Beaumont and Fletcher.

A short avenue of chestnut trees, now in their scented glory of rose-pink blossom, hid the square red-brick hunting lodge, still known by its pre-Revolution name of Le Pavillon du Dauphin, from the broad solitary roadway skirting the Forest of St. Germains. Under this avenue James Berwick, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes bent on the ground, was walking up and down the morning of the day he was expecting Barbara to join him.

It was seven o'clock—not early, according to French hours, for now and again the heavy wheels of a market cart, the jingling of the tiny bells hung on to the blue worsted-covered harness, the neighing of the horses, would break on his ear, and serve to remind him that he was in France—in the land where, if long tradition speaks truly, the thing that he was about to do would find many more honest apologists than in his own; in France which had given, close to this very spot, so magnificent a hospitality to his own Stuart ancestors. All about him lay the deep, mysterious, unbroken calm of the great forest; every trace of last summer's merrymakers—if, indeed, such people ever made their way to this, the further edge of the wooded peninsula,—had been completely obliterated. What more enchanting spot could be found in the wide world to form the setting of what he believed would be a life-long romance?

Like most men, he had always seen something offensive, almost grotesque, in the preliminaries now usual to conventional marriage. Heavens! what a lack of imagination had the modern bride and bridegroom! Especially in England—especially in his own class. Here the mating birds, amid awakening spring, would sing his own and Barbara's epithalamium.

And yet Berwick was not happy, as he had thought to be, to-day. Again and again during the long wakeful night he had just passed he had caught himself wondering whether his uncle, at the beginning of his long intimacy with Madame Sampiero, had felt such scruples as these which now tormented him. If so, they had soon vanished; Lord Bosworth, during many years, had been supremely content with life, and all that life brought him.

Perhaps he, Berwick, was made of more scrupulous stuff. To-day he had to face the fact that in his cup of honey there was a drop of exceeding bitterness. The knowledge that Boringdon might be mistaken,—that Barbara might, after all, never be free,—made the matter scarcely more tolerable. Oliver had so spoken that at the time his words had carried conviction. Berwick asked himself why he had not told her the whole truth, and then let her be the judge as to what they should do. He had always been aware that there were the two streaks in his character—the two Stuart streaks—that of extreme nobility, and that which makes a man capable of acts of inexplicable betrayal.

In vain he tried to persuade himself that now was too late to change. Human nature has its limits; in a few hours Barbara would be here, and with quickening pulses he tried to think only of the immediate future. Later on, there would—there must—come inevitable pain and difficulty; they would have to face the reproachful gaze of Madame Sampiero, the undoubted disapproval of Lord Bosworth, and yet whose example were he and Barbara now about to follow?

The present was his own, no one—no one, that is, but himself—could deprive him of to-day's completed joy; and yet he would have given much to hasten the march of the lagging hours, to sleep, to dream the time away. Perhaps, when he was in the actual presence of the woman he loved with a depth of feeling which, to a certain extent, purified and rendered selfless his longing for her, he would find courage to tell her the whole of what Boringdon had said—

This concession to his conscience lightened his heart, and he looked with leisurely and pleased gaze at the finely proportioned building—a miniature replica of what the central portion of the Palace of Versailles must have looked like in the days of Louis XIII. No wonder the curious, stately little pavilion had caught the fancy of his father—that whimsical, unfortunate Charles Berwick, whose son thought of him far oftener than he had ever done as a younger man. The Pavilion du Dauphin, put up for sale in one of France's many political convulsions, had only cost its English purchaser twenty thousand francs; and now each year Berwick received an offer from the French Government to buy the place back at five times that sum! He always refused this offer, and yet he came there but seldom, sometimes in the autumn for a few days, occasionally, perhaps once in two or three years, with Arabella. Since the death of his own mother, no woman save James Berwick's sister had enjoyed the rare charm of the old hunting lodge.

The building was not fitted for ordinary life. It consisted of two vast central rooms,—that above the central hall being little more than a loft,—out of which opened smaller apartments, each and all bearing traces of the prodigal wealth and luxurious fancy of that fermier gÉnÉral into whose acquisitive hands the place had drifted for a while during the last half of the eighteenth century. It was he, doubtless, who had added the painted ceilings, the panels which Berwick's father believed had been painted by Nattier, and which, if this were so, would have made the Pavilion du Dauphin a bargain even at the price which Berwick yearly refused for it.

When Arabella was there, the brother and sister managed very well without English servants, done for, and that most adequately, by an old garde de chasse, Jean Lecerf, and his wife, whom Berwick paid generously for looking after the property during the winter months of the year.

This old couple,—with the solitary exception of Lord Bosworth, who rarely alluded to his younger brother,—were the only people who ever spoke to Berwick and his sister of their parents. Those eccentric parents, whose marriage had been in itself a wilful, innocent romance, culminating in a runaway wedding, had spent five summers here, bringing with them, after the first year, their baby daughter. The stories the Lecerfs had to tell of that time lost nothing in the telling!

MÈre Lecerf—a name generic of the soil in that part of Northern France—knew very little of her present employer, saving the agreeable fact that he must be very rich. She was quite unaware that he was a widower, and she had accepted with apparent satisfaction, and quaintly expressed felicitations, the story he had seen fit to tell her within an hour of his arrival the day before—namely that he was now married, and that his wife was coming to join him for a few days!

Berwick would have preferred to make no such explanation, but something had to be said, and, after all, would not he henceforth regard Barbara Rebell as in very truth his honoured, his cherished wife?

He walked from the outside air into the spacious room, into which the morning sun was streaming through the one immense window which gave on to a steep clearing, now carpeted with the vivid delicate green of lily-of-the-valley leaves. One of the qualities which had most delighted him in Barbara during the early days of their acquaintance had been her perception of, and delight in, natural beauty. How charmed she would be with this place! How the child which had awakened in her would revel in the strangeness of a dwelling-place which so little resembled the ordinary conventional house!

Groups of fair shepherdesses, each attended by her faithful swain, smiled down from the pale grisaille walls, but close to the deep chimney,—indeed, fixed inside, above the wooden seat—was a reminder of an age more austere, more creative than that of Nattier. This was a framed sheet of parchment—a contemporary copy of Plantin's curious sonnet, "Le Bonheur de ce Monde," whose naif philosophy of life has found echoes in many worthy hearts since it was first composed by the greatest of Flemish printers.

With the exception, perhaps, of three or four lines, Berwick now found himself in unexpected agreement with old Plantin's analysis of human happiness.

And Barbara? Ah! she undoubtedly would agree with almost every word of it; he caught himself wondering whether the position he had won, and which he owed in a measure,—perhaps in a very great measure,—to his wife's fortune, would be really forfeited, were he to become again a comparatively poor man. Berwick had by no means forgotten what it was to be straitened in means; and he realised that want of substantial wealth had been a great bar even to Lord Bosworth. Still, oddly enough, the thought of giving up his wealth for the sake of Barbara was beginning to appeal to his imagination. He went so far as to tell himself that, had he come across her as a girl, he would of course have married her, and forfeited his large income without a regret.

So it was that, during the long solitary spring day, spent by him almost wholly in the forest, Berwick experienced many phases of acute and varying feeling, most of which tended to war with the course to which he was being inexorably driven by his sense of honour rather than by his conscience.

But for Boringdon's revelation as to Pedro Rebell's state, Berwick's conscience would have been at ease. So much he had the honesty to admit. Apart from that one point which so intimately involved his honour, he was without scruple, and that although he loved Barbara the more for being, as he well knew she was, scrupulous, and, as he thought, conscience-ridden. Nothing, so he told himself again and again during those hours of fierce battle, could alter the fact that she belonged to him in that special sense which is, as concerns a man and a woman, the outcome of certain emotional experiences only possible between two natures which are drawn to one another by an over-mastering instinct.

In the days that followed the fire at Chancton Priory, there had arisen, between Berwick and Barbara, a deep, wordless intimacy and communion, which at the time had had the effect of making him divine what was in her mind, with a clearness which had struck those about them as being actually uncanny. And yet it was then, during those days, that Berwick had sworn to himself that his love was pure and selfless in its essence. As she had lain there, her hand quivering when it felt his touch, every gross element of his nature had become fused and refined in the clear flame of his passion. It had been during these exquisite, to him sacred moments, that he had told himself that on these terms of spiritual closeness and fusion he would be content to remain.

But alas! that mood had quickly changed; and the interview with Boringdon had reawakened the violent primeval instinct which had slumbered,—only slumbered,—during the illness of Barbara. The knowledge that another man loved her, with an ordinary, natural love by no means free from that element of physical attraction which Berwick himself had been striving, not unsuccessfully, to control in his own heart, had had a curious effect upon him. His soul, ay, and something much less spiritual and more tangible than his soul, rushed down from Heaven to earth, and he began to allow himself, when in the company of the woman he loved, certain experiments, slight, almost gossamer in texture, but which he would afterwards recall with a strange mingling of shame and rapture, for they proved him master of that most delicate and sensitive of human instruments, a pure and passionate heart.

The wide solitary glades carpeted with flowers, the chestnut groves, skirting the great avenue of firs, which is one of the glories of the Forest,—everything to-day seemed to minister to his passion, to bring Barbara Rebell vividly before him. Coming on a bank from whose mossy surface sprang high, delicately tinted windflowers, Berwick was suddenly haunted by a physical memory—that of Barbara's movement of surrender two days before. Again he felt her soft quivering mouth yielding itself to his lips, and, still so feeling, he suddenly bent down and put these lips, now sanctified, to the cool petals of a windflower. Was it a sure instinct which warned him that Barbara's love for him, even if it contained every element the natural man seeks to find in his mate, was so far governed by conscience that she would never be really content and unashamed so long as they were outside the law? More, if Boringdon were right, if Pedro Rebell were indeed dying, and Barbara became in time James Berwick's wife, would she ever forget, would she ever cease to feel a pang of pain and remorse in, the fact of this episode, and of the confession which would—which must—follow after? He had to ask himself whether he was prepared to cast so dark a shadow over the picture of these days, these hours, which her mind would carry into all the future years of their lives.

More difficult, because far more subtle and unanswerable, was the knowledge that Boringdon might after all have been wrong, and that Barbara might never be free. In that case, so Berwick with fierce determination told himself, he would be fool indeed to retard the decisive step which would resolve what had already become, both to him and to Barbara, if the truth were to be faced honestly, an intolerable situation.

But in his heart Berwick knew well that Oliver Boringdon had spoken the truth. Even now, to-day, release might have come, and Barbara might be a free woman. Slowly, painfully, as he fought and debated the question with himself, he became aware that only one course was compatible with his own self-respect.

A secret misgiving, a hidden, unmentionable dread, which would have troubled, perhaps with reason, many a man in Berwick's position, was spared this man. He knew that he need have no fear that Barbara would misunderstand, or question, even in her heart of hearts, his sacrifice. It would not be now, but later, that she would suffer,—when they went back to their old humiliating position at Chancton, as lovers unacknowledged, separated, watched.

And so, at last, the outcome of the struggle which saw him go through so many different moments of revolt and sharp temptation, was that Berwick brought himself to envisage that immediate renunciation, which seemed so much more difficult to face than did the further, if less poignant, sacrifice which still lay in the distant future, when, to make Barbara his wife, he would give up so much that had hitherto, or so he had thought, made life worth living.

Slowly he made his way back to the Pavilion du Dauphin, there to set himself grimly to do all that was possible to make his decision, if not irrevocable, then most difficult of revocation. MÈre Lecerf was abruptly told that as her master must leave the hunting lodge that night she must arrange to come and sleep there, in order that "Madame" should not be alone in the solitary building. But that, as Berwick well knew, was by no means enough, for MÈre Lecerf would acquiesce in any change of plan with joyful alacrity.

So it was that six o'clock saw him passing into the Pavilion Henri IV., the famous hostelry which terminates the long Terrace of St. Germains. There he was well known, and could, in his present mood, have well spared the delight with which his orders were received, as also the few sentences in which the landlady's young daughter aired her English. "But how so! Of course! The most beautiful of our rooms shall be ready for Monsieur's occupation. Perhaps for three nights? La, la! What a short sojourn! A carriage now, at once? Another one to be at the Pavilion du Dauphin this evening? But yes, certainly!"

Barbara, stepping down from the high French railway carriage, looked about her with a strange shrinking and fear in her dark eyes. From the moment she had left the boat she had been reminded, and that intolerably, of another journey taken, not alone,—on the day of her marriage to Pedro Rebell. The last few months seemed obliterated, and Berwick for the moment forgotten. She was haunted by two very different presences,—that of her mother, and that of the West Indian planter, whose physical nearness, which had ever, from their marriage day onward, filled her with agonised revolt and terror, she seemed now to feel as she had not felt it for years, for he had soon tired of his victim. Had it not been that thoughts of Madame Sampiero, and of the duty she owed to the paralysed woman, restrained her, she would have been tempted to open the railway carriage door and step out into the rushing wind, and so end, for ever, the conflict in her mind.

There are women, more women than men, who are born to follow the straight way,—to whom crooked paths are full of unknown terrors. Such a woman was Barbara Rebell. And yet the sight of Berwick,—Berwick, pale indeed, but quiet, self-possessed and smiling, as they advanced towards each other across the primitive little station,—brought comfort, and even security, to her heart. It was so clearly impossible that he would wish to work her any ill—

No other passenger had got out at Poissy, and the station-master, who knew the owner of the Pavillon du Dauphin, looked with curiosity at the man and woman now going towards one another. The information given to MÈre Lecerf had already reached him, "Cold types, these English!" but he cheered up when he saw Berwick suddenly bend down and kiss each of the traveller's pale cheeks, in French husbandly fashion. "Salut Monsieur! Salut Madame!" the familiar accents fell sweetly on Barbara's ear as she walked through to the town square, where a victoria was waiting to take them to the Pavillon du Dauphin.

As she sat, silent by his side, Berwick took her hand in his. Again and again he opened his lips to speak, to tell her of his decision. But something seemed to hold him back from doing so now. Later, when they were alone, would be time enough.

And Barbara? Still full of vague, unsubstantial fears, she yet felt free—absolutely free—from the presence which had journeyed by her side. Berwick now stood between herself and Pedro Rebell, but, during the long silent drive up the steep road leading from the valley to the forest plateau, Barbara's mother seemed to stand sentinel between herself and Berwick.

At last they were alone,—alone in the shadow-filled hall where the beams of the May moon, slanting in through the wide, curtainless window, warred with the light thrown by the lamp still standing on the table where they had sat at supper half an hour before.

As she heard the door shut behind Madame Lecerf, Barbara had risen and gone over to the friendly glow of the fire. She was now sitting, rather rigidly upright, on the wooden bench which formed a kind of inglenook within the stone fireplace. Just above her head hung the faded gilt frame containing Plantin's sonnet; her hands were clasped loosely over her knees, and she was looking straight into the heart of the burning peat.

Berwick, himself in shadow, watched her in tense silence; there was something enigmatical, and to him rather fearful, in her stillness,—in some ways he felt her more remote from himself than he had ever felt her to be since the night they had first met.

When driving from Poissy, he had taken her hand, and she had let it rest in his; but only for one brief moment, during the last two hours, had the woman he loved shown any sign of emotion. This was when, as they sat at table, the old French woman serving them had said, in answer to some question: "Mais oui, Madame Berwick!" and Barbara's face had suddenly become flooded with colour.

At last she looked round from the fire, and sought to see where her companion was sitting. Berwick thought the gesture beckoned; he leapt up and came forward with a certain eagerness, and, standing before her, smiled down into her serious eyes.

Suddenly she put out her hand and touched his sleeve. "Won't you sit down," she said, "here, by me?"

He obeyed, and she felt his arm slowly gathering her to him, while he, on his side, became aware that she first shrank back, and then gradually yielded to his embrace. Nay more, she suddenly laid her cheek against his lips with a curious childish abandonment, but he knew there was something wanting,—something which had been there during the moment that their souls, as well as their bodies, had rushed together the last,—the only time, till now,—that he had held her in his arms.

She made a slight, an ineffectual effort to disengage herself as she asked in a low voice: "Why did your servant call me that? Call me, I mean, by your name?"

"Because," he answered, rather huskily, "because I told her that you were my wife. I hope that name is what all will call you some day."

Barbara's lips trembled. "No," she said very slowly, "I do not think that will ever happen. God will not let me be so happy. I have not deserved it." Yet even as she said the words, he felt, with quick, overmastering emotion, that she was surrendering herself, in spirit as well as in body, and that she came willingly.

He turned and caught her more closely to him.

"Listen," he said hoarsely, "listen while I say something to you that perhaps I ought to have said before, earlier, to-night."

Then, rather suddenly, he withdrew his arms from about the slight rounded figure enfolded in them. The utterance of what he had made up his mind must now be said had become immeasurably more difficult during the last few moments. He asked himself, with rough self-reproach and self-contempt, why he had so delayed, why he had allowed her to come here to be so wholly at his mercy, and he—yes, he—at hers? He got up and walked slowly to the other side of the great room, and came back, even more slowly, to where Barbara was sitting.

There he knelt down by her.

"Barbara," he said, "be kind to me! Help me! My pure angel, what does your heart tell you would be to-night the greatest proof of my love—of my adoration of you?"

And then the most amazing, and, to the man looking up at her with burning eyes the most moving, change came over the face bent down to his. Barbara had understood. But she said nothing,—only slipped down and put her arms, a wholly voluntary movement of caress, round him, in a strange speechless passion of gratitude and tenderness.

"Ah, Barbara," he said, "you have made me know you too well. You have allowed me to see too clearly into your heart not to know that I was a brute to ask you to do this thing,—to do that which I knew you believed to be wrong." And, as she pressed more closely to him, her tears wetting his face, he went on: "But I promise,—I swear,—I will never ask it of you again. We will go on as we did,—as we found ourselves able to do,—after the fire."

"But will not that make you unhappy?" Her lips scarcely moved as she whispered the words, looking into his strained face with sad, beseeching eyes.

"Yes," he said, rather shortly, "if I thought it impossible, or even improbable, that you would become my wife, it would make me very unhappy, but that, or so I believe, is not impossible, not even improbable. Ah, Barbara, must I tell you,—do you wish me to tell you,—everything?"

She looked up at him with a sudden fear and perplexity. What did he mean, what was it he had heard and wished to keep from her? But she would trust him, trust him to the end, and so, "No," she whispered, "tell me nothing you would ever regret having told me. I am quite content, nay, more than content, with your goodness to your poor Barbara."

An hour later Berwick was driving away from the Pavillon du Dauphin, not to the station as MÈre Lecerf believed, but to St. Germains, within easy, tantalising distance of the woman he had just left,—a very tearful, a very radiant, a most adoring, and alas! a most adorable Barbara.

Looking out with absent eyes across the great moonlit plain to his left, Berwick thought over the strange little scene which had taken place. He hardly knew what he had said,—in any case far less than he had meant. Not a word, for instance, of what Boringdon had told him,—how could he have spoilt, with the image of death, such an evening as had just been theirs? Heavens! how strangely Barbara had altered, even before that whispered assurance that he would never, never ask her to do that which she thought wrong.

When he had first brought her into the Pavilion, there had been something tragic, as well as touching, in her still submissiveness of manner. But afterwards—ah, afterwards!—he had been privileged to see a side of her nature—ardent, yet spiritual, passionate, yet pure,—which he felt that he alone had the power to awaken, which had manifested itself only for him. How happy each had been in the feeling of nearness to the other, in the knowledge that they were at last free from watching, even if kindly, eyes, and listening ears,—what happiness they promised each other for the morrow! They would give themselves, so Berwick told Barbara, three days in this sylvan fairy land, and then he would take her to Paris, and go himself back to England.

Barbara Rebell never knew that those three days, of to her unalloyed bliss, held dark hours for her companion—hours when he cursed himself for a quixotic fool. But, even in the midst of that strange experience, Berwick was able to write in all honesty to his sister, the only human being to whom he confided the fact that he was in France,—might she not already have learnt it from some less trustworthy source?—certain cryptic words, to which she could then attach no meaning: "One word more. I wish to remind you that appearances are deceitful, and also to tell you that I have at last found that it is possible to be good, to be happy, and also to have a good time."