sentence, and the scream itself died
away in a quaver, as she faded into insensibility, and Farquaharson
lifted her clear of the floor and carried her to the lounge.

After that he turned to face Holbury and addressed him with a quietness
which the glitter in his eye contradicted. "This is a pity, Holbury. It
seems that you frightened her with some brutality. She lost her head and
came here. I was trying to persuade her to go back."

"Yes," Holbury's laugh rang with the uncontrolled quality of a maniac's.
"Yes, I know. You tore the clothes off of her trying to persuade her to
come back to me! Well, you needn't trouble about sending her back
now--the door's locked. She's yours. Do what you like with her. Of
course I ought to kill you, but I won't. I brought these men to
establish beyond doubt the identity of the co-respondent. It's a gentle
riddance--a crooked wife and a crooked paramour."

One of the men advanced into the room and ostentatiously gathered in a
couple of hairpins and a bit of torn lace, while Farquaharson crossed
and stood face to face with the irate husband.

"Do you mean that you believe that?" The question came with a deadly
softness.

"I don't have to believe. I have seen."

"Then," Stuart's words ripped themselves out like the tearing of cloth,
"send your damned jackals outside, unless you want them to see their
master treated as such a cur deserves."

A moment later the two servants were assisting Holbury to his motor, one
of them nursing a closed and blackened eye on his own account as a badge
of over-impetuous loyalty; and most of that night, while Marian Holbury
lay groaning on the couch, Stuart Farquaharson sat before his empty
hearth with eyes which did not close.

The Holbury divorce suit, after filling advance columns of spicy print,
was awarded with a sealed record and Farquaharson was given no
opportunity to tell his story to the public. He saw nothing more of
Marian and was widely accused of having compromised and then abandoned
her. So Stuart closed the house on the Hudson, as he had closed the
house in Virginia, and with a very bitter spirit went to Europe.

It was some time before this, perhaps several months, that Eben Tollman,
the indispensable friend--serving hitherto without reward or the seeking
of reward--ventured to aspire openly to more personal recognition. He
had been building slowly, and if perseverance is a merit, he deserved
success. Perhaps Conscience had changed. There had been many things to
change her. She had lived long without a break in an atmosphere which
she had dreaded and her father had not grown sunnier. A life of dogma
had acidulated into so impossible a fanaticism that in contrast Tollman
seemed to assume something like breadth of gauge.

The heart attacks which had been painted as such sure death had been a
greater threat to the girl than to the man whose heart was physically
involved. There had been two of them and both had been survived. William
Williams was a man who was always dying, but who never died. Yet these
seizures served their purpose since they kept the daughter freshly
reminded that a sword of Damocles hung over her--and that her father
must not be crossed. It became a thought with which she lived, with
which she slept, until it carried her to more and more absurd lengths of
self-effacement and ate out the heart of her independence. Of Eben
Tollman she no longer thought as a man old enough to be her father and
as impersonal as the Sphinx.

If he lacked the fire and buoyancy which had made association with
Stuart Farquaharson a thing of light and color and sparkle, so did her
whole life lack that fire in these gray days. So did she herself lack
it, she told herself wistfully. At all events he came nearer being
_fides Achates_ than any one else. Stuart was a memory and she was
trying very hard to make him even less than that--only the gnawing ache
in her heart wouldn't let her.

Yet when Tollman shifted her abstract acceptance of what he meant to her
to a question of a concrete application, she felt the sudden sinking of
despair.

All afternoon her father had been petulant and reminiscent. He had
seemed perversely bent on committing a righteous suicide by forcing her
to make him angry. He had cast into damnation all the "fads" and "isms"
of an ungodly present and, since he judged the time had come to point a
moral, he had buried Stuart Farquaharson at the bottom of the heap.

Even now Conscience winced under these tirades. The truth was that she
was heart-broken; that the image of Stuart, despite his feet of clay,
was still shrined in her life. But she was fighting that and she did not
know that the fight was hopeless.

So to-night, as she sat with a sewing basket in her lap and Tollman sat
across from her in the chair he had so often occupied of late, the
surprise came.

"Conscience," he said, and something in the tone of his voice caused her
to look suddenly up, "I've tried to be your friend because I've known
that it was only that way I could be anything."

Suddenly his voice leaped with a fierceness of which she had never
thought it capable. To her he had always been sort of extinct volcano,
and now he broke into eruption. "Must it always be only that? Is there
no hope for me?"

The piece of sewing in her hand dropped suddenly to her lap with the
needle thrust half through. She sat as if in tableau--a picture of
arrested motion.

She should have foreseen that the comfortable and platonic relation
could not last--but she had not foreseen it. It came with a shock and in
the wake of the shock came crowding pictures of all the rest of life,
painted in these dun tints of New England lethargy from which she had
prayed to be delivered. Then slowly and welling with disquiet, her eyes
rose to his and she found them full of suspense.

"I suppose," she answered in a bewildered tone, "I ought to have known.
But it's been so satisfying just as it was--that I didn't pause--to
analyze."

"Couldn't it still be satisfying, dear?" He took an eager step forward.
"Am I too much of a fossil?" He paused and then added with a note of
hurt. "I have felt young, since I've been in love with you."

The middle-aged lover stood bending forward, his face impatiently eager
and his attitude as stiffly alert as that of a bird dog when the quail
scent strikes into its nostrils.

"I've accepted all you had to give," she said with the manner of one in
the confessional, "and I never stopped to think that you might want
something more than I was giving." Still he waited and she hurriedly
talked on. "I must be honest with you. I owe you many debts, but that
comes first of all. I've tried to forget--tried with every particle of
resolution in me--but I can't. I still love him. I think I'll always
love him."

Tollman bowed. He made no impassioned protest and offered no reminder
that the man who still held her affection had proven himself an
apostate, but he said quietly. "I had hoped the scar was healed,
Conscience, for your own sake as well as mine. So long as I knew it hurt
you, I didn't speak."

For the first time in months tears started to her eyes and she felt
that she was wounding one who had practiced great self-sacrifice. He
spoke no more of his hopes until some time after the news came of
Stuart's participation in scandal.

At first Conscience instinctively refused that news credence, but in
many subtle and convincing ways corroboration drifted in and her father,
with his prosecutor's spirit, pieced the fragments together into an
unbroken pattern. Until this moment there had lurked in Conscience's
heart a faint ghost of hope that somehow the breach would be healed,
that Stuart would return. Now even the ghost was dead. She was sick,
unspeakably sick: with the heart-nausea of broken hope and broken faith.

Much of what she heard might be untrue, but it seemed established beyond
doubt that from her and from his early ideals--like the oath of Arthur's
knights--he had gone to careless living. He had played lightly with a
woman's honor and his own, and had not come out of the matter unsoiled.
Now nothing mattered much and if Tollman claimed the reward of his
faithfulness and her father would died happier for it why should she
refuse to consider them?

In these days the old man's urgency of Tollman's suit was rarely
silenced, but one afternoon he pitched it to a new key, and the girl's
habitual expression of weariness gave way to one of startled amazement.

"Of one phase of the matter," he said, "I have never spoken. I refrained
because Eben was unwilling that you should know, but justice is
justice--you should honor your benefactor."

"Honor my benefactor? I don't understand."

The old man shook his lion-like head and, out of the parchment of his
bony face, his eyes burned grimly.

"This house--this farm--all of it--we have only by the sufferance of
Eben's generosity, and yet I've heard men call him close."

Conscience thought that she had lost the possibility of being stunned,
but now she sat speechless as her father continued.

"I never was a competent business man and I put affairs in Eben's hands
too late. He concealed from me how dire my straits were--and our income
continued--but it was coming out of his resources--not mine. If Tollman
had chosen to demand payment, we would have been wiped out."

"How long have you known this?"

"Since shortly after my affliction came upon me."

Conscience moved over and stood by the window. She pressed her temples
with her finger tips and spoke in a dead quiet. "You have known--all
that time--and you never told me. You have urged his suit and you never
let me guess that my suitor had already--bought me and paid for me."

With a low and bitter laugh--or the fragment of a laugh, she turned and
left the room.

After weeks of patient silence, Tollman asked once more, "Conscience, is
there still no hope for me?" To his surprise she met his questioning
gaze very directly and answered,

"That depends on your terms."

"I make no terms," he hastened to declare. "I only petition."

"If you ask a wife who can be a real wife to you--who can give you all
her love and life--then the answer must still be no," she went on
steadily with something like a doggedness of resignation. "I can't lie
to you. I have only a broken heart. Beyond friendship and gratitude, I
have nothing to offer you. I can't even promise that I will ever stop
loving--him. But--" her words came with the flatness of unending
soul-fag--"I suppose I can give you the lesser things; fidelity,
respect; all the petty allegiance that can go on without fire or
spirit."

"I will take what you can give me," he declared, and at the sudden ring
of autumnal ardor in his voice and the avid light in his eyes, she found
herself shivering with fastidious distaste. She did not read the eyes
with full understanding, yet instinctively she shrank, for they held the
animal craving of a long-suppressed desire--the physical love of a man
past his youth which can satisfy itself with mere possession. "I will
take what you can give me, and I shall win your love in the end. I have
no fear; no doubts. I lack the lighter charms of a youthful cavalier,
but I believe I have still the strength and virility of a man." He
swelled a little with the strutting spirit of the mating male. "You will
learn that my heart is still the heart of a boy where you are conceded
and that our life won't be a shadowed thing."

"I must have time to think," she said faintly. "I don't--don't know
yet."

Driven by wanderlust and an unappeasable discontent, Stuart Farquaharson
had been in many remote places. Around those towns which were Meccas for
tourists he made wide detours. His family had jealously kept its honor
untarnished heretofore and though he bore himself with a stiffer outward
pride than ever, he inwardly felt that fingers of scandal were pointing
him out, through no misdeed of his own. Now he was back in Cairo from
the Sudan and the upper Nile, almost as brown and hard of tissue as the
Bedouins with whose caravans he had traveled and for the first time in
many weeks he could regain touch with his mail. That was a matter of
minor importance, but his novel had come from the press on the day he
sailed out of New York harbor and perhaps there awaited him at
Shepheard's some report from his publisher. That gentleman had predicted
success with an abundant optimism. Stuart himself had been sceptical.
Now he would know.

He sent his luggage ahead and drifted on foot with the tide. What a
place this would be, he reflected, to idle time away with the
companionship of love. His eyes narrowed painfully with a memory of how
Conscience and he had once talked of spending a honeymoon in Egypt. That
seemed as long ago as the age of Egypt itself and yet not long enough to
have lost its sting. Grunting and lurching along the asphalt, with bells
tinkling from their trappings, went a row of camels and camel-riders.
They threaded their unhurried way on cushioned hoofs through a traffic
of purring roadsters and limousines. Drawn by undersized stallions, an
official carriage clattered by. Its fez-crowned occupant gazed
superciliously out as the gaudily uniformed members of his _kavasse_ ran
alongside yelling to the crowds to make way for the Pasha! Fakirs led
their baboons, magicians carried cobras in wicker trays, and peddlers
hawked their scarabs and souvenirs. Against the speckless overhead blue,
rose the graceful domes and minarets of mosques and the fringed tops of
palms.

Farquaharson lightly crossed the terrace at Shepheard's Hotel and
traversed the length of the hall to the office at its back where mail is
distributed. For him there was a great budget and he carried it out to
one of the tables on the awninged terrace which overlooks the street.

Yes, here was the publisher's note. He tore the envelope. "You have
become famous," began his enthusiastic sponsor. "The thing has been a
knockout--the presses are groaning."

He read that letter and turned to others. A dramatist wished to convert
his book into a play ... several magazines wanted to know when his next
story would be complete ... two or three clipping bureaus wished to
supply him with the comments of the press ... many of the missives bore
the marks of much forwarding. Some had followed him half way around the
world. Then at the bottom of the pile he found a small but thickly
filled envelope. As it peeped out at him from under others his heart
leaped wildly and he seized it. It was addressed in the hand of
Conscience Williams. She had written to him! Why should she write except
to tell him he might come back? Cairo was a wonderful place! The entire
world was a wonderful place! A street fakir thrust a tray of scarabs up
from the sidewalk and grinned. Farquaharson grinned back and tossed him
_backsheesh_. Then he opened his missive. A young British army officer
looked on idly from the next table, amused at the boyish enthusiasm of
the American. As the American read the officer saw the delight die out
of his eyes and the face turn by stages to the seeming of a mummy.

Conscience had written a letter in which she suggested that, now at
least, they might say farewell in all friendliness. She was going to
marry Tollman, to whose great kindness she paid a generous tribute. The
date was not set but it would be some time that winter.

"I've had a great deal of time to think and little else to do, Stuart,"
she wrote, and at this point the penmanship had suffered somewhat in its
steadiness. "We have both had some troublesome times, but isn't there a
great deal we can remember of each other with pleasure? Can't it be a
memory which we need not avoid? I was bitterly rebellious and
heart-broken when you ignored the note in which I asked you, as humbly
as I could, to come back, but that is over now--"

_A note which asked him to come back!_ The letter fell from
Farquaharson's fingers. His hands themselves fell limp to the table. He
sat stupefied--staring and licking his lips.

The English officer rose and came over, dropping a kindly hand on his
shoulder.

"I beg pardon, sir," he said, "but are you ill? Can't I get a nip of
brandy?"

Stuart turned his head stupidly and looked up. Then slowly he pulled
himself together, with a shamed realization that the eyes of a hundred
pleasure-seekers had witnessed his collapse. He straightened and set his
jaw. "No, thank you. I'm all right," he declared. "I've been in the
desert, you see, and--" But the Englishman had nodded and gone back to
his table.

Ten minutes later, scornful of over-sea tolls, Farquaharson was filing a
cablegram. The letter had said she would be married "some time in the
winter." It was now past mid-winter. Would there be time? His hand
trembled with his haste as if the saving of a few seconds could avail.


     "Received no note from you. Wrote to you that night begging a
     chance," he scribbled, as his head swam with the effort and frenzy
     of his suspense. "Horrible mistake has occurred. Matter of life and
     death and thousand times more than that that you take no step till
     I see you. Am sailing by first boat. Wait."


That afternoon he dashed across the gangplank of a P. and O. steamer at
Alexandria just as the last whistle blew. While the propellers churned
the Mediterranean waters into a restless wake at the stern, Stuart
walked the decks like a man demented. Would there be time? His fingers
itched for his watch, because his obsession was the flight of hours. But
on the second day out a wireless message came, relaying from Cairo. The
man did not dare open it on deck. He took it to his cabin and there with
the slowness of deep fear, he unfolded the paper.




CHAPTER XIII


Against the stupor of Stuart Farquaharson's brain, as he sat in the
small stateroom of the P. and O. steamer, beat the fear of what he might
read.

Subconsciously his senses recorded small and actual things as the vessel
lurched through a heavy sea: the monotonous rat-tat of the brass
door-hook against the woodwork, and the alternating scraps of sky and
water as the circle of his port hole rose and fell across the line of
the horizon.

He was thinking of the letter that had come to Cairo--and lain there so
long unopened, but he was spared a knowledge of the suspense with which
Conscience had awaited an answer.

She had written it early in the fall and had mailed it endorsed "please
forward" in the care of his New York publishers, so that it had played
tag with him, never catching him, over the length of Europe and, after
that, had zig-zagged along the cities of the Levant and the fringes of
Africa.

Meanwhile, the man to whom it was addressed was wandering from the upper
Nile to Victoria Nyanza and beyond--where mail routes run out and end.
Acknowledging in her thoughts, from the first frost on Cape Cod to the
middle of winter, that temporizing only spelled weakness, Conscience had
none the less temporized. She said to herself: "Nothing he wrote _now_
would alter matters." Still with a somewhat leaky logic she added: "But
I'll give him a month to answer before I fix the date." When the month
had passed without result she granted herself other continuances, facing
alike, with a gentle obduracy, the pleas of her elderly lover and the
importunities of a father who threatened to murder himself with the
self-inflicted tortures of impatience.

At length she capitulated to the combined forces of entreaty, cajolery
and insistence. The fight was lost.

Through the preparations for that wedding she went without even the
simulation of joy or glamour. At least she would be honest of attitude,
but days which filled the house with wedding guests brought to her
manner a transformation. Her decision was made and if she was to do the
thing at all she meant to do it gallantly and with at least the outward
seeming of full confidence. She meant to betray to these visitors no
lurking misery of spirit; no note of struggle; no vestige of doubt. The
eyes which burned apprehensive and terror-stricken, throughout the
darkness of interminable nights, were none the less serene and regally
assured by day. The groom, too, seemed rejuvenated by such a spirit as
sometimes brings to autumn a summer quality more ardent than summer's
own. At the end of his _fiancée's_ doubtings, he fatuously told himself,
had come conviction. She knew at last how much stauncher a thing was his
own dependable strength and ripened manhood than the frothy charm of a
half-fledged gallant who had crumpled under the test.

Among the guests who for several days filled both the manse and
Tollman's house, were two who were not entirely beguiled by Conscience's
gracious and buoyant demeanor. One pair of these observant eyes was
violet blue and full of starry freshness. Intimate letters from
Conscience, in the old days, had invested Stuart Farquaharson with a
romantic guise for their possessor and Eben Tollman scarcely measured up
to that standard.

The other pair of eyes was neither young nor feminine, but elderly and
penetrating. Though Doctor Ebbett's temples were whitely frosted, he and
Eben Tollman had been classmates at Harvard. Now he was to be best man
at his friend's belated marriage. The work in which he had made his name
distinguished had to do with the human brain--its vagaries as well as
its normalities--and his thought was enough in advance of the general to
be frequently misunderstood and sometimes a target for lay ridicule.

On the evening after his arrival he sat in Eben Tollman's study with two
other men who were also classmates. Tollman himself was still at the
manse, and his guests were beguiling themselves with cigars which he had
furnished, and whiskey which he had not--and upon which he would have
frowned.

Over his glass Carton, the corporation lawyer, irrelevantly suggested:

"Eben seems a boy again. It makes us chaps whose children are almost
grown, feel relegated to an elder generation."

"Miss Williams," observed Henry Standing, "has a pretty wit and a
prettier face. I wanted to say to her: 'Now, my dear child, if I were
twenty years younger--' and then I caught myself up short. I chanced to
remember that Eben _isn't_ twenty years younger himself."

Carton nodded thoughtfully. "I can't help feeling that a thing like that
is always a bit chancy. Eben was a sober-sided kid in his cradle and the
girl is all fire and bloom. Fortunately it doesn't seem to have occurred
to her that there's any disparity." He paused, then demanded: "Ebbett,
you're a psychologist. What do you think?"

Dr. Ebbett took his cigar from his lips and studied it with
deliberation. When he spoke his words were laconic.

"I think it's as dangerous as hell."

"But a young wife will rejuvenate him and keep him young, won't she?"

"It's rarely been done before," retorted the doctor drily. "Moreover,
it's not a question of making him young again. A man of our friend's
type is born old."

"Oh, come now," protested Carton. "What's the matter with his type?"

Dr. Ebbett paused, listening to the blizzard's shrieking outside, then
he replied evenly:

"He's too intensely a New Englander. The somber and narrow man represses
one-half of his being and straightway sets up a Mr. Hyde in ambush to
make war on his Dr. Jekyl. Our lunatic asylums are full of patients
whose repressions have driven them mad. The whole Puritan code is a
religion of repression--and it's viciously dangerous."

Dr. Ebbett paused and sent a cloud of cigar smoke outward. His voice
abandoned the lecture-room professionalism into which it had fallen.

"But, as you say, that is all academic. Perhaps the bride has youth and
humor enough to leaven the whole lump."

Much less abstruse were the thoughts of Eleanor Kent: she of the violet
eyes, as she listened to Mary Barrascale's eulogy of Eben Tollman on the
day before the wedding. Eleanor could not forget moments which had
seemingly escaped Mary's observation: moments when Conscience, believing
herself unnoticed, allowed a look of fright to come to her eyes and a
line to circle her lips.

"When you told me in your letter that he was so much older than you,"
declared Mary, her enthusiasm bubbling as the three engaged themselves
over the last details of packing, "I simply couldn't bear it,--but he
isn't old at all. He's simply charming, and he has _such_ a rare
distinction of manner. I feel as if I were talking to a Prime Minister
whenever we have a chat."

"Thank you, dear," said Conscience, quietly, and the happy serenity of
her eyes seemed genuine--except to Eleanor.

"Of course, at one time," Mary rushed on, "we all thought that you had
decided to marry Mr. Farquaharson--and he sounded well worth while from
what you told us. It only shows what an easy thing it is to make
mistakes. How did you find out yourself, dear?"

Eleanor Kent thought she saw Conscience wince and close her eyes for an
instant as though in a paroxysm of pain, but her question came gravely:
"How did I find out what?"

"Why, that he was the sort of man that--well, that his mixing up in that
Holbury scandal indicated."

The girl who was to be married rose from the trunk over which she had
been bending and averted her face, but her voice was evenly calm as she
answered:

"I fancy the reports we had of that were exaggerated."

A sudden fire snapped in the violet eyes of Eleanor Kent and her cheeks
burned under a rosy gust of anger.

"Mary," she announced with spirit, "Mr. Farquaharson was a friend of
Conscience's and I have no doubt he still is. I don't think either of us
knows anything about him that gives us the right to criticize him. Have
you read his book?"

"Why, no. Of course, I didn't mean to say anything--"

"Well, I advise you to read that book." Stuart's champion tossed her
head with the positiveness of conviction. "It's not the kind of novel
that a rake could write. It's straight and clean minded, and if what a
man chooses to write, indicates what he thinks, he's that sort himself."

At this defense from an unexpected quarter, a light of gratitude kindled
in the face of the bride-to-be.

When the day set for the wedding had worn to dusk, Conscience escaped
from the guests and made her way slowly to her unlighted room. Her knees
were weak and she told herself that this was the natural stage-fright of
the altar--but she knew that it was more than that.

As she reached for matches the sound of voices beyond the door arrested
her, and the challenge of her own name held her attention.

"She's _perfectly_ lovely," declared Mary Barrascale, whose speech ran
to superlatives, "and she's _radiantly_ happy, too. To think that she's
being married and we're still in college."

Conscience straightened where she stood near the window. She raised her
palms to her temples and stepped back unsteadily until she could lean
against the wall. Before her eyes rose a vision of the college
campus--another of the care-free dormitory, then the picture dissolved
into another and she found herself trembling. Memory was playing tricks
and very softly a voice seemed to whisper in her ear, as it had actually
whispered long ago in response to these same regrets, "Does it hurt as
much as that, dearest?"

She became vaguely conscious of Eleanor's voice again, low pitched and
tense.

"I should think, Mary, you would see the truth. You chatter about how
happy she is--and she's almost going mad before your eyes. It's
ghastly--positively ghastly."

"What in heaven's name do you mean?" Mary's question broke from her in
amazement.

"I mean that anyone who wasn't deliberately trying to be deceived ought
to see what all this radiant happiness is worth. She's sick with doubt
and misgiving. If you ask me I believe it's because she still loves
Stuart Farquaharson--and besides I don't believe he was ever given a
fair chance." The girl halted and then broke into silent tears. "She's
letting them make a sacrifice of her--and I'm utterly ill with the
thought of it."

Conscience leaning weakly against the wall, let both hands drop
nervelessly at her sides. "I don't believe ... he was ever given a fair
chance." Her lips shaped the words she had just heard in a soundless
echo.

Was that true? she asked herself, accusingly, and her brain was too
confused for a just answer. An avalanche of new doubts rushed down upon
her, crushing her reason. She saw in this ceremony a horrible travesty
from which she must escape at all costs.... But how? She had no longer
the strength to repudiate boldly her settled decision. Her courage was
at ebb and she was caught in the grip of unreasoning panic. She would
abandon everything and everybody ... she would slip away ... she would
be true to herself first and then try afresh to be true to others. In
short she was for the time distracted.

She slipped over noiselessly and closed her door. She selected a small
traveling bag from the other pieces of luggage packed for her wedding
trip.

Then, overcome by sheer emotional exhaustion, she threw herself on her
bed where she sobbed quietly in the flickering of the candles. It was so
that the bridesmaids found her when they came in their capacity of tire
maidens to remind her that she must soon begin dressing for the
ceremony.

At once Eleanor had her arms about her friend, while Mary stood by
gasping and ineffectual.

Slowly Conscience raised her face and looked miserably from one to the
other. Her voice was dead and colorless.

"I heard what you said, Eleanor," she declared. "It's all true.... I
can't go through with it."

"But it's too late now, dear!" began Mary Barrascale's horrified voice
which Miss Kent silenced with a glance of contempt.

"Thank God, it's _not_ too late--yet," she said calmly. "It's never too
late while it's still _now_. But the bag, dear--what was that?"

Conscience rose and stood unsteadily with a trace of panic lingering in
her eyes. She spoke faintly.

"I guess I was quite mad.... I had the impulse to--to run away."

"You can't do that, you know." Eleanor Kent was one of those diminutive
and very feminine persons, who in moments of crisis can none the less
assume command with the quiet assurance of an admiral on his bridge.

"You have still a perfectly good right to change your mind, but it
mustn't be just on impulse. We're going to leave you now for thirty
minutes. When the time is up I'll be back and if you want to begin
dressing--all right." She paused a moment and then with a defiant
stiffening of her slender figure she announced crisply. "And if you
_don't_ want to, I'll go downstairs and tell them that you've decided
not to be married."

"What will they think of you?" Mary Barrascale had reached a condition
from which her contributions to the talk emerged in appalled gasps.

Eleanor wheeled on her. "They can think what they jolly well like," she
announced with a fine abandon of recklessness.

Feeling like watchers beside a jury-room door, the two bridesmaids kept
vigil, harboring contrary hopes.

Left alone in her room, the girl stood for a while gazing about her as
if her wild eyes were seeking for some secret panel that might open in
the walls and give her escape. She must think! There was little enough
time at best to bring order out of this panic-ridden confusion of her
thoughts. But her mind was like a stream in freshet. It could only race
and swirl along one channel, and that was the spillway of memories.

Stuart Farquaharson the boy; Stuart the man, coming to her at Chatham;
Stuart standing self-governed as her father scourged him with abuse;
Stuart the lover; all those semblances passed before her until her
world seemed peopled with them, and her old love grew clamorous in
resurrection--and insurrection.

In a little while she would be--unless she halted here--holding up her
hand for Eben's ring, and at the thought a sickness swept over her. It
was impossible. Instead of victory it was, after all, an abject and
hideous surrender. She could not face it and all that must come after
it.

Then she heard a feeble rap on her door. At the threshold stood the
wheelchair to which her father was confined like a slave chained to his
seat in the galley. She caught a brief impression of a pair of eyes
beyond him: the eyes of Eleanor Kent, full of the message of strength;
eyes that seemed to be saying, "Stand firm. Be sure!" But nearer at hand
was the face with skin drawn like parchment over its bony angles, deeply
lined with suffering, and crowned with a great shock of snowy hair.

The features, though, were only details of setting for the spirit of the
keen eyes that had always burned with an eagle fierceness and an
unyielding aggressiveness. Now they were different, and as the guests
who had brought the chair and its occupant up the stairs and into the
room withdrew in silent respect, the daughter's gaze was held by them
with a mesmeric force.

It was a face transfigured; a face in which the hardness of fight had
died into the serenity of peace.

Angles and wrinkles had become only lines of emphasis for this new
tranquillity of the eyes; eyes that might have seen a vision of divine
accolade and were at peace.

"My daughter," he said, as soon as they were alone together, and his
voice held the music of a benediction, "you are standing at the
threshold of your life--and I am near the end of mine, but for the first
time in many years, I am content and all my sorrows are paid for."

"Father!" she exclaimed brokenly, but he went on.

"I can now go, knowing that your life is secure on the rock of a stable
marriage: all your dangers over. You are making of my poor life a
success after all--and its end is a thing of peace. Eben is not as young
as you, but his heart is great and his character sincere. In the shadow
of his strength you will 'be secure and at peace beside still waters'
and I can leave you without fear. In his blood is the steadfastness of
Plymouth Rock--ay, and the Rock of Ages and the honor of our
forefathers."

The old man broke off, and raised his thin hand to his lean face with a
gesture of appealing physical weakness. His enthusiasm had tired him and
now a smile came to his lips of unaccustomed sweetness and tenderness.
When he spoke again it was in a different tone.

"But you know all that. My life has been one of stress, and you've not
known a mother. What I came to tell you, my dear, is that I realize you
may have missed that tenderness, and that whatever I may have seemed, I
have always felt it."

She was kneeling by his chair now with her hands gently stroking his
white mane.

"I know, Dad," she declared, and he reached up and took her fingers
between his two palms.

"You are making me happy, my daughter, unspeakably happy," he said. "And
I, who have long been old, feel young again. The Bible tells us that
marriage means leaving father and mother and cleaving only to the
one--but thank God, Eben insists that I shall spend my remaining days
with you both, and I am very happy."

At last he was rolled out again, leaving behind him a memory of that
exalted peace of countenance, and with a stifled groan the bride-to-be
turned back to her room--her period of reflection almost consumed.

"It would kill him!" she moaned. "It would be murder. And that look!
That happiness! I guess that will have to be my compensation."




CHAPTER XIV


When the bridesmaids entered it was a pale but firm face that greeted
them. "It was panic," said Conscience slowly. "If I hadn't decided
freely and fully and finally, I wouldn't have come this far. No one has
forced me.... He, Eben, is worth a dozen of me.... Please believe me,
never speak of this to anyone. It was sheer nerves and panic."

Of the wedding itself, Conscience had always a memory as confused and
unreal as that of a dream in which logical events go mad. Through many
faces, which at the moment seemed to be floating against black and
leering at her, she had the sense of moving without the action of her
muscles.... She saw the lion-like mane of her father's head and the
ecstasy of his eyes and a voice in her but not of her whispered: "Well,
I hope you're satisfied."... She was conscious of the heavy scent of
flowers which reminded her of a funeral.... One face stood out distinct
and seemed to be boring into her, reading secrets which, she felt
through a great dizziness, she ought not to let him fathom. It was the
face of Dr. Ebbett.... Then she heard a voice which sounded to her
unduly loud saying: "I do," and realized that it was her own. Later she
was reliably informed that she had appeared splendidly collected and
regally happy. This blurred focus of realization left her only when she
found herself in her own room and heard Mary Barrascale's voice
speaking.

"I've never seen a bride who was lovelier, or a groom who was happier,"
announced Mary exuberantly as she began lifting the white veil from the
dark hair. Then she added in afterthought:

"Oh, by the way, I guess this is a message of congratulation or
something. One of the servants handed it to me a few minutes ago." She
drew from the bosom of her gown an envelope bearing the imprint of a
cable office.

As Conscience took the missive a sudden intuition hinted the contents
and the waxy white of her cheeks became a dead pallor. Very slowly she
tore the envelope and read Stuart's message frantically penned in Cairo
on the way to the Alexandria train.


     "Received no note from you. Wrote to you that night begging a
     chance. Horrible mistake has occurred. Matter of life and death and
     thousand times more than that, that you take no step till I see
     you. Am sailing by first boat.  Wait.  Stuart."


The bride's heart stopped dead, then pounded madly. Stuart had received
no note from her! Then he had not abandoned her. He still loved her and
from that instant, whenever she told herself she did not love him, she
must lie. Now she was Tollman's wife. It had almost come in time.
Perhaps it _had_ come in time.

Conscience turned to the bridesmaid with a queer and unnatural ring in
her voice.

"Mary," she asked, "just exactly when did this message arrive?"

"It must have been immediately before the ceremony," the girl answered
with a puckered brow, striving for exactness. "One of the servants
handed it to me just as we started down the steps--of course, I couldn't
give it to you then."

"No," Conscience spoke as if her words came from a long distance and
again she caught her lower lip between her teeth. She had to do that to
keep from screaming or breaking into a bitter laugh. "No, of course, you
couldn't give it to me then, and yet--" She broke off and Eleanor
Kent's arms encircled her.

"Conscience, dear," she demanded, "was it anything you should have
known?"

Conscience straightened slowly and shook her head. She even forced a
stiff smile. "No," she lied with an effort of fulfilment for her first
wifely duty. "It was just what Mary thought. A message about my
marriage. I must write an answer."

Farquaharson, sitting in his stateroom, unfolded his cablegram with the
feeling of a defendant who sees the door of the jury-room swing open.

With a stunned sense of despair he read:


     "Don't hurry home to explain. It's too late for that. We will be
     glad to see you when your trip ends.
                          "CONSCIENCE TOLLMAN."


Conscience Tollman! There was no longer a Conscience Williams then. He
could only realize that some hideous mistake had made absolute a
life-wrecking edict which--had he only known before--might, perhaps have
been set aside. Now it was irrevocable and his own blindness and a
stubbornness masquerading as pride were to blame.

Now she was the wife of Eben Tollman, the bigot whose narrowness would
cramp her life into a dreary torture. His imagination eddied in
bewildered wretchedness about that whirlpool of thought, bringing
transient impulses of madness and self-destruction.

The thought of her as the wife of any man except himself must have meant
to him a withering agony--but the idea of marital intimacy between
Conscience and Eben Tollman, seemed an unthinkable desecration at which
his flesh crawled. He vainly argued with himself that this was no sudden
loss which had struck his life barren, but one to which he had already
shaped his resignation. All that self-schooling had been swept away as
fiercely as fragments of drift in the freshet of news that came with
her letter. She had not exiled him but had asked him to return. She had
spoken of a bitterness born of disappointment, which she had conquered:
a bitterness for which he was responsible. Stark pictures shaped
themselves across his brooding: pictures of the gray life to which his
desertion had condemned her ... the gradually crushing tyranny of
weakness ... the final surrender. It had been a surrender after years of
siege, not because her courage had failed, but because she had waited in
vain for the reinforcement of his loyalty. This was what he had done
with his life and hers. For him there was an empty future: for her
marriage with a coldly selfish sensualist who called his greed piety.
Stuart Farquaharson sat in a chilled inertia of despair while the ship's
bells recorded the passing of hours. From the decks above drifted little
fragments of human talk and human laughter, but to him they were
meaningless. Late in the evening he rose with an effort and went on deck
where he sought out an unoccupied place. Phosphorescent gleams broke
luminously in the wake. Clusters of great stars and the bright dust of
star-spray sprinkled the sky, but whether he looked up or down Stuart
Farquaharson could see only the light of victorious surrender in the
eyes of the woman he loved, declaring her love for him. Now she was in
the arms of another man--a man who had cunningly and patiently
subordinated every lesser thing to his determination of possessing her.

The voice of impulse pleaded with him fiercely to go back and tax that
man, panoplied though he was in the sanction of society and the church,
with having won foully. Tollman would never kindle the fire that burned
deep and blue-flamed in his wife's nature. Her life with him would be
thirst and hunger. But Stuart's fever turned to chill again as he
remembered. He had forfeited his rights and stood foresworn. His vows
had been brave and his performance craven. He acknowledged with
self-scorn that his eagerness to break through Tollman's force of
possession went back to a motive more selfish than exalted. He was
driven by a personal craving to hold another man's wife in his arms. He
was tempted by the sense of insurmountable power which he knew he held
upon her thoughts, her love and her imagination.

This must be the persuasiveness of some devil's advocate which whispered
to him: "Go now! Despite all her stern allegiance to duty you can make
her come into your arms. This marriage is all a hideous mistake. The
bigots have trapped her with a bait of false martyrdom. Go while she is
still sickened with the first bitterness of this profanation of youth in
the custody of age." Then into this hot-blooded counsel crept the old,
cold voice of logic, like a calm speaker quieting the incendiary passion
of a mob.

It was her right to make the test unhampered, since--through his own
delinquency--it was too late to avoid the test.

Two courses lay open to him now that the past was sealed. He might
return to his own country, excusing himself on the shallow pretense that
he meant only to "stand by" in case she needed rescue from the
unendurable, or he might turn his face east and put between himself and
temptation as much of space as lies between Cape Cod and the Ganges.

The two alternatives were, roughly, those of passion and reason, yet
each was led by so many tributary problems that it was not easy to
disentangle the threads of their elements.

Stuart Farquaharson's inheritance of fighting blood brought a red
blindness which at times made the voice of reason seem contemptible and
pallid with cowardice.

Could Eben Tollman, whom he had always distrusted, have engineered the
thing?

Stuart, pacing the deck, halted at the thought and his fevered temples
turned abruptly cold. His face set itself into malignant lines of
vengeance. If such a thing could be proven--as there was a God in
Heaven--Tollman was his to kill and he should die! He stood for a while,
his chest heaving with the agitation of his resolve--and then he smiled
grimly to himself. The calmer voice denounced him for a fool running
amuck with passion. These were thoughts suited to a homicidal half-wit.

How could Eben have achieved such an end? It was absurd to seek such a
reason for the fatality of his own senseless course. He had himself to
blame.

Buffeted between the two influences, fighting a desperate duel with
himself, Farquaharson paced the deck all night.

At times his face burned and his eyes smoldered with a fever only half
sane. At times cold sweat stood on his temples and he trembled, with
every muscle lax and inert. As dawn began to lighten the eastern
sky-line no man could say--and least of all himself--which counsel would
in the end prevail.

When the purser appeared on deck he gazed perplexedly at the haggard and
distracted face which confronted him and the nervous pitch of the voice
that put rapid questions. It was obvious that this solitary passenger
had not been in his berth.

"What is our first port of call, and when do we reach it?" demanded
Farquaharson.

"Brindisi. To-morrow."

"From Brindisi what are the most immediate connections respectively--for
the States and--for India."

The officer replied with a directness that rose superior to personal
curiosity.

"For the States the quickest course is to leave this vessel at
Gibraltar. I can't tell you precisely what connection you could make
there--but I dare say the delay would be only the matter of a day or
two."

"And for the east?"

"You mean back-tracking over the route we've come?"

"Yes."

"We should anchor at Brindisi at two o'clock to-morrow afternoon. At
two-thirty the _Mogul_ weighs anchor for Port Said ... and the Indian
Ocean."

Upon the forehead of the passenger who stood in the freshness of the
morning air were beads of sweat. His face was pale and drawn with the
stress of one called upon for swift decision and terrifically shaken by
irresolution. Knowing only that this seemed a stricken man, the purser
pitied him.

Farquaharson let his eyes roam west and a momentary light of eagerness
leaped in them. Then he wheeled eastward and the light paled into the
deadness of despair. After a moment he straightened himself and braced
his shoulders. At the end he spoke with a quiet decisiveness.

"Be good enough to send a wireless to Brindisi for me. Please do what
you can to have the _Mogul_ held in the event of our being delayed. It's
a matter of the utmost importance."

The purser nodded. "Very good, sir," was his ready reply. "It may be a
near thing, but I fancy you'll make it."

       *       *       *       *       *

Stuart Farquaharson's acknowledgment of the cablegram was brief. For the
same reason which had made him so urgent in entreating Conscience to
take no step until he arrived, it seemed better now that he should
remain absent. He added assurances that he had never received any letter
from her and mentioned the one he had written at the time of their
parting. He wished her every conceivable happiness. As for himself, he
would be indefinitely in the Orient where life was colorful enough to be
diverting.

Of course, Conscience did not receive that letter until her return from
the wedding trip, made brief because of her father's condition. The trip
itself had seemed in many ways as unreal and distorted an experience as
the ceremony had been. She had constantly reminded herself of how much
she owed to the generous devotion of her husband, but no self-reproach
could stir into life the more fiery sentiments of her heart. For his
virtues she had the admiration of a daughter, a friend or a sister--but
not the bright enthusiasm of a bride.

Tollman himself, the observer would have said, had left nothing to ask.
Seemingly his one wish was to treat his life as a slate upon which every
unacceptable word and line should be sponged out and rewritten.

The wife sat in the study of her husband's house a day or two after
their return, when Tollman entered with a face full of apprehension. He
had just suffered a fright which had made his heart miss a beat or two
and had set his brain swirling with a fevered vision of all future
happiness wrecked on a shoal of damnable folly. When he had presented
his wife with the keys of his house he had not laid upon her any
Bluebeard injunction that one door she must never open. Bluebeard lived
in a more rudimentary age, and his needs included a secret chamber. The
things which Eben Tollman earnestly desired to conceal from his wife's
view could be adequately stored in the small safe of his study, since
they were less cumbersome than the mortal remains of prior wives done to
death. They were in fact only documents--but for him pregnant with
peril--and what had stamped his face suddenly with terror was the
realization that now for the only time in all his meticulously careful
life--he had left them open to other eyes than his own.

The old minister had been moved bag, baggage and creed over to
Tollman's larger house, and in these days of reaccommodated régime, the
road between the two places was one busy with errand-running. On one of
these missions Eben had been driving with the slow sedateness which was
his wont, when upon pleasant reflections, like shrapnel disturbing a
picnic, burst the sense of danger, and the realization of his folly. It
struck the self-congratulation from his face as abruptly as a broken
circuit quenches a lighting system.

He saw the table in his study as he had left it: the strongbox open--the
safe, too, from which he had taken it, agape: papers lying in
unprotected confusion. Among them were the two purloined letters which
had made his marriage possible, and which if discovered would end it in
the volcanic flames of his wife's wrath. There were also certain
memoranda concerning the affairs of William Williams which might have
raised an ugly implication of an estate wrecked at the hands of a
trusted friend. His fear-inflamed imagination went a step further until
it saw also his wife's figure halting in her task of tidying up the
study and her eyes first widening in bewilderment, then blazing into an
unspeakable fury--and scorn. How could he have done such a thing--he the
martinet of business caution? It seemed to himself inconceivable and not
to be accounted for merely by the explanation of a new husband's
abstraction.

He remembered now. These particular papers had formerly been kept in a
separate box--safe from confusion with others. In sorting things out
prior to his wedding trip he had made several changes of
arrangement--and had until this moment forgotten that change.

A sudden sweat broke out on his forehead and, snatching the whip from
its stalk on the dashboard, he belabored his aged and infirm mare into
a rickety effort at speed.

Ira Forman, standing by the green doors of his barn, watched the rich
man go by with this unaccustomed excitement. Ira's small resources had,
on occasion, felt the weight of Eben's hand and as he gazed, his
observation was made without friendliness. "In a manner of speakin' Eben
'pears to be busier than the devil in a gale of wind. I wonder who he
cal'lates to rob at the present time."

Eben had occasion to be busy. He had often told himself that it was the
part of prudence to burn those documents, yet some jackdaw quality of
setting store by weird trinkets had always saved them from destruction.
In a fashion they were trophies of triumph. With indefinable certainty
he felt that some time--somehow--their possession would be of
incalculable value. They constituted his birth certificate in this new
life.

While a frenzy of haste drove him, the realization of what he might find
when he arrived made him wish that he dared postpone the issue, and the
hand which fitted a key to his own front door trembled with trepidation.
Once he had seen his wife's face he would know. Her anger would not burn
slowly, in such a case, but in the conflagration of tinder laid to
powder. Yet when he stole quietly to the study door and looked in,
anxiety made his breath uneven. She was sitting there, within arm's
length of the table--which, thank God, seemed to the casual glance, just
as he had left it,--but in her fingers she held what appeared to be a
letter, and as he watched, unobserved, she crumpled it and tossed it
into the flames that cast bright flecks of color on her cheeks. Her face
looked somewhat miserable and distraught--but that hardly comported with
what should be expected had she learned the truth--unless possibly it
was the exhaustion of wretchedness following the violence of a swiftly
sweeping and cyclonic storm. On the whole, her attitude was reassuring,
he thought, and in any event a bold course was best. So he entered the
room, smiling.




CHAPTER XV


"You are looking very serious, dearest," he declared in a tone of
assumed lightness, marred by a cumbersome quality which made it
grotesque. As his voice broke on her reverie, his wife started, then sat
gazing at him with a sphinx-like expression in her eyes, which he found
it hard to endure. But he went boldly on: "Very serious indeed for a
bride of a month's standing."

Still she did not answer and under the steadiness of her silent gaze,
his momentary reassurance wilted. He had foreseen the possibility of
encountering a woman turned Valkyrie, but was unaccoutred to face this
enigmatical calm.

Standing here now with those cool eyes upon him, a new and cumulative
apprehension tortured him. What if, with a swift determination, his wife
had decided upon yet another course: that of simulating until her own
chosen moment ignorance of what she knew: of drawing him more deeply
into the snare before she confronted him with her discovery?

But as he was weighing these possibilities, Conscience broke the
silence. She even smiled in a mirthless fashion--and the man began to
hope again.

"I _was_ serious," she said. "I was reproaching myself."

"Reproaching yourself--" the husband arched his brows--"for what?"

She responded slowly as if weighing her words.

"For many things. You have devoted years of your life to my father and
myself--and asked nothing. After a long while I consented to marry
you--though I couldn't give myself freely or without reserve."

He bent over a little and spoke with a grave dignity.

"You have given me everything," he said quietly, "except the admission
that you love me. I told you before we were married that I had no fear
and no misgiving on that point. I shall win your love, and meanwhile I
can be patient."

She let the implied boast of word and manner pass without debate and
went on self-accusingly:

"You've treated yourself very much like an old house being torn to
pieces and done over to satisfy the whims and eccentricities of a new
tenant."

Tollman affected a manner meant to be debonair, but his thought was
divided and uncontrollable impulse drew his glance shiftily to the
table.

"Well, suppose that I have tried to change myself, why shouldn't I? I
love you. I'm eager to demonstrate that I'm not too old a dog to learn
new tricks."

She only shook her head, and, finding words more tolerable than silence,
he proceeded:

"I've discovered the fountain which Ponce de Leon missed. Henceforth I
mean to go on growing younger."

"And yet, Eben--" She was still looking at him with that directness
which hinted at some thought foreign to her words--something as yet
unmentioned which had left her unstrung. "It's not really a congenial
rôle to you--this one of reshaping your life. At heart you hate it....
This house proves that. So does this room--and its contents."

The pause which separated the final words brought a sinking sensation at
the pit of his stomach, and the discomfort of a fencer, dueling in the
dark--a swordsman who recognizes that his cleverness is outmatched. His
question came with a staccato abruptness.

"How is that?"

Conscience rose from her chair and for a moment stood letting her eyes
travel about the walls, the furniture, the pictures. As they wandered,
the husband's gaze followed them, and when they rested for an instant on
the open strong box and the untidy papers, his alarm gained a brief
mastery so that he stepped hurriedly forward, placing himself between
her and the danger.

"What were you saying?" he questioned nervously.

"I was calling your attention to this room. Look at it. If you didn't,
at heart, hate all change--all innovation, you couldn't have lived here
this long without having altered it."

"Altered it--why?"

Conscience laughed. "Well, because it's all unspeakably depressing, for
one thing. Outside of prisons, I doubt if there is anything drearier in
the world than Landseer engravings in black frames and fantastically
grained pine trying to be oak--unless it's hair-cloth sofas and
portraits that have turned black."

The lord of the manor spoke in a crestfallen manner, touched with
perplexity. To what was all this a preamble?

"That portrait is of an ancestor of mine," he said and his wife once
more laughed, though this time his anxiety fancied there was irony in
it. "All right," she said, "but wouldn't it have been quite as
respectful and much more cheerful to send him on a visit to some painter
who takes in dingy ancestors and does them over?"

"I hadn't thought of it," he acknowledged, but the idea did not seem to
delight him.

"No." They were still standing, she facing the table and he facing her,
making of his shoulders as wide a screen as possible.

Now she moved and stood with the fingers of one hand resting lightly on
the spot where lay a profusion of scattered sheets and envelopes. These
were papers which, should she see and recognize them--granting that she
had not already done so--would spell divorce or separation. Tollman drew
a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his forehead. At the price of
any concession he must get her out of that room for five minutes!

"No," she went on. "It hadn't occurred to you, because you really
dislike all change. You are a reactionary ... and I'm afraid I'm what
you'd call a radical."

"But, dear--" he spoke eagerly, ready to sacrifice without combat even
his cherished reverence for the unchanging order of his fathers: even
his aversion to the wasting of money--"I haven't told you before because
I wanted to surprise you. I've let all that wait until you should be
here to direct it. I wanted the renovated house, like the renovated man,
to bear the stamp of your designing."

The wife's eyes flashed with surprise and apparent pleasure. "Do you
really mean it?" she exclaimed. "Do you really mean that I may do what I
like with the place?"

"Yes, yes--" he hastened to assure her. "You are in supreme command
here. You have _carte blanche_."

For a while she did not speak, but when she did her voice was very soft.
"Eben," she said almost falteringly, "you give me everything--and I give
you so little."

A few minutes later, with vast relief, he watched her go through the
door, then collapsed, a limp creature, into the chair by the table, his
arms going out and sweeping the papers into a pile close to his body.
His face, relaxed from the strain of dissembling, looked old and his jaw
sagged.

But before he had sufficiently recovered to investigate the documents he
heard a rustle and looked around. Conscience was standing in the
door--and he feared that even the slouch of his shoulders, seen from
behind, might have been dangerously revealing. His wife's level tone as
she spoke, no less than her words, intensified his conviction of defeat.

"The note that I asked you to mail to Stuart Farquaharson--that night
when he left--never reached him."

So she had, after all, been playing with him as a cat plays with a
mouse! She had left the room, only to return and confront him when he
was unmanned. Something of cornered desperation came into his eyes, but
with a final instinct of precaution he managed to assume a remnant of
poise.

"Never reached him? That seems hardly possible."

She nodded. "Yes; doesn't it? I asked you at the time if you were
certain you had mailed it. Do you remember?"

"Perfectly. I said I had never forgotten to mail a letter."

"Still, he never received it--and he wrote one to me--at the same time
which I didn't get, either."

Eben Tollman licked his lips. It seemed useless to carry the fight
further. He stood with one foot over the brink and momentum at his back.
Then when another moment would have ended his campaign of dissimulation
his wife spoke again, and the man's brain reeled--but this time with an
incredulous reversal of emotion. Some miracle had saved him!

"I've just had a note from him. He's in India."

Eben Tollman straightened up, and shook from his shoulders the weight of
a decade or two.

He had been dying the multiple deaths of the coward because he had let
his imagination bolt and run away. The menace had passed, and
straightway came a transformation. Once more he was full-panoplied in
his assurance of self-righteousness. His voice was unctuously
calculated, persuasively considerate.

"That is a very extraordinary story, but you aren't letting things that
happened so long ago trouble you, are you, my dear?"

"A thing--which has caused bitterness between friends--even long ago,
must trouble one."

"Yes, I quite concur in that sentiment." He nodded understandingly. It
was the same gentleness of manner to which he had owed so much in the
past. "And yet--I don't like to speak critically of a man who was once a
rival--yet unhappily there are other things to be remembered. His
experiences in New York seemed to prove him wanting of much that your
friendship must demand."

Conscience did not answer, but she felt the justice of the criticism.

When his wife had again left him alone he lost no time in bending over
memoranda and running through papers with fingers that trembled.

Then he straightened up again. All was as he had left it. The two
intercepted letters were tied safely together and the dust which had
gathered upon their wrapper was undisturbed.

For some minutes he abandoned himself to the satisfaction of a man whose
escape has been narrow--but complete. Eventually, however, his brows
drew together with an annoyance which had strayed into his thoughts and
poisoned them. He had handled the situation ineptly and expensively.

He had given his young wife _carte blanche_ to do what she chose with
his old house. She would waste money more lavishly even than he had
wasted it when he had employed the services of the Searchlight
Investigation Bureau. What, after all, were these cushion-footed sleuths
but blackmailers of a legalized sort? He dismissed lightly the
circumstance that such enterprises fatten upon the support of gentlemen
who have work to do which more open methods fail to favor. This process
of thought permitted his armor of self-righteousness to be worn in
accord with thrift and the accomplishment of his wishes and to remain
the while undented by self-accusation.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first days of her wedding trip had been marked, for Conscience, by a
numbed vagueness, which brought a kindly blunting of all her emotions.
In that coma-like condition she could be outwardly normal while inwardly
she was living a life of unrealities. She had fought that dangerous
comfort as a surrender to phantasy until in a measure she had conquered
it.

She had fought steadfastly against all the insurgent influences in her
heart aroused by the belated telegram, as one fights the influence of a
drug. It was not Eben Tollman's fault--ran her logic--that this message
from Egypt had drawn Stuart Farquaharson dangerously close to his wife's
inmost thoughts at a time when, she had told herself, he must henceforth
be kept in the far background.

But there was no escaping the reality that the cablegram and the letter
had brought definite results. They had lifted Stuart out of his place in
the past and drawn him into the present. He had not been guilty of
desertion, but was, like herself, the victim of a hideous and
inexplicable mistake.

It had hurt when Tollman referred to Farquaharson's unfavorable record,
even with the consideration of tone he had employed. But Conscience told
herself that her duty lay less in defense of the man whom she had once
loved and who had fallen from his pedestal than in the square facing of
present facts.

Her husband had alluded to Stuart with neither rancor nor resentment but
in kindliness and fair judgment. Now, at all events, she argued wildly,
seeking to coerce her heart, it was to Eben and not to Stuart that she
owed loyalty. So, while her husband sat in his study regretting that he
had conceded too much to his fears of unmasking, she wrestled in her
room with rebellious heart fires, kindled by the letter from the exile.

She shivered, though the room was warm. Assuredly, she told herself, she
must keep burning before her mental vision the memory that, however much
Stuart had been the victim of a mistake at the time of their parting, he
had since forfeited all claims upon her love.

       *       *       *       *       *

Stuart Farquaharson, the writer of best sellers, reflected that Life
does not divide its chapters by the measure of the calendar, nor does it
observe that rule of literary craftsmanship which seeks to distribute
the drama of a narrative into a structural unity of form with the
ascending stages of climax.

At this bruised cynicism an older man would have smiled, but to Stuart
it was poignantly real.

He had lost the prize which to him seemed the only guerdon worth
striving for, while every other recognition had come easily--almost
without effort.

The success of his novel had been so extraordinary that Farquaharson
fell to reviewing his literary experience with a somewhat impersonal
amusement. He had not poured his soul into his work with a bitter sweat
of midnight endeavor as the genius is said to do. He had wooed the muse
about as reverently as a battered tramp might fondle an equally battered
dog, seeking, without illusion, a substitute for better companionship.

One afternoon he sat alone in a Yokohama tea-house, reading the latest
collection of newspaper reviews which had come to his hand.

"We have here a book," observed one commentator, "which irritates with a
sense of undeveloped power while it delights with a too-facile charm. It
would seem to come from a pen more gifted than sincere."

As Stuart slipped the collection of clippings into his pocket a hand
fell on his shoulder and he rose to encounter a ruddy-faced young man in
the undress uniform of the United States Navy.

"Why so solitary?" demanded the newcomer. "Surely a famous novelist
needn't sit alone in the shadow of Fuji Yama. The place teems with
charming Americans."

Farquaharson's face lighted with genuine pleasure as he grasped the
outstretched hand in a grip of cramping heartiness.

"Jimmy Hancock!" he exclaimed. "Why, man, I haven't seen you since--" He
paused, and Jimmy, seating himself, grinned back as he took up the
unfinished sentence: "'Since the memory of man runneth not to the
contrary--' I'll have Scotch and soda, thank you."

Farquaharson laughed. This was the same breezy Jimmy and the two had met
rarely since the first academy days. That was a time which carried them
both back almost to Conscience's visit in the Valley of Virginia.

A torrent of questions, many of them intrinsically inconsequential yet
important to the exile, had to be put by the officer and answered by the
author. Finally came one which Stuart had apprehended.

"When did you see Conscience Williams last? An unspeakably ancient
letter from home mentioned your spending a summer up there on Cape Cod?
There were even rosy prophecies." Farquaharson winced a little.

"She is married," he said evenly, though with an effort. "She quite
recently married a gentleman by the name of Eben Tollman."

"Oh, then I was misinformed. Give me her address if you know it and I'll
send my overdue congratulations."

Farquaharson complied with that obedience to social necessity which made
him conceal the fact that, for him, this reunion with an old friend had
been robbed of its savor and turned into a series of unhappy memories.

"This evening you are coming aboard to dine with me," announced Hancock
when he had finished his drink and risen, "and after dinner a handful of
people will arrive for an informal dance on deck."

But Farquaharson gave an excuse. He felt weary and shrank from those
inevitable confidences which must ensue. This evening he was leaving for
Tokyo and would reach Yokohama on his return only in time to make his
steamer for Honolulu. Jimmy Hancock was full of regret. His own cruiser,
he said, would sail to-morrow for Nagasaki.

Stuart's return from Tokyo and Nikko put him in Yokohama just before his
steamer's sailing time. So it happened that he went over the gang plank
of the _Nippon Maru_ as the whistle was warning visitors ashore.

Having no acquaintances among the figures that lined the deck rail
behind a flutter of handkerchiefs, he went to the smoking-lounge where
for two hours he busied himself with his author's routine of note books.

It was mid-afternoon when he emerged among those fellow passengers who
had long ago claimed their steamer chairs and dedicated themselves to
the idleness of the voyage.

Stuart began pacing the boat deck with the adequate companionship of his
pipe. He was not lonely for the society of men and women. In his own
mind he put a stress of emphasis on women. Two of them had touched his
life closely enough to alter its currents. One, he had lost through his
own folly and her inability to free herself from the sectionalism of an
inherited code. The other had been foolish in the extreme and had drawn
him into the whirlpool of her heedlessness.

In ways as far apart as east and west, each had been fascinating and
each had been beautiful.

The orbit of his rounds carried him several times past a woman, who was
standing unaccompanied at the rail astern. Her face and glance were
turned outward where the propellers were churning up a lather of white
spume and where little eddies of jade and lapis-lazuli raced among the
bubbles.

He felt, at first, no curiosity for the averted face, but finally the
length of time she had been standing there without change of posture,
the unusual slenderness and grace of the figure, and the fact that he
had _not_ seen her features awakened a tepid interest.

But when, for the seventh time, he rounded the white walls of the after
cabin and she turned with a smile of seeming welcome on her lips,
Farquaharson stopped dead. For just a surprised instant he forgot the
requirements of courtesy and glanced about as if instinctively seeking
escape. His jaw stiffened, then with a sense of chagrin for this
gracelessness he stepped forward with a belated cordiality.

But in the brief interval he saw the exquisitely fair coloring of the
woman's cheeks flush pinker, and the lower lip catch between her teeth.

Her eyes, which in the afternoon sun were golden amber, clouded with a
swift shadow of pain which as swiftly vanished.

"I was wondering, Stuart," said Marian Holbury slowly, "whether you
meant to speak to me at all."

"I didn't know you were on this side of the world," he responded with
recovered equanimity.

She leaned against the rail and, while the breeze whipped the sash of
her sweater and her white skirt about her, studied him gravely until he
said: "Meeting you here was such a coincidence that it astonished me ...
don't you find it surprising, too?"

She shook her head.

"No," she said, "I don't. You see I _did_ know that you were on this
side of the globe. I even knew that you would be on board. Lieutenant
Hancock told me."




CHAPTER XVI


Stuart Farquaharson's first impulse upon finding his surprise for the
meeting unshared, was an astonishment at Marian herself. Unless some
great urgency existed for an immediate return to the States he supposed
that she would have avoided sailing with him.

"The circumstance that the one man I knew in Yokohama should also be an
acquaintance of yours only heightens the effect of the coincidence," he
hazarded, and his companion smiled as though amused at some unimpaired
element of humor as she naïvely responded: "Yes--except that in a
foreign town we would be apt to meet the same people."

However it had happened, thought Stuart, it was a deplorable accident:
their being thrown together for ten days in the narrowed companionship
of a sea-voyage. For her, even more than himself, it must bring back the
painful notoriety of their last companionship.

It had all been so bootless and uncalled for! Marian Holbury might have
divorced her husband had she wished, and remained unstigmatized. Yet she
had, by yielding to an ungoverned impulse, reversed their positions of
justification. Now the news of their names on the same sailing lists
would come to ears at home and set tongues wagging afresh. There had
been enough of that.

As she stood there regarding him quietly, with the thorough
self-possession of her sex and her class, he reminded himself that there
was no profit in a sulkiness of attitude.

"What are your sentiments," he inquired, "regarding a cup of tea?" And
she laughed frankly and easily as she responded:

"They are of the friendliest." Together they turned and went toward the
nearest white-jacketed deck steward.

As he made a pretense of sipping his tea Farquaharson admitted to
himself that the lady whom he was meeting after a long interval had lost
nothing of her charm.

The ten days of enforced companionship would at all events be relieved
of tedium, but he was in a quandary as to what should be his attitude.
Later in the seclusion of the smoking-room he shaped a tentative policy
of such deferential courtesy as he would have tendered a new
acquaintance. He fancied that she would appreciate a manner which
neither bordered on intimacy nor presumed upon the past.

But as the days went on a variance developed between the excellence of
his plan in theory and in practical application. For one thing, Marian
herself seemed less grateful in her acceptance of it than he had
anticipated. He sometimes felt, from a subtle hint of her manner, that
her confidence in her own adroitness and _savoir faire_ needed no such
assistance from him.

There were moments, too, between their casual conversations when a
wistful sort of weariness brought a droop to her lips, as though she
would have welcomed a less constrained companionship.

Sometimes when off guard, he found himself slipping into the manner
which seemed more natural, and then he wondered if his policy of
aloofness might not savor of the priggish.

Not until they were nearing Honolulu did they refer to the past and then
it was Marian and not Stuart who broached the subject.

"We were fortunate in being in Japan in cherry-blossom time," suggested
Stuart in a matter of fact fashion, as they strolled on deck at sunset.
"We saw it all at its best."

"Cherry-blossom time in Japan--" she echoed musingly. Then suddenly she
broke out with an almost impassioned bitterness, "Yes, I suppose we
were--fortunate! We are both still in our twenties. I am rich and you
are better than that--you are along the way of being famous. And yet it
occurs to me that neither of us is precisely happy. We are both outcasts
from contentment--just Bedouins in the world's desert, after all."

His question came vaguely and uncomfortably, "What do you mean, Marian?"

She laughed, banishing the gravity from her face.

"Nothing--nothing at all, Stuart," she assured him. "It was just a
woman's mood." But after a moment she went on in a voice of greater
seriousness: "It seems as good a time as any to tell you that I've come
to realize with a wretched guiltiness--how I pulled you into the mess I
made of my own affairs. If there were any way of undoing it--"

He interrupted her quickly, "Please don't brood over that, Marian. It's
all ended now. You were too confused just then by your own foreground
wretchedness to be able to gauge the perspectives."

"One has a right," she declared with self-scorn, "to expect from an
adult human being, a reasonable degree of intelligence. I didn't display
it to any conspicuous extent."

"You gave way to a moment of panic."

"Yes--and you suffered for it. I didn't quite understand then that
sealing the evidence in the divorce, while it was supposed to protect
me, really left you no chance to clear yourself."

"Naturally not," he smilingly rejoined. "You weren't a lawyer, you know.
But it must pain you to discuss these things and I'm not asking any
explanation. Why shouldn't we let them rest in peace?"

Her face flushed a little and she seemed on the point of argument, but
she only said: "Yes, I suppose that is better."

The evening before the _Nippon Maru_ was due in the Hawaiian port there
was no moon, but all the softly blazing stars of the tropics were
kindled in the sky and the phosphor waters of the Pacific played in an
exquisite echo of light. Marian Holbury, in her simplicity of white
skirt and white blouse looked as young as a school girl and, Stuart
thought, more beautiful than he had ever seen her. They sat together on
the after-deck which, as it chanced, they held in monopoly and the woman
said musingly:

"To-morrow we part company, don't we?"

"I'm afraid so," he answered. "My ticket reads to Honolulu."

"I suppose I should thank you," she continued in the same pensiveness of
manner. "I guess your unbroken reserve was meant for considerateness."

"Under the circumstances," he replied, a shade piqued by her tone,
"anything else might have been embarrassing--for you."

With eyes traveling seaward she spoke again and there was a ghost of
quiet irony in her voice.

"That seems to be a thing a man's chivalry never leaves to a woman's own
judgment; the determination of what she may find embarrassing."

"At least a man doesn't want to force the dilemma on her." Possibly he
did not succeed in saying it entirely without stiffness.

"If I'd been afraid of your doing that," she reminded him, "I might have
changed my sailing date."

"I was just a little surprised that you didn't," he admitted.

A strolling couple passed and Marian watched them turn out of sight
before she spoke again.

"As a matter of fact, I did change it. I left the friends with whom I'd
been traveling and took this earlier steamer home." She caught the
expression of surprise in his face, but before he could put it into
words she heightened it to amazement with the calm announcement: "I did
that because Lieutenant Hancock told me that you were sailing by it."

"But I--I don't understand!"

"No. You wouldn't."

"I'm dense, I suppose," he acknowledged, "but I should have fancied the
only result of that would be unpleasant gossip."

"Yes, Stuart, you _are_ dense," she interrupted, and into her eyes
leaped an insurgent flame of scorn. "Why should I care what gossips
thought? Their verdict was rendered long since. I had a reason more
important to myself than their opinions."

"Will you tell me what it was? If my attitude was silly, Marian, at
least it was sincere."

"I was wondering whether I would tell you or not, Stuart. Most women
would not; but I'm reported to be startlingly--perhaps shockingly
candid--so perhaps I will."

Formerly he had thought her clever with a play of wit which made for
fascination, but he had believed her processes of thought transparent to
his own scrutiny. Of late he had discovered in her something baffling
and subtle. This was not the same Marian but a Marian of whom his old
acquaintance had been merely the matrix as iron is the beginning of
tempered steel. The woman whose eyes dwelt on him now with a sort of
inscrutable indulgence was one who reversed their positions. It was as
if she read him easily in these days, while in herself she retained
depths which he had no means of fathoming. But two things he _could_
read in her eyes: courage and utter honesty--and these were qualities
which he esteemed.

After a little she asked him with a direct reading of his thoughts which
made him start uncomfortably, "You find me changed?"

Stuart drew a long breath. It broke suddenly upon him that if this woman
had begun life under other auspices she might have developed into
something rather magnificent.

"Not changed--" he answered promptly. "Transformed!"

"Thank you," she said, holding her voice steady. "It was the realization
of the change that made me try the experiment."

"What experiment?" His bewilderment was growing.

"If I'm going to tell you--and one can talk frankly of things that
belong unmistakably to the past--I must lay the foundation."

"Yes?"

"Of course, you realize that everyone said I fled to you--because we had
had an affair. Later when I was divorced and you saw nothing more of me,
they laughed at me--they thought I had grabbed at the reflection and
dropped my bone in the stream."

"But, Marian! You understood--"

She raised a hand. "Please let me finish in my own way. It's not too
easy at best."

"Forgive me."

"To their eyes, my one chance of rehabilitating my life lay in marrying
you. I mention this to forestall misunderstanding; because in what I've
got to say next it might logically occur to you as a thing I'd
contemplated myself."

"Surely," he exclaimed, "you don't think me so mean of mind as that."

With a somewhat rueful smile, she continued:

"When things became unendurable at home and I fled to your cottage,
what did you think of me?"

His response was immediate: "That you were in a panic. It seemed to you
a case of any port in a storm. I was geographically near and--"

"You really thought that?" A queer note came into her voice and she
added almost in a whisper as if echoing it to herself: "Just because you
were geographically near!"

"Why else?" he demanded. "Of course, in your indignation against that
brute Holbury, you momentarily thought of me with contrasting emotion. I
understood that, but I never exaggerated it into anything more
important--or permanent."

"No. You just thought me a frivolous little idiot, and the estimate was
annoyingly correct. I knew that--and yet I hadn't quite realized how
meanly you _did_ think of me--until now."

"But, Marian--!"

"If you thought," she went on, and in the starlight, he could not see
how the color had left even her lips, "if you thought that--even in
those circumstances--even driven by terror of my life--I would have fled
to any other man in the world--" Abruptly she broke off.

Stuart Farquaharson's forgotten pipe had died to ashes. Now it fell with
a tiny crash to the deck. The man leaned forward toward her and his eyes
mirrored an astonishment genuine and absolute.

"Do you mean ... that you really fancied ... that you loved me?"

She turned her face away until he could see only the roundness of her
check's contour and the curling softness of the hair on her neck. Her
voice carried a burden of lethargic weariness. "No, I didn't fancy it
... I knew it ... I've known it ever since."

As Stuart Farquaharson remained silent in the amazement of these
declarations, Marian turned her face again upon him. This time she spoke
with a fiery impetuosity:

"I suppose I should be burning with shame at confessing that ... only
somehow I've never been able to realize why people should blush so at
the truth ... and, as I said a moment ago, since it's over, there's no
reason why I shouldn't tell you, is there?"

"So now--it is over?" He spoke very softly yet with a sense of relief.

Marian's eyes held his own with their remarkably candid gaze, making no
effort to mask their misery. Her finely shaped head carried itself high
as if in disdain for all dissimulation, and once more she went on in a
forced evenness:

"Yes, now it's over, but I'm not through talking. Please don't interrupt
me. I've said too much to let it rest there and I've got to say the rest
in my own fashion." She paused, then went resolutely forward. "You had
spoken to me of Miss Williams, but--you know you were always reticent
about the things you felt deeply--I didn't know enough to thoroughly
understand. In the last year I've done a lot of thinking.... The point
from which I always started was obvious. If you had cared at all about
me, you would have looked me up--when the divorce was ended.... But
later I heard of her marriage--Miss Williams'.... Perhaps, I told
myself, things were different with you now. I heard of you from time to
time ... and never as of one who was very happy."

She paused and Stuart laid a hand gently on hers, but she withdrew her
own and began afresh:

"I don't care for the word 'chastened,' but I knew that I'd learned some
things. I knew that I wasn't that same woman any more. The irresponsible
lightness had been pretty well cured ... and I wasn't very happy,
either.

"Marian," he declared feelingly, "you don't have to defend yourself to
me. The man who won your love could feel nothing but pride."

"Thank you," she said briefly. "I'm not through yet.... I thought that
if you met the _new_ me ... you might revise your _old_ opinion.... I
thought at least that I could study you and that afterward there would
be no uncertainty.... You spoke of the coincidence of our meeting. There
was no coincidence about it. I was traveling more or less at random, but
I knew you must come through Yokohama and I waylaid you. When Jimmy
Hancock told me at the chance that you were taking this boat, I took it,
too.... It meant ten days in which to study you--but I needed only ten
seconds. I saw your face when we met on deck ... and that told me all
there was to tell."




CHAPTER XVII


She came to a stop and sat looking out at the phosphorescent sea and the
star-filled skies. Farquaharson leaned forward, his words coming
brokenly and in a heavy misery of embarrassment.

"Marian, I _have_ recognized the new you: I've seen the splendid
development and fulfilment of you. It's only that ... that--" He broke
off and began over impetuously. "I happened to fall in love
with--Conscience before I met you. Of course, that's quite hopeless now
... but it seems permanent." He was struggling with a diffidence which,
in such circumstances, a man must have been very callous to have
escaped. On the lips of his characters, in fiction, words flowed with an
ease of dialogue and broke often into epigram. Now they eluded him,
leaving him in confusion. The situation was one for which he found
himself unprepared. "I doubt if I shall ever feel otherwise--about her,"
he went on somewhat flounderingly. "You and she are women of almost
opposite types in a way and yet--yet I've been realizing while you
talked, that in many respects you are alike."

Marian's lips twisted themselves into a smile, stiff with tension of
spirit, but a whimsical irony tinged her voice.


     "The Colonel's lady and Rose O'Grady
     Are sisters under their skins,


I suppose we have that kinship, Stuart."

The man's hands closed into a tight grip on the arms of his steamer
chair. In his eyes were regret and sincerity, but his words came with
the firmness of resolve:

"I have, as you say, been dense," he declared, speaking now in even
sentences that had ceased to break disjointedly. "I haven't even done
you the justice of recognizing your more genuine self. You spoke of
drawing me into the web of your troubles--but you didn't say the thing
which you might have mentioned. I was also an adult of supposedly human
intelligence. I should have foreseen the dangers of even so innocent an
affair as was ours. I should have protected you."

"Against myself?" she inquired.

"Against ourselves," he responded quickly. "I should, for instance, have
told you that I was so much in love with one woman, that to me all
others must remain--just others. Now you have done me the honor to say
you love me."

"Please, Stuart!" Marian's face was momentarily drawn in a paroxysm of
pain. "Please don't make me pretty speeches. It isn't necessary--and it
doesn't help."

"I'm not making pretty speeches," he declared. "My love is a hopeless
one, but I can't deny its force without lying. I've helped you spoil
your life and if I can help you mend it--" He broke off there and then
abruptly he said: "Marian, will you marry me?"

She carried her hands to her face and covered her eyes. For a moment she
sat in a stunned attitude and her words came faintly:

"I understand your motive, dear. It's gallant--but it wouldn't do."

"Why?" he demanded and again her head came up with the bearing of pride.

"I've already told you that it's not rehabilitation in the eyes of the
world I seek. For you it would be sacrifice--and for me a failure. If
you asked me because you loved me, and I believed I could make you happy
I think you know what my answer would be. But to marry you without your
loving me--well, that would be--" She paused and then finished: "It
would be sheer Hell."

Stuart leaned over and picked up the pipe. His face was rigid and
self-accusing, and the woman laid her hand on his arm.

"You have ridden with me in the hunting field, Stuart," she irrelevantly
reminded him. "I hope you'll testify that I can take my croppers when
they come. Please don't think I'm whimpering."

"One could hardly think that," he declared.

A sudden thought brought a fresh anxiety to her eyes, as she vehemently
demanded: "Was she--was Miss Williams, influenced by what people said
about you and me?"

"I suppose," he said, "the only version she had was the public one, and
I fancy there were those about her who made use of it, but I don't
believe it affected her decision."

Marian's voice was very low, almost tender now. "It would mean a good
deal to you, wouldn't it, to have her know the truth?"

His hand gripped her own feelingly for a moment and he nodded his head
but, in words, he said only: "Yes--it would."

"I wish I knew her. I wish I could set you straight with her," she told
him and after that she rose. "At all events it was worth the
experiment," she commented. "Well, '_la comedia e finita_.' I think now
I'll go to bed."

       *       *       *       *       *

Conscience dealt relentlessly with herself in those storms of argument
which arose in her mind and had to be fought out; storms involving the
readjustment of her life to the partnership of marriage.

Yet she must not, if she placed value upon success, fall into the class
of parasite wives who suffer their own independence of thought to
languish.

One day she came into the study while Eben was engaged in those matters
of business which brought the most unaffected pleasure to his eyes and
his attitude was that of such absorption that she did not at once
announce her presence. When he turned at length and saw her, he came
instantly to his feet, but despite the smile of his welcome, Conscience
caught the repressed reluctance with which he shoved back his papers and
pencil.

"Eben," she hazarded, "why can't I make myself useful? Can't you
delegate some part of your work to me?"

Instead of gratification his expression took on the cast of
apprehension, though he laughed.

"What! Do you want to turn business woman, my dear?" he inquired. "Are
you ambitious to come into the firm and have your name on the door?"

"I want to have a hand on the oar because I think you have a sort of
financial genius and I'd like to share a thing which must come that
close to your inner life," she explained, and under the pleasurable
spell of her appreciation Tollman found himself expanding with
responsive pride. To certain forms of flattery he was as susceptible as
a schoolgirl.

"If I have ability," he made modest disavowal, "it's of a slight
caliber."

"I don't know anything about your financial rating," went on his wife.
"I've never asked any questions about that and I don't care so far as
the mere figures go. But I believe you have a gift of business
generalship which, in fields of wider opportunity, might have made you a
millionaire."

Tollman broke unexpectedly into a peal of laughter. He complacently
accepted the tribute to his powers, but would have preferred it laid on
with greater lavishness. Quite casually he remarked:

"When I said slight caliber, I spoke comparatively. If the occasion
arose, I fancy I could sign a check now--not only for a million but for
several."

Conscience's dark eyes must have mirrored their amazement: an amazement
which was entirely natural, and which concerned not only the revelation
of wealth in itself, but more complex things as well.

The disturbing thought intruded itself that in a land of such sparse
opportunities these returns could be wrung out only by a policy so
tight-fisted as to be merciless. It must mean draining resources to
their dregs. That was an unpleasant suspicion which she instantly
expelled with the reminder that her husband had inherited wealth and
that in supplementing it he had not been limited to a local field of
operation.

The next unwelcome thought suggested that if Eben were so rich as that
his generosity to her father and herself was discounted. Out of
abundance he had given a moiety and because of it she had put her life
into a yoke. But that idea, too, she met with the answer that his
conduct must not be measured by a given cost but by its spirit and
willingness.

"You are surprised?" His smiling inquiry called her back from her
disturbing reverie with a sense of guilty criticism.

"Only at the degree of your success, Eben," she told him gravely; "I had
not supposed it so large."

But as time went on, an intelligence less keenly edged than hers would
have recognized that it was only to the anterooms of his financial
interests that he admitted her.

This was inevitable, and obviously he could not explain what she felt to
be a rebuff. To make full disclosure of certain transactions would have
stripped Eben Tollman of disguise and brought results as parlous as
those he had feared on the afternoon when he left his strong box
unlocked. Structures of self-delusion might have fallen into shapeless
débris under the batteries of her frank questioning. Eben Tollman could
dismiss from thought the woman who has lost her way or the man who has
succumbed to a destructive thirst. That required only the remembrance
that the "wages of sin is death." But if real estate which he owned in
poor, even disreputable sections of distant cities brought him in
surprisingly large rentals, he did not conceive that his duty required
an investigation of the characters of his tenants.

Of course should his agents tell him that his property was being
prostituted to evil ends for gain he would have to sever relations with
them, but he selected agents who troubled him with no such embarrassing
details. This was a practical attitude, but something told him that in
it Conscience would hardly see eye to eye with him.

It was late in May that Jimmy Hancock wrote a note to the girl with whom
he had ridden horseback in the Valley of Virginia.

"I've just had a stroke of luck," he said, "in meeting our old friend
Stuart Farquaharson, who is touring the world, crowned gorgeously with
bays of literary fame. I ran into him yesterday in Yokohama and from him
learned for the first time of your marriage. If I am the last to
congratulate you, at least I am among the first in heartiness and
sincerity....

"There are some charming Americans here--though I don't think of any
others whom I should mention as common acquaintances. Or did you know
Mrs. Larry Holbury? She has been reigning graciously over us, and I am
among the smitten. However, since both she and Stuart are to sail on the
_Nippon Maru_ I have no great modicum of hope."

Poor Jimmy! Never was man less bent on purveying morsels of deleterious
gossip. Never was man, in effect, more stupidly blundering.

He wrote the day after the dance on his cruiser and he spoke of the
things near his current thoughts.

When Conscience had read the note, her eyes wandered thoughtfully and at
the end her lips curled. "So she followed him across the world, did
she?" she said half aloud, since she was quite alone. Then she added
quietly: "Still I guess she didn't pursue him without knowing that she
would be welcome. It was just as well that the dream ended in time."


Until his stroke had disabled the Reverend William Williams, his
congregation had thought of him less as an individual than as an
institution. In their minds he had shared the permanence of the church
steeple. Trained through two generations to his intensity and fiery
earnestness they saw in other clergymen a tame half-heartedness.
Exponents of more modern and liberal thinking had since come and gone
leaving the men and women who had been reared on the thundered Word as
expressed in his firstlies, secondlies, thirdlies and finalies unable to
fill their pulpit to their satisfaction.

Then it was that Sam Haymond, D.D., came to them, as a visiting preacher
for a single Sabbath. He came heralded by tidings of power in oratory
and zeal of spirit beyond the ordinary. Report had it that his shoulders
were above the heads of mediocrity and that, like Saul of Tarsus, he had
entered upon his ministry, not through the easy stages of ecclesiastical
apprenticeship, but with the warrior-spirit of a man wholly converted
from the ranks of the scoffers. Accordingly it was appropriate that he
should come as the guest of Eben Tollman, the keystone in the arch of
the church's laity and of the old minister who still held power as a
sort of director _emeritus_.

Eben being engaged by peremptory affairs in his study, Conscience drove
to the station to meet him on a fine young Saturday morning at the
beginning of June. She set out from the house which maintained a sort
of lordly aloofness among pine-covered hills, more than usually
conscious of the lilt of summer in air and landscape.

The Tollman farm had been one of goodly size when Eben had inherited it
and outlying tracts had since augmented it by virtue of purchase and
foreclosure, until the residence, which faced a lake-like cove, was
almost isolated of site. On either side of the sandy road, as Conscience
drove to the station, elms and silver oaks and maples were wearing new
and tender shades of green. Among the sober pines they reminded her of
fashionables flaunting their finery in the faces of staid conservatives.

Between the waxen profusion of bayberry bushes, wild-flowers sprinkled
the carpet of pine needles and blackberry trailers crawled in a bright
raggedness.




CHAPTER XVIII


Sam Haymond, D.D., gathering together his belongings, as the train
whistled for the village, fancied that he could visualize with a fair
accuracy the gentleman who had written, "You will be met at the
station." Eben Tollman used, in his correspondence, a stilted formality
which conjured up the portrait of one somewhat staid and humorless.

Conscience and her husband had, on the other hand, formed no mental
portrait of the visiting minister, save that his reputation and
accomplishment would indicate mature years.

When the train stopped, and only one stranger emerged upon the
crushed-stone platform, Conscience thought that their guest had missed
his train. Sam Haymond, D.D., in turn, seeing no elderly gentleman of
sober visage, inferred that his host had failed to meet him. There was
only a young woman standing alone by a baggage truck and for an instant
the thoughts of the minister were fully occupied with the consideration
of her arrestingly vivid beauty: a beauty of youth and slender litheness
and exquisite color.

Then their glances met and the girl moved forward. It flashed
simultaneously upon both of them that faulty preconceptions had caused a
failure of recognition.

The tall, young man, whose breadth of shoulder and elasticity of step
might have been a boy's, spoke first with an amused riffle in his eyes.

"My name is Sam Haymond. Are you, by any chance, Mr. Tollman's
daughter?"

Under the challenge of his humorous twinkle, a sudden mischief flashed
into Conscience's face. She was tempted to announce herself as William
Williams' daughter and let it go at that, but with a swift
reconsideration she laughed and told the whole truth.

"I am Mr. Tollman's wife."

The minister raised his brows in surprise. "Now I don't know why I
pictured Mrs. Tollman as a delightful but maternal lady with a gift for
mince pies--yet I did."

"I'm afraid I'm below par on my mince pies," she confessed with a
mockery of humiliation. He could not, of course, know that the youth in
her was leaping up to his bait of spontaneity as a trout leaps to the
fly when flies are few. Conscience went on: "But you're below par,
too--on ecclesiastical solemnity. I expected a grave-faced parson--"

Sam Haymond's laughter pealed out with a heartiness which seemed gauged
to outdoor spaces rather than to confining walls.

"I haven't always been a minister," he acknowledged as he put down his
suit-case. There was in his whole appearance an impression of physical
confidence and fitness, which made Conscience's thoughts revert to
Stuart Farquaharson.

"Once I preached a very bad sermon in a log meeting-house in the
Cumberland mountains," he went on. "It is a country chiefly notable for
feuds and moon-shining. I was introduced by a gentleman whose avocations
were varied. He explained them to me in these words, 'I farms some; I
jails some an' I gospels some.' Perhaps I'm cut to a similar pattern."

For both of them the drive proved short. Like a brook which has been
running in the darkness of an underground channel, and which livens with
sparkle and song as it breaks again into the sun--Conscience found
herself in holiday mood and her companion was responsive and frankly
delightful.

Haymond was, she understood, a preacher who could move men, but just
now he was only a splendidly alive companion. If she thought of him as a
preacher at all it was a preacher whose conception was rather that of a
knight serving a divinely royal master than a prosecutor thinking in
terms of dogma.

As an experiment in psychology, the luncheon was interesting because of
the riffles and undercurrents that passed below the conversation's even
tenor. The white-haired minister and his bronze-faced junior joined no
issues of conflicting opinion and each saw only the admirable in the
other--although two men so unlike in every quality except a common zeal
might more easily have found points of disagreement than concord.

Tollman was rather the listener than the talker, but when his eyes met
those of the visitor, Conscience fancied she detected an instinct of
vague hostility in those of the host and a dubiousness in those of the
guest. It was as if the waving antennae of their minds had touched and
established a sense of antagonism.

Sam Haymond knew types as a good buyer knows his line of wares. Here, he
told himself, was a nature cramped and bigoted. Such men had smirched
the history of religion with inquisitions and tortures--and had retarded
the progress of human thought.

Tollman's impression was less distinct. He fancied that in the
penetrating quality of the other's gaze was an impertinence of prying.

Had the visiting clergyman carried his analysis far enough to discover
that both men were bigots, he would still have drawn this distinction:
the lion and the jackal have the same general motive in life, yet the
jackal is hardly a lion.

Possibly it was a feeling of disquiet under silent observation which
caused Tollman, after luncheon, to turn his guest over to his wife for
entertainment, and Haymond acquiesced with enthusiasm to Conscience's
suggestion that they go for a sail to the greater bay.

To Conscience this was all retrieving from monotony a little scrap of
the life for which she had so eagerly yearned: the life of progress,
stimulus and breadth.

And then they were in the tilting boat, racing before a wind which
bellied the taut mains'l and drummed upon its canvas. She and Eben had,
once or twice, taken this same sail, but he had endured in patience
rather than enjoyed it.

On those occasions Ira had revealed a surly personality, which now
expanded and mellowed into conversation as Haymond asked questions about
the setting of eel traps and lobster pots and the management of fish
weirs.

The wind toyed so persistently with Conscience's dark hair that she took
it down from its coils and let it hang in heavy braids. The color rose
in her cheeks and the gleam to her eyes making them starry, and a lilt
sang in her voice.

There was a wealth of sapphire and purple in the water; there were thin
shore lines of vivid green and dazzling sand. Sails bronzed and reddened
in the sun and the distance. Gulls quarreled and screamed as they
fished--and everything was young.

"Them's mackerel gulls," volunteered Ira as he pointed to two birds
perched on a precariously buffeted buoy. "There's a sayin' that 'When
the whippoorwills begin to call, the mackerel begins to run'--then the
gulls come, too."

But as the sailboat drew near its landing stage again and the sunset was
fading into twilight, the fires died slowly, too, in the eyes of
Conscience Tollman and she felt that a vacation had ended.

There seemed to be in the sunlight of the following morning a tempered
and Sabbath stillness.

Perhaps the sun itself remained pagan, but if so it only lent contrast
to the slumberous restfulness where the shadows fell.

Over the countryside brooded the calm peacefulness of the day and when
the church bell gave its first call, its notes floated out across
silences disturbed by no noisier interruptions than bird notes and the
distant voice of the surf.

When her father had expressed his determination of going, for the first
time since he had been stricken, to the church where he had so long
preached, Conscience had demurred without avail. She had been, at first,
alarmed, lest the associations dwelling between those walls might excite
him beyond his strength. He must feel that he was going back, broken, to
a place where, in strength, he had been a mentor and potter whose clay
was human thought. But he would listen to no objections and when the
congregation gathered, his invalid's chair stood at the head of the
center aisle and he looked directly up at the pulpit from which, since
his youth, he had thundered the damnation of sinners.

When the tall young man took his place in the pulpit, the aged minister
swung his finely shaped head around with something of pride as though he
would say, "Here is my successor, in whom I am well pleased."

It was the revered elder who first engaged the interest of the
congregation, but when Sam Haymond had announced his text: "Let him who
is without sin amongst you cast the first stone," there came a shifting
of attention. Here was a man gifted with that quality of voice without
which there can be no oratory; endowed with that magic of force under
which human emotion is a keyboard responsive to the touch; commanding
that power which can sway its hearers at will between smile and tear.
His reputation was already known to them, but within five minutes after
his voice sounded reputation had become a pallid label for something
flamingly real: something under which their feeling stirred; something
that made their pulses leap like a bugle call; something that soothed
them like sleep after weariness--and above all something so convincing
that questioning was stilled as by the voice of a prophet who comes
direct from the presence of God.

The Reverend William Williams had held their loyalty by virtue of
vehemence and fire, and in that the visitor matched and surpassed him.
The intensity was there, but much besides--and yet in all else this was
a man as opposite to the aged veteran of the pulpit as east is far
across from west. In all the fire of his words was no mention of the
fires of hell. He seemed to know nothing of the avenging God, whose name
had rung terribly from that rostrum for half a century: a God swift of
anger and mighty to punish: an omnipotently jealous God. The Deity he
served was one of infinite charity to whose forgiveness nothing was
unforgivable--except unforgiveness.

He was expounding a doctrine of joy and aspiration: a splendid and
uplifting message from a God of the onward and upward march. No
suspicion came to him that, in effect, he was assailing the life work of
the old man below him, whom he deeply revered, yet he breathed a
conception of religion not only unlike, but contradictory to the set and
riveted dogma of his listening predecessor.

Minds that had unquestioningly accepted the old and hard gospel of
righteousness by duress of brimstone awoke to a new insurgency and eyes
little given to the light of thought kindled to this new postulate of
brotherhood and the service of brotherhood.

Conscience sat with her eyes hypnotically fixed on the face of the
speaker. Yesterday afternoon he had gone sailing with her; to-day he was
voicing her own beliefs from the pulpit whose former incumbent had
strangled and throttled them with his tyranny of weakness.

Of her father and the influence this sermon might have on him she did
not just then think at all. She like the others was being swept on a
tide of rapt attention--and she had forgotten that William Williams was
not at home in his study. But as that discourse progressed one might
have followed the ebb and flow of a man's life-battle, had he watched
only the face of the old man, in the wheel chair, crowned with a white
mane.

First there was the expression of exaltation which mutely proclaimed: "A
prophet is risen among us," but after it came swift doubt and
foreboding. The eagle eyes, deep-set in the thin face, were clouded and
hurt. Tho talon-like fingers clutched at their chair arms. Must he sit
here constrained to silence, while another confounded his teachings?

After doubt came certainty under which the sunken eyes of the paralyzed
man smouldered fiercely and his face blanched to the deadness of
parchment. This was all a passionate and revolutionary appeal for
liberality--or--by his interpretation--for license. It mounted into an
indictment against the cramping evils of intolerance, it scathingly
denounced the goodness of the strait-jacket until the old minister saw
every effort of his life assailed and vilified. His mind, distorted by
suffering and brooding, beheld a prophet indeed, but a prophet who
carried Satan's commission and who dared to serve it in the house of
God.

Would God himself remain silent and unavenging under such insult? He at
least, the lifelong servant, would not sit voiceless while his Master
was libeled. He who had spoken here many hundreds of times before would
speak once more and his last message would be one of scourging from the
temple desecrators more evil than money-changers.

But he shook with so palsied a fury that for a time he could only
surrender to his physical weakness. With a mighty effort he braced his
withered body and pulled himself forward. He knew he was killing
himself, but he would fall at his sentry post, challenging the enemy.

Sam Haymond, himself oblivious until now to all but his own
earnestness, brought his gaze back to the chair just below him--and
suddenly the resonance of his swelling voice fell silent--snapped by
astonishment with a word half spoken.

Of the tragedy which was acting itself before him he realized little. He
saw only a venerable colleague stricken by some sudden and terrible
ailment.

Then William Williams raised his thin arms above his head. Out of his
eyes rained challenge, denunciation, anathema! Mutely he was hurling the
curse of God's church. With the last ounce of his attenuated strength he
was struggling for the voice which at this moment of supreme need had
failed him. Over the body of the congregation, as the preacher halted,
fell a deadly stillness.

From the throat of the old man came a strangled groan, which had sought
to be a command for silence, and he crumpled forward. Life had gone out
of him, and Sam Haymond, lifting both hands, spoke in a voice of hushed
awe, "My brethren, the hand of God has fallen here."




CHAPTER XIX


About the churchyard, like sentinels of peace, stood ranks of elms and
silver oaks. They had been old and gnarled of trunk, when the man whose
life had just guttered out inside had come, young and militant, to
preach the letter of that law, whose spirit was to his understanding a
fourth dimension. Through the long windows of colored but artless glass,
now partly raised, poured slanting panels of summer sun, mottling the
interior and its occupants with dashes of red and blue.

Into the hush which had fallen there crept also those minors that seemed
to belong rather to an exaggerated quiet than to sound: the trill of a
bird, voicing an overflow of joy and the humming of bees among the vines
of the church yard, where slanting headstones bore quaintly archaic
names and life dates of sailors home from the sea. A wandering butterfly
had drifted in and was winging its bright way about the place where the
sermon had been interrupted. But the bated breath of awed amazement
broke at the end of a long-held pause into a buzz of whispered
exclamation.

Conscience rose unsteadily and started forward, her hands clutched to
her breast, and the minister came hurriedly down the pulpit stairs.

Later in the day when the body still lay in the parlor of the Tollman
house and Conscience sat almost as motionless near by, Eben Tollman
paced the floor with features set in an expression unpleasantly
suggestive of the undertaker's professional solemnity.

Possibly Tollman was not inconsolably cast down. So long as the old
man's precarious life spark had been a danger signal, burning against
the influence of Stuart Farquaharson, it was vital that he should live.
Now he was entitled to the serenity of a holy man's reward.

It was near to sunset when the husband left the room and the eyes of
Conscience kindled for the first time out of their lethargic quiet.
Abruptly she rose from her seat and rebelliously demanded of the young
minister, "What would you say if I should confess to you that just one
thing has been clear and outstanding through all the confusion of my
thoughts since this morning? I've been unspeakably sullen."

"I should say," he responded quietly, "that it is a guise which grief
often assumes."

"No," she protested, disdaining the cajolery of self-delusion, "my
sullenness isn't that sort. It's pure rebellion. I've been thinking of
the abysmal failure of those who dedicate themselves most wholly. _His_
devotion to righteousness was implacably sincere and severe. It was the
doctrine of the hair-shirt. He scorned to ride any wave ... he had to
buffet every one head on ... until he battered out his life and wrecked
himself."

"A man must serve as he reads his command," her companion reminded her.
"He has done his work as he conceived it."

"And yet--" she looked into his face with a deep questioning which held
no note of accusation--"if anything that you said to-day is true, his
whole effort was not only wasted but perverted, and it was true. It was
so terribly true that it killed him!"

"What do you mean?" Haymond's gaze searched her eyes with incredulous
amazement. It seemed to be making an effort to steady her against the
wild utterances of hysteria, but her response was convincingly calm.

"I mean just that. I myself had nothing in common with his views. To me
they seemed narrow--pitifully narrow and uncomprehending--and he was my
father. We were warned that in any sudden gust of anger his feeble life
spark--would go out, so I put my own conceptions of what counted behind
me and tried to shield him." Sam Haymond hardly heard the last words. He
could realize only the dazing and crushing import of his own unwilling
instrumentality. At last he inquired slowly, "You mean that my
sermon--that the things I said--" There he broke off and the distress in
his eyes was so poignantly genuine that Conscience replied softly, "No,
it wasn't you. It was Fate, I guess. Even I can't blame you. It only
proves that the thing I warped my own life to prevent was
inevitable--that's all."

For a little while the minister stood silent and across his face passed
a succession of bewildered shadows.

"It is hard for me to grasp this," he said at last with a grief-laden
voice. "It is hard for me to realize that two men serving the same God;
both preaching His Word with identical earnestness could be so at
variance that the concept of one should give mortal hurt to the other."

They sat in silence until the sunset pageantry had dimmed to twilight.
Then the man spoke again, guardedly.

"You said something about warping your life for your father's sake. I
wonder if--well, I wonder if there's anything it would help you to talk
about--not to the minister but to the friend."

She met his gaze with one of equal directness, and he could see an
impulse, rather hungry and eager, dawn only to be repressed in her eyes.
At last she shook her head. "No," she answered. "But it's good of you to
ask me. No, there's nothing that talking about will mend."

       *       *       *       *       *

Eben Tollman's effort at being young was not wholly successful. There
were times when even he suspected that it lacked something of complete
attainment. He had now been married six months and his wife, though
undeniably loyal, was as far as ever from kindling into that eager fire
of complete love which he had boasted he would awaken in her.

When Conscience had warned him that their marriage would be an
incomplete relationship Tollman had inwardly smiled. Of her faithfulness
he could be sure and she herself would be his. The rest was a somewhat
gossamer and idealistic matter which her youth exaggerated in
importance.

But after six months, possession was no longer enough--and it was all he
had. Sometimes indeed it seemed to him that the thing he lacked was
greater than the sum of the things he possessed.

He had boasted that in indulging her wishes he found his highest
privilege and pleasure, but he was of those who take their pleasures
sadly. He had given her unrestricted permission to remodel his house,
yet in every fresh detail of the alteration he discovered an act of
vandalism under which his spirit writhed.

To his mind everything gained in sanctity by its age: the moth-eaten
furniture was hallowed by tradition. The rheumatic old dog of uncertain
breed, to which he had never vouchsafed a caress became now, when
banished to the stable, a tried and faithful companion relegated to
exile.

Privacy, he conceived as a matter of being shut in, and a house without
cobwebbed shadows became a place bereft of decent seclusion. About him,
now, all this undesirable metamorphosis was taking place.

"What is this room, my dear?" he inquired one morning as he spread
before him on the breakfast table blue prints, while Conscience was
pouring his coffee.

A shaft of early light tilting obliquely through the window fell on her
head, making a soft nimbus about her dark hair and bringing out the
exquisite color of her face. As Tollman looked up, raising the plans
with a finger indicating the spot in question, he recognized the
radiance of youth which could, under such a searching brilliance, remain
flawless. He felt in contrast old and sluggish of life current.

"That?" Conscience's brows were lifted in surprise. "Why, Eben, you've
been over those plans a half-dozen times. Surely you're familiar with
them. That's your bed-room."

"And this one?" He shifted his finger and his face clouded.

"That's mine."

"Separate apartments?" he inquired dryly, though he was, as she had
said, discovering no new cause of displeasure.

"Certainly."

"And three baths, and a garage and a car--and a terrace." He paused and
his face fell into a sullen and stubborn expression. After a moment he
added coldly, "That's all going to run into money."

Conscience set down the coffee cup and looked at him as she quietly
asked, "Is there any reason why it shouldn't? If you were poor, I would
share your poverty without complaint, but as you told me, unasked, we
are not poor. Economy carried beyond the point of virtue becomes
unlovely, I think."

Eben shifted his line of objection. Separate apartments hinted at that
modern trend which he believed sought to rob marriage of its sacred
intimacy.

"It is not only the expense," he announced stolidly. "Our people have
always held close to a certain conception of home and marriage. From the
days of the Mayflower these words have stood for a life fully shared.
People who play lightly with sacred things are the sponsors for the
other style of life: for houses where the husband and wife lead
separate existences and substitute small dogs for children."

He felt, as he concluded, the deep eyes of his wife fixed on him with an
expression which he could not quite fathom. Her lips were parted and the
freshness of her cheeks colored with a tinge of indignation.

"Have I ever seemed to prefer small dogs to children?" she asked him in
a still voice which bordered dangerously on anger. "You talk of a life
fully shared. Have I failed to share anything except the business part
of your life--which you closed to me?"

Eben Tollman did not wish to pursue that topic.

"I was only expressing general views," he hurriedly assured her, and
again under her level scrutiny, he felt the contrast between her vibrant
vitality and his own autumnal maturity. But Conscience went steadily on
in the unmistakable manner of one who has no intention of being
misunderstood.

"But I won't share any cramped delusion that things are good merely
because they are dusty and immobile. I won't share the fallacy that to
call a thing conservative sanctifies it. There is more virtue in a tiled
bathroom than in a cob-webbed chapel. If we change this house at all we
will do it thoroughly."

Eben Tollman rose and pushed back his chair. Conscience's face had taken
on the glow of something like Amazonian defiance. To her beauty had come
a new quality which stirred the senses of her husband like a roll of
drums. It was an emotion which he believed to be love and coming around
he caught her rather pantingly in his arms.

It was an intolerably wretched misfit, this union of Conscience and Eben
Tollman, but so bent was the woman upon redeeming the hopeless
experiment that she sought to brace the doomed and tottering structure
with fictitious props. To be an "unimpeachable" wife was not to her
thinking a sufficient meeting of her problem. Her own fastidiousness and
cleanness of character would have made that less a duty to her husband
than to herself. The more difficult requirement was to close, and keep
closed the port of her thoughts against those dreams and yearnings that
stole in like blockade-runners, but these buccaneer thoughts came
insistently and impertinently invested with a colorful challenge to the
imagination.

From every dream-ship that sailed in, looked out the face of Stuart
Farquaharson.

This, she told herself, was a pure perversity. All memories should fade
as distance widens, yet of late the banishment of Stuart had been less
complete than heretofore.

Slowly she prosecuted Stuart Farquaharson in the court of her own
judgment and condemned him to mental exile. The steps of his
deteriorating course were clear enough. He had loved her sufficiently to
do everything but stand firm in stress. When he thought her lost he had
consoled himself with another woman. When the second lady, too, had come
to grief through his devotion, he had withdrawn. Then with the reception
of Conscience's letter at Cairo, the past had risen with Phoenix
upblazing and he had recklessly cabled her to halt at the step of the
altar. She confessed with deep humiliation that had the message come in
time, she might have obeyed. But that, too, had failed--and now with his
versatile capacity for the expedient, he was dallying again with the
affections of Marian Holbury. It was, she admitted, not a pretty record.
She told herself almost savagely that she hated Stuart Farquaharson as
one can hate only where contempt succeeds love.

This was the bulwark of fallacy with which Conscience Tollman sought to
safeguard her dwindling confidence in the ultimate success of her
wifehood and she clung to it with a bitter determination.

       *       *       *       *       *

Where the old iron urns, painted a poison green, had stood in the front
yard of Tollman's house there was no longer any offense to the eye.
Where an unsightly fence had confined a somewhat ragged yard, low stone
walls, flower bordered, went around a lawn as trim as plush. The house
presented to the eye of the visitor that dignity which should invest the
home of a gentleman whose purse is not restricted. The spirit of the
colonial had been preserved and amplified, and from the terrace one
looked out on a landscape of hill view and water glimpse, as from a
fitting and harmonious place.

One afternoon Conscience Tollman was walking among her flowers. They
would be gone before long, for already the woods were beginning to burn
with the colors of autumn and the bogs where cranberry-pickers worked
were blazing into orange and claret. The road that came out of the
pines, formerly deeply rutted and sandy, was now metaled and approached
the house in a graded curve.

Looking off down the hill to where it turned from the highway into the
farm, she saw a motor which she did not recognize and which even at the
distance showed, dust-whitened, as from a long journey. It had entered
between the stone gate pillars, and Conscience, with a glance at her
garden apron, muddied from kneeling at the flower beds, turned and went
hastily into the house. The car evidently brought visitors and as, from
her bed-room window, she watched it round the nearer curve and draw up
at the yard entrance, her perplexity grew.

It was a large machine of foreign make and, when the liveried chauffeur
opened the tonneau door, a woman stepped out whose face was obscured by
her dust veils.

When the maid appeared above stairs a few minutes later the mystery of
the unknown visitor's identity remained unsolved.

"The lady said," announced the servant, "that she hoped you would see
her for a few minutes."

"Who is the lady?"

"I don't know, ma'am. She said she had no card with her and would I
please just deliver that message."

As Conscience came noiselessly and lightly down the stairs a few moments
later her guest was standing by one of the pillars of the terrace,
looking off across the breadth of landscape, but her figure and profile
were revealed. The veil, thrown back, was faintly aflutter about a head
crowned with red-brown hair and a face delicately chiseled. Her eyes
held the clear luminosity of lighted amber, but, unconscious of being
observed, they held a note of pain--almost of timidity. Conscience's
first impression untinged by any bias of preconception expressed itself
in the thought, "Whoever she is, she is very lovely." Then she stepped
out onto the tiles and the lady turned. The eyes of the two met and the
lips of the two smiled.

"You are Mrs. Eben Tollman?" inquired the visitor and Conscience nodded
with that quick graciousness of expression which always brought to her
face a quality of radiance.

"Yes, the maid didn't get your name, I believe."

The hint of pain and timidity had left the amber eyes now and in their
place had come something more difficult to define.

"No, I preferred giving it to you myself. I am Marian Holbury."




CHAPTER XX


The visitor did not miss the sudden and instinctive change on the face
of her hostess or the impulsive start as if to draw back in distaste.
Conscience evidently saw in this visit a violation of all canons of good
taste. At all events she remained standing as if letting her attitude
express her unwillingness to prolong the situation.

"I suppose if I were diplomatic," went on Marian when it was evident
that the other had no intention of making inquiries as to the cause of
her coming, "I might say that I'd turned in to make inquiry about these
bewildering roads--or to borrow gasoline."

"If there is any motoring assistance I can give--" began the hostess,
but the other woman interrupted her with a short laugh and a glance of
almost reckless straightforwardness.

"No, it isn't for that, that I came. You see I'm _not_ diplomatic. I'm
said to be startlingly frank. I came to talk with you, if you'll let me,
about Stuart Farquaharson. He is a common friend of ours, I believe."

A pale flush rose to Mrs. Tollman's cheeks and she volunteered no reply.

The two women, each unusual in her beauty and each the other's opposite
of type, stood with the quiet repression of their breeding, yet with an
impalpable spirit of enmity between them: the enmity of two women who at
heart love one man. Mrs. Holbury spoke first.

"You are thinking that my coming here is an unwarrantable impertinence,
Mrs. Tollman. Perhaps that's true, but I think my reason is strong
enough to justify it. At all events I'm not doing this because it's
easy for me, or because I have anything to gain. Do you think you can
spare me ten minutes and reserve hostility of judgment until you hear
what I came to say?"

Conscience was somewhat bewildered, but she answered quietly, "Of
course, Mrs. Holbury. You must forgive me if I seemed discourteous.... I
was so surprised. Won't you be seated?"

"Thank you." The visitor took a chair and for a moment sat gazing across
the coloring hills where the maples were flaring with yellow and the
oaks were russet-brown. "Stuart Farquaharson has been a friend ... more
than a casual friend ... to both of us."

"Stuart Farquaharson," said Conscience quickly, "was one of my best
friends. I hope he is still, but for a long while I haven't seen him. He
drifted into another world ... a world of travel and writing ... and so
I think of him as belonging to the past--a sort of non-resident friend."

Marian Holbury's face flushed. "My interest, on the contrary," she made
candid declaration, "is not the sort that will ever be of the past,
though I doubt if I shall see him again, either."

Even now under their composure they had the masked feeling of fencers
and antagonists.

"I saw him last years ago," said Conscience, and Marion answered at
once, "I have just returned from the Orient. Mr. Farquaharson was a
fellow passenger."

"I had happened to hear of it." Eben Tollman's wife spoke casually and
Marion countered with an equal urbanity.

"Yes, one does happen to hear of these things, doesn't one? He called
the meeting a coincidence and was surprised."

"And you?"

"I could hardly be astonished because you see I had, without his
knowledge, waylaid him."

The hostess may have indicated the astonishment she sought to conceal,
for Mrs. Holbury laughed and again her eyes had that unmasked frankness
which made surprisingly unconventional assertions seem quite normal.

"I am wondering, Mrs. Holbury," Conscience spoke now without any hint of
hostility--disarmed by her visitor's candor, "why you are telling me
this."

"When one has valued a friend and has had reports of him which are both
deleterious and unfair it is quite conceivable, don't you think, that
that person would wish to know the truth and to see the friend
vindicated?"

Mrs. Eben Tollman met the direct eyes with a level glance almost of
challenge.

"What reports do you mean?"

"Mrs. Tollman," said Marian earnestly, "you have agreed to listen.
Please don't let us fence evasively. You had the same reports of Stuart
that the rest of the world had; reports for which I feel largely
responsible because many things which seemed most damaging, he might
have explained to his own full credit. He refrained on my account." She
paused a moment, then continued resolutely, "Incidentally he knows
nothing of this effort I am making to have you understand the truth. Do
you want to hear the unfalsified story of how I was discovered by my
husband in his cottage and in his arms?"

Conscience nodded gravely and when, ten minutes later, her visitor had
finished a narrative in which she had not spared herself, the hostess
had an unpleasant feeling that her own attitude had been priggish while
the other woman's had been astonishingly generous.

That conviction gave a softness to her voice as she put her next
question softly. "Why should it mean anything to Mr. Farquaharson
now--my opinion?"

"In the Philippines," said Marian Holbury, "the army officers have a
name for a dishonorable discharge from the service. They call it the
'yellow furlough.' Do you imagine that Stuart Farquaharson could
willingly retire in that fashion? Don't you see how greatly he would
covet an honorable discharge?"

Conscience felt suddenly glad that Eben would not return to the house
before evening. She had another thing yet to learn and she asked
faintly, "But it must have been hard for you to come and tell this to a
stranger. Why did you do it?"

"Hard!" For the first time the even control of Marian's voice broke into
vehemence. "It was more than hard. It was all but impossible. But he
couldn't tell you himself, without discrediting me and there was no one
else to do it."

"Even so I don't quite see--"

But Mrs. Holbury cut her short with an imperious gesture and her voice
held a vibrant thrill of feeling.

"You say that Stuart Farquaharson stands for a past chapter in your
thoughts. I love him and I know him. If the good opinion of a woman to
whom he is only a memory means more to his happiness than the possession
of everything in life I can give--and would gladly give--" She broke off
and added with regained composure, "Well, I love him enough to try to
get him what he wants, that's all."

She wheeled and went hurriedly down the path toward her car, leaving
Conscience standing on the terrace, with her lips parted and her hands
nervously clenched.

       *       *       *       *       *

Conscience did not mention to her husband the visit of Marian Holbury.
To do so would not only have been the violation of a self-sacrificing
confidence but the pleading of a cause for which Eben could feel no
response except distaste. She knew that Eben thought of Marian as a
light and frivolous woman who had been cashiered from matrimony.

During the next two years--which passed in labored slowness, she kept
the matter to herself, though to her it was not merely a visit. It was a
time from which she dated other times. It was the day upon which her dam
had broken: the dam of her carefully reared fallacy. From that day on
she could no longer fall back on the idea of a discredited Stuart in
support of her efforts to exile him from her thoughts.

Thus disarmed, she asked herself, how was she to carry on the fight to
find contentment; and to the question came two and only two answers.
Children might fill the void of her existence or she might in time
school herself into a tame acceptance by a sheer crushing of impulses.

In the responsibilities of motherhood there might be even now a fullness
of compensation which would make of sacrifice an enthusiasm. The whole
unsatisfied abundance of her nature could laugh at disappointment,
striking out the past and living afresh in the lives of her children.

This was not a new thought and it held little hope. For two years she
had prayed for its fulfillment and now her faith faltered.

So the one thing left seemed to be a vapid and colorless resignation.

Alone in her bedroom one night, which was typical of many nights, she
pondered these matters. By her dresser mirror burned bayberry candles
and in their faintly wavering illumination she caught an occasional
glimpse of herself. She was not vain, but neither was she totally blind.
She knew that God had given her a mind suitable for alert companionship.
God had bestowed upon her, too, beauty of body and face, which might
have been gifts for the glorification of love.

It was one of those midsummer nights when the air, no longer void,
teems with an indefinable influence of restlessness. Like prisoners
beating on their iron doors at night, the repressed longings were all
awake, too--and clamorous. A sense of fear obsessed her, almost of panic
gaining force of volume like an inrunning tide.

Eben, she knew, was slowly but very certainly reading an aversion to
himself into every small manifestation of personal independence.

Suddenly her eyes grew wide and terrified. Was not her feeling, after
all, if only she had the courage to admit it, one of aversion for him?
Vehement denial rose at the thought, prompted by the discipline of fixed
ideas.

"But why," whispered a small voice of inner mockery, "did you just now
turn the key in your door? What was _that_ but an impulse of
withdrawal--a barrier?"

There had been another night when she had felt such a nameless and
restless fear. Then she had dreaded being left alone. Now she was afraid
she might not be. Then a man had come to her and soothed her, but it had
been another man.

Why should these thoughts of Stuart Farquaharson always obtrude
themselves on every revery?... Was there no key she could turn against
him, whom it was her duty to shut out?

If he were ever to return to her and find her in such a mood as
possessed her now, she feared that she would throw herself into his
arms. Thank God he would never come!

Something of the same restlessness that obsessed her was at work with
her husband, too, that night, though it led him less into panic and
self-questioning than into a brooding conviction of life's injustice.

Above the mantel of his study hung a portrait of an ancestor garbed in
the blue and buff of the army of Independence. Until quite recently this
portrait's features had been well-nigh extinguished under the
accumulated soot and tarnish of many decades, but Eben had revered them
with that veneration of ancestor-worship which is an egoism overflowing
the boundaries of a single generation. Lately Conscience had had the
picture restored and now the renovated forebear, almost jaunty in his
refurbishing, looked down on his descendant and the descendant's pride
was quickened.

To-night, however, the eyes of the portrait seemed full of grim
accusation. In their cold depths Eben could fancy the question sternly
put, "Where are your sons? Are you going to let the flame of our
honorable line flicker out with your own death?"

Perhaps the root of ancestor-worship, in all forms, lies deep in the
wish of the devotee to be, in his own turn, honored. Perhaps, too, the
obsession of self-perpetuation grows rather than wanes as the line
becomes less worth perpetuating.

At all events Eben Tollman had no children and his thoughts fell into
brooding and bitterness. His present attitude needed only a spark, such
as jealousy or suspicion might supply, to fire it into some quirk of mad
and bitter resentment.

He turned out the lamp and went slowly up the stairs. Outside his wife's
door he paused, and, without knocking, tried the knob--to find the door
locked against him. A deep flush of resentment spread over his cheeks.
He drew back his hand, being minded to rap peremptorily--then he
refrained and went on to his own room.




CHAPTER XXI


Conscience was sitting on the terrace one day with a book, which she
smilingly laid down as her husband joined her. Eben took up the small
volume of Browning's verse and idly turned its pages, his eyes falling
almost immediately on the old inscription, "Stuart to Conscience." His
unfixed jealousy seized upon a frail mooring but he stifled the scowl
that instinct prompted and turned the pages to the point where a narrow
ribbon marked "The Statue and the Bust."

He had often wondered what people found to admire in Browning, but now
he read with an unflagging interest. Here was a document in evidence:
the narrative of a wife who dissembled her love and the ungodly moral of
the thing was that the culpability of the lovers lay--not in their
clandestine devotion but in their temporizing postponement of a guilty
love:


     "And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost ...
     Is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin...."


Before Eben Tollman's eyes swam spots of red and in his heart leaped a
withering flame of betrayed wrath.

Had Conscience, after all, through these months and years, deceived him?
Had she surreptitiously kept in touch with the erstwhile lover who had
already wrecked one home? Had she been letting memories kindle fires in
her which all his faithful love had left unquickened?

The long incubating dourness had hatched from its egg and, like the
young quail which runs while the shell still clings to its pin feathers,
it was alive and seeking nourishment.

If such guilt existed, it called for condign punishment and as God's
instrument he must mete it out. But he was a righteous man and must
first be certain. Therefore, he would not let her suspect his own
doubts. If she were dissembling he would dissemble, too, but to a better
end. In her this deceit was a sinful hypocrisy, but in him it would be
as virtuous as the care with which the prosecutor cajoles the criminal
into self-conviction. So he inquired with a reserved and indulgent
suavity, "Are you particularly fond of that poem, my dear?"

Conscience gazed pensively away beyond the hillside, where the heat
waves played, to the cool blue of the cove. Her manner impressed him as
preoccupied.

"It has beauty, I think, and in some respects a true psychology. It
recognizes that even straight-forward sin may be less ugly than
hypocritical virtue."

All the prejudices of the man's illiberal code arose snarling, but he
stifled their expression and, abandoning the immediate subject, turned
absently back to the title page. "'Stuart to Conscience,'" he read
reminiscently. "This book must be quite an old keepsake."

The Virginian's name had not been recently mentioned between them. There
had been no agreement, tacit or otherwise, to that effect, but the wife
had inferred that this was a topic which he was willing to have drop
with the lapse of time out of their conversation. If he recurred to it
now it must indicate that any vestiges of animus once entertained for
Farquaharson had died. That was rather pleasing and generous, she
thought.

"Yes, quite old," she responded with a smile.

Tollman nodded understandingly. A short while before he had been reading
his Providence newspaper and a brief paragraph, which would otherwise
have escaped his eye, had caught his attention like the red lantern at a
railroad crossing--because it contained the name of Stuart
Farquaharson. The lines were these: "'The Longest Way Round,' a comedy
in three acts, by Stuart Farquaharson, will have its première at the
Garrick Theater on Monday evening. After a road engagement the piece
will be presented to Broadway early in the fall. The cast includes--"
But Eben had not troubled about the cast. He was speculating just now
upon whether his wife had seen the item--and if so whether she would
speak of it.

"I wonder what has become of him," he suggested speculatively, and
Conscience shook her head as she answered, "It's been a long while since
I've heard of him."

If she had read the morning paper--and she usually read it--she must be
lying. This circumstance the husband duly noted in the case which he was
building up against her.

"I dare say he rather dropped out, socially speaking, after his escapade
with that New York woman," he volunteered. "It was a pity."

"The reports we had about his conduct," defended Conscience with a
straightforward glance, "were grossly untrue. He suffered the effects of
the circumstantial out of consideration for her."

"Indeed!" Tollman's voice was one of quickened interest, seemingly of
pleased surprise. He was developing an excellent facility in the actor's
art. "That is gratifying news. One likes to think well of an old friend,
but how did you learn?"

The woman bit her lip. She had made her assertion in so categorical a
form that to withhold her authority now meant to appear absurd, and she
had not wished to betray the confidence of Marian Holbury. So she fell
back on the alternative of a partial explanation.

"Mrs. Holbury herself explained the matter to me. It was a chapter of
accidental appearances."

Tollman was gazing at his wife with brows incredulously arched but his
scepticism appeared amused--almost urbane.

"But where in the world did you and Mrs. Holbury meet? Your orbits have
no points of contact."

"She was driving to Provincetown--and stopped here."

"Ah!" Tollman might have been pardoned in making further inquiries, but
already his plan of proceeding cautiously had seemed to supply him with
such valuable points of evidence that he meant to continue the fruitful
policy, so he contented himself with the casual inquiry, "Was this
recently?"

"No, it was about two years ago."

Two years ago and until now she had never mentioned it! Then she _had_,
through at least one ambassador, held communication with her lover. A
moment ago she had declared herself without news of him. The woman whom
he had trusted was at heart unfaithful. It was just as well that he had
decided to assume the rôle of the blind man. Now he would proceed
further and devise a trap into which she should unwittingly walk and
from which there should be no escape.

A plan presented itself with the fully formulated swiftness of an
inspiration. He would arrange a meeting between his wife and
Farquaharson. He, himself, seemingly unsuspicious and fatuously trustful
of demeanor, would observe them. He would throw them together--and when
the truth was indisputably proven he would act.

Already the terrific force of the purely circumstantial was at work; a
force which has sent innocent men by scores to prison and the scaffold.
To the man who was to be both prosecutor and judge the links seemed to
be joining nicely. Then with the force of a climax, a climax for which
even he was unprepared, Conscience said, "Will you be using the car
Monday?"

"I had meant to. Why?"

"I thought I'd go to Providence for some shopping. However, I can go by
train."

Providence! Monday! The place and day of Stuart Farquaharson's opening
with his comedy in three acts.

Yesterday such a suspicion would have seemed impossibly absurd. To-day
he realized that yesterday he had been a blind fool.

"Do you mind my going with you?" He made the suggestion in a tentative,
almost indifferent fashion. "I have some business with my bank there. I
sha'n't be in your way."

That should give her pause, he thought, craftily pleased with himself.
It should drive her back upon self-betrayal or a plausible objection.
Incidentally it should indicate to her that he suspected nothing.

"I should be glad to have you go," she declared at once. "I want your
opinion on hangings and furniture for the new guest room."

For an instant Tollman was bewildered. Her acquiescence seemed
spontaneous and cordial, and since she was going for a clandestine
meeting with her lover it should be neither. Perhaps, however, this only
showed how swiftly her brain worked in intrigue.

Although Conscience had not, in fact, read the paper and knew nothing
whatever of Stuart Farquaharson's presence in Providence, it must be
confessed that, to a suspicious mind the circumstances built
consistently to that conclusion.

In due time Eben wrote and mailed a brief note to Mr. Stuart
Farquaharson at the Garrick Theater, Providence. It said:


     "My Dear Mr. Farquaharson: My wife requests me to invite you to
     join us for lunch on Monday at one at the Crown Hotel. We know you
     will be extremely busy, but we hope that the principle of Auld Lang
     Syne will prevail and that you can spare us an hour."


On Sunday evening after Conscience had gone to her room, Eben Tollman
sat in his study alone, except for his reflections, which were both
numerous and active.

His note should reach the man to whom it was addressed on Monday
morning. What would be the emotions of the recipient? He, of course,
would already have an appointment with the wife, believing the husband
to be totally deluded. The unwelcome discovery that instead of a
tête-à-tête there was to be a censored meeting would in itself sadly
alter matters, but what other construction would Stuart put upon the
development? Would he assume that Conscience, fearing discovery, had
sought to cover their plans under this excusing subterfuge? Would he
imagine that the husband had possessed himself of the guilty secret and
meant to confront him with an accusation? At whatever conclusion the
lover arrived, Eben imagined Stuart pacing his room in a confused and
thwarted anxiety. That was in itself a pleasurable reflection--but it
was only the beginning. When the young Lothario met him he would find a
man--to all seeming--childishly innocent of the facts and fondly
incapable of suspicion. He, Eben Tollman, would lead them both slowly
into self-conviction by as deliberate a campaign as that which had won
him his wife in the first instance.

       *       *       *       *       *

Stuart Farquaharson came into the hotel breakfast-room that Monday
morning with dark rings under his eyes and an unaccustomed throb of pain
in his temples. He wore the haggard aspect of one wrestling with a deep
anxiety. Already about the tables were gathered a dozen or more men and
women in whose faces one might have observed the same traces of fatigue.
To Stuart Farquaharson they nodded with unanimous irritability, as
though they held him responsible for their condition of unstrung
exhaustion.

When the Virginian had ordered he sat gazing ahead of him with such
troubled eyes that had he still been under the surveillance of the
Searchlight Investigation Bureau, those keenly zestful observers would
doubtless have reported the harrowed emotions of a guilty conscience.
Soon, however, Stuart drew from his pocket a blue-bound and much-thumbed
manuscript and fell to scribbling upon it with a stubby pencil. Into
this preoccupied trance broke a somewhat heavy framed man whose
smoothly-shaved face bore, despite traces of equal stress, certain
remnants of an inexhaustible humor.

"Did you rewrite that scene in the third act?" he demanded briskly as he
dropped into a vacant chair across the table and, with a side glance
over his shoulder, added in the same breath, "Waiter, a baked apple and
two eggs boiled three minutes--and don't take over two minutes on the
job, see?"

As the servitor departed, grinning over the difficulties of his
contract, Mr. Grady sent an appraising eye about the room and proceeded
drily, "All present or accounted for, it seems--and Good Lord, how they
love us! It's really touching--they're just like trained rattle-snakes."

"Can't say I blame 'em much," Farquaharson stifled a yawn. "Dress
Rehearsal until two this morning followed by a call for line rehearsal
again at eleven. When they get through that, if they ever do, there's
nothing more except the strain of a first night."

Mr. Grady grinned. "That's the gay life of trouping. It's what girls
leave home for. By the way, how much sleep did you get yourself?"

"About three hours."

"You'll feel fine by to-night when the merry villagers shout 'Author!
Author!'" The heavy gentleman looked at his watch and added, with the
producer's note of command, "When we finish here we'd better go to my
room and see how the dialogue sounds in the rewritten scene."

Later Stuart sat in the empty auditorium of the theater where the
sheeted chairs stretched off into a circle of darkness. The stage, naked
of setting; the actors whose haggard faces looked ghastly beyond the
retrievement of make-up; the noisy and belated frenzy of carpenters and
stage crew: all these were sights and sounds grown so stale that he
found it hard to focus his attention on those nuances of interpretation
which would make or ruin his play. He was conscious only of a yearning
to find some quiet place where there was shade along a sea beach, and
there to lie down and die happily.

About noon Mr. Grady, who had for some purpose gone "back," resumed his
seat at the author's side and, between incisive criticism shouted
through his megaphone, suggested, in the contrast of a conversational
tone, "Don't you ever look in your letter box? Here's mail for you."

Absently Stuart took the envelope and when the scene ended made his way
to the light of the open stage door to investigate its contents. There,
seeking asylum from the greater heat of the wings he came upon the
ingenue, indulging in the luxury of exhausted tears.

Farquaharson glanced at the note carelessly at first and the signature
momentarily baffled him. Eben Tollman signed his name with such marked
originality that it was almost as difficult to decipher as to forge.

But that was a minor and short-lived perplexity. It was indubitably Eben
Tollman who had sent this invitation and he said that he did so at the
request of his wife.

The face of Stuart Farquaharson, which had a moment before seemed
incapable of any expression beyond lethargic fatigue, underwent so
sudden a transformation that the ingenue interrupted her weeping to
watch it. There was a prefatory blankness of sheer amazement followed
by an upleaping of latent fires into the eyes; fires that held hints of
revived hopes and suppressed yearnings. Within the moment this fitful
light died again into a pained gravity. What was the use of reopening
the perilous issues?

Of course he wanted to see her. He wanted to see her so intensely that
to do so would be both foolish and dangerous. He had spent these years
drilling himself into a discipline which should enable him to think of
Conscience as someone outside his personal world. To see her now would
be to set into eruption a volcano which he had meant that the years
should render extinct. No one but himself could know by what a doubtful
margin he had won his fight that day on the P. and O. steamer. Could he
do it again with the sight of her in his eyes and the sound of her voice
in his ears?

Yet, how could he without utter gracelessness decline?

The fashion of the invitation, communicated through the husband, proved
its motive. Conscience wished to show him that she could receive
cordially and with no misgivings as to the outcome. She probably wished
also to assure him that from all possible charges, he was now absolved.
These motives were all gracious, but, he admitted with a queer smile of
suffering, their result was rather akin to cruelty. He decided that he
must meet her in the same spirit and allow her to feel that, through
her, his life had suffered no permanent scar. It was palpably a case for
gentlemanly lying.

Though Eben's note to Farquaharson had said that Conscience requested
him to extend the invitation, he had not yet mentioned to her the
circumstance of its sending. He wished to study an unwarned face when
she met Farquaharson. If she attempted to flash a warning of any sort;
if her words cleverly shaped themselves into forms of private meaning
for the lover: he would be there to note and correlate.

During the morning's shopping Conscience had not seemed, to his narrow
watching, impatient to separate from him, but shortly after noon she
suggested, as though blaming herself for her previous remissness, "But
you had business with your banker, didn't you? Doesn't that have to be
seen to early?"

"There's an abundance of time," he hastened to assure her. "I can look
after that matter after lunch. I expect a telephone call regarding it at
one, which can reach me in the hotel dining-room--unless you prefer
being alone."

But Conscience laughed.

"Prefer being alone? Why should I? It's something to have a man along
who's willing to be bored and carry parcels."

As they entered the dining-room promptly on the hour, Conscience saw in
the doorway the back and shoulders of a man who seemed to be searching
the place for an acquaintance. In the bearing and erectness of the
figure was something so familiar that it stabbed her with a sharp
vividness of memory. She started and just then the man turned and she
found herself face to face with Stuart Farquaharson.

The Virginian stepped promptly forward with hand extended and a smile of
greeting, but for the moment Conscience neither advanced nor lifted her
hand. She stood unmoving and wide-eyed as if she had seen a ghost and
her cheeks went deadly pale.

"I only got your note a little while ago," he explained easily. "I am
such a new hand at this theatrical game that I haven't learned yet to
expect mail in the stage-door box. I hope I'm not inexcusably late."

But the woman still stood mystified and startled. When she did speak it
was to repeat blankly, "My note? What note?"

Tollman had been standing a pace to the rear and his gaze, for all its
schooling, was one of tense appraisal.

Now he smilingly interposed, "Let me explain, Mr. Farquaharson, I took
the liberty of couching my invitation in my wife's name because I knew
she shared my wish to have you with us--but for her I reserved the
pleasure of a complete surprise."

There was for an instant an awkward tableau of embarrassment. A flush of
instinctive anger rose to Farquaharson's temples. He had come because he
thought Conscience wished to show him that she was happy and he
forgiven. Now it appeared that her wishes had not been consulted, and
she stood there with an expression almost stricken. Tollman had been
impertinent--if nothing worse.

To Eben Tollman it was all quite clear. Here was a guilty pair too
confounded for immediate recovery. Farquaharson, being warned, was
attempting to carry it off smoothly enough for both.

But immediately the color swept back into the woman's face and
cordiality came to her lips and eyes. Taking the Virginian's hand she
smiled also on her husband. The very fact that Eben did not realize her
reasons for dreading such an encounter was a proof of his complete trust
in her, and this surprise had been planned by him in advance for her
pleasure.

"This is wonderful, Eben," she declared impulsively. "I was so
astonished that it took my breath away. I didn't know, Stuart, that you
were on this side of the ocean."

"Such is fame," laughed Farquaharson with a mock disappointment, "with
my name on every ash barrel and every alley fence in this delightful
city!"

They were acquitting themselves rather adroitly, under the
circumstances, thought Eben, though their assumption of innocence was,
perhaps, a shade overdone.




CHAPTER XXII


As they took their seats at the table reserved for them, a conflict of
emotions made difficulty of conversation for two members of the trio.

Their prefatory talk ran along those lines of commonplace question and
answer in which the wide gap between their last meeting and the present
was bridged.

This, reflected Eben, was a part of the play designed to create and
foster the impression that they had really been as completely out of
touch as they pretended.

"And so you left us, an unknown, and return a celebrity!" Conscience's
voice and eyes held a hint of raillery which made Stuart say to himself:
"Thank God she has not let the fog make her colorless."--"When I saw you
last you were starting up the ladder of the law toward the Supreme
Court--and now you reappear, crowned with literary distinction."

A thought of those days when he had closed his law books and his house
in Virginia to begin looking out on the roofs and chimney pots of old
Greenwich village, rose to the Virginian's mind. It had all been an
effort to forget. But he smiled as he answered.

"I'm afraid it's a little early to claim celebrity. To-morrow morning I
may read in the Providence papers that I'm only notorious."

"You must tell me all about the play. You feel confident, of course?"
she eagerly demanded. "It seems incredible that you were having your
première here to-night and that I knew nothing of it--until now."

It not only seemed incredible, mused Eben: It _was_ incredible. He was
speculating upon what would have happened had he really been as blind as
he was choosing to appear.

"They say," smiled Stuart, "that every playwright is confident at his
first opening--and never afterwards."

It was hard for him to carry on a censored conversation, sitting here at
the table with his thoughts falling into an insistent refrain. He had
always known Conscience Williams and this was Conscience Tollman. He had
told himself through years that he had succeeded ill in his determined
effort of forgetting her; yet now he found her as truly a revelation in
the vividness of her charm and the radiance of her beauty as though he
had brought faint memories--or none--to the meeting. His blood was
tingling in his arteries with a rediscovery which substituted for the
old sense of loss a new and more poignant realization. It would have
been better had he been brusque, even discourteous, replying to the
morning's invitation that he was too busy to accept. But he had come and
except for that first moment of astonishment Conscience had been gay and
untroubled. She at least was safe from the perils which this reunion
held for him. So, as he chatted, he kept before his thoughts like a
standard seen fitfully through the smoke of battle the reminder, "She
must feel, as she wishes to feel, that it has left me unscathed."

"But, Stuart," exclaimed Conscience suddenly, "all these night-long
rehearsals and frantic sessions of rewriting must be positive deadly.
You look completely fagged out."

Farquaharson nodded. His weariness, which excitement had momentarily
mitigated had returned with a heavy sense of dreariness. He was being
called upon now not to rehearse a company in the interpreting of his
three-act comedy, but to act himself, without rehearsal, in a drama to
which no last act could bring a happy ending.

"I _am_ tired," he admitted. "But to-night tells the story. Whichever
way it goes I'll have done all I can do about it. Then I mean to run
away somewhere and rest. After all fatigue is not fatal."

But Mrs. Tollman was looking at the ringed and shadowed eyes and they
challenged her ready sympathy. This was not the splendidly fit physical
specimen she had known.

"Yes, you must do that," she commanded gravely, then added in a lighter
voice: "I'd always thought of the first night of a new play as a time of
keen exhilaration and promise for both author and star."

"Our star is probably indulging in plain and fancy hysterics at this
moment," he said with a memory of the last glimpse he had had of that
illustrious lady's face. "And as for the author, he is dreaming chiefly
of some quiet spot where one can lie stretched on the beach whenever he
isn't lying in his bed." He paused, then added irrelevently, "I was
thinking this morning of the way the breakers roll in across the bay
from Chatham."

Eben had been the listener, a rôle into which he usually fell when
conversation became general, but now he assumed a more active
participation.

"Chatham is quite a distance from us, Mr. Farquaharson," he suggested,
"but it's only about two hundred yards from our terrace to the float in
the cove. However, you know that cove yourself."

Into Farquaharson's face came the light of keen remembrance. Yes, he
knew that cove. He and Conscience had often been swimming there. He
wondered if, on a clear day, one could still see the schools of tiny
fishes twelve feet below in water translucently blue.

"Yes," he acknowledged, "I haven't forgotten the cove. It opens through
a narrow channel into the lesser bay and there used to be an eel pot
near the opening. Is that eel pot still there?"

Eben Tollman smiled. His manner was frankly gracious, while it escaped
effusiveness.

"Well, now, Mr. Farquaharson," he suggested, "I can't say as to that,
but why don't you come and investigate for yourself? You can leave by
the noon train to-morrow and be with us in a little over two hours--I
wish we could wait and see your play this evening, but I'm afraid I must
get back to-day."

An instinctive sense of courtesy alone prevented Stuart's jaw from
dropping in amazement. He remembered Eben Tollman as a dour and
illiberal bigot whom the community called mean and whom no man called
gracious. Had Conscience, by the sunlight of her spontaneity and love
wrought this miracle of change? If so she was more wonderful than even
he had admitted.

"It's good of you, Mr. Tollman," he found himself murmuring, "but I'm
afraid that's hardly possible."

"Hardly possible? Nonsense!" Tollman laughed aloud this time. "Why,
you've just been telling us that you were on the verge of running away
somewhere to rest--and that the only undecided point was a choice of
destination."

Stuart glanced hurriedly toward Conscience as if for assistance, but her
averted and tranquil face told him nothing. Yet under her unruffled
composure swirled a whirlpool of agitation and apprehension, greater
than his own.

In a spirit of amazement, she had heard her husband tender his
invitation.

Now as Stuart sat across the table, she was rediscovering many little
tricks of individuality which had endeared him as a lover, or perhaps
been dear because he was her lover, and in the sum of these tremendous
trifles lay a terrific danger which she did not underestimate. His
presence would mean comparison; contrast between drab reality and
rainbow longings.

But how could she hint any of these things to the husband who, by his
very invitation, was proving his complete trust, or the lover to whom
she must seem the confidently happy wife?

"I'm sure Conscience joins me in insisting that you come," went on Mr.
Tollman persuasively. "You can wear a flannel shirt and do as you like
because we are informal folk--and you would be a member of the family."

That was rather a long speech for Eben Tollman, and as he finished
Conscience felt the glances of both men upon her, awaiting her
confirmation.

She smiled and Stuart detected no flaw in the seeming genuineness of her
cordiality.

"We _know_ he likes the place," she announced in tones of whimsical
bantering, "and if he refuses it must mean that he doesn't think much of
the people."

Stuart was so entirely beguiled that his reply came with instant
repudiation of such a construction.

"When to-morrow's train arrives," he declared, "I will be a passenger,
unless an indignant audience lynches me to-night."

They had meant to meet surreptitiously, mused Eben Tollman, and being
thwarted, they had juggled their conversation into an exaggeration of
innocence. Conscience's face during that first unguarded moment in the
dining-room had mirrored a terror which could have had no other origin
than a guilty love. His own course of conduct was clear. He must, no
matter how it tried his soul, conceal every intimation of suspicion. The
geniality which had astonished them both must continue with a convincing
semblance of genuineness. Out of a pathetic blindness of attitude he
must see, eagle-eyed.

But Conscience, as they drove homeward, was reflecting upon the frequent
miscarriage of kindness. Her husband had planned for her a delightful
surprise and his well-meaning gift had been--a crisis.

Stuart sat that night in the gallery of the Garrick theater with
emotions strangely confused.

Below him and about him was such an audience as characterizes those
towns which are frequently used as experimental stations for the drama.
It regarded itself as sophisticated in matters theatrical and was keenly
alive to the fact that it sat as a jury which must not be too
provincially ready of praise.

Yet the author, hiding there beyond reach of the genial Grady, and the
possibility of a curtain call, was not thinking solely of his play.
Stones had been rolled to-day from tombs in which he had sought to bury
many ghosts of the past. With the resurrection came undeniable fears and
equally undeniable flashes of instinctive elation. He was seeing
Conscience, not across an interval of years but of hours--and to-morrow
he was to see her again.

When the first act ended the man who had written the comedy became
conscious that he had followed its progress with an incomplete
absorption, and when the curtain fell, to a flattering salvo of
applause, he came, with a start, back from thoughts foreign to the
theater.

The conclusion of the second act, with its repeated curtain calls and
its cries of "Author, Author!" assured him that his effort was not a
failure, and when at last it was all over and he stood in the wings
congratulating the members of his company, the wine of assured success
tingled in his veins--and his thoughts were for the moment of that
alone.

"They don't hate us quite so much now," said Mr. Grady as he clapped a
hand on Stuart's shoulder. "The thing is a hit--and for once I've got a
piece that I can take into town without tearing it to pieces and doing
it over."

Yet in his room afterward he paced the floor restively for a long while
before he sought his bed.

He was balancing up the sheets of his life to date. On the credit side
were such successes as most men would covet, but on the debit side stood
one item which offset the gratification and left a heavy balance.

This visit of to-morrow was a foolish thing. It might be wiser to
telegraph Tollman that unexpected matters had developed, necessitating a
change of plan.

It is a rash courage which courts disaster. From the small writing desk
near his bed he took a telegraph blank, but when he had written, torn up
and rewritten the message he halted and stood dubiously considering the
matter. The hand which had been lifted to ring for a bell-boy fell at
his side.

After all this was simply a running away from the forms of danger while
the danger itself remained. Into such action Conscience must read his
fear to trust himself near her--and he had undertaken to make her feel
secure in her own contentment. It was too late to draw back now. He must
go through with it--but he would make his stay brief and every moment
must be guarded.

At noon the next day he dropped, clad in flannels, from the train at the
station. It had been a hot trip, but even with a cooler temperature he
might not have escaped that slight moisture which excitement and doubt
had brought to his temples and his palms.

These miles of railway travel since he had reached the Cape had been so
many separate reminders of the past and he had not arrived unshaken.

But there on the platform stood Conscience Tollman, with a serene smile
of welcome on her lips, and as the chauffeur took his bags she led him
to the waiting car.

"Come on," she said, as though there had been no lapse of years since
they had stood here before, "there's just time to get into our bathing
suits and have a swim before luncheon."

The main street of the village with the shade of its elms and silver
oaks, and the white of tidy houses, setting among flowers, was a page
out of a book long closed; a book in which had been written the most
unforgettable things of life. Besides well-remembered features, there
were details which had been forgotten and which now set free currents of
reminiscence--such as the battered figurehead of an old schooner raised
on high over a front door and a wind-mill as antique of pattern as those
to which Don Quixote gave battle.

And when the winding street ran out into a sandy country road Stuart
found himself amid surroundings that teemed with the spirit of the past.

But over all the bruising comparisons of past and present, the peace of
the sky was like a benediction, and his weariness yielded to its calming
influence. He had been away and had come back tired, and for the
present, it was better to ignore all the revolutionary changes that lay
between then and now.

They talked about trivial things, along the way, with a lightness of
manner, which was none the less as delicately cautious as the footsteps
of a cat walking on a shelf of fragile china. Each felt the challenge
and response of natures keyed to the same pitch of life's tuning fork.

"Why are all the Cape Cod wagons painted blue and all the barn doors
green?" asked the man, and Conscience demanded in return, "Why does
everything that man controls in New England follow a fixed color of
thought?"

When the car drew up before the house which he remembered as a miser's
abode, his astonishment was freshly stirred. Here was a place
transformed, with a dignified beauty of residence and grounds which
could scarcely be bettered.

"How did the play go?" demanded Tollman from the doorway, with an
interest that seemed as surprising as that of a Trappist Abbot for a
matter of worldliness. "The papers came on the train with you, so we
haven't had the verdict, yet."

And then while Stuart was answering Conscience enjoined him that, if
they were to swim before lunch, time was scant and these amenities must
wait.

"Aren't you going in?" demanded the visitor and the host shook his head
with an indulgent smile.

"No," he answered. "That's for you youngsters. I may drop down to the
float later, but, barring accident, I stay out of salt water."




CHAPTER XXIII


Less in words than by a subtle though unmistakable manner, the husband
made it clear to Stuart Farquaharson that his status in this
establishment was to be as intimately free as if he had been the brother
instead of the former lover of Conscience. It was difficult to reconcile
this unqualified acceptance with every impression he had formed of Eben,
and while he unpacked his bag in his bedroom a sense of perplexity
lingered with him. But as he was changing into his bathing suit a
solution presented itself which seemed to bear the stamp of four-square
logic.

Eben Tollman was neither the ogre he had formerly seemed nor yet the
utterly careless husband that his present conduct appeared to indicate.
He had simply recognized in the days of Stuart's ascendancy something
akin to disdain in the Virginian's attitude toward him. Now time had
demonstrated which was the victor, and Tollman was permitting his pride
the pardonable gratification of showing the younger man its security and
confidence.

Conscience had not yet appeared when Stuart came down, and neither was
Eben in evidence, so the visitor stood in the open door with the summer
breeze striking gratefully against his bare arms and legs until he heard
a laugh at the stair-head and wheeled to look quickly up. The picture he
saw there made his heart beat fast and brought a sudden fire into his
eyes.

Conscience stood above him with her arms lifted in an attitude of one
about to dive and in the gay colors of her bathing dress and cap; in the
untrammeled grace of slender curves she seemed the spirit of vivid
allurement. With an answering laugh the man stepped to the lower
landing and raised his own arms.

"Come on!" he challenged. "Jump, I'll catch you."

But as suddenly as though he had been struck, he dropped his arms at his
sides, realizing the wild, almost ungovernable impulse which had swept
him to take her in his arms in contempt of every consideration except
the violence of his wish to do so. Moments like this were
unsettling--and to be guarded against.

Then she had come down to the hall and he was on his knees, as he had
been on that other day at Chatham, tying the ribbons of her bathing
slippers with fingers that were none too steady.

But while they dived in water which was almost unbelievably blue and
clear, they might have been two children as irresponsibly full of sheer
zest and sparkle as the bubbles that leaped brightly up from their
out-thrust and dripping arms. Forty minutes later Stuart was following
her up the twisting path between pines and bayberry bushes while the
salt water streamed from them.

Eben Tollman had not after all found time to join them at the float, and
glancing up from his chair on the terrace where he sat almost completely
surrounded by a disarray of daily papers, he was now somewhat
disconcerted at their early return.

He had been inwardly writhing in a tortured frame of mind which their
arrival brought a necessity for masking and the things which had made
him so writhe had been the reviews in these papers of "The Longest Way
Round."

Eben was not an habitual reader of dramatic comment. The theater itself
he regarded as an amusement designed for minds more tinctured with
childish frivolity than his own.

Yet since Conscience and Stuart had left the house he had been mulling
over, with the fascination of a rising gorge and a bitter resentment,
paragraphs of encomium upon his hated guest. Had he ever indulged
himself in the luxury of profanity it would have gushed now in torrents
of curses over Stuart Farquaharson, upon whom life seemed to lavish her
gifts with as reckless a prodigality as that of a licentious monarch for
an unworthy favorite.

"Nothing but applause!" exclaimed Eben to himself, with a quiet madness
of vituperation--entirely unconscious of any taint of falsity or
injustice. "He makes no effort beyond the easy things of
self-indulgence, yet because he has a supercilious charm, he parades
through life seizing its prizes! Women love him--men praise him--and
every step is a forward step!"

He had, indeed, been reading no ordinary words of praise, bestowed with
the critic's usual guardedness. In Providence last night the unusual had
occurred and the reviewers had found themselves acclaiming a new
luminary in the firmament of present-day playwrights. Later the men with
New York reputations would be claiming Stuart Farquaharson's discovery,
and here in the Rhode Island town they had recognized him first. They
had no intention of relinquishing that distinction which goes with the
first clear heralding of a rising genius.

As Eben Tollman read these details in cold type, each note of their
eulogium scorched a nerve of his own jealous antipathy. Of course,
Conscience would take all this flattery, spread before her lover, as a
mark of genuine merit--as the conqueror's cloth of gold. It seemed that
he himself had succeeded in bringing Stuart on the scene only that the
woman might smell the incense being burned in his honor.

But Eben regulated his features into a calm and indulgent smile as the
two of them came across the clipped lawn.

They made a splendid pair with the sun shining on their wet shoulders;
the woman's neck and arms gleaming softly with the tint of browned
ivory; the man's tanned and strong over rippling muscles. Their drenched
bathing suits emphasized the delicacy of her rounded curves, and his
almost Hellenic fitness of body.

"I've been reading what the critics say, and my congratulations are
ready," announced the elder man calmly with a semblance of sincerity.
"It would appear that last night was a triumph."

For the next few days Stuart Farquaharson surrendered himself to the
_dolce far niente_ of salt air and sun and the joy of their reviving
influences. All contingent dangers he was satisfied to leave to the
future.

There was a new and spontaneous gayety in the woman's manner, but the
Virginian did not know that it was new. Eben Tollman, however, marked
the contrast and was at no loss in attributing it to its fancied cause.
He gave no thought to the truth that she was splendidly striving to keep
flying at the mast-head of her life the colors of artificial success.

So each in his own way, Eben and Stuart were deceived by Conscience, one
believing her indubitably guilty and the other thinking her
unquestionably happy.

In the elder man a ferment of bitterness was working toward the ends of
deranged deviltry--and its influence was all secret so that its tincture
of insanity left no mark upon his open behavior.

The difficulty of maintaining a surface guise of friendliness toward the
man whom he believed to be successfully wrecking his home might have
appeared insuperable. In point of the actual it was made easy--even a
thing of zest--by virtue of a lapse into that moral degeneracy which was
no longer sane. The growth of craftiness for the forwarding of a single
idea became uncanny in its purposeful efficiency and a morbid pleasure
to its possessor. Eben seemed outwardly to have lain aside his
strait-jacket of bigotry and to have become singularly humanized.

One afternoon Stuart and Conscience went for an all-day sail. The
husband had promised to accompany them, but at the last moment pleaded
an excuse. It was in his plan to continue his seeming of entire
trustfulness--and nothing better furthered that attitude than sending
them away together in the close companionship of a sail boat--while, in
reality, the presence of Ira Forman, tending tiller and sheet, was as
effective as the watchfulness of a duenna or the guardianship of a
harem's chief eunuch.

Ira Forman rose from his task of packing the luncheon paraphernalia on
the white beach near a life-saving station. He had regaled them as they
picniced with narratives of shipwreck and tempest, swelling with the
prideful importance of a singer of sagas. Now he bit into a plug which
looked like a chunk of black cake and spat into the sand.

"See that boat over yon in the norrer channal? You wouldn't never
suspicion that a one-armed man was sailin' her now, would you?"

"No!" Stuart spoke with the rising inflection of a flattering interest.
"Has he only one arm?"

Ira's nod was solemnly affirmative. "He shot the other one off oncet
while he was a-gunnin' and, in a manner of speakin', it was the makin'
of him. Until he lost his right hand an' had to figure out methods of
doin' double shift with the left, he wasn't half as smart as what he is
now. In a manner of speakin' it made a man of him."

The amused glance which flashed between Conscience and her companion at
this bit of philosophy was quickly stifled as they recognized the
gravity which sat upon the face of its enunciator, and Stuart inquired
in all seriousness, "But how does he manage it? There's mains'l and jib
and tiller--not to mention center board and boom-crotch--and sometimes
the reef-points."

The boatman nodded emphatically. "But he does it though. He's educated
his feet an' his teeth to do things God never meant 'em to." Then in a
voice of naïve emphasis he demanded, "Did either one of you ever lose
anything that belonged to you? I mean somethin' that was a part of
yourselves--somethin' that was just tore out by the roots, like?"

Stuart wondered uneasily if the stiffness of his expression was not a
thing which Conscience could read like print; if the simple-minded
clam-digger had not quite unintentionally ripped away the mask which he
had, until now, worn with a reasonable success.

But Conscience had missed the moment of self-betrayal because an
identical anxiety had for the instant blinded her intuition.

"Wa'al," continued Ira complacently, "I ain't never lost a leg nor yet
an arm--but, in a manner of speakin', I cal'late I know just round about
what it's like. A feller's life ain't never the same ag'in. That man
that's handlin' that boat now--he wasn't worth much to hisself nor
nobody else a'fore he went a-gunnin', that time."

He paused, wondering vaguely why his simple recital had brought a
constrained silence, where there had been laughter and voluble
conversation, then feeling that the burden of talk lay with him, he
resorted to repetition.

"The reason I spoke the way I did just now was I wondered if either one
of you ever had anything like that happen to you. Not that I presumed
you'd ever lost a limb--but there's lots of other things folks can lose
that hurts as much; things that can be hauled out by the roots, like;
things that don't never leave people quite the same afterwards."

Stuart smiled, though with a taint of ruefulness.

"I guess, Ira," he agreed, "almost everybody has lost something."

Ira stood nodding like a China mandarin, then suddenly he came out of
his preoccupation to announce:

"I'll begin fetchin' all this plunder back to the boat now. I cal'late
to catch the tide in about half an hour. You folks had better forelay to
come aboard by then."

Conscience and Stuart strolled along the stretch of beach until, around
a jutting elbow of sand dunes, the woman halted by a blackened fragment
of a ship's skeleton. She sat for a while looking out with a reminiscent
amusement in her eyes--and something more cryptic.

The man turned his gaze inward to the green of the beach-grass beyond
the sand where he could make out a bit of twisting road. There was
something tantalizingly familiar about that scrap of landscape;
something which stirred yet eluded a memory linked with powerful
associations.

Then abruptly it all came back.

His car had been standing just at that visible stretch of road on the
afternoon when Conscience had begged him not to criticize her father and
he had retorted bitterly. He could see again the way in which she had
flinched and hear again the voice in which she had replied, "You know
why I listen to him, Stuart. You know that I didn't listen ... before
his stroke. I didn't listen when I told him that if you went, I went,
too, did I?"

That was long ago. Now she was studying him with a grave scrutiny as she
inquired, "I've been wondering, Stuart, why you have never married. You
ought to have a home."

The man averted his face quickly and pretended to be interested in the
vague shape of a steamer almost lost in the mists that lay along the
horizon. Those sweetly curved lips had been torturing him with their
allurement. From them he wanted kisses--not dispassionate counsel--but
he replied abstractedly:

"I'm a writer of fiction, Conscience. Such persons are under suspicion
of being unstable--and temperamental. Matrimonially they are considered
bad risks."

Her laughter rang with a teasing mockery, but, had he known it, she had
caught and been startled by that absorption which had not been wholly
banished from his eyes. It was not yet quite a discovery, but still it
was something more than a suspicion--that he still loved her. In its
breaking upon her was a strange blending of fright and elation and it
directed her subsequent questions into channels that might bring
revelations to her intuition.

"I've known you for some time, Stuart," she announced with a whimsical
smile which made her lips the more kissable. "Much too long for you to
attempt the pose of a Don Juan. I hate to shatter a romance, but the
fact is, you are perfectly sane--and you could be reliably constant."

This constancy, he reflected, had already cost him the restlessness of a
Salathiel, but his response was more non-committal than his thought.

"If my first reason is rejected," he said patiently, "I suppose I must
give another. A writer must be absolutely unhampered--at least until his
storehouse is well stocked with experience."

"Being unattached isn't being unhampered," she persisted with a spirited
flash in her eyes. "It's just being--incomplete."

"Possibly I'm like Ira's one-armed man," he hazarded. "Maybe 'in a
manner of speakin' I wouldn't be half as smart as what I am' if I didn't
have to face that affliction."

But with her next question Conscience forced him from his defense of
jocular evasiveness.

"Did you know, Stuart, that--that Mrs. Holbury came to see me?"

He feared that she had caught his flinch of surprise at that
announcement but he replied evenly:

"Marian wrote to me that she had seen you. How you two happened to meet,
I have never guessed."

"She came here, Stuart, to explain things which she thought put you in
an unsightly light--and to say that whatever blame there was belonged to
her."

"She did that?" Stuart Farquaharson's face reddened to the temples and
his voice became feelingly defensive. "If Marian told you that she had
been more to blame than I, she let her generosity do her a wrong. I
can't accept an advantage gained at such a cost, Conscience. I think all
of her mistakes grew out of an exaggerated innocence and she's paid high
enough for them. Marian Holbury is a woman who needs no defense unless
it's against pure slander."

"Stuart," Conscience's voice was deep with earnestness, "a woman only
sets herself a task like that because she loves a man."

"Oh, no," he hastily demurred. "It may be from friendship, too."

But his companion shook her head. "With her it was love. She told me
so."

"Told you so!" Farquaharson echoed the words in tones of almost militant
incredulity, and Conscience went on thoughtfully:

"I was wondering if, after all, she might not make you very happy--and
might not be very happy herself in doing it."

If she was deliberately hurting him it was not out of a light curiosity
or any meanness of motive. Her own tranquillity was severely pressed,
but she must know the truth, and if a love for herself, which could come
to no fruition, stood between him and possible happiness, she must do
what she could to sweep it away. This was a new thought, but a grave
one.

For a while Stuart was silent, as he studied the high colors of the sea
and sky, contracting his eyes as if the glare pained them, and in his
face Conscience read, clear, the truth of her suspicion.

"Conscience," he said at last, "I asked Marian to marry me two years
ago--and she refused. That's all I can say."

But for the woman it was enough. She needed no explanation of why Marian
had refused an offer from the lips and unseconded by the heart. She came
to her feet, and her knees felt weak. She was afraid to let this
conversation progress. He loved her--and if he could read the prohibited
eagerness of her heart he would come breaking through barriers as a
charging elephant breaks its way through light timber.

"Ira is calling," she announced lightly, "and he speaks with the voice
of the tide. We must hurry or we won't make it back across the
shallows."




CHAPTER XXIV


But that night it happened, as it had happened once before, that the
stars seemed exaggerated in size and multiplied in number. On the breeze
came riding the distant voice of the surf with its call to staring
wakefulness and restlessness of spirit.

Conscience went early to her room, feeling that unless her taut nerves
could have the relaxation of solitude, she must scream out. To-day's
discovery had kindled anew all the fires of insurgency that burned in
her, inflaming her heart to demand the mating joy which could make of
marriage not a formula of duty and hard allegiance, but a splendid and
rightful fulfillment.

As she sat by the window of her unlighted room, her eyes were staring
tensely into the night and the pink ovals of her nails were pressed into
the palms of her hands. Her gaze, as if under a spell of hypnosis, was
following the glow of a cigar among the pines, where Stuart was seeking
to walk off the similar unrest which made sleep impossible. "He still
loves me," she kept repeating to herself with a stunned realization, "he
still loves me!"

She hoped fervently that Eben was asleep. To have to talk to him while
her strained mood was so full of rebellion would be hard; to have to
submit to his autumnal kiss, would make that mood blaze into revulsion.

But at last she heard a footfall on the stair and in the hall and held
her breath in a sort of terror as they ended just outside her threshold.
She knew that Eben was trying her door--trying it first without knocking
after his churlish custom. She hoped that he would pass on when
darkness and silence were his answers, but after a moment came a rap and
when it met with no reply it was repeated with a peremptory insistence.
Conscience drew a long breath, and, shivering with distaste, she slowly
lighted a candle. Then she went shudderingly to the door and opened it.

In the stress of the moment, as she shot back the bolt, she surrendered
for just an instant to her feelings; feelings which she had never before
allowed expression even in the confessional of her thoughts. She knew
now how Heloise had felt when she wildly told herself that she would
rather be mistress of Abelarde than wife to the King.

Eben standing in the doorway, smiling, seemed to her disordered mood the
figure of a Satyr.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I've had a letter from Ebbett," Tollman commented one day at luncheon.
"Like Stuart here, he's been working too hard and he wants to know if he
can run down for the week-end."

When Conscience had declared her approval the host turned to
Farquaharson. "I shouldn't wonder if you'd like Ebbett. We were
classmates at college, and he was my best man. Aside from that, he's one
of the leading exponents, in this country, of the newer psychology--a
disciple of Freud and Jung, and while many of his ideas strike me as
extreme they are often interesting."

The prophecy proved more than true, for with Dr. Ebbett as a guide,
Farquaharson gratified that avid interest which every sincere writer
must feel for explorations into new fields of thought.

One evening the two sat alone on the terrace in the communion of lighted
cigars and creature comfort long after their host and hostess had gone
to their beds, and Ebbett said thoughtfully, and without introduction:

"It seems to have worked out. And God knows I'm glad, because I had my
misgivings."

"What has worked out?" inquired the younger man and the neurologist
jerked his head toward the house.

"This marriage," he said. "When I came to the wedding, I could not
escape a heavy portent of danger. There was the difference in age to
start with and it was heightened by Eben's solemn and grandiose
tendencies. His nature had too much shadow--not enough sunlight. The
girl on the other hand had a vitality which was supernormal."

He paused and Stuart Farquaharson, restrained by a flood of personal
reminiscence, said nothing. Finally the doctor went on:

"But there was more than that. I'm a Massachusetts man myself, but Eben
is--or was--in type, too damned much the New Englander."

Stuart smiled to himself, but his prompting question came in the tone of
commonplace.

"Just what does that mean to you, Doctor--too much the New Englander?"

Ebbett laughed. "I use the word only as a term--as descriptive of an
intolerance which exists everywhere, north and south, east and west--but
in Eben it was exaggerated. Fortunately, his wife's exuberance of spirit
seems to have brightened it into normality."

"But what, exactly, did you fear, Doctor?"

"I'm afraid I'd have to grow tediously technical to make that clear, but
if you can stand it, I'll try."

"I wish you would," the younger man assured him.

Dr. Ebbett leaned back and studied the ash of his cigar. "Have you ever
noticed in your experience," he abruptly demanded, "that oftentimes the
man who most craftily evades his taxes or indulges in devious business
methods, cannot bring himself to sanction any of the polite and innocent
lies which society accepts as conventions?"

Stuart nodded and the physician went on:

"In short we encounter, every day, the apparent hypocrite. Yet many such
men are not consciously dishonest. They are merely victims of
disassociation."

"I'm afraid," acknowledged Stuart, "I'm still too much the tyro to
understand the term very fully."

"None of us understand it as fully as we'd like," Dr. Ebbett assured
him. "But we are gradually learning. In every man's consciousness there
is a stream of thought which we call the brain content. Below the
surface of consciousness, there is a second stream of thought as
unrecognized as a dream, but none the less potent."

The speaker paused and Farquaharson waited in silence for him to
continue.

"The broader a man's habit of thought," went on the physician slowly,
"the fewer impulses he is called upon to repress because he is frank.
The narrower his code, the more things there are which are thrust down
into his proscribed list of inhibitions. The peril lies in the fact that
this stream of repressed thought is acting almost as directly on the
man's life and conduct, as the one of which he is constantly aware. He
has more than one self, and since he admits but one, the others are in
constant and secret intrigue, against him."

"And this makes for unconscious hypocrisy?"

"Undoubtedly. Such a man may be actively dishonest and escape all sense
of guilt because he has in his mind logic-proof compartments in which
certain matters are kept immured and safe from conflict with the reason
that he employs for other affairs. It was this exact quirk of lopsided
righteousness which enabled our grandsires to burn witches while they
sang psalms."

"You think our host is of the type most susceptible to such a danger?"

"Yes, because the intolerant man always stands on the border of
insanity."

"But, Doctor," Stuart put his question with a keenly edged interest,
"for such a condition as you describe, is there a cure, or is it only a
matter of analysis?"

"Ah," replied Ebbett gravely, "that's a large question. Usually a cure
is quite possible, but it always depends upon the uncompromising
frankness of the patient's confessions. He must strip his soul naked
before we can help him. If we can trace back into subconsciousness and
identify the disturbing influences, they resolve themselves into a sore
that has been lanced. They are no longer making war from the
darkness--and with light they cease to exist."

As the neurologist broke off the aged and decrepit dog for which Eben
Tollman had discovered no fondness until it had been exiled to the
garage, came limping around the corner of the terrace and licked
wistfully at Stuart's knee.

"That dog," commented the physician, "ought to be put out of his misery.
He's a hopeless cripple and he needs a merciful dose of morphine. I'll
mention it to Eben."

"It would be a gracious act," assented the younger man. "Life has become
a burden to the old fellow."

Dr. Ebbett rose and tossed his cigar stump outward. "We've been sitting
here theorizing for hours after the better-ordered members of the
household have gone to their beds," he said. "It's about time to say
good night." And the two men climbed the stairs and separated toward the
doors of their respective rooms.

Dr. Ebbett left just after breakfast the next day, but on the verge of
his departure he remembered and mentioned the dog.

"I've been meaning to shoot him," confessed Tollman, "but I've shrunk
from playing executioner."

"Shooting is an awkward method," advised the doctor. "I have here a
grain and a half of morphine in quarter-grain tablets. They will cause
no suffering. They are readily soluble, won't be tasted, and will do the
work."

"How much shall I give? I don't want to bungle it."

"It's simply a question of dosage. Let him have a half grain, I
shouldn't care to give that much to either a dog or a man--unless a drug
habitué--without expecting death--but there's the car and it's been a
delightful visit."

Possibly some instinct warned the superannuated dog of his master's
design. At all events he was never poisoned--he merely disappeared, and
for the mystery of his fading from sight there was no solution.

       *       *       *       *       *

The case for the prosecution was going well, thought Eben Tollman, and
building upward step by step toward a conviction. But step by step, too,
was growing the development of his own condition toward madness, the
more grewsomely terrible because its monomania gave no outward
indication.

One evening as the three sat on the terrace, it pleased Eben Tollman to
regale them with music. He was not himself an instrumentalist, but in
the living-room was a machine which supplied that deficiency, and this
afternoon had brought a fresh consignment of records from Boston. This,
too, was a night of stars, but rather of languorous than disquieting
influences, and the talk had flowed along in serenity, until gradually,
under the spell of the music the two younger members of the trio fell
musingly silent.

Tollman had chosen a program out of which breathed a potency of passion
and allurement. Voices rich with the gold of love's abandon sang the
songs of composers, wholly dedicated to love's own form of expression.

Stuart Farquaharson's cigar had gone out and he sat meditative in the
shadows of the terrace--himself a shadowy shape, with his eyes fixed
upon Conscience, and Conscience, too, remained quiet with that
unstirring stillness which bespeaks a mood of dreams. Something in the
air, subtle yet powerful, was working upon them its influence.

"Eben seems to be in a sentimental mood this evening," suggested
Farquaharson at last, bringing himself with something of a wrench out of
his abstraction and speaking in a matter-of-fact voice. He remembered
belatedly that his cigar had gone out and as he relighted it there was a
slight trembling of his fingers.

"Yes, doesn't he?" Mrs. Tollman's laugh held a trace of nervous tremor,
too. "And I remember saying once that that was just as possible as the
idea of Napoleon going into a monastery."

"Are we going to swim before breakfast to-morrow?" asked the man,
distrusting himself just now with topics touching the past and
sentiment.

"Suppose we walk down to the float and have a look at the state of the
tide," she suggested. "Then as Ira would say we can 'fore-lay' for the
morning."




CHAPTER XXV


AS they went together down the steep path, there was no flaw in the
woman's composure and no fault in the lightness of her manner, but when
they reached the float, with the dark water fall of mirrored stars she
turned abruptly so that she stood face to face with the man. In the
light of the crescent moon he saw that her eyes were wide and full of a
deep seriousness. For a moment she did not speak and recognizing the
light of fixed resolve and the attitude of steeling herself for some
ordeal, he also refrained from words until she should choose her moment.

There was an ethereal quality in the beauty of her pale face,
jet-crowned in the starlight, and a Jeanne d'Arc gallantry in the
straightness of her slender figure. When at last she began to speak it
was in a low voice, vibrant with repression, but unwavering and full of
purpose.

"Stuart," she said, "I am going to call on you to help me, by being all
that a friend can be--by proving your loyalty and obeying a command
that's very hard to give ... by obeying it without even asking why."

"Command me," he said quietly, and for just a moment there was a threat
of faltering in her manner, as though the edict were indeed too hard,
but almost at once she went on in a firm voice.

"You must go away. You must go to-morrow. That's what I brought you down
here to tell you."

"Of course, I have no choice but obedience," he replied simply. "But I
can't go without asking questions and having them answered."

"Yes, you must."

"Why are you sending me away?"

"I hoped it would be possible," she said as her dark eyes filled with
pain and conflict, "for this visit to end without these things having to
be said. I hoped you'd just go away without finding out.... I've done my
best and tried to play the part ... but I can't keep it up forever....
Now I'm asking your help."

"Conscience," he reminded her, and his tone held a sympathy which
discounted his stubbornness in demanding the full reasons for her
decision, "I don't want to press you with questions when you ask me, in
the name of friendship, not to do it ... but--" He paused a moment and
continued with a shake of his head. "We must be honest with each other.
Once before we let a failure to fully understand separate us. I can't
make the same life-wrecking mistake twice. Don't you see that I must
know why I am being banished?"

Slowly she nodded her head in reluctant assent. Her figure seemed to
waver as with faintness, but when Stuart reached out his arms to catch
her, she stepped back and stood with regained steadiness.

"I suppose ..." she acknowledged, "I must be fully honest with you.... I
suppose I was only trying to make it easier for myself ... and that I
must face it fully."

"Face just what, Conscience?"

"The facts. When you came, Stuart, I believed that you had been cured of
the old heartbreak. I believed it until--the other day when we talked
about Marian Holbury--then I knew--that you were still in love with me."

Farquaharson's face paled and his lips tightened.

"I had tried," he said slowly, "to let you think the things which might
make you happier--but I don't seem to be a good actor."

"You were a splendid actor, Stuart, but you had a woman's intuition
against you."

He remained looking across the water for a while before he replied, in a
hurt tone.

"I understand. Now that you've discovered the truth ... I must go
because you could entertain the friend ... but not the lover.... Even if
the lover could maintain his attitude in everything but thought."

But Conscience shook her head.

"No, you don't understand yet ... must you still have the whole truth
... even if I tell you that you can serve me best by not asking it?"

"I must have it, because I am honest in believing that I can serve you
best by knowing it all."

"Very well." She raised her hands in a half-despairing gesture and into
her eyes welled a flood of passion as if a dam had broken and made
concealment futile. Her words came with a low thrill, and the man's
brain swam with an ecstatic sense of discovery which for the moment
obscured all other thought.

"You must go, Stuart, because the basis we met on has been destroyed.
You must go because--because it isn't just that you love me, but that we
love each other."

"Conscience!" The name broke from his lips with the ringing triumph of a
bugle-call, and he had almost seized her in instinctive embrace, but she
put out her own hands and pressed them, at arms length, against his
breast as though to hold him off. Her eyes met the burning eagerness of
his gaze with a resolved and unshakable steadiness.

"Please--" she said very quietly. "Please don't make me fight you,
too--just now."

Slowly with the dying of his momentary elation into misery Farquaharson
stepped back and his arms fell at his sides.

"Forgive me," he murmured. "I can't touch you--here--now--with that
look in your eyes. You are right."

"I must send you away," she continued, "because I want you to stay so
terribly much--because it's all a false position for us both.... Do you
remember what Ira said about losing something that was pulled out ...
'by the roots, like'?... The time has come for that Stuart, dear ... the
roots are taking too strong a hold ... they must be torn out."

"Do I mean as much as that to you?"

"You mean so much--that everything else in life means nothing.... You
mean so much that I compare all others with you to their injustice ...
so much that I follow the glow of your cigar at night when you are
walking ... that I watch the light in your window before I go to bed ...
that I wake up with the thought that you are in the house ... that I
think of you ... want you ... in a way I have no right to think and
want."

"Conscience," he began, gripping his hands at his back and schooling his
syllables so sternly that, in what seemed to him his hour of Gethsemane,
he spoke with a sort of unedged flatness, "your semblance of success has
been splendid, magnificent. Until to-night I believed absolutely that
you no longer cared for me--and that you were happy.

"From the first I had seen in this marriage a certainty of disaster ...
but when I came here I found a succession of bewildering surprises.
These surprises entirely blinded me to the truth. Your serene bearing
had every mark of genuineness, but there were other things, too--things
beyond your control. The very place was transformed. Eben Tollman
himself was really another man. His manner was no longer that of the
bigot. He had learned the art of smiling."

Conscience shook her head.

"That is only another reason why you must go away, Stuart. Eben has
always been the soul of generosity to me. He hates from the core of his
heart these changes of which you speak. He has tolerated them only
because I wanted them. With you here I can't be just to him. I contrast
the little characteristics in him that grate on me and annoy me with the
qualities in you that set me eagerly on fire. I tell you it's all unjust
and it's all my fault."

She paused and then, because her knees still felt weak and her head was
swimming, she dropped wearily down and sat on the small bench at the
side of the float.

Stuart's senses were keyed to concert pitch. Some tempting voice
whispered to his inner realization that, should he pitch the battle on
the plane of passion's attack, he could sweep her from her anchorage. To
his mind she was more beautiful and desirable than Circe must have
seemed to Ulysses, but like the great wanderer he battled against that
voluptuous madness. If he lost it would be the defeat of a man, but if
he won, by that appeal, only the victory of an animal. His voice
remained almost judicially calm.

"But this changed attitude--this positive urbanity where there used to
be utter intolerance--how do you account for that?"

She looked very straight into his eyes and spoke steadfastly.

"I can only account for it in one way--and it's a thing which doesn't
make me feel very proud of myself, Stuart. I think that he, too, has
been deluded by what you call my splendid semblance. I believe he trusts
me utterly. He has seen us together and thinks I've stood the acid
test--and I've got to do it."

"But why did he ask me here, if he thought there was danger?"

"Because he had the courage to trust his happiness under fire."

"That implies that until now--at least--he was in doubt."

"Grave doubt. I think he was almost ready to call it all a failure."

After a long silence Stuart Farquaharson spoke with a quiet of
resolution which held more feeling than could have been voiced by
vehemence.

"You have told me enough, Conscience. I will _not_ go. _You_ have tried
it with a desperate sincerity for three years--and it's a failure. You
have fought splendidly to vindicate the whole monstrous travesty, but it
can't be vindicated. It was doomed by every law of nature from the
start. We have now not only the right but the duty to rectify it, and to
rectify it together. You must divorce him."

"Divorce him!" The woman came to her feet and her eyes were starry with
a light that held a momentary flicker of scorn. "Divorce him when his
whole married life has been dedicated to the single purpose of trying to
make me happy ... when his only fault is that he has failed to interest
me?... Divorce him because we find too late that we still love each
other? If that is your only counsel, Stuart, you have nothing to
offer--but treason!"

"Conscience," he reminded her as a deep flush spread over the face that
had been pale, "so long as there remained a chance for you to succeed, I
made no suggestion that might unsettle you. My love for you has never
changed or wavered. It has incalculably grown. But, until to-night, have
I in any manner assumed the guise or asked the prerogatives of a lover?"

"Until to-night," she retorted, "I've never appealed to you for help.
Now I tell you of fires I'm trying to control--and you are only setting
matches to them."

"I am begging you to conquer this undertow of your heredity, and to see
things as they are, without any spirit of false martyrdom. I am calling
upon you to rouse yourself out of this fanatic trance--and to live! By
your own confession you love me in every way that a woman of flaming
inner fires can love. Under all your glacial reserve and perfect
propriety you have deeps of passion--and you know that _he_ can never
stir them. You say you will conquer this love for me. Have you overcome
it in these three years? What has this travesty of a hopeless marriage
given you, but a pallid existence of curbed emotions and a stifled
life?"

He had begun speaking with a forced calmness that gave a monotony to his
voice, but the sincerity of his plea had brought a fire into it that
mingled persuasively with the soothing softness of the voice itself.
Conscience felt herself perilously swept by a torrent of thoughts that
were all of the senses; the stifled senses of which he had just spoken,
straining hard for release from their curbing. His splendid physical
fitness; the almost gladiatorial alertness of his body; the glowing
eagerness of his face were all arguing for him with an urgency greater
than his words. This was the man who should have been her mate.

Perhaps it would be better to end the interview; to tell him that she
could no longer listen to assaults upon her beliefs and her
marriage--but she had come out here with the militant determination to
fight the matter out, and it was not yet fought out. She must let him
make his attacks and meet them without flinching. Into the tones with
which she began her reply came the softness and calmness of a dedication
to that purpose. Stuart recognized the tone with something like despair.
Against this antagonism of the martyr spirit he might break all his
darts of argument, to no avail.

"Do you suppose you have to tell me," she asked, "what is lacking in my
life or how hungry I am for it? I knew years ago what it was to love you
... and I've dreamed of it ever since. But all your appeal is to
passion, Stuart--none of it to the sense of fair play. I'm neither
sexless nor nerveless. When I held you off a little while ago, my hands
on your breast could feel the beat of your heart--and the arms that kept
us apart were aching to go round your neck. I've sat back there in the
window of my room night after night and watched you walking in the
pines, and I've wanted to go out and comfort you.... I've been hungry
for the touch of your hand on mine ... for everything that love can
give."

It was difficult for him to stand there under the curb of self-restraint
and listen, but as yet he achieved it. And in the same quiet, yet
thrilling voice she continued: "Your coming here brought a
transformation. The fog lifted and I've been living the life of a
lotus-eater--but now I've got to go back into the fog. Every argument
you've made is an argument I've made to myself--and I know it's just
temptation."

"Don't you see, dearest, that you are utterly deluding yourself?" The
fervency of combat came with his words. "Don't you see that all that is
finest and most vital in you, is that part that's in protest? Don't you
see that you are just reacting in every crisis to the cramped puritanism
you once denounced?"

"Puritanism!" she exclaimed, and the gentle manner of her speech
stiffened suddenly into a timbre more militant.

"Call it what you like. Yes, I _am_ a puritan woman, Stuart, and I thank
God for the heritage--if I am always to have to fight these battles
against passionate rebellion. I know puritanism now for what it is. I
guess Christ might have been called a puritan, when Satan took him up on
the high mountain and offered him the world." She paused only a moment,
then swept on with the fervor of an ultimatum. "And since you choose to
put it that way," she looked at him with eyes full of challenge, "I mean
to stay the puritan woman. You've come with your southern fire and the
voluptuous voice of your southern pleading, to unsettle me and make me
surrender my code. You can't do it, Stuart. I love you, but I can still
fight you! If that's the difference between us--the difference between
puritan and cavalier--there's still a line that mustn't be crossed. To
cross it means war. If you fire on Fort Sumpter, Fort Sumpter can still
fire back."

"How am I firing on Fort Sumpter?" he asked and she quickly responded.
"You're assailing my powers of endurance. You're trying to make me take
the easy course of putting desire above duty. You're trying to make me
forget the ideals of the men at Valley Forge--the things that your
ancestors and mine fought for when they went to war to build a nation:
before they fought each other to disrupt one--loyalty and
steadfastness!"

"Conscience," he said with the momentary ghost of a smile, "you are
speaking from your father's pulpit. That is all an excellent New England
sermon--and about as logical."

"At least it's sincere," she retorted, "and I think sincerity is what I
need most just now."

The kindled glow of the woman turned fighter gave an enhanced beauty to
the face into which the Virginian looked.

"Now certainly," he declared, "I shall not go. You say I have fired on
Fort Sumpter--very well, I'll fight it out. You accuse me of assaulting
your duty, but I'm trying to rouse you to a bigger conception of duty. I
see in this idea to which you are sacrificing yourself as distorted a
sense of honor as the suttee's, who ascends her husband's funeral pyre
and wraps herself in a blanket of fire. I see in it, too, the dishonor
of a woman's giving her body to one man while her heart belongs to
another. By your own confession you are part Eben Tollman's and part
mine. He holds only a pallid and empty allegiance: I hold, and held
first, your heart, a splendid, vital heart.... I can offer you life ...
and you belong to me!"

"Then you mean--that I must fight you, too--as well as myself?"

"I mean that you must, if that's the only way you can find yourself.
I've asked you to divorce him--and let me be your husband. You refuse,
but I have the right to take back what has been stolen from me, and I
mean to do it. From this moment on I am avowedly and openly your
lover--with all that that means. You have challenged me to attack. I
mean to attack."

Conscience drew back a step and her hands came up to her bosom as she
regarded him, at first with unbelief, and then with an anger that made
her seem an incarnation of warring principle.

"I sought the wrong ally," was all she said, but she said it with such a
cold ring of contempt that the man's answer broke out almost fiercely.

"You don't know it, Conscience, but you are still the deluded daughter
of men who burned witches in the name of God; people who could sing
psalms through their noses, but couldn't see beyond them; men who
exalted a dreary bigotry above all else. I inherited traditions as well
as you. My fathers have committed homicide on the field of honor and put
woman on a pedestal. They made of her a being, half-angel and half-toy,
but I refuse to be bound by their outworn ideas.

"Nowadays we prate less priggishly about honor because it is no longer a
word with a single meaning." He paused a moment, then went on in a
climax of vehemence. "From this moment on your New England code and my
inherited chivalry may be hanged on the same gibbet! This revered temple
of your marriage is just as sacred to me as a joss house--and I mean to
invade it--and break its false idols--if I can!"

Conscience stood for a brief space with her hands clenched on the rail
that guarded the edge of the float. She was almost hypnotically
conscious of his eyes burning with a sort of wildness into her own, but
when she spoke it was in a manner regally unafraid--even disdainful.

"You are quite welcome to break them if you can," she declared, and the
next moment he saw her going with a superbly firm carriage up the
path--and found himself alone and tremendously shaken.




CHAPTER XXVI


For the best part of an hour Stuart sat confusedly looking out across
the cove. Then with the wish for some stimulating fillip he stripped and
plunged into the sobering coolness of the water. Even after that he did
not return to the house, but struck out aimlessly across the hills with
little realization of direction and small selection of course. Once or
twice a blackberry trailer caught his foot and he lurched heavily,
recovering himself with difficulty.

Led by the fox-fire of restlessness, he must have tramped far, for the
moon went down and curtains of fog began to draw in, obscuring hills and
woods in a wet and blinding thickness. From the saturated foliage came a
steady dripping as though there had been heavy rain, and far away, from
the life-saving station, wailed the hoarse, Cassandra voices of the
sirens. At last physical fatigue began to assert itself with a clearing
of the brain and he turned his steps back toward his starting point. He
was trusting now to his instinctive sense of direction, because the
woods and thickets were fog-choked and his course was groping and
uncertain. A half mile from the house he set his foot on a treacherously
shelving rock, and found himself rolling down a sharp embankment, with
briars tearing his face and hands. Throwing out his right arm, in
defense of his eyes, he felt his hand bend back at the wrist with so
violent a pain that a wave of nausea swept over him and for a moment he
was content to lie where he had fallen, listening to the sobbing drip of
the pines. When he rose and started on again his right hand hung with
fingers that he could not move and the fever of swollen pain in its
wrist. But when he drew near the house he saw that there was still a
light in the window of Conscience's room and that she herself sat,
framed against, the yellow candle glow, in an almost trance-like
attitude of stress. She was silhouetted there, no longer self-confident
and defiant but a figure of wistful unhappiness. From the raw wetness,
her bare shoulders and arms were unprotected. Her hair fell in heavy
braids over the sheer silk of her night dress and her bosom was
undefended against the bite of the fog's chill.

At breakfast the next morning Eben Tollman, who was usually the least
talkative at table, found that the burden of conversation fell chiefly
upon himself.

Conscience was pale and under her eyes were dark smudges of
sleeplessness while Farquaharson kept his right hand in his lap and
developed an unaccustomed taciturnity. But Eben appeared to notice
nothing and stirred himself into an admirable and hospitable vivacity.

His concert of last night had borne fruit, he thought.

If his knowledge of actual occurrences was sketchy his imagination had
filled all the blank spaces with colorful substitutes for fact.

"Stuart," he demanded suddenly, "what's happened to you? You've hurt
your right hand and you're trying to conceal it."

"It's nothing much," explained Farquaharson lamely. "I went for a walk
last night and when the fog came up I strayed over an embankment--and
had a rather nasty fall."

"My dear boy!" exclaimed Eben Tollman in a tone of instant solicitude.
"We must call the doctor at once. But you must have been out all night.
The fog didn't gather until two o'clock this morning."

Farquaharson only nodded with an uncommunicative smile, and Conscience
spoke in quiet authority.

"If it's a sprain, I can do as much for it as a doctor could. Wait for
me on the terrace, Stuart, I'll be out in a few minutes with hot water
and bandages."

A half hour later, grumbling remonstrances which were silently
overruled, the Virginian found himself in efficient hands.

The fog had not lasted long and this morning the hills sparkled with a
renewed freshness. A row of hollyhocks along the stone wall nodded
brightly, and the sun's clarity was a wash of transparent gold.

Stuart Farquaharson studied the profile of the woman who was busying
herself with bandages and liniments.

The exquisite curve of her cheek and throat; the play of an escaped curl
over her pale temple and the sweet wistfulness of her lips: none of
these things escaped him.

"It's not necessary, after all, that you should go away, Stuart," she
announced with a calm abruptness to Farquaharson's complete
mystification. "Last night I was in the grip of something like hysteria,
I think. Perhaps I'm still young enough to be influenced by such things
as music and moonlight."

"And this morning?"

"This morning," she spoke in a matter-of-fact voice as she measured and
cut a strip of bandage, "I am heartily ashamed of my moment of panic.
This morning I'm not afraid of you. Whether you go or stay, I sha'n't
give way again."

"Conscience," protested the man with an earnestness that drew his brow
into furrows of concentration, "last night I said many things that were
pure excitement. After years of struggling to put you out of my life and
years of failure to do it, after believing absolutely that it had become
a one-sided love, I learned suddenly that you loved me, too. The
summed-up spell of all those hungry times was on me last night. Can't
you make allowances for me?"

"I have made allowances," she assured him steadily. "I've made so
many--that I'm no longer angry with you. You see I spent most of last
night thinking of it. We were both moon mad. Only now--we can't go on
pretending to be Platonic friends any more. When war has been declared
comradeships between enemies have to end."

"You are both very fair and very unfair, Conscience," suggested Stuart
Farquaharson thoughtfully. "I said some wild things--out there in the
moonlight--with my senses all electrified by the discovery of your
love--and yet--"

He broke off, and Conscience, rising from her finished task, stood
gazing out with musing eyes over the slopes of the hills. Suddenly she
said:

"I realize now that if you'd gone away just because I asked it, we would
always have felt that nothing was settled; that instead of winning my
battle I'd just begged off from facing it."

"Among all the unconsidered things I said last night, Conscience,"
Stuart began again, "there were some that I must still say. It was like
the illogical thread of a dream which is only the distortion of a waking
thought-flow. The essence of my contention was sound."

"A soundness which advises me to divorce my husband and marry you," she
demurred with no more anger than she might have felt for a misguided
child, "though he and I both made vows--and he has broken none of
them."

"You made those vows," he reminded her, "under the coercion of fears for
your father. You distorted your life under what you yourself once called
a tyranny of weakness."

"And to remedy all that you counsel an anarchy of passion." She seemed
to be speaking from a distance and to be looking through rather than at
the horizon.

"I believe that even now my father knows--and that he's no more
willing to have me surrender my convictions--than when he was on earth."

"And I believe," the response came reverently but promptly, "that where
he is now his eyes are no longer blinded by any scales of mistake. If he
looks down on us from the Beyond, he must see life with a universal
breadth of wisdom."

For an instant tears misted her eyes and then she asked in a rather
bewildered voice, "Stuart, stripped of all its casuistry, what is your
argument except a plea for infidelity?"

"Revolt against that most powerful and vicious of all autocracies," he
confidently declared, "the tyranny of weakness over strength!"

But Conscience Tollman only shook her head and smiled her unconverted
scepticism.

"Was it being true to such an ideal as that which made a certain king in
Israel send a certain captain into the front of the battle, because he
loved that captain's wife? I have listened to all this argument, because
I wanted you to feel sure that I wasn't afraid to hear it. But it can
never persuade me. And what have you to say of the trust of a husband
who accepts you in his house as a member of his family--without
suspicion?"

"I say that he has had his chance in all fairness and has failed. I say
that during the years of this ill-starred experiment you have fought
valiantly to make him win. I have, at least, not interfered by act or a
word. If he had not arranged this meeting I should never have done
so--and since he is responsible for our being brought together now he
must face the consequences."

"Then your attitude of last night was not just moon madness, after all?"

"I mean to penetrate your life as far as I can and to recognize no
inner sanctum from which I am barred. He is the usurper and my love is
not tame enough to submit. I am your lover because, though your words
deny me, your heart invites me. I'm coming to stay."

This time the woman's eyes did not kindle into furious or contemptuous
fires, but her voice was so calmly resolute that Stuart felt his own had
been a blustering thing.

"Then, Stuart, I'm still the puritan woman. I'm asking no quarter--and I
have no fears. Attack as soon and as often and as furiously as you wish.
I'm ready."

       *       *       *       *       *

Eben Tollman noted that under the steady normality and evenness of his
wife's demeanor there stirred an indefinable current of nervousness,
since the evening of the tryst at the float and that the whole manner of
the visitor toward himself was tinctured with a new brusqueness, as
though the requirement of maintaining a cordial pretense were becoming
over tedious.

These were mere bits of chaff in a light breeze and he flattered himself
that it had taken his own perspicacity to detect them. A less capable
diagnostician might have passed them by unobserved. But to him they
marked a boundary.

Alone in his study, the husband ruminated upon these topics. Here he had
sanctuary and the necessity of a hateful dissimulation was relaxed. He
could then throw aside that mantle of urbanity which he must yet endure
for a while before other eyes. He formed the habit of gazing up at the
portrait of the ancestor who had died in the revolution and almost
fancied that between his own eyes and those painted on the canvas there
was an interchange of understanding.

He was in truth a man who had already parted company with reason while
still invested in its perfect masquerade. His bitter and unfounded
suspicions, denied all outer expression, had undermined his sanity--and
any one who had seen him in these moments of sequestered brooding would
have recognized the mad glitter in his eyes.

"The pair of them are as guilty as perdition," he murmured to himself,
"and I am God's instrument to punish." Punish--but how? That was a
detail which he had never quite thought out, but at the proper time the
Providence which commanded him would also show him a way. But before
punishment there must be an overt act--an episode which clinched,
beyond peradventure, the sin of these two hypocrites before his hand
could fall in vengeance.

These reflections were interrupted one afternoon by a rap on the study
door to which, for the space of several seconds, Eben Tollman did not
respond.

He was meanwhile doing what an actor does before his dressing-room
mirror. Eben Tollman alone with his monomania and Eben Tollman in the
company of others were separate personalities and to pass from one to
the other called for making up; for schooling of expression and the
recovery of a suave exterior. In this process, however, he had from
habit acquired celerity, so the delay was not a marked one before, with
a decorous face, unstamped of either passion or brooding, he opened the
door, to find Conscience waiting at the threshold.

"Come in, my dear," he invited. "I must have inadvertently snapped the
catch. I didn't know it was locked."

"There's a man named Hagan here who wants to see you, Eben," announced
Conscience. "He didn't seem inclined to tell me his business beyond
saying that it was important."

"Hagan, Hagan?" repeated the master of the house with brows drawn in
well-simulated perplexity. "I don't seem to recognize the name. Do you
know him?"

"I never saw him before. Shall I send him in?"

"I suppose it might be as well. Some business promoter, I fancy."

But as Conscience left, Tollman's scowl returned.

"Hagan," he repeated with a soft but wrathful voice to himself. "The
blackmailer!"

His face bore a somewhat frigid welcome, when almost immediately the
manager of the Searchlight Investigation Bureau presented himself.

Mr. Hagan had the appearance of one into whose lap the horn of plenty
has not been recently or generously tilted, and the clothes he wore,
though sprucely tailored, were of another season's fashion.

But his manner had lost none of its pristine assurance and he began his
interview by laying a hand on the door-knob and suggesting: "The
business I want to take up with you, Mr. Tollman, had best be discussed
out of hearing of others."

Tollman remained unhospitably rigid and his eyes narrowed into an
immediate hostility.

"Whatever business we may have had, Mr. Hagan," he suggested, "has for
some time been concluded, I think."

But on this point the visitor seemed to hold a variant opinion.
Momentarily his face abandoned its suavity and the lower jaw thrust
itself forward with a marked hint of belligerency.

"So?" he questioned. "Nonetheless there is business that can be done at
the present time in this house. It's for you to say whether I do it with
you--or others."

Tollman's scowl deepened and the thought presented itself that he had
been unwise in ever giving such a dishonest fellow the hold upon him of
a prior employment. But he controlled himself and invited curtly, "Very
well. Sit down."

Mr. Hagan did so, and this time it was Mr. Tollman himself who somewhat
hastily closed and latched the door which protected their privacy of
interview, while the guest broached his topic.

"The best way to start is with the recital of a brief story. You may
already have read some of it in the newspapers but the portion that
concerns us most directly wasn't published. It's what is technically
called the 'inside story.'"

"The best way to start, Mr. Hagan," amended Tollman with some severity
of manner, "is that which will most quickly bring you to the point and
the conclusion. I'm a very busy man and can spare you only a short
time."

But despite that warning the detective sat for a moment with his legs
crossed and gave his attention to the deliberate kindling of a cigar.
That rite being accomplished to his satisfaction, he settled back and
sent a cloud of wreathed smoke toward the ceiling before he picked up
again his thread of conversation.




CHAPTER XXVII


Even when he had comfortably settled himself Mr. Hagan's initial comment
was irrelevant.

"Your place is decidedly changed, Mr. Tollman. Improved I should call
it."

"Thank you. Please state your business."

"On one of the cross streets in the forties in New York City there's a
hotel called the Van Styne with a reputation none too savory and
downtown there's a sort of mission organization in which a minister,
name of Sam Haymond, takes an interest. He's a live-wire reform worker."

"Indeed?" Eben Tollman's monosyllabic rejoinder conveyed the impression
of an interest unawakened, but Mr. Hagan was not so soon discouraged.

"Doesn't interest you yet? Maybe it will later. Recently a girl by the
name of Minnie Ray fell out of a window at the hotel I'm speaking
of--the Van Styne. It killed her."

"Yes?"

"I thought likely you'd read the item in the papers. The coroner's
verdict was accident."

"Yes?" These brief, interrogatory replies might have proved dampening to
some narrators. Not so with Mr. Hagan. He nodded his head, then he
asserted briefly. "But as a matter of fact the Ray woman committed
suicide."

"You disagree, it appears, with the coroner."

"I have the facts--and it was seen to that the coroner didn't."

"What bearing has this deplorable episode on our alleged business, Mr.
Hagan?" asked Tollman, and the detective raised an index finger.

"That's what I'm coming to. The Ray woman is only incidental--like
others that get adrift in New York and end up in places like the Van
Styne. Anyhow I'm not starting out to harrow you with any heart-interest
stories.... I'm here to talk business, but you know how it sometimes is,
Mr. Tollman. A share or two of stock worth par or less may swing the
control of a corporation ... and a piece of human drift like Minnie
might turn out to be a human share of stock."

"I'm afraid I don't follow you, sir."

"Don't let that trouble you. You will. Minnie Ray didn't have much
education when she came on east from Indiana and I expect she didn't
have a very heroic character either. But until she went to the Van
Styne, she seems to have been straight."

"There is always an 'until' in these cases," observed Mr. Tollman dryly
and the head of the "Searchlight" nodded his acquiescence.

"Sure there is. She was young and what the rounders call a good-looking
chicken. At first she was inclined to be haughty and upstage when men
she worked for got fresh with her which didn't help her to get jobs--or
hold them. So she hit the toboggan. She spent what little money she
brought with her and after that it was the old story. So far as Minnie
could figure prospects there wasn't a thing she had or a thing she could
do that would bring in money--except the one asset that wasn't on the
market: her virtue. As I said I didn't start out to tell a sob story,
but in this business we see quite a few cases like that. It's usually
just a question of how long these girls can hold out before they sell
the one thing that's saleable. Maybe you can't blame them at that. If
virtue is measured that way--and it's a practical way--the 'until,' as
you call it, came to Minnie at the end of quite a siege."

Mr. Tollman's impatience grew into actual fretfulness as his visitor
delayed coming to the point of his proposition.

"It seems to have been a case," went on the detective unhurriedly, "of
dropping down the scale for her until she was up against the question of
diving into East River--or hypothecating the one asset."

"How about this mission that you speak of? Didn't it help her?"

"All it could--but that wasn't enough. It got her one or two temporary
jobs--but there were hundreds on its lists and it had to spread charity
thin. So for the time being they were trying down there to keep her
courage up, and that was about all they could do."

"I will take the address of this mission and send a contribution,"
announced Mr. Tollman benignly. "I suppose your business here is
soliciting that--is it not?"

"Yes--it is not," exploded Mr. Hagan emphatically with a smile that
savored of a snarl, "though I don't doubt they'd appreciate it. Well,
there was a cold-blooded party laying siege to Minnie. He was one of the
rat-faces that you can see any time you stroll along Broadway, and up to
date she'd been refusing to play with him. But he had the chance to put
money in her way--and all he asked was that she'd 'be nice to him.'"

"You put things very bluntly--I might almost say, vulgarly, Mr. Hagan,"
objected Eben Tollman with a fastidious shiver and his visitor flashed
his answer back in a manner of menacing aggressiveness.

"It strikes you that way, does it? Perhaps you know a way to talk about
things like this that isn't vulgar. Personally, I don't. Well, the long
and the short of it is this, after so many weeks of fighting this thing
out with herself Minnie Ray reached the point where she fell for a
dinner with the rat-faced gentleman at the Van Styne, and after he'd
opened some wine--" The raconteur shrugged his shoulders. "Well, you see
she wasn't accustomed to drinking bubbles and topping it off with brandy
and benedictine."

"The climax of your story lacks the full force of surprise," Eben
reminded his guest. "You forecast the result at the commencement."

"No, I haven't, gotten to the result yet. This is only one stage of it.
It happened that the Rev. Sam Haymond heard of a job as a lingerie model
in a department store, that would fit Minnie nicely, and he rushed
around to her room to carry the glad tidings. The landlady said that
Minnie had gone to the Van Styne with a gentleman friend--so the dominie
took a taxi and went there, too. You see he didn't know until he got
into the lobby and saw all them red lights and heard some little of the
conversation there, that it wasn't a _regular_ hotel. But there he
was--so he had her paged."

"Did he find her?"

"He did not. The clerk didn't mention that she was in the house and of
course 'Jim Smith and wife' on a register didn't mean much to him.... So
the Rev. Haymond didn't connect with Minnie--and Minnie didn't connect
with the job. But the rat-faced gentleman who had left her there after a
pleasant evening and was on his way out heard her real name paged. He
beat it back to inquire what in the Sam Hill Haymond wanted with her? He
found her in the sort of despair that would come to a girl like that at
a time like that. What you call the 'until' Minnie probably called the
'too-late.' Maybe she guessed what the minister had cone for and what
she had just missed. Anyhow her 'gentleman-friend' warned her that there
had been a raid on a place nearby and that downstairs they were having a
scare-- He said that he himself was leaving and she'd better be
careful. Well, she went clear out of her head--and she jumped out of
the window. It was the fifth floor, you see."

Mr. Tollman's face was gravely serious as he put a question which might
have seemed less near the kernel of the matter than several others, "Why
did they fear a raid?"

"They sometimes happen, you know. The police get periodically active.
The Van Styne has been pinched before." Mr. Hagan rose from his seat and
added with the solicitude of one wishing to make the _amende honorable_,
"However, Mr. Tollman, I believe that was before you owned the place."

The anxious anticipations of the host during the course of the story had
not quite prepared him against the bluntness of this announcement, and
his surprise vented itself in a sudden start. But immediately recovering
his poise, he spoke coldly. He even smiled.

"Now that your story is ended, what is the real matter that brought you
here?"

"I represent others," Mr. Hagan informed him evenly, "who, to quote your
own words on a previous occasion, prefer remaining unnamed. If that
hotel should happen to be raided and its record should be
published--together with the name of the owner--it might prove an
embarrassment to you. I'm authorized--under certain conditions--to offer
you immunity against that unpleasant chance."

Eben Tollman rose from his seat. He stood for a moment gazing into the
eyes of the portrait above the mantel and then he spoke with a measured
dignity:

"Mr. Hagan, your proposition is just about what I fancied it would
be--an attempt at blackmail. But it's abortive. I do own the property of
which you speak, but in understanding so precisely the sort of business
done there, you have the advantage of me. This renting has all been
conducted through agents whom I seem to have trusted unduly. You _have_
done me a service in acquainting me with the facts and I thank you for
your information which, I take it is authentic. I shall at once rid
myself of such a despicable property. I shall also place in the hands of
the District Attorney of New York, the facts you have given me, and
suggest that he call upon you to ratify them." The speaker paused
impressively and then swept virtuously into his peroration:

"To the anonymous gentlemen who offer me immunity against a raid--for a
consideration--you may say that I will conduct the matter through the
District Attorney's office. As for yourself, Mr. Hagan, permit me to add
that I regard you as a most extraordinary scoundrel with whom I could
have nothing in common."

The detective, who had been thus conclusively defeated, continued to sit
with an attitude of composure, and spoke without chagrin:

"Hard words ain't going to kill me, and as for the balance of it I don't
most generally lay all my cards on the table at once. You say you'll rid
yourself of this property and that you didn't know how it was being
used. All right, but why didn't you know? You could of known, couldn't
you, if you hadn't taken damned good care _not_ to know? Do you think
that story will stand scrutiny with the public or with your wife?"

"Be good enough," cautioned Tollman ominously, "to leave my wife's name
out of this talk. It's hardly an appropriate combination."

"No," assented Hagan with readiness, "and it's going to be less so
before I finish. How do you expect to rid yourself of the Van Styne? By
selling it, at a profit, to somebody else that'll go on getting rich on
other Minnie Rays? And when you've done that are you going to carry the
same policy of high-minded reform through the rest of your property in
New York find Boston? I've got a list of the lot."

"I'm through answering questions," asserted Tollman with finality.
"You've made your bluff and it has failed."

"Just as you say." The detective rose and stretched himself luxuriously.
"By the way as I came in, I passed your wife on the porch, and I
happened to notice that Mr. Farquaharson was visiting you."

Eben Tollman had started toward the door, but this remark gave him
pause.

"He didn't recognize me of course," mused Mr. Hagan, "but then in a way
we are old acquaintances, I suppose--I shadowed that bird some time."

"What do you mean?"

Mr. Hagan's manner underwent an abrupt transformation. He wheeled and
faced his host with a dangerous glint in his eye.

"This is what I mean! You called me a blackmailer and a scoundrel just
now. Sure I'm a crook! We're both of us crooks, but I admit it and you
don't. So to my thinking, I'm honester than you. I came to you first.
Next I'm going to Stuart Farquaharson out there and to your wife.... Mr.
Farquaharson might be interested to know that you hired me once to try
to frame him. Your wife might be interested to know that you hired me to
send her those scandal magazines that roasted him. They both might be
interested to know where you got your money from. Now it's just a
question of who I do business with, but before I leave here I do
business with _somebody_."

As Mr. Hagan declared himself his lower jaw came more protuberantly
forward and his eyes blazed with an increasing truculence. And in the
exact degree of his growing aggression, Mr. Tollman quailed and became
clammily moist of brow.

"Perhaps, Mr. Hagan," he tentatively suggested, "you had better sit
down again. Possibly we aren't quite through yet after all."

The detective reseated himself and his composure returned.

"Frankness is always best," he vouchsafed complacently. "I thought when
we once came to understand each other, we'd get along."

       *       *       *       *       *

While Eben Tollman was entertaining his unwelcome guest in the study his
wife and Stuart Farquaharson were having tea on the terrace. Upon the
recent combat of their wills there seemed to have succeeded a calmness
of aftermath. If Stuart had as Conscience expressed it "fired on Fort
Sumpter" his subsequent conduct had in a fashion belied his vehemence of
pronunciamento. Now his artillery of resource was silent. Perhaps the
weariness and heightened pallor of the woman's face, which gave it an
ethereal quality, made an appeal upon the chivalry his postulates
denied.

This afternoon the entire landscape carried a tuneful message and a
brilliant sparkle and play of colors. It was a day for peace and
laughter, rather than for heart-bruising discussion--and they were still
young enough to seize upon and avail themselves of such respites.

Farquaharson laid aside the manuscript of an unfinished novel, with
which Conscience had been assisting him as critic and amanuensis, and
let his eyes dwell on her face.

She was wearing a smock of rose-colored silk which fell like drapery,
rather than mere clothing, about her and seemed to kindle a delicate
echo of its pinkness in the ivory of her cheeks. For a little while the
author forgot his work.

"Dearest," he said suddenly, and though he couched his words in form
and voice of the whimsical they held the essence of entire sincerity, "I
hate to seem unduly impressionable or sentimental--but there's something
rather marvelous about you. You'd make a man--even a hardened one--want
to go down on his knees before you in worship and at the same time you'd
make a timid one want to dare hellfire to take you in his arms. In
short, you're a secret and a riddle: an enticement and a sobering
inspiration."

The woman's cheeks momentarily reflected more warmly the rosy color of
her smock and to her eyes came a mischievous riffle.

"Or to say all that more briefly, Stuart," she replied in a
disconcertingly matter-of-fact voice, "I'm a woman--and incidentally you
mustn't drop into the habit of calling me dearest."

The old boyhood smoldering blazed briefly in the man's face, but cleared
at once into a smile.

"You were criticizing the woman psychology of my heroine, I believe," he
said calmly, lifting the neglected manuscript in his one good hand.
"What's wrong with her?"

"She's mid-Victorian. She's not modern," ruled the critic. "Her virtue
is just a sugary saintliness that doesn't ring true. Any real woman in
her circumstances would feel more disgraced by her marriage than by a
divorce."

Farquaharson raised his brows, then his laugh rang out with a somewhat
satirical merriment.

"And this from you! You admit in fiction the exact truths that you deny
in life."

"But your lady was tricked into marriage in the first place," responded
Conscience with spirit. "You show me half the reason that woman had and
I'll start my lawyer filing a petition the same day. I'll go further
than that." Her eyes were twinkling since she meant to treat all these
allusions so lightly as to disarm his own seriousness. "As a
self-inflicted penalty I'll marry you."

"I wonder if you would."

"On my word of honor, and meanwhile our tea is getting cold. One lump,
isn't it?"

He nodded; then, as he watched the deftness with which her hands made a
pretty ceremony of pouring tea, he inquired: "Have I seen that ring
before--the opal with diamonds?"

"I don't believe you have. Eben gave it to me last Christmas."

"And you're not afraid of the opal's ill-luck?"

"I love them enough to take the chance. Haven't I ever shown you my
others--there's quite a collection of them."

"No."

"They're in the safe. I'll get Eben to open it as soon as Mr. Hagan
leaves."

Teasingly the man inquired, "Doesn't your husband trust you with the
combination?"

Conscience flushed. Her companion had touched a sensitive nerve. This
was one of the details that went into the summary of Eben's excluding
her from his business life, and it had hurt her.

"I can't ever master it somehow," she evaded, and as she spoke Eben
Tollman ushered Mr. Hagan out upon the terrace.

As stranger and host passed out Stuart fancied that he detected in
Tollman's manner a certain eagerness to speed the parting guest and when
the visitor had gone, Eben withdrew at once to his sanctum, declining a
cup of tea. The bad half hour had shaken him and sent his thoughts
coursing in channels of apprehension. The past was refusing to lie dead
and he found himself thinking of what might occur if two wisely
intercepted letters should ever fall into the wrong hands.

They lay securely immured in the safe, but he had overheard the teasing
reference to his withholding, from his wife, the combination--and it
vexed his anxiety. He treasured these trophies of his acumen and
victory, but palpably the time had arrived for their sacrifice.

He reconsidered an impulse to lock himself in. Once to-day he had
apologized for inadvertently throwing on the catch and a repetition
would seem pointed. The letters were in an envelope inscribed "S. F. &
C. W." and there would be no difficulty in finding them.

So Eben Tollman opened the safe, and unlocked a certain strong box
filled to overflowing with papers of divers sorts.

As he stood holding the tin dispatch case with its cover raised he heard
Stuart's voice beyond the threshold and it was a voice couched in a tone
of annoying and unthinking levity.

"Don't forget! If I prove a case as strong as my heroine's you will act
as you say she should act."

"It's a bargain," came the quick and laughing response. "I'm ready to
prove my faith by my works." Then as the pair appeared framed in the
door, Conscience explained, "Eben, I want to show Stuart my opals."

To Tollman it seemed a most untimely interruption. Possibly that was why
the fingers that held the box trembled, as he came around to his chair
at the desk and said shortly, "They're in the larger drawer at the
left."

As Conscience came over to the safe Stuart followed her until he stood
across the width of the desk from his host whom he regarded absently.
Then something quite unaccountable occurred. Mrs. Tollman, in putting
down the somewhat heavy metal tray containing her trinkets, let it slip,
so that it spilled its rings, and pins and necklaces on the desk
top--and as if responsive to her clumsiness in handling her treasures,
though really because of nervous tension, Eben started violently, and
the box which he held fell from his quaking hands, scattering papers in
a confused litter about the floor.

Instantly Tollman was on all fours retrieving, and the undignified
posture had the advantage of serving to conceal the wild terror of his
face; a terror such as may stamp itself upon the features of a man who
cannot swim and who has twice gone down.

As he searched in a feverish panic, pretending an impartial interest in
the generality of scattered documents, Eben was tortured by the
knowledge that Stuart and Conscience were searching, too, and a
conviction that if either of them found that envelope first, the legend
"S. F. & C. W." would prove sufficiently illuminating to require an
accounting.

Finally the elder man straightened up, and stood panting. The vital
package was still unfound. Stuart Farquaharson tossed a sheaf of ancient
bill receipts across the desk with the casual comment, "Well, that seems
to be the crop."

Over the harrowed visage of the host swept an almost felicitous wave of
relief and then, as abruptly, his cheeks changed color again, fading to
an ashen pallor tinged with greenish sickliness. In his eyes the light
appeared to die. He licked his lips and a palsy shook him like a violent
chill. The Virginian's eyes were still searching the floor, but his left
hand,--the uninjured one--rested lightly on the table, and as Mr.
Tollman looked he saw that the fingers were spread upon a yellowed
envelope, of which the exposed surface bore the clearly legible
inscription "S. F. & C. W."

And while the victim of terror stood, transfixed with his premonition of
crisis, Farquaharson also glanced down and, seeing the envelope, added:
"No--here's one more. It must have been lying here all the time."




CHAPTER XXVIII


To Tollman's eyes familiar with content and superscription, it was all
glaringly conspicuous. The initials seemed to stand out like headlines,
but Farquaharson was without suspicion and he saw only one more paper in
which his interest was most perfunctory. The whole issue had narrowed
now, Eben realized with a tension of fear which brought out sweat beads
on the pasty white of his face, to the hairbreadth narrowness of one
question. Would Stuart see the initials or would they escape his notice?

But the Virginian was not yet broken to the habit of being a cripple. He
could not remember that he must avoid the effort to use the right hand
which he had always used. Now he reached down and picked up the
envelope--still with the lettered surface turned up to sight--and
rapping still swollen knuckles on the desk top, he let the envelope fall
just as he raised it.

But this time it fell face down--and the perilous letters lay hidden.

Eben grabbed forward with such precipitate haste that Farquaharson
looked up in astonishment and for the first time recognized something of
the agitation which shook the other: the spasmodic panting of his breath
and the outstanding arteries on his temples. "Why, you are ill, man!" he
exclaimed. "What's the matter with you?"

Tollman made a supreme effort to rally his powers of self-control. The
envelope lay between them--but out of his own reach and that spelled the
wavering balance of suspense.

"This stooping after papers seems to have brought on a touch of
vertigo," he explained and he had the sense, costly in self-restraint,
to let his eagerly outstretched hand drop at his side, "Conscience, I
think I'll have a little brandy."

After his wife had gone he spoke again.

"Didn't you--have another paper, Stuart?" The question came casually
from the chair into which he had collapsed. "I might as well put it with
the rest while I'm waiting for the brandy."

"Yes, I'd forgotten it. Here it is," and the younger man handed back the
envelope--this time using his left hand.

Once more Tollman's luck had held good.

Later in the analysis of retrospect Stuart began to wonder at his host's
strange behavior until of idle speculation suspicion was born, but as to
that circumstance he held his counsel.

The last summer month brings to the Cape the August twister and the
August tide. The twister seems to be a simultaneous rushing in of
tornado-like winds from every quarter and a whirling bluster of elements
gone mad. And in that month the high tide is the highest in the year.

For the household of Eben Tollman as well as for the weather the season
seemed charged with the unquiet influences of equinox.

In the older man himself the currents of hatred and jealousy were rising
to a danger line of unbalanced deviltry and as for the two who still
responded to the nameless yet invincible clarion of youth, the elements
of passion and insurgency were awake, ready for an August twister and an
August tide.

Then there befell the household a series of coincidental labor problems
that left them all at once without servants. The chauffeur, who hated
his employer, was summarily discharged for drunken insolence. The cook
was taken dangerously ill and her sister, the housemaid, went with her
to her home at Provincetown. The gardener and outside man alone remained
on duty and since both of these came and went from a distance,
Conscience and Stuart found themselves promoted to kitchen and pantry.

       *       *       *       *       *

A day of bluster and storm had ended in a sunset of brilliant color,
which dyed the cloud-ramparted west with a victorious pageantry of
crimson and gold. The night would be different, for in the east the
moon, just climbing over the horizon, was a disc of pale tranquillity
dominating a symphony of blue and silver.

In the pantry, with windows giving to the east and west, Conscience was
washing dishes and Stuart, whose right hand was once more usable, stood
nearby drying them. Pausing, with her eyes first on the changing fires
of the west and then on the soft nocturne of the east, the woman spoke
softly:

"The sun and the moon are the same size, and the same distance above the
horizon. How differently they paint their pictures of the world."

Her companion only nodded.

While Eben Tollman contributed his part to the program of housekeeping
without servants, by manipulating the phonograph from the living-room,
Stuart had been studying the aproned figure at the sink.

Her face, in repose, held a pallid unrest of tried endurance, and
occasionally she paused in her task to listen, with unexpressed
nervousness, to the voluptuous swell of the music.

As he reached out for a rinsed plate their hands touched and she
started.

"Conscience," said the man thoughtfully, "you've been very studiously
avoiding me of late. I mean avoiding me when I could talk to you alone.
For all your boasts of self-confidence, you're afraid of me. Isn't that
true?"

"No," she said, "I'm only avoiding unnecessary battles." Suddenly her
voice became almost querulous. "That phonograph is getting on my nerves.
Aren't you sick of it?"

"Jack London wrote a story once," he replied calmly, "of a Klondike
prospector and his dog. Between them there was a feud of long-treasured
hatred."

Conscience glanced at him questioningly.

"What has that to do with Eben and the phonograph?" she inquired.

"The dog couldn't endure music. When a violin string spoke, he howled
his misery. It was as if the bow were being drawn across the rawness of
his own taut nerves.... That dish is ready for me, isn't it?"

She handed it to him, and he went on imperturbably: "The man would let
the violin strings cry out until the beast's howls of sheer agony
mingled with their strains. There came a time when the dog squared
accounts. Eben's music reminded me of the story."

Conscience turned off a water faucet and faced her companion
indignantly. She was inwardly trembling, with a nameless disquiet and
anxiety.

"Stuart," she exclaimed, "this campaign of vague accusation isn't a very
brave device and, in theory at least, you've always stood for fairness."

"I've ceased to believe in _his_ fairness," he told her promptly. "I
believe that what he thinks isn't fit to print and he's trying to drive
you, whether or no, into vindicating his rotten implications."

A piece of chinaware slipped from his hands and crashed on the floor and
so tense were the woman's nerves that a low scream escaped her lips.

The mail wagon passed the tin box down by the edge of the pine thicket
twice a day and the latest of these visits was between eight and nine
o'clock in the evening.

The household duties were finished before that and the three were
sitting on the terrace with a world of silver light and cobalt shadows
about them. That is to say, two of them sat there in silence while the
third came and went about his duties of changing records and needles and
the winding of the machine--for he still dedicated himself to
minstrelsy.

And in Conscience the germ of an idea which seemed trivial and foolish
was beginning to grow into a sort of obsession. Her nerves like those of
the dog in the story tightened into such rebellion under this music,
singing always of love, that she, too, wanted to cry out. Her head was
swimming with the untrustworthy sense of some cord of control snapped;
of a power or reason become unfocused; of a hitherto staunch morale
breaking.

At last, with the feeling that she could sit there no longer, she rose
abruptly from her chair. "I'm going down to get the mail," she
announced.

Both men rose, offering her escort, but she shook her head in determined
negation.

"No, thank you both, I don't need either of you."

Stuart watched her figure following the twisting thread of the path
among the apple trees, whose gnarled trunks made fantastic shapes in the
moonlight. Then he glanced at the stolid and seated figure of her
husband and his face darkened. When Eben essayed comment his visitor
vouchsafed replies in monosyllables so that conversation languished. At
last the younger man rose from his chair.

"I think, after all, I'll go down and walk back with her," he said and
Eben Tollman only nodded.

Leaving the house behind him, Stuart had silence except for the
occasional call of a whippoorwill, and as he drew nearer to the sleepy
darkness at the pines a clear and fragrant scent of honeysuckle came to
his nostrils.

He guessed that in this sudden withdrawal to the isolation of the firs,
Conscience had followed the same instinct that takes a wounded animal
off, to be alone with its pain. So he approached with a noiseless
caution abetted by the sound-deadening carpet of pine needles, searching
the shadows for her unannounced and at first vainly.

In the sea of moonlit brightness this strip of trees afforded a margin
of soft, almost sooty obscurity, save where here and there darts of
light fell through the raggedness of the foliage.

Finally he saw her. She was seated on a rounded bowlder and both her
hands were pressed tightly against her face. Her pose was rigid and
unmoving; an attitude of distress and high-keyed misery of spirit.

Her thoughts were her own and safe from penetration, but their tenor was
as obvious as though, instead of sitting alone in a stunned silence, she
were proclaiming her crisis in Hamlet's resonant soliloquy.

There was a droop of surrender in her usually gallant shoulders and a
limpness in her whole body which even the darkness did not entirely
conceal. Within herself she admitted that her resolution had come to the
condition of a stronghold so long besieged that it is no longer strong:
where only the grim spirit of holding out against odds is left to keep
the colors flying.

But perhaps if she could have a half hour of relief from the pitiful
counterfeit of strength she might develop a fresh power of resistance.
In all sieges there must be moments like that: moments when, if the
enemy only knew, a quick assault would end the fight. If the enemy did
not discover them, they passed without defeat.

Her young and splendid body seemed to her a temple out of which she had
driven the love god, the deity of motherhood and the glowing lights of
wholesome sex ... and where she had set up instead a pale allegiance of
soulless form. Her life seemed a thing of quenched torches and unlit
lamps.

Conscience Tollman was in a dangerous mood, and some of her belligerency
of spirit Stuart Farquaharson saw as he came quietly to her side and
spoke her name, gently, as one might speak to a sleep walker.

"Why did you come?" She looked at him a little wildly and her voice
shook. "I wanted to be alone."

"I was troubled about you," he said very gently. "You had been away so
long."

Her courage was almost prostrate, but it still had that resilient power
which rises from exhaustion for one effort more. There was in her the
spirit of the Phoenix, and realizing how clearly he would read defeat
in the limp droop of her shoulders, she straightened them, not abruptly,
but as one who has been sitting at ease draws up into a less careless
attitude upon the arrival of another. She even smiled and spoke with a
voice no longer tremulous.

"Yes, I did stay longer than necessary. The music bored me and down here
it was very quiet--and inviting."

"Conscience," he said seriously, "you were more than bored, you were
distracted."

But at that, she laughed almost convincingly. "Must one be distracted to
enjoy an occasional moment of solitude? It's the favorite recipe of
philosophers."

"Your attitude wasn't that of enjoying solitude. It was that of
despair."

"I was a little fagged. I'm all right now."

As if in demonstration of her assertion she rose with a dryad lightness
and stepped forward for inspection into a spot of moonlight, where she
stood illuminated--and smiling.

"Do I look like a victim of despair?" she challenged and the man, with
a quick, almost gasping intake of his breath, leaned toward her and
declared in a voice of passionate fervor, "To me you look like the
incarnation of heart's desire."

Now, her mirth was less convincing, but for a time she fenced gallantly,
adroitly, though with a waning remnant of resistance. It was a sword
play of wills, but the man attacked with a saber of tempestuous love,
and the woman defended herself with a weakening rapier of finesse. She
was desperately tired and her heart was not in the fight, so she grew
less lightning-like of thrust and less sure of parry as the play went
on.




CHAPTER XXIX


When they had talked for ten minutes Stuart abruptly exclaimed,
"Dearest, it was not far from this spot that you once told me you loved
me in every way you knew how to love: that you wanted to be, to me, all
that a woman could be to a man. Have you forgotten? I told you that my
love was always yours ... have you forgotten that?"

Her hands went spasmodically to her breast and her eyes glowed with the
fire of struggle. Suddenly the physical impulses, which she could not
control, deserted the rallying strength of her mind, and she trembled
visibly.

"The two men who say they love me," she broke out vehemently, "are
succeeding between them in driving me mad."

"Because," he as emphatically answered, "you are trying to reconcile a
true and a false allegiance--because--"

"This isn't a time," she broke in on him desperately, "for preaching
theories to me. I'm hardly sane enough just now to stand that."

"I'm not preaching," he protested. "I'm asserting that no amount of
bigotry can white-wash a living sepulcher."

"I told you I wanted to be alone.... I told you--" Her voice broke. "I
told you that I _must_ be alone."

"You defied me to attack when and where and how I chose," came his
instant rejoinder. "I'm fighting for your salvation from the undertow."

His eyes met hers and held them under a spell like hypnosis, and hers
were wide and futile of concealment so that her heart and its secrets
were at last defenseless.

"I--I will go back to the house," she said, and for the first time her
voice openly betrayed her broken self-confidence.

"_Can_ you go?" he challenged with a new and fiery assurance of tone.
"Don't you know that I can hold you here, without a word, without a
touch? Don't you realize that I can stretch out my arms and force you,
of your own accord, to come into them?"

She seemed striving to break some spell of lethargy, but she only
succeeded in swaying a little as she stood pallid and wraith-like in the
moonlight. Her lips moved, but she failed to speak.

"I will never leave you again." Farquaharson's voice leaped suddenly
with the elation of certain triumph. "Because you are mine and I am
yours. I said once with a boy's assurance that they might surround you
with regiments of soldiers but that I would come and claim you. Now I've
come. There is no more doubt. Husband or lover--you may decide--but you
are mine."

Her knees weakened and as she tried to retreat before his advance she
tottered, reaching out her hands with a groping uncertainty. It was then
that he caught her in his arms and crushed her close to him, conscious
of the wild flutter that went through her soft body; intoxicated by the
fragrant softness of the dark hair which he was kissing--and at first
oblivious to her struggle for freedom from his embrace.

"Stuart ... Stuart...!" she pleaded in the wildly agitated whisper of a
half-recovered voice. "Don't--for God's sake, don't!"

But as she turned up her face to make her final plea, he smothered the
words with his own lips upon hers.

For years she had dwelt for him on the most remote borderland of
unattainable dreams. Now her heart was throbbing against his own and he
knew exultantly that whatever her mind might say in protest, her heart
was at home there. In his brain pealed a crescendo of passion that
drowned out whispers of remonstrance as pounding surf drowns the cry of
a gull.

But at last her lips were free again and her panting protests came to
him, low but insistent. "Let me go--don't you see?... It's my last
chance.... The tide is taking me." Then feebly and in postscript, "I'll
call for help." But the man laughed. "Call, dearest," he dared her.
"Then I can break silence and be honest again. Do you think I'm not
willing to fight for you?"

The moment had come which she had faithfully and long sought to avoid:
the moment which nature must dominate. Even as she struggled, with an
ebbing strength of body and will she realized that in the wild moment of
his triumph she was a sharer. If he were to release her now she would
crumple down inertly at his feet. Almost fainting under the sweep of
emotion, her muscles grew inert, her struggles ended. The tide had taken
her.

Slowly, as if in obedience to a command from beyond her own initiative,
she reached up the arms that had failed to hold him off and clasped her
hands behind his head and when again their lips met hers were no longer
unresponsive. Slowly she said in a voice of complete surrender, "Take
me--my last gun is fired. I tried--but I lost--Now I can't even make
terms."

"You have won," he contradicted joyously. "You've conquered the
undertow. 'The idols are broken in the Temple of Baal.'"

She was still dependent upon the support of his arms: still too
storm-tossed and unnerved to stand alone and her words came faintly.

"I surrender. I am at your mercy.... There is in all the world nothing
you can ask that I can refuse you."

"You have chosen--finally?" he demanded and he spoke gravely, unwilling
that she should fail to understand. "There will be no turning back?"

"You have chosen--not I," she replied, her eyes looking up into his.
"But I accept ... your choice ... there will be no turning back."

"You are ready to repudiate, for all time this life ... Eben Tollman ...
the undertow? You will be big enough and strong enough to break these
shackles?"

"I am ready--" she said falteringly.

"And you will not feel that you have proven a traitor--to the memory of
your father?"

That was a hard question to ask, but it must be asked. He felt a shiver
run through her body and _he_ saw in her eyes a fleeting expression of
torture.

"I am ready," she repeated dully. Somehow he remembered with a shudder
hearing a newspaper acquaintance describe an execution. The poor wretch
who was the law's victim went to the chair echoing in a colorless
monotony words prompted into his ear by the priest at his side. Then he
heard her voice again.

"Are you through questioning me, Stuart? Because if you are ... I have
something to say."

"I am listening, dearest."

"You see you must understand. You have conquered. I have
surrendered--unconditionally. But it's not a victory to be very proud of
or a surrender to be proud of. Once I could have given you
everything--with a glory of pride--but not now." He had to bend his ear
to catch her words so faintly were they breathed. "I'm overwhelmed, but
not convinced. I'm ready to choose because your will has proven the
stronger--but I know that it's only a triumph of passion over right.
Some day we may both realize that--and hate each other."

"But you have chosen! You've risen above the bigotry of your blood!"

"No. I'm just conquered--whipped into submission. I told you you might
attack when you liked.... I thought I was strong ... and I wasn't. It
isn't a victory over my strength--but over my weakness. To-night I was
utterly helpless."

She seemed stronger now, and in a sudden bewilderment the man released
her and she stood before him pale but no longer inert.

"Then--then," he spoke with a new note of misgiving, "your decision is
not final after all?"

That word "helpless" was ringing like a knell over his late triumph. It
tinged victory with a hideous color of rapacity and brutality.

"Yes--it's final." She spoke slowly and laboriously. "It's final because
I've confessed my helplessness. If I rallied and resisted you to-night
... I know now ... that I'd surrender again to-morrow. There's only one
way I can be saved now."

"Saved--but you've saved yourself. What do you mean?"

"No, I've lost myself. You've won me ... but that's over. I can't fight
any more.... I tell you I'm helpless." After a moment she added with a
ghost of new-born hopefulness: "unless you can do my fighting for me."

"What would you have me do?" His words came flatly and with no trace of
their recent elation.

"It is for you to say, Stuart. I'm yours.... I have no right to ask
mercy ... when I lost ... when I love you so that ... that I can't
resist you."

"So, the code of your fathers still holds you," he said miserably. "The
undertow."

"I believe in what I've always believed," she told him. "Only I can't
go on fighting for it any longer. It's for you to decide now ... but you
inherited a code, too ... a code that has honor for its cornerstone, and
that might be able to put generosity above victory.... I wonder if it
could ... or if I'm worth the effort."

"Honor!" he exclaimed with deep bitterness. "A word with a thousand
meanings and no single meaning! A tyrant that smugly rides down thought
and tramps on happiness!"

"Honor has a single meaning for a woman." She laid both hands on his
shoulders and looked into his eyes. Her own held a mute appeal stronger
than words, and her voice was infinitely tender.

"Stuart, whatever you do, I love you. I love you in every way that I
know how to love ... but in the name of my God and yours and of my love
for you and your love for me ... I ask you--if you can--take me back to
the house--and don't enforce your victory."

The man straightened up and stood for a while, very drawn of feature and
pallid. He lifted a hand vaguely and the arm dropped again like dead
weight at his side. Without seeing them, he looked at the mirrored stars
in the fresh-water lake across the way and twice his lips moved, but
succeeded in forming no words.

At last his head came up with a sudden jerk and his utterance was
difficult.

"So you put it up to me, in the name of your God: to me who acknowledge
no God. You ask it in the name of generosity."

"No," she corrected him. "I'm not in a position to ask anything.... I
only suggest it. I'm too helpless even to plead."

She moved over a few paces and leaned for support against the gnarled
trunk of a scrub pine, watching him with a fascinated gaze as he stood
bracing himself against the inward storm under which his own world and
hers seemed rocking.

With the heavy and dolorous insistence of a muffled drum two thoughts
were hammering at his brain: her helplessness: his honor.

But he had never put honor underfoot, he argued against that voice; only
an arbitrary and little conception of honor.... Yet she could not rid
herself of that conception ... and she was helpless. If he took her now
into the possession of his life, he must take her, not with triumph but
as he might pick up a fallen dove, fluttering and wounded at his
feet--as an exquisitely fashioned vase which his hand had shattered.

He remembered their first meeting in Virginia and his wrath when she had
laughed at his narrative of the Newmarket cadets.

The Newmarket cadets!

His father had been one of them at fifteen. There came again to his
ears, across the interval of years, the voice of the old gentleman, so
long dead, telling that story in a house where traditions were strong
and hallowed.

Across a wheat field lay a Union battery which must be stormed and taken
at the bayonet's point. Wave after wave of infantry had gone forward and
broken under its belching of death. The line wavered. There must be a
steady--an unflinching--unit upon which to guide. The situation called
for a morale which could rise to heroism. General Breckenridge was told
that only the cadets from the Virginia Military Institute could do the
trick: the smooth-faced boys with their young ardor and their
letter-perfect training of the parade grounds. Appalled at the thought
of this sacrifice of children, the Commander was said to have exclaimed
with tears in his eyes, "Let them go then--and may God forgive me!"

And they had gone! Gone because there burned in their boyish hearts
this absurd idea that honor is a word of a single meaning: a meaning of
sacrifice. They had gone in the even unwavering alignment of a
competitive drill, closing-up, as those who fell left ugly gaps in their
formation, until those who did not fall had taken the gun which the
veterans had not been able to take.

That had been the honor of his fathers, the honor which he had been
declaring himself too advanced to accept blindly. Suddenly his boyhood
ideals and his mature ideas fell into the parallel of contrast--and
beside that which he had inherited, his acquired thought seemed tawdry.
Of course, charging a field gun was an easy and uncomplicated thing in
comparison with his own problem, but his father would have met the
larger demand, too, with the same obedience to simple ideas of honor.

His own contention had been right and Conscience's wrong. That he still
believed. So the spirit of the French Revolution had been perhaps a
forward-moving colossus of humanity: a triumph of right over
aristocratic decadence. And yet the picture of a slender queen going to
the guillotine in a cart, with her chin held high under the jeers of the
rabble, made the big thing seem small, and her own adherence to code
magnificent.

Slowly Stuart went back and spoke in tones of level resolution.

"To make war on you when you defied me was one thing ... to fight you
when you are helpless is another.... I wasn't fighting you then but the
rock-bound bigotries of your ancestors." He paused, finding it hard to
choose words because of the chaotic things in his mind.

She had confronted him with a splendid Amazonian spirit of war and a
declaration of strength which he could never break, and the cause for
which she had stood was the cause of a cramped standard which he
repudiated. Now she no longer seemed a militant incarnation, but a
woman, softly vibrant: a woman whom he loved and who was helpless.

He added shortly:

"You win, Conscience. I can't accept what you can't freely give."

"Stuart--" she exclaimed, and this time the ring of revived hope
thrilled in her voice, but he lifted a hand, very wearily to stop her.

"I've complained that when the crisis comes we react to the undertow. If
you are the exponent of your code, that code is good enough for me. I
bow to a thing bigger than myself.... Your God shall be mine, too ...
to-morrow I leave, and I won't come back."

"Now, Stuart, my love," she declared, "you can say it truly: 'The idols
are broken in the Temple of Baal.'"

But the renewed life of her voice faltered with the sudden realization
of the other thing: of the bleakness of her future when he had gone, and
suddenly she broke out in undisguised terror.

"But even until you go, Stuart ... even until to-morrow, protect me
against myself, because ... I am totally helpless, and I love you rather
madly."

Instinctively her arms came out and her eyes burst once more into the
fires of passion, but she made an effort and drew back, and as she did
so the stress of the fight prevailed and, had he not caught her, she
would have fallen. She had fainted.

Farquaharson picked her up in his arms, and, distrusting himself to
remain there, started to the house, carrying her like a sleeping child.

The sight of the man going up the path with the woman in his arms was
the only portion of the entire interview which Eben Tollman saw, but it
served his imagination adequately as an index to the rest. He had,
after a long wait on the terrace, followed them to the pines, but had
not announced himself. His arrival had been too tardy to give him a view
of their first--and only--embrace, and his distance had been too great
to let him hear any of their words. When, after a circuitous return, he
reached the terrace, his wife was sitting, pale, but with recovered
consciousness, in a chair, and he himself went direct to his study.




CHAPTER XXX


It was a sleepless night for every one in the house of Eben Tollman.
Conscience still felt that her long fight had ended in a total defeat
and that she had been saved from worse than defeat only because her
victor had risen to her plea for magnanimity. Now she lay staring at the
ceiling with eyes that burned in their sockets. Self-pity warred with
self-accusation.

She could not forget that moment of ecstasy in her lover's arms nor
banish her wish for its repetition. With him the home of her dreams
might have been a reality where men and women who made splendid
successes and splendid failures came and talked of their deeds and their
frustrations, and where children who were the children of love raised
rose-bud lips to be kissed.

Ahead lay an indefinite future, of Stygian murk, peopled with melancholy
shades.

Stuart himself did not attempt to sleep. He sat in a chair at his window
and stared out. Once or twice he lighted a pipe, only to let it die to
ashes between his teeth. He must not tarry here, beyond to-morrow. He
had taken either a high and chivalrous ground or a sentimentally weak
one. In either case it was an attitude to which he stood pledged, and
one to which Conscience attached the importance of salvation. How long
could he hold it?

But of the three minds prickled with insomniac activity, the operations
of the elderly husband's were the strangest and most weirdly
interesting. They had thrown off the halter of sanity and ranged into
the imaginative unrestraint of fantastic deviltry.

Sitting alone in the study, Eben sipped brandy and indulged his
abnormality. For him, weaving certainties out of the tenuous threads of
hallucination, there developed the spaciousness and might of epic
tragedies.

The brandy itself was a symptom of his quiet madness. Until recently he
would as readily have fondled a viper as toyed with a bottle.

Now he had formed the habit of lifting a secret glass, as a rite and a
toast to the portrait of the ancestor, with whose spirit he seemed to
commune.

The things that had festered in the unclean soreness of his brain had
tinctured every thought with their poison of monomania, leaving him
without a suspicion of his own miserable deceit. He believed that he
held the imperative commission of the Deity to act as a vicegerent and
an avenger. God had designated him as a prosecutor, and to-night he was
summing up the case against the transgressors.

"A sinful and an adulterous generation!" he breathed with curling lips.

Item by item he went over the evidence, and it fitted and jibed in every
detail. From the first interrupted assignation at Providence to this
evening when he had seen, silhouetted against a starry sky, the man
carrying close to his breast the wife of another, no link failed to join
into a perfect chain of guilt.

But above all he must remain just--as just as the Divinity whose
commission he served. This essence of absolute and impersonal
righteousness demanded an overt act of unquestionable guilt. "So saith
the Lord."

When that deciding proof was established there should fall upon the
sinning pair the wrath of an outraged heaven, and he, Eben Tollman, in
whom every feeling of the heart had turned to the gall of hatred, would
hurl the bolt.

But when he appeared at the breakfast table the next morning he brought
the only untroubled face to be seen there.

"I am going to New York this afternoon," announced Stuart somewhat
bluntly, and Eben looked quickly up, frankly surprised.

"Running down for a day or two? You'll be back, of course?" he inquired,
and the guest shook his head.

"No. I sha'n't be back at all."

"But your Broadway opening doesn't take place until October? Didn't you
tell us that?"

"Perhaps. I'm not going on that account."

"Then why not finish out your vacation?"

"I have finished it."

The host looked at his guest and read in his eyes a defiant dislike and
a repressed ferocity, but he chose to ignore it. The long-fostered
urbanity of his make-believe must last a little longer. But at that
moment Stuart's eyes met those of Conscience and he acknowledged a sense
of chagrin.

After all, he was leaving to-day and whatever his feelings, he had so
far been outwardly the beneficiary of Tollman's hospitality. Nothing was
to be gained, except a sort of churlish satisfaction, by assuming at the
eleventh hour a blunt and open hostility of manner.

"I'm sorry," suggested Tollman evenly. "I had hoped that we might have
you with us longer. You have brought a certain animation to the
uneventfulness of our life here."

Stuart changed his manner with an effort.

"Thank you," he replied. "But I've already over-stayed the time I had
allowed myself for a vacation. There are many neglected things to be
taken up and finished."

"You hadn't spoken of leaving us before." The regret in Tollman's voice
was sincere, because it was the regret of a trapper who sees game
slipping away from the snare, and it made him perhaps a shade over
insistent. "Do you really regard it as so important?"

For just an instant a gleam of anger showed in the visitor's eyes under
this questioning, and his glance, leveled straight at his host, was that
of a man who would prefer open combat to veiled hostility.

"Not only important," he corrected, "but vital."

"Of course, in that event," murmured Mr. Tollman, "there is nothing more
to say."

But an hour later as Conscience and Farquaharson sat on the terrace,
somewhat silent and constrained, Eben joined them with a deeply troubled
face.

"I've just come from the telephone," he announced with the air of a man
in quandary. "It was an imperative call from Boston--and it puts me in a
most awkward position."

Farquaharson, sitting with the drawn brow of preoccupation, simulated
for his host's assertion no interest and offered no response, but
Conscience asked, "What is it, Eben?"

"It's a business matter but one that involves a duty to my associates. I
don't see how I can ignore it or decline to go."

"But why shouldn't you go?" inquired his wife, and immediately Eben
replied.

"Ordinarily I should, but Stuart says he must leave for New York to-day
and there are no servants on the place. You can't stay here absolutely
alone."

"I shall be all right," she declared, but her husband raised his hands
in a gesture of reasonable protest.

"I couldn't think of it," he insisted. "Why, it's a half-mile to the
nearest house. It wouldn't do."

Then with an urgency of manner he turned to Farquaharson.

"Stuart, I dislike greatly to ask you to change your plans--but you
realize the situation. Can't you put off leaving until to-morrow?"

The younger man turned slowly and his gaze was disconcertingly
piercing, as he asked, "Don't you regard that as a somewhat
unconventional suggestion--leaving Conscience here with no one but me?
What of Dame Grundy?"

Eben only laughed and arched his brows in amusement.

"Why, my dear boy, you're a member of the family, aren't you? Such a
question is the height of absurdity."

"Your faith is touching," retorted the visitor dryly, then he added:
"I'm sorry, but I must go this afternoon."

Before him rose the true proportions of the ordeal to which his host so
casually invited him, and from facing them he flinched with the honesty
of genuine apprehension.

After last night each hour spent here meant trusting under fire a
resolution attained only in a moment of something like exaltation. Such
an experiment seemed the rashness of sheer irresponsibility, and to
underestimate its danger was only recklessness.

Then he saw Conscience's eyes fixed musingly upon him and in them
brooded a confidence which he could not analyze or comprehend.

"I wouldn't urge it," went on Eben persistently, "if there were any
other solution--but there doesn't seem to be. So in spite of your
objections I believe you'll do as I ask, Stuart, even at the cost of
some inconvenience to yourself. In a way you can't refuse, my boy,
because until this morning you gave us no warning of this sudden
flight."

And with a complacency which the younger man found as galling as an
insult, the host turned and went into the house with an air of one who
takes for granted compliance with his expressed wish.

Indeed, his line of reasoning admitted no doubt or shadow of doubt. He
had construed Stuart's first refusal as a mere trick of intrigue,
cloaking under the appearance of protest a situation eagerly welcomed.
Refuse an uninterrupted opportunity to take to his embraces the woman he
adored with a guilty passion! Eben laughed to himself at the thought.
Does a hungry lion scorn striking down its prey? Does a thief repudiate
an unwatched treasury?

But when he had gone, Stuart turned indignantly to Conscience.

"You see, don't you, that it's impossible?"

"Why?" she asked, and in his bewilderment he found himself answering
excitedly:

"Why? Do you mean that, after last night, you would trust yourself here
... with me ... and no one else? Didn't we both admit that it was too
much for us--unless we separated?"

"After last night," she responded, and the fearlessness of her voice
utterly confounded him, "I would trust myself with you anywhere."

"God in Heaven!" he burst out. "Don't you realize that all strength is
relative? Don't you know that any boiler ever made will explode if you
give it enough pressure?"

"It's not a test I welcome either," she declared seriously. "But I do
believe in you now--and there's another side to it." After a moment's
hesitation she went on slowly: "After going through last night--and
after trying to face the future ... there's comfort in feeling that he
trusts me like that. I don't deserve it, but I'd like to ... and when he
comes back to-morrow, if there's one day more of fight left in you,
Stuart dear--I can."

His expression changed and he said dubiously: "It's going to be hard."

"Yes, but how can we tell him that?"

He nodded acknowledgment of the point. "There _is_ something in being
trusted," he told her resolutely. "If you can feel secure with me one
day more--I'll go through with it."

So Eben had his way and put his own damaging construction on the result.

"Good!" he announced when the visitor finally acceded; "I felt sure you
wouldn't leave me in the lurch. I'll drive the buggy to the train and
leave it at the livery stable until I get back--since we have no
chauffeur."

When Tollman had gone Stuart came to Conscience on the terrace. "You'll
be all right here for a while, won't you?" he asked. "I think I'll go
for a tramp."

She said nothing, but her eyes were questioning, and the man answered
their interrogation almost gruffly.

"We've got to walk close to the edge," he said with the quiet of
restrained passion. "You trust me, you say, and even before you said it
I read it in your eyes. I want that same trust to be in them
to-morrow.... I don't know how you feel, but I'm like the reforming
drunkard--tortured by his thirst." He paused, then added, "I think it's
just as well to walk off my restiveness if I can."


It was five o'clock when he returned, hot and weary from fast tramping
in the blistering heat, but when he presented himself, as dusty as a
miller to Conscience, who received him among the flowers of her garden,
the woman recognized, from his face and the smile of self-victory in his
eyes, that he had come back a dependable ally and not a dangerous enemy.
In his voice as he hailed her was the old ring of comradeship--and it
was almost cheerful. "Hurry into your bathing suit," he invited tersely.
"The water is bluer than water ever was before."

Her eyes met his dubiously. She had not, like himself, burned out her
wretchedness of spirit in muscular fatigue.

"I feel rather tired, Stuart," she demurred. But he answered
decisively, "That's exactly why you need a plunge. You'll go in the
tired housekeeper and come out Aphrodite rising from the foam."

"To-morrow perhaps--" she began, but he shook his head.

"If I'm any judge of weather the furies are brewing something in the
line of a tempest. To-morrow will probably be a day of storm."

Under his forced lightness of speech, she realized the tenderness of
solicitude--and acquiesced, because he wished it.

From her window as she changed into bathing things she saw the cove,
blue as the Bay of Naples. After to-morrow, she thought, she would hate
that cove. After to-morrow she must begin making her life over, and it
would be like poverty's task of turning thread-bare seams.

In a little while Stuart, waiting for her in the hall below, heard, as
he had heard on the day of his arrival, a laugh at the stairhead and
looked up to see her there, standing once more in the attitude of one
about to dive.

Her bare arms were raised and her dark hair fell heavily about her face,
for she had not yet gathered and bound it under her bathing cap.

Through the emptiness of after years, he knew that picture would haunt
him with the ache of inexpressible allurement, but now he forced a laugh
and, stretching up his own arms, said challengingly, "Jump; I'll catch
you."

Each detail of that swimming excursion was a reminder; an emphasis of
thought upon these little things which association had made
unaccountably dear, and which must be relinquished, yet the physical
stimulus of the cooling water and the rhythmic companionship of the long
swim across the cove and back had their effect, too, and were healing.

As he followed her up the twisting path ... between pine and bayberry
... for the last time ... the sun shone on her until she sparkled as if
the clinging silk of her dripping bathing dress were sea weed, and in
his heart he cursed Eben Tollman.

When they sat alone at table, where shams refuse to survive, a silence
of constraint fell upon them and each fresh effort at talk broke down in
pitiful failure.

Later as the last plate was stored in the cupboard and Farquaharson hung
his dish towel on its rack, he said whimsically, "And to-morrow your
butler leaves your service. Are you going to give him references?"

With a sudden break in her voice she wheeled on him.

"Please, Stuart," she begged, "don't try to make jokes about it. It's
ghastly."

Early in the evening Farquaharson's prophecy fulfilled itself and the
storm broke with a premature ferocity of shrieking winds, and endless
play of lightning and torrents of rain. Against the French windows of
the living-room, where they sat, came a pelting like shot against the
glass.

"Conscience," said Stuart gravely, when the talk had for a time run in
uneven fits and starts, "I know your views by now, and you know mine.
But I want you to realize this: it's not your cause that I obey or
love--it's _you_."

He paused for a moment, then went on: "You told me last night that you
were helpless. I want you to recognize that you have been splendidly
victorious--all through: because you are splendid yourself. It's a
victory that's costing us all the happiness out of life, perhaps, but it
oughtn't to leave you any room for self-reproach. You stood a long siege
and it was left for me to make the hardest and most cruel onslaught of
all on your overtaxed courage. I am sorry--and I capitulate--and I love
you."

The clock in the hall struck nine and Conscience rose from her chair.
Her eyes filled with uncontrollable tears and her lips trembled at their
corners. The man bent forward, but, catching himself, he drew back and
waited.

"Stuart, Stuart," she told him, "it's all so bleak--ahead! There are
things that I must say to you, too, but I can't say them now. We can't
sit here talking like this. It's like talking over the body of our dead
happiness."

"I know," he replied in a strained voice. "It's just like that."

"I'm going to my room," she declared. "Perhaps I can write it all more
easily than I can say it. Do you mind?"

"No." He shook his head. "I think it's better--but you must sleep
to-night. Have you anything to take?"

"I have trional--but maybe I won't need it."

He closed the windows and shot the bolt of the front door; then, at the
head of the stairs, they both paused.

"I would like to kiss you good-night," he said with a queer smile,
"but--"

"But what?" she asked, and with their eyes meeting in full honesty he
answered: "But--I don't dare."

Conscience's own room was at the front and right of the house,
overlooking the cove and the road. Stuart's was at the back and left,
separated by the length of the hall and by several rooms now empty.

For a long while after she had switched on her lights the woman sat in
an attitude of limp and tearless distress. She could not yet attack the
task of that letter which was to explain so much.

But finally she made a beginning.


     "Dearest," she wrote, "(because it would only be dishonest to call
     you anything else), I am trying to write the things I couldn't say
     to you. You know and I know that if we acknowledged loving each
     other, when I have no right to love you, at least it has been a
     love that has been innocent in everything except its existence.
     When we look back on it, and try, as we must, to forget it, there
     will be no ghosts of guilty remembrance to haunt us. We loved each
     other in childhood, almost, and we loved each other until we let a
     misunderstanding separate us. I'm afraid, dear, I shall always love
     you, and yet I shall be more proud than ashamed when I look back on
     this time here together. Perhaps I should be ashamed of loving you
     at all, while I am the wife of a man who is good and who trusts me.
     But I am proud that you proved big enough to help me when I needed
     you. I shall be proud that when I was too weak to fight for myself
     you fought for me. I am proud that there was never a moment which
     Eben might not have seen, or one which he would have resented.

     "I am trying to think, and when one reaches the point of utter
     honesty with oneself, one sees things more clearly. I told you that
     I thought Eben himself had come to believe this marriage a failure.
     But now I see why more clearly.

     "It was my fault. I have been absolutely true to him in act, but
     perhaps, if I had let myself, I could after all have been true in a
     larger sense: in the sense of a better understanding. Perhaps I can
     still--and I mean to try.

     "I know that you distrust him, but since last night I have been
     thinking of his great generosity, and of what unfaltering trust he
     has had in me. A trust like that ought to have brought him an
     allegiance not only of form but of the heart itself.

     "Had he been a mean or suspicious man there were many
     circumstantial things that might have aroused his jealousy, but he
     has always been above jealousy.

     "We know that there has been no taint of guilt--that our love has
     been, by ordinary standards, entirely innocent. But to him it has
     all been giving--and receiving nothing.

     "From first to last he has trusted me. Leaving me here with you is
     a final demonstration of that trust--and he loves me.

     "I am writing about Eben because I want you, who are at heart so
     just, to be fair in your thought of him. In our decision to
     separate for all time--"


There the pen faltered and Conscience had to rest for a moment.


     "--you would not think the more of me, if you did not believe that
     I meant to carry the effort through to the end. I am going to begin
     over with what you call the hopeless experiment--and even now I
     think I have a chance ... a fighting chance of winning. If I have,
     I owe it to you."




CHAPTER XXXI


In Boston Eben would have been safely housed against the storm, but Eben
was not in Boston. He had driven to the village and put his horse and
buggy in the livery stable. At the station he had bought a ticket for
Boston, but when the express made its first stop he had dropped off to
buy a paper and had intentionally allowed his train to go on without
him.

To several acquaintances whom he met he confided the circumstance of his
clumsy mistake, and one of them remembered in the light of after events
that though he spoke with his ordinary reserve of manner his eyes had
held a "queer glitter." Tollman told these persons that he would take
the later train to his destination, but what he actually did was to
board the afternoon local going in the direction of his home. As chance
ordained, he paid his fare to a new conductor, who did not know him, and
sat in the day coach unaccosted and unrecognized.

He did not remain on the local until it reached his own town of Tanner,
but dropped off at West Tanner, one station short of the full distance,
from which point he had a walk of four miles by a road sandy and little
frequented, to his own house.

Even now Eben did not hurry, but when he had left the limits of the
village he walked slowly and even paused occasionally to rest and
reflect, consulting his watch on these halts as though his object was
not so much the saving of time, as its killing.

In short, the Eben Tollman of this evening was not the same man that he
had ever been before. To a superficial eye he was, as usual, sedately
quiet, yet there was a new quality in his mood. This was the sort of
quiet that might brood at the bottom of an ocean whose surface is being
lashed into the destructive turmoil of tempest. Only since Eben Tollman
was a madman--not a noisy and raving maniac but a homicidally dangerous
and crafty one--his situation was inverted. It was the surface that was
calm with him and the deeps that were frenzied.

To be sure, all these seeming vicissitudes of his journey were parts of
a plan symmetrically ordered from the crazed compulsion of suspicion and
jealousy and now ripe for its fruition, which was to be murder.

Of course the motive which actuated him, locked in its logic-proof
compartment, would not have been, by him, called murder but obedience to
a divine mandate. None-the-less it contemplated human sacrifice.

Just as the storm broke with its cannonading of winds and its
fulmination of lightning he stopped at the edge of a small lake where an
ice-house, now exhausted of supply, had been left accommodatingly
unlocked.

He felt no hesitancy to taking refuge there because the place belonged
to him. Quite recently he had foreclosed, the mortgage which gave him
title to the small farm upon which it stood.

Eben's plan contemplated neither a premature nor an over-tardy arrival
at his own house. The two malefactors who were, he felt absolutely
certain, using his roof for their lustful assignation, had the night
before them. They would avail themselves of it with that sybarite
deliberateness which had characterized their epicurean guile and deceit
from the beginning.

He consulted his watch. He judged that a quarter after nine, or perhaps
nine-thirty, would be about the psychological time for his entry upon
the scene, with his contribution of an unforeseen climax to the drama.

It was not yet seven, and it would be as well to wait here while the
storm, which made the old ice-house tremble about his head, rode out its
initial fury.

His judgment proved good for before it was necessary to start, the main
violence of wind and rain had abated into gusts and desultory showers.
Along the way he encountered evidences of its force, in fallen branches
and broken trees; and in one place, as he crossed a road, he ran into a
hanging strand of telephone wire pulled down by broken timber.

As he drew near his own house his wrath mounted to the cold and
inflexible bitterness of arctic destruction, but his mind seemed to
clarify into a preternatural alertness such as the absinthe-drinker
fancies gives a razor edge to his thought functions. Like the keenness
of absinthe it was hallucination. The tremendous thrill of a madness
that had been cumulative through months and had finally reached the
fulfillment of action, was vitalizing him.

When the walls of his house bulked at last before his eyes, he paused
and began to take an accounting. One detail somewhat dismayed him. The
entire lower floor was dark, and since it was yet early he had not
expected that to be the case. The sudden fear attacked him that he was
too late.

He made a complete and careful circuit of the grounds, noting with the
fancied shrewdness of his mood every circumstance upon which a meaning
might be placed.

The blankness of the first floor was merely indicative--but when he
noted also the dark sash of Farquaharson's window indicativeness assumed
a more sinister emphasis. It was reasonable to infer that unlighted
rooms were unoccupied rooms and conversely, it was ominously significant
that the wide window of his wife's bedroom gave the single frame of
illumination that broke the darkness of the four walls.

For a better survey, he retreated to a bit of high ground at the right
of the house which afforded a narrow glimpse into Conscience's room,
though at an unsatisfactory range.

From this natural watch-tower he could make out the seated figure of his
wife at her desk and from time co time she turned her head, as one
might, who speaks to, or listens to, a companion within the same walls,
though out of sight of a man who commands a circumscribed field of
vision. Shortly he left that position and lurked for a time among the
flowers and shrubbery that lined the stone wall of the yard.

From here he saw Conscience move into the zone of light framed by the
window. Her hair had been loosened from its coils and fell in a heavy
cascade of darkness over shoulders that were bare.

She seemed to wear a dainty negligée of ribboned silk, and as he watched
she began slowly braiding her hair into two dusky ropes. After a little
time she disappeared again from view.

The lunatic, now thoroughly frenzied, and imbued with the phantasy of
suspicion, went back again to the higher ground and, after a time, saw
her open the door of her room and disappear into the hall. That hall was
the road that led to Stuart Farquaharson's room--and perdition!

Once more he, too, went to the rear of the house. There lay the best
chance of viewing the next and most ominous scene of this drama of
infamy and unfaithfulness.

But the hall at that angle was dark and told him nothing. Something else
however told him everything--at least he so believed. The window of
Stuart Farquaharson's room was no longer black but a frame of light.

Eben stood for a space with breath that came in hurried and panting
excitement while the madness mounted in his veins and burned fiercely in
his eyes.

Then, against the illuminated background he saw Stuart, the man whom
God meant him to kill.

He was wrapped in a bathrobe and was calmly raising a match to his
pipe-bowl.

The averted face was looking, Eben bitterly told himself, at the door
which he could not see; was watching it open to admit Conscience
Tollman.

Now was the appointed time! Now were the judgments loosened! Hastening
his steps into an awkward trot, Tollman went around to the front door,
his fingers trembling so that he had to stop and make an effort at
calming himself before he could manage the key in the lock.

When at last it was fitted and stealthily turned with an attempt at
noiselessness, the door refused to yield. That, he told himself
furiously, he might have expected. For all their seeming sense of
security they had reënforced it by shooting the bolt on the inside so
that no one could enter without sending an alarm ahead of his coming. It
was only one proof more of guilty concealment within. But it was far
past time for needing such corroboration. He had seen enough and the
problem raised by the present discovery was quite another. He went about
the place trying side doors and windows, but everywhere his house was
closed against him--and that meant a complete revision of plan, and the
relinquishment of the tremendous force of climax to be gained by
slipping in unannounced and holding over confounded evil-doers the
irrefutable proof of demonstration.

He must knock on his door, and give them time to slip back into their
disguise of hypocrisy. It meant that, in the principal feature, his
whole carefully laid plan had failed, but at least now he knew the truth
and was ready to let the avenging bolt fall. They would meet him with
smiles of innocence: they with sinful kisses yet warm on their lips.
They, fresh from their interrupted love, would talk casually. Very
well, for a little while yet he could smile and be casual, too, meeting
their guile with counter dissembling--until he was ready.

       *       *       *       *       *

If Stuart Farquaharson had been sitting most of that evening in a
darkened room, it was because his misery was so great that the light
seemed to make clearer the wretchedness of his future. For a time he had
tried to read; even to write, but that was before Eben had come. In all
those efforts he had failed and now for more than an hour he had been
gazing dejectedly out of the window, listening to the wind as it
buffeted itself out and died in an exhausted moaning among the pines. He
had heard the wailing of the harbor sirens but his eyes had been
unseeing--at least unrecognizing.

And Conscience had been writing the letter which she meant to leave
under the door of Stuart's room. He would find it there in the morning,
and when he said good-by, he would understand the things which she had
left unsaid before they parted in the hall.

She _had_ gone and left the letter at the door: had even listened there
a moment, unknown to the room's occupant, and it was that crossing of
her threshold which her husband saw.

Then Stuart had switched on his light, and thrown off his clothes. If he
seemed calm as he lighted his pipe, it was a calm of spent emotion, and
not the complacency of a man who awaits a tryst.

Through the stillness of the house the hammering of the brass knocker
sounded loudly. Stuart Farquaharson in his room and Conscience in hers,
both heard it, with a sense of astonishment. The man opened his door and
hurried to the stairhead, where he found Conscience, arrived in advance
of him.

But as he had crossed his threshold Farquaharson had seen an envelope
lying in the light that flooded through, and he recognized Conscience's
hand in the address as he picked it up. Remembering what she had said
about writing to him he was not surprised, and wishing to save the
missive until he should be alone again, he thrust it into the pocket of
his bath robe.

"I wonder who it can be--on such a night?" murmured the woman, and the
man suggested:

"Perhaps you had better let me investigate. I imagine some motorist has
come to grief in the storm."

When he threw open the door, Eben Tollman stepped in.

The elder man stood for a moment glancing from his guest to his wife,
and in that instant of scrutiny whatever of the inquisitorial might have
lurked in his eyes left them for a bland suavity. Conscience had
hastened forward and her lips were smiling. Farquaharson's eyes dared to
meet his own with a level straightforwardness.

But Tollman read into both the smile and the straight-gazing eyes a
hypocrisy which superlatively embittered the blood in his veins.

Conscience was standing before him with the exquisite clarity of her
complexion unclouded; with the dark pools of her eyes unvexed by the
weight of hideous perfidy that should be stifling her heart.

This capping off of infamy with an angelic pretext of innocence was the
supreme insult not only to Eben Tollman, outraged husband and man, but
to the Righteousness he served, the Righteousness which he now seemed to
hear calling trumpet-tongued for the reprisal which was at hand.

"What in the world has happened to you?" he heard his wife exclaiming in
an astonished voice, and he laughed as he responded:

"I came back. Haven't you a kiss for me, my dear?" Then when she raised
her lips to his an inner voice, which spoke only madness, whispered
viciously, "The Judas woman! The unspeakable infamy!"

He explained that he had missed his train, and that when he telephoned
to Boston, he learned that the matter could after all be deferred. A man
from Chicago had also failed to arrive.

"But the train has been in for hours," Farquaharson reminded him with a
puzzled tinge in his voice. "It can't have taken you this long to drive
from Tanner."

"No, I didn't drive. The idea struck me of getting off at West Tanner
and walking over. The old mare went lame and I didn't want to give her
any more work to-night.... Then the storm broke and I took refuge in an
empty ice-house."

Conscience said suddenly: "But, Eben, you are soaked--and if you've been
wandering about like that, you can't have had any supper."

"No," he shook his head. "I haven't and I'm starving."

Including them both, he suggested with a frank seeming of pleasure.
"However, I'm glad to be back. Did I wake you both up? You seem to have
made a short evening of it."

"I haven't been asleep," answered Stuart, and Conscience added: "Nor I."

"I noticed," went on the husband evenly, "that the lower floor was dark,
as I came up ... your window, too, Stuart, when I first saw it."

"You must have come very slowly," replied the younger man with a
calmness that struck the other as the acme of effrontery. "My light has
been burning for ten minutes ... but I don't make out how you saw my
window if you came from the front of the house."

Eben winced a little, but his smile only became more urbane.

"Quite true, my boy. You see I tried my latch key first, and finding the
house dark, I sought to avoid disturbing the sleepers. I went to the
back door and the side door. Finally I knocked. Since neither of you was
asleep it's all right."

"Perhaps after being in the fog so long," Conscience suggested, "a
little brandy might be advisable," but Eben Tollman laughed.

"My dear, for some unaccountable reason, I feel as if I'd been away from
home as long as Enoch Arden--and I'm much happier to be back. I am in
the mood for celebration. There's a bottle of old Madeira in the pantry.
I don't think a little of it will harm any of us ... and I'm going to
dissipate even farther. I'm going to smoke a cigar." Smoking a cigar was
with Eben a rite which occurred with the frequency of a Christmas or a
Thanksgiving dinner.

Something youthful had come into his manner, and Farquaharson, in spite
of his misery, laughed.

"I'm afraid I'm hardly dressed for a party," he demurred, but Eben
answered in a tone of aggrieved hospitality.

"My dear fellow, you are much more fully dressed than when you go
bathing; both of you--and how can I celebrate alone?" So Stuart
smilingly asserted:

"All right. We'll have a toast in your excellent Madeira to the return
of Enoch Arden."

Possibly his voice held a meaning less light than his words. Perhaps he
was thinking of it as a toast to his own departure into exile, but to
Eben it had the ring of a sneer, as though the words "too late" had been
added.

Conscience disappeared to return shortly with a tray containing cold
meat and bread, and to her husband she said: "Eben, I can't find the
famous Madeira. Where is it?"

He rose, and announced that he would bring it at once, disappearing
beyond the swinging door of the pantry.

While he was absent, Conscience turned to the man in the bath robe. A
smile half of amusement and half of self-accusation tilted the corners
of her lips.

"You see," she said thoughtfully, "I've just let myself think of him as
elderly until, to me, he's become elderly. Yet to-night he's younger
than either of us, isn't he?"

"To-night neither one of us is very young, dear," he replied with a wry
smile.

In the pantry Eben Tollman poured three glasses of Madeira, and placed
them on a tray carefully noting their relative positions. With fingers
that trembled violently for a moment Eben grew as abruptly steady; he
drew from his waistcoat pocket a small envelope such as druggists use,
and into two of the glasses he divided its supply of small tablets.

"Ebbett said they were tasteless and readily soluble," he reminded
himself. "And that the amount should be enough for a dog or a man."

Then he patted his breast pocket, where lay an envelope yellowed with
age, bearing the legend "S. F. & C. W."

Of that he meant also to make use later.




CHAPTER XXXII


The living-room held a glow of mellow light, but as Eben returned with
the three brimming glasses, Conscience touched a button which darkened
the wall sconces and left only the large lamp on the table, where she
had placed her tray.

"Inasmuch as two members of this party are more or less gauzily
appareled," she suggested, "it doesn't seem to be necessary to make an
illumination of it."

Tollman, with a seeming of absent-mindedness set down his light burden
on a small side table, somewhat remote, but it was with no want of
certainty that he marked the relative positions of its contents. One
glass was alone at the edge of the silver platter. Two others were
closer together at the center.

Now he came over, empty-handed, and as he regarded the larger tray of
food, he rubbed his palms appreciatively with a convincing relish.

"You have prepared a feast for the traveler on very short notice," he
smilingly attested while inwardly and more grimly he added in
apposition--"'a table in the presence of mine enemies!'"

His wife modestly disclaimed credit. "You are easy to please, Eben.
There's only beef sandwiches and fruit and a little cake. Would you like
me to make you some coffee?"

Eben raised his hand with a gesture of refusal. "No, indeed, I am more
than satisfied--unless you want it yourself."

But she shook her head, "It would keep me awake. I haven't been sleeping
well of late." This announcement of insomnia--twin sister to a troubled
conscience, he thought--was a somewhat bold skirting of admission, but
his words were reassuring.

"The Madeira is well timed then. A glass before bedtime should be
soothing." Still standing, he bit into one of the beef sandwiches, and
observed with an approach to the whimsy of gayety: "I've never been
quite clear in my own mind as to what was meant by the stalled ox of
scriptural fame and I've always subscribed to the text 'better a dinner
of herbs where love is'--but I'm bound to say, it's very gratifying to
have the stalled ox and the love as well."

For Farquaharson his air of celebration held an irony which accentuated
his own exclusion and made participation difficult. He was the exile at
the feast.

Eben who, alone of the three, had not seated himself wandered about with
the restless volubility of a peripatetic philosopher, though his humor
was genial beyond its custom. At last with the air of one too engaged
with his own conversation to heed details of courtesy he took up his
glass and sipped from it thoughtfully.

"Even if this is my own wine," he commented, "I can't withhold
commendation. I sometimes think that only the very abstemious man can
truly appreciate a good vintage. For him it is an undulled pleasure of
the palate."

Stuart Farquaharson at last found it possible to laugh.

"I for one can't dispute the statement," he confessed. "I haven't tasted
it yet--though I understood that both Conscience and I were invited."

"A thousand pardons!" exclaimed the host, shamefacedly. "I am a poor
sort of Ganymede--drinking alone and leaving my guests unserved!"

He set down his own glass, and with tardy solicitude proffered to them
the remaining two.

"Here's to the homecoming," he proposed with a jauntiness which sat upon
him like foreign raiment as he took up his own wine again and Stuart,
with a dolorous smile, suggested: "Why not include me in the toast,
Eben? The arrival--and the departure."

"Ah," demurred the elder man easily. "But that's not to be celebrated,
my boy. For us that is a misfortune."

The two men emptied and put down their glasses--and lighted cigars while
Conscience sat thoughtfully, making slower work of her Madeira.

"And now shall we have a little music?" inquired the husband, while the
younger man's face darkened, and Conscience said rather hastily:

"Not this evening, please, Eben. We've rather overworked the phonograph
of late."

"Not even 'The Beautiful Night of Love'?" The inquiry held an insistent
shade of regret.

But Eben, as his glance went shiftily to the face of the clock, was as
steady and as cool as one may become under the temporary keying of a
repressed and brain-wrecking excitement. To this inflexible composure he
must hold until a certain moment arrived, and he must time himself to
its coming with a perfection of nicety.

"At last, Eben," Farquaharson testified when a brief silence had fallen
on the trio, "I am ready to praise your wine. I feel the glow in my
veins and the glow is insidiously grateful."

"I was just thinking so, too," agreed Conscience. "It takes only a taste
to go to my head." She was still holding between her fingers the stem of
a glass half-full. "I was very tired and already I feel wonderfully
restored."

Indeed the shadow had left her eyes and in them was a quiet glow as she
smiled upon her husband whose nerves were as tautly strung as those of a
sprinter crouched upon his mark and straining to be away at the pistol's
crack. "The traitoress has the infamy to smile at me--whom she has
betrayed," was the thought in his heart. "It will soon be time!"

These final minutes of necessary waiting and dissembling were the most
unendurable of all--this damming back of a madman's thirst for
vengeance. Ebbett had said that there is a prefatory period of
excitation followed shortly by languor. They must realize their fate,
otherwise punishment would be empty, but when he should launch his bolt,
the power of the drug must have laid upon them both the beginnings of
helplessness: the weight of its inertia. Now he said, acknowledging the
praise of his wine:

"The glow comes first, and then the sedative influence--like the touch
of velvet."

"You are almost poetic to-night, Eben," smiled Conscience, and he
laughed. But abruptly he shivered, and became prosaic again.

"It seems chilly to me here--Perhaps I've taken cold. The day was hot
enough, heaven knows, but the night has turned raw--Do you mind if I
light the fire?"

Receiving permission, Eben turned his back and stooped to touch a match
to the logs on the hearth. In a moment the flames were leaping and the
man who had straightened up stood for a brief space watching them spread
and broaden.

It was while he was so engaged that Conscience raised her hand and held
out her glass, still not quite emptied, for Stuart to set down. She did
so silently and the man rose from his chair and took it from her, but in
the simple operation their fingers met and a sudden surging of emotions
came to each in the moment of contact.

Without a word, save as his lips formed mutely the two syllables--"To
you"--Stuart lifted the glass toward her and then drained it.

Then as he replaced it together with his own on the table Eben Tollman
turned, and noted, with satisfaction, the emptiness of the miniature
goblets.

The light of animation had died slowly from the dark eyes of the woman,
until to the watching husband they seemed inky pools of languor. The
leaping flames held her attention and her lips were parted in an
inscrutable half-smile. Already her thoughts were becoming pleasantly
languid, dwelling on such inconsequential things as how blue the water
had been--and that after all to-morrow does not come--until to-morrow.

Shadows leaped and danced fantastically against the color of the
crackling logs and in her hair shimmered a glow that ranged between the
glint of darkened mahogany and jet. It was of this that Stuart thought,
as, for a half hour, they listened to Tollman's talk, content with brief
replies or none at all. Some magic had lulled him, too, into a quietened
mood from which had been smoothed the saw-edged raggedness of despair.
With a vague wonderment he recognized this metamorphosis. No such
soothing potency lay in any wine ever pressed from the grapes of
Funchal; but it was inexplicably pleasant, and surrender grew beyond any
power of its questioning or combatting. Gradually, agreeably the two of
them were sinking below the surface of consciousness. Soon they would be
submerged.

Then in a moment of partial realization, Conscience said: "I think I had
better go upstairs. I was almost napping in my chair." But she made no
actual effort to move and her husband raised a smiling demurrer to the
suggestion.

"It would be a pity to go just now. The fire has only begun to be
cheerful and as for myself I am still chilly."

It was unaccountably pleasant there, with this strange, almost magical
blurring of realities into a velvety ease ... with visions of blue water
and contented thoughts hovering near in a waking and seductive sort of
sleep.

A long silence fell upon the three--realized by only one.

The point where they drifted into the nebulous territory of dreams was
undefined. The actual was dropping away into an impalpable mistiness as
the earth drops from under a rising aëroplane.

Both Conscience and Stuart sought futilely to rouse themselves because
the dream had now ceased to be pleasant, and yet it was only an ugly
picture projected against a beautiful background deepening into a purple
velvet stupor.

They knew the picture itself was not real because, in it, Eben's usually
calm face was distorted into a demoniac frenzy and his voice quavered
and ranted into a high-pitched incoherence.

The dream in spite of its fantastic wildness must have held some
attribute of the comic for they smiled as if in confidential
understanding. Eben seemed to be waving before their eyes an envelope
and to be talking about intercepted letters which was all absurdly,
impalpably funny.

There was also some grotesque eloquence about the vengeance of a Most
High God, visited upon adulterers.

But the voice dropped sometimes to an inaudible pitch and rose sometimes
like a scream because it came from an incalculable distance and the
figure, distorted with meaningless gyrations of gesture, appeared and
disappeared like a shade in a farce.

Eben Tollman stood declaiming on his hearth with his clenched hands
stretched high above his head while his victims drowsed peacefully.

Mania raced and burned through him as a current travels through wire.
The dam of repression which had only collected and stored up the
elements of flood had burst into torrents and chaos. The wreck of his
brain swirled furiously in a single whirlpool of idea, the monomania
that he was called to be God's avenger.

But he had lost his audience and his victims had escaped him. Upon the
lips of the two unspeakable malefactors dwelt a smile of obtuse
tranquillity.

He raised his eyes, as if to heaven, and his voice in fulminating
anathema.

"'Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them in like manner,
giving themselves over to fornication and going after strange flesh ...
are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal
fire.... Likewise also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh ...
despise dominion and speak evil of dignities.'"

The madman paused, but only for a moment, then again he thundered out
his rabid and distorted prayer. "'Their throat is an open sepulcher:
they flatter with their tongue.... Destroy them, O God: let them perish
through their own imaginations.'"...

When Tollman's delirium had burned him into a temporary exhaustion he
collapsed into a chair and at his feet, forgotten now, fell the envelope
which he had flaunted vainly before the eyes of the transgressors. They
had escaped, not scourged or harrowed according to their deserts, but
smiling like sleepy children, through the door of unconsciousness and
oblivion. Gropingly his fingers went again into his pocket and came out
holding the envelope out of which he had taken the death tablets. They,
too, had betrayed him. Instead of torture they had brought the peace of
Nirvana.

From the limp fingers of the demented creature who sat gazing at his two
victims, the envelope fluttered down. Except for the mad embers of the
eyes, one might have said that the room held three dead bodies.

At least he had sent them on to a judgment from which they could not
escape with iniquitous smiles.

Then a sudden doubt assailed him. Were they, after all, dead?

He came to his foot, moving with the spasmodic jerkiness of his
condition, but with all the augmented strength of a madman's power.

To his crazed investigation their wrists betrayed no pulse and their
lips, no breath. Then they were dead!

With an inarticulate exclamation, like the oath of a man devoid of
speech, he ripped the sheer and ribboned silk from his wife's breast, as
savagely as though he were tearing the flesh itself, and laid his hand
upon the bared bosom. There, too, was the unfluttering stillness of a
lifeless heart.

Then straightening up, he gazed down on her, loathing all the beauty
which had once allured him and which now dedicated itself, in death, to
the benediction of a smile turned toward her lover.

Already mad, his lunacy became a perversion of deviltry. He lifted the
unstirring body and posed it in a relaxed attitude of ease upon the
broad couch that stood at one side of the hearth. Back of the bared
shoulders, he heaped cushions, so that she seemed the voluptuous figure
of a woman who abandons herself to as irresponsible a gratification of
sense as a purring tigress. The fire, playing on the ivory of her cheeks
and the bosom more softly white than the checks, seemed to awaken a
ghost of flickering mockery about her smiling lips.

Then, drawing upon his unwonted strength of the hour, Eben Tollman moved
the other figure until what had been Stuart Farquaharson sat beside what
had been Conscience Tollman in lover-like proximity.

As he staged this ghastly pantomime, he gloated wildly. That was the
scene which a bolted door had prevented him from surprising! That was
the inexpressible and iniquitous devotion which they had hidden in
innocent smiles! Their eyes were closed, but each face was turned
toward the other, and in death the woman's seemed to take on a deeper
tenderness.

Tollman lifted one of her arms, from which the drapery fell back, and
laid it across the shoulder of the man at her side, and about him the
world rocked in the quake of mania.

He stood off and contemplated them from a greater distance--and having,
in his madman's saturnalia, burned out even the augmented forces of his
fever, a feeling of weakness overcame him. Then it was that his eyes
caught the corner of an envelope protruding from the pocket of Stuart
Farquaharson's bath robe. Hurriedly he tore it out and ripped off the
end. It was in Conscience's hand--doubtless another proof of iniquity.

But as he read, the fires of his brain were swept back, under the
quenching force of undeniable conviction. This letter had not been meant
for his eyes. It could hold no motive of deceiving him.

Only treatment in confinement could ever again set up the fallen and
shattered sanity of this man, but like rents in a curtain there came to
him flashes of the rational. They came fitfully under the tremendously
sobering effect of what he read. What Stuart Farquaharson had never
read.

"It was my fault.... I have been absolutely true to him in act ... but
perhaps ... I could ... have been true in a larger sense. I have been
thinking of his great generosity and of what unfaltering trust he has in
me ... he has always been above jealousy. We know that there has been no
taint of guilt. Even now I think I have a fighting chance of winning. If
I have I owe it to you...." These words spelled out a document which
could not be doubted, which even the perversion of a jealousy gone mad
could no longer doubt.

He, Eben Tollman, the righteous, had built the whole horrible structure
of abomination--out of jealous fabrications! He had made the hideous
mistake and capped it with murder!

A nausea of brain and soul swept him. Then again the half-sane interval
darkened luridly into hallucination, but now it was a new hallucination.

The figure of the woman on the couch seemed to move. Instead of the
filmy draperies torn by his own hand, she wore the habiliments of
poverty and looked at him out of a face of plebeian prettiness; a face
of dimly confused features. The apparition rose and stood waveringly
upright. "You murdered me, too!" it said in a voice of vague simplicity.
Eben Tollman tried to scream and could not.

He covered his eyes with his palms, but failed to shut out the image
because it lay deeper than the retina's curtain.

"I'm one of the others you murdered," went on the voice. "I'm Minnie
Ray."

Tollman straightened suddenly up. The vagary had passed--but on the
couch the two immovable figures remained.

Tollman had never been a handsome man, but his face and carriage had
held a certain stiff semblance of dignity. Now his cheeks flamed with
the temperature which must, without the immediate administration of a
powerful sedative, burn out his life with its crisping and charring
virulence. His eyes were no longer human, but transformed into that
kinship with those of wild beasts or red embers that comes with acute
mania.

As the shadows wavered in the room which he had made a place of murder,
there rose out of them taunting, accusing figures. He seemed to see
Hagan, the detective, grotesquely converted into an executioner clad in
red and Sam Haymond launching against him the anathema of the Church.
There were shapes of strange things neither human, animal nor
reptile--but wholly monstrous--emerging greedily from filthy lairs and
creeping toward him with sinuous movements through a sea of slime.

For the furies that haunted Orestes, because of his classic crime, had
come back to pursue Eben Tollman.

He laughed as maniacs laugh and screamed as maniacs scream, until the
strange medley of insensate sounds went rocketing and skittering through
the house and came back in echo, as the retort of the furies.

One human sense was left: the sense of flight: the impulse to leave the
place where Death held dominion and Death's avengers came in unclean and
rapacious hordes.

Turning, he fled with a speed born of his dementia, hurling himself
through the door with a crash of shattered glass and a trail of
incoherent ravings.

Without sense of direction or objective he raced here and there,
doubling like a frightened rabbit, taking no account of paths or
obstructions, seeing nothing but hordes of pursuing furies urged on by a
parson and a hangman who led the chase.

The storm had begun anew, and out here in the darkness the cannonading
of thunder and wind swelled the chorus of pursuit. When the refugee
fell, he clawed and bit at the vines which had tripped him, in a fancied
battle of Laocoön, until at last he saw the coolness of water ahead of
him, and, dashing down the slope, hurled himself, shrieking, into its
stillness.

There his outcry ended. His spread fingers clutched at a liquid
emptiness and his fevered eyes showed once or twice briefly--and were
quenched.




CHAPTER XXXIII


The logs on the hearth leaped and crackled, spurting tongues of blue
flame, and after they had roared up to their fullest they slowly
subsided, until the shadows about the walls spread and encroached from
their corners toward the center of the room. The polish of furniture and
the bright angles of silver and bric-à-brac stood out with diminishing
high-lights. Hour by hour and minute by minute the faces of two unmoving
figures seated on a low and heavily cushioned couch grew less clear and
merged into the growing darkness.

Then the logs glowed only as embers against their bed of white ashes and
the table lamp burned on in single steadfastness.

Silence held the place, abandoned now by the furies, to the smile on two
unstirring faces. The gray of the east had begun to brighten into the
rose that comes ahead of the sun, when slowly, as if struggling under a
weight of pyramids the heavy lids of one of the faces fluttered. They
fluttered with no recognition as yet of the difference between death and
life, realizing only the burden of an immeasurable inertia.

Almost imperceptibly the currents of submerged vitality began to steal
back into the veins of Conscience Tollman.

For ages she seemed struggling through the heavy shades of coma, and
even after she was able to see her surroundings, it was without a
realization of their significance.

She sat studying with an impersonal gaze the quiet figure at her side,
looking even at her own hand resting upon its shoulder with the same
absence of interest that she might have felt for another hand and
another shoulder.

But about the time that the sun came over the eastern skyline,
dissipating the mistiness of dawn into the birth of a new day, she
crossed the line between the palpable and impalpable, and her brain
began to awaken to the need of battle with this lethargy.

The unmoving figure at her side was no longer simply an object upon
which her eyes dwelt without recognition, but the man she loved and was
sending away, and the hand which rested on his shoulder must no longer
lie there idle.

Then with all its complicated features of phenomena, the bewilderment of
the situation burst on her, and she struggled to her feet, reeling under
the assaults of dizziness and weakness and wonderment.

How had they come to be sitting there in that unaccountable fashion
together and alone, while the first brightness of morning stole in at
the French windows and the lamp burned on with its sickly mingling of
day and night and the fresh breeze swept in through a broken and
flapping door?

Where was Eben?

Conscience raised her voice--still weak from the drug--and called
wildly, but there was little sound and no answer. Undefined but strong,
the realization struck in upon her that tragedy in some monstrous shape
had entered the place and left its impress.

She stood, still groping with amazement, and her hands rose with a
fumbling uncertainty until the touch of their fingers fell upon the
bosom from which the drapery had been torn, and instinctively gathered
it again over her breast and throat.

But whatever the riddle might portend it could await construction. One
primary fact proclaimed itself in terms so clear and unmistakable that
all else was lost.

Stuart seemed lifeless. She herself had the feeling of one who had been
tangled in the fringes of death: who had struggled out of the meshes of
a fatal web.

He had saved her, when she was too weak to fight--it all seemed very
long ago.... She loved him.... She must save him now.

She knelt at his side, chafing his wrists and trying his heart with ear
and touch--her eyes wide with almost hopeless forebodings.

At last she rose and pressed her hands tight to her throbbing temples.

"Thank God," she whispered, for a faint flutter of life had rewarded her
investigation. In a bewildered voice she murmured: "I must think. I must
remember! We were all sitting here--we were talking."

Again she called, feebly at first, then with a growing strength, for her
husband, and when no answer came except the echo of her own voice, she
left the room and went gropingly, supporting herself against furniture
and wall, to the telephone--but the telephone, too, was dead. The storm
had done that.

Confused now with a torrent of alarms and a sense of futility, she came
back to the man whose life seemed so tenuously suspended, having no plan
beyond a Valkyrie passion of resolution to bring him back from the
border of death by the sheer force of invincible will. She succeeded,
after many attempts, in shifting him from his sitting posture to a
greater ease. Between his still lips she forced brandy.

After ages of suspense and vigil, with his head on her lap and her
fingers wildly working at his wrists, she vacillated terribly between
the hope that life was returning and the fear that it was waning. After
other ages she saw his lids flicker almost imperceptibly and then, when
anxiety had taken a heavy toll, his eyes looked up in uncomprehending
life. Conscience bent her face close to his and there was breath on his
lips and nostrils. Eben had been a Machiavelli in spirit only. In
effect he had bungled.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mystery still hung over the house of Eben Tollman an hour or two later,
but the two figures that had sat with the quietness of unaccomplished
death were again sensate and restored to full consciousness.

Conscience had been able to go to her own room, and Stuart, now dressed,
came slowly and as yet somewhat haltingly down the stairs, holding
carefully to the rail. He was setting out to search for Eben Tollman,
and to call in medical help. But in the hall he paused, and then,
turning on impulse, went slowly into the living-room.

There he stood looking about as a man who has dropped from his own
planet to one wholly unfamiliar may seek to take his bearings.

His eyes fell as he paused on two patches of white which showed against
the dark richness of the rugs and laboriously he picked them up. One was
a yellow envelope inscribed "S. F. & C. W."

As a sudden blow may bring back a lost identity to the victim of amnesia
the discovery electrified the man and he straightened into an abrupt
erectness. His features lost their sleep-walking indefiniteness and his
jaw stiffened.

As the significance of his discovery dawned on him, a pallor quite
separate from that of his condition came over his face and a murder
light broke in his eyes. He would go on with his search for Eben, but
when he found him now--! He wheeled suddenly and began looking at the
table, and across the confused screen of his brain flashed a complete
picture and an understanding.

Then he studied the other and smaller envelope--and recognized it as the
one which Dr. Ebbett had given Eben Tollman when they talked of a
merciful release for the dog that had outlived his enjoyment of life.

"I don't believe I'll ever find him--alive," he said very slowly, under
his breath; "I think I understand."

Then after a moment of grave reflection he added:

"I don't see why she need know it all," and he dropped the two letters
and the small envelope upon the dead logs and touched a match to their
edges. Then he carried three wine glasses out to the pantry, and
carefully washed them, pouring again a few drops of clear wine, like
residue, into their bottoms. "Coroners are inquisitive," he told himself
musingly.

After that he opened the door and went out into the morning, which,
succeeding the storm, was a morning of sunlight.

THE END





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