E. Augier.

During the ten days which followed that on which Mrs. Boringdon had held a certain conversation with her son, Lucy Kemp gradually became aware of two things. The first, which seemed to blot out and exclude everything else, was that she loved—in the old-fashioned pathetic sense of the abused word—Oliver Boringdon.

Hitherto she had been able to call the deep feeling which knit her to him "friendship," but that kindly hypocrisy would serve no longer: she was now aware what name to call it by. She had known it since the evening she had noticed that his manner had altered, that he had become more reserved, less really at ease. The second thing of which Lucy became aware, during those long dragging empty days, was the fact of her keen unhappiness, and of her determination to conceal it from those about her—especially from the father and mother who, she knew, were so strangely sensitive to all that concerned her.

Major-General and Mrs. Kemp had been settled at Chancton Grange for some years, and the Mutiny hero, the man whose gallant deed had once thrilled England, Mrs. Kemp, and their young daughter, had come to be regarded by the village folk with that kindly contempt which is bred, we are told, by familiarity.

The General's incisive, dry manner was rather resented by those of his neighbours who had hoped to make of him a local tea-party celebrity, and his constructive interest in local politics won him but tepid praise from the villagers, while the fact that Mrs. Kemp's large-minded charity and goodness of heart was tempered by a good deal of shrewd common-sense, did not make her the more loved by those, both gentle and simple, whom she was unwearying in helping in time of trouble.

The husband and wife were, however, rather grudgingly regarded as a model couple. It had soon been noticed that they actually appeared happier together than apart, and, surprising fact, that in the day-to-day life of walking and driving, ay and even of sitting still indoors, they apparently preferred each other's company to that of any of their neighbours!

Why one man succeeds, and another, apparently superior in every respect, fails in winning the prizes, the pleasant places, and the easy paths of life, is a mystery rather to their acquaintances than to their intimate friends—people who, according to the schoolboy's excellent definition, "know all about you, but like you all the same." Now the peculiarity about General Kemp was that he had neither succeeded nor failed, or rather he had been successful only up to a certain point. He had won his V.C. as a subaltern in the Mutiny, and promotion had naturally followed. But after he had attained to field rank, he saw his career broken off abruptly, and that for no shortcomings of his own, for nothing that he could have helped or altered in any way.

It was a prosaic misfortune enough, being simply the relentless knife of economy, wielded by a new and enthusiastic Secretary at War, which cut off at one sweep General Kemp and various of his contemporaries and comrades in arms. The right honourable gentleman, as he explained to an admiring House of Commons, was able to save the difference between the full pay and the retired pay of these officers—a substantial sum to be sure, but still not so much as was afterwards expended by the right honourable gentleman's successors in bringing the establishment of officers up to its proper strength again.

General Kemp was a deeply disappointed man, but he kept his feelings strictly to himself, and only his wife knew what compulsory retirement had meant to him, and, for the matter of that, to herself, for Mrs. Kemp, very early in life, had put all her eggs in Thomas Kemp's basket.

But in one matter there had been no disappointment. The fact that Lucy's childhood had been spent, though not unhappily, far from her parents, seemed to make her doubly dear to them: and then, to their fond eyes and hearts, their child was everything a girl should be. Unlike the girls of whom Mrs. Kemp sometimes heard so much, she showed no desire to leave her father and mother—no wish even to enjoy the gaieties which fell to the lot of her contemporaries who lived amid livelier scenes than those afforded by a remote Sussex village, and this though she was as fond of dancing and of play as other young creatures of her age.

Until a year ago,—nay, till six months back,—Mrs. Kemp would have disbelieved an angel, had so august a visitant foretold that there would soon arise, and that through no fault of hers or of the girl's, a cloud between her daughter, her darling Lucy, and herself; and yet this thing, this incredible thing, had come to pass.

The worst the mother had feared, and she had sometimes feared it greatly, was that her only daughter, following in this her own example, would marry to India, or, worse still, to some far-away colony. But, even so, Mrs. Kemp would have made the sacrifice, especially if Lucy's lover had in any way recalled the Tom Kemp of thirty years before.

However, as so generally happens, the danger the mother had dreaded passed by harmlessly: Lucy received and rejected the offer of a soldier, the son of one of the General's oldest friends; and her girlish heart had turned to something so utterly different, so entirely unexpected, that neither Mrs. Kemp nor Lucy's father had known how to deal with the situation which had come upon them with a suddenness which had amazed them both.

In spite of her look of unformed youth and gravely young manner, Lucy Kemp was in no sense a child. There are surely many women who at some stage of their life, paraphrasing the famous phrase, might well exclaim, "I think, therefore I am—a woman." But such a test would convict many women of eternal childhood.

Lucy, during the last year, had thought much—too much, perhaps, for her comfort. She had early made up her mind as to what she did not wish to do with her life. In no circumstances would she become the wife of Captain Laxton, but she had found it difficult to convince him of her resolution.

So it was that now, during those dreary days when the flow of constant communication between Oliver Boringdon and the Grange had ceased, as if by a stroke of malignant magic, poor Lucy had had more than time to examine her mind and heart, and to feel a dreadful terror lest what she found there should also be discovered by those about her, and especially by Oliver himself.

Mrs. Kemp was not well—so rare an occurrence as to alter all the usual habits of the Grange. The General wandered disconsolately about the garden, and through the lower rooms, reading, smoking, and gardening, but it always ended in his going up to his wife's room. Lucy, standing apart, was not too busy with her thoughts to realise, more than she had ever done before, the vitality, the compelling bondage, of such an attachment as that between her quiet, rather silent, father and her impulsive affectionate mother. Watching those two with a new, and an almost painful, interest, the girl told herself that, for a year of such happy bondage between herself and Oliver Boringdon, she would willingly give the rest of her life in exchange.

Looking back, especially on the last few months, Lucy was able to recall many moments, nay hours, when Oliver had undoubtedly regarded her as being in a very special sense his friend. Bending over her work, sitting silent by her mother's bedside, Lucy would suddenly remember, with a fluttering of the heart, certain kindly looks, certain frankly uttered confidences—and, remembering these things, she would regain some of the self-respect which sometimes seemed to have slipped away from her in a night. To Lucy Kemp the thought of seeking before being sought was profoundly repugnant, and she was deeply ashamed of the feeling which possessed her, and which alone seemed real in her daily life.

There had been no love-making on Oliver's part—no, indeed!—but the very phrase has acquired a vulgar significance. The girl thought she knew every way of love, and she shrank from being "made love to." Captain Laxton's eager desire to anticipate her every trifling wish, his awkward and most unprovoked compliments, the haunting of her when she would so much rather have been alone—ah! no, Oliver could never behave like that, in so absurd, so undignified a manner, to any woman. If Captain Laxton was a typical lover, then Lucy Kemp felt sure that Boringdon was incapable of being, in that sense, in love, and she thought all the better of him for it.

Nay, more,—the belief that Oliver was in this so different from other, more commonplace, men, brought infinite comfort. Lucy, compelled to admit that he had at no time shown any wish to make love to her, brought herself to think it possible that Boringdon was in very truth incapable of that peculiar jealous passionate feeling of which the girl now knew herself to be as much possessed as was Captain Laxton himself—that strange state of feeling so constantly described in those novels which she and her mother read, and of which her soldier lover, when in her company, seemed the living embodiment.

During the past ten days, Lucy had only twice seen Oliver, and this in village life must mean deliberate avoidance. So feeling, pride, and instinctive modesty, had kept her away from the Cottage, and Mrs. Boringdon—this was surely strange—had made no effort to see her. Once, in a by-way of Chancton, Lucy had met Oliver face to face,—he had stopped her, inquired eagerly concerning Mrs. Kemp, and seemed inclined, more than she had done at the moment, to talk in the old way, to linger—then with an odd, almost rude abruptness, he had turned and left her, and tears, of which she had been bitterly, agonisingly ashamed, had rushed into poor Lucy's brown eyes.

Their other meeting—one which was infinitely pleasanter to look back upon—had been at the Grange. Boringdon had come with a note from his mother to Mrs. Kemp; Lucy had taken it from him at the door, and unasked he had followed the girl through the hall out into the old-fashioned garden. There, after a word said by her as to the surprising result of an important by-election,—since she had known him Lucy had become very much of a politician,—Oliver had suddenly taken from his pocket a letter which concerned him nearly, and acting as if on an irresistible impulse, he had begged her to read it.

The letter was from a man who had been one of his principal constituents and supporters during his brief period of Parliamentary glory, and contained private information concerning the probable resignation of the member who had been Boringdon's successful rival at the last election—it of course amounted to an invitation to stand again.

For a moment standing, out there in the garden, Time seemed to have been put back: Oliver and she were talking in the old way—indeed, he was just telling her exactly what he meant to write in answer to this all-important letter, when, to Lucy's discomfiture and deep chagrin, General Kemp had suddenly appeared in the garden porch of the Grange and had put a quick sharp end to the discussion. "Your mother wants you, Lucy—will you please go up to her at once?" and the girl had obeyed without saying good-bye, for she felt sure—or perhaps, had hoped to ensure—that Boringdon would wait till she came down again. But alas! when she ran down, a few minutes later, the young man was gone, and her father answered her involuntary look of deep disappointment with one that made her hang her head and blush! The child in Lucy asked itself pitifully how father could have been so unkind.

General Kemp had indeed been angry—nay, more than angry. The showing of a letter by a man to a woman is an action which to an onlooker has about it something peculiarly significant and intimate. Standing just within the threshold of his house, seeing the two figures standing on the path close to one another, and so absorbed in what they were saying that some moments elapsed before they looked up and became aware of his presence, the father realised, more than he had done before, Lucy's odd relation to the young man. "What the devil"—so General Kemp asked himself with rising anger—"what the devil did Boringdon mean by all that sort of thing?"

"Il faut qu'une porte soÎt ouverte ou fermÉe!" The wise French saying which provided de Musset with a title for one of his most poignant tragi-comedies, was probably unknown to General Kemp, but it exactly expressed his feeling. The upright soldier had no liking for half-open doors—for ambiguous sentimental relations.

"I can't think what the man was thinking of—taking a letter out of his pocket, and showing it to her for all the world as if she were his wife! I wish, Mary, you'd say a word to Lucy."

"What word would you have me say, Tom?" Mrs. Kemp raised herself painfully in bed. She still felt in all her bones the violent chill she had caught, and the being compelled to lie aside had made her, what she so seldom was, really depressed. On this unfortunate afternoon she had followed with intuitive knowledge every act of the little drama enacted downstairs: she had heard the General's sharply uttered command; noted Lucy's breathless eager longing to be down again; and then she had heard the front door open and shut; and she had listened, almost as disappointedly as Lucy might have done, to Boringdon's firm steps hurrying up the road past her windows. If only she had not caught this stupid cold, all this might have been prevented! To-morrow she must really persuade the doctor to let her come down again.

"Surely, Mary, you don't need to be told what to say to the child! A mother should always know what to do and what to say in such a case. If we had a son and I thought him behaving badly to some girl, I should be at no loss to tell him what I thought of his conduct,—in fact, I should think it my duty as his father to do so." The General came and stood by his wife's bed. He glowered down at her with frowning, unhappy eyes.

"But that would be so different, Tom! I should be quite willing to speak to Lucy if I thought she were behaving badly—if she were to flirt, for instance, as I have seen horrid girls do! But this, you see, is so different—the poor child is doing nothing wrong: it is we who have been wrong to allow it to come to this."

The General walked up and down the room. Then he suddenly turned and spoke, "Well, I think something ought to be done. Get the matter settled one way or the other. I never heard of such a state of things! Lucy looks very far from well. Such a case never came my way before."

"Oh! Tom, is that quite true?"

"Certainly it is!"—he turned and faced her,—"quite true. Of course I've known men behave badly to women, very badly indeed, who hasn't? and women to men too, for the matter of that. But I've never come across such an odd fellow as Boringdon. Why, he scowled at me just now,—upon my word you might have thought I was the stranger and he her father! but I took the opportunity of being very short with him—very short indeed!" Then, as Mrs. Kemp sighed a long involuntary sigh, "No, Mary, in this matter, you must allow me to have my own way. I don't approve of that sort of conduct. It's always so with widows' sons—there are certain things only a man can knock into 'em! I wish I'd had that young fellow in the regiment for a bit. It would have done him a great deal more good than the House of Commons seems to have done. And then again I can't at all see what Lucy sees in him. He's such a dull dog! Now Laxton—I could understand any girl losing her heart to Laxton!" He walked to the window. "There's McKirdy coming in. I'll go down and have a talk with him. Meanwhile, you think over all I've been saying, Mary."

Poor Mrs. Kemp! as if she ever thought nowadays, in a serious sense, of anything else! But she was inclined, in her heart of hearts, to share Lucy's view of Boringdon's nature. Perhaps he was one of those men—she had known a few such—who are incapable of violent, determining feeling. If that were so, might not his evident liking for, and trust in, Lucy, develop into something quite sufficiently like love amply to satisfy the girl?

And Boringdon? Boringdon also was far from happy and satisfied during those days which had followed on his talk with his mother. The result of the conversation had been to make him deliberately avoid Lucy Kemp. But at once he had become aware that he missed the girl—missed, above all, the power of turning to her for sympathy, and even to a certain extent for counsel, more than he would have thought possible. He felt suddenly awakened to a danger he would rather not have seen,—why, oh! why, had not his mother left well alone? The state of things which had existed all that summer had exactly suited him. Looking back, Oliver felt sure that Lucy had not misunderstood the measure of affection and liking which he was willing, nay, eager, to bestow on her.

As the days went by, the young man wondered uneasily why his mother had suddenly left off asking the girl to lunch and to tea, as she had done, at one time, almost daily. He knew that Mrs. Boringdon rarely acted without a definite motive. Often her eyes would rest on his moody face with a questioning look. He longed to know why Lucy never came to the Cottage, but he was unwilling to give his mother the satisfaction of hearing him make such an inquiry. Then he reminded himself that, after all, Mrs. Kemp was really ill: the whole village watched with interest the daily visit to the Grange of the Halnakeham doctor. Perhaps Lucy found it difficult to leave home just now.

Even concerning his village worries—those connected with his work as land-agent to the Chancton estate—Boringdon had got into the way of turning to Lucy Kemp for comfort, and so he felt cut off from the only person to whom he could talk freely. Then had come that short meeting in the lane, and something timid, embarrassed in Lucy's manner had suddenly made him afraid, had put him on his guard—but afterwards he had been bitterly ashamed of the way in which he had behaved in leaving her so abruptly.

His heart grew very tender to her, and, had he not known that his mother was watching him, he would almost certainly have "made it up"—have given way—and nature would have done the rest. But Oliver was aware that any sign of weakness on his part would be a triumph for Mrs. Boringdon—a proof that she had known how to shepherd him into a suitable engagement with a well-dowered girl: and so he had held out, knowing secretly that it only rested with him to restore his old relation with Lucy to its former footing.

At last, it had been Mrs. Boringdon who had asked him, in her most innocent and conventional voice, to take a note from her to Mrs. Kemp, and the accident that it had been Lucy who had opened the front door had been enough to shake his resolution, and to break down the barrier which he had put up between himself and her. At the time he had been carrying the letter concerning his old constituency about with him for two days, and the temptation to tell Lucy all about it proved too strong. Hence he had followed her through into the quiet fragrant garden which held for him so many pleasant associations of interesting, intimate talk with both the mother and the daughter.

Then, almost at once, had come the sharp, he told himself resentfully the utterly unwarrantable, interruption—more, there had been no mistaking General Kemp's manner—that of the man who cries "hands off!" from some cherished possession. Boringdon's guilty conscience—it was indeed hard that his conscience should feel guilty, for he was not aware of having done anything of which he should be ashamed—Boringdon's guilty conscience at once suggested the terrible thought that General Kemp doubtless regarded him as a fortune-hunter. When the front door of the Grange had closed on him he felt as if he could never come there again, and as if one of the pleasantest pages of his life had suddenly closed.

He determined to say nothing of the pregnant, even if almost wordless, little scene to his mother, and it was with a nervous dread of questions and cross questions that he entered the drawing-room of the Cottage with words concerning a very different person from Lucy Kemp on his lips. "Don't you think," he asked, "that the time has come when we ought to do something about Mrs. Rebell? She has been here, it seems, at least a week, and several people have already called on her."

Mrs. Boringdon looked at her son with some surprise, and he saw with satisfaction that his little ruse had been successful; the news he brought had made her forget, for the moment, the Grange and Lucy Kemp.

"Several people?" she repeated, "I think, my dear boy, you must be mistaken. No one ever calls at Chancton Priory. How could anyone—unless you mean Miss Vipen and the Rectory," she smiled slightingly—"have even been made aware of this Mrs. Rebell's arrival?"

"And yet there's no doubt about it," he said irritably, "I had the list from McKirdy, who seemed to take these calls as a personal compliment to himself! Miss Berwick drove over two or three days ago, and so did the Duchess of Appleby and Kendal." He waited a moment, feeling rather ashamed. He had known how to rouse his mother to considerable interest and excitement.

"The Duchess?" she echoed incredulously.—Most country districts in England have a duchess, and this district was no exception to the rule,—"what an extraordinary thing! I should have called on Mrs. Rebell, Grace's friend, before now, but it seemed so strange that she was not in church. It made me fear"—Mrs. Boringdon looked slightly shocked and genuinely grieved—"that she was going to follow the example of all the other people connected with the Priory."

"I don't know why you should say that, mother. It is quite impossible for Madame Sampiero to go to church, even if she wished to do so. As for McKirdy, I suppose he is a Presbyterian, but the Priory servants all go, don't they?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Boringdon, reluctantly, "the servants certainly do go,—that is, the lower servants. No one has ever seen the housekeeper at church, and, of course the state of things here must grieve Mr. Sampson very much."

Oliver smiled grimly. "If that is really so, Sampson doesn't know when he's well off. The sight of Mrs. Turke, resplendent in a new gown each Sunday, would certainly distract the congregation from his dull sermon!" But Mrs. Boringdon bent her head gravely, as if refusing to discuss so unsavoury and painful a subject.

"Have you seen her?" she asked with some natural curiosity. She added hastily, "I mean, of course, Mrs. Rebell."

"No," he said, "but I expect to do so in a few minutes. I saw McKirdy in the village just now, and profiting by his absence, I'm going to try and establish some kind of communication between Madame Sampiero and myself. There's a most urgent matter which ought to be settled at once, and McKirdy was so disagreeable the last time we met that I do not wish to bring him into it if I can possibly avoid it."

The Chancton estate, in addition to two villages, comprised many large farms stretching out on the fringe of the downs, and no day went by without the transaction by Boringdon of much complicated and tiresome business. In this, however, there would naturally have been much to interest such a man as himself, especially as he and Berwick had theories about agricultural problems and were eager to try experiments—in fact, Berwick was already doing so very successfully on his Sussex estate.

But for Boringdon, the new work to which he had set his hand had soon been poisoned, owing to the peculiar conditions under which he was compelled to do it. His immediate predecessor had been Doctor McKirdy, whose duties as medical attendant to Madame Sampiero had comprised for a while that of being her vice-regent as regarded estate matters. That arrangement had been anything but a success, hence the appointment, through Lord Bosworth's, or rather through James Berwick's, influence, of Oliver Boringdon. The change had been made the more easy because McKirdy, with an obstinacy worthy of a better cause, had always refused to accept any payment for this extra labour.

At first, the old Scotchman had been glad to give up the work he knew himself to have performed inadequately. Then, as time went on, he began to interfere, and Boringdon discovered, with anger and astonishment, that many matters were being gradually referred, both by the greater and the lesser tenants, directly to Madame Sampiero, or rather to the man who was still regarded, and with reason, as her vice-regent.

The doctor also insisted on being the sole means of communication between his patient and Boringdon. This was after he had found them speaking together,—or rather Boringdon speaking and Madame Sampiero listening,—concerning some public matter quite unconnected with Chancton. From that moment, Alexander McKirdy had set his very considerable wits to work against the younger man. He had informed him with sharp decision that his weekly audiences with his employer must cease: pointing out that almost everything that must be referred to her could be so done through him. Boringdon, for a while, had felt content that this should be so—he had always had a curious fear and repugnance of the still stiff figure, which seemed to be at once so physically dead and so mentally alive.

Then had come the gradual awakening, the realisation of his folly in consenting to an arrangement which destroyed his authority with those with whom he was brought into daily contact. Even the humblest cottager had soon discovered that the doctor, or "Kirdy," as he was unceremoniously styled amongst themselves, was once more the real over-lord of Chancton, and Boringdon found himself reduced to the disagreeable rÔle of rent collector, his decisions concerning any important matter being constantly appealed from, and revoked by, the joint authority of Madame Sampiero and Doctor McKirdy.

The situation soon became almost intolerable to the high-spirited and sensitive young man: if it had not been for his mother, and for the fact that the very generous income allotted to him for the little he now did was of the utmost importance to her, he would ere this have resigned the land agency.

His pride prevented any mention of the odious position in which he found himself to Berwick, the more so that in theory he had all the power—it was to him, for instance, that Madame Sampiero's lawyers wrote when anything had to be settled or done. McKirdy also always allowed him to carry on any negotiations with neighbouring landowners. Boringdon had a free hand as regarded the keepers and the shooting—indeed, it was only with regard to the sporting amenities of the estate that he was really in the position of master rather than servant.

To his mother he always made light of his troubles, though he was well aware that he had her ardent sympathy, which took the, to him, disagreeable form of slight discourtesies to Doctor McKirdy—discourtesies which were returned with full interest by the old Scotchman. To Lucy and to Lucy's mother he had been more frank, and all she knew had not contributed to make Lucy feel kindly to Doctor McKirdy, though he was quite unconscious of how he was regarded by her.

To-day, matters had come, so felt Boringdon, to a head. On his way from the Cottage to the Grange, he had stopped for a moment at the estate office, and there had engaged in a sharp discussion with one of the more important Chancton farmers concerning a proposed remittance of rent. The man had brought his Michaelmas rent in notes and gold, the sum considerably short, according to Boringdon, of what should have been paid. The land-agent had refused to accept the money, and the farmer, naturally enough, had declared it to be his intention to make an appeal to Madame Sampiero through Doctor McKirdy.

It had been partly to turn his mind from the odious memory of this conversation that the young man had not been able to resist the temptation of following Lucy through into the garden with which he had so many pleasant memories, and once there, of showing her the letter which seemed to point to an ultimate escape from Chancton, and all that Chancton now represented of annoyance and humiliation.

Leaving the Grange, he had passed Doctor McKirdy, and had made up his mind to try and see Madame Sampiero within the next few hours. If it came to the point, he believed he could conquer, only, however, by calling to his aid the Bosworth faction, but the thought of an appeal to Berwick was still, nay, more than ever, disagreeable. At the same time this was a test case. He was sorry that his mother had not called on Mrs. Rebell, for he was dimly aware that the trifling lack of courtesy would give McKirdy a slight advantage, but during the last few days he had had other things to think of than his sister's unfortunate protÉgÉe, in whom, however, he unwillingly recognised another adherent to the McKirdy faction.

And yet the first meeting of Boringdon and Barbara Rebell fell out in such wise that it led to a curiously sudden intimacy, bred of something between pity and indignation on her side and gratitude on his.