IN London during the ensuing winter people warmly discussed, and many of them warmly condemned, a certain Italian episode, in which a woman and a man, once well-known and, in their very different ways, widely popular in Society, were the actors.

In the deep autumn Sir Donald Ulford had died rather suddenly, and it was found in his will that he had left his newly-acquired property, Casa Felice, to Lady Holme, who—as everybody had long ago discovered—was already living there in strict retirement, while her husband was amusing himself in various Continental towns. This legacy was considered by a great number of persons to be “a very strange one;” but it was not this which caused the gossip now flitting from boudoir to boudoir and from club to club.

It had become known that Rupert Carey, whose unfortunate vice had been common talk ever since the Arkell House ball, was a perpetual visitor to Casa Felice, and presently it was whispered that he was actually living there with Lady Holme, and that Lord Holme was going to apply to the Courts for a divorce. Thereupon many successful ladies began to wag bitter tongues. It seemed to be generally agreed that the affair was rendered peculiarly disgraceful by the fact that Lady Holme was no longer a beautiful woman. If she had still been lovely they could have understood it! The wildest rumours as to the terrible result of the accident upon her had been afloat, and already she had become almost a legend. It was stated that when poor Lord Holme had first seen her, after the operation, the shock had nearly turned his brain. And now it was argued that the only decent thing for a woman in such a plight to do was to preserve at least her dignity, and to retire modestly from the fray in which she could no longer hope to hold her own. That she had indeed retired, but apparently with a man, roused much pious scorn and pinched regret in those whose lives were passed amid the crash of broken commandments.

One day, at a tea, a certain lady, animadverted strongly upon Lady Holme’s conduct, and finally remarked:

“It’s grotesque! A woman who is disfigured, and a man who is, or at any rate was, a drunkard! Really it’s the most disgusting thing I ever heard of!”

Lady Cardington happened to be in the room and she suddenly flushed.

“I don’t think we know very much about it,” she said, and her voice was rather louder than usual.

“But Lord Holme is going to—” began the lady who had been speaking.

“He may be, and he may succeed. But my sympathies are not with him. He left his wife when she needed him.”

“But what could he have done for her?”

“He could have loved her,” said Lady Cardington.

The flush glowed hotter in the face that was generally as white as ivory.

There was a moment of silence in the room. Then Lady Cardington, getting up to go, added:

“Whatever happens, I shall admire Mr. Carey as long as I live, and I wish there were many more men like him in the world.”

She went out, leaving a tense astonishment behind her.

Her romantic heart, still young and ardent, though often aching with sorrow, and always yearning for the ideal love that it had never found, had divined the truth these chattering women had not imagination enough to conceive of, soul enough to appreciate if they had conceived of it.

In that Italian winter, far away from London, a very beautiful drama of human life was being enacted, not the less but the more beautiful because the man and woman who took part in it had been scourged by fate, had suffered cruel losses, were in the eyes of many who had known them well pariahs—Rupert Carey through his fault, Lady Holme through her misfortune.

Long ago, at the Arkell House ball, Lady Holme had said to Robin Pierce that if Rupert Carey had the chance she could imagine him doing something great. The chance was given him now of doing one of the greatest things a human being can do—of winning a soul that is in despair back to hope, of winning a heart that is sceptical of love back to belief in love. It was a great thing to do, and Carey set about doing it in a strange way. He cast himself down in his degradation at the feet of this woman whom he was resolved to help, and he said, “Help me!” He came to this woman who was on the brink of self-destruction and he said, “Teach me to live!”

It was a strange way he took, but perhaps he was right—perhaps it was the only way. The words he spoke at midnight on the lake were as nothing. His eyes, his acts in sunlight the next day, and day after day, were everything. He forced Viola to realise that she was indeed the only woman who could save him from the vice he had become the slave of, lift him up out of that pit in which he could not see the stars. At first she could not believe it, or could believe it only in moments of exaltation. Lord Holme and Robin Pierce had rendered her terrified of life and of herself in life. She was inclined to cringe before all humanity like a beaten dog. There were moments, many moments at first, when she cringed before Rupert Carey. But his eyes always told her the same story. They never saw the marred face, but always the white angel. The soul in them clung to that, asked to be protected by that. And so, at last, the white angel—one hides somewhere surely in every woman—was released.

There were sad, horrible moments in this drama of the Italian winter. The lonely house in the woods was a witness to painful, even tragic, scenes. Viola’s love for Rupert Carey was reluctant in its dawning and he could not rise at once, or easily, out of the pit into the full starlight to which he aspired. After the death of Sir Donald, when the winter set in, he asked her to let him live in the house on the opposite side of the piazza from the house in which she dwelt. They were people of the world, and knew what the world might say, but they were also human beings in distress, and they felt as if they had passed into a region in which the meaning of the world’s voices was lost, as the cry of an angry child is lost in the vastness of the desert. She agreed to his request, and they lived thus, innocently, till the winter was over and the spring came to bring to Italy its radiance once more.

Even the spring was not an idyll. Rupert Carey had struggled upward, but Viola, too, had much to forget and very much to learn. The egoist, spoken of by Carey himself one night in Half Moon Street, was slow to fade in the growing radiance that played about the angel’s feet. But it knew, and Carey knew also, that it was no longer fine enough in its brilliant selfishness to stand quite alone. With the death of the physical beauty there came a modesty of heart. With the understanding, bitter and terrible as it was, that the great, conquering outward thing was destroyed, came the desire, the imperious need, to find and to develop if possible the inner things which, perhaps, conquer less easily, but which retain their conquests to the end. There was growth in Casa Felice, slow but stubborn, growth in the secret places of the soul, till there came a time when not merely the white angel, but the whole woman, angel and that which had perhaps been devil too, was able to accept the yoke laid upon her with patience, was able to say, “I can endure it bravely.”

Lord Holme presently took his case to the Courts. It was undefended and he won it. Not long ago Viola Holme became Viola Carey.

When Robin Pierce heard of it in Rome he sat for a long time in deep thought. Even now, even after all that had passed, he felt a thrill of pain that was like the pain of jealousy. He wished for the impossible, he wished that he had been born with his friend’s nature; that, instead of the man who could only talk of being, he were the man who could be. And yet, in the past, he had sometimes surely defended Viola against Carey’s seeming condemnation! He had defended and not loved—but Carey had judged and loved.

Carey had judged and loved, yet Carey had said he did not believe in a God. Robin wondered if he believed now.

Robin was in Rome, and could not hear the words of a man and a woman who were sitting one night, after the marriage, upon a piazza above the Lake of Como.

The man said:

“Do you remember Robin’s ‘Danseuse de Tunisie’?”

“The woman with the fan?”

“Yes. I see her now without the fan. With it she was a siren, perhaps, but without it she is—”

“What is she without it?”

“Eternal woman. Ah, how much better than the siren!”

There was a silence filled only by the voice of the waterfall between the cypresses. Then the woman spoke, rather softly.

“You taught her what she could be without the fan. You have done the great thing.”

“And do you know what you have done?”

“I?”

“Yes. You have taught me to see the stars and to feel the soul beyond the stars.”

“No, it was not I.”

Again there was a silence. Then the man said:

“No, thank God—it was not you.”