Cowley.

It was the second day of the three which were being devoted to the coming-of-age festivities of Lord Pendragon, and Miss Berwick had asked herself to lunch at Halnakeham Castle. Because of the great ball which was to take place that evening, this day was regarded by the Duchess and the more sober of her guests as an off-day—one in which there was to be a lull in the many old-fashioned jollifications and junketings which were being given in honour of the son of the house.

The Duchess of Appleby and Kendal had been a very good friend to Arabella and to her brother, and that over long years. Owing to a certain inter-marriage between her own family and that of the Berwicks, she chose to consider them as relations, and as such had consistently treated them. She was fond of James, and believed in his political future. Arabella she respected and admired: both respect and admiration having sure foundations in a fact which had come to the Duchess's knowledge in the days when she was still young, still slender, and still, so she sometimes told herself with a sigh, enthusiastic! This fact had been the sacrifice by Arabella Berwick of the small fortune left her by her parents, in order that some debts of her brother's might be paid.

At the present moment James Berwick was actually staying at the Castle, and his sister had asked herself to lunch in order, if possible to see, and if not, to hear, on what terms he found himself with that one of his fellow guests whom his hostess, knowing what she did know of Arabella's fears, should not have allowed him to meet under her roof.

To Miss Berwick's discomfiture, Louise Marshall was at lunch, more tragic, more mysterious in her manner, alas! more lovely, in her very modified widow's dress, than ever; but Arabella's brother, so her host informed her when they were actually seated at table, had gone over for the day to Chillingworth! This meant that the sister had had a four-mile drive for nothing—a drive, too, which was to be repeated that same evening, for the whole of the Fletchings party, even Lord Bosworth, were coming to the ball.

One of the most curious of human phenomena met with by the kindly and good-hearted who are placed by Providence in positions of importance and responsibility, is the extreme willingness shown by those about them to profit by that same kindliness and good-heartedness—joined to a keen disapproval when those same qualities are exercised on behalf of others than themselves!

There had been a time when the Duchess's rather culpable good-nature, strengthened by her real affection for the two young people concerned, had been of the utmost service to Arabella Berwick—when, indeed, without the potent help of Halnakeham Castle, Miss Berwick would have been unable to achieve what had then been, not only the dearest wish of her heart, but one of the utmost material moment—the marriage of her brother to the great heiress whose family had hoped better things for her than a union with Lord Bosworth's embarrassed though brilliant nephew and heir.

But the kind Duchess's services on that occasion were now forgotten in Arabella's extreme anger and indignation at the weak folly which had led to Mrs. Marshall's being asked to meet Berwick. The sister had come over to Halnakeham determined to say nothing of what she thought, for she was one of those rare women who never cry over spilt milk,—the harm, if harm there were, was already done. But the old habit of confidence between the two women, only separated by some ten years in age, had proved too strong, especially as the opportunity was almost thrust upon the younger of the two by her affectionate and apologetic hostess.

"Qui s'excuse s'accuse"; the Duchess, sitting alone after lunch with her dear Arabella, should surely have remembered the wise French proverb, the more so as she had not made up her mind how much she meant to say, and how much to leave unsaid, concerning James Berwick's strange behaviour during the few days he had been sleeping,—but by no means living,—at the Castle.

"Well, my dear, we need not have been afraid about your brother and poor Louise Marshall—from what I can make out, he has hardly said a word to her since he has been here! In fact, he has hardly been here at all. He goes off in the morning and comes back late in the afternoon. He did stay and help yesterday, and made, by the way, a most charming little speech,—but then he took his evening off! I've been wondering whether there can be any counter attraction in the neighbourhood of Chillingworth—?"

The speaker looked rather significantly at her guest. She had been at some trouble to find out what that attraction could be which took Berwick daily to Chancton, and as her own confidential maid was Mrs. Turke's niece, and a Chancton woman, she had come to a pretty shrewd idea of the truth.

But Miss Berwick was absorbed in her grievance. "No," she said sharply, "certainly not! James hasn't ever been over to Fletchings, and we have no one staying there whom he could want to see. I suppose the truth is he wisely tries to escape from Mrs. Marshall. Knowing all you know, Albinia, and all I said to you last year, how could you have the woman here? I was really aghast when I heard that she was coming, and that James was hurrying back to see her—of course everyone must be putting two and two together, and he will find himself at last in a really bad scrape!"

The Duchess began to look very uncomfortable. "The poor soul wrote and asked if she might come," she said feebly; "I do think that you are rather hardhearted. It would melt your heart if you were to hear her talking about him to me. She has paid a woman—some poor Irish lady recommended to her—to look up all his old speeches, and she devotes an hour every day to reading them over, and that although she doesn't understand a word of what she's reading! It's really rather touching, and I do think he owes her something. Of course you know what she would like, what she is hoping for against hope—old Mr. Marshall was a very rich man——"

Miss Berwick knew very well, but she thought the question an outrage—so foolish and so shocking that it was not worth an answer. Indeed, she shrugged her shoulders, a slight but very decided shrug, more eloquent than any words could have been from such a woman.

The Duchess, kind as she was, and with a power of sympathetic insight which often made her unhappy, felt suddenly angered. She took up a book. It had a mark in it. "Reading this sentence," she said rather nervously, "I could not help thinking of your brother."

Miss Berwick held out a languid hand. She thought this rather a mean way of avoiding a discussion. Then she read aloud the sentence—

"It is the punishment of Don Juanism to create continually false positions, relations in life which are false in themselves, and which it is equally wrong to break or to perpetuate."

There was a pause. Arabella put the book down, and pushed it from her with an almost violent gesture. "I cannot understand," she cried, "how this can in any way have suggested James! I never met a man who was less of a Don Juan. If he was so he would be happier, and so should I. Imagine Don Juan and Louise Marshall—why, he would have made mincemeat of such a woman; she would have been a mere episode!"

"And what more has poor Louise been? No woman likes to be a mere episode! I do not say"—the Duchess spoke slowly; she knew she had gone a little too far, and wished to justify herself, also to find out, for the knowledge had made her very indignant, if Arabella was aware of how her brother was now spending his time,—"I do not say by any means that your brother is a Don Juan in the low and mean sense of the term, but circumstances and you—yes, you, in a measure—have made his relations to women essentially false and unnatural. Yes, my dear girl, that sort of thing is against nature! You are amazed and indignant when I speak of it as being possible that he should marry Louise Marshall, and yet I am quite sure that James is a man far more constituted for normal than for abnormal conditions, and that he would be happier, and more successful in the things that you consider important for him if, like other men, he realised that—that——"

The Duchess stole a look at her guest's rigid face, then went on with dogged courage—

"Well, that a certain kind of behaviour nearly always leads to a man's having to take a woman—generally the wrong woman, too—to church, that is, if he is, in the ordinary sense, an honourable man! I fear," concluded the Duchess dolefully, "that you think me very coarse. But James and Louise between them have made me quite wretched the last few days, so you must forgive me, and really I don't think you have anything to fear—Louise is leaving the day after to-morrow."

The speaker got up; why, oh! why, had she allowed herself to be lured into this odious discussion?

Arabella had also risen, and for a moment the two women, perfectly contrasted types of what centuries have combined to make the modern Englishwoman of the upper class, faced one another.

The Duchess was essentially maternal and large-hearted in her outlook on life. She was eager to compass the happiness of those round her, and thanked God daily for having given her so good a husband and such perfect children—unconscious that she had herself made them to a great extent what they were. Particular to niceness as to her own conduct, and that of her daughters, she was yet the pitying friend of all black sheep whose blackness was due to softness of heart rather than hardness of head. On the whole, a very happy woman—one who would meet even those natural griefs which come to us all with soft tears of submission, but who would know how to avert unnatural disaster.

To her alone had been confided the story of Miss Berwick's love passages with Daniel O'Flaherty. To-day, looking at the still youthful figure and proud reserved face of her friend, she marvelled at the strength of character, the mingled cruelty and firmness, Arabella had shown, and she wondered, not for the first time, whether the agony endured had been in any sense justified by its results. Then she reminded herself that as Mrs. O'Flaherty the sister could hardly have brought about, as Miss Berwick had known how to do, her brother's marriage to one of the wealthiest unmarried women of her day.

"I think we ought to be going downstairs: and—and—please forgive me for speaking as I did just now—you know I am simply tired out!"

And indeed the Duchess had endured that which had gone far to spoil her innocent happiness in her son's coming-of-age festivities. After each long day of what was on her part real hard work, the poor lady, whom all about her envied, would call on her only confidant, the Duke, to scourge her for the folly to which her kindness of heart and platonic sympathy with the tender passion had led her; and husband-wise he would by turns comfort and scold her, saying very uncomplimentary things of both the sinners now in full enjoyment of his hospitality. Berwick, generally the most agreeable and serviceable of guests, was moody, ill at ease, and often absent for long hours—behaving indeed in a fashion which only his hosts' long kindness to him could, in any way, excuse or authorise.

As to Mrs. Marshall, she made no effort to disguise her state of mind. She gloried in her unfortunate and unrequited passion, and made the object of it appear—what he flattered himself he had never yet been—absurd. She made confidences to the women and entertained the men with eulogies of Berwick. Now, to-day, she was looking forward, as her hostess well knew, to the evening. At the ball it would surely be impossible for her lover to escape her, though her anxiety—and this, the Duchess's fatal knowledge of human nature also made clear to her—was somewhat tempered by the fact that on this occasion, in honour, as she plaintively explained, of dear Pendragon, and in order to cast no gloom over the festivity, she would once more appear in a dress showing the lovely shoulders which had once been described as "marmorean"—the word had greatly gratified her—by a Royal connoisseur of feminine beauty.

The fact that the whole affair much enlivened the party and gave an extraordinary "montant" to what would otherwise have been rather a prosy gathering,—that her guests so much enjoyed an item which had no place in the long programme of entertainments arranged by the Duke and herself—was no consolation to the Duchess.

"One moment, Albinia!"

The younger woman had turned very pale. The Duchess's words concerning Berwick and his sentimental adventures had cut her to the quick. Heavens! was this the way people were talking of her brother? The words, "an honourable man," sounded in her ears. How cruelly, how harshly, men and women judged each other!

"Of course, what you said just now concerning James and his love affairs,—if one may call them so,—impressed me. How could it be otherwise? As you know, I have no sympathy, I might almost say no understanding, of his attitude in these matters. There is a whole side of life to which I feel," her voice dropped, "the utmost repugnance. I have never allowed anyone to make me those confidences which seem so usual nowadays, nay, more, I have never even glanced at the details of any divorce case. I once dismissed a very good maid—you remember Bennett?—because I found her reading something of the kind in my room. I could not have borne to have about me a woman who I knew delighted in such literature——"

"But my dear Arabella——"

"Let me speak! Bear with me a moment longer! Now, about James. Of course I know he's in a difficult position—one that is, as you say, unnatural. But, after all, many men remain unmarried from choice, ay, and even free from foolish intrigues—to me such episodes are not love affairs. If there is any fear of such folly leading to marriage, well then, for my brother the matter becomes one of terrible moment——"

"You mean because of the money?" The Duchess had sunk down again into a chair—she was looking up at her friend, full of remorse at having seemed to put Arabella on her defence.

"Yes, Albinia, because of the money. You do not know—you have never known—what it is to lack money. I have never wanted it for myself, but I have longed for it, Heaven alone knows how keenly, simply to be relieved from constant care and wearing anxieties. I seem to be the first Berwick who has learnt how not to spend! As for James, it is impossible to imagine him again a poor man."

"And yet he is not extravagant."

Miss Berwick looked pityingly at the Duchess. "What is extravagance? Perhaps in the common sense of the word James is not extravagant. But he cares supremely for those things which, in these ignoble times of ours, money alone ensures—Power—the power to be independent—the indefinite, but very real, prestige great wealth gives among those who despise the prestige of rank."

"But do those people matter?" asked the Duchess, rather superbly. "Snobbish radicals—I've met 'em!"

"But that is just what they are not!" cried Arabella feverishly. "They care nothing for rank, but they do care, terribly so, for money. The man who is known to have it—fluid at his disposal (that's how I heard one of James's friends once describe it)—at the disposal, if so it be needed, of the party, commands their allegiance and their respect, as no great noble, every penny of whose income is laid out beforehand, can hope to do. If James, instead of marrying as he did do, had gone on as he began, where would he be now? What position, think you, would he occupy? I will tell you, Albinia,—that of a Parliamentary free-lance, whose very abilities make him feared by the leaders of every party; that of a man whose necessities make him regard office as the one thing needful, who is, or may be, open to subtle forms of bribery, whose mouth may be suddenly closed on the bidding of—well, say, of his uncle, Lord Bosworth, because he gives him, at very long and uncertain intervals, such doles as may keep him out of the Bankruptcy Court. Can you wonder that I am anxious? To me he is everything in the world——"

She stopped abruptly, then began speaking again in far more bitter accents.

"Louise Marshall! You spoke just now of his possible marriage to that woman. She may be rich, but I tell you fairly that I would rather see James poor than rich through her. I cannot find words to express to you what I think of her. She sold herself, her youth, her great beauty, her name, and her family connections—you among them, Albinia—to that vulgar old man, and now that the whole price has been meted out to her, she wishes to re-invest it in a more pleasant fashion. She has sold and now she wishes to buy——"

"My dear Arabella!"

"Yes, it is I who am coarse,—horribly so! But I am determined that you shall hear my side of the case. You speak of my brother's honour. Do you know how Louise Marshall behaved last year? Do you know that, when that wretched old man lay dying, she came to Bosworth House—to my house—and insisted on seeing James, and—and"—the speaker's voice broke, the Duchess could see that she was trembling violently; "Why do you make me remember those things—those horrible things which I desire to forget?"

Emotion of any sort is apt to prove contagious. The Duchess was very sorry for her friend; but she had received, which Arabella had not, Mrs. Marshall's confidences, and then she knew, what Arabella evidently did not know, how James Berwick was now spending his time, and what had dislodged—or so she believed—Louise Marshall from his heart. And so—

"As you have spoken to me so frankly," she said, "I also owe you the truth. Perhaps I am not so really sorry for Louise as you seem to think me, but, during the last few days, a fact has come to my knowledge—I need hardly tell you that I have said nothing to Louise about it—which has made me, I must say, feel rather indignant. I asked you just now, Arabella, whether there could be any rival attraction at Chillingworth; that, I confess, was rather hypocritical on my part, for there is an attraction—at Chancton Priory."

"At Chancton Priory?" repeated Miss Berwick, "why there's absolutely no one at Chancton Priory! Who can you possibly mean?"

All sorts of angry, suspicious thoughts and fears swept through her mind. As is so often the case with women who keep themselves studiously aloof from any of the more unpleasant facts of real life, she was sometimes apt to suspect others of ideas which to them would have been unthinkable. She knew that her friend's maid was a niece of Madame Sampiero's housekeeper. Was it possible that there had been any gossip carried to and fro as to Berwick's attraction for some rustic beauty? Well, whatever was true of him, that would never be true. To him temptation did not lie that way.

But it was the Duchess's turn to look astonished. "Do you mean," she exclaimed, "that you have not seen and know nothing of Barbara Sampiero's cousin,—of this Mrs. Rebell, who has been at Chancton for the last six weeks, and whom, if I judge rightly from the very pathetic letter which poor dear Barbara Sampiero dictated for me to that old Scotch doctor of hers, she is thinking of making her heiress?"

"Mrs. Rebell?"—Miss Berwick's tone was full of incredulous relief—"My dear Albinia, what an extraordinary idea! Certainly, I have seen her. My uncle made me call the very moment she arrived, and I never met a more apathetic, miserable-looking woman, or one more gauche and ill at ease."

"She did not look gauche or ill at ease at the Whiteways meet."

"Mrs. Rebell was not at the meet," said Arabella positively. "If she had been, I should, of course, have seen her. Do you mean the woman who was riding Saucebox?—that was some friend of the Boringdons."

It was the Duchess's turn to shrug her shoulders: "But I spoke to her!" she cried. "I can't think where your eyes could have been. She's a strikingly attractive-looking woman, with—or so I thought, when I called on her some ten days after she arrived at Chancton—a particularly gentle and self-possessed manner."

"Oh! but you," said Miss Berwick, not very pleasantly, "always see strangers en beau. As to James, all I can say is that I only wish he did admire Mrs. Rebell—that, at any rate, would be quite safe, for she is very much married, and to a relation of Madame Sampiero."

"You would wish James to admire this Mrs. Rebell? Well, not so I! To my mind his doing so would be a most shocking thing, a gross abuse of hospitality"—and as she saw that Miss Berwick was still smiling slightly, for the suggestion that her brother was attracted to the quiet, oppressed-looking woman with whom she had spent so uncomfortable a ten minutes some weeks before, seemed really ludicrous—the Duchess got up with a sudden movement of anger. "Well, you will be able to see them together to-night, and I think you will change your opinion about Mrs. Rebell, and also agree with me that James should be off with the old love before he is on with the new!"

"Albinia"—Miss Berwick's voice altered, there came into it something shamed and tremulous in quality—"Sir John Umfraville has left us. When it came to the point—well, I found I couldn't do it."