THE sound of music stole over the gardens of the Priory, at sunset. It was the close of one of the most exquisite days of Spring. A calm had settled over the country with the passing away of the sun-god. His attendant winds and voices had been sacrificed on his funeral pyre.

Two figures sat on the terrace by the open window of the drawing-room, listening to the utterance, in music, of a tumultuous, insurgent spirit. In Professor Fortescue, the musical passion was deeply rooted, as it is in most profoundly sympathetic and tender natures. Algitha anxiously watched the effect of her sister’s playing on her companion.

The wild power of the composer was not merely obvious, it was overwhelming. It was like “a sudden storm among mountains,” “the wind-swept heavens at midnight,” “the lonely sea”: he struggled for the exactly-fitting simile. There was none, because of its many-sidedness. Loneliness remained as an ever-abiding quality. There were moon-glimpses and sun-bursts over the scenery of the music; there was sweetness, and a vernal touch that thrilled the listeners as with the breath of flowers and the fragrance of earth after rain, but always, behind all fancy and grace and tenderness, and even passion, lurked that spectral loneliness. The performer would cease for some minutes, and presently begin again in a new mood. The music was always characteristic, often wild and strange, yet essentially sane.

“There is a strong Celtic element in it,” said the Professor. “This is a very wonderful gift. I suppose one never does really know one’s fellows: her music to-night reveals to me new sides of Hadria’s character.”

“I confess they alarm me,” said Algitha.

“Truly, this is not the sort of power that can be safely shut up and stifled. It is the sort of power for which everything ought to be set aside. That is my impression of it.”

“I am worried about Hadria,” Algitha said. “I know her better than most people, and I know how hard she takes things and what explosive force that musical instinct of hers has. Yet, it is impossible, as things are, for her to give it real utterance. She can only open the furnace door now and then.”

The Professor shook his head gravely. “It won’t do: it isn’t safe. And why should such a gift be lost?”

“That’s what I say! Yet what is to be done? There is no one really to blame. As for Hubert, I am sorry for him. He had not the faintest idea of Hadria’s character, though she did her best to enlighten him. It is hard for him (since he feels it so) and it is desperate for her. You are such an old friend, that I feel I may speak to you about it. You see what is going on, and I know it is troubling you as it does me.”

“It is indeed. If I am not very greatly mistaken, here is real musical genius of the first order, going to waste: strong forces being turned in upon the nature, to its own destruction; and, as you say, it seems as if nothing could be done. It is the more ironically cruel, since Hubert is himself musical.”

“Oh, yes, but in quite a different way. His fetish is good taste, or what he thinks such. Hadria’s compositions set his teeth on edge. His nature is conventional through and through. He fears adverse comment more than any earthly thing. And yet the individual opinions that compose the general ‘talk’ that he so dreads, are nothing to him. He despises them heartily. But he would give his soul (and particularly Hadria’s) rather than incur a whisper from people collectively.”

“That is a very common trait. If we feared only the opinions that we respect, our fear would cover but a small area.”

The music stole out again through the window. The thoughts of the listeners were busy. It was not until quite lately that Professor Fortescue had fully realised the nature of Hadria’s present surroundings. It had taken all his acuteness and his sympathy to enable him to perceive the number and strength of the little threads that hampered her spontaneity. As she said, they were made of heart-strings. A vast spider’s web seemed to spread its tender cordage round each household, for the crippling of every winged creature within its radius. Fragments of torn wings attested the struggles that had taken place among the treacherous gossamer.

“And the maddening thing is,” cried Algitha, “that there is nobody to swear at. Swearing at systems and ideas, as Hadria says, is a Barmecide feast to one’s vindictiveness.”

“It is the tyranny of affection that has done so much to ruin the lives of women,” the Professor observed, in a musing tone.

Then after a pause: “I fear your poor mother has never got over your little revolt, Algitha.”

“Never, I am sorry to say. If I had married and settled in Hongkong, she would scarcely have minded, but as it is, she feels deserted. Of course the boys are away from home more than I am, yet she is not grieved at that. You see how vast these claims are. Nothing less than one’s entire life and personality will suffice.”

“Your mother feels that you are throwing your life away, remember. But truly it seems, sometimes, as if people were determined to turn affection into a curse instead of a blessing!”

“I never think of it in any other light,” Algitha announced serenely.

The Professor laughed. “Oh, there are exceptions, I hope,” he said. “Love, like everything else that is great, is very, very rare. We call the disposition to usurp and absorb another person by that name, but woe betide him or her who is the object of such a sentiment. Yet happily, the real thing is to be found now and again. And from that arises freedom.”

Hadria was playing some joyous impromptu, which seemed to express the very spirit of Freedom herself.

“I think Hadria has something of the gipsy in her,” said Algitha. “She is so utterly and hopelessly unfitted to be the wife of a prim, measured, elegant creature like Hubert—good fellow though he is—and to settle down for life at Craddock Dene.”

“Yes,” returned the Professor, “it has occurred to me, more than once, that there must be a drop of nomad blood somewhere among the ancestry.”

“Hadria always says herself, that she is a vagabond in disguise.”

He laughed. Then, as he drew out a tobacco-pouch from his pocket and proceeded to light his pipe, he went on, in quiet meditative fashion, as if thinking aloud: “The fact of the matter is, that in this world, the dead weight of the mass bears heavily upon the exceptional natures. It comes home to one vividly, in cases like this. The stupidity and blindness of each individual goes to build up the dead wall, the impassable obstacle, for some other spirit. The burden that we have cast upon the world has to be borne by our fellow man or woman, and perhaps is doomed to crush a human soul.”

“It seems to me that most people are engaged in that crushing industry,” said Algitha with a shrug. “Don’t I know their bonnets, and their frock-coats and their sneers!”

The Professor smiled. He thought that most of us were apt to take that attitude at times. The same spirit assumed different forms. “While we are sneering at our fellow mortal, and assuring him loftily that he can certainly prevail, if only he is strong enough, it may be our particular dulness or our hardness that is dragging him down to a tragic failure, before our eyes.”

The sun was low when the player came out to the terrace and took her favourite seat on the parapet. The gardens were steeped in profound peace. One could hear no sound for miles round. The broad country made itself closely felt by its stirring silence. The stretches of fields beyond fields, the woodlands in their tender green, the long, long sweep of the quiet land, formed a benign circle round the garden, and led the sense of peace out and out to the horizon, where the liquid light of the sky touched the hills.

The face of the Professor had a transparent look and a singular beauty of expression, such as is seen on the faces of the dead, or on the faces of those who are carried beyond themselves by some generous enthusiasm.

They watched, in silence, the changes creeping over the heavens, the subtle transmutations of tint; the fairylands of cloud, growing like dreams, and melting in golden annihilation; the more delicate and exquisite, the sooner the end.

The first pale hints of splendour had spread, till the whole West was throbbing with the radiance. But it was short-lived. The soul of the light, with its vital vibrating quality, seemed to die, and then slowly the glow faded, till every sparkle was gone, and the amphitheatre of the sky lay cold, and dusk, and empty. It was not till the last gleam had melted away that a word was spoken.

“It is like a prophecy,” said Hadria.

“To-morrow the dawn, remember.”

Hadria’s thoughts ran on in the silence.

The dawn? Yes; but all that lost splendour, those winged islands, those wild ranges of mountain where the dreams dwell; to-morrow’s dawn brings no resurrection for them. Other pageants there will be, other cloud-castles, but never again just those.

Had the Professor been following her thoughts?

“Life,” he said, “offers her gifts as the Sibyl her books; they grow fewer as we refuse them.”

“Ah! that is the truth that clamours in my brain, warning and pointing to an empty temple, like the deserted sky, a little while ahead.”

“Be warned then.”

“Ah! but what to do? I am out of myself now with the spring; there are so many benign influences. I too have winged islands, and wild ranges where the dreams dwell; life is a fairy-tale; but there is always that terror of the departure of the sun.”

“Carpe diem.”

Hadria turned a startled and eager face towards the Professor, who was leaning back in his chair, thoughtfully smoking. The smoke curled away serenely through the calm air of the evening.

“You have a great gift,” he said.

“One is afraid of taking a thing too seriously because it is one’s own.”

The Professor turned almost angrily.

“Good heavens, what does it matter whose it is? There may be a sort of inverted vanity in refusing fair play to a power, on that ground. Alas! here is one of the first morbid signs of the evil at work upon you. If you had been wholesomely moving and striving in the right direction, do you think you would have been guilty of that piece of egotism?”

“Vanity pursues one into hidden corners of the mind. I am so used to that sort of spirit among women. Apparently I have caught the infection.”

“I would not let it go farther,” advised the Professor.

“To do myself justice, I think it is superficial,” said Hadria with a laugh. “I would dare anything, anything for a chance of freedom, for——,” she broke off, hesitating. “I remember once—years ago, when I was quite a girl—seeing a young ash-tree that had got jammed into a chink so that it couldn’t grow straight, or spread, as its inner soul, poor stripling, evidently inspired it to grow. Outside, there were hundreds of upright, vigorous, healthful young trees, fulfilling that innate idea in apparent gladness, and with obvious general advantage, since they were growing into sound, valuable trees, straight of trunk, nobly developed. I felt like the poor sapling in the cranny, that had just the same natural impetus of healthy growth as all the others, but was forced to become twisted, and crooked, and stunted and wretched. I think most women have to grow in a cranny. It is generally known as their Sphere.” Algitha gave an approving chuckle. “I noticed,” Hadria added, “that the desperate struggle to grow of that young tree had begun to loosen the masonry of the edifice that cramped it. There was a great dangerous-looking crack right across the building. The tree was not saved from deformity, but it had its revenge! Some day that noble institution would come down by the run.”

“Yes. Well, the thing to do is to get out of it,” said the Professor.

“You really advise that?”

“Advise? One dare not advise. It is too perilous. No general theories will hold in all instances.”

“Tell me,” said Hadria, “what are the qualities in a human being that make him most serviceable, or least harmful?”

“What qualities?” Professor Fortescue watched the smoke of his pipe curling away, as if he expected to find the answer in its coils. He answered slowly, and with an air of reflection.

“Mental integrity, and mercy. A resolute following of reason (in which I should include insight) to its conclusion, though the heavens fall, and an unfailing fellow-feeling for the pain and struggle and heart-ache and sin that life is so full of. But one must add the quality of imagination. Without imagination and its fruits, the world would be a howling wilderness.”

“I wish you would come down with me, some day, to the East End and hold out the hand of fellowship to some of the sufferers there,” cried Algitha. “I am, at times, almost in despair at the mass of evil to be fought against, but somehow you always make me feel, Professor, that the race has all the qualities necessary for redemption enfolded within itself.”

“But assuredly it has!” cried the Professor. “And assuredly those redeeming qualities will germinate. Otherwise the race would extinguish itself in cruelty and corruption. Let people talk as they please about the struggle for existence, it is through the development of the human mind and the widening of human mercy that better things will come.”

“One sees, now and then, in a flash, what the world may some day be,” said Hadria. “The vision comes, perhaps, with the splendour of a spring morning, or opens, scroll-like, in a flood of noble music. It sounds unreal, yet it brings a sense of conviction that is irresistible.”

“I think it was Pythagoras who declared that the woes of men are the work of their own hands,” said the Professor. “So are their joys. Nothing ever shakes my belief that what the mind of man can imagine, that it can achieve.”

“But there are so many pulling the wrong way,” said Algitha sadly.

“Ah, one man may be miserable through the deeds of others; the race can only be miserable through its own.”

After a pause, Algitha put a question: How far was it justifiable to give pain to others in following one’s own idea of right and reasonable? How far might one attempt to live a life of intellectual integrity and of the widest mercy that one’s nature would stretch to?

Professor Fortescue saw no limits but those of one’s own courage and ability. Algitha pointed out that in most lives the limit occurred much sooner. If “others”—those tyrannical and absorbent “others”—had intricately bound up their notions of happiness with the prevention of any such endeavour, and if those notions were of the usual negative, home-comfort-and-affection order, narrowly personal, fruitful in nothing except a sort of sentimental egotism that spread over a whole family—what Hadria called an egotism À douze—how far ought these ideas to be respected, and at what cost?

Professor Fortescue was unqualified in his condemnation of the sentiment which erected sacrificial altars in the family circle. He spoke scornfully of the doctrine of renunciation, so applied, and held the victims who brought their gifts of power and liberty more culpable than those who demanded them, since the duty of resistance to recognised wrong was obvious, while great enlightenment was needed to teach one to forego an unfair privilege or power that all the world concurred in pressing upon one.

“Then you think a person—even a feminine person—justified in giving pain by resisting unjust demands?”

“I certainly think that all attempts to usurp another person’s life on the plea of affection should be stoutly resisted. But I recognise that cases must often occur when resistance is practically impossible.”

“One ought not to be too easily melted by the ‘shrieks of a near relation,’” said Hadria. “Ah, I have a good mind to try. I don’t fear any risk for myself, nor any work; the stake is worth it. I don’t want to grow cramped and crooked, like my poor ash-tree. Perhaps this may be a form of vanity too; I don’t know, I was going to say I don’t care.”

The scent of young leaves and of flowers came up, soft and rich from the garden, and as Hadria leant over the parapet, a gust of passionate conviction of power swept over her; not merely of her own personal power, but of some vast, flooding, beneficent well-spring from which her own was fed. And with the inrush, came a glimpse as of heaven itself.

“I wonder,” she said after a long silence, “why it is that when we know for dead certain, we call it faith.”

“Because, I suppose, our certainty is certainty only for ourselves. If you have found some such conviction to guide you in this wild world, you are very fortunate. We need all our courage and our strength——”

“And just a little more,” Hadria added.

“Yes; sometimes just a little more, to save us from its worst pitfalls.”

It struck both Hadria and her sister that the Professor was looking very ill and worn this evening.

“You are always giving help and sympathy to others, and you never get any yourself!” Hadria exclaimed.

But the Professor laughed, and asserted that he was being spoilt at Craddock Dene. They had risen, and were strolling down the yew avenue. A little star had twinkled out.

“I am very glad to have Professor Fortescue’s opinion of your composition, Hadria. I was talking to him about you, and he quite agrees with me.”

“What? that I ought to——?”

“That you ought not to go on as you are going on at present.”

“But that is so vague.”

“I suppose you have long ago tried all the devices of self-discipline?” said the Professor. “There are ways, of course, of arming oneself against minor difficulties, of living within a sort of citadel. Naturally much force has to go in keeping up the defences, but it is better than having none to keep up.”

Hadria gave a quiet smile. “There is not a method, mental or other, that I have not tried, and tried hard. If it had not been for the sternest self-discipline, my mind at this moment, would be so honeycombed with small pre-occupations (pleasant and otherwise), that it would be incapable of consecutive ideas of any kind. As it is, I feel a miserable number of holes here”—she touched her brow—“a loss of absorbing power, at times, and a mental slackness that is really alarming. What remains of me has been dragged ashore as from a wreck, amidst a rush of wind and wave. But just now, thanks greatly to your sympathy and Algitha’s, I seem restored to myself. I can never describe the rapture of that sensation to one who has never felt himself sinking down and down into darkness, to a dim hell, where the doom is a slow decay instead of the fiery pains of burning.”

“This is all wrong, wrong!” cried the Professor anxiously.

“Ah! but I feel now, such certainty, such courage. It seems as if Fate were giving me one more chance. I have often run very close to making a definite decision—to dare everything rather than await this fool’s disaster. But then comes that everlasting feminine humility, sneaking up with its simper: ‘Is not this presumptuous, selfish, mistaken, wrong? What business have you, one out of so many, to break roughly through the delicate web that has been spun for your kindly detention?’ Of course my retort is: ‘What business have they to spin the web?’ But one can never get up a real sense of injured innocence. It is always the spiders who seem injured and innocent. However, this time I am going to try, though the heavens fall!”

A figure appeared, in the dusk, at the further end of the avenue. It proved to be Miss Du Prel, who had come to find Hadria. Henriette had arrived unexpectedly by the late afternoon train, and Valeria had volunteered to announce her arrival to her sister-in-law.

“Ah!” exclaimed Hadria, “heaven helps him who helps himself! This will fit in neatly with my plans.”