"Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world."

R. L. S.

Love has been described, by one who had a singularly intuitive knowledge of men's hearts, as a vital malady, and in one essential matter the similitude holds good—namely, in the amazing suddenness with which the divine fever will sometimes, nay often, seize upon its victim, driving out for the time being all other and allied ills, leaving room only for the one all-consuming passion.

James Berwick was one of those men—more rarely found perhaps in England than on the Continent, and less often now than in the leisurely days of the past—who can tell themselves that they are pastmasters in the art of love. Two things in life were to him of absorbing interest—politics and women, and he found, as have done so many of his fellows, that the two were seldom in material conflict. His sister, Miss Berwick, did not agree in this finding, but she kept her views and her occasional misgivings to herself.

Women had always played a great part in James Berwick's life, and that, as is generally true of the typical lover, in a very wide sense, as often as not "en tout bien tout honneur." He thought no hour wasted which was spent in feminine company: he was tender to the pruderies, submissive to the caprices, and very grateful for the affection often lavished on him by good and kindly women, to whom the thought of any closer tie than that of friendship would have been an outrage.

More than once he had been very near, or so he had thought at the time, to the finding of his secret ideal,—of that woman who should be at once lover and friend. But some element, generally that of the selfless tenderness for which his heart craved, was lacking in the unlawful loves to which he considered himself compelled to confine his quest.

He based his ideal on the tie which had bound his uncle, Lord Bosworth, to Madame Sampiero, and of which he had become aware at a moment when his youth had made him peculiarly susceptible to what was fine and moving in their strange, ardent romance.

To his ideal,—so he could still tell himself when on one of those lamentable return journeys from some experimental excursion in that most debatable land, le pays du tendre,—he could and would remain faithful, however faithless he might become to the actual woman who, at the moment, had fallen short of that same ideal.

Berwick constantly made the mistake of consciously seeking love, and so of allowing nothing for that element of fantasy and surprise which has always played so great a part in spontaneous affairs of the heart.

He asked too much, not so much of love, as of life—intellect, passion, tenderness, fidelity, all these to be merged together in one who could only hope to be linked with her beloved in unlawful, and therefore, so whispered experience, in but temporary bonds.

During the last ten years—Berwick was now thirty-five, and, while his brief married life lasted, he had been absolutely faithful to the poor sickly woman whose love for him had fallen short of the noblest of all—he had found some of the qualities he regarded as essential to a great and steadfast passion, first in one, and then in another, but never had he found them all united, as his uncle had done, in one woman.

Mrs. Marshall, of whom his sister was still so afraid had first attracted him as a successful example of that type of woman to whom beauty, and the brilliant exercise of her feminine instincts, stand in lieu of mind and heart, and whose whole life is absorbed in the effort to excite feelings which she is determined neither to share nor to gratify. To vivify this lovely statue, to revenge, may-be, the wrongs of many of his sex, had been for Berwick an amusing diversion, a game of skill in which both combatants were to play with buttoned foils.

But Mrs. Marshall, caught up at last into the flames in which she had seen so many burn—holocausts to her vanity and intense egotism—suddenly began to love Berwick with that dry, speechless form of passion which sears both the lover and the beloved, and which seems to strip the woman of self-respect, the man of that tenderness which should drape even spurious passion.

The death of the lady's husband had occurred most inopportunely, and had been followed, after what had seemed to Berwick—now wholly disillusioned—a shockingly short interval, by one of those scenes of horror which sometimes occur in the lives of men and women and which each participant would give much to blot out from memory. During the interview he shuddered to remember, Berwick had been brought to say, "My freedom is dearer to me, far more so, than life itself! If I had to choose between marriage and death, I should choose death!"

Arabella need not have been afraid. Louise Marshall's very name had become hateful to him, and the fact that she was still always trying to throw herself across his path had been one reason why he had spent the whole summer far from England.

It was in this mood, being at the moment out of love with love, that Berwick had come back this autumn to Sussex and to Chancton Priory. It was in this same mood that he had first met Barbara Rebell, and had spent with her the evening of which he was afterwards to try and reconstitute every moment, to recall every word uttered by either. He had been interested, attracted, perhaps most of all relieved, to find a woman so different from the type which had caused him so much distress, shame, and—what was perhaps, to a man of his temperament, worse—annoyance.

Then, after that short sojourn at the Priory, he had gone away, and thought of Barbara not at all. Certain matters had caused him to come back to Chillingworth before going on to Halnakeham Castle, and during those days, with a suddenness which had left him defenceless, had come a passion of deep feeling—none of those about them ventured to give that feeling its true name—for the desolate-eyed, confiding creature, who, if now thrown defenceless in his way as no woman had ever yet been, was yet instinct with some quality which seemed to act as a shield between himself and the tremulous, tender heart he knew was there, if only because of the love Barbara lavished on Madame Sampiero.

During those early days, and for the first time in Berwick's experience, humility walked hand in hand with love, and the lover for a while found himself in that most happy state when passion seems intensified by respect. James Berwick had hitherto been always able to analyse every stage of his feeling in regard to the woman who at the moment occupied his imagination, but with regard to Mrs. Rebell he shrank from such introspection.

Yet another feeling, and one oddly new, assailed him during those long hours which were spent in Barbara's company—now in the quiet stately downstair rooms of the Priory, now out of doors, ay, and even by Madame Sampiero's couch, for there Barbara, as if vaguely conscious of pursuit, would often take refuge. Jealousy, actual and retrospective jealousy, sharpened the edge of Berwick's feeling,—jealousy of Boringdon, of whom he gathered Barbara had lately seen so much, and with whom, as he could himself see, she must be on terms of pleasant comradeship—jealousy, far more poignant and searching, of Pedro Rebell, and of that past which the woman Berwick was beginning to regard as wholly his, had spent with him.

Mrs. Rebell never made the slightest allusion to her husband, and yet for six long years—those formative years between nineteen and five-and-twenty—Pedro Rebell must have been, and in a sense rarely allowed to civilised man, the master of this delicate, sensitive woman, and, when he so pleased, her lover. Who else save the half-Spanish West Indian planter could have brought that shadow of fear into Barbara's eyes, and have made her regard the passion of love, as Berwick had very soon divined she did regard it, as something which shames rather than exalts human nature?

From one and another, going even to Chancton Cottage, and questioning Mrs. Boringdon in his desire to know what Barbara he knew well would never tell him, Berwick had so far pieced together her past history as to come somewhere near the truth of what her life had been. He could picture Barbara's quiet childhood at St. Germains: could follow her girlhood—spent partly in France, partly in Italy—to which, as she grew to know him better, she often referred, and which had given her a kind of mental cultivation which, to such a man as himself, was peculiarly agreeable. Then, lastly, and most often, he would recall her long sojourn in the lonely West Indian plantation. There, if Grace Johnstone was to be believed, she had at times suffered actual physical ill-treatment from the man whom she had married because he had come across her path at a moment when she had been left utterly alone; and also because—so Berwick, as he grew to understand her, truly divined—Pedro Rebell bore her father's name, and shared the nationality of which those English men and women who are condemned to exile are so pathetically proud.

Mrs. Turke, Doctor McKirdy, and Madame Sampiero all watched with varying feelings the little drama which was being enacted before their eyes.

Of the three, Mrs. Turke had the longest refused to believe the evidence afforded by her very shrewd senses. The old housekeeper took a frankly material view of life, and Doctor McKirdy had not been far wrong when he had once offended her by observing, "I should describe you, woman, as a grand old pagan!" There were few things she would not have done to pleasure James Berwick; and that he should enjoy a passing flirtation with Mrs. Rebell would have been quite within his old nurse's view of what should be—nay more, Mrs. Turke would have visited with condemnation any lady who had shown herself foolishly coy in accepting the attentions of such a gentleman.

But when the old woman realised, as she soon came to do, that Berwick's feeling for Madame Sampiero's kinswoman was of a very different quality from that with which she had at first credited him, then Mrs. Turke felt full of vague alarm, and she liked to remind herself that Mrs. Rebell was a wife, and, from certain indications, a good and even a religious woman in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

These stormy November days, so rough without, so peaceful within, each big with the presage of coming winter, reminded Mrs. Turke of another autumn at Chancton, and of other lovers who had found the atmosphere of the Priory strangely conducive to such a state of feeling as that which seemed to be brooding over James Berwick and Barbara Rebell.

True, Madame Sampiero and Lord Bosworth had been far more equally matched in the duel which had ended in the defeat of both: but the woman, in that conflict, had been troubled with fewer scruples. They also had begun by playing at friendship—they also had thought it within their power to absorb only the sweet, and to reject the bitter, of the feast spread out before them. In those far away days Mrs. Turke had been, to a certain limited extent, the confidante of her mistress, and now she felt angered at the knowledge that her foster-son was becoming impatiently aware of her watching eyes, and nervously afraid of any word, even said by his old nurse in joke, concerning his growing intimacy with Mrs. Rebell.

To Madame Sampiero, the present also brought back the past, and that, ah! yes, most poignantly. As she lay in her beautiful room, her solitude only broken by those two whom she had begun to watch so painfully, or by Doctor McKirdy who gave her news of them, she felt like the wounded warrior to whom heralds bring at intervals news of the conflict raging without. A word had been said by Mrs. Turke soon after Berwick's return, but the housekeeper had been rebuked by her paralysed mistress with sharp decision.

The thought that the creature who was beginning not to take, so much as to share, in her heart the place of her dead child, could be caught in the net out of which she herself had not even yet cut herself free, was intolerable—the more so that she had been amused, rather cynically amused, at the effect her god-daughter had produced on the austere Boringdon. To see them together, to see his growing infatuation, and Barbara's utter unconsciousness of the feeling which, after the first memorable interview, brought him daily to the Priory, had been to Barbara's god-mother a delicious comedy. The woman in her delighted in the easy triumph of this other woman, more particularly because at first she had not credited Barbara Rebell with the possession of feminine charm.

In this matter Boringdon showed Madame Sampiero how wrong she had been, and not he only, but many others also had at once come under her spell. And then, as is nearly always the way with those women who inspire sudden passions, Mrs. Rebell's charm was not, in its essence, one of sex. The grim, silent Scottish woman, Madame Sampiero's night attendant, smiled when Barbara came into the room, and LÉonie, the French maid, had very early informed her mistress, "Je sens que je vais adorer cette Madame Rebell!" while as for James Berwick, his attitude the more moved and interested Madame Sampiero, because she had never seen him in any relation save in that of her own kind, cool, and attentive guest.

Every nature betrays feeling in a manner peculiarly its own. Berwick would have been surprised indeed had he realised his constant betrayal of a passion so instinctive as to be as yet only partially revealed to his innermost self. For the first time in his experience he loved nobly—that is, with tenderness and abnegation. To be constantly with Barbara, to talk to her with that entire intimacy made possible by the solitary circumstances of her life, was all he asked as yet. Barbara Rebell, during those same short weeks, was also happy, and wholly content with the life she saw spread out before her—looking back to the six years spent with Pedro Rebell as to a terrible ordeal lying safely far behind her, so deep, so racial had been, after the first few weeks of their married life, the antagonism between them.

Feeling her physical helplessness more than she had ever done, Madame Sampiero asked herself, with a foreboding which deepened into pain, whether certain passages in her own life were now about to be enacted over again in that of her own cousin? Lying there, her mind alone free, she told herself that while regretting nothing that had been, she yet would do all in her power to prevent one she loved from going through what she had endured—the more so that, to her mind, James Berwick was not comparable to the man for whom she had herself sacrificed everything. Lord Bosworth's only desire, and that over long years, had been to make the woman he loved his wife. She knew well that the nephew had a more ingenious and a less simple nature—that the two men looked at life from a very different standpoint.

Madame Sampiero also realised to the full what Berwick's great wealth had meant and did mean to him, and how different a man he would have been without it. Had Barbara Rebell been free, so the paralysed woman now told herself, James Berwick would have fled from the neighbourhood of the Priory at the first dawn of his attraction.

Barbara's god-mother would have given much to know what neither her own observation nor Doctor McKirdy's could tell her—namely, how Berwick's undisguised passion was affecting the object of it. Every day the older woman looked for some sign, for some conscious look, but Barbara remained in this one matter an enigma to those about her. Madame Sampiero knew—as every woman who has gone through certain experiences is bound to know—the deep secrecy, the deeper self-repression, which human beings, under certain conditions, can exercise when the question involved is one of feeling, and so sometimes, but never when Mrs. Rebell was actually with her, she wondered whether the attitude of Barbara to Berwick hid responsive emotion, which, when the two were alone together, knew how to show itself articulate.

One thing soon became clear. Barbara much preferred to see either Boringdon or Berwick alone; she avoided their joint company; and that, so the three who so closely observed her were inclined to think, might be taken as a sign that she knew most surely how it was with them, if still ignoring how it was with herself.

Concerning love—that mysterious passion which Plotinus so well describes as part god part devil—Doctor McKirdy was an absolute fatalist. He regarded the attraction of man to woman as inevitable in its manifestations as are any of the other maleficent forces of nature, and for this view—not to go further than his own case—he had good reason. Till he was nearly thirty, he had himself experienced, not only a distaste but a positive contempt for what those about him described as love.

However much the fact was disguised by soft phrases, he, the young Alexander McKirdy, knew full well that the passion was wholly base and devilish—playing sometimes impish, more often terrible, tricks on those it lured within its labyrinth; causing men to deviate almost unconsciously from the paths lying straight before them; generally injuring their careers, and invariably—and this, to such a nature as his own, seemed the most tragic thing of all—making, while the spell was upon the victims, utter fools of them. Above all had he condemned, with deepest scorn and intolerance—this, doubtless, owing in a measure to his early religious training—that man who allowed himself to feel the slightest attraction for a married woman; indeed, for such a one, he felt nothing but scathing contempt. The whole subject of man's relation to woman was one on which the doctor had been, even as a very raw and shy youth, always ready to hold forth, warning and admonishing those about him, especially his own sentimental countrymen cast up on the lonely and yet siren-haunted sea of London life.

Then, holding these views more than ever, though perhaps less eager to discuss them, a chance had brought him to Chancton, there to fall himself in the same snare which he believed in all good faith so easy to avoid. After one determined effort to shake himself free, he had bowed his neck to the yoke, gradually sacrificing all that he had once thought made life alone worth living to a feeling which he had known to be unrequited, and which for a time he had believed to be unsuspected by the object of it.

Who was he, Alexander McKirdy, so he asked himself during those days when he watched with very mingled feelings Berwick and Barbara—who was he to jeer, to find fault, even to feel surprised at what had now befallen James Berwick and Barbara Rebell? And yet, as was still apt to be his wont, the old Scotchman blamed the woman far more than the man—for even now, to his mind, man was the victim, woman the Circe leading him astray. This view angered the mistress of the Priory, but not even to please Madame Sampiero would the doctor pretend that he thought otherwise than he did.

"Is this, think you, the first time she soweth destruction?" he once asked rather sternly. "I tell ye, Madam, she cannot be so simple as ye take her to be! I grant her Jamie"—falling back in the eagerness of the discussion on what had been his name for Berwick as a child—"we all know he's a charmer! But how about that poor stiff loon, Oliver Boringdon? would you say that there she has not been to blame?"

But the answering murmur was very decided, "I am sure it is the first time she has sowed destruction, as you call it."

"Well then, she has been lacking the opportunities God gives most women! If she has not sowed, it has not been for lack of the seed: she has a very persuasive manner—very persuasive indeed! That first night before she stumbled into this house, I was only half minded that she should see you, and she just wheedled me into allowing her to do so—oh! in a very dignified way, that I will admit. Now as women sow so shall they reap."

"That," muttered Madame Sampiero, "is quite true;" and the doctor had pursued, rather ruthlessly, his advantage. "Can you tell me in all honesty," he asked, peering forward at her, meeting with softened gaze the wide open blue eyes, "if you yourself sowed destruction innocently-like, that is without knowing it? Was there ever a time when you were not aware of what you were doing?"

For a moment the paralysed woman had made no answer, and then her face quivered, and he knew that the sounds which issued from between her trembling lips signified, "Yes, McKirdy, I always did know it! But Barbara is a better woman than I ever was——"

"Ay, and not one half so beautiful as you ever were!" The doctor had remained very loyal to his own especial Circe.

It now wanted but a week to Lord Pendragon's coming-of-age ball, and Chancton Priory shared in the general excitement. Madame Sampiero was well aware that this would be her god-daughter's real introduction to the neighbourhood, and she was most anxious that the first impression should be wholly favourable. As regarded what Barbara was to wear, success could certainly be achieved; but in whose company she should make her first appearance at Halnakeham Castle was more difficult to arrange, for it had come to Doctor McKirdy's knowledge that James Berwick intended that he and Mrs. Rebell should share the long drive from Chancton to the Castle.

This the mistress of the Priory was determined to prevent, and that without signifying her sense of its indecorum. The way out of the difficulty seemed simple. Madame Sampiero intimated her wish that Doctor McKirdy should be the third occupant of the Priory carriage, and that with this strange-looking cavalier, Barbara should make her appearance at the Castle: in that matter she thought she could trust to Berwick's instinct of what was becoming, and further, she had little fear that he would wish to attract the attention of the Duchess of Appleby and Kendal to his friendship with Mrs. Rebell. But, to Madame Sampiero's astonishment and chagrin, Doctor McKirdy refused to lend himself to the plan.

"Nay," he said, "I've been thinking the matter over, and I cannot make up my mind to oblige ye. Your wit will have to find out another way." There had been a pause, and he added, with one of his curious twisted smiles, "It's not such as I who would dare to intervene at 'the canny hour at e'en'!"

"Then I must tell James it cannot be!" Madame Sampiero spoke the words with the odd muffled distinctness which sometimes came over her utterance. But Doctor McKirdy had been thinking carefully over the situation: "Why not ask Mrs. Boringdon?" he growled out. "The woman does little enough for the good living she gets here!"

Madame Sampiero looked at her faithful old friend with real gratitude. How foolish she had been not to have thought of that most natural solution! But to her, Oliver Boringdon's mother was the merest shadow, scarcely a name.

And so it was that James Berwick's plan was defeated, while Barbara Rebell, who had not as yet become as intimate with Grace Johnstone's mother as she hoped to do, was made, somewhat against her will, to write and invite Mrs. Boringdon and her son to share with her the Priory carriage.