^s-^s ff^J-^i- V\ ^S-^VJ iM^: =W*S«"*«<"« PR CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library PR4613.D46G2 Gallia, 3 1924 013 341 874 DATE DUE um (fW Him™ p^H**-' r^TT- - -■ r*l"W™ u^j ^^^^^w It- fWv ; ™™„ printed IN U.S.A. GALLIA By MENIE MURIEL DOWIE AUTHOR OF " A GIRL IN THE KARPATHIANS" PHILADELPHIA J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY „ rr- 189s COPYRIGHT, 1895, BY J. B. Lipfincott Company. Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, U.S.A. -W u^ GALLIA. CHAPTEE I. A little thought will usually show where a story begins. Gurdon considered very rightly that his began with a visit he paid to old Mrs. Leighton in Cornwall Gardens. At least he knew it did not begin when he was at home, nor when he was at Rugby, nor yet when he spent two years at the Lyeee in Bordeaux (though he hesitated about this part, and sometimes won- dered if that had been the prologue). The in- terval of his life in Munich and his life in Lon- don, and again at Oxford, where he passed his examination for the Civil Service, was a barren period, with no suggestion of a story about it. But the call he had felt himself impelled to make in Cornwall Gardens, because Mrs. Leigh- ton was a connection of the Secretary of State for the Colonies, and by no means a quantite nl- gligeable, had something about it of an inaugura- tive character, and when he looked back upon it, he perceived that this was because it had quite certainly ushered in an incident. 3 4 GALLIA. The incident was his journey to Paris. " It is about Robbie," Mrs. Leigbton bad said, as the last visitor swept round the corner of the screen. "Ah!" " Yes. You will know that I do not care a rap about Eobbie, although he is my only grandson — but I think of the family." " Just so," said Gurdon, who knew that Mrs. Leigbton cared innumerable raps about Eobbie, and didn't think for a second about the family. " And what about him ?" " He is getting into the ways of wicked Paris. You know what I mean ?" Gurdon wasn't qualifying as a silent servant of his country for nothing; he didn't know in the least what she meant. He waited, looking steadily at her. " Ah, well, you have always been so steady," she went on, with a faint sigh, as though this were regrettable ; " but — er — Paris — the menage a deux. Ah, these artists — and their models !" Mrs. Leighton was a very rusee and clever old lady, and her uplifted eyes as she said " these artists," coupled with the quaint, dry twist in her voice when she said " their models," were quite funny. Gurdon never smiled, although perhaps Mrs. Leighton meant him to. He knew the old lady's foible was to be credited with a vast GALLIA. 5 knowledge of wickedness and that tenderness for the wicked which is supposed to proceed from " tout comprendre." He had heard Robbie say that the stories his grandmother could get out of one glass of Chartreuse, about the days when she was a young girl and stayed with her aunt at the French Embassy, licked anything a man could find in three times the quantity of Kiim- mel, and Eobbie didn't mean it as a compli- ment. Although he might be a bad boy, he had all that feeling of particularity about the minds of his female relatives which is an Englishman's trait as exclusive as it is touching. He was too young to perceive that, being two generations younger than his grandmother, his idea of humour must be immeasurably different. She belonged to the day when a clever woman of undoubted propriety made a reputation for wit by an audacity that was nicely calculated. " You were not thinking of going to Paris for your holiday, perhaps ?" Mrs. Leighton went on, after a little pause. Mark Gurdon was not without politeness. " "Well, in point of fact, I rather was !" he said quickly, being careful to make it seem as though she had by chance lit upon a plan he had been turning over. It wouldn't be a bad thing for him to do Mrs. Leighton any little favour, but it would have been a very bad thing if he had let her sus- l* 6 GALLIA. pect that he thought he was doing her a favour. " If you do, I wish you would just burst in upon Robbie." Gurdon had no difficulty in suppressing a smile at the picture Mrs. Leighton had so evi- dently formed of her grandson's surroundings. " Has he been exceeding his allowance ?" was all he said, however. " ~Now, how like a man !" cried Mrs. Leighton. " Of course, if he didn't exceed his allowance, you cannot imagine that there should be any- thing to criticise in his way of life. Good heavens, what a moral code !" "My dear lady" — Gurdon began, with great deference and in defence, but he was drowned immediately. s " Let me tell you that these people are not all disastrously expensive ! On the stage, in books, I grant you ; but in real life — especially French real life in the neighbourhood of the studios — they are often remarkably thrifty and careful. Models, drawn from the peasant class, they have not forgotten the habits of their parents. They are not all young and pretty and fond of dress (as for that, models are never pretty in real life) ; they are middle-aged and plain, their minds set on Economies, their only expense to keep a big blue bow on the neck of the odious little white dog they usually cherish !" GALLIA. 7 " My dear Mrs. Leighton, your intimate knowl- edge"— began Gurdon, now frankly laughing, but she swept him up brusquely again. " Of course, never tell me ! Wasn't Paris my home, and don't I know it — grille, entresol, grenier, and sous le toit f" She made a funny little upward movement with the gold double eyeglass, and Gurdon never paused to ask himself how a life at the Embassy could have furnished so vivid an insight into these byeways ; he merely noticed what an esprit the old soul had, and what a perfect French tongue she spoke with. He rose and held out his hand, smiling. Mrs. Leighton liked Gurdon, his smiles and his silences and his appreciation ; she often said to her step-sister, who, though twenty years her junior, was her great friend, "Mark will go far." And she did not like him less because he so obviously thought as much himself. She was old, and she knew that no man goes far who doesn't think he will go far and mean to all the time. " You will hear from me in Paris. I foresee myself strangling that dog in its own blue bow, and pitching the lady after it into the street. But, you know, Robbie is no infant; he may have his own ideas of manly independence." " Robbie has no ideas of any kind," said his grandmother with scorn — " no ideas at all be- 8 GALLIA. yond plein air and — and that sort of thing. That is what I dislike about it. There are two ways of being vicious, my dear boy — one of them com- mands at least a little respect. Some men are vicious from conviction — but of the men who are vicious from convention what are you to say?" The little movement of her pretty old white hands with which she accompanied this mot, gave Gurdon an opportunity of kissing one of them in leavetaking. The skin felt like fine crumpled tissue-paper, and had a little breath of fleur de limon about it — the old French scent Mrs. Leighton habitually used. " Some from conviction, others from conven- tion," repeated Gurdon to himself when he got into the street. " What a dear, queer, charming old humbug she is !" CHAPTEE II. It was by means of a little blue poste-UUgraphe that Grurdon announced his arrival in Paris to his old college friend Leighton, who lived, or at anyrate had a studio, far out in the Passage des Favorites ; and it was another little blue poste- telegraphe which came to his hotel, the Lille et d' Albion in the Rue de Rivoli, and carried Leighton's welcome and his invitation to join him at a certain public studio in the Latin Quarter, where he still studied rather fitfully. " Dear old man, this is a rare surprise !" Leighton said, when, later in the day, he saw the tall, English-looking figure of his friend at the edge of the blue smoke that filled the men's studio. They shook hands and looked at each other. They had shaken hands last in the im- possible flurry of the Oxford railway platform, and no one who had seen them there would have wondered that the porter followed quite another young man with the portmanteaux, and stared wildly among fifty more in a vain en- deavour to recognise the gentleman who had engaged him. They were like any thousand of young men at that time ; now, only two years later, they had changed immensely. Leighton's 10 GALLIA. fair hair was four inches long where it had been barely half an inch, he had a weird beard of rough tow-coloured stuff which partially covered his white throat. He was extremely d&colleti. A horrid rag of a tie disappeared into a stained blue waistcoat front, and a grey jacket with gaping side pockets modelled his muscles effect- ively with its greasy shine. Gurdon? "Well, Gurdon looked exactly as one would have ex- pected. He wore a brown travelling serge, a white shirt, and a black bow tie. He was clean shaven, his rather hatchet-shaped face pale and sallow, his reddish- dark hair just long enough to part in the middle, and rigorously flattened below a brown crush hat. There was about him that suggestion of baths and shaves and tailors and general precision, of which one is ashamed to feel a little tired, because it is in itself so ad- mirable. " One must spend one's holiday somewhere," Gurdon was murmuring. "Thought I'd look you up. Paris is always all right for a holiday." " The only place in the world fit to live in, I say," the other replied. " Now I'm just done. The light has been vile all afternoon, and I'm tired of sweating after the tone of that mossy old beggar over there. I'll get my traps, and we'll come along and have a yarn somewhere." Gurdon's eye travelled towards the model, whom his friend's phrase had most aptly pictured. GALLIA. 11 " Magnificent chest and shoulders," he said admiringly. " Ha, ha ! rather ! That's old Lemuel's strong point. He travels on that chest and shoulders, I can tell you. Here's a friend of mine thinks you've got a beau torse, Lemuel, hein ?" A few gurgling laughs and chuckles followed this sally, and one or two men looked up lazily at Gurdon for a moment. It seemed to he an old studio joke, and some muttered comments in French, American, and other foreign lan- guages rumbled about the studio. The old Hercules upon the platform smiled a little, as at a familiar compliment; without altering the pose, he seemed to stiffen proudly ; the muscles in his right arm swelled and the strong old fingers grasping the wooden spear contracted a trifle more firmly. It was the end of the last hour of the afternoon when models get slack sometimes; and the half-jocular bit of praise, as well as the knowledge that a stranger was looking at him, served to brisk up the splendid old figure, on which forty pairs of eyes had been fastened more or less all day. "He understands English, then, does he?" Gurdon asked, with some curiosity. " Oh, he is English. Lemuel is a character, too, I can tell you. Hasn't always been a model, by any means." 12 GALLIA. " No, I should say not. He never developed that muscle in this atmosphere." " Pretty foul, isn't it ? I expect it strikes you. I'm used to it. They will smoke that Petit Caporal, and that's what does it. "Well, there is not any tobacco in France, anyhow." " I daresay you'll welcome a pound or two of the old stuff, then ?" "My dear fellow! How fearfully decent of you ! You can't beat England for some things — pals and tobacco." They made their way into the grey and dismal little street. It was winter, but not cold. Neither of them wore an overcoat, and they stepped out briskly in the direction of the Gare Montparnasse. They may have had a good deal to say, but they talked only in snatches. There was much cordiality in their voices, but their interests were now so different, and their lives had strayed so far apart that there could be no consecutive talk between them all at once. When they had struck obliquely into the Rue Vaugirard, Leighton paused suddenly. " I was taking you to my old barracks in the Passage," he said, "but I don't see the good. The light has gone, and you won't be able to see my things — that is, even if you want to." Mark interjected something friendly. " And I really don't see the good." GALLIA. 13 " "Well, let us consider what we are going to do to-night," said Gurdon, noting what he imagined to be his friend's reluctance to go to the studio. That was so like Leighton — never to consider how far he was going to admit his friend to the intimacies of his new life until they were half-way to the very scene of them, then to pull up and bungle out something about the light. In which reflection Mark utterly misjudged Robbie. " I'm out of things here, of course. It's ages since I was in Paris. I look to you, Eob, to take me about." " I'll take you round," Rob answered, with a burlesque wink. " And I suppose you don't mean Bulliers and that sort of haunt; you mean the Divan Japonais and the Alcazar, eh ?" Mark nodded. " "Well, I'll have to shine out in some other togs. So we'll go to the studio, and you'll wait and look about you, while I adorn in a corner behind a wide-meshed fishing-net." They set out at a swinging pace, and Mark pondered. This time they didn't talk; Mark looked about him after the fashion of a man who notices things, not effects, and Leighton got all the society he wanted out of the cigar Mark had handed him at the studio door. "How about the old lady? But I suppose you never see her much ?" 14 GALLIA. " On the contrary, I sat opposite to her at dinner at the Fearon's the other night, and I have even called. She is brisker than ever, and of a freshness that shamed half the young women in the room — or should have done." " Say anything about me ?" " Oh, hoped I would see you when I went to Paris, and no doubt will expect me to tell her how you are getting on. She is interested in you, you know." " Rather, and I believe she's the only member of the family who wasn't disappointed when I turned painter. She sent for me when she heard it. She said, " Robert, you are an inde- pendent boy, and I like you. Go to Paris. Never mind what your uncle says; he doesn't know Paris. It's the only place to qualify as a human being who understands his world. Be a painter. I don't mind if you are a failure or a success, only don't give it up; stick to it and get all you can out of it. You start on Thurs- day ? Very well. Taste all the flavours of the art life, it is very developing. I will stop your allowance from Thursday. It would never do for you to have money; you would not develop character, you would not see real life." Leighton had attempted some little imitation of his grandmother's manner, and Mark roared with laughter at the climax of her advice. " "Was she as good as her word ?" he asked. GALLIA. 15 " Every bit !" said Eobbie, with enthusiasm. " She's a rare old woman, and I'm proud of her. Never you believe in her wickedness ; she isn't half as bad as she'd make you think, nor half as fond of the devil as she says." " I have no doubt that she wouldn't be hard on a man, though, if — er — if he wasn't quite straight ?" Gurdon said, and looked tentatively at the houses and the evening sky. " She abdicated her right to oversee my con- duct when she stopped that four-fifty," Eobbie said, with a shrewd chirp in his voice. Gurdon felt amazed, but volunteered no com- ment. " Your uncle still holds out, I suppose ?" he asked carelessly. " Yes, he used to make up my grandmother's money to six hundred. That was in Oxford days, you remember. A daughter was not expensive, he said, and he could afford it. I should just about say he could. He was pretty sick when I made a break for Paris, but the money goes on, thank God ! for it's all I have. And of course he was not bound to do anything at all, as he's only an uncle by marriage — and that with a difference. Besides, he's as close as a locked door, the worthy Hamesthwaite." The subject of Leighton's worldly goods dropped, and they swung along in silence for a good way. 16 GALLIA. " Now, it's not far off. I warn you, you'll be surprised when you see the kind of place I build in. Anything lonelier or less attractive — from an average point of view — than the Passage des Favorites never was conceived by mortal architect or builder. I've often wondered what Favorites ? Most favourites wouldn't care to live here, I take it." Gurdon turned a pair of hazel-grey eyes slowly upon him, but there was nothing to be made of Robbie's open face ; the blue eyes looked straight before him, the lids narrowing themselves from time to time as he tasted a snatch of compo- sition in the surrounding buildings or the street. Gurdon gave it up. " We turn on our left sharp now." They had been walking about half an hour. The road was unmade and muddy, no longer a street, but a road ; there were bleak gardens with dying shrubs in them, and great glass balls set up on small pillars, and heaps of shells, and stones, and coloured glass, and other excrescences of bad taste in suburban horticulture. The houses were no longer in rows, they were scat- tered, and occasional blank building-fields could be seen over wood palings ; fields edged by a segment of a street consisting of one block of painfully narrow houses with raw edges. Over everything there was an air of neglect, of disap- pointed, disheartened effort, or candid squalor; GALLIA. 17 it made an impression of the utmost desolation upon Gurdon, and he wondered what in heaven's name could cause a man whose very profession presupposed a love of beauty, to choose such a spot. "Grand place for an artist this," Leighton broke out with warm enthusiasm, and flung tbe end of his cigar at a broken statue which was set up behind a bush of hemlock in the garden they were passing. " You have no idea of the queer things you see here sometimes. You'd hardly think Paris had an edge like this, would you ? Over there is the barribre" waving a hand on which charcoal had formed an effective back- ground to a turquoise set in silver, in the direc- tion of the sunset. " The lights that travel over this plain sometimes are magnificent. Now, for instance, look now how the thing composes! You see where they have been pulling down the backs of these houses — you see that heap of yel- low sand with the puddle in the middle where they've been making mortar, and that heap of concrete there for the new facade, and the yellow freestone with the saw still in it ? Look how the sun leaps into that puddle and catches hold of that saw. Jove ! I've got to paint that thing one of these days." Gurdon felt instructed, and really did think he saw something rather fine about it. " I shall call it ' Well begun is ill done,' if I send b S* 18 GALLIA. it to England ; they love titles at the Academy," Leighton went on, with the same warmth, already seeing the thing packed for delivery at a London exhibition. " I wonder if I've got the key. Oh, perhaps Arsenie will be home by now. Here, Gurdon, stop ! this is our door. Where were you off to ?" CHAPTEE III. " "Who is Arsenie ?" Gurdon asked, as lightly- as he could, and smiling. "Arsenie? Have I not mentioned her?" Leighton looked at him in frank surprise. " Oh, she lives with me, and cooks, and looks after me, and keeps me out of mischief." He laughed — laughed like a Paris art student. " You're pretty well acclimatised," Mark man- aged to say, with admirable carelessness, for the fact was, he had never believed a word of old Mrs. Leighton's story, and with every step he took towards the Passage des Favorites it had seemed more and more improbable. Leighton laughed again, this time with just a shade of colour in his forehead. " You mustn't expect a great beauty. She's not that. Queer name, isn't it — Arsenie ? Everybody calls her Arsenic, but that really is a bit rough." They had been standing at the door all this time, Robbie striking the key on the iron handle as he gave these hurried particulars. Now a step sounded inside, and the door was opened from within. " J'amene un ami a moi, belle, mais ne te \9 20 GALLIA. derange pas," Leighton said in execrable French as they went inside. " Tiens, bon — s'il ne veut pas manger !" cried tbe woman in a voice very shrill, but gay. She had the coarse, rough black hair of the Midi, and the sallow skin and large features, but there was a possibility of drama in her pose, of repartee upon her thick lips, and of immense practi- cality in her shrewd, bold eye. She looked about thirty-four as she stood there, carelessly dressed, and with no figure in particular. In point of fact, she had the most perfect classic build of any model in the Quartier. It was because she was so like Venus that she was dowdy in common clothing. There were lines of temper, and power, and dominance in her forehead. She had a small casserole in one hand and a spoon in the other; she was cooldng the evening meal, and after she had looked at Grurdon a moment with a very direct but friendly stare, she turned back to a corner where a ridiculous little fourneau and charcoal stove had been accommodated. " I could never keep out of debt in this world if I hadn't Arsenie," said Robbie, bringing his glance from the stove to Gurdon's inexpressive face. " I don't owe a penny, and I don't believe I've been drunk since last Mi-Car§me. If I had that four-fifty I could afford to do without her, and go to the bad — as it is, I couldn't. Hello, IiU-lu !" GALLIA. 21 A very small fluffy white dog got up from a heap of drapery in a corner, and came wagging and wriggling towards Leighton ; it wore an im- mense blue bow upon its neck. Gurdon passed his hand over his forehead, and walked a few paces to a dark corner, where a shabby divan was constructed below a big brown barge-sail. He was a good deal perplexed. " I shall change now, Mark ; take a squint at those croquis over there." Gurdon moved nearer to the divan. It was a big, barn-like studio and at the other end he could hear Arsgnie playing with the little dog in a voice like the sharpening of a carving-knife, and with a rough show of affection that made him shudder. All round, the walls were pinned over with sketches, studies, schemes for pictures, caricatures, verses, impertinences and toys from Carnival time. On the floor a few mats were lying, and skins. All was wonderfully clean, nothing but the ashes of cigarettes lay upon the divan or the floor. A pair of wooden sabots were in a corner, a few hats hung on pegs. Gurdon made a careful inspection of these things, because he felt really interested, and he saw that his friend's hand was strong and sure, and ut- terly different from what it had been when he drew dons and proctors and freshers in the old days. He turned to go over to the stove and talk to 22 GALLIA. Ars&rie, but at that moment she opened a little door and disappeared, striking matches and evi- dently engaged in getting a light. He pushed aside a heap of clothes on the divan and sat down to rest a minute till she came back. To his amazement, a head reared itself at the other end of the heap of clothing, — a head with a good deal of black-brown hair cut short and a pair of very round, very sleepy eyes; two feet thrust themselves out of his end of the bundle and swung to the floor. The figure sat and then stood up and shook herself; she seemed a girl of about eighteen. " Qui done ?" she said, looking candidly and laughingly at Gurdon. Just then Leighton came in, hitching his shoulders into a black coat, which was less familiar to him than his grey jacket. " Hullo, young Lemuel, you here ?" he said in English. "Yes; been asleep, though. "Who is this?" She pointed to Gurdon as though she ought to be told at once of any intruder into the circle. " Friend of mine from England, Gurdon by name. Look here, Lemuel, don't you make love to him." The girl leapt into the air with a high, curious shriek of amusement and delight. She was a round well-developed creature, but she was light and fearfully agile, and it made a wonderful GALLIA. 23 effect. "WTien she descended, she cut a strange step towards Gurdon, flung both her arms round his head and kissed him on his severe, neatly- shaven lips. Then she went off into the gayest, most squealing of laughs. " You see how I begin," she said, and danced over the floor and swung round and looked at them, and doubled herself up to scream and laugh again. There was something so mocking and pro- voking about the creature that Gurdon, laugh- ing, but tingling curiously in a way he did not stop to understand, jumped up from the divan and caught her and said — " I'm going to box your ears, you saucy child !" He gave her two light pats on each side of her head, took her by the elbows firmly, and said, "Now, are you sorry? Not a bit?" She was tremendously pretty. " "Will you do it again ?" "No, I just won't," she said demurely, but with a nod of such shrewdness that Leighton fell to guffawing in the corner. "Voyons, mes enfants, — du cafe!" shouted Arsenie from the stove, and brought forward a little tray. The girl they had called Lemuel flew round the studio and sat on the floor beside Robbie, pretending to laugh when she looked at Gurdon, and throwing her dress skirt over her head as she rocked about in mock paroxysms. Mark's 24 GALLIA. mind was full of bewilderment as he took his place in this strange circle. Who was this wild creature, a child and not a child? How was she with Leighton and Arsenie? He looked from one to the other of them, intending to ask about her, but they were playing ball with the little white dog, and Lemuel's round eyes were peeping at him from under her skirt hem. "I think we'd better not say who you are; you've behaved yourself so disgracefully," Leigh- ton just then said, looking over his shoulder. " She is tbe daughter of our friend with the beau torse, and she is called young Lemuel." " Moi, aussi," she began to scream, but Robbie put his hand out and caught her by the hair, and they played together till they nearly upset the coffee. Gurdon took up Lu-lu and fingered the beast's big bow, while he wondered what old Mrs. Leighton would make of the only ele- ment that had been wanting in her picture of Robbie's surroundings. CHAPTER IV. It was not only to look after Eobbie Leigh- ton, and oblige that young man's grandmother that Gurdon had come to Paris. A notable feature of his mind was a peculiar power of forming small hut effective combinations; the power was now more than a natural faculty. Mark had discovered, early in life, that he had such a quality, and he had had many opportuni- ties of becoming impressed with a sense of its use- fulness ; he therefore determined to develop it as another man might decide to develop his talent for music or sculpture. On the principle that the greater includes the less, Gurdon, while capable of forming a scheme of very respectable magnitude, was also sensible of the importance of the smallest details, and made a practice of never neglecting them. You might have met Gurdon anywhere, — at dinner, in a train, between the acts, on a racecourse, in the cabin of a steamer, — and after half-an-hour's conversation you would have put him down merely as an excellent specimen of the average man; in which judgment you would have been mistaken. For this very power I speak of is by no means part of the average man's equipment, and it was just this and noth- B 3 25 26 GALLIA. ing else that distinguished Mark from the crowd. It is very habitual to use the phrase regarding a young man that he must " make a career for himself" ; and there is nothing quite so rare as to see the young man who has done it. Circum- stances, when not relatives or an accident of birth, are tbe usual agents in the manufacture of this article; and to come across the man who, not having either the relatives or the accident of birth, and not being favoured by the circum- stances, has deliberately set to work to construct the circumstances, to connect them with the motor engine of his own will, and, having set the whole a-going, to contrive that career shall be the result, — to come across such a man is to have found something approaching the human equivalent of a blue rose. Gurdon's father had been an engineer, and a fairly successful one, too ; his mother a curate's daughter, who to the single effort of giving birth to him had added the second of selecting his Christian name, and then died. Mark always did his mother justice when he thought of her. He was far too keen and fair-minded not to see that she had done very well by him; she had given him a splendid constitution, a very nice nose, which was not too suggestive of talent to be handsome and even aristocratic, and a very useful kind of name. She might just as easily have called him Jeremiah — for she was the GALLIA. 27 daughter of a Low-Church curate who still read in the Old Testament, and had brought his daughter up to do likewise. He knew that he owed a great deal to his mother, and he forgave her handsomely for the fine and slightly rip- pled hair which had also been of her bestowal, since on the whole it lay very flat. There is nothing in his personal appearance that a man resents more fiercely than a tendency to curl or crinkle in his hair. His father's was a life of change and chance. Sometimes there was more money than at other times, and it had been in one of their brightest moments that young Mark's four years at Rugby were paid for. Then came the French experi- ence, and while his father held a post as man- ager of some extremely expensive and compli- cated wine-pressing machinery, Mark had crossed the Bordeaux Jardin Public four times daily, on his way to and from the Lycee. French, even when acquired in Bordeaux, is a tremendous arrow in a young man's quiver when he comes to shoot at a mark in the world; and young Gurdon took to it like a duck to water, and all his life would drop into a French book for pref- erence; and having sat through one fortnight of performances at the Francais, arose and left the building with an exquisitely chastened accent, which never forsook him. Even as it is custom- ary to look for no grit in the schoolboy who 28 GALLIA. keeps his nails clean, so the morals of the Englishman who speaks French like a native are very justifiably doubted by people of experi- ence ; but on both these points an exception may perhaps be claimed in favour of Mark. When Gurdon, senior, was sent to put up and superin- tend certain brewing plant at Munich, his son naturally accompanied him, and thereupon set himself to conquer first his intuitive antipathy to the Germans, and then his no less fierce objec- tion to their declensions, with the result that his midday Bairisch suited him as well as his pre- vious Medoc had done, and he thought out for himself, combining an immense dispassionate- ness with the hot logical fervour of two and twenty, the Franco-German question, to his own complete consequent peace of mind in this matter. The Munich life appearing for the time a per- manency (if such a misuse of terms he for- givable), Mark came to England and to Oxford with an education so peculiar, and in some re- spects so in advance of that of men of his age, that he felt moderately certain of making his exams, for his chosen career, and entering the Civil Service with good numbers. He found he had to work harder than he had expected, but, nevertheless, events fell out to his satisfaction, and his first reverse came after he had acquired a much-yearned-for stool in the Colonial Office. GALLIA. 29 It was the death of his father. All Mark's life had been so matter of fact thus far that he was dismayed to find how much he regretted the man who, in life, had meant very little to him. He put on his decorously correct mourning with a puzzled brow, and then went to look after the investment of the £1500 which was all the money he had to expect as capital. His father had been his only relative ; he was now alone in the world — without the least sense of loneliness ; the curi- ous sadness that would fall upon him when he laid down the afternoon paper, when he waited for the next course of the abominable club din- ner, when he looked across the water in St. James's Park towards that circle of buildings in which his hopes and his future lay — seemed to him inexplicable, because illogical. But in time the sadness wore away, and only the puzzled remembrance of it stirred sometimes in his brain. It was characteristic of Mark that he invested that £1500 as it stood. " There may be a time when I shall want just such a sum of money for some particular step in my career," he told himself; and perhaps he phrased it, There shall be a time, and not, There may be. And then the dull months went over, painted only by the minute social advances the young man made. The friendship of Robbie Leighton had introduced him to a circle which ideally 3* 30 GALLIA. represented the desire of his very" wide-awake dreams ; this might be looked upon as one of the adventitious circumstances mentioned before, but how many young men could have made any capital out of a single afternoon call, with a number of other people in the room ? It was Mark's own cleverness that told him to make a conversational opportunity, not for himself, but for his brilliant hostess — and to make it in Trench. "When he thought over the visit, he discovered that beyond " How do you do ?" and " Good-bye," it was his unique utter- ance in that drawing-room; but it drew from Mrs. Leighton a very delightful sort of com- mand to Robbie to tell Gurdon to call upon her, and Mark never misled himself as to its impor- tance. So much for Mark's character ; his appearance has been indicated. As to his belief, it was con- cretely rooted in himself, and his creed was that it behoved a man — not every man, but such a man as himself — to succeed. Success on the one hand implies a failure somewhere or of some one or the other. Mark quite saw the admi- rable justice of this. Some people of course had to fail, it was what they were intended for and it suited them, only he was not of these. He was born to be a successful, honourable, gentlemanly, " decent" kind of fellow, just as some men were born to be low, ruffianly devils, or seedy, piti- GALLIA. 31 able failures. As he had a decidedly kind heart, and wouldn't have hurt a fly, he thought it fear- fully hard on them, and would like to have given them each a sovereign, poor chaps. This, in rough outline, was Mark's ethics. So he stood, fresh and handsome, on the steps of the Lille et d' Albion, pulling on a pair of French Suede gloves, and prepared to pursue his second object in coming to Paris. It was about eleven o'clock, so he stepped out for Neal and a glimpse of yesterday's Times; at twelve it would, be time to look up some of the men at the Embassy; they would have had time to address about five envelopes apiece, and would be ready for luncheon. In the afternoon he was going to Auteuil to see St. Crispin, the marvel- lous colt belonging to his friend the Marquis de Mont Voisin, come in fourth, that being the place assigned inevitably to young Mont Voisin's horses. He owed this very desirable acquaint ance also to Mrs. Leighton. The old Marquise having been a friend of her girlhood, it was natural that when the boy came to London she should have made a little dinner for him, and collected such young men as she thought he would like to meet. Mont Voisin spoke just as little and just as much English as every other Frenchman, and it had fallen to the lucky Gur- don to show him London, and answer all his questions in his own tongue. A card discreetly 32 GALLIA. left at the H6tel Mont Voisin on his way to Leighton at the studio had procured for Gurdon a cordial invitation to "team down" (this was how Mont Voisin put it, and it is certain he imagined himself to be employing an extremely showy bit of London slang) on his coach. Now it was an annoying thing to Gurdon that, as he conscientiously read his Times, there should crop up continually the insufferable remembrance of that half-hour in Leighton's studio. For one thing, the cropping-up of recollections was not what he was accustomed to expect of his own mind; for another, they interfered materially with the digest of the South African intelligence which he was bent on making. It was part of Gurdon's daily routine to read first the news of the great Empire whose ends he was called upon in the humblest of fashions to serve, then to think about them, and finally to know what he thought about them. He had the clearest pos- sible head. One thing at once, and that thing thoroughly, was his rdle ; but if a man is to be disturbed by the recurrence of an atmosphere, such as the atmosphere of the studio, and that atmosphere accompanied by a sensation, such a sensation as the insolent kiss of a minx of a girl, how in the world is he to reflect upon the rights and wrongs of the Swazis ? Gurdon had barely got rid of this problem when he set out for the Legation. CHAPTER V. " Hullo, that can't be ! By Jove, it is, though ! I say, here comes Miss Essex." The two men were walking across the Jardin du Luxembourg after a dejeuner at the H6tel Foyot, for which Gurdon had paid an exceed- ingly round number of francs, and it was of course Robbie Leighton whose careless youth still expressed itself in a number of such ejacu- lations. Gurdon saw a tall girl coming towards them in the sunshine that filtered through the plane trees; he noticed that she was fair and slim and English; he moved his stick into his other hand, so as to be ready to take his hat off; and he also observed the light and colour that seemed to overspread his friend's face. As for Robbie, he saw the pompons of the planes patterned black upon a pale sky dappled in opaline colours of winter clearness ; he heard the firm, sharp beat of her slim feet upon the orange path, and felt something severe and virginal and beautiful in. her walk ; and then he swept his hat from his head in an ardour of smiles, which was made very noticeable by the correct courtesy of Gurdon's gesture. The next instant both men 34 GALLIA. came to a halt, brief enough, hut sharp and simultaneous, amazement, in a dull colour of mounting blood, painting itself in their faces. The girl had cut Leighton dead. It had been clear, intentional, and effective. The pale, fair face had seemed a little paler as she passed them by, the clear blue eyes had fixed a quiet gaze between their shoulders. " In God's name !" began Leighton, rather gaspingly, as they settled into a vacant seat, " In God's name, what can she mean ?" "You appear to have mistaken the lady," Gurdon said, with a faint sarcasm below the lightness of his tone. " Mistaken her ? "Well, if anything was plain, it was that she knew me ! "What in the world has happened ?" " Did you Bay Essex ? Not the sister of Dark Essex, of Balliol, by any chance ?" " By every certainty. Last year he wrote and told me she was coming out, and asked me to be of use to her in any way I could. I have been of use to her in a hundred ways, and we've been the best of friends. . . . Some brute has been telling lies about me !" Leighton wound up in a voice of sudden passion. "Or perhaps the truth?" Gurdon had the kind of personal courage which can say a little thing like that. " Oh, you mean — Arsenie ?" GALLIA. 35 Their eyes met as Leighton turned and looked at Mark. It appeared to be an opportunity to get at his friend's mind on this subject; it appeared to be the moment for doing Mrs. Leighton a favour. " My dear fellow," Gurdon began in expostula- tory cordiality, " this art circle of yours up here is a very small thing, and it is not to be expected that the light of day is to be screened off from one especial building in the Passage des Favor- ites. What in the world have you hoped for? Did you mean these people who frequent the same studio as yourself all day, not to know this thing ? Really, Leighton, you are not going to tell me you were not prepared for an incident of this kind ?" " Prepared for it ?" cried Robbie. " Prepared to have Margaret Essex cut me as though I were a blackguard not fit to be spoken to, or to have her eyes rest on ? "Would you have been pre- pared for it 1" Leighton was snorting with indignation and a sense of outraged virtue. " Of course I should have been ; always sup- posing I could have contrived so idiotic a situa- tion for myself. You can't reckon without public opinion and people's idea of life. Such women as Miss Essex are public opinion, and while they inhabit the same part of Paris as yourself, you must count them in your schemes. Why should 36 GALLIA. Miss Essex's views be any different here from what they would be in London ?" Leighton sank together in a dismayed and per- plexed heap, and Mark continued to talk over the ruins without apparently noticing the havoc he was causing. " It must be one thing or the other, and you have to choose which," he con- cluded presently, after a monologue to which Robbie had given gloomy and disgusted atten- tion. " Besides, I know the sort of woman Miss Essex is ; it was written all over her — in her walk, her face, the swing of her gown." Poor Robbie had only read the poetry of these elements. " You can't mistake them. Made of a very fine material, but cold and inhuman as the grave itself." He leaned back complacently, folding his arms. " Measuring all men with a measure, and that measure made of wrought steel." " Rot !" said Leighton simply, and with that got up, and made as though to pursue his way towards the studio. There was a silence of several minutes. Even when they paused again while Gurdon bought a couple of bunches of violets at the gate of the Jardin, no word was spoken. It was Leighton who broke the silence, and his voice was careless and gay again. " We'll go and sit in the courtyard and have a yarn with old Lemuel; he isn't sitting to-day, and you'll find him a queer old chap." The meeting with GALLIA. 37 Miss Essex was not apparently to colour the whole afternoon, and Gurdon caught himself wondering how deep it had gone with Leighton. "I thought so, there he is, lifting weights just to show off to the men." The old Hercules was dressed in seedy black, wearing a sombrero which made him handsomer and more picturesque than ever. He had a couple of big iron bars in his hands with balls at the ends of them, and he was raising these above his head and twirling them in the air. Gathered round him just outside the sculpture studio, upon the greenish-grey flagstones, were some of the men students, waiting for the afternoon work to begin. It was a Monday afternoon, and the broad stone steps that led down into the courtyard were covered with Italians, women in garish aprons, head-cloths, and skirts; men, in more or less ragged everyday clothes, carried bundles which contained costumes of various sorts. Children, all with immense black eyes in gingerbread-coloured faces, tumbled about like guinea-pigs, sang and screamed, or were por- tentously still and silent, according as they were accompanied by an elder sister of some nine summers or not. To the outsider it was a very picturesque scene. To the student it was Monday afternoon. " You must have been painted an immense number of times, Mr. Lemuel, you're so com- 4 38 GALLIA. pletely the classic type," Gurdon said politely to the old man, who had put down his weights and was wiping his hroad, fine hrow. " Well, I may say I have !" the Hercules re- plied in a remarkably small, insignificant voice. " Munkacszy's design for the ceiling of an au- dience hall at the Champ de Mars last year — I was the Zeus in that. You will have seen Laurent's fresco at the Pantheon ? I am there. I posed for three figures there and for the head of one. Oh, and in the last ten years — yes! That group of the new Ajax — if you were at the Salon three years ago, you might have seen it — it created a great sensation because poor young Suvain shot himself beside it on varnish- ing day; it was his, you know, and they hadn't given him the place he expected. I worked seven months with him for that. It was a grand thing." Insensibly, as they talked, they had been moving in the direction of the street, and before he knew it, Mark found himself pushing open the swing-door of the marchand de vin at the corner. "But before this part of your career, what were you engaged in?" he asked, after little glasses had been handed them. " Ah, before that I was a sculptor myself, and slapped clay with as good a will as any." The old man's face darkened, and his small GALLIA. 39 voice sounded as though the Amer Picou had got into it too. " But I never made anything of it, and I had a wife and family to keep." Good heavens! it was this man's daughter Gurdon rememhered. " And so many asked me to pose — for high terms too — that I saw I could do better at it." Mark suspected a fine talent for idleness in this powerful old Jove, but he only said, " Sculpture ought to be a fine thing for the muscles." "Ah, my muscles were made before ever I saw a mallet or dreamed of touching one. You must make the muscles when they're young, sir, and they'll never quite disappear. Boxing made mine, when I was at the University. A per- former with the gloves yourself, perhaps ?" Gurdon said he was fond of it, but more for the exercise than the science. "I lead a fairly sedentary life, — I'm in a Government office — and I find an hour three times a week keeps me wonderfully fit," he added in a conversational way, and perhaps impelled to give some confidence about himself as a means of putting himself on an equality with the old man. " It is long since I darkened those doors," old Lemuel said, slowly and musingly. ""Who knows, you may be sitting in the same seat." " You were — ?" Gurdon began in some surprise. 40 GALLIA. The white head nodded slowly several times. Gurdon got the idea that the Paris model did not wish to talk about those days. He was wrong: there was nothing old Lemuel didn't want to talk about. " I had a sort of an ambition once, — oh, I've seen the folly of it long since, — and it was out of place there." This made Mark uncomfortable. He called sharply to have their glasses filled again, and, with his brows knitting, quickly asked Lemuel what he meant ? " Well, I wanted to get on, you see ; the whole thing was too slow for me. I'd "no money and precious little interest, and — I wanted to marry." He stopped, but Gurdon accepted this pause in silence, and, after putting his lips to his glass, the old model went on musingly. " Yes, I wanted to marry ; ah, it's a very long while ago, that ! I had energy, I had some push about me then. A salary on a crawling scale, with a pension at the end of it, seemed to me too poor a thing to sit down and wait for. I thought I might do something to get myself into notice. What was the use of my being one of hundreds whose names were unknown except to their immediate superiors in office and to the hall porter? A mere coral insect, one of thousands, raising a mountain reef of pink tape !" Mark's lips folded themselves in and yet more GALLIA. 41 tightly in. He was young enough, although twenty-eight years of age, to be surprised, to imagine something of a coincidence about his meeting with this man, about the similarity in his own feelings now and that other Government clerk's then. He looked rather fixedly at old Lemuel's physique, the set of his neck upon his shoulders, the pose of his head. He imagined him young ; to look at he must have been a man in a thousand ; his manner, too, was smooth, easy, and dignified. Years of being bandied about in a studio had given little unfamiliar touches of servility to it in places ; but these still struck oddly and incongruously upon the ear, and in no wise seemed natural to the man. Had not old Lemuel of the beau torse and the Paris studios had more in his favour thirty years ago than he, Gurdon, at this moment? Mark was not by any means a man of sentiment; it was not so much tbat he despised it as that it was the very last attitude his mind was likely to assume, but no human being can be wholly without this impractical quality, and Gurdon had, of course, a little of it — so little that it was just enough for himself. His clear head showed him that the points in which he was superior to the young man Lemuel must once have been, were not upon the surface, were not easily discoverable. And the conversation made the more dent upon his brain, because, only the evening before, driv- 4* 42 GALLIA. ing home upon the box-seat of Mont Voisin's coach, he had thought to himself, " I am not getting on." With the upper octave of his brain he was discussing with the Marquis the breed of English racehorses and the inferiority of French blood ; then there had come rushing to him on the sharp wind that tightened the skin upon his face, the sudden thought, " I am not getting on," and at once the deeper octave had played with variations upon this theme. Mark had had a socially successful afternoon, following upon a socially successful luncheon ; if he had been thinking about himself at all, he might have been thinking that, on the whole, he was doing very fairly well. But he liked racing, and he liked Mont Voisin's Paris chatter, and he had not been thinking about himself at all. Then the evening breeze had brought him that uncomfort- able thought ; so clear and crisp and definite that it had the effect upon him of the utterance of a being who knows better than one's self. An argumentative fellow in the main, Mark didn't argue with this impersonal dictum ; he tried his best to discover upon what collocation of half- liquid ideas it had been based, but he could trace none of these, although he searched and filtered his brain to the utmost. Failing this, he had set himself to sum up his position, and had, so to speak, heaved a mental log to determine by dead reckoning at least his GALLIA. 43 rate of professional progress. A very few min- utes served to show him that the dictum could be justified. What would the next year bring him, in all likelihood? At the best, if the Government held on, chance might put him ahead of some senior. His chief, Lord Hames- thwaite, might perceive him more nearly, might suspect his ability, might differentiate him, in his own mind, from his fellows. Ah, how much that differentiation would mean ! That was, at the best, the very best. At the worst ? At the worst, he would dine out a little oftener, meet a few more important people, be caught up to the paradise of Lady Hamesthwaite's Wednes- day dinners. That was all. Quite certainly he was not getting on. The thoughts engendered by that dictum were in no way dissipated or diluted in their dis- comforting strength by an evening at the the- atre. A morning at the Cluny and Pantheon, which he had always previously failed to see, and to which Leighton now dragged him — these also were powerless to lead his thoughts from a more or less profitless contemplation of his own future. Now, having chanced against a queer old studio-character, that the conversation should take this very turn, and his companion appear in the shocking character of a disappointed ap- pointment-seeker, with a background which, in a tray full of human experiences could not be 44 GALLIA. distinguished from his own, was sufficiently dis- quieting. The thoughts set flowing by old Lemuel's brief confidences had so absorbed Mark's attention that he missed even a sentence or two of the slow, musing talk. The soft, small voice of the man, his fixed eyes, the backward throw of his big head, with its cover of shining white curls and tangles — all these things made up the impression that he was unwinding his thoughts from the silver cobwebs of the past. " Get to know something ; — yes, that is the scheme, I was right so far ; — get to know some- thing and don't print it. The mistake was that I did." It was this phrase, very emphatically spoken, which captured and led back Gurdon's excursive mind. He was just going to put a question, when the door burst open and Leighton came in with a rush. " Gad, I thought as much !" he exclaimed, shouldering up to them past a group of blue cotton ouvriers. "When in doubt as to old Lemuel's whereabouts, try the wine-shop, eh ?" He caught the old man a whack on his big shoulder, and laughed as he ordered a little glass for himself. When the Marmorweib of romantic legend felt the first pink shaft of morning sunlight on her stony bosom, the life that night and the green moonbeams had given her stopped suddenly, and so long as the sun shone she was cold upon her GALLIA. 45 pedestal. This change meant a moment of keen pain for her, we may fancy. There was a blast- ing touch of the morning about young Leighton and his greeting, and it wrought some such change in old Lemuel. On Gurdon, too, it was not lost. Something forbade him saying, " "We were speaking of early days," or anything of the kind. He was silent. The whole foregoing conversation began to seem unreal and shadowy. It was to be remembered often at other times ; but now he listened with an odd expression in his face as Robbie announced that he was off work for the afternoon ; the new model was too vile for anything, and he wasn't going to paint her. No modelling, just a hundred-weight or two of Frankforterwurst without the spice. " Look here, I'll make a sketch of you instead, if you like. There's a line in your jaw that I like, rather." " All right. How long will it take ?" asked Mark. " Oh, depends ; say an hour or two, and then we'll go over the river and dine. Lemuel, can we go up to your place ? There's a very fair light there, and I don't suppose little Lem will think it an intrusion." " She's not at home, she's sitting for Carlo Deo's wood-nymph. You're very welcome." In a few minutes they were mounting the five flights to the old model's appartement. CHAPTER VI. The twenty years between Mrs. Leighton and her stepsister, Lady Hamesthwaite, made no sort of difference to their friendship, which was of the closest possible kind, but it would have been very difficult for an outsider to discover in what the very distinct bond between the two women consisted. It is almost unusual for relations to come into any such close connection as will make them deep and lasting friends. But, a good way back in Julia Hamesthwaite's life, there had been a moment at which Mrs. Leighton had played the part of a friend, rather than that of a half-sister, and the younger woman never forgot it. She owed her very excellent marriage to Mrs. Leigh- ton; or, to speak more clearly, she owed her escape from a very unfortunate marriage to that sympathising and clever woman. The incident has nothing to do with this story, and need not be detailed. But Lady Hamesthwaite, fitted in every way to be the wife of a distinguished ser- vant of the Crown, had as nearly as possible missed this brilliant vocation, and she owed it to her half-sister that she had quite not missed it. The intercourse between the house in Corn- 46 GALLIA. 47 wall Gardens and the house in Grosvenor Place was very constant and very cordial, and it was to be expected that, the very afternoon of the Hamesthwaites' return to London from their country place, Mrs. Leighton should have looked in to greet her sister Julia. " And you know I have Gallia with me," Lady Hamesthwaite had said, as they sat over their tea in the smallest of the tiresomely immense drawing-rooms which seemed fitted for nothing but big political receptions. "It is not often that I am so fortunate." A little laugh followed this remark ; it was certainly remarkably seldom that this mother and daughter could be found together. " I hope she is in, and that she will be coming down. I take the deepest interest in Gallia," Mrs. Leighton said quickly. " You know that you are a little responsible for her peculiarities ; it was you who advised me always to let her have her own way, and dis- pose of herself as she pleased." " It was my advice for the time being ; you would have done no good by thwarting Gallia when she chose her path years ago. She has been lost to us both since then." Lady Hamesthwaite hastened to cover with a smile the sigh that involuntarily escaped her. "But — I think Gallia will come home. My theory is that the modern girl has also a crop of 48 GALLIA. wild oats to sow ; not the usual sort, of course, — JDieu soit beni — but wild oats nevertheless. Per- haps she will have finished soon, and then, you will see, Gallia will come home." There was confidence and reassurance always to be found in Mrs. Leighton's remarks. She had lived a long time with her eyes open and seen many things, and she was usually right in what she predicted. The little pause that fell between the two women was broken in upon by a step crossing the parquet of an adjoining floor; a second later Gallia Hamesthwaite appeared beside a curtained archway. " How do you do, Aunt Celia ?" she said, coming to kiss the old lady on the cheek. Mrs. Leighton took both her hands, and smiled up at her with a penetrative and slightly interrogative smile. "Whether she was satisfied or not with the inspection did not appear. It had the effect of annoying Gallia excessively. She turned to her mother. " Have the afternoon papers come yet ?" " I don't know, dear, but ring and ask Bowles ; they are usually sent up to my dressing-room, you know." "Do you not think mother looking very well?" Gallia began, after she had rung the bell. " I do ; I can't imagine why she should GALLIA. 49 come rushing up here now, of all times in the year, when London never fails to give her that bronchial trouble." " Her social duties, my dear" — Mrs. Leighton began. " But she has no social duties. Of course, if she were anyone else, and I were someone quite different, she would have to get me married and all that, but as it is — Come, it must be ad- mitted that I have lifted the burden of social duties pretty thoroughly off mother's back. Thank you, but, Bowles, please send out for the other papers, and bring them to me when they come." A very few minutes later she retired to the window with a sheaf of journals, and was en- tirely lost to the conversation at the other side of the room. "Do you think she is on the way home?" asked Lady Hamesthwaite, a little wistfully. " She is still very young, and proportionately earnest. She will slough this skin in time, but one always fears a little what skin will be found underneath." The crackle of the newspapers at the window covered the clear, precise tones of Mrs. Leigh- ton's voice, and Gallia read on undisturbed. " Anything of interest, darling ?" Lady Hames- thwaite called out presently. " Yes, there is some rather good correspond- c d 5 50 GALLIA. ence about — but you wouldn't care to hear about it." " Tell us what is interesting you, dear Gallia," her Aunt Celia said, with bland encouragement. Gallia did not lay down her paper, but in a tone of level indifference replied, " There is an agitation about the State regulation of vice." "My dearest child!" "Dear Gallia!" came from the ladies on the sofa. " But I don't suppose it will come to anything. One man very justly observes that the result of it has been the abolition of regulation, not the abolition of vice. I wonder who he is. He writes rather well." Mrs. Leighton got up and went over to the window with her soft, elegant step ; she put the fine crinkled hand Gurdon had kissed upon the girl's head, and sank upon the other end of the settee. " Dear Gallia, I'm not an illiberal old woman, now am I ?" she said, with a delightfully light French note in her voice. Gallia looked quietly into her face. " I hardly know. I'm not good at summing up people, Aunt Celia." "Well, I will make you a little proposition, and you shall judge at the end of it if I am illiberal in my opinions." Gallia's lip curled to a smile — a very old smile for so young a face. GALLIA. 51 " Ah, you are going to say" — " I think you will find I am not going to say that," Mrs. Leighton interrupted humorously. " I am not going to say it is not a fit subject for you to read about or think about. I am only going to suggest that it is a waste of time — your valuable time" — her voice was very serious now — " to make up your mind upon so exceed- ingly complicated a subject as this one," tapping the paper with her taper old fingers, " for the simple reason that you are unable to assist its settlement one way or the other! That's all. Now?" " But, auntie, how can you say I am unable to assist its settlement? I can't make the State do this or that, — I couldn't even cause father to support a Bill, — but I, in my own person, must read about and think about it, because it is a question that only girls can settle ulti- mately." Mrs. Leighton was infinitely too tactful to demur to this sweeping statement. She paused for a moment, trying to think what it would be best to say. " One likes to know the amount of one's in- debtedness to people," Gallia went on, without enthusiasm, but simply and firmly. "I could not be happy — I mean that I could not have a feeling of self-respect — unless I had estimated just the amount of my debt to that class of 52 GALLIA. society which assures my class a good deal of its immunity." There was a terrible, portentous pause. " I think, dear, if you knew how much phrases of that kind can hurt and distress other women who have — who have striven to play their part of wife and mother well, you would perhaps reserve them."" It was Lady Hamesthwaite who came up and made this very gentle remark, through the curls that hung over her daughter's ear. Then she dropped a kiss upon the curls and moved away through the big drawing-rooms. Gallia flew after her and caught her, and rubbed away the two tears that were pausing at the top of the pretty, delicately-coloured cheeks. " Dearest mother, don't you misunderstand me, for Heaven's sake ! I was a fool to speak as I did to Aunt Celia, — one always is a fool to say what one thinks about anything, — but you know, mother, I never trouble you with my views upon these, or any other of the subjects that puzzle me. Whoever they may concern, they do not touch you in the very least ! How you can have found any offence to yourself, in your — in your delightful position, in what I said, beats me altogether. I wasn't talking about wives and mothers — I was talking about" — "Don't, dear Gallia! it distresses me so much!" " I wasn't going to say anything then, I wasn't GALLIA. 53 really !" Gallia explained, with childlike eager- ness. " I only want to say that wives and mothers were as far from my thoughts as pigs and whistles. I won't attempt to tell you what I did mean. I won't refer to it again. Auntie Celia is not like you ; she pretends to know the world, — yes, she has, I know, she has lived a very long time in it in a measure, — and she leads me into argument, and then I am idiot enough to say what I think, and sometimes idiot enough to refer to something that is true ! But never mind that; it shan't happen again if I can help it. Only, mother, don't you be distressed. I can't bear that. Do me the justice, mother, to say I don't bother you with such subjects," she pleaded in genuine distress, and with the most single- minded pursuit of her subject, she blundered into yet another pitfall, as youth will. " I never, never confide any difficult thoughts to you on the subjects over which I am really puzzling — now do I ?" Unlike her sister, Lady Hamesthwaite had no great sense of humour, or she would have noted the pathetic absurdity of her daughter's apology for having hurt her feelings. As it was, she saw and felt the pathos of the stab conveyed in this last remark, which Gallia was so eager to drive home, but not the absurdity of her doing so at such a moment. It was but too true that Gallia never confided to her mother the thoughts that 6* 54 GALLIA. really occupied her extraordinary brain, and that such peace of mind as Lady Hamesthwaite en- joyed regarding her daughter sprang from this very reserve. " I am angry with Aunt Celia for driving me into saying such things before mother ! It was abominable of me to do it, anyhow. I have broken my record that I meant so hard to keep. I always recognised mother's unfitness for any discussion of serious moral problems, and yet the first worldly-minded old woman who comes along with a cambric bandage for my weasel eyes, irritates me into wounding mother with an expression of my views about realities. It's too disgusting. It's shown me how little self-control I've got, so it may do good that way ; but — I'm angry with Aunt Celia all the same." In some such channel as that Gallia's thoughts were running when her mother had kissed her and smiled before rejoining Mrs. Leighton. " I wonder, is there anything so difficult as to be a good mother now-a-days?" Lady Hames- thwaite said, with a sad little smile, as she felt her sister's arm go round her waist with a com- forting pressure. "But you must forgive dear Gallia," she went on quickly, with that beautiful instinct of protection that few mothers seem to be without, in spite of their growing difficulties and trials. " She is exceedingly penitent about her want of tact. Gallia has a great feeling for GALLIA. 55 tact, and — and for propriety. I know she is really grieved to have introduced so unsuitable a topic." Mrs. Leighton could not forbear a smile. " If one had any doubt as to what century one were living in, it would be cleared up by the occurrence of such an incident as this !" she said, with the little light French turn in her voice again. "What is dear Gallia penitent about? About having discussed an impossible subject before her mother! Ah, once it was another way, and we had to whisper behind our fans for fear the shell ears of little daughters caught a murmur of the coarse tide of life. Ay de mi! which is better — or which is worse? But you are right, Julia — Gallia is still a long way from home." " I think — although I don't understand her — still I think that my sympathy is of use to her. I began a long time ago to let her go her own way. I cannot draw back now. Sometimes it seems long to wait for her, but I have never lost her love, and even her curious care of me is very sweet sometimes. Yes, I know she will come back some day." " You are the sweetest mother-woman in the world, my Julia," Mrs. Leighton said, kissing her, and noticing with apprehension a moisture in her own carefully-pencilled eyes. " Good- bye, dear. Don't forget you and Gerald are 56 GALLIA. dining with me on Thursday. "Would Gallia come, I wonder ? If she will, I shall be de- lighted. Let me know in the morning, and an- other man shall be found." " She may come home," Mrs. Leighton said reflectively, as she lay back in her victoria, " but I fear she'll find veal a rather insipid staple after the modern style of husk." Gallia stood at the window, watching the car- riage drive away ; her mother had left the room with Mrs. Leighton, and had not returned to it. Gallia was alone with the supremely uncomfort- able feeling not uncommon with her. To look at, Gallia Hamesthwaite was no or- dinary girl, but her mind and character were by no means very uncommon. She was dark and tall and slender; if her expression had been simpler, she would have .been extremely attrac- tive. Her face might have been called beautiful, by reason of the skin, hair, and eyes — particu- larly her skin, which was, perhaps, perfect. But a girl of far less natural beauty would have been twice as attractive, both to men and women of average taste. Gallia's very expression was one we are beginning to know, and, if the truth must be confessed, to resent a little. A young, healthy girl, with good features, good temper, good nature, and good faith, is so delightful an object, and so welcome in the world, that we are selfishly annoyed when charming-looking girls GALLIA. 57 abdicate their right to these qualities, and refuse the pleasure and satisfaction that resul from their contemplation. For her height, Gallia's face and head were classically little, but they made the strongest impression of divergence from the ideal of girlhood. Her eyes were clouded with wonder upon wonder about mat- ters which have strained the strongest and toughest brains the world has ever seen. Her brows forgot to wear the smile-wreaths we have thought becoming to her years, and knitted themselves with painful intensity in contempla- tion of some misty peak of Darien. All this was the result of her particular sort of education on her particular nature. Up till the age of seventeen, Gallia had re- ceived the best form of home education. The time that some girls devote to music, she had devoted to languages, and knew three very well, besides her own. She had absorbed the same amount of geography, history, science, and mathematics that most clever girls do absorb now-a-days, and none of it had interested the individual part of her brain. Natural sciences had arrested her most, and then, unassisted and unadvised, she made excursions in sociology, and became enraptured. Social ethics captured her ; Mill and Herbert Spencer, whom she skimmed over like a swallow, fired and delighted her. A year or two later, just when she was to have 58 GALLIA. come out, she went to Oxford. Her mother and her father regarded this departure with dis- may. The daughters of Lady Hamesthwaite's friends never wanted to do anything of the kind: why should Gallia? Gallia was essen- tially a middle-class creature ; her father's father had been a business man, her mother, the daugh- ter of a monumentally successful London physi- cian. Both these grandparents had made places for themselves in society owing to the possession of something society had not got, that mixture of energy and the instinct of success and advance- ment. The girls who came to call with their mothers on Lady Hamesthwaite, — who might have been, in the nature of things, Gallia's companions, were utterly remote from her. Sleek creatures, with small ears, long, oval faces, narrow-fronted mouths, and smooth-netted heads, they sat there in their neat, stupidly-imagined clothes, and were coldly conscious of their unlikeness to Gallia. This girl's free movements, free play of feature, free mode of thought, free mode of dress, — this last brought to better perfection than all the rest because more easily understood, — made up an enigma which their blood rather than their brains divined. Gallia had developed late; at seventeen she was a tall girl rather than a young woman ; thus her head was older than her body, and had GALLIA. 59 already acquired a brisk, boyish habit of thought. When femininity descended upon her, there was a struggle ; she did not want it ; was prepared to do without it ; found it an added source of puz- zlement to life, which was already a hot-bed of complications for her ; and, as all late-developed women do, resented it fiercely; fought sepa- rately and subdued every sign of it. As a child, Gallia had never had a doll ; had never played at keeping house, teaching school, having callers, as most other girl-children do. If there was a baby about, she had shivered and left the room. Nothing terrified her like the society of young married women. The least mention of the semi-prurient subjects so many women, and even the best-bred women, habitu- ally discuss, sent her from the scene. In like manner she disdained as vulgar, though she was not frightened by, every sign of coquetry in girls; if she had had girl friends, she could never, save mockingly and with a curling lip, have listened to love-confidences. She adored animals, and they were her nearest companions ; she doted on natural history, and studied the strange characteristics of different beasts with astonishing zest : yet she was so young and raw and contradictory that the broad facts of nature, if applied to herself, revolted her to sickness. She aroused a certain amount of admiration in the world, but no word of love had been whis- 60 GALLIA. pered to her even at twenty years of age, when she had been some time a free-lance at Oxford. Such is an outline of her character, no uncom- mon one, as I said before. There are a great many Gallias in the world now-a-days, and they are, for the most part, very unhappy people. CHAPTER VII. " So this is who you are ?" A dark, tall, thin young man, with a very handsome face, was offering his arm to Gallia Hamesthwaite on the evening of Mrs. Leighton's dinner-party, and he made this remark in a tone of insolence so effec- tive and attractive that the girl coloured curiously, and replied to him with a look of concentrated dislike ; dislike and something else as well. The man passed over the dislike and laughed scorn- fully at the other ingredient, which did not seem to surprise him. "I pardon your astonishment at discovering my parentage," she said lightly. " But you may consider me a sport ; we can't all take after our parents, and clever people may have stupid chil- dren." Gallia hated to find that annoyance, or some other feeling was making her a little un- natural. " I fail — as usual — to apprehend the drift of your remarks ; my mind is ill fitted to appreciate such subtleties. But a longing for justice is ever present with me. My opinion of you is of little moment, but I had never imagined you so fatuous a person as the man I discover to be your father." 6 61 62 GALLIA. Mr. Essex — it was the very man whom Gurdon had referred to as Dark Essex of Balliol — let his words dribble forth with an amount of affecta- tion almost too dazzling even in the Fellow of a college. "You have dropped your serviette already," he added, handing it to her. " Don't keep on doing it, please. Should one eat the soup, here ? I have only lunched with Mrs. Leighton before." Gallia reassured him about the soup, and made absolutely no defence of her father. She let her eyes wander round the table to see who composed her aunt's party, for the Hames- thwaites had been the last arrivals, and dinner being announced very soon, she had only time to notice Dark Essex at the other end of the room, and establish her composure before he came to take her in. Although she looked about the table, and went to work naturally enough with her dinner, she was, in reality, palpitating with anxiety to hear his next remark. She had come to know this man at Oxford, at some lecture, a little over a year ago. Their meetings had been very irregular, and charac- terised by some peculiarity. Essex was as re- actionary as his kind of man always is, and he had never before come upon a woman without a trace of coquetry iu her. He didn't believe in such a woman as a possibility. He was forced to converse in her own key with Gallia, GALLIA. 63 but he liked to use her roughly at the same time. Once he had taken her out in his boat, and they had spent at least four hours together. Another time he had come upon her out on a long walk in the direction of Abingdon, when he too was going the same way, and they had gone along together. Once at Abingdon, it seemed necessary to have some tea, and then there was no particular occasion to hurry back, and it was nine o'clock before they reached Oxford. When he forgot all his assumed rudeness of manner, he could be charming. Vain men are not rare, but a man who well-nigh smothers himself in a cloak of vanity is less common. When Essex forgot to be rude, and forgot to be vain, he was an interesting companion. He would talk freely on all the subjects that in- terested Gallia, and treat her opinions with the same want of deference he would have shown to a man's. And in all the small ways and man- ners of life he exercised all the admirable polite- ness of an ordinary Englishman. It could be seen that the old-fashioned style of woman was his ideal, but Gallia did not quarrel with this, for, sentimentally, the old style of woman was her ideal. " You cannot," she would say, " make yourself the old style of woman ; you cannot interfere with the clock of evolution that is wound up and goes on in each one of us ; you 64 GALLIA. cannot arbitrarily put back its hands to the time of fifty years ago. Some people's clocks go slower than others, that is all. It isn't that I'm pleased with my pace, or that I like myself as I am, but I'm a quick clock." Very often she and Essex found themselves plunging about in some such arguments. He could not free his mind from the single and only conception of woman of which he was capable, and he looked on what are called, tiresomely enough, new developments in women as fresh forms of wiles, the arts of the nineteenth-century Eve. All tbis humbugging about at college and wrangling after " degrees and things" was to him a part of the misguided artfulness of modern women. He couldn't believe in women seriously. Let Gallia talk with her whole soul in her mouth, he would, at his most intolerable, shake his head with a smile, — a sort of " My dear, I see through you" expression, which whipped her up to the point of longing to hit him. This mental atti- tude of Essex's is very commonly met with, and often in men quite brilliantly clever in their own lines. And the very worst of it is, that they are never to be convinced. One of two things inevi- tably happens to such men. Either they marry the pretty foolish-kitten style of person and say triumphantly, " Of course I was right; just look at Mabel, dear little soul !" when they cannot be contradicted ; or the undying womanhood in the GALLIA. 65 woman who burns and argues with them falls a victim to their masculinity, and she spends the rest of her life, after marrying them, in adapting or concealing the parts of her nature which offend the lord god, her husband. This seems hopeless? Well, it is hopeless. Look at Gallia's case. She didn't know it, — that sort of girl never would know it, — but she had fallen in love with Essex. She had now left Oxford. There could be no more punting and no more walks. They had met in society, she had been introduced as Lord Hamesthwaite's daughter. Essex had seemed anxious to show her that he could be even ruder to her in that capacity than in her other of simple student ; and the upshot of it all was with God and the Fates. " You will forgive my silence," he said pres- ently. " At a dinner one is expected, to amuse the lady on one's right, and fill up gaps left by the other man for the lady on one's left, is it not so ? My left appears to have a healthy appetite, and is filling up her own gaps, so we may score her off." " "Well, then, I claim the amusement due to the lady on your right," she. exclaimed quickly, and smiled with a touch of" girlish pleasure. " I beg you won't look, up at me like that," Essex said, with a note of protest. " Have I not told you before that it would upset my whole scheme of life to fall in love with you ?" 66 GALLIA. " And mine." " Yours — to fall in love with me ?" " I didn't mean that — and I didn't say it," Gallia said, with sudden stubbornness. " Funny ; now I consider that you both meant it and said it, but we'll pass that over. Please bear in mind that I am not to be tampered with, that's all. "We meet in quite a new fashion ; the landscape has changed, the figures in the landscape must change too. "We are in Lon- don : you on your own ground ; I, because Mrs. Leighton knew my mother, wanted another man in a hurry, and heard that I had grown up hand- some and had a chance of getting disliked into notice some day." " "Very well. Then you can indulge me with a new form of treatment," said Gallia, with a nod. "By the way, the man across there, now gnawing a salt almond, has honoured you with a number of savagely covetous stares." " That is Sir Edmund Bruce." "It is so delightful to be in the society of some one who is au fait with little social details of that kind — to a commoner like myself the greatest treat," said Essex, with exaggerated en- thusiasm. " You are simply abominable ; can you never stop sneering ?" " I breathe again. If you consider me simply GALLIA. 67 abominable, I believe you will not — at least not immediately — fall in love with me ! In the meantime, I may tell you that you have im- proved greatly in doing your hair." " Too flattered !" said Gallia, with a curling lip, but she experienced a thrill of gratification all the same. " Merely justice, I assure you. Have I ever paid you a compliment 1" " One !" she looked up and laughed in his face. " And that was ?— " " The compliment of disliking me." A shadow came in the middle of Essex's fore- head, just between the brows. " Mr. Essex, we are wondering if you can give the explanation of Mark Gurdon's sudden flight to the interior of Africa ?" A very pretty little woman, Lady Mary Mortimer, fired this sudden question into the. idle bickering Gallia and Essex usually maintained. " Is it really the interior ? When he left, there was word of Cape Town, and since then rumour has pushed him farther and farther towards the tracks of Stanley and others." " Oh, well, it's somewhere in Africa," Lady Mary explained easily. " Was it true about his cough?" " Surely Gurdon didn't mean us to take that seriously ? I had no idea it was intended to go further than his chief." 68 GALLIA. " Well, he had a cough ! Dear Mrs. Leighton, you said he had a cough, didn't you ?" applying in the most plaintive fashion to her hostess. " And I have always heard the climate of South Africa was so wonderful for anything of that kind ! The air there is so extraordinarily dry, you know." " Or so extraordinarily moist, Lady Mary ?" Essex interjected gravely. " Oh, yes, I believe that was it. Yes, so sin- gularly moist, you know ; and of course that is everything in a — in a — bronchial trouble — isn't that what Mr. Gurdon had ?" " I can't remember if the cough was in his throat or in his chest," Mrs. Leighton said, with affectionate solicitude. " I fancy it lay about here," said Essex, laying a finger in the middle of his brow ; " but I don't think the Colonial Office would mind where it was." "You have got to do something for him, Gerald, when he comes home !" Mrs. Leighton said warmly. " Mark Gurdon is a young man I like." " His future is assured, Celia." Lord Hames- thwaite made her a little bow ; she kissed the tips of her fingers to him in return. " He is not to be kept licking envelopes all his young days," sbe went on severely. " And when he comes back from Africa" — GALLIA. 69 " I wish I knew which part of Africa," Lady Mary wailed softly. Lord Hamesthwaite shook his head. "Ah, I believe he was mistaken in going there," he said. " What does he want to endanger his future and his country's future for, by getting to know anything about her dependencies ?" Essex said to Gallia, with a little air of irritation which was very well done. Lord Hamesthwaite looked over quickly to the Oxford man and his daughter, but he did not make any remark. " Yes ; I don't see why he needed to go to Africa," Mrs. Leighton went on. " His cough," said Lady Mary tenderly. " He had just been to Paris, too," her hostess went on, as though this formed an effective reason against a man's going anywhere. " His French is delicious — quite the French of my own day !" " Talking of Paris, what news is there of young Robbie?" Lady Hamesthwaite inquired, disengaging herself dexterously from an elderly flirtation with a Dean. "I very seldom hear from Robbie," Mrs. Leighton replied, with a marked absence of her usual tact, or a conspicuous display of it. Everybody at once felt that Robbie had been " naughty." 70 GALLIA. " My dear," looking down the table to a very sweet young woman in white, "have you any news of my grandson to give us ?" " The prettiest girl in the room is blushing ; don't miss it," murmured Essex to his neighbour, and Gallia craned her neck to see who it was he distinguished thus. " There is very little news to give of an' artist before he has arrived," the prettiest girl said, in a voice of such beauty as made her most ordinary utterance a kind of favour. " Mr. Leighton is to be seen very regularly at the studio — and — that is all! In the spring" — she raised the very glistening grey eyes and swept a glance to Lady Hamesthwaite — " in the spring, who shall say ?" " You were speaking, Mrs. Leighton ?" said the courteous peer on her left. " No, I think not— was I?" The peer attacked his souffle with renewed ardour, wondering what the words " I couldn't have done it better myself" meant? For those words he had certainly overheard. " Do you really think her so pretty ?" Gallia asked, with an elaborate air of criticism. "She is not only the most beautiful, she is the best woman I have been privileged to know," Essex replied, with a very new ex- pression, amounting almost to worship, on his face. GALLIA. 71 It was no wonder if Gallia Hamesthwaite looked up at him in interest and surprise. The smile with which she was so much more familiar succeeded that new look. " Don't distress yourself, my dear ; she is my sister." " Sometimes, you know, Mr. Essex, — or per- haps you don't know ? — your rudeness not only oversteps the bounds of what is permissible — but it ceases to be amusing." Gallia turned superbly to the man on her other hand, who chanced to be an old friend. " Maurice, you are eating far too much pud- ding ! Don't," she said, with cordial roughness. " I wondered when you were going to notice me," the young man replied ruefully, in a very high, thin falsetto voice. " I have made no less than three distinct remarks to you during dinner, and once I even told you my best story. Not the one about Gladstone and the muffins, — that was my best last season,— but the one" — " I expect I know the one," Gallia remarked coldly. " ISo, you can't really ; you've been at Oxford all the time ! It's the joke they played Eosebery with his racing-glass. You'll like it awfully. Look here, I'll tell you now, if you'll shunt Essex for a bit." " I'm afraid there isn't time ; I see Aunt Celia looking at mother. It will keep, won't it ?" 72 GALLIA. "Yes, if you are really — Oh, this is your glove, I expect?" Maurice Forrester was still babbling harmlessly when the ladies left the room. " Give it to me, I will take it to Miss Hames- thwaite," Essex said, and said it with so cool an assurance that the glove was meekly handed over to him. A moment later Sir Edmund Bruce dropped into Gallia's vacant chair, and Forrester had to name the men to each other, and observe the neatness with which Essex had got the glove out of sight before Sir Edmund's eye could have fallen on it. " Let me put it on for you," Essex said ten minutes later, when he came on Gallia alone in the green gloom of Mrs. Leighton's little palm- house. He took her hand in his, turned it over, then spread out the fingers one by one, and folded them together again. Gallia made no sign. She was as though under chloroform, breathing naturally, slightly, her muscles flaccid and limp, her power over herself simply nil. "Was this the next style of treatment she had asked for ? Essex raised the hand — a white, slim, charming hand it was — a little higher up ; he was sitting opposite her on the immense tub of a woolly- stemmed palm. He was going to kiss her hand, she knew ; and she knew she was glad that he was going to kiss it: she had one fear which GALLIA. 73 came and went with the throb of her even pulse — that he would put it down without kissing it. " I wish I were as beautiful as your sister," Gallia was impelled to say, and she said it with some carelessness and a smile. " I am glad you are not — or I should worship you," said Essex, speaking low. " And if you did ?" she asked, looking at him still lightly, and with a curl of amusement on her lips which masked perfectly her curious feelings. "If I did — I should want you," he said slowly. His head was bent and she could not see his face, but she did not care to, she was occupied with her own feelings. Still, it was a strange phenomenon, this Essex with a note of ordinary passion in his voice, a note that Gallia was hear- ing for the first time in her life. All she knew in the strange confusion of the moment was, that this was not herself, not the old self she had eaten and slept and risen and walked with for so many years. It was a self she had never known or sus- pected the existence of; she was sure she would be ashamed of it afterwards — at the time it was too strong for her, and had to have its way and sway. Next, he looked at her, seeming to ap- praise her, and not unkindly. Few women but have to live through this discomfort, which arises through their having awaked at the wrong 74 GALLIA. moment for the wrong man. "I should want you," he had said. " But my life has no need of you, Gallia, and I don't — I don't." The head-shake and the sad smile with which he said the last words tore something down in Gallia's soul. The veil of the temple was rent in twain. It was not that the worst had come, it was that everything had come. There could be nothing any more. Gallia was in the drawing-room rallying Mau- rice about his fund of wit and humour before that big minute had closed and gone to make up its little hour. "Never happy any more," — where had she heard the line ? It was some refrain, apparently, that had stuck in her mind, and she marvelled to hear it beaten out so clearly in the hoof-strokes of her father's horses as they drove home. Essex sat on the edge of a palm-tub and laughed to himself, and wiped his eyes with a long thin pearl-coloured glove. CHAPTER VIII. Five weeks had passed since the dinner at Mrs. Leighton's at which Gallia had met Dark Essex, and she had not yet succeeded in com- forting herself. Outwardly she had been the same ; her way of life was in no wise altered, and at luncheon and dinner, when she joined her father and mother, her dark face sparkled and her sharp young tongue clacked with all their wonted brightness. It was when she got upstairs to her own rooms that the brunt of that meeting made itself felt. She had come to observe nar- rowly the manner of the recurrence of that recol- lection,— not that this made it any easier to bear, only she was trained to the verbatim reporting of her own feelings, and would not have known how to cease from it. Suppose she was wander- ing towards her desk, or kneeling on the rug beside her dog, or dislodging the Grand Vizier, as she called her big Persian cat, from his nest among the divan cushions, a blankness would fall upon her mind. "I remember; there was something that has made me unhappy : what was it ?" Thus her mind would go to work; then sud- denly the sharpness of remembrance would lay 75 76 GALLIA. hold of her nerves, and a little inarticulate cry would escape her; her hands would go up to hide her face, and a shiver, not in her limhs, but in her body, would shake and sicken her. Then with a smile she would say, " I told him that I loved him, Grand Vizier, — no, I asked him to love me, — and he pushed me aside like a Picca- dilly cab-tout. 0 God !" Done with smiling, the shame and the bitter- ness choked her, and she would bury her face in one of her dozen cushions. " I used to think no feeling was eternal, or even should be eternal," she said one day, after some such turn of suffering. " Life blots out life no less than death does, I used to say to some of the girls. But I was wrong. Some bits of life have a longevity in proportion to their bitter- ness. Some things one doesn't forget or live out; some feelings have a strength" — To Gallia, talking aloud was as congenial and familiar as it is to all somewhat separated beings who are in the habit of thinking. She was not, as are many people, self-conscious when left alone with herself, she was at her ease, at home, in the society of someone she at least knew and had tried always to understand. " I wonder, does the same division obtain in the kingdom of sentiment as obtains in the world ? Are there feelings with the life of little animals and birds, and if one strikes them with GALLIA. 77 the will, firmly, do they bleed to death in five minutes ; and are there others with the life of the wild beasts in them, that grow stronger and wilder and savager the moment they are wounded, and fight us worse and die hard. Surely, the good, kind, sweet feelings are the little animals ; how quick charity and good temper and gen- erosity will bleed to death and be forgotten! Passions are the brutes, the lions, tigers, and leopards of that kingdom : they leap up and hit harder and maul worse after the first bullet behind the shoulder. But the reptile feelings — what are they? Slowrlived, poisonous things, that crawl and crawl and drag their wounds with them in no discomfort. Shame is a snake, and you may cut its head off and it will live still. Jealousy, humiliation — the vipers of the feeling world. But shame — shame is a snake, and it is knotted all round me." Tears did not come readily to Gallia, but the dry, gasping sort of cries that shuddered through her closed lips every now and then had each the bitterness of many tears. It was a big, third-floor, three- windowed room looking far into the Green Park that was Gallia's study in the Grosvenor Place house; she had furnished it herself with a keen eye to well- considered shapely spaces of fine flooring. It was not a matter of parquet and prayer-carpets ; a wide and wonderful velvet pile in dove-grey 78 GALLIA. and with ouquets of pink and purple flowers in faded tints ran clear to the skirting-board. Upon a dais, so strange a lounge as could never be called a divan had been arranged ; a canopy in dull purple and duller gold hung over it, and from a bronze chain a lamp depended, with four purple eyes in its old metal-work, eyes that glowed in the early winter dusk — for Gallia had not switched on her lights yet. Partly because the room was so wide, partly because the scheme of decoration had been so broadly carried out, Gallia made a very small heap of human suffering kneeling there beside the Grand Vizier, with whose plush existence nothing could ever interfere. Her dark violet cloth gown — so much of herself as not to seem a dress at all — fell sparsely round her, and one meagre purple beam of the little lamp made a violet pool on the cream-coloured nape of her neck. But Gallia roused herself, and kneeling and sitting on her heels, looked up towards the light with all the appearance of a young girl before a shrine. " "Why I, with all my interests, should care for any man at all, and that man in particular — I wish I knew if I did really care for him, and I wish I knew what leads him to act, intermit- tently, as if he cared about me. If I were ever to see him again, I would behave more GALLIA. 79 straightforwardly. I deserved what I got for that vulgar reticence I showed. There is no other word for it. Vulgar ; utterly, vilely, cus- tomarily, crustedly vulgar. Why couldn't I look up hravely at him ? why couldn't I say plainly and simply, 'Dark Essex, I love you, do you not love me too ?' But no ! I am too half-and- half — neither a good woman of the old kind nor a good woman of the new. Surely he would have treated me with respect ? No woman — no decent woman — scoffs or jeers at a man who tells her he loves her. If he had not loved me, he could have said so. I would have borne the dis- appointment with as much pride as I could find, and I should have been able to respect myself; there would have been no shame. But what have I done ? Let him play with me ; take my hand and toy with it, and/eeZ it, like a hired creature, without even the satisfaction of doing my duty, and fulfilling my part of the bargain, which a hired creature would have had. Lower than the women in the street I've been ; lower than the poor, poor women in the street. Oh !" She had come back to the same bitter shudder and the same sickening sense of degradation. Her head was buried between her knees now, her white hands squeezed whiter in their con- vulsive pressure. Gallia was at the age for what must be described as "tall" sentiment. This sort of thing was just as real to her as would 80 GALLIA. have been any of the real sorrows of life. And the tiresome part of sorrows is that they do not hurt in proportion to their validity and excusa- bility. If we are to he sympathetic, we can re- member always that silly suffering hurts just as much as sensible suffering. A love-trouble, even when you love the wrong person without having any business to, is just as bitter as having a relative carried off by a railway accident. The soft mumble of the lift-ropes sounded from without, there was a footstep or two in the passage, the door opened, and the footman said, " Mr. Essex," in the strange hard voice he used upon the big staircase at parties. The odious rush of blood in Gallia took from her the power to think clearly. She knew that since the door was round a corner, he would not have seen her; she knew that the room was almost in darkness ; would Hendon turn on the light or not ? If he didn't, and she kept quiet, perhaps Essex would not see. This jumble of thoughts went through her like a rifle bullet; there was a little click just before the door closed, and three constellations gleamed out among the wall draperies. She raised herself softly inside her silken skirt, but the rustle caught his ear, and he saw — there was no means of disguising it — that she had been kneeling, that she had been giving way to emotion, that her self-possession was to seek. GALLIA. 81 She stood and looked at him for a few mo- ments, saying nothing, holding out no hand, using the time to collect herself and decide how to deal with him since he was in her presence. His smile, his whole air, the way in which he held his hat and stick, were those of any and every man of manners who makes a call. She could read nothing in them. But she was not like any woman receiving a visitor ; there was no reason to battle through the surf of commonplace with Essex before riding upon the deep waters. So she said nothing till he had spoken. He took no notice of the fashion of his recep- tion ; he produced a little package. " I wanted to return you this myself — because I have been so terribly unfortunate as to burn one page with some cigarette ash," he said, very easily and well. "Before replacing the volume with another, which anybody might have done, I wanted to show it to you and ask you to let me mend it. You see, I thought, as there are some marks in it, you might value this copy. Now, it can be mended by means of this other copy I bring. Dear Miss Hamesthwaite, what is the matter with you? you are not suffering from a stiff neck, I hope ?" In spite of herself Gallia laughed. " I believe that is it," she said drily. " Well, I daresay you are not in the mood for / 82 GALLIA. visitors, but give me your attention for three minutes, and then I will go." This alarmed her very much indeed : unpre- pared for his coming, she was less prepared to have him go. But she said no word till they had opened the little book and discussed its wound. She would have nothing done to it; she knew the word that was missing in the verse, and it might have been her own cigarette any day in the week. She forgave it freely. " Since you are so good, I will go." " Since I am so good, I think you might stay. I want to ask you something. Sit down Bome- where." He took a chair, put his hat and stick upon the floor, and leaned towards her with his hands — very fine sallow hands — dangling between his knees. It was an attitude of uncompromising attention. For the moment Gallia was unnerved. She altered her plan of attack. " Why are you so different to-day ?" she said, in a manner very natural and frank. " That cannot have been what you wanted to ask me, but I will answer it if you wish. This is my afternoon manner ; I put it on with this coat." He glanced down the front of himself, and dusted a slight speck from its lodgment between two buttons. As he sat there, he was an infinitely elegant and correct presentment of a man of his world. Gallia wondered how he GALLIA. 83 could conceal so much divergence from the type inside one frock-coat. " I am going to ask you to let me refer to our last meeting," she said gently and very gravely, " or rather parting." " You got up and rushed off, if I remember." Gallia believed he was nervous underneath his smile. "I greatly regret my manner all through that interview — it was not sufficiently frank or straightforward." He looked genuinely surprised. "I don't know if you will agree with my summary of the interview, so I will put a ques- tion to you first. Will you really say what you think in reply?" " Mb, I can't make any such promise." " But you will try to answer truly V "If lean, I will." "What did you think were my feelings for you that evening — particularly during the time we sat in the palm-house ?" " I am glad to be able to speak by the book. You thought me ' simply abominable.' " "Ah, no, don't joke — that is only another complication. But if jokes are to count," with a feminine whisk of her tactics, " did you think I was really in danger of doing so when you asked me not to fall in love with you ?" " Every woman is — are we to say in danger ?— 84 GALLIA. very well — is in danger of falling in love, as they have agreed to term it, with every man when the people in question are your and my ages, and have corresponding appearances and gifts." " Is every man in danger of falling in love with every woman, then — given the same con- ditions as you name ?" " Certainly." " Well, did you think then — do you think now — that I have fallen in love with you ?" " How could I be so vain as to say so, if I did think it?" " I perceive that I have begun ill — you are not replying well. We must do it some other way. I am going to grant that my manner in the palm- house could readily have given you the impres- sion that I was in love with you." " If it did, if you were, if I was, if neither of us is — what matter, so long as we say nothing about it to each other ?" " I can't agree with you there." " Of course not, because you are a woman, •and must continually be pulling up a plant to see how it is growing. Now, for Heaven's sake, don't snatch at that wretched metaphor and turn it some other way on !" " I am going to do nothing of the kind." She got up from her chair some yard or two away, came up to him and put her hands on his •shoulders; as he didn't look up, she raised his GALLIA. 85 chin with one stiff finger. Her eyes had a dif- ferent kind of light, her lips were parted, and her voice, when it came, was rich, tender, beauti- ful as he had never heard it. " Listen ! I owe you a straight speech, and even if you don't want to hear it, bear with me, for it hurts so to know one has not been true to oneself — that one hasn't had courage. Oh, there isn't anything women want except courage — they have to use so much, much more than men. If I spend all mine in the next minute, it will be good ; I shall have been true. The other night, I don't know what took hold of me ; I have felt once or twice that you were different from any other man I've seen, and made me feel different. I think, in a crowd, if you had been somewhere behind me, I'd have known you were there. The other night, though you said one rude thing after another, and didn't use even the commonest civility to me, my whole soul wrapped itself up in one thought; it seemed to sit with folded arms inside me, waiting for you, wanting you to kiss my hand. I didn't know it then, but I believe now that that means that I love you. Hush ! — wait. It is all right— I know you said it — your life has no need of me, and I am not beautiful enough for you to worship — that on one side. You have no need of me. I don't think you told me as kindly as you might. One never knows, but I think — well, yes, I think 8 86 GALLIA. if it had been you showing me that you loved me, and if I had felt like you — I think I would have spoken differently ! But, however, it came ! I am young and I can put up with it. I have loved you — it is right that you should know it ; I love you still, and may do so for a long time ; but I want you to forgive me for the other evening. It was immodest, flagrant, shameless, the way I sat there and said nothing, and let you use me as you did. That was disgraceful, and though I have tried, I can't forget the shame of it. But it was so new to me then, I was taken by surprise. I had not an idea that I loved you, or I would have been ready to speak. I would have said, ' No, none of these simulacra with me ; I really love you, and they insult me.' But I will forget those to you, for perhaps you did not guess I loved you. Will you try to forgive me my want of honesty, since I have tried to make up for it now 1" CHAPTER IX. She stood back from him, her arms at her sides, waiting as though for a sentence, for his reply. He got up and went over to lean upon the mantelshelf. "With an elbow in one of its dusky oak crevices and his face finely thrown up by the background of carving, he was still at his full height, and he felt free, his own man. For a moment, as she watched him keenly, Gallia thought he was going to be natural, to be what she knew he might be if ever he would give his inner self free play ; but next instant a smile rose, and her head rolled from side to side in the impatience she immediately felt of the manner he was assuming. " It has been a question in good society," he began very slowly, " how far it is justifiable for one person to place another person in an impos- sible position ; you will, since you are a member of that society, know doubtless better than I do how this question has been decided. But out of the depths of a somewhat sickly experience of the world, I am able to tell you one thing — that, had you said these things to nine out of ten other men, they would have seized and kissed you, and said God knows what, that you wouldn't 87 88 GALLIA. have been prepared to hear. And they would have been in no sense to blame. You are going to say that they would not have been gentle- men." "I wasn't; I was going to say they could hardly be so dull of apprehension as to so mis- take me," cried Gallia hotly. " It would not have been a matter of appre- hension, dull or the reverse. It would have been a matter of convention. Men are always expected, in certain positions, to show passion." He smiled very drily. " They are expected — by women at least — to be what women call men. Nine out of ten women would have meant that speech to end in a smother of embraces. One moment. I am not in the least certain that you are the tenth woman, I am only sure that I am the tenth man. You will admit that I have not kissed you ?" " "Why should I mind if you had, when I love you ?" Gallia asked simply. " You know I didn't mean things to end in one way or another. I said what I thought I ought to say to save my own self-respect, and you were and are free to act exactly as you think right or feel inclined. Though I would, of course, prefer you to under- stand rather than misunderstand me." A footman came in at this moment. " Her ladyship wished me to say Mr. Gurdon was in the drawing-room, and if you were dis- GALLIA. 89 engaged, she would like you to come down, miss." " Say to her ladyship, Hendon, that I am not able to come down this afternoon." He went out, and Gallia turned to Essex again. " Why can you not treat me with the same decency a woman is expected to show a man when he tells her he loves her? What is the difference ?" " I daresay from your point of view there is no difference, and I hope you will think that I have behaved myself as becomingly as any woman could have done." " Well, you have not acted like the nine men you mention, from one of two reasons. Perhaps because you had the sense to see that I expected nothing of the kind, perhaps because you did not happen to have the feelings you say they would have had." "I am not in the least moved to explain which," said Essex calmly. " The subject of what you and a number of other people call love may be one I have never studied, or it may be that 1 have read further into it than you have done. Perhaps I call love by some other names, perhaps I don't even see it to be a fine and desirable feeling. We needn't go into that." " No, we needn't ; there is no question of it. 8* 90 GALLIA. I had merely to explain conduct I was ashamed of, to explain it for my own sake ; I have done. I am glad and proud again ; I have not, if you have understood me, anything more to feel ashamed of." She came up to him and took his hand. " Thank you. You at any rate listened to me — I am grateful for it." If ever a pair of sincere eyes looked up at a man, they were Gallia's. Essex, even through his priggishness and affectation, was conscious of being at a disadvantage. "By the way," with a complete change of tone, " you had a glove of mine — will you please give it me ?" " Are you afraid I may make a trophy of it?" She shook her head and smiled a little wistfully. " No, you won't make me believe you really credit me with so unworthy a thought." " I haven't it with me now ; I will post it to you." « Thanks." " And — don't you think the world is still a little too raw for your very advanced treatment of it?" He went to get his hat and stick. "No," said Gallia firmly, and sitting down among her cushions; "the world is never too raw for a woman to do what she thinks right. She would help to keep it raw by playing down to its rawness. There can be no excuse for not ALLIA. 91 acting in accordance with the light one has. One may be misunderstood, one may be dis- liked, but we have to save our own souls for ourselves." " And the dramatic faculty inherent in all women makes the saving process so much the more picturesque." A disheartened note of sad laughter came from her. " Good-bye," was all she said. " If one could believe you sincere, you would be worth loving, by some better man than I. Good-bye, O New Woman, who is yet the old !" " Good-bye, epitome of unbelief." Gallia was smiling too. " If only" you have not put out my soul's little light !" she added, half to herself, in a frightened whisper. This time Essex laughed musically as he went to the door. " Let me know if I have," were the last words she heard him say ; then the door shut, the lift- ropes rumbled again, and two minutes later she watched him cross the road towards the park gates. She drew a nervous breath or two, and passed her handkerchief below the curls on her fore- head. " That is the end of that," she said. " If I had foreseen his coming at all, I should have foreseen his going too. It is no worse and no better 92 GALLIA. than I might have imagined it." She walked up and down the big room several times, not so much thinking as struggling to get hold of her feelings, and know what she thought. " Life is no different now from what it was," she told herself, " and yet I feel as though I had to gather up the threads and see into what kind of knot I can tie them, and how I can get them to hold. Nothing has really happened, only now I know that something is not going to happen — for instance, love is not going to hap- pen. What did he mean about the name he might call it by? Of course he must see it very differently from me. He hinted that he thought it neither fine nor desirable. That was very honest of him. I was too hard ; I didn't think — one never does think till afterwards — that of course he cannot respect love. "What man can be honest with himself and about him- self? I wish I had told him that I saw that, that I knew that ! And I wish — oh, how I wish I had asked him to kiss me once ! Perhaps he would have said no ; but if he would have con- sented to be simple, surely he would not have minded kissing me just once ! A woman always grants as much as that, and shines in doing it. It is looked on as a sacrifice on her part, and no one thinks the worse of her. Could anyone, even himself, have thought the worse of him? Ah, how I wish — I wish"— a rush of emotion GALLIA. 93 almost choked her, but she flung her head up and ran to the window to look at the lights twinkling across the Park ; with her hands cling- ing to the casement bar, she leaned there a moment. " For now I shall never be kissed, and it cannot be good never to have been kissed at all ! "Well, there will be one of the flowers of life I shall never have picked — a love-kiss. Surely, surely no woman can be so mean and poor a creature as not to be worth and worthy of one man's kiss ?" Her earnestness was pitiful. Essex had fatu- ously mistaken Gallia : she had absolutely no dramatic faculty, was never conscious of her attitude or her expression, or the strength of the feeling from an outside point of view. She was only bitterly and clearly honest in herself and to others; her ideal was high, and her ideal was absolute reality. She had never buried any truth from herself, and could not easily understand the desire to do so which is so common. In spite of a very wideawake mind, she had no idea to what •extent compromise enters into the most honour- able man's idea of honour. As a woman, she took honour and honesty very seriously, well knowing them to be among the latest branches of study opened to her sex, and deeply sensible of their importance ; but of the necessity for compromise even in such holy of holies she knew nothing. 94 GALLIA. Entirely without conceit and self-consciousness, her whole life was a desire to know, and then to be true to what she knew. Crude and perhaps ludicrous as she might now and then appear, her single-mindedness was her most marked char- acteristic. Had she been different, had she had the skill of any of the nine women Essex had cited, she would have been nine times better fitted to win his love — only she would never have striven to do it. She suffered at this time because her views were nobler, she herself a little better than com- mon ; such human creatures as differ thus from their fellows are rarely made welcome in the world of men and women in which she lived. It was so late now that she hurried to her rooms. There were no tears to dry, no eyes that needed bathing, no sign for a maid's keen eyes to notice that her mistress had lived through any scene. When she came running from her bath, she brought a calm, quiet face with her, and immersed herself quite naturally in the even- ing papers while her hair was being dressed. Her mother was in the drawing-room, with a magazine and a paper-cutter, as usual, when she went in ; they were to dine alone, and to pick Lord Hamesthwaite up at eleven at the House on their way to a reception. " So sorry, dear, that you could not come down when Mark Ghirdon was here ; he was so GALLIA. 95 interesting about Africa," Lady Hamesthwaite said pleasantly, with her customary proud smile at her daughter's beautiful face. " Mr. Essex came in, and I really think he must have stayed two hours with me," Gallia replied, naturally. " Do you like Mr. Essex very much ?" Gallia paused to weigh her words. " No, mother ; I don't think I like him par- ticularly at all." " Who is Essex, by the way ?" Lord Hames- thwaite had come in and overheard these re- marks. "He is an Oxford man; a fellow and a tutor. He writes a good deal for the literary weeklies, I think," Gallia answered ; " and he is often in London, for his mother is a great invalid. They have a house, — in Hammersmith Terrace, I be- lieve he said, — and they are very poor." " His sister is a very beautiful woman," said Gallia's father judicially. " Yes; I would like to know her so much." " You are sure to meet her at Aunt Celia's ; she is a great pet there." They rose to pass in to dinner. "A handsome family, then," Lord Hames- thwaite said; "that young man had a very unusual type of good looks, but I am afraid he is a prig." Gallia was not at a point whence she could 96 GALLIA. perceive the rugged truth of this dictum. Be- sides, she would have persisted in loving him even had she been convinced of his prighood. He was the first man she had loved, and the first man is never a woman's free choice. Like the first fish of the amateur trouter, he is an acci- dent; neither science, skill, nor selection has a hand in landing him. Sometimes he is a hand- some and creditable accident. I have known the first man in more than one case to be a meritorious person — oftenest, though, he is a very mean, small-finned little accident. The conversation drifted off to Mark Gurdon again and his African experiences. " I believe he is to be at Axminster's dinner at the Reform to-morrow ; I must keep my eye on him if Celia wants him helped into some- thing." Nothing seemed more natural to Lord Hames- thwaite than that a young man should want to be helped into something ; whereas to hear that a man wrote for literary weeklies was to hear something that made it very difficult to realise his personality. "Poor old Mr. Quittenden has had another stroke," Gallia remarked presently, feeling within herself a strong need of the relief of the commonplace. And someone else's tragedy is just as often our commonplace as our tragedy is • theirs. GALLIA. 97 "Where did you see that?" Lord Hames- thwaite asked quickly. " All the papers have the telegram." "This child may be trusted," Lady Hames- thwaite began laughingly, " to see and know of what is happening" — She was interrupted by a fit of coughing; her husband looked quickly up at her, but said nothing. " Ah, that was the second stroke, wasn't it ? It can only be a matter of weeks — or, at most, months — for the member for Hollo whampton." " Poor old thing ! I liked him so much that one day he lunched here," Gallia said. " It is really very sad." " 'm, yes !" replied her father, who keenly re- membered Mr. Quittenden's action regarding a certain Bill, and wasn't so sure that it would be so very sad for his party. " He was always such an admirer of yours, Gerald!" Lord Hamesthwaite looked doubtfully at his wife. " I remember so well his saying to me, ' There isn't another man in England who so completely fills the idea of a" — Again Lady Hamesthwaite was interrupted by the same strange, choking cough. " Now, Julia," Lord Hamesthwaite burst out, bringing his fingers sharply on the table, " this settles it. London is not for you. Don't say k g 9 98 GALLIA. a word — I will have my own way about it. Gallia, your mother must go abroad at once. I've been very patient. I've watched this getting worse daily, and I've seen the futility of treat- ment. ~No doubt I've been a fool to hold my tongue so long about it. But go she must, and that immediately." "But my dinners, my receptions — the invi- tations are all out !" poor Lady Hamesthwaite interjected pathetically. " And Gallia, whom I thought I was to have the happiness of taking about with me this year" — " Gallia will go with you, as I cannot leave town. She has finished with Oxford. Tou can take her, or she can take you, about the Riviera, if you like." Gallia had one moment of communing .with herself, then she said cheerfully, "I'll tell you where we'll go, mother, we will go to Algiers. It will do you heaps of good." And so they spent most of the evening dis- cussing and forming plans. The last post brought Gallia a small regis- tered package. Within it was one long glove and one of Mr. Essex's cards. She turned them over several times, amused at the over-care, in which she detected more than a spice of scorn, which had registered the tiny parcel, hurt somehow by the formality of the visiting-card. She turned over the doubled GALLIA. 99 sheet of notepaper and looked inside the en- velope. There was no word, not a pen-scratch. Just the address in Essex's little cramped Greek handwriting. " Yes, mother, let it be Algiers. And — let us go to-morrow. We can spend a week in Cannes to get anything you may need." " My dear, I need nothing but what can be telegraphed for to Paris ; but to-morrow" — " Do let it be to-morrow, if you can, dear. I am so sick of — I hate — hate — hate this place so !" She flung herself back in her chair so violently, and threw her arms above her head with so much vehemence, that the little matters on her knees, the glove and its belongings, fell upon the floor. Lady Hamesthwaite noticed them with her kind, tactful eyes, and came over to Gallia and kissed her. " To-morrow or next day, dear, at latest. Now, away to bed ; we shall be so busy all day seeing people, and explaining things, and writing notes." CHAPTER X. Mrs. Leighton happened to be giving a little luncheon-party, when Lady Hamesthwaite ran in on the following morning to announce the Algiers programme, and find condolence for the necessity of giving up all her social ploys for the winter. Margaret Essex, whom Mrs. Leighton frankly delighted in because she was so beauti- ful, and Mark Gurdon were of the party, and they sat next each other. Every man has, at the bottom of his heart, an admiration, more or less strong according to his temperament, for the delicately beautiful, beneficent-faced, and gracious married woman — the woman of the kind eyes and tender mouth. It is less the beauty of this sort of woman than her beneficent air that wins him. She is the woman who draws most souls to follow after her, she has the face which could start a crusade. She may have moments that are humanly prank- some, but she is guilelessness itself. She is more wonderful at thirty than at twenty, for the per- sistent beauty of her character, as it grows stronger and stronger, can draw only beautiful lines in her face, "We may thank our stars and 100 GALLIA. 101 gods that hers is an inextinguishable race, that there will always be some of these women to be found, that where they walk, things hope- lessly wicked will bud out into goodness, and good things be better. We can only have one quarrel against them; that their immemorial fine forgiveness may perpetuate things indiffer- ently good and bad. Margaret Essex was young yet, but the mark belonging to this race of souls was set on her forehead already. She was not very clever, she had not much brain, and her training had been desultory; but none of those things matter in such a woman. I think she may be exempted from tediously practical formulae, and the set duties of a dull world ; in the advancement of women she must always be franked. On the whole, it is admitted by right that woman's sense of law, order, and judgment should be taught as they are being taught now ; but this must not apply to the soul-woman I am speak- ing of. She has a track of her own to follow, lonely and lovely. She is amenable to laws as mysterious to us as those that tell the tides when to turn. Enough of her. This was the race to which Margaret Essex belonged, and Grurdon had summed her up coldly and foolishly on that day when she passed him by in Paris. He knew now that he had been wrong. He had never 9* 102 GALLIA. talked to any woman in his life who gave him the same feelings as this one. Man is ap- proached through his simple senses first; a goddess may sit at his elbow, and the turn of her wrist as she handles a fork will be the first of her charms to arouse his regards. Mark found himself watching Margaret's fingers as she crumbled her bread, and wondering if it were merely that he had never observed women's fingers before, or if hers were really so infinitely more delicate in colouring and contour than those of any other woman ? They were flower- fingers. Then her voice, her habit of speaking with her eyes cast down in thought, and at the end of her sentence, or if she put a question, raising them with so clear and direct a glance; this unconscious charm he caught himself wait- ing for, with an eagerness that was utterly foreign to his whole nature as he knew it. That she had not recognised him as the man who had been walking that day in the Jardin du Luxem- bourg with Leighton was quite certain ; so far she had only heard of him as being newly returned from Africa, and he had carefully re- frained from mentioning Paris. Strange, but he would have been unanxious for her to identify him as Leighton's friend at this early moment of their acquaintance. She disapproved of Leighton. She must have learned — she couldn't have failed to learn — of Leighton's relations with GALLIA. 103 Arsenie, and Gurdon didn't find it anything but natural that her favour was removed from a man who openly kept a mistress. Gurdon was a man of no imagination whatever; for him, what was, was. It was habitual for women to disapprove of a man who kept a mistress and took small pains to conceal this fact ; just as it was habitual for them to receive intimately, and finally marry, men who had connections, decently regulated and properly concealed, of a more casual nature. Gurdon hadn't a shadow of doubt in his mind that Margaret's moral views were of this complicated but no less universal pattern; he felt sure she would recognise the same difference between the two kinds of men that he did ; and he sympathised with her in the shock she must have experienced in discovering Leighton's lapse from this high standard, and felt that she was entirely justified in dropping his acquaintance. There was one little faint distinction, which he would have admitted, but which did not happen to occur to him. He would have excused Leighton everything but the publicity of his behaviour ; and Margaret would not. But this was, after all, a very, very faint distinction, although in the present ease, it had been the direct cause of Leighton's losing her friendship. Margaret had been what may be described as " carefully brought up ;" she had lost her father 104 GALLIA. early, but her mother, who was a clever and a charming woman, had herself accompanied her to Germany, and then to France, for educational purposes ; and it was only during the last year, when Mrs. Essex had become too much of an invalid to leave her home, that she had consented unwillingly to her daughter's studying art in Paris. So far as it could be, everything that could be done was done, and every precaution taken; with the result that Margaret's sojourn gained greatly in dulness and propriety, while it certainly lost in gaiety and charm. The five hundred a year which was Mrs. Essex's income amply sufficed to keep going the little house in Hammersmith Terrace, and Essex, though he was not particularly generous, provided his sister's dress allowance from his own not over well-filled coffers. They were the widow's only children, and though the son had her own dark kind of beauty (so much so, that his real name, Hubert,' had fallen into disuse, and most people spoke of him as Dark, a sobriquet he had acquired at Win- chester), it was on Margaret's face, the fair refine- ment of her dead husband's, that Mrs. Essex loved best to look. " Do you know, I haven't seen your brother for years, and once I was very much indebted to him down at Oxford," Gurdon said, gliding carefully away from the subject of art, which GALLIA. 105 was too nearly allied to Paris to be safe for dis- cussion. " "What did he do for you 1" Margaret asked. " Oh, he read with me ; gave me a short cut when I had been neglecting my reading badly, and was becoming scared at the thought of the exams." " He can't be much older than you ?" " No ; but he had had the benefit of a con- sistent classical education, and was years ahead of me in most things," Gurdon answered; and was amused to find a man of his experience speaking of a consistent classical education as a benefit. " He is fearfully clever," Margaret said, betray- ing a simple worship, which Gurdon thought as delightful as it is now-a-days proportionately rare. Though he did not know many women, Gurdon was dimly aware that they were no longer in the habit of thinking men " fearfully clever"; he knew that some totally different spirit was abroad. How refreshing to come across a beautiful woman, a woman of spirit too, like Margaret Essex, who was still able to look up in worship of the man she thought fearfully clever ! " Would he be likely to be at home if I were to call some day a little after five ?" Gurdon said, rather disingenuously, and meaning "Would you be at home V 106 GALLIA. " He goes down to Oxford to-morrow. What a pity!" The eyes rested on him again, with their frank, glistening look. "He is at home to-day, going over his books." "If it would be convenient, I might drive down to-day. It is Hammersmith, is it not?" Gurdon did not ask himself why he was so anxious to get a footing in that Hammersmith house — time enough for reflection afterwards; but he knew very well what he wanted, and he saw proudly that he had secured it. Luncheon was over at last, and guests left early, as everybody knew that Lady Hames- thwaite had come for a last interview with her sister; and a few people who had heard her cough, and who felt that easy lack of responsi- bility in disposing of their friends which is so common, thought that it might indeed prove to be her last interview. "You will let me see you to the train?" Gurdon was saying to Margaret in the hall, as she stood fastening her little sable close round her neck. " Thank you, but I am going to walk up Gloucester Road and take an omnibus ; the train is nearer and quicker, of course, but we don't often have so bright an afternoon as this." " Then perhaps I may see you to the omnibus ?" Mark said, with a smile. " If it is your way." GALLIA. 107 " Did you not tell me I could find your brother this afternoon ?" " Oh, you are coming out too ?" She did not seem to have grasped this, and she turned to him with a little sparkle of surprise. " However innocent a woman may be, it is safer not to presume too much upon that inno- cence," thought the cautious Mark very wisely. A sun of shrewdness and womanly intuition is apt to break through those poetic blue mists of unsuspicion. "It would be a pleasure to me to see him again, and this seems to be my only chance," he replied coolly. A few moments later they had scaled the stairway of a red " road-car," and settled them- selves easily and simply in the close quarters of a garden-seat. " For real exhilaration, give me the top of an omnibus on a fine afternoon in London," Mar- garet exclaimed, with evident enjoyment, as they rolled quickly over the good wood pave- ment. " The men drive so splendidly, and it seems to me an omnibus always gets through things before every other conveyance. I love to feel the on and off of the break, and to watch the way the pole seems to feels its way through the traffic. The lightness and balance of these poles must be wonderful, you know — a touch sways them. Then the horses are so nice and 108 GALLIA. fat and strong, and you never see a lame horse in an omnibus, whereas nearly all the horses in cabs have something the matter with them." " I confess these things never struck me before, but you are perfectly rigbt," Mark said, feeling a genuine interest for the moment in noticing the points she referred to. " Oh, without its omnibuses London would lose half its charm for me." "Do you know, your power of observation must be very keen indeed ? Of course, that is what makes you an artist." " Oh no ! Tou are quite wrong — really you are ! The observation that detects shades of lameness in cab-horses is not a bit the sort an artist ought to have. And that happens to be one of my great difficulties. I am far too care- ful of detail. ' Cherchez le mouvement,' one of the professors says to me twice a week. ' Mais, mademoiselle, ilfaut cligner les yeux.' " " "Well, but surely"— " Yes ; but he doesn't mean the peculiarities of movement in a cab-horse," said Margaret, laugh- ing; " it is the effect I have to search for, and the central principle movement. I can't explain it at all, — I never could explain anything, — but you know that an artist has to look at effects through half-closed eyes ; if you are to be broad, if you are to get your planes of colour right and your values, you mustn't go darting weasel-gimlet GALLIA. 109 glances here and there for little minor de- tails." " You have cleared up the whole matter for me in a phrase. ' Weasel-gimlet glances' is ex- cellent. I never thought of this before, but I see there are many distinctions even among good powers of observation. My own are fairly good, and they are neither like yours nor those you want to acquire. My eyes seem to have little independence. I can walk a mile and see noth- ing, but if I bring my head into play, my eyes will register with a photographic accuracy, and I have complete pictures of places, people, and things fixed firmly on the retina of my brain — which I would swear by in a court of law after- wards, if need were." Margaret looked at him critically, listened carefully, and then said, with a very ingenuous touch of admiration, " That is a splendid power to have at command. I expect you have trained it greatly." " I have tried to strengthen it, I think. But," smilingly, " I have never tried to talk of it be- fore, and you must look kindly on my egotism for once." She had no need to reply except with a smile, for they were at Hammersmith, and obliged to clamber carefully down. The way Margaret swung the tails of her skirt round her, and posi- tively ran down the stair, while every other 10 110 GALLIA. woman blundered into more or less of an expo- sure of boot-top, thick, shapeless leg, and repel- lent underskirt, was another point which Gurdon registered politely in Margaret's favour. " "We have a little walk now," she said, and they set off down the bustling, horrible King Street, having continually to avoid the foot-path on account of the crowds at the doors of multi- farious gin-shops. It was not a moment for conversation, and Gurdon was busy wondering how he was to account to Essex himself for the enthusiasm which had brought him down. If he remem- bered, Essex was a silent, severe, satirical person, who would be quite keen enough to see through the object of Mark's visit, and who would further be quite cool enough not to help him to carry off the situation with eclat. The two men had never actually been friends, though they had known each other very well and met very fre- quently ; and though, as Gurdon had said, Essex had helped him materially when reading for his degree, yet they had never passed that inde- finable barrier between knowing one another well and being friends. But small difficulties only whetted Mark's courage, and he followed Margaret into the drawing-room with a good air of self-possession. CHAPTEE XL As a matter of fact, that call in Hammersmith turned out exceedingly well. It is only necessary to go to a place in sufficient trepidation, and a visit always will turn out well, provided the trepi- dation does not bereave the caller of his senses. Gurdon's trepidation did not so bereave him ; he was only conscious of having padded out a college intimacy slightly, and this for his own excellent purposes. Once inside the house, he had a quarter of an hour in which to get on terms with Mrs. Essex; this was the kind of social enter- prise in which success was certain to him. Mrs. Essex brought out her best conversation, and imagined that she had been entertaining a young man of public importance, as well as a young man whom Margaret must like, or else, why had she brought him down — upon an omnibus, too, that very hob-nobby and familiar vehicle ? Her son, coming into the room and finding them talk- ing and laughing with such freedom and good understanding, himself being a remarkably self- centred person, accepted Gurdon as his sister's and his mother's friend, remembered him as a in 112 GALLIA. very decent fellow when he was " up," and chimed in agreeably in the mutual harmony of the moment. Mark left, feeling that Essex was improved since college days ; that he was more a man of the world and more human. " I remember, I believe, that I liked Essex very well," he said to himself as he went westwards in a train ; and certainly Gurdon was not the man to notice the amazing narrowness of mind which was one of Essex's worst faults, and which the life open to a Fellow of an exclusive college does nothing to minimise. During the long, wintry spring the two men met a number of times. When Essex was in town, he dined at the club with Mark ; and once, when a big statesman went down to speak at Oxford, Gurdon was Essex's guest for a couple of days. But before they encountered one another again at the house in Hammersmith, Mark had estab- lished a habit of going to supper there on Sunday evenings ; and it was an odd week when he did not manage to see Margaret somewhere, at least once, in between times. The fact was, that he was desperately attracted towards her, and when in her presence did not recognise himself for the same man : his nature seemed changed; he expressed opinions with unimpeachable sincerity, which were in direct GALLIA. 113 opposition to the opinions he would have ex- pressed to the men he was in the habit of dining and talking with at the club. He couldn't fail to notice the extraordinary effect the girl had on him. Sometimes he knew he was in love with her ; he knew that he was going to ask her to marry him if he had any sort of chance to do so ; he knew that he would be ruthlessly cutting up his schemes for his own life and future, and he knew he would be acting like a fool. At least, he knew these things when he got back to his own milieu; he did not know them at Hammer- smith, and he did not know them in the train ; — the train formed a kind of hot, yeasty interlude, when he sat still and read his papers with diffi- culty, feeling all the time a restlessness and a desire to gaze into space with a smile upon his face which must have betrayed his errand to the stockbroker opposite. At his rooms, in the big leather arm-chair which had been his father's, and which had faithfully hatched out schemes of transcendent ambition in all his years of office life, Mark had terrible hours. He was a traitor to these schemes at heart. He was a traitor to that chair. One part of his brain looked on in a sort of cold horror, while the other part sketched out a future wbich should be more successful because of the lovely wife who would share it. "It all depends on whom a man marries," he 10* 114 GALLIA. would say didactically to himself, well knowing that it does not. A woman with a great deal of money would not have retarded him ; any other woman, no matter how clever and beautiful and distinguished, certainly would; Mark knew, as well as any man in Whitehall, that the day is past when women could play a part in the dip- lomatic world by reason of personal talent or beauty. Money, and money only, and a great deal of money at that, would have helped him. He was an exceptionally clear-eyed person; he had studied all the possibilities of advancement in parliamentary and diplomatic circles ; also he had looked round him. He could, with the help of a rich wife, buy a capital position as a junior politician. But Margaret was poor. Double and treble-milled was each one of these thoughts, yet, once at Hammersmith and in the room, they left him. He was at his ease and natural again ; natural with the nature Margaret had called up in him. Both mother and daughter thought him " de- lightful," and very clever and full of power and determination. They magnified his good qual- ities, as kind women will, and they never ob- served his bad qualities at all; for which they are not to be blamed, as these were very negative in Mark, and might almost be said to be non- existent at that time. However innocent Mar- garet may have been of the construction which GALLIA. 115 might be put upon Mr. Gurdon's visits, and the meaning he managed to throw into them, — and it is permissible to imagine Margaret just as innocent as a " nice" girl ought to be, — it was not to be supposed that their intention escaped Mrs. Essex. She saw perfectly well, with ma- tronly clearness, in fact, that " young Mr. Gur- don was interested in dear Margaret," had, in fact, fallen in love with her. " I suppose we shall have Mr. Gurdon as usual about seven o'clock," she said, smiling indul- gently, as she prepared to snatch a few moments' sleep in her arm-chair after tea. "I daresay," Margaret answered from the piano, and without interrupting the "Schlum- merlied" she was softly playing. " I like to see a determined lover," Mrs. Essex went on, still with the same complacence. The " Schlummerlied" came to an end. " A determined what f" " My dear child, of course you are aware that he may propose any day ?" Mrs. Essex roused herself a little at Margaret's tone, and a moment or two later she saw that her sleep that afternoon must be given up. " It is a little hard that every intimacy with a man may have to be terminated just at the comfortable point — because he thinks it neces- sary to propose," Margaret said, with a sense of injury, but an air of great self-possession. " Not 116 GALLIA. that I have seen any signs of his forgetting him- self in that way," she added, smiling. "You may be perfectly assured that he is going to propose to you. He has singled you out, ever since he came here, by the most marked attention. He has sent you books and songs ; he has brought you flowers ; he has come early — and — and — not gone away till very late ; and he neyer takes his eyes off you when he is in the room." Mrs. Essex enumerated these points in a help- less tone, and Margaret nodded, and ticked each one on her slim fingers. Very true — what can a man do more ? " In fact, he has shown all the polite signs of being in love ?" she said, laughing, and looking very pretty. Any girl will laugh and look pretty when she hears of the subjection of a presentable victim ; she is only haughty and insulted if the victim is not presentable. Her own feelings for the man do not come into the question at all at this stage. " Well," she went on, still smiling, and still looking pretty, " we will exhibit all the polite signs in the reverse direction. As I am not going to accept him, and shouldn't think of doing so, we must begin at once. For instance : I will have a headache, and be lying down up- stairs when he arrives. You will entertain him till supper-time. I will struggle down to supper, looking very pale." GALLIA. 117 " That of course will bring matters to a head immediately," Mrs. Essex broke in, and herself unable to prevent a smile at Margaret's nonsense. " Oh, but I won't be lackadaisical and floppy. My headache will be of the severe kind, and my manner will be as severe as the headache. You, in the meantime, will have prepared the way by talking about other men I have known and liked. I think, you know, one gets through these things quicker and more painlessly if one conducts them on the ' someone else' tack ; a man will go away if he is made to understand that there is another man, but he won't if he thinks you are fancy-free. "Well, he hardly could — it would be rude of him. He has to stay and teach you to care for him. I owe these ideas entirely to novels, but novelists make a study of such points. So you will tell him about other men." " But what other men ? I don't at this moment know of any other men. You see, Margaret, you have not been like most girls of the present day ; you have not had batches of ' men friends.' " Margaret nodded. " I've had a mother-friend," she said. " Now, let me think whom you have known ? But, in any case, it would not be honourable or true of us to mix up any man's name with yours — merely to put off Mr. Gurdon. I should not at all like it." 118 GALLIA. " Dear mamma, you take it too seriously; you haven't to say anything at all. After all, I'm quite as likely to marry any of the men I've known as Gurdon." "Mr. Gurdon, dear; don't get into the habit of speaking of men by their surnames — even to me. It is very fast, I think." " "Not exactly fast, now, mamma, surely, though it may have been once. I expect I have caught the habit among the girls in Paris. They do it, but not from fastness, merely from economy of time." "It occurs to me that the only young man you have known is Mr. Robert Leighton." The word "Paris" had obviously suggested him to her mother, and Margaret, who was standing over by a window that looked upon the river, felt suddenly frightened. " I wouldn't mention his name, mamma. In fact, I agree with you that perhaps it wouldn't be at all a good plan to do as I said." " The best thing for you to do is to tell him firmly and quietly that you don't, and never can, care for him — if that is the case." Mrs. Essex sighed — from mixed motives, for she had never been able to contemplate the idea of Margaret's marriage with equanimity, and it was also true that she had had pangs of sheer jealousy when she had seen Gurdon and the girl laughing and chatting in a certain youthful intimacy that she GALLIA. 119 of course could never have with her daughter; at the same time, as a woman, she had to be sorry for a lover. " I will not have a headache at all, on second thoughts," Margaret announced, presently. " Well, then, I think I will," Mrs. Essex said lightly, and rising from a chair. " The room is very warm, Margaret, and I have missed my sleep." Mrs. Essex had heard the wheels of a hansom, but she was already on the upper flight of stairs before the front door bell rang. And this was the first Sunday evening on which Mark Gurdon did not stay to supper. CHAPTER XII. A man feels his rejection either in proportion to his depth of feeling for the woman, or in proportion to his depth of feeling for himself; without severity it may be said, usually the latter. With Mark it was strongly the latter, and a little of the former mixed in. He had really admired Margaret very much ; he was greatly puzzled to understand why she had not admired him. He couldn't suppose it was because he was poor that she would not marry him, and he equally could not suppose it was because she couldn't love him ; he therefore declined upon the supposition that it was because he had not given her time enough to discover his good points. A girl — that is, a nice girl — is a very inexperienced creature, he told himself, and no doubt she had known so few men in her beautiful, carefully supervised life, that she was not able to see how superior he was to most other fellows from whom she might have ex- pected proposals. He was a gentleman, and looked like one (a great advantage, this); he was poor, certainly, but he had a future; his manners and character — well, he didn't know 120 GALLIA. 121 anybody with better manners or character — this frankly and without any egotism, in fact, speak- ing as an outsider. It is neither a man's nor a woman's fault that a proposal is usually such a fearful and ridiculous farrago. No woman with a sense of humour can listen to it without inward smiles — supposing that she is quite cool towards the man. If she is not quite cool towards him, she takes it in as well as the other woman who has no sense of humour. For falling in love blots out a sense of humour, of necessity, for the time being. Who looses his falcon to the flight, leaving his hood still on ? Yet is the proposing man more closely hooded than the gay gosshawk. Mark did remarkably well with his proposal, and made very fair use of his materials ; it is not his fault that details of it sound silly; all real proposals sound rather silly, and no novelist in the world but can make up a much sweeter and more attractive one out of his own head. He knew she was particular about some things, Mark said to her, when the moment came (he meant Leighton and his escapade by " some things"). Well, he shouldn't like to brag about it, but — and then he made the well-known speech without which no proposal is really complete. He wore that air of humility and seriousness, combined with a rigid sense of right and wrong. He wouldn't like to call himself a good man ; no p 11 122 GALLIA. man who sat beside Miss Essex could have the presumption to call himself good ; but he would say that most men would call him a very decent specimen. He had " lived" to a certain extent (he was very careful to put in this ambiguous qualification, and tradition justified him ; no man with any respect for himself ever leaves it out) — to a certain extent he had lived the life of an ordinary man of the world, but he had had his limitations, and there were lengths to which he had never gone. These were not things that she would understand, nor that he would like to speak of further, but, at any rate, he had lived a sort of life that enabled him to come into the presence of the woman he loved with his head up because he could show a clean record. Margaret was, as I have insisted more than once, exceedingly inexperienced, and she was inclined to think this very fine ; not knowing in the least what it meant, and further unaware that it formed part of the time-honoured shib- boleth of proposal, she was decidedly impressed by it. And if anything could have won her to accept Gurdon, it would have been more of this high-minded and yet humble expatiation on his spotlessness. Miss Essex looked prettier than ever, with her dark-grey, serious eyes holding two tears which never fell ; and Gurdon was then moved to take her hand, very gently and respectfully. It was GALLIA. 123 she who gave the pressure. " Thank you — thank you so much," she said, rather brokenly, " for what you have said. I feel very much — I mean I am quite sure that — that — but, ob, please, Mr. Gurdon, don't think me odious, but I really never thought of you in that light, and I" — with a good deal more of the same. Thus the moment of deepest emotion was reached over Gurdon's touching picture of the precise degree and shade of grey in which he had painted himself out of the devil's black paint-pot. Margaret felt it to have been a pathetic and impressive moment in the interview, and in her own mind afterwards she called him "poor fellow" once or twice : whether because he had not allowed himself a better time in this vicious old world, or because she could not hand him the reward of this praiseworthy self-denial, she never explained to herself, not having the ana- lytical temperament. As was natural, she saw less of Gurdon in the weeks that immediately followed, although it had been arranged that this was not to interfere with their " friendship." It was not likely to, as it in no way trenched upon that most mythical and shadowy of relations. Gurdon looked more serious, talked a little less at the club, and folded his lips ominously as he walked between the Colonial Office and his rooms. He turned 124 GALLIA. in one night and heard part of a concert at St. James's Hall, but came out because it seemed to him that he could not bear to hear a " Polonaise" of Chopin's, which Margaret had played in- differently well, faultlessly given by " some foreign fellow, with a beastly head of hair," as he mentally designated the eminent artist upon the platform. Coming out into Piccadilly, he ran against a man he knew slightly — that is, a man he had known slightly for a number of years. This individual, Lauriston by name, was a good-natured, weak-minded being, with a taste for what he called " sport," and night clubs, and gardenias that reeked intoxicatingly of opopo- nax as well as their own odious scent. Gurdon, being " a serious-minded chap," had little in common with Lauriston as a rule, but he was just then at a loose end, and allowed himself to be hailed and his arm taken, and finally borne off in a fit of overdone chumminess to see some- thing of which " ten stone," " six rounds," and a " purse," formed descriptive elements. As a matter of fact, Gurdon would just as soon have sat at the National Sporting Club, and clapped feebly, and listened to cheers, either raucous or affectedly treble, as he would have done any- thing else. In his own belief he was a badly cut-up man, but he hoped he was " taking it as a man ought;" without going into this point, he was certainly taking it as a man often does. He GALLIA. 125 sat in silence, with a half-smile of satire on his face, and watched Lauriston hang over the pea- cock-plush edge of the box, as he exchanged the time of day with fat gentlemen in exceedingly- tight check suits and a tendency to a display of Parisian diamonds upon their ties. It was late enough when Mark found himself passing along Piccadilly on his way to his rooms in Byder Street. Already the impression of his unusual evening was passing out of his mind ; in his younger days Mark had seen as much of that sort of evening as a steady fellow ever does, and he took it very calmly. Champagne in a big tumbler did not matter greatly to him. He was not unconsciously observant, as he had once told Margaret ; the scenes of Piccadilly passed him by, or he shook them off casually, and entered, although unwillingly, upon his private gloom again. Suddenly, when he had passed one woman, a shaft of recollection shot into his mind, and he looked round instinctively. The- recollection was accompanied by some revulsion of feeling, but he turned with an impulse and raised his hat. " Miss Lemuel ?" he said. It was as much a protest as a question, and for once the face that met his had no smile. " "Well, I never !" she exclaimed in surprise ; " to think of its being you !" 11* 126 GALLIA. " No," he replied ; " to think of its being you ! "Why are you out alone like this ? How are you in- England ? Where is your father ?" " Ah, well, that will be the whole story if I tell you all that, won't it ?" She smiled now, but it was half-heartedly. " We're in England because father has a job here. He came over to sit to Gilford for his ' Death of Greek Art' " " Well, but how are you out at this time of day ? But perhaps I am not minding my own business as I ought 1" his tone became reserved. " Perhaps you aren't. I'm looking for father, if you want to know. Father has been drinking a good bit lately, and I'm not sure how he'll get through with this affair of Gilford's, unless I keep a pretty tight hold on him. The landlady fired us out of our lodgings to-day, and I got all packed and taken to a friend's — well, she's the charwoman who cleans Gilford's studio ; and then father said he'd go and have a look round and come back sharp for me when he'd settled something. I waited till about one o'clock, and then I knew something had happened, so I've been going round the dens." She told all this very simply, and it was obviously only the inconvenience of her father's action, mixed with a fear that he would not be able to take up his "job," that disturbed her. As they walked on together, Gurdon reflected quickly. Though he had met her half a dozen GALLIA. 127 times in Paris only, and they had never talked much, he had an inexplicable liking for this girl. Used to roughing it she might be, but he could not allow her to walk alone down Piccadilly when he was there to prevent it. He looked down at her on to the top of her shabby little hat, as it proved. " Take my arm," he said curtly. " Your father was to look for rooms, you say ? What if he has found none — where have you to go V " Nowhere," was all her answer. " Well, we must devise something. Is it not possible he may have returned to the char- woman's while you have been out looking for him ?" " Yes, he might have done." He could tell that she thought this very un- likely. " Well, let us get into a cab and go there at once. Is not that the best thing to do ?" She admitted that it might be ; and even though he could have put her into a cab and sent her oft", he believed it his duty to see her safely even to that poor shelter. He hailed a cab, and they drove away together down to Kensington. On the way, she plucked up her spirits, and told him many things that had happened in Paris since the winter when he had been there. At the end of May, Leighton had gone to Spain for the summer. When he returned, Arsenie 128 GALLIA. had made other arrangements, since when Leigh- ton had ceased to live at his studio, and had removed to a hotel meuble. He had become so extravagant that he had been obliged to have another man share his studio. His bill at the restaurant where he fed grew so large that he had had to move on to another. He had an arrangement at the artists' colourman's to give him all his studio studies in return for material, and he had taken to working his Academies in oil colours instead of charcoal, painting in a tiger-skin and a drift of muslin afterwards, and calling them " Apres le Bain," " Belle Baign- euse," and kindred titles. All this chatter rippled pleasantly through Gur don's mind, and combining with the motion of a good cab, soothed him considerably. Cara Lemuel had a sharp and amusing tongue ; often he was moved to a tired laugh at what she said ; and when she took his hand and thanked him for being so good to her, it seemed only natural to put an arm round her thin shoulders with a comforting pressure. _ Altogether, he did not mind much how long this drive lasted. But at length, in some of the narrow slummy by-ways near Queen's Gate, the cab drew up, they got out, and Cara undertook to find the door. Gurdon stopped irresolutely for a second, then he told the man to wait, and followed her. CHAPTER XIIL Old Lemuel had not come in. That was the first thing that struck Gordon when he passed upstairs behind Cara. The key was below the mat just where she had placed it, the paraffin lamp was smelling as it had done ever since she turned it down hours before. They sat down opposite one another in the stuffy, evil-smelling little room. "What can have happened to father? Oh, there must have been some accident!" Then she cried. She was that simple sort of creature that cried unrestrainedly and exuberantly when she was sorry, even as she laughed when she was glad. She dropped her face into her hands with a howl. Her short brown curls parted from the back of her neck, and fell forward in a thick shock at each side. The pointed girlish shoulders 6hook in a convulsive way. The backs of her narrow arms, pressed to her sides, had something young and pitiable about them; she was a horribly lonely, forsaken little thing. Gur- don made a quick step towards her, and patted her reassuringly on the back. " Come, this won't do," he said, with the, i 129 130 GALLIA. exaggerated cheerfulness one uses to a child. "What is the good of making up your mind that the very worst has happened? Depend upon it, your father is with a friend somewhere. There, that's right : be a woman." He might have kissed her, perhaps, but the thought of Margaret, whom some weeks ago he had dreamed of kissing, prevented him for the moment. Instead, he essayed more practical comfort. He found a spirit-lamp among her belongings, and with a little encouragement she produced some cheap red wine, which he heated and made her drink. She sat beside this medi- tatively for a little, then she raised her crying face, which had a prettiness about it in spite of tears and reddened eyelids. This time, as he looked at her, no thought of Margaret occurred to him : his love for her had been compounded of idealised passion and fancy — they are very poor wear. "With her jacket off, and in some soft, limp sort of brown material, Cara looked pretty. Her dark skin, ripe colour, and easy eye had a single meaning. There are some women in the social state, as it is at present, fitted exclusively for " the oldest of all professions for women." They are to be met in all ranks of life. "What sort of wives do they make? "What sort of sweet- hearts ? What sort of mothers ? "Whosoever selects them for a position of any permanency GALLIA. 131 is mistaken. "Women of abnormal sensuality, of incurable lightness, are private scourges. In a ballroom, for example, they will exercise every one of the arts and lures that have only one in- tention, then they will step into their carriages and sweep away with a final glitter in their las- civious eyes, and the poor creature in the street, whom they would not touch, is their victim. The friends of women are not wise to declare that none are born scorpions. That is the dark side of the picture. Of the light side and its effect, Ghirdon is an example. Since his refusal by Margaret Essex, he had been fighting down a severe attack of passion ; this night on which he came across Cara had sensu- ally roused him. Under his cold, calm meas- uring nature were buried smothered fires, on whose embers no wind of circumstance had yet blown strongly. His sensuality, as in other words he had told Margaret, had been slight; he made the mistake of imagining that he had resisted such temptations, whereas they had, in reality, never come his way, and he had never felt or seen them. He had carried what he called " decency" to the chilliest business pitch, in a gentlemanly manner — that is, in the manner usual to a fastidious gentleman. The time came when, standing opposite Cara, he remembered only one thing; remembered with the greatest astonishment the means he had taken in the past 132 GALLIA. to work himself up to the pitch of carrying through certaiu experiences with some air of relish. His training, his carefully nurtured ideas upon these subjects, had led him, even when alone, in his own mind and memory to banish the recollection of moments of almost wholly forced abandonment. He conceived a great horror of that old self of his ; it passed over his mind as a wave : whether he had found anything better or not might be a question, he felt that his old feel- ing had been wrong. His brain worked with the spasmodic, whirring activity of the roulette wheel. The girl was in his arms without his having consciously taken her in them. Before passion quite swamped reason, he was question- ing her hurriedly, in a voice whose very tones were quite new to him. The answers she made, which were an encouragement to passion, would have wounded love ; but Gurdon was not in a condition to see distinctions, or to give feelings names. Things themselves are infinitely less confusing than the names they go by. One may recognise the thing itself, and one may even un- derstand and feel familiar with it, but, over and above this, one must know its exact name. This difficulty is increased because things are not equally well named. The appositeness of all names to the objects and feelings they describe is nothing like so obvious as the appositeness of the title pig for the animal pig ; for, as the old GALLIA. 133 lady remarked, anybody could see for himself It was a pig. The moment you leave the dry-land region of pigs and such-like easy instances of careful and adequate nomenclature, you set forth upon a turgid sea of difficulties. It is the things that swim dimly below the surface of the thick water that are so hard to recognise and to name. Numberless people, be it said, sail out and never suspect the existence of these things ; to them they are unthinkable. Others are con- scious of them, but avoid the effort of clear comprehension and classification; to these they are unnameable. And a larger body of people than either of these, or indeed both these put together, are content to name them wrongly and confuse one hopelessly with another; to these they are undistinguishable. Such things as these, that fin slowly through the gloom of deep green waters, are chiefly feelings. There are among them passion, cruel and kind; desire, physical and spiritual, the same in form, but differing utterly in clearness of colouring: the one swimming on his belly in the mud, the other undulating through the bright weed, where the light of day shines down. If love, the flying fish, drop among them for a space, straightway he is confused to his own hurt until he swoop upward into the air again. The psychologist with his water-telescope is apt to be as wrong 12 134 GALLIA. as anyone, and this has made many sensible and clever people decide that it is better to sit upon the shore beside the pig — who is so like a pig that you cannot mistake him ; or, if you sail over the water, to keep your eyes lifted to the clouds of tradition, superstition, and legend. It will be a good day when one shall arise and tell us whether it is happier to live than to know, and at what level we should keep our dim, imperfect human eyes, as we pass about in the world that we think was made for us and that we have improved for ourselves. If Gurdon's case could have been put before Margaret Essex and Gallia Hamesthwaite, — poor Gallia, away with her sick mother in Algiers, living a life of pulses and temperatures, and utterly divorced from her previous interests, — how differently they would have seen it ! Gallia, whose watchword used to be " Truth" — Margaret, whose watchword was " Goodness." And if it could have been put before Gurdon himself, whose watchword was " Decency," or before Leighton, whose was " Life, and don't be ashamed of it" ? Gurdon's justification for his action lay in the fact that he had been won from his even, decent life when he fell in love with Margaret Essex. The hopes that had then risen in him had altered the aspect of his mind. His emotional territory had been changed in character by the volcanic upheavals during those weeks of close GALLIA. 135 intercourse. He had sat in the little Hammer- smith drawing-room and watched Margaret's fine flower-like hands moving over the yellow keyboard of the old sweet Broadwood, and his cold nature had warmed and warmed as he looked. " Ah, the throats of thunder I Ah, the dulcet lips ! Ah, the gracious tyrannies Of her finger-tips !" Or he had seen her singing. Margaret singing was a picture for the gods. Then they had talked a long time about all sorts of abstract matters ; and the conversation had been of that curious kind which love directs, of which love is ever the under-note. Then, when he went into town again and sat at dinner by himself at the club, or read in his own rooms afterwards, the mist of Margaret's influence still hung in the air around him. It was not that she gave him any token of love, or let drop one word on which he could build, but she was gracious, smiling, and her reception of him was kind, and she would play and sing when he asked her, liking apparently to give him pleasure ; liking, at any rate, to make music for one who seemed to love it as any musical-souled being will. H he had been a man of high moral tone (instead of being what he was, a man of " decent" moral tone), he might have had a quarrel against 136 GALLIA. her for destroying the placid fabric of his daily life, and then turning him off, to weave the frag- ments of it in what pattern he could, accom- modating the red thread of passion, of which he was conscious for the first time. He had come through all the experiences of the single man who, loving one woman, alters and rearranges his future to admit her share in it ; he had tuned himself up to the new pitch of marriage ; he had fostered, nurtured, been glad of the new feelings that had come to him, and which in that particular connection were credit- able and decent, and then — he had been sent away; sent away single and unsatisfied, with havoc in his heart. But the feelings were still there. He was softened, warmed, plastic, and single. Whereupon, the girl Lemuel crossed his path, and attracted his quickened sympathies. Here was where he might give himself rein and be no wise to blame : he assured himself on this point before he took her, for, as he said to him- self, he was not a blackguard. He did not love her, although, oddly enough, he told himself that he did ; he did not, for if he had, he would have hated the French artist of whom she naively told him ; as it was, that was his permission. And not having a mind that traced its inspira- tions to their sources, Gurdon was unaware that Margaret Essex was a more or less direct cause of his protection of Cara. CHAPTER XIV. - It is difficult to understand why, as Gallia Hamesthwaite sat beside her dead mother, in the big bedroom of the white hotel upon the hillside, she should have thought of Dark Essex. At a moment so lonely that it seemed to her an iron gateway had closed across the avenue of life, and she should never go any farther down that avenue, this man, with whom, after all, she had never been closely intimate, who had certainly never been kind to her, seemed nearer to her than any other human being. If there were anyone in the world whose hand-clasp she would have been passionately glad of, that per- son was Essex. He had not been very often in her mind during the three months' sojourn in Algiers; she had, during that time, thought almost cease- lessly of her mother. Lady Hamesthwaite had not benefited by the change; she had seemed wonderfully feeble, with an unexplained, gentle, sweet-natured feebleness, which grew only more evident day by day. In the mornings, Gallia had walked beside her invalid chair ; in the after- noons she had taken her place in the comfortable European victoria which had been sent over 12* 187 138 GALLIA. from France for their use. In between whiles she seemed to have read aloud an infinitude of novels and books of travel, looking up frequently to see if her mother's cheeks were flushing with fever, or if she appeared ready for a little sleep. At first Gallia had provided herself with books that interested her more, and when the poor lady laid her head back on the cushions and closed her eyelids, Gallia had been wont to dip into these more congenial volumes. But after a time she could not give them her attention, and she put them aside and sat quietly in her place, letting her eyes wander to and fro between her mother's face and the view from the window of the white town down the hill. "When Lady Hamesthwaite's illness became more marked, when she had to send for her father, her thoughts and her daily life became confused : she lived in a dream. She could not have remembered, at the end of the day, whether some scene by her mother's bedside had hap- pened in reality, or whether her brain had pictured it for her in a terrified foresight into what was coming upon them. " And most of the time while she was well, I lived away from her, and thought it a great thing to follow out my own life and my own ideas. Why couldn't I have postponed that? I shall have such a long time for my own life and my own ideas, and I have had so short a time GALLIA. 139 with mother! But I don't think I am ever going to care for the things I used to care for ! Perhaps it is really right, after all, to sacrifice oneself to other people and live for them — but to me that has always seemed so immoral.'' Poor Gallia sighed away the wreckage of her creeds and devoted herself, as whole-souledly as though she had never had any, to the duty and the privilege of nursing her mother, to whom she felt herself almost a stranger. And Lady Hamesthwaite died because she had to ; died in a fit of beautiful, painless un- consciousness, with her daughter and nurse be- side her, her husband in England, and no good- byes or last words of any kind. On the next day, when the funeral was to take place, Gallia spent the long hours of the morning in the darkened room beside the coffin ; spent it with her thoughts. She was not crying — had not cried at all. Tears, at moments of 'emotion, seemed to be more remote even than laughter from Gallia's nature. The habit of her mind reasserted itself, and she stared before her, fol- lowing through winding ways the ideas that arose like phantoms and fled in front of her. " What happiness or pleasure have I ever had from mother?" she asked herself honestly. " What has she meant in my life — sweet woman that she was ? Almost nothing ! I have hardly known her, really ; there has been no communion 140 GALLIA. between our minds, and none in our lives. Now she is dead, and — unless remorse for what was quite right and should not have been helped changes me — the loss is hers. How is my life any different ? If I am still honest, if I do not start to build up in my mind the notion that mother was everything to me, and that now she is gone, all is gone — if I don't teach myself that pious lie, my life will be just the same. Can I have ever loved her at all ? If I had ever loved her, I must have shown it in some fashion — and I don't remember that I ever did. It would be far more comfortable and far more respectable to give way to paroxysms of grief now, to fling myself about, to shriek to her sweet body lying here, and say, ' Mother, I always loved you, and I am finding it out too late !' " The girl paused ; Bhe had a sudden impulse to do this, she had a sudden wonder if perhaps this was, after all, what she meant. But Gallia had been too long accustomed to tell herself what she felt, having decided that after an interview with what it was reasonable for her to feel, and she lifted her sad look from the coifin and went on with her thoughts again. " All the time mother loved me ; Aunt Celia knew, and her letters might have told me, only, somehow, I knew it. Why is all the sweetness and passion and exquisiteness confined to the side of one party to the contract ; why is it so GALLIA. 141 certainly sweet to be a mother, — apparently no matter of what sort of child, — and why has the child on its side no instinctive sense of the ex- quisiteness of parentage?" She mused a long time upon this theme, and then another thought rose before her, and she followed it, as before, through the by-ways of her strange mind. " The charm of motherhood must be innate : it has nothing to do with the child, or how it turns out, or what it proves to be. It is started once for all at the child's birth-time, and every woman has the sense of motherhood according to her emotional capacity. A mother has those feel- ings, which are more than mere love, because she has done something for the child, because she has borne it. She has performed a sort of self-sacrifice, which I have always thought the most subtle kind of selfishness in the world. Motherhood is selfish after all. So it comes in with my belief that the highest sort of selfishness is the only true and good religion — the only one that really makes for goodness. A woman gets a good deal out of motherhood ; more than she does out of marriage : motherhood is, on the whole, better suited to her than marriage, I believe." She got off her chair and looked into the coffin, which was filled with flowers, Bave where her mother's exquisite hands were crossed on her breast, and where her face, immeasurably 142 GALLIA. more beautiful than it had been in life, with the colouring still perfect in its transparent delicacy, looked up at her with shut eyes. " Were you very happy with father, I wonder ? or did you really love my coming more than all the rest ?" she asked gently and wistfully of the quiet face. "I wish you could have told me before you went which is best — love or mother- hood? At this minute, mother, you are the most beautiful woman in the world ; your spirit may be gone from your body, but it has left its loveliest reflection on your face. If only you could have told me that one woman's secret !" It was characteristic of Gallia that, in spite of her amazing belief regarding selfishness and its continuous practice as the highest form of virtue, the questions she framed just then were entirely abstract ones. She was not thinking of love for herself, she was not remembering how she had said good-bye to it in that upstairs room in Grosvenor Place. She was asking because she would have liked to know. Perhaps she thought her mother's spirit might have lent her some beam of the illumination it must by that time have found in the place whither it was gone. She was called away to receive her father, who had been telegraphed for several days before, and travelling with greatest possible speed, had arrived too late. He looked a very broken man indeed, as he GALLIA. 143 advanced into the sitting-room and met his daughter. One look at Gallia's face told him his wife was dead, and he could for the moment only take her two hands, and with his head turned away to hide his grief, press them with the terrible shuddering pressure of a man in the first throes of grief. She took him silently to the room, and, closing the door, let him find his way through the dim light to his wife's coffin. In two hours he came out, but she did not see him ; he had gone to his own room, and was to be left undisturbed till the funeral started, so his man brought word. So Gallia went back to be companion to the dead woman till the narrow door should be shut that was to close her from this world — and it was then that the yearning arose in her for the hand-clasp of someone she loved — and she thought of Dark Essex. She had no grudge against him that he did not love her, and, on the whole, she had for- given him the method in which he had ex- plained this to her. It made no difference to her love for him, which was deep, had not grown from liking, and was unaffected by manifesta- tions of dislike ; which was also entirely without vanity or egotism, and had no support from his admiration or love of her ; which was, therefore, if one may judge by its immunity from these 144 GALLIA. earthly characteristics, the test kind of love there is. If, by some impossible occurrence, he could be with her for five minutes ! if, without speaking, she could have him clasp her hand firmly for one moment ! " I believe I should even be able to bear it if he were a little sorry for me. I wonder if it would touch him to hear that someone — anyone whom he knew — had lost her mother? I wonder if he would give the news one second's pity?" She heard them in the adjoining room walking about, waiting for her to come out. " Yes ; I think he would be different now, and also — I know he wouldn't. Good-bye — for just now, mother : it has not all been for nothing. If you loved me all my life, some time, no doubt, we shall meet, and I will love you. I would have loved you if you had been my child, and, perhaps, when I am a mother myself, my child may be like you, and I shall love it, and make the score even in that way." She took one of the white roses that lay near her mother's hands and kissed it, and began to put it inside her dress; then she stopped and looked at the slim bud again. "Now, why do I do that?" she thought; "it will die, and go brown, and all crumble, and I shall have it in a piece of paper somewhere, and GALLIA. 145 forget where I've put it, and it will be forgotten, and get lost, or be dropped. No; one is not meant to remember — as we know by the sad case of all souvenirs. Mother, I'll give you back your rose. How much I remember you, I shall see in time," — she smiled anxiously, — " but I will not give my humanity a chance to insult your memory." And these odd words were the last Gallia ever said to her mother. 13 CHAPTER XV. Mrs. Leighton was very sorry for her niece. " It is the greatest possible misfortune for Gallia," said the wise old lady. " In time she would have come to know her mother, and, of course, to love her ; and now — ah, it is a terrible misfortune." For Mrs. Leighton did not mistake for love the care and kindness Gallia had shown to her mother ; she herself had a fairly clear perception of the bent of Gallia's mind, and so far she be- lieved that the girl lived entirely within herself, and that she had no friends. If it be not good for man to live alone, it is even worse for woman, the old lady believed. Gallia must now be three or four-and-twenty, and she had no one to love. Eor Lord Hames- thwaite, although a good and amiable and even a distinguished gentleman, was not the kind of man anybody would have made the mistake of loving. Besides, since his wife's death he had immersed himself more deeply still in politics. During the Easter recess he addressed meetings in the provinces, and worked even harder than while Parliament was sitting. Gallia lived with him in Grosvenor Place, but she was able to 146 GALLIA. 147 pursue an almost entirely separate existence in the big house, for there were no entertainments and few visitors during the first months of mourning. She had not returned immediately to England after the loss of her mother; she had spent two months very quietly in a small mountain town in the Alpes Maritimes. Here, accompanied only by her mother's maid, a con- ventional-minded French servant who suffered untold tortures of tristesse and ennui, she had lived and dreamed the days away ; reading very little, and quite unconsciously hastening the departure of certain qualities of her youth and the charm that she had never recognised in her- self and never used — unless dimly among her fellow-students at Oxford in the old days. She liked to watch the mule traffic up the steep rocky path, she liked to look at the people pursuing their everyday avocations. She took no photographs, collected no flowers, made no sketches, put no impressions on paper. She merely walked and stood about, a curious smile of observance and silent kindliness upon her face. She made no charities, intruded in no kitchens, was known only by sight, and received none of the sentimental demonstrations of affec- tion such as are histrionically proper to a situa- tion of the kind. Her maid, with thimble in pocket and scissors at her side, turned over sadly the four simple 148 GALLIA. dresses that formed Gallia's entire wardrobe at this time. They were very strange dresses in- deed. The dressmaker in Nice, a very im- portant artiste, had had the fashioning of them, and never remembered having like restrictions imposed upon her. As they expressed in a measure Gallia's mind at this time, they have a certain interest. All were black, all were made in the same manner, absolutely plain in skirt, with bodice and band, high to the neck and long to the wrists, no fleck of white or flake of cambric anywhere at all. They tied at the throat with a black satin bow, and each was lined in the thickest satin of dove grey — though of this their wearer was possibly never aware : a dressmaker must have some excuse for the bill. In the cool mornings the maid laid out the cloth gown; on warm mornings the soft black linen. Also, according to the temperature of the evening, Gallia passed the last three hours of her day in velvet or in silk. She was far too clever a girl not to have taken great pains with her dress in her happier days, and she had a beautiful figure of the heaven-born kind; now, however, she watched with a sense of dreary amusement the careful routine of her bedroom so punctually performed. "Mademoiselle met?" occurred as regularly twice a day as though a galaxy of gowns was to be chosen from ; and " Celle de sole" Gallia GALLIA. 149 would answer, or " Celui en velours," as the case of robe or costume came up for decision. It was in one of these same simple vestures that she made her appearance in her aunt's drawing-room, about a week after she came home. Mrs. Leighton was herself in mourning, but it was a mourning most tastefully tempered to a garish world. She felt herself shudder when Gallia came in and sat among the pink and pale blue sofas, some of which were believed to have belonged to the very Louis themselves. The old lady was seated in what she called her " Salon Trianon," and there was someone else in the room whom Gallia did not immediately observe; someone who wore the coolest of dresses of a June green shade, a muslin fichu, and a muslin hat with hop- wreaths on it; someone who sat near a green curtain, and was, that day, the very prettiest thing in Ken- sington. "I think you know Margaret Essex?" said the hostess, as Gallia's severe folds settled them- selves in the most frivolous of seats, and seemed to hold aloof from a carpet strewn with baskets tied with ribbons, from which pink roses poured luxuriantly. The girls said something and shook hands. Each was interested in the other. Of course Margaret remarked that her brother knew Gallia well in Oxford. 13* 150 GALLIA. "I think I feel a little alarmed about Miss Hamesthwaite's brain capacity in consequence of what he has said," she added smilingly, and she felt even more alarmed at the look Gallia bent on her, although it was only a look of inquiry. But very soon Miss Essex went away, feeling certain that the aunt and niece had not met for some time, and guessing that Mrs. Leighton must have much to hear from Gallia. Nothing surprised her more than Miss Hames- thwaite's simple request that she would come and see her in Grosvenor Place. " I shall be so very pleased to," Margaret had said cordially; and, "You will find that the very sweetest piece of china in London," Mrs. Leighton had remarked when the door closed on her pretty visitor. " I thought it would be interesting to inspect a real girl," Gallia said tranquilly; " they are so very rare." And indeed a tropical butterfly couldn't have seemed a less familiar thing to her than did Margaret. " And now, darling, tell me all about dearest Julia." Mrs. Leighton had risen, and as she spoke she pressed her niece's firm shoulders tremulously, and sat down close to her and took her hand. "Ah, my love, my love!" she sighed. Gallia had known this interview was before GALLIA. 151 her, and had been bracing herself for it for a long time. Only the knowledge that Aunt Celia had loved her mother, and particularly the knowledge that her mother had loved Aunt Celia, had enabled her to bear it as she did ; but she marvelled at the awful sort of hardness in her voice and in her heart as she detailed the history of those weeks. Sbe thought afterwards that it was then that she had noticed the change in her that was afterwards so clearly marked; a change that altered her whole manner and character, no less than it altered her face and her dress. Mrs. Leighton also noticed this change, and was more assured than ever of the misfortune Lady Hamesthwaite's death had been to the lonely girl. It was not that Gallia's face was older, but it had altered. Her idle, out-of-door mountain life had made her more beautifully healthy than usual, and her eye, instead of seeming clouded by the impossible problems she had a taste for considering, had the far outward look of a person who had thought through something, who had found foothold beyond. I think it was Herbert Spencer who considered that a thinker should regard each solution reached, not as solid ground, but as a raft that would bear him for a time. Gallia, having swum strongly in fell currents, had climbed to a new raft. 152 GALLIA. An hour later, when most of the sorrowful particulars had been given, and silences were becoming frequent in the room, the butler made his appearance, and announced that Mr. Gurdon was below, and had inquired if Mrs. Leighton would receive him. " Of course, dear, I have been seeing nobody" said the old lady pathetically to her niece. " Yes, Linton, say to Mr. Gurdon that I shall be glad if he will wait a little in the library." " I am just going, Aunt Celia ; I think I will say good-bye at once. You will come and see me soon, will you not ?" Noticing this leave-taking, Linton waited by the door to show out Miss Hamesthwaite ; and thus it was that Gurdon, sufficiently familiar in the house to put aside some of the formalities, and standing therefore half in and half outside the library door, examining an amazing Moorish portiere that had been a present from Lady Hamesthwaite to her stepsister, saw a lady come downstairs of whose face and figure he caught just one astonishing glimpse. Gallia never no- ticed him at all — she was looking straight in front of her, and waiting while the butler looked for her carriage. " What a magnificent girl !" said Gurdon to himself, as he followed a footman to the drawing- room. CHAPTER XVI. One side of Edwards Square is formed by the backs and belongings of bouses fronting the Kensington High Street, the other two sides by very nice small houses looking into Edwards Square garden, the fourth side by a row of in- teresting buildings which were originally stables, and in some cases are so still, but of which many have been appropriated to other and more amusing purposes. They are buildings which differ fundamentally from the average of all Lon- don buildings in that they have a character; this character is of the most romantic and picturesque kind — it is to have no character. You look at them as you pass by, — or at least you would look at them if you did pass by, — and feel that anything might happen in them — that they might be anything; you know that Gaboriau would have made thousands of francs out of any one of them ; you wonder how they have escaped F. W. Eobinson. As a matter of strict fact, you never do pass by Edwards Square — nobody ever does. There is no reason to enter its quiet and very agreeable precincts unless you live there — unless your destination be your own 153 154 GALLIA. front door, on one side of the square or the other. The few people, other than the residents, who have ever come there have done so because they have been lost, deservedly, in a vain attempt to find that non-existent thoroughfare between South Kensington and Kensington High Street. It was when once so lost that Gurdon came there. He entered the square from the South Kensington side, and looked about him in his quick, clear-headed way. On the wide side of him stretched forward the row of quiet houses, on the other, in a horizontal direction, the row of buildings which were once stables. He worked upon the paving-stone with the ferule of his umbrella in a moment of thought. Then he turned upon his left, walked down past the buildings, stopped for a moment to copy the address on a notice-board above one of them, turned back upon his tracks, and was in the High Street in two minutes. The building that bore that notice of " To let" lay about the middle of the row. It had a coach-house door painted green ; a harness-room door in the same colour, and above this second door a window, which had obviously replaced the flap door to a hayloft. There was also a good skylight, which showed signs of having been improved. In a word, a stable made into a studio. GALLIA. 155 On an evening when the blackened trees and shrubs were heartening up in a pale green man- ner inside the garden railings; when sparrows were chirping in the trees in a way to suggest only the sharpening of dozens of slate-pencils, combined with the hearthstoning of dozens of steps, there mixed with these indications of a metropolitan spring evening the cricket-note of a guitar, that seemed to be played in a purposely subdued manner by a very skilful hand. In chorus with the guitar, two siskins in a cage beside the coach-house door woke up and began in an irresponsible way a sort of tune to which they were unaccustomed. Whether the guitar, or a shaft of late sunlight that invaded the cage, had aroused them, one could not know; but soon the guitar ceased, the door opened, and a girl came out and reached up for the cage, and bore the siskins, in a futile flutter, to the room within. Inside, the harness room wore the air of a hall or anteroom, and a curtain crossed the approach to the coach-house or studio, which was a long, narrow apartment, matchboarded and painted green, and could not have made a single brougham feel more at home than the young woman and the tea-kettle and the sofa looked. The wooden platform on castors, which had supported a model in a chair many times, was 156 GALLIA. covered with a mattress and some rugs and cushions, and made an odd sort of lounge, which travelled slightly when one sank upon it. Hereon the girl flung herself, and picked up the guitar angrily, like a person who, although tired of its companionship, had nothing else to talk with. The guitar spoke, in response to her sweeps and clutches upon its strings, and her ill-trained but effective little voice scraped out the phrases of a gipsy song. In between the verses, which were innumerable, the guitar stormed, sobbed, or twittered, as demanded by its wilful friend, with a sympathy which, though mechanical, seemed spontaneous and personal to itself. Cara Lemuel's playing was as unlike that of the myriad young women who play the guitar " a little" as any playing could well be. Her mother had been a Spanish gipsy before she became a model, and long before the days of which she had any memory, the girl had carried the shabbiest of tambourines among the cafe tables in shabby parts of Seville. The two siskins, now hung on a nail upon the inside of the big coach-house door (which was no longer made to open) shrugged their wings as they listened, and put away their bills at this evening hour safely for the night amid a plumage of which they made the very most. Tiring at last of her playing, the guitar was laid GALLIA. 157 aside, and Cara slept as easily and simply as she had often slept before on the sofas of other studios in Paris. "When Gurdon came in some hours later, she was just awaking, and her awaking was as easy and smiling as her sleep. Irritation marks the waking of most western- bred beings; smiles dawned slowly upon the features of the southern Cara. "Don't move, little woman, you look so pretty," Gurdon said, as he threw his bag into a corner. "I've come for a couple of hours only, and have to dress and be at the other end of London by half-past eleven. Any coffee ?" She pointed lazily to a covered pot upon the stove, and he found himself a cup upon a shelf and sat down beside her. She did not talk much, but she smiled a great deal, and was caressing in a very attractive manner, and her black-brown hair, which was of a locky char- racter, heavy, full of form, and making effective masses no matter how arranged, fell against his cheek as she kissed him, and had a spicy scent about it which was delicious and a little intoxi- cating. "I have a new song for you," she said; " at least I have remembered it bit by bit, and I ex- pect my mother used to sing it. What a pity you don't know Spanish !" "You shall teach me Spanish. I learn lan- guages pretty easily, and it will be a good thing 14 158 GALLIA. for me to know a little Spanish." Gordon's mind, characteristically, saw the proposition at once in the light of its possible advantage to himself. " Well, now, I'll tell you. This is the song of a gipsy girl who loves a man not of her own people, and she is saying all the time, in each verse, how he is so white and so fair and that sort of thing, and the chorus always is — oh, how would it be in English ? It won't sound a bit the same, but she always sings — ' So in the chestnut avenue, All the day I wander, wander ; This side of the hill path The brown chestnuts grow ; And white magnolia blossoms shine In the dark gardens down below.' Oh, I've made a rhyme, haven't I ? "Well, now, I'll sing it to you. First, it's about the lover, all very quiet like this." She bent over the guitar and picked a mourn- ful prelude from the strings; then her voice, dramatic in spite of, or perhaps because of, its want of training, rose in the recitative of the verse part. Gurdon listened; he was passion- ately fond of music, or rather of singing, and he looked as much as he listened. Cara's small curved brown fingers, thin and taper, with the articulations appearing whitish through the skin, skipped nimble above the strings, and she bent GALLIA. 159 lower over the neck of the instrument, her hair falling in free locks from her head ; but for the chorus head and hair were jerked backwards, the guitar was clutched passionately against her body, and the sadness of the weird gipsy plaint rang out in a very agony of descriptive music. " Sing that bit that begins ' Yo soy la castafia marron' again," cried Grurdon; " that's the bit I like!" " Ah, that's ' I, the brown chestnut,' " Cara said, smiling with immense fascination in his face. Then she shot from her low seat and stood a dozen feet away, in the attitude so pecu- liar to Spanish women, the shoulders and head thrown far back, one foot advanced, her guitar seeming to strain upon the troubadour ribbon that passed round her right shoulder. Thus she sang the chorus with a stormy melancholy; at the end, sweeping the guitar behind her back, where her left hand held it head downwards, she stepped the opening movements of one of those Spanish dances, so haughty, so restrained, so solemn, that they seem to double the burning of the fire beneath. She was below the medium height, but with the national port of head and shoulders, she seemed a queen in stature, and the effect was electric when a few swift paces brought her with a laugh to Grurdon's feet. Neither of these two loved the other, but passion was a religion 160 GALLIA. with the half-Spanish creature, and religion will soon become a habit. To toy dramatically and convincingly with the simulacra of strong feeling is just as successful, is perhaps more successful a means of arousing passion in another, and Gurdon found an unnatural abandon made easy to him by the wiles and magic of the girl's walk, or song, or strange dance. He took the guitar from her neck and caught her in his arms and feasted upon her face. CHAPTEE XVII. The friendship which grew up between Mar- garet Essex and Gallia was wholly of Miss Hamesthwaite's making ; from the first and to the last she frightened the picturesque Margaret considerably. Margaret would have confessed to an interest in her conversation, would have admitted volubly a deep admiration of her man- ner, mind, and appearance, but would have been conscious all the time of the courage of a tor- toise-shell guinea-pig when she found herself in her friend's society. The turn in the Park which they were now taking, Margaret having lunched — timidly and tUe-a-tete — in Q-rosvenor Place, was entirely Gallia's idea, and had been under- taken with the excuse of seeing Miss Essex on her homeward way ; but the unlooked-for appa- rition of Gertrude Janion was an accident, and the sort of accident that Margaret deplored. As the three walked along together, they pre- sented the oddest contrast : Gallia, in the middle, was as severe as black of the plainest cut could make her; Margaret, on her left, was draped rather than clothed in Madonna blue, softened with lace the colour of old stucco, and wore a hat with wide black eaves arching over her palely l 14* 161 162 GALLIA. brilliant hair, the whole deftly combined to create the air of inevitability that a really becoming gown will ever present. Beside these two Miss Janion felt happy that she knew how to dress, and was at that moment, as at every moment of her public appearance, dressed to perfection. To be fashionably clad is given to many women, and often a perfectly original personality is concealed by clothes which are original only within the strictest limits ; it is unusual to issue from the hands of Felix or of "Worth in a garment which, besides taking rank as their latest and most wonderful creation, has also the added merit of describing exactly its wearer's mental plane. The Janion girl was in herself exactly what her clothes looked ; as it happened, neither Worth nor Felix had the credit of her, though she would have disgraced neither. It was her proud boast that she dressed on £250 a year, " for every- thing, my dear girl," and she could certainly, as regards " smartness," have cut out women with three times that sum at disposal. She was a small, very neatly built person; nothing was exaggerated about her figure. Nature had been friendly towards her, and even seemed to know her aspirations from the begin- ning, and to sympathise with them ; had dowered her with a waist that needed wonderfully little compression, and bore that little remarkably GALLIA. 163 well ; had given her a beautifully modelled throat, bust, and arms : the throat and arms she left alone and was glad of; the bust she enhanced artificially, in obedience to the prevailing notion that a young woman shall not await nature's own development. With regard to features, she had nothing to complain of; she was not really pretty, and so the effect of prettiness which she never failed to make was all the more meritorious. The acute angle of her jaw, which made her face, broad at the brows, come off to a very sprightly point, was much in her favour ; so were her eyebrows, which had a double curve in that the sharp, closely feathered ends of them turned upwards again. Certainly, her eyebrows were most piquant. As to complexion, she would tell you frankly that she had always found the " Norwich man" best of anyone ; you could rely on his things, and they were not so madly expen- sive as some of the other people's. " He doesn't sell that Sauce Bechamel sort of stuff for evening wear, and then swear that it's not a paint, only a ' cream,' as most of the other people do," she would exclaim, in her very high, shrill little voice. Perfect frankness about these various aids to beauty was Miss Janion's line. To Gallia, such a woman was what the dis- covery of the ass-like horse of the Central Asian 164 GALLIA. plains was to Przevalsky : she listened eagerly, greedily, with her face all lighted up, to the stream of chatter about laces and people and powder, and silk-covered hair-pins, and the last book, and Mrs. Tree's dresses in the last play, and the new system of paying a yearly sum to a milliner and taking your hats on hire by the week or fortnight, and other kindred topics, very brilliantly touched on. Margaret, her grey eyes shining, her face beneath the delicate, sun- beamy colour which was its most usual surface, listened in horror, wondering vaguely what on earth Miss Hamesthwaite would think, and if she would take Gertrude to be a type of all her companions. So engrossed were the three, that in the crowd they missed seeing two well-known faces ; a rare thing for the Janion girl, who had the fashion- able trick to a nicety, of seeing and not seeing everybody at her own expedient whim. " Hullo ! A queer team for a troika !" ex- claimed Lauriston, who had just joined Gurdon and Dark Essex, when his eyeglass focussed the backs of the three girls. Gurdon was on horseback (he rode every day while he was in London, because all the men who succeeded in climbing into big places in the Ser- vices rode every day while they were in London, and were in the habit of saying they could never have lived without it). He looked round quickly. GALLIA. 165 " Your sister, Essex, and I believe" — " Miss Hamesthwaite in the middle," said Lauriston glibly, " and the Janionette on the oft'. Think I'll catch up with them and hear how they are getting on. I've often wanted to know Miss Hamesthwaite, and the little girl will introduce me." " Should we all move down ?" Gurdon in- quired tentatively. " I shall reserve the pleasure for another occa- sion," Essex said, with his stone smile. Gurdon had by this time thought that more suitable surroundings might be found for his in- troduction to Lord Hamesthwaite's daughter ; so Lauriston strolled off alone, and having become exceedingly short-sighted, owing to his lifelong habit of insisting that he was so, failed to dis- cover the trio, and brought up ignominiously beside a very brilliantly-painted and high-hung barouche, the occupant of which would have been (so she always declared) a marchioness in actual fact, if divorce were on a sensible basis in this foolish old country. " Your sister is a great friend of Miss Hames- thwaite's," Gurdon said, looking down very keenly upon, as it happened, the dazzling disc of Essex's silk hat. " They meet pretty frequently, I believe, but I fail to apprehend why either of them should take up Miss Janion." 166 GALLIA. " I have met Miss Janion, I fancy, at a ball." " A subscription ball." " I believe it was." " It certainly would be." " Is a subscription ball to be made a cause of reproach in your exclusive mind ?" Mark asked lightly. " Far from it. I have, all unknown to her, a deep and lasting admiration for Miss Janion. She is the most unaffected woman I know, save one. She is incurably vulgar, she is shrewd enough to know it, and yet I have never found her making the least attempt to disguise it. She doesn't pose. My sister does pose a very little, and it comes near to spoiling her. She thinks she cares for art, but that will pass off quite satisfactorily when she marries." " You are against a woman having an interest, then?" " My dear Gurdon, I don't believe I have even got an opinion about women. A quiet man doesn't need to have, nowadays. Women have taken men's opinions of them for granted, and there is nothing they seem to quote with more freedom. But I know," he yawned, quite genuinely, " I'm on the safe side. I'm ' against' nothing. If I were, it might be against a woman having more than two interests — herself and the man she marries." " And her children ?" QALLIA. 167 " You will not prevent a woman having an interest in her children if she has been woman enough to have had an interest in herself and her husband. And as far as my observation goes, the posing woman will care for her children too. She can't afford not to. Maternity is a strong pose with your platform woman. She has to be regarded as a 'thorough wife and mother,' it fills the cheap seats so. Yes, women have a lot of courage. But I don't believe the woman breathes, who, if she didn't care for her children, would have the courage to say so. Which brings us back to Miss Janion, who never poses." " If my memory of Miss Janion is correct, she wore a very low dress at the ball ; I remember this because she asked me if I thought it too low, and I was a good deal embarrassed." Essex laughed ; just a couple of bars of deep, rich-noted laughter, then he drooped his head, leaned upon the railings, and went on making a little mound of sand, and burying a small tuft of grass with his foot. " But, as I was going to say, she is nothing like so attractive a woman as your sister." Essex raised his eyes with a serious expression in them. It was as though he had half ex- pected Grurdon to discuss his sister in the same tone they had used concerning Miss Janion, but Grurdon had no such idea, and Essex, reassured, 168 GALLIA. spoke in the way and with the conviction he always showed when he mentioned his sister. "She is the only type of woman left us, capable of attracting in the romantic way," he said thoughtfully. " This sort of subject comes easy to me just now, because, as I think I told you before we left the club, my publishers rec- ommend the expansion of that monograph of mine into a book, and I've been working upon it for the past two months at a quiet little place I've found in Surrey. In The Comparison of Emotion in the Human and other Animals, most of the arguments against Darwin are drawn from an unprejudiced consideration of the emo- tional capacity in women. I have decided to recognise three kinds of attraction, although I might reasonably decide against this division into three. Intellectual attraction — very com- mon nowadays, and responsible for at least half the marriages in middle-class society, where marriage still remains and will remain a matter of attraction. Physical attraction — accountable for all the other marriages in the world (not counting those of position, interest, and so on, which don't concern me, as they are marriages of no attraction) — accountable for all the others, Gurdon, except a small number still founded on romantic attraction. My sister Margaret is a type of the sort of woman who makes that last form of marriage possible. To be romantically GALLIA. 169 attractive, a woman has got to be innately good (I am using such words in the old-fashioned sense, you understand) and innately beautiful ; but beyond this, as we have hounded the old timidity and simplicity and insipidity and such other idities from our doors, she must be semi- talented and semi-independent. There is a rage for talent and independence nowadays; a girl can't have the commonest sort of success, poor thing, unless, forsooth, she does something inde- pendent !" "I agree with every word you say of your sister." " It's a pity she happens to be my sister, for the sake of argument, but I refer to her merely because she is a picture, an etching of the type — a silver-point." "She is indeed; but I was going to say that I think her clever. Her music, her painting, are ever and ever so far above the amateur average, you must admit ?" " Oh, I do ; but so is every other girl's, you know." " "Well, I don't know. Miss Janion now, I'm sure, if she plays, it's in just the usual way." " Doesn't play a note, doesn't paint a stroke. You don't appreciate Gertrude. Her talent is to be better dressed than any one else, and she always is, in my judgment." H 15 170 GALLIA. "I am becoming anxious to know more of this shining example of the modern girl." " Then you had better hasten forward, and if they haven't had enough of it, you'll meet them coming up. I'm going to the Natural History Museum to talk to an old friend who has written to me. "Will you dine with me to- morrow ? A note in the morning will do. I'm only in town till Saturday." " Devonshire again ?" "No, Surrey. An inn three hundred years old ; everything three hundred years old except the cat and the bitter ale." "Well, I envy you." Mark gathered up his reins. " You don't now, but if you were seedy, you would yearn for a week in my village." CHAPTER XVIII. " Oh dear, I believe I want my tea !" ex- claimed Miss Janion, with the same manner, and certainly in the same key, that a green paroquet would have made a similar remark. The three oddly assorted companions had chosen three isolated chairs, which had the merit of being somewhat private, and yet commanding a fair view of the drive. " There's nothing I look forward to with the same yearning anticipation as tea. I begin about three o'clock ; I tell my- self how delicious tea is going to be ; at four, I console myself by thinking that I can ring for it a little early, and that will be a quarter to five. I don't think there is anything that excites me more than the thought of tea; and how beastly it always is when it comes !" " And men think we get so much out of it !" Gallia said drily, having greatly appreciated Miss Janion's extravagant little speech. " It's men who, by chaffing women about tea- drinking, have got up the idea of tea being such a godsend. There's a conspiracy among men to make women stick to tea and think they like it. Hear men sighing, ' Ah, I wish I dare,' 171 172 GALLIA. when they steadily refuse it day after day. Catch them taking any !" " I'm always trying new teas, and new ways of making tea," put in Margaret. " I think I sometimes enjoy it when it's very weak and has a great deal of cream and sugar in it." " Depend upon it, you only think so," laughed Gallia. " It's a woman's bitterest disappointment, — tea and men," Gertrude wound up sagely. " I'm not a bit disappointed in men — on the whole," Margaret declared. "Nor am I," from Gallia; "I think men are quite good enough." "Good? You don't mean to say you think men good?" " I don't think I mean that sort of good," with a smile to Gertrude. "But they are good- looking enough, and strong enough, and healthy enough. They compare favourably with women in these respects." Margaret had her eye fastened on Gallia's face. " One has two views of men, I think : one of men in relation to the world, — the world of war and letters and statesmanship and trade, and so on, — and one has to admire them there; the other, of men in relation to oneself, and there it seems to me most important that they should be well-grown and healthy and sound — in wind, GALLIA. 173 limb, and temper." She ended up with a little laugh. Margaret was conscious of not under- standing her, but Gertrude, being a person of absolutely no insight, replied glibly — " I like men to be amusing and jolly, and of course as good-looking as possible. I don't think I mind much if they are what Miss Hamesthwaite calls sound." " But you would if you were going to marry them." " I don't know. But, any way, one can't marry them all." "But there are other women" — " They've got to look out for themselves. And now that so many have taken up nursing, it can't be quite the slavery it used to be to have an in- valid husband." Miss Janion was quite unaware of being on the wrong track. " I do think life, — I mean domestic life, — is beautifully easy now ; one needn't do a thing oneself, one can get some- one in ! At home we are always getting people in. Papa has his masseur every day; mamma has her nursemaid — I mean maid-nurse ; Alfred has his electric shock person and galvaniser — he can't raise a slipper before eleven, when this per- son comes, and afterwards he's awfully larky until it wears off. Ella Lane, who lives next door, shares my hair man, who comes in. "We get in the butler ; we get in a woman — I think she's a lady — to do the flowers for parties. One needn't 15* 174 GALLIA. really have any trouble nowadays, or do anything; one can always get someone in." " It's the tendency to-day. In the next century we shall have organised things more perfectly, and shall be able to get even more people in, in other capacities." " Well, hasn't there been a fuss lately about getting all the cooking in ?" asked Margaret. " I'm sure a central depdt for that would be a great blessing." " It would indeed. We may live to see that, but we shan't live to see the real advance ; which will be the getting in of fathers and mothers, or rather husbands and wives to be fathers and mothers." Gertrude shrieked; Margaret was silent and startled. " I was speaking quite seriously, and if you think, you will see that such a scheme would be eminently rational. The outcome of the present health movement must lead that way. People will see the folly of curing all sorts of ailments that should not have been created, and then they will start at the right end, they will make better people. How can we wonder that only one per- son in ten is handsome and well-made, when you reflect that they were most likely haps of hazards, that they were unintended, the offspring of people quite unfitted to have children at all. There are people fitted, for instance, to be GALLIA. 175 mothers, which every woman isn't; there are women fitted to bring up children, who may not be mothers. Think of this : a man may love a woman and marry her ; they may be devoted to each other, and long for a child to bring up and to love; but the woman maybe too deli- cate to run the risk. What are they to do? What would be the reasonable thing to do? Sacrifice the poor woman for the sake of a weakly baby ? !N"o, of course not, but get in a mother !" A moment's silence fell upon the three. Their brains were a little burdened, and no wonder, by this astounding piece of social reform. " But why not adopt a child?" ventured Mar- garet at length. " But it wouldn't belong to" either of them, and they couldn't tell in what odious surroundings it had been born. Surely much more reasonable to get in a mother." A light dawned upon Miss Janion, and she began, " But this strange woman" — " She wouldn't be a strange woman ; she would be a splendid, beautiful, healthy, accredited woman, and probably physically very attractive. The man's sentiment, if he had any, would be greatly in her favour; men have wonderfully little sentiment, as their whole way of life shows, in a matter of that kind. He would have been able to indulge his very highest feeling in the 176 GALLIA. choice of his wife. It would make enormously in favour of morality." " Do you think it would ?" said Margaret. " Surely ; by making in favour of health, by making in favour of justice, by lifting a burden from the shoulders of the weak and placing it on the shoulders of the strong." "And the — the poor journeyman mother — would she like giving up her child ?" the gentle Margaret asked again. " It wouldn't be her child only, it would be his child, by agreement" — " Now, I wonder, if one was married, whether one would like another woman supplying the baby element in the family ?" " If one were not strong enough to supply it oneself, Miss Janion, surely ? And don't you see that if this plan were adopted, there would be far fewer delicate men and women in the world ? The plan would be worked from both sides equally, and the strong, finely-bred children growing up happily, well distributed over the homes of the country, instead of there being eight in one and none in another, as is the case just now, these children would have a much better chance. People are not above ' getting in' a wet-nurse nowadays, and in the most casual fashion ; it seems to me this is only a step farther." Again a silence, — on Margaret's part a sunset- GALLIA. 177 coloured silence ; on Gertrude's a silence pointed by twitching lips and eyebrows ; on Gallia's, tbe silence of a shrewd and hopeful saint. " It sounds like treating the world as a sort of farm, and men and women merely as animals," said Margaret, with some distress. " Precisely my idea," said Miss Hamesthwaite calmly. "At present half the world is not as well treated as the best class of animals, and there isn't a political economist living who wouldn't say that if the increase of the lower classes could be taken out of their own hands and supervised on scientific lines, crime as well as a number of diseases would be stamped out. If it could only be done — if it could only be done!" Gallia's clear, earnest face, with the thin, dark line deep between her eyebrows, looked straight in front of her, and that was how Gurdon saw her, and again thought her magnificent, as he rode by, about thirty paces away. "And what would you do with people like that in your world?" said Miss Janion, point- ing to the brilliant barouche, which was turn- ing opposite them in order to take its beautiful occupant to the corner in time to see the Duchess. " Who is it ?" inquired Gallia innocently. Miss Janion informed her with some cere- mony. " I really know her well by sight," she 178 GALLIA. added, "because we both get our hair at the same shop — there is really no one like Hugo for hair-pin fringes." " I have no quarrel with her," Gallia replied, with a certain bitter quiet. " Vile creature !" sputtered the Janion girl. Gallia looked shocked, and rose from her seat. " I hope you don't mean that," she said ; " you have the greatest possible reason to be grateful to her whole class and to pity them. I must go home now, I think." She had looked at the sky and the trees' shadows, and then compared their time with her small black-enamelled watch. " You should write about your ideas," said Margaret, smiling up at her from under the black-eaved hat. Gallia shook her head briskly. " One would only be grouped with all the other women who are said to be leading the ' Sexual Revolt,' and that would do the ideas harm, for no one would take them seriously." " But so much attention is paid to what women write now." Gallia smiled drily, and swept her eyes over the park before bringing them to Margaret's face; then, taking her hand at the same mo- ment, she said — " That's just it ! "What they say makes so much noise that nobody hears properly what it is. A woman who really feels these things GALLIA. 179 shouldn't write about them now, until what they call the boom of women is over." " But couldn't she write under a man's name ?" " Men don't think these things, you see." "No men?" " I don't think any man." "But how is that?" "Because" — Gallia smiled a little, and then her face grew wistful as she returned her an- swer, unspoken, to her own mind. " Good-bye, Margaret. Don't dislike me on account of this crusade against the copy-book. Good-bye, Miss Janion." "It's been an awfully jolly afternoon," re- marked that sprightly young woman, as she and Margaret Btood to watch the quiet figure in black go up the path. " She is amusing," she added heartily. " She doesn't mean to be." " People so seldom mean to be, and so often are." "But she's perfectly serious in all she says, and even more serious in the things she thinks and doesn't say." " Keally, now ? Do you think she can have been jilted or had a disappointment ? It sounds like it, doesn't it ?" CHAPTER XIX. Gallia's life, at this time, was a very lonely- one, and that, she would say to anyone who com- miserated her, was its very best feature. She liked to be alone, at least she thought, like many other young people of her temper, that she liked it ; but she was happier and better in every way when she was not alone, and her father, a man of small insight in domestic matters, but occasion- ally right in his judgments for all that, decided that she should not moon about the country home in Surrey for six weeks all by herself, but should persuade " one of her young friends" (Lord Hamesthwaite was perfectly unaware that she had none — he believed that every girl had a number of young friends) to go down and spend the time with her. " Very well," Gallia had said, and she deter- mined to see if Mrs. Essex and Margaret would come. " Quietly, of course," Lord Hamesthwaite had added, with a sigh. " No party. Quite quietly. And I have asked Shillinglee and Oswald — I think you have met Oswald ? "We are going to have a week's work upon the Bill. Later on Denyer will join me." " Has Mr. Denyer left Africa, then ?" 180 GALLIA. 181 "My dear child, you surely remember the whole business of Denyer's leaving the Cape not six weeks ago ? He is in the Auvergne at present for his health, but by the end of July he will be in England." Gallia nodded; she took no interest in the South African business and Mr. Denyer, but it was impossible to take up a paper without coming upon a mention of her father's name and the name of Denyer in connection with the great question. These few words were spoken at the beginning of the hot fortnight in June. There always is a hot fortnight every June in London, and it was just beginning about the time that Lord Hames- thwaite made known his summer plans to his daughter. "What a quiet summer it was going to be ! how different from the summers Gallia had always run away from in her mother's lifetime, when a large political party was gathered in the breakfast-rooms every morning, and important talks — talks which were going to colour the Par- liamentary business of the day — went forward among the old-fashioned flower-beds ; then the quiet that fell when a midday train had borne all the political tools and implements to the big London workshops. On Wednesday nights, the immense dinner-parties at which Gallia had sometimes been present; parties at which un- 16 182 GALLIA. expected political constellations scintillated, and the working-man member sat down with the nursing peer, and a satirical writer, some Tory- leopard, lay down with the Radical kid. It all seemed very far away now, and now that it seemed so far away, Gallia wondered if she would not have done better to be in the midst of it. She could be brilliant in society if the mood was upon her ; but in those days she had been so serious, because so young, that the men who held the country's destiny in their hand had appeared too frivolous for her. " They never seemed to be interested in real things," Gallia explained to her aunt when she dropped in upon her to detail her father's plans, and they got talking about past times together. " All they said and all they thought seemed so far away from real things as they really are. It seems to me, that if you live the perfectly en- gineered life of public men, — put down by a brougham in time to be picked up by a Pull- man, turned out of a Pullman into a waggonette or a dog-cart; just time to dress for dinner; just time to sleep before being called and dressed and breakfasted ; just time for a few words, quite lightly and unseriously spoken, and usually taking the form of a chaffing comment upon an opponent, or a good story of a mistake in one of the Offices, or an amusing misunderstanding at one of the Embassies ; then the waggonette GALLIA. 183 and Pullman and brougham again, and the House for a few hours, — what leisure have they to look at real things as they really are ? In the train men look at the afternoon papers — or they read one of a mass of pamphlets from inside an elastic band. I don't see, — unless they remem- ber things they saw when they were boys and loitered about and birds-nested, — I don't see how they are to know about any of the things that really are." " To hear these wild sentiments from your father's daughter !" cried the vivacious old lady in reply. " Why, child, there is no particular occasion to know about things as they really are. Men in your father's position have no time for that, and it wouldn't advantage them the least bit if they had. They know most accurately, I am sure, about things as they are reported to be. They read and get up reports ; and when you would have them looking out for railway car- riage windows across flying fields" — " "Well, they might see something." " What in the world could they see ? A few labourers going home, perhaps." " Or a few wood-pigeons," interjected Gallia softly. Then, "But surely laws are made to make things better than they are," she went on, " and if they don't ever" — " My dear child, you are really too old to talk like that — in your position too !" 184 GALLIA. " Dear Aunt Celia, you must forgive me. You know I am very, very backward in all such things, having never paid them the least attention; but I think I'm going to be more interested in papa's work now." "I hope you will sympathise with it, dear," said Mrs. Leighton gravely. "It might be as well not to go so far as to be interested in it; — that is a term that seems to represent so unpleasant an attitude nowadays ; — but to sym- pathise with it would be very graceful, dear, very graceful indeed, and very gratifying to your father, I am sure." Gallia smiled in her wistful manner, and passed to another subject. " When will you come down to the Hall, Aunt Celia?" " You really want to have me, dear ? So good of you both ! Well, I shall be a month at Aix, and — shall we say the early part of August ?" " Any time that suits you will do perfectly, of course. Papa mentioned this morning that Lord Shillinglee was coming down for a week — perhaps Mr. Oswald too, on political business." " Have you ever thought, my dear Gallia, of marrying Lord Shillinglee ?" " Certainly I have not." "Ah! because in some ways it might suit very well." Gallia laughed. " I don't know whom it GALLIA. 185 would suit in any way," she said, and added quickly, in order to change the subject, for on marriage Aunt Celia was dangerous, " And Mr. Denyer is expected." "At the Hall? You don't say so. It is always so difficult to get any information about public business. I never think of asking your father, unless I am prepared to pretend that I know already, and Mr. Gurdon persists in saying that he knows no more than the pigeons in the courtyard. But Denyer has certainly played a great part recently, and I want very much to see the man himself." Mrs. Leighton was referring to what was at that time " the South African question ;" it does not in the least matter which South African question. The Government had, as usual, quite scandalised one-half of the public either by its action or inaction in the matter. Lord Hames- thwaite had been severely criticised, publicly and privately ; then something had been taken back and something else explained away, and a great deal more ignored, and the whole matter was forgotten save by the people who were leisurely engaged in compiling a Blue Book to be published in a few years' time ; a Blue Book which might be used in Board Schools as a model of the complete letter-writer. "But I often feel," went on Mrs. Leighton, " that Mark Gurdon — who has been in Africa 16* 186 GALLIA. and has his eyes so wide open — could tell me a great deal, but he will only dilate upon the ' Karroo.' " The door opened at this moment, and Gurdon himself almost anticipated the an- nouncement of his name. " So magnetically sympathetic of you to come in just now! your name was upon my lips," said Mrs. Leighton, as they shook hands. " Let me present you to my niece, Miss Hamesthwaite. Dear Gallia, Mr. Mark Gurdon, to whom I have become quite attached!" This was made very playful and complimentary, and something in the old lady's manner put Mark at his very best. The old lady's easy and genial artificiality acted like a sun upon persons who possessed the social art ; they behaved delightfully in her rooms, and went away happy because successful. As for herself, it was her habit to remark that she was entirely satisfied with the manners of the present day, about which she heard so much complaint. There was all the courtesy that one could wish, if one merely gave it an opportunity to come out. Gallia watched Mark carefully as he spoke to her aunt. She seemed to have heard of him often, considering that he was an unimportant person as yet; his name had appeared on the lists her mother had sometimes sent her of guests at a reception; his name was on her visiting list, and she would have to ask him to parties GALLIA. 187 herself in the.future. She listened, and admired his speaking voice, it was so much lower and rounder than the usual modern man's. " I mis- trust falsetto voices ; they mean weakness, when they don't mean worse," she had said to herself in the days when she had been accustomed to sum up everything with great promptitude ; the days before she was three-and-twenty. His voice was not the only good thing about Mark to strike a girl's fancy ; there was a firm- ness and a faint pinkness about his face which did not suggest a London life in any way, and yet would have been too delicate for a country- man. His eyes were bright and clear — those curious ringed eyes of grey and hazel ; his teeth were perfect; not too small, and very white. Gallia saw all these things rather as a dealer might notice the points in a horse than as a lady might perceive a young man's claims to handsomeness. " And you are so good as to think my mo- ment has come," he was saying, smilingly, to Mrs. Leighton, and Gallia watched thoughtfully all the time. " Your moment for what ?" she suddenly in- quired, and her uncompromising eyes fixed themselves upon him when he turned to her. " My moment to emerge from the covert of mediocrity into the open of — what shall we say?" 188 GALLIA. " Predestination," said Mrs. Leighton, with a touch of solemnity under her smile. " You are going in for public life ?" said Gallia, taking a quite impersonal interest in the subject. " It is the only thing for me to attempt. When a man has no position — no private position of any kind, I mean — and no duties, except to- wards himself, he had better be trying to suc- ceed, don't you think, in something? It em- ploys his leisure," Mark replied genially. " Oh, if he has no interest in outside things — in agriculture, or literature, or art — I suppose he may as well" — " Be his own field, and book, and marble, Miss Hamesthwaite ? I think he may. And it has the merit of being exceedingly difficult," he went on, with his well-calculated indifference, and a smile that had the curves of satire. " To some men, success and advancement are, as Mrs. Leigh- ton has said, predestined. But my education was not of the right kind ; it was scattered and varied." " It has made you a man of the world," Mrs. Leighton put in briskly. " But not of the world of public service," said Mark, with a shake of his head. " I ought to have been at Eaton ; whereas I wasted three or four years at a great public school, learned nothing, and had to do without the kudos as well. At GALLIA. 189 Eton a man gets known by his Christian name, if he gets nothing else, — or, better still, by a diminutive of his Christian name, — and it is all that he requires. You will not believe, Miss Hamesthwaite," with a dry, whimsical smile upon his face, " what a difference it makes to a man's career. To have been 'Eddy' — better still, to have been 'Bobsy' at Eton, is a guarantee of place and progress ! But," with a glance of deprecation, "your sympathy encourages one too much. It is a long subject, and I must pray forgiveness for talking so much about myself." He looked at Mrs. Leighton, but turned a glance finally on Gallia. He was not sure if she were despising him for his determination to make something of himself, but he was patient, and he felt that she would not despise him when she knew him better. Mark had discovered that there is no kind of woman who will not admire personal ambition in a man — irrespective of the object of that ambition. Women, Mark knew, will respect a clever murderer if he shows suffi- cient dexterity. Her next remark, therefore, sur- prised him, simply spoken though it was. " The desire to ' get on,' as it is called, is some- thing I have never been able to comprehend," she said. Then she turned to her aunt : "I have forgotten to say till now that papa is coming to dinner to-night, if you are not engaged." " That is very charming of him. I quite won- 190 GALLIA. dered when we were to meet again, as I go to Aix on Thursday. Are you coming too, dear ? Do. I will make Mr. Gurdon stay to entertain you, and we can all go on to Holland House together. Yes ?" " Thank you, Aunt Celia, but I hadn't intended going to Holland House." Gurdon had mur- mured that he would be delighted. " My dear child, we must have you go about a very little. It is time now that you appeared in some places. You can be quiet without being immured." Gallia apparently gave in. " Then I will go and tell papa : he is at the House of Lords — I may just catch him." Gurdon thought the little movement of au revoir that she made, and her slow step to the door he was holding, very beautiful in their way. He was quite satisfied to have met her at last. She was driven to Westminster, and sent in a tiny note with the evening plans in it ; then with an idle whim she alighted at Dean's Yard and sent her carriage to wait beside her father's. She liked this old, strange part of London, so unlike London as it is ; she liked to wander in the precincts of the Abbey, and look up at the dull red-brick houses, which seemed so comfortable, which seemed to mean something quite apart from all the other buildings in all the great City. It was long since she had strolled into the cloisters, GALLIA. 191 and it would be eool there this hot June day. She took her way past the constable, to that passage, flagged and grey, where mysterious dull-red doors have the air of closing the burrows of canons and other cobwebby and unreal dignitaries. She turned aside into the little court that opens on the left. Did big London know that such a place was in existence ? Surely not, or it would tear brick from brick, cast the heavy time-eaten, wrought ironwork of lamp and sconce and knocker into its metropolitan dust-heap. She went on, past more red doors, down the long passage to the small, square, grass-centred Court ; the air, that had smelt of stone and bone, and lime and time, grew fresher here ; the pat- terns of the tracery in the arches were touched in places by the sun ; it was light again — for the open air came there. Gallia, who had not a tear for human ill or sorrow, turned back into the dim flagged passage wjth her handkerchief to her eyes ; she had suddenly grown conscious, as human beings do at times, of the disposition to peace, beauty, dignity, and spiritual loveliness, about some places, — and it marks the contrast to man and his fret and unrest. Some such dim sense of discord and disparity with a beautiful world had touched Gallia — she stopped, where a shaft of sunlight from the little Court invaded the courtyard for a few feet. " Quite a Royal Academy success," said a voice 192 GALLIA. behind her, and she looked up, startled, to per- ceive Mr. Essex. " How are you ? You'd be a boon to Bome struggling fellow who couldn't get in ; you'd be the picture of the year." CHAPTER XX. In the moment of shaking hands, Gallia dis- covered a strange thing ; her feelings for Essex had undergone some change. She looked quietly into his face, with some idea, perhaps, of seeing whether his glance had any effect upon her ; it had an effect, but the effect was different. The thing amounted to this : she had grown, her mind had grown, and she had arranged a scheme of life for herself, had arranged a series of ideas, in none of which Essex could have the least part. Essex, the Essex she had loved, could not touch her now in the same way ; the part of her that he had touched and had hurt was atrophied. So much the better or so much the worse for Gallia. " I had forgotten about you," she said, in faint surprise at herself. " Really ? But why not ?" he asked lightly ; " though I had not quite forgotten you." She did not take up this cue. " What are you doing now ?" she inquired. " Just now I am looking at your hat ; a moment since I was wondering how you came here. You can't have been calling on an old college friend ?" i n 17 193 194 GALLIA. " For one thing, I have no old college friend to call on. If you know men who live here, can you tell me if this environment affects them in any way ? I should change my whole mind if I lived here." Essex looked at her whimsically. " Am I to understand that, not having lived here, you have not changed your mind, and that"— She interrupted him, again with the same half curious, half surprised, but very quiet ex- pression. " You need not go so far out of your way to understand or misunderstand me. Come here and sit down for a moment — I want to see how you make me feel." " I can give you a quarter of an hour," he answered, after a glance at his watch. " I sha'n't rob you of all that. "Where were you last December ?" " December ? — I was in Oxford." " I was in Algiers with my mother, and she died at the end of the month. That was when I last thought of you seriously. Then — how odd it seems ! — I would have liked so much to see you." " "Why didn't you telegraph ?" " You needn't say that sort of thing ! I am quite aware that I seem a very strange style of person to you, but, you see, to you I say ex- GALLIA. 195 actly what I mean; when one has once been frank at a very big moment, it seems foolish to be terrified of the effect of little bits of frank- ness in quite small moments. So I asked you where you were because I wondered if I came into your mind at all when I was wanting to see you so much." " So far as I can recollect, not less or more than usual." Gallia laughed — an unamused, unmerry sort of laugh it was. " And is the world beginning to grow accus- tomed to the measure of honesty you decided to mete out to it ?" Essex asked pleasantly. " I have, just at present, very little to do with the world. One has not to mind being thought peculiar by a number of people ; it doesn't break the skin, that I know of." " If adverse opinion took the form of what I believe is called ' chaps,' how raw we should all be," remarked Essex. "And I suppose," he went on, with an inquiring air, " it is absolutely impossible to a woman of your nature to let things slide, and be happy, and look pretty, and marry, and love, and bring up children, and work out an amiable, not too complicated or fatiguing sort of destiny ?" " I certainly hope to bring up a child. I think it is all I do want," Gallia answered. " But the other things you cannot give way to ?" 196 GALLIA. " I am as happy as anyone when I see cause. A sail, a good gallop, a day's shooting, will often — in fact, will always make me happy; that's because I'm young and strong and my blood moves. I do not comprehend the emotional kind of happiness to be got out of some man's admiration of me — or whatever it is that gives it to women. Love did not seem to me a happy thing. It attacked my pride, my independence, the whole fabric of my character; it lowered my crest — I think you might have seen ?" She turned to smile at him. " You still think that you loved me ?" Essex asked, almost quite naturally. " We needn't go into it again ; but whatever my feelings may be, and however ill-regulated and untimely, I don't mistake them. I told you that I loved you, and you know why I told you. I wish it had not been necessary, God knows, but you made it necessary." He turned fully towards her, leaning his back into the corner of the stone seat and holding his knee with both hands. " Gallia, I am terribly sorry for you. Don't mistake me ; it is nothing to do with your having loved or not having loved me. It is simply be- cause you are the perfectly hapless kind of mod- ern woman. Your whole make-up is an egre- gious mistake — a complete waste of material. There is no place in all the world for you. GALLIA. 197 You are not wanted because you are for no use." " The earwig of humanity," she interjected, with a wistful kind of smile. " You have a beautiful face," continued Essex, speaking with unusual entrain. " Good heavens, child, what eyes you have ! And what use are those eyes to you? They are shaped to look things of which you have no knowledge. Your lips, — one could imagine, if one saw a picture of you, the most emotional moments in the world made by your lips. And you use them — good Lord ! — you use them to talk the flimsiest philos- ophy— the sociology of a schoolgirl's half-holi- day!" Gallia's face was quite grave, was sometimes sad, but a light was growing at the back of her eyes, the light she had gleaned since she saw Essex last. " Physically you are so lovely," he went on in a more argumentative key, " that one regrets you have no grain of coquetry to make play with all these bodily gifts, even if it were cruel play. I think — do you know this? — I think that when I made some sort of love to you at Mrs. Leighton's, I was only misled by your appearance into thinking you the sort of woman that you looked. You are not heartless in the way of being cold and indifferent, — that has gone out with women now, — you are simply 17* 198 GALLIA. incapable of an ordinary feminine feeling." Essex had no idea that this was said with a strong note of irritation, of resentment. " As I look at you now, you are the sort of being an amorous-minded man, which you know I am not, would sell his whole career to kiss. It is your outward form that looks so; it does not suit your mind ; it will give you trouble yet, for men will fall in love with it. That will not be your fault, but the bitterness will be all yours. For you are a misshapen woman." Gallia heard all this with very little surprise, it was not so new to her ; and though she felt the touch of scorn in Essex's voice, she knew the scorn was not his, but was his outraged sex speaking in him. "When he applied his last epithet to her, she never winced. "But there is something more than love in the world, is there not?" Her voice was a whisper, an anxious whisper. " For women ? Nothing ! What else should there be?" " There is motherhood." This time her voice was calm, only her eyes looked wistfully before her. Essex looked a little more curiously at her. " A mad anomaly !" he exclaimed. " One should be beautifully made and beauti- ful to be a mother," she said again, still staring Wistfully before her. " Perhaps" — she seemed GALLIA. 199 to recollect him and turned towards him with a half-hearted smile and her eyes magnified by the tears in them — " perhaps there is a bigger object in my appearance than the satisfaction of any man's senses." " Good heavens, what a coil ! Then you have some sort of feelings?" He was genuinely surprised. " Listen," Gallia said. " At any rate one can talk to you and — you — don't gasp. Listen. The first sort of love, the amorous love, is over and done in me. I hadn't a seam or a big vein of it. I think I had only a ' pocket' — and it's worked out ; wouldn't pay to sink another shaft for that. The capacity for mother-love, I think, is very large in me ; I think I should make a good mother : I can't tell you how I know, but I have been finding it out ever since my own mother died, and I began to know it when I sat beside her dead body. I could spend myself and lose myself in my child, if I had one, and ask for no return ; for everything else I come first ; but I shouldn't come first there. When I marry, I shall, of course, marry without love. For that is used up. It is my misfortune, and has come out of the crookedness of things, that I didn't love the right person at the right time." Essex was looking at her with more of himself in his eyes than anyone had ever seen there before. When her voice dropped, an impulse 200 GALLIA. taught him to take her hand. He took it, but she did not appear to notice him or his action. She was just talking out her soul to the grey stones, softened oddly by their influence, and also because she was beside the only human being who understood her. " But that has nothing to do with the rest. On the whole, it may be an advantage. If I were to fall in love again, it might be with someone quite unsuitable to be the father of my child — someone who would not be fine and strong and healthy, and of a healthy stock. As it is, when I marry, — I talk of it quite as a certainty because it is a certainty to me, being rich and good-looking, and the only child of my father, — I shall marry solely with a view to the child I am going to live for." She turned towards him again in a rising tumult of feeling, and clasped the hand he had given her in both hers. They were trembling a little, he noticed, but though he felt some strong emotion himself, he concealed it bravely, for he knew it had nothing in common with the emotion she felt. " So don't you think — don't you think that there may be a place in the world for me after all ?" At the moment she had told her love for him, she had left him cold and normal ; now describ- ing a greater and more spiritual feeling, she lit strange fires. Two passers-by went down the cloister passage at this moment, men hurrying GALLIA. 201 along ; oddly enough, they did not observe the pair sitting on the seat, hand held in hand. It gave Essex a moment to control himself, to fold his lip and batten down some flame that would have been half articulate only. Then he kissed both her hands with a quietness that came natural to him at this moment of passionate feeling, he even laid them for a moment upon his breast, then, still holding them, looked into her eyes. " I am not making love to you now, Beautiful, Beautiful . . ." he said, very, very low; then, having told this momentous lie for her sake, he kissed the hands once more and put them down. " I know you are not," she said simply. " You have heard, and you know, — for you said it your- self,— I am not the sort of woman to be made love to." Essex's lips twitched uneasily once or twice in something that was not unlike a smile. " But I need not be cut down like the green fig- tree on that account, for I may be of some use after all; there must always be room in the world for a good mother of children, and I will teach them none of the unhappy things I know when I bring them up." " Gallia," Essex began hesitatingly, and moving a little closer to her, " have you thought — with that odd clear head of yours — about the thing you propose ?" " Motherhood ? Often and often. I am very 202 GALLIA. strong, and I have never known what it is to be frightened at anything. I am not fright- ened." " Not motherhood," he said, still speaking low and with his dark eyes curiously intent upon her face. " Marriage without love." Gallia was silent a moment ; then she nodded her head. " The same answer as before," she said. "Because there would be years of it; and marriage is not" — Essex would have roared with laughter at this stupendous phrase if he had heard it in cold blood — " is not all motherhood." But the strength of the whole moment was that Essex's cold blood was hot. " Other women bear the same sort of thing." " They have married for money or position, and they have reckoned on the price all along." " Ah, but other women, who have very little money and no position ; who have often a diffi- culty to get a living ; women who are not mar- ried. My position will be just this much better than theirs, that I shall be a mother." The triumph in her voice was somehow pitiful. He shivered a little. " They are not bred as you are, they haven't your feelings." " Why not ? Some of them must be well bred, and just now you said I hadn't any feelings !" GALLIA. 203 " I never said you had no feelings of delicacy or refinement," Essex replied, with quick se- verity. " It does not seem to me," she spoke cynically and coldly, "judging merely by pathological facts such as come under everyone's notice, that marriage can have much to do with delicacy and refinement." He shook his head. "My dear, you are becoming the modern woman again, and a moment since you were primary — and exquisite." " "Well, we'll put that aside. Of course," low- ering her tone and making it hard and crisp, " I quite know it, if I were differently made, I might dread it ; but I look at it like the women who marry for position and money — as a price. It is a pity, as I heard a girl say the other day, that it is not an affair of ' money down' — that one cannot write a big cheque, and be done. But these things are the inherent disadvantages that cannot be done away with. And it leaves me very clear in mind. To be marrying for love might bring about one's object less satisfactorily. If I were living fifty years hence, I should not probably have to marry at all. But our yoke is the ignorance of our day. Dark, I have talked enough. I am going now." She stood up. He remained seated, thinking. It was a beautiful deep twilight in the cloister now. 204 GALLIA. " How is it you have talked so inwardly to me ?" he asked, with a shadow in his eyes. "Because with you I have no mauvaise honte. How should I have ? Did I not take the very widest step that afternoon in my room last year ?" She seemed quite free and simple with him, but there was a warm colour in her cheek and a light in her eyes. If his life had depended on it, Essex could not have prevented the words that rose in him, or stemmed the flood that brought them. " Was it true then — what you said ?" he asked, in a low voice that he kept even with difficulty. " Quite true then." " Then." He repeated the word gravely. His head was bent, his face hidden. He stood up beside her. " And now I cannot bear to think of how cruel I was to you. How brutal !" He put his arms round her shoulders. " May I kiss you and be forgiven ? The man you loved, who is to be the only man you love, may kiss you now ? It is quiet here, but all the world might be present for me." His voice rocked unevenly for a moment, but he steadied himself, and Gal- lia's eyes fed on his excitement. " How cold you found me ! "We suffer for the degeneracy of our day. But I have enough passion" — his voice broke in a note like laughter — "to kiss you once." He threw back his head when his lips left hers. "Love, love! My love — love," GALLIA. 205 he said, and the word, which feeling made sing in the air, had that in it which seemed to cradle Gallia's heart; she leaned and rested on these tones, tasting something of the peace of sleep. Then his head bent forward, and she felt its weight upon her own, the curve of his cheek was against her forehead. Quick to learn and to respond, this new moment was teaching her fast, but he raised his head and said, " You will know that for half an hour you were worshipped, for a minute you were kissed . . . and . . ." She looked up at him with the only look of its kind her face ever wore, then she turned and walked away towards the gate. In the odd harmony that had come to be between them, Gallia was conscious of some strange chord that sounded curiously. That Essex was sincere, for the first time in his life perhaps, she felt, and that was enough. She could not know the inside of this man's mind, nor tell that the odd chord was Essex's own amazement at himself. The man was find- ing another self. For years he had sown and reaped in the home pastures of his soul, but, straying vaguely to an unsought hill-top, had unwittingly climbed the ridge and set foot in an undiscovered country. 18 CHAPTER XXL Essex, leaving the cloister, now dimly lamp- lit, some hour or so after Gallia flitted away, came across a friend and dined with him at the House of Commons, and was during dinner, as the friend was fain to remark, even more himself than usual. Then, having walked up and down the terrace till half-past ten, he said good-night, and took his way on foot to Hammersmith. Some men believe greatly in the calming effects of long walks, though what calm does a tiger find, who pads almost ceaselessly the length of his cage ? During the dinner and the after-talk, Essex had not once thought of Gallia ; no sooner, however, was he striding through the network of Bel- gravian streets, than his mind seemed to pick up the turmoil of his thoughts just where he had dropped them when Shale clapped him on the shoulder. What proved — had not everything in his whole character proved previously — that Essex was a man of the least possible emotional experience, was the fact that he was surprised when his memory failed to give back a detailed and pho- nographed replica of his and Gallia's conversa- tion. He remembered a number of isolated sen- 206 GALLIA. 207 tences that had fallen from her lips, but what, he wondered, had been his answers to them? "Were such subjects as these ever contemplated by the religious-minded, his aberrations might be alluded to as a merciful dispensation. No truthfully recorded conversation of the highly emotional kind could fail to sound ridiculous, were one to observe it with a frigid or even with a tepid mind. Slightly warmed and relaxed the mind must be to judge such matter. (It is fortunate that the people whose opinions matter, have only time to read novels in the evening, or late at night.) The finest love-scenes ever written are those that can be read at eleven a.m., without sounding sickly or silly. To a cynic such as Essex, with a thinness of skin like his in the matter of seeming absurd, the details of that half-hour in the cloisters would have appeared farcical indeed. But all that remained to him was a confused memory ; a memory startling, but puzzling, pleasurable. That he should have acted as he had done sur- prised Essex, but it did not disconcert him ; no, not though it seemed so unusual and astonish- ing; he remained fully satisfied with himself. That some people might perceive an indelicacy in kissing and professing to love a lady to whom he had no idea of offering marriage, Essex was unaware, or if he were aware, would have waived as trivial. Besides, he knew that in 208 GALLIA. Gallia's mind, as in the minds of many other thoughtful people, love and marriage were re- garded as justly separate. He knew Gallia had understood him ; he was sure — and he was quite right in being sure — that he had left her a sense of satisfaction, of fulfilment. She would pro- ceed on her way, he on his, and they would walk to their separate destinies. As he passed down Kensington, he saw the long line of carriages going up to Holland House; but he had not Mark Gurdon's ac- quaintance with people's crests and arms and liveries, and, having no psychic sense, he was quite unaware that Gallia, more lovely than ever before, was sitting beside Mrs. Leighton in one of those carriages, and that her father and Mark Gurdon were seated opposite to her. Love is a very short, small, and frequently un- important incident in the lives of most people. It is meant to be. If the days of a man's life be threescore years and ten, during which he gets up and goes to bed between the performance of stupid but necessary duties, it is only reasonable that at the most he should offer up a sacrifice of six months or so to love. The Honourable Gallia Hamesthwaite, unphotographed, unparagraphed, and ungossiped about, passed in the plenitude of her beauty from room to room ; kinder, more tolerant of stupidity than usual ; more gracious and more approachable, but with a Buperbness GALLIA. 209 about her that is only to be seen in the face and manner of a woman who has picked her aloe- flower. Mark Gurdon was often beside her; Mrs. Leighton observed and admired and approved her, and, clever old lady as she was, never sus- pected Mark's dawning ambition. "Whether it woke definitely then, or whether he had felt thrills of it before, cannot be told. But he was annoyed to think, when he shut their carriage door upon the ladies, that he had thought of going to Edwards Square that night, since he was in the neighbourhood, and had not seen Cara for two or three days. He walked briskly to Edwards Square, his face flushing and his eye kindling with thought induced by the scene he had left, not the scene he was going to. What we call delicacy is a quality wholly unknown to Life and Nature ; Nature has no regard for the fitness of things, and Life arranges the most tasteless con- trasts. For instance, it was far from agreeable of them both to make Gallia attract Mark with the light lit by Essex's kisses, and it was equally outr& in them to send Mark to the arms of his mistress with his head filled with thoughts of another woman. But none of the persons con- cerned were to blame for these contingencies. Life and Nature were alone responsible, and can only be excused on the ground that neither is really well bred. o 18* 210 GALLIA. The studio was lighted when he knocked, and a step which was not Cara's came towards the door. It was opened by the charwoman who had befriended Cara when her father met with his accident and when she met with Gurdon; the woman now came daily to do what service she required. " She's very bad, poor dear," said Mrs. Miles, in a voice of deep sympathy; and Mark's face, which a moment before had been fired by ambition, fell hastily to lines of genuine anxiety. "HI? How? Since when?" "Without waiting for an answer, he pushed past the portibre, and came swiftly to the broad couch on which, among a number of bright cushions and rugs, he saw the girl's pale face. She was awake and knew him, though her first words showed her mind was wandering. In an instant, Mark's cloak was off, and he was kneeling beside her, raising up her head and putting the wild-looking hair out of her eyes. " Whatever she would 'a done if it hadn't of been my day a' comin', God knows," said the woman fervently. " But have you done anything ? Have you sent for a doctor? "When was she taken ill? Did you find her so ?" Mrs. Miles posed herself, with her arms wrapped across the strings of her three aprons. GALLIA. 211 " Hight o'clock is my hour a' comin', which I 'ave to git Miles's breakfuss before 'e goes hout of a mornin'. I 'adn't got down our court be- fore I says, 'There, I've forgot the baskit,' it came over me all of a minute, and there, I says, ' Little miss '11 never 'eed if I'm a minit late,' for punkchell's been my motter since hiver I took to charin', which was wen Miles took to drink"— " But when you got here, my good woman, when you got here — was she ill ?" " "Wen I 'ad the baskit, sir," Mrs. Miles con- tinued, with an air of one who rigidly adheres to truth, and will not step aside for any- thing,— ""Wen I 'ad the baskit, I came on in a 'urry, and come hup to the door, sir, same as you might, that unthinkin'." "And I was dancing — dancing," Cara was saying in a low whisper and playing upon the covering with her fingers, as though in imitation of the figure of a dance. " "Which she wasn't, sir, for knock and knock I did, and then at last I 'eard a groan. Aoh !" Mrs. Miles placed one hand below her waist and just in front of the ample curve of her hip. " I don' know as ever I came over the same since I was carryin' Hemmer ; which I was took so I couldn't kerry a bucket, not the shillin' size, and Miles 'ad to borrer off the landlord of the ' King o' Denmark,' which he wouldn't 212 GALLIA. lend him more than fourpence in the shillin' on 'is score." With a patience that did him credit, Gurdon forbore to interrupt Mrs. Miles again; he em- ployed himself in very gently straightening the rugs and covers and cushions of the lounge and making the poor soul more comfortable ; but he was ready on the instant that Mrs. Miles should reach the kernel of the story to leap up and fetch a doctor. "An' I 'eard a sound," continued the good woman, who had detailed at least one family reminiscence in the meantime which Mark's ear had failed to catch, " like you was polishin' one of them parky floors with a clawth, an', aoh my ! it was 'er a-draggin' 'erself along the wall and floor to hopin the door." " What did she say to "you ?" put in Mark sharply. " Say ? She was pas' speakin' and took 'er up in my arms I did, and kerry her in 'ere on the sofa. She's been talkin' a deal of furrin talk, but wen I undress her I soon give a guess wot was up, pore young woman — not but wot I've 'eard these furrin natures 'as it easier, but I did wot I could, and got 'ot water and give 'er fermentations same as the doctor hordered me, an' made all neat, for it's a hawkward spot with illness" — " Have you had a doctor ?" Mark broke in, GALLIA. 213 feeling his brain turning with Miles's chat- ter. The woman looked at him rather sharply, and her expression, as he afterwards recalled it, puzzled him greatly. " I didn't know wot might be your wish, sir ; an' I done wot I could, bein' accustom' to illness; there's beef-tea a-makin' now, and I give 'er beef-jelly, wot I run to the chemiss for and was obliged to take 'er purse, but you'll see as one and ninepence was every bit I took, sir. It's strengthening stuff she needs and careful nursin', but then I can't leave Miles, 'e do drink that shockin' wen I'm away, and negleek 'is family something shameful, still I could stay most of the time and run 'ome hivery now and then if you was willing." " Thank you," Mark said, gladly accepting as kindness what was probably merely the avid relish of illness common to her class. " But I will have a doctor now, and if you can come every day, I will nurse her myself all night. The first thing to do is to find out what is the matter." A sharp look from the faded eye of Mrs. Miles was lost upon him. " What, dear ?" bending over Cara; "you were dancing? And did you fall? And why were you dancing so much?" His voice was very tender indeed, and his face kind and gentle as he looked at her. 214 GALLIA. A look of intelligence came into her eyes. " I was frightened, and so I thought I would dance and dance . . ." He shook his head vaguely. " Bein' no stairs to come up and down," said Mrs. Miles in a furtive undertone and glancing round the building in a depreciatory manner. " Stay by her and watch her, and I will fetch a doctor," said Mark, getting up. " Or no, better you go — you will know the neighbour- hood ; I will stay and look after her. Tell him to come at once." " There's two in the Square, but perhaps you wouldn't wish" — " Either of them ; whichever is youngest and will come out quickest : it must be past two o'clock. And you need not come back." He shut the door after her carefully, and then came back to walk to and fro in the room with a puzzled face. Once he stopped to open the big skylight, through which the pale June stars looked very far off. Gurdon was a humane man, although he had had few opportunities of making the discovery. He was now much dis- turbed in mind, and with strange accesses of unselfish kindliness assailing him. He looked frequently at Cara's flushed face and tossed hair ; sometimes he stopped and smoothed her fore- head with his hand, but for the most part he strode up and down quickly and silently, his GALLIA. 215 black evening shoes making no noise upon the boards and rugs of the studio. Three-quarters of an hour passed before the brisk step of a man outside announced the arrival of a doctor, hurried and a trifle irritable, as a man might well be who had gone to bed at twelve, after a long day, and been roused at 2.30 from his deepest sleep. He looked sharply at Mark and his evening dress, and appeared to think someone else would come forward to explain what had occurred, and what was wanted. Mrs. Miles had gone home, and the burden of the situation was with Mark. The doctor's manner and the nature of his questions caused him some embarrassment, but the seriousness of the interview made him forget it again. He could give very little information about the illness, and the doctor had to be contented with the fact that Mrs. Miles would give a full account in the morning. But Mark held the lamp while Dr. Hudson made a hurried examination, and waited eagerly for the temperature to be men- tioned. " She will do nicely if this fever can be kept down : I will send you something at once to fight that ; there is a messenger call at my house in the Square, and several all-night chemists. Inconvenient? Oh, she might be in many a worse place. Plenty of good air here, and the 216 GALLIA. quietest spot in London." He began to write a prescription on a leaf of his pocket-book. " You say you can get someone to look after her at night. Very well, but I will send in a nurse first thing in the morning, with your permission, to attend to the patient and prepare her for my visit about ten. Np, we can do nothing more now, save keep up $he strength a little and get the temperature down. To-morrow I shall be able to make a definite statement about the cause of trouble." He looked up, this keen, worldly- wise young man, and met Mark's still rather puzzled eyes. "I have no doubt I am leaving the patient in the most careful hands, meanwhile. Good-night." "When he had gone, Mark sat down by Cara in the empty, quiet studio and looked long at her little face, pale again now with a fine saffron pallor. "Poor little thing, I suppose you owe this to me," he said. CHAPTER XXII. During the fortnight that followed the party at Holland House, Gallia had been rather busy socially. A number of her mother's old friends, people whom she knew only in the traditional family way, sent invitations of a quiet kind to her; almost every day she seemed to be lunching with someone, and she appeared at a number of the fashionable afternoon concerts. In the mornings, after her ride, she more than once secured Margaret to do some shopping with her, and in the course of time a silvery grey and white plumage replaced the black of her ear- lier mourning months. Then suddenly Lord Hamesthwaite decided to make an immediate move to the Hall, and some housemaids were despatched to help the permanent staff of ser- vants there to be ready earlier for the coming of the family. Mrs. Essex and Margaret had to be prevailed upon to come sooner, for Gallia had no desire to be left alone in the country. She had appeared to fall in with her father's idea, and there was to be a constant succession of guests throughout the summer, since she refused to go abroad. x 19 217 218 GALLIA. Mrs. Leighton, immersed in the formalities of the cure at Aix, was feeling astonishingly miserable. " I am not sure that I have ever been so ill as during the first week at this atrocious place. I should leave immediately if I were not too pros- trate to travel. How infinitely preferable a nice English attack of rheumatism would be. But I needn't distress you with the wails of a tiresome old woman, particularly when I have something quite important to say, and the pains in my right arm threaten to prevent all correspondence. This, then, dear Gallia, is what troubles me. Robbie is coming home. He has not dared to write to your father since the dreadful letter he received about two months ago, the result, I have always been convinced, of an entire misconcep- tion. Spain still seems to be a very difficult country to travel in, especially when one leaves the beaten track, as Robbie in his adventurous way naturally hastened to do. He gives me the entire explanation of the gambling episode ; and you will remember I endeavoured to assure your father at the time that he was taking too severe a view altogether. It seems that Robbie had engaged a mule, and packed all the delightful draperies and embroideries he had secured upon the beast, as well as his luggage, containing, foolish boy, his reserve sum of money. At the end of an exhausting journey across the moun- GALLIA. 219 tains, he drove this beast into a stable, and actually in the time that he was eating a most unsavoury meal, the animal and all the baggage disappeared, stolen, of course. He wasted about a week in fruitless endeavours to secure the attention of the authorities, and it was only then, when he was at his last penny, that he gambled for pesetas — for his dinner really, poor boy — in the low inns and among the gipsies. I want you to have him at the Hall at once, if you can ; you will find him full of delightful stories, and you will persuade your father to be more lenient to him than he has been before. If we back him up, he says he will have no difficulty in establish- ing himself in London, now that his course of study is over." That merely made one more for Gallia's little house-party, and she remembered Eobbie as an engaging, open-natured, happy-minded fellow, who would be a certain acquisition in any country house. She came down the staircase from her own rooms after reading Mrs. Leighton's letter, dressed for going out. In the passages and on the landing were plenty of signs of a hurried flitting. The servants were at work rolling up carpets and taking down curtains, and making other preparations in view of the house being closed for three or four months. The mechanism of housekeeping was a dead letter to Gallia ; she 220 GALLIA. had no idea of the time and trouble, the myriads of small duties, that go towards managing a house. If she had known, she would have been filled with a very wholesome and active con- tempt for half of the accepted formulae; she would have instituted a sweeping simplification. Just at that moment, passing down the stairs, her eye fell on a soft-headed brush with a brass attachment in the middle of its abnormally long handle, and a wonder as to its use seized her suddenly, and she paused in idle irony with her hand on the balustrade. At that moment came a crash, a cry, and some detached screams, from behind one of the big white drawing-room doors. She hurried into the room, and her appearance seemed to add to the confusion of the knot of maid-servants gath- ered round a fallen step-ladder, opposite one of the four windows. A heap of pale yellow silk damask mixed up with the latter suggested im- mediately that a servant had fallen while taking down a curtain. As the window was some twelve feet high, there was the material for a very pretty accident, and Gallia crossed the room at her swiftest pace to see what was amiss. " Which of you is hurt?" she demanded of the astonished group, two of whom were on the floor supporting an older woman, and one me- chanically gathering up the curtain and seeming to examine it for possible damage. GALLIA. 221 "Never mind the curtain, Emily. What is this ? who has been hurt ?" " I don't know if the ladder could give way, miss, or if she overbalanced herself," the maid began. " I didn't see it myself," she went on, with the usual haste of a domestic to clear her- self in view of possible blame ; " I was over at the mantelpiece moving the corner-pieces." " It's the charwoman, miss, that was on the ladder," broke in Fraser, the second housemaid, " and I think it must have been in reaching up too high above her head. I told her to go up a step more and she'd have been more at her ease." " You told her ? How could you do such a wicked, lazy thing ? You were too idle or too frightened to go up yourselves, and so you sent an old woman up to do your work. I am ashamed to have such women in my service. Emily, go for Mrs. Bostock at once." The words fell slowly and coldly from the dispassionate Gallia. Very seldom indeed had she occasion to address any of her servants, with the exception of her own footman and her maid. She was held in the awe with which all servants regard a mistress who is habitually unconscious of their existence. The girls flushed hotly at her reprimand, but did not dare to offer any excuse. Gallia took the place of one of them beside the injured 19* 222 GALLIA. charwoman, and in a few minutes Mrs. Bostock, the housekeeper, arrived. " I think we must have a mattress and carry her to the nearest bedroom ; I fear it is serious." It was wonderful how quickly the poor soul was carried to a bachelor bedroom on the same landing, by the now eager servants, reinforced by the footman ; but it was Gallia's own hand that applied the restoratives and brought back groaning consciousness to the sufferer. Mrs. Bostock had left the room with a maid on a search for different bedding; Emily had borne a messsage to the carriage which was awaiting Gallia, and now drove off for a doctor ; and Fraser, as principal culprit, had escaped to a more sympathetic milieu in the servants' hall. Gallia was alone when the charwoman came to her senses. " It's my side, m'm, — my lady, — an' my back. Oh lor ! oh dear ! My back struck the floor and the ladder come a-top of me; I 'ope I 'aven't broke my column ! But it's my side as feels the wrinch ; it never 'as been right since a fall I 'ad in our mews when I was going with Johnnie ; stipped on the cat, I did, a nasty little sandy cat Miles kep' in the stable — 'e was drivin' for Serumfry Paget then. Oo — ooh !" "Yes; now lie still for a minute, and first drink some of this. "When you feel a little stronger, we will get your clothes off." GALLIA. 223 " Thank you, my lady. It is a gnoring pain just above the 'ip joint, an' " — " Now pray be silent, or you will exhaust your strength, and won't be able to tell the doctor how you feel," Gallia said, in her firm, quiet voice. The effect of this remonstrance lasted several minutes, no doubt by virtue of the last touch, which appealed strangely to Mrs. Miles's pride of ailment. It was Gallia who assisted her own maid to undress Mrs. Miles; it seemed to her the French- woman's hands moved fussily about the task. " Six years have I come in an' out this house, and nothink never happened," Mrs. Miles maun- dered on in an undertone. " 'Twas me as took down the drawing-rooms when they was cherry and cream — cherry and cream with gold galoon, 'ung in panels, they was" — " Can you bear me to turn you just a little, to unfasten your skirt ? That will do. ISTow, then, just a moment — yes, I am sure it pains you, but you will feel better when they are off." With that tender firmness which some women have by nature, some others learn in the hos- pitals, and most never learn at all, Gallia re- moved the poor outer clothing, multifarious in strings and pins. Further than this she hesitated at first to go : would the poor thing feel more uncomfortable to have a lady or a servant made familiar with her shifts and makeshifts ? Gallia's 224 GALLIA. good sense decided for her, and she proceeded with her task. " Me lyin' here," began the woman, in a more excited key, " and poor Missie with no one to 'ot 'er beef-tea for Jer, nurse bein' out, for I promis' to run in at dinner-time, it's only ten minutes in the bus !" " "What are you anxious about ? Do you wish a message sent to your home? That will be easily done ; I will call Emily, and you shall tell her"— " Oh, it isn't that, my lady. Oo— ooh !" " Bear up a little longer ; see, take another drink of this. There. I sha'n't take off the bodice, just loosen it upon your chest a little." An instinct taught Gallia that small soothing sentences, at short intervals, kept the patient's attention from her hurt. "Never mind," as something slipped to the floor from Mrs. Miles's shawl-spread bosom ; "it's only a letter, I'll put it on the mantel- piece"— " Oh dearie dear, whatever shall I do," the poor creature wailed suddenly. " Missie told me to be sure and send it ! I had to put it in the pillar before twelve, so as 'e'd have it early this afternoon." " Make yourself quite easy about it ! Ah, I hear the doctor coming ! I shall give orders for you to be well looked after, and shall be back in GALLIA. 225 two hours, to see you myself. The letter ? It shall be sent at once by one of the servants." Gallia took it hastily, and called a soft " Come in !" Mrs. Bostock ushered in the doctor, and after a few words of explanation, Miss Hamesthwaite hurried to the carriage. She was over-due in Hammersmith Terrace, where her mission was to prevail upon the Essexes to hasten their visit to the Hall. In the outer lobby she stopped. " Kuowles, I wish William to take this letter at once to" — she turned it over as she spoke, and her eyes fell on the address. The note was directed to " Mark Gurdon, Esq., The Colonial Office, Whitehall." But this was not what sur- prised Gallia, or convinced her that her own footman had best not deliver it. " Never mind, Knowles, I shall not require William." She got into the carriage, and sat reflecting while Hendon waited for his order. " Stop at the first boy-messenger office," she said. All the way down Kensington Koad she kept thinking. Gallia's was a very alert and ready mind, but she was puzzled to think how Mrs. Miles should be in possession of a note from a sick person, to whom she referred as " Missie," which was addressed to Mark Gurdon — in Mark Gurdon's own handwriting. CHAPTER XXIII. Two days later, Gallia and her father left for the country, and they left in Lord Hames- thwaite's favourite manner, namely, in their own carriage. Without being enormously wealthy people, they were decidedly rich, and for a man in his position Lord Hamesthwaite's expenditure was inconsiderable. He could afford, he averred, to sacrifice a pair of carriage-horses every year ; for this his coachman never failed to convey to him was what must happen if he insisted upon driving the two weary roans, fat and arti- ficially spirited, over forty miles of Surrey turn- pike in the middle of July. A second pair was therefore ordered from the Hall, to be in readi- ness at Guildford, and, covered with dust, father and daughter duly arrived at their beautiful Surrey home, which had been restored by Gallia's grandfather, and still preserved the quaint charm it had possessed as an old red-brick and timbered manor house. Those two days had been busy ones for Gallia. She had saddled herself, considering it the barest duty, with the care of the poor char- woman who had been injured in her service, 226 GALLIA. 227 and Mrs. Miles was now established in the neighbouring hospital, with two fractured ribs and an easy conscience. For had not Miss Hamesthwaite, than whom no one was more delicately reserved in the matter of befriending and patronising the poor, herself sent down to "the Mews" and arranged that one pound a week should find its way to the pocket of " Halice," the thirteen-year offspring of the drunken coachman and the poor hard- worked soul, who had said piteously, and without any sense of its humour, " If you'll believe me, my lady, I've never 'ad a day's illness nor a day's 'oliday since I was married," regarding both as equally desirable respites. These arrangements had not been concluded without a second and even third conversation with Mrs. Miles, in which further information regarding Mark Gurdon's connection with " lit- tle Missie," as well as the illness of the latter, had formed a large part of Mrs. Miles's super- fluous running commentary. The accident and the attention she was exciting made Mrs. Miles more talkative than usual, and she insisted upon choosing Gallia as the recipient of her confi- dences. Gallia had no experience in dealing with women of this class, — indeed, Miles was the first specimen she had come across, — and although she sometimes succeeded in stemming the tor- 228 GALLIA. rent of wholly irrelevant matter, and always succeeded in greatly impressing the charwoman, she every now and then became inundated and swamped by fresh streams, and acquired perforce much private information concerning the inner life of an acquaintance. Putting aside her an- noyance at having learnt certain private facts about a man she knew, the whole thing had, from many aspects and for many reasons, an effect on Gallia's mind. The day after her arrival at the Hall, no visi- tors being yet come, she went briskly out to the stables to choose which horse she would ride. She felt the necessity of a long time of thought, and she knew nothing so conducive to it as hours in the saddle by field and fallow, by copse and hill. The stables were a great feature at the Hall, and Lord Hamesthwaite was, distantly and quite ignorantly, very proud of his horses. For him- self, two would have been sufficient; the big white horse he drove in town, and the solid, fiddle-headed cob he rode in the country. But with Gallia it was different. Her pair of skewbalds and double dog-cart were known in every village in the "Weald ; nothing could beat her little Norfolk trotter in the dark-green cart ; and her particular pride was a perfectly ap- pointed Devonshire donkey jingle, in which a very fleet dark jackass flipped along the road on pointed hoofs. GALLIA. 229 This time she rode a half-bred Arab, capable of a ten-mile canter which bade fair to send its rider to sleep, and took her way by a bridle-path through a wood of chestnuts. A smiling morning of perfect summer did not reflect smiles on Gallia's face. She rode along, wrapt up in her own thoughts, unconscious of flowers and birds ; observing the road before her and her horse in that accurate but mechanical fashion common to all good riders. Her face was in its severest mask. She was paler than usual, owing perhaps to fatigue, perhaps merely to mental tension. She was searching diligently in her brain for the reason of a sensation she had experienced. She was perplexed because it seemed to her she had been guilty of a logical inconsistency. The proposition, as she phrased it, was this : she had heard that Mark Gurdon had a mistress. That was the initial fact. On hearing this, she had been conscious of strong moral revulsion. And that was the crux : considering what her own view of the subject had always been, that put her about. Why should she experience a sense of nausea on hearing as much about any man? Why particularly about Gurdon, whom she had met less than a dozen times, and merely liked with a liking the most ordinary ? She reflected upon this without any solution^ 20 230 GALLIA. occurring to her, and her manner of reflection was peculiar. Just as she would have all the world be fair and honest with all the world, so she was fair and honest with herself. She re- garded herself, very reasonably, as two people — her reason as one person, her feelings as another. She imagined in her mind a kind of platform from which first her reason spoke, and, as it were, stepped down ; in the open moment that fol- lowed, her feelings made themselves heard in the same place. At length it struck her that until she could discover whether the fact of a man keeping a mistress would disgust her, should she hear it of any casual acquaintance, no conclusion could be come to. " My feeling is so odd and vague in this matter that 1 think it must be a sort of elemental sex impulse speaking in me, and not personal feeling at all," was the leaf of wisdom that floated from the big tree and fell at length upon the surface of her mind. " I must put the question to some other girl." Miss Janion's personality flashed before her, and she smiled — smiled, and then laughed aloud, so that Mahmoud turned one ear backward shiveringly. It would be amusing to have Miss Janion down when Lord Shillinglee and the others came, for instance ; but the ques- tion should be put to Margaret during the first private talk they had together. GALLIA. 231 She gathered up her reins, and the light press- ure of her leg behind his girth opened Mahmoud like a pair of scissors, and he bounded off for a gallop. " There is a human soil in human thought of which the oak trees, thank God, know nothing !" Gallia laughed again at the confused feeling she had attempted to put into words, and Mahmoud, taking that as an encouragement, thrashed his feet into the deep summer dust of the road, that stifled the green acorns with white powder. "When she had swallowed sufficient of the tonic of a gallop, Gallia settled her horse to his exquisite Eastern pace. Past a common with necklaces of young geese upon it ; then a halt while a gate was deftly opened, Mahmoud breast- ing it at the instant Gallia's crop loosened the catch ; forward again, this time on a wood road, where squirrels and partridges crossed almost beneath the horse's nose ; past openings that showed sudden cornfields; past hazel coppices thick with green cobs ; past tangles of ripening bramble-berries; past farms and new ricks of hay, smelling stronger, and a thousand times more sweetly, than the corner of Bond Street and Burlington Gardens, till at length, outside the village of Hiddenfold, Gallia drew rein. " Ah, it is too hot for this," she said, casting back her open coat and wondering why she had let herself get so hot. " I shall positively 232 GALLIA. have to see if I can get some lemonade some- where." Mahmoud blew a portentous snuffle, the best sound save a whinny that can be heard from a horse, when Gallia brought up at the door of a little thirteenth-century inn. As everyone knew Miss Hamesthwaite by sight, attendance to her wants was swift. The homely ginger pop from a stone bottle completely re- freshed her, and she drank it slowly, unabashed by the eyes of two dusty cyclists who, with purple faces and necks above their grey club clothes, were irrigating lime-choked channels by means of a quart pot of shandy-gaft'. Gallia's roving glance penetrated easily to the interior of a tiny sitting-room on the left of the door, and she was not much astonished to recog- nise a friend extended in a long basket chair in the shade of the window geraniums. At his full length, in cool grey, a grey crush hat still upon his head, waistcoatless, with a white silk shirt rising and falling to every breath, lay Dark Es- sex, sound asleep. The table was covered with papers and books and other signs of industry, but the worker, looking amazingly handsome, lay stretched beside his tools, overcome by the warmth of the day. Though she had heard lie was at " a little pub in Surrey," as he had phrased it to his sister, she had not known that Hiddenfold, only some dozen miles from the GALLIA. 233 Hall, was the spot lie had chosen. Looking round, she did not wonder at his choice. It was a delicious village. " I rather wish he were not here," Gallia said, as she finished her drink hastily, " and yet, why not? "Why not? On the whole, I am glad. He is the one person in the world I can talk to." With some caution she put Mahmoud on the turf and crossed the green rather than risk waking the sleeper by riding past his window. 20* CHAPTER XXIV. The first few days of Margaret's stay were de- voted by Gallia to giving her riding-lessons in the park, and driving her about with her mother in the afternoons. Once or twice Gallia had mooted an invitation to Hubert Essex to walk over and lunch or be driven over to dine, but always Margaret had gently negatived the plan. " He is so hard at work," she said ; " if you would like me to be frank, I will say that he would be angry with me for letting you know his whereabouts." " That would be very silly of him," observed Gallia, smiling. " And, you know, it is possible to refuse an invitation." " Of course, but he would think he ought to call, and I don't suppose he has more than one suit here." " Men's sense of etiquette — which must pro- ceed from vanity — is a thing I cannot keep pace with," Gallia remarked, blending a touch of con- tempt with her indifference. "And there is another reason," Margaret said, with reluctance. " Of course there is another reason. You are 234 GALLIA. 235 afraid my attractions might prove too strong for his sensitive nature. Naturally I divined that." Margaret laughed. " Well, you know, it wouldn't he at all odd if he did fall in love with you, but I should be sorry, because it would only make him unhappy," she rejoined, with some spirit. Gallia smiled out over the park. " You may laugh," continued Margaret. " I know you don't believe in men having feelings like ours." " On the contrary, not like ours, but simply the counterpart of ours." " Hubert is a curious silent creature, but that is not to say that he has no heart." " Very true." " Gallia, you are laughing again ? What has made you so hard upon men generally V " Me hard upon men ? What a wild idea ! I like men extremely. I'm more at ease with them than I am with women; I've known far more of them intimately. I'm not sure that I don't think their make-up much honester than women's. How can you call me hard upon them?" She argued with the greatest good- humour, for she was attached to Margaret, and liked Margaret to assault her. " Simply because I have dared to hurst their cocoons ; to wind off some of the strange silky poetry that has been wrapped round them by generations of women and their fellow men. I don't believe all this 236 GALLIA. about men's feelings, because I've never come across any of it; that's why. I explain such evidences in a totally different way, and I claim that my way is a great deal more in accordance with the facts. There you have it." " The long and the short of it is, that you don't believe in love," said Margaret simply, and with a small air of offence. " But you will fall in love yourself some day, and then you will see what it is like." Gallia's cheek darkened for a second, then her face cleared and she leaned far back in the win- dow-seat they were occupying, and passed her hand up and down the shining cold edge of the old-fashioned rose-patterned chintz curtain. There fell a long silence between them. Gallia felt no inclination to make any reply : she did not even realise that the moment was one emi- nently suited to confidences; and if she had, it would have made no difference. She had never experienced, in all her life, the faintest desire to confide in anybody. This reserved habit of mind made her, at one and the same time, in some things so wise, and in many things so ignorant. Margaret saw her flush, and felt a moment's expectation; then she divined that, though Gallia might be, or have been, in love, she had no desire to describe her experiences. She broke silence, therefore, in a half-whispering voice. GALLIA. 237 " I have heard it said," she began curiously, " that every man is a widower when he proposes." " Ah ! Have you indeed ?" Gallia was roused from her abstraction and gleamed with dark humour upon the speaker. "And yet," Margaret continued, in a hesi- tating manner and with a little lurking hope in her voice, — " And yet, one always hopes, if one did fall in love some day, it would be with a man who had been as little of a widower as possible !" The humour of this speech threatened to over- come Gallia's gravity; in spite of Margaret's touching earnestness, she would have given way to a strong desire to laugh, perhaps, unless she had had a very clear motive in hearing the girl's views frankly and confidently expressed. " Instinctively, then, you dislike the idea ?" " Oh, I think it dreadful ! Everyone must." "Do you think it dreadful all the time — or only when it is brought home to you in connec- tion with one of your acquaintances ?" " "Well, of course, it's a thing one tries to think of as little as possible^" Margaret said emphati- cally. Gallia noted this with a certain bird-like alert- ness of glance. " But every time it does come into my head it horrifies me ; of course, more than ever about a man I know." 238 GALLIA. For the moment Gallia could not be quite sure whether this referred to an experience, or whether Margaret spoke prospectively. She waited. The speaker continued musingly — "As a rule, I suppose it is just about men whom you know that you don't hear of it." A caustic smile hovered on Miss Hames- thwaite's lips. " I believe it is a canon of decency to conceal such facts ; one owes it to one's women friends, men think. But, Margaret, if you knew and liked a man, — if he was a friend, you know, — you wouldn't dislike him if you discovered that he had a mistress, for instance ?" Margaret turned a much-startled face from the window. " How" — she began, and then suddenly re- covered her composure. "I shouldn't dislike him — as a friend — I suppose." " But— as a lover ?" " Oh," she cried quickly, " I could not bear him as a lover !" " But, my dear girl, men being what they are, is that reasonable ?" " Oh, there is a difference between believing a thing to be generally the case, and knowing it to be the fact. Oh, do say there is." " Oh, surely. And there's a difference to an ostrich who has his head buried — or hasn't, as time and opportunity have allowed." GALLIA. 239 " Gallia, you are fearfully severe. I suppose there are some girls — the Gertrude sort of girls, you know — who don't mind at all. But most girls — of some heart and feeling — most girls do feel it dreadfully." "If a man were here, he would exclaim piously, ' And God grant there may always be such girls in the world, or what hope has a man of keeping straight1.' " Gallia laughed de- lightedly. "Yes, we have proved there are three sorts of women. The bad ones, to fan the flame of men's vices — a red flame that, for the sake of the picturesque ; the good girls, to feed the white flame of their virtues; and the in- between girl, who blows neither fire, and can warm herself indifferently at both." " But you, Gallia, you ? You have never said what you think of it." " Oh, for me, I would love any man who at- tracted my mind, who shared my tastes — I mean my sort of love, you know; but it would be independent of any idea of marriage. To a certain extent, then, and with regard to marry- ing, I think my ideas on other points lead to my preferring the ordinary man." This she said very thoughtfully, and with a marked, earnest voice. " There are a lot of passionless men about nowadays," she went on in an easier tone, " and it would be terrible to marry one by mis- take. Yes, I have decided. It is quite reason- 24:0 GALLIA. able— which is the main thing. I shall make no fuss about it if my future husband has a past — of a reasonable colour." " I think — if I loved a man" — Margaret's face and voice partook of an ideally exquisite qual- ity as she spoke — "I think I could forgive him." Gallia gazed at her in admiration. " You are the being biology will never explain. You keep alive the old tradition about soul, and angels, and saints, and spirits. JSo scientist living but would forswear his whole life's labour for you if he saw you at this moment ! Wouldn't he, now?" " Nonsense, Gallia ! I am nothing of the kind.'* She laughed charmingly. " Though, of course, I know" — with a great attempt at frank- ness— " that I am pretty." "You beautiful, silly soul! I believe you honestly think that's all that's the matter with you. Come down, and let us get the letters which have just trotted across the park on Punch's back." They ran downstairs together, and fell upon the post-bag in the hall. " Ah, more excitement ! The great man from Africa arrives in London to-morrow, and — good- ness ! — this is from Robbie Leighton. He's in Paris. He's coming — when ? Oh, I'm to expect him when I see him." GALLIA. 241 Margaret made some comment or other, but her pensiveness lasted all the afternoon. Per- haps she was going to be called upon to forgive him — a part women have ever loved to play. 21 CHAPTEE XXV. Quite the typical country house party was gathered beside the cedars one afternoon some few days later. It was the kind of day upon which no object was quite still before the eye, every tree and flower seemed to tremble, rather to shiver lightly, in the gold heat, which was so intense as to appear solid, corporeal, to lie like a weight upon the earth. While tea went on under the trees, the light oak luggage-cart could be seen upon the winding drive making its way downhill towards the high road and the station. Just in front had passed a pretty pair-horse victoria, and it was quite in keeping with stable etiquette that the victoria drawn by the two fretting thoroughbreds should start slowly in advance, and the luggage-cart, which flew easily, behind a less important equine character, should come after. John Denyer was expected from London, where he had passed a few days on his arrival, and whither Lord Hamesthwaite had travelled three times to see him on important business. From one of these visits the Colonial Secre- tary had returned with a question to put to his 242 GALLIA. 243 daughter. It had taken her a good deal by sur- prise. "Ask Mr. Gurdon down here? Oh, surely, if you like. But why am I to write ? You know him, papa, I suppose better than I do ?" " I have seen him perhaps three times socially. I met him at your Aunt Celia's one night a little time ago j and I have happened to meet him twice, or three times since" — " And you met him at a dinner at the Reform last year, for I recollect you told me of it," Gallia put in. "Very true, no doubt; but it had escaped me." " And in your own department too !" " In my own department I have of course been aware of him, my dear, but I have not known him." " I suppose he is a mere menial in the depart- ment?" said Gallia wickedly, for she was not above laughing occasionally at her father's pom- posity. For a wonder Lord Hamesthwaite de- cided to take this seriously. " I greatly wish, Gallia, that you had acquired some of your dear mother's genius for compre- hending important social matters ! Mr. Gurdon is a very remarkable young man. His sagacity," Lord Hamesthwaite continued, as though he were referring to a water-spaniel, — " his sagacity is amazing. Quite amazing. I am not mistaken 244 GALLIA. when I tell you that Gurdon is a man with a career before him. He is not yet thirty, and he has been singled out. Besides, he is most gen- tlemanly and of charming manners. Denyer took a great liking to him when they met in Africa." " Oh ! So he met Denyer in Africa ? I never heard him say so." " You have indicated his greatest talent. lie is a young man who does not feel it necessary to say everything that he knows or that he has done." Gallia might not have a head for affairs, but she was quite sharp enough to know that this was very high praise. She had often heard her Aunt Celia say that Mark should be helped on, and she was able to perceive that he was in a fair way to have her father's hand reached down to him. "Shall we therefore say Thursday?" Lord Hamesthwaite inquired, with a smile. He was a great deal too courteous to leave his daughter with the recollection of something like a repri- mand from him in her mind. "Yes; I'll ask him for Thursday, papa." Lord Hamesthwaite turned rather nervously towards her on his way to the door. " You don't dislike Mr. Gurdon, Gallia, I hope." " Tout au contraire," she replied lightly, "I like him very much." GALLIA. 245 The discussion ended, the note was written, Gurdon was free, and would be delighted, and consequently arrived in correct form in time for luncheon on Thursday. The same afternoon, a dishevelled young man stepped out of a station fly, with a battered brown bag in his hand, and bade the footman be careful of the foreign-look- ing package he was taking from the hands of the driver. " Good gracious!" exclaimed Gallia, who was at that moment issuing from the hall door, ac- companied by Margaret. "It is Robbie." Mar- garet could have told her as much, for it was indeed no other. The young man swept a Spanish sombrero from his head with an insouciance that was native and a flourish that was foreign, and dis- closed the astonishing effect produced by a per- son having hair much fairer than his skin. He shook Gallia heartily by the hand, keeping his eyes well upon her face and his sombrero at his side. " Miss Essex I once had the pleasure of know- ing in Paris," he said, with a neat little empha- sis, just marked enough for Margaret to hear upon the " once." "I have not forgotten you at all," said the exquisite Margaret, with a tender music in her voice, and upon her face a smile only just large enough to love. 21* 246 GALLIA. " Good heavens ! passionately attached to each other, I declare," said Gallia inwardly, and re- flected further that a charming scamp like Mr. Robert Leighton was precisely the kind of being Margaret was framed to waste herself upon. Robbie's behaviour from the first hour of his arrival left no doubt of his feeling to Margaret, and Gurdon, for one, observed it with much peace of mind. He was extravagantly charming to Mrs. Essex — utterly enthralled by Margaret, of whom he made sketches in a dozen fictitious characters, and of whom he immediately undertook a serious portrait. This very portrait was under discussion as they sat at tea, awaiting, on Gallia's part with some excitement, the arrival of John Denyer. " Now look here," Robbie exclaimed, leaping up wildly with a teacup in his hand. " My idea is to have her here — Miss Essex, do you mind — just half a minute ? Thanks — by this pink peony tree. In this same pink gown. No hat on. Drenched in sunlight — you see ?" " She will have sunstroke to a certainty," cried her mother. " Face, hair, hands, all that wonderful gold shade," Robbie went on, with unabated enthusi- asm,— " that grey atmospheric gold ; and then the peonies and the dress — masses of bluish- purple." GALLIA. 247 " But they are pink," suggested someone diffi- dently. " Actually, but not relatively !" cried Robbie, with much fervour. " Actually we know they are pink. Relatively we see they are bluish-purple. One paints what one sees." An impressive silence followed tbis explanation of the method of art. " Then I am of course going to do a head in the old Italian manner, with a gold background. Gold is Miss Essex's inevitable setting. But it is among flowers that a large portrait should seize her. Dear Miss Essex — is it troubling you too much ? Just over here. The pink of your gown is simply inspired! I see a most fascinating scheme, by using that sheet of poker-red nastur- tiums as a background." They strolled off together, amid a chorus of laughter and shrieks of horror ; but the earnest- minded artist and his victim heeded them not, and it may be stated in Robbie's defence that he did paint that picture, and that it acted as an extinguisher to some two hundred and fifty other pictures in the centre of a room at the Grafton Galleries. Gurdon was a silent member of the party. He had wondered why no one wanted to paint Gallia, a slim, silvery figure with a dense blue- green feathered arm of the cedar behind her. Her old plainness of attire was no longer 248 GALLIA. indulged in. "Whether she thought it seemly, as the hostess of a large establishment, or whether it was the outcome of but another personal whim, Gallia had chosen to be rather magnificent in her costume of late. From her head, on which she wore one of those French rustic hats, with cobwebs of lace draped over the brim, so unbecoming to almost every Englishwoman, to her feet and ankles in their silvery-grey stockings and grey leather buckled shoes, she was perfect. Sitting with her legs crossed, the dove-coloured ruffle of her petticoat — pale ashes of roses tint — was a delight to see, and perhaps it was because he enjoyed look- ing at her so much, that Mark found little to say. Mrs. Essex was not a talkative woman, but she was a good listener, and little Lord Shillinglee, a young man of enormous wealth and no fixed po- litical opinions, was giving her plenty to listen to. "Ah, you see they haven't got the money, Mrs. Essex; these Radical fellows '11 promise anything to a man who will back them up a bit with some money. I'm a bit of a Eadical myself, you know, though this lawn isn't the place to say so, eh? And I really shouldn't mind going in with them, if it was only to hear the other side curse — I beg your pardon, Mrs. Essex, but they would, you know." He dis- solved in a malicious little chuckle, and shook furtively within his baggy clothing. GALLIA. 249 Gallia looked down at him, where he sprawled awkwardly at one side of her, and then over to Mark sprawling gracefully at the other. Her mind was busy with the contrast when the carriage came up to the front door. Lord Hamesthwaite at once went to receive the short, well-built man who got down from it. " Ah, there is Mr. Denyer," said Mrs. Essex, and the eyes of the party were for the moment directed to the group. A few minutes later the great man was among them. Mark Gurdon's eye never left Miss Hamesthwaite when the intro- duction was being performed. All her whims of manner, the scorns and ironies and indiffer- ences of youth dropped from her, and left a picture of the woman she would be in a few years' time, when her slow development had pro- gressed. Only the ease and dignity natural to her posi- tion, as well as the graciousness that was her own, appeared in the pleasant words of welcome that she spoke. A certain glow rose in Gurdon's mind, as he caught this glimpse of the stately and social Gallia he had seen once before, with a difference, at Holland House. Entirely with- out " beauty manners" at all times, Gallia some- times lacked something of the influence the man- ners of a beautiful young woman give her. It is most fortunate that the generality of beautiful people behave as though they were beautiful — 250 GALLIA. for this, not their actual claims of form and feature, is what the mass of mankind observes and responds to. Denver had been moving among the groups, but he came and stood beside Gallia and looked across the park. The figure of Mr. Essex, in his light-grey clothes, was seen crossing the grass to the house. " Ah, Miss Hamesthwaite, can you guess what it is to a man whose eyes have been accustomed to the far lovelier flowers of our Dark Continent, to see again a sward, moist and velvety, freckled with daisies ?" Gallia responded intently to the touch of real emotion in the man's voice. She was inter- ested. Her greeting to Essex was unconsciously shortened. " How exquisite your Surrey is ! A garden, a series of parterres. One of oak forest, one of chestnut plantation, one of meadow grass, one of corn or flowers." " It must seem wonderfully small to you. But it is rich, really very rich — and would go so much further if the people knew anything about exploiting it. You, in Africa, can compel set- tlers to the use of more scientific means of cul- tivation ; nothing compels them here !" Gallia spoke with a note of regret and bitterness, then stopped to give Mr. Denyer a cup of the tea that had just been brought out. GALLIA. 251 " Expensive business trying to start new agri- cultural methods in this country!" remarked Lord Shillinglee, who had abandoned agriculture for coal, and saw no reason to regret it. " Very, eh, Gallia ?" cried Robbie, with the air of acute mischief. " Let me see, what did your van cost when you were so hot on agricultural reform ?" " Miss Hamesthwaite, this is news !" cried Mark, much interested. " How much truth is there in the accusation of philanthropy ?" Gallia turned to him, smiling. " I'm afraid a good deal," she replied. " Others enjoy telling that story more than I do — ask papa about it." Lord Hamesthwaite appeared nothing loth to provide details. " Ah, those were the days of our enthusiasm," he said in a good-natured, quizzing fashion. ""We attended the classes at an agricultural college throughout a whole session. Then we started a van and selected our own teachers." " Then it was partly your scheme ?" inquired Mrs. Essex. "Not at all! I was severely neutral. This young woman did the whole thing. Let me see — what did the van teach, Gallia ?" "Farmyard Economics," said Gallia briefly, suppressing a smile. ■ A low, delighted chuckle from Essex greeted the reply. 252 GALLIA. " It wasn't agriculture, it was simply, as I say, Farmyard Economics we wanted to teach. We weren't in connection with, far less in opposition to, any of the efforts made by the societies ; but I thought, and for that matter still think, there was room for the practical enlightened common sense our people talked. My two young men lectured in turns in the van." " Of course free?" from Gurdon. " Oh, certainly, free !" " The expense was all upon the other side," said Eobbie, laughing. " It cost a pretty penny to compel them to come in — to the van, didn't it, Gallia?" " You will never be happy till I tell you what it did cost," Gallia said, looking over to him. " For how long did you pursue the idea ?" Denyer inquired. "For a season, commencing in the middle of February and continuing to the beginning of June." " Well, it cost just a fraction over a thousand pounds," said Gallia reluctantly. This statement excited much delighted laughter. " Farmyard Economics !" murmured Essex in a tone of irresistible gravity. Gallia swept round upon him. "Well, I paid two young men, bought two horses from papa — and he let me have them very cheap, I remember they were £40 apiece. Then GALLIA. 253 I had to have the van built. It was a beautiful van, painted in grass-green and corn-colour, with appropriate mottoes — no, I will not divulge the mottoes round the top. That van cost over £200, although I designed every bit of it myself" — There was more laughter, in which Gallia joined frankly. " But what industry and application on your part, Miss Hamesthwaite !" Denyer said, looking admiringly upon the beautiful face. Gallia coloured. "I was just growing up," she said, more seriously, and Avith a return to the irony of her ordinary mood. " I had been too well fed, I suppose, all my life, and I had a good deal of superfluous energy to work off. Besides, I was just at the age of devotion and anxiety to do good, and that sort of thing. It didn't last long, and of course I see the folly of it now." This speech affected various of her hearers very differently. Gurdon's face, in spite of his enjoyment of the details of her scheme, had been alight with in- terest and admiration. He had thought that Gallia affairie would be more charming a picture — a reality — than any other Gallia. He thought that eagerness and warmth and interest must have greatly become her dark beauty, which a touch of too much cynicism made somewhat inhuman. 22 254 GALLIA. Denyer, experienced man and diplomat, leader, organizer, financier, and ruler, was interested too, because he was faced by something he did not understand, and could not account for. To Denyer nothing that he did not understand was small or unimportant. The mere fact that he did not understand it gave it a certain importance in his eyes. Essex, with eyes half-shut and blinking at long intervals beneath his hat brim, scrutinised less her face than her mental attitude. The mere details of her expression were less noticed by him than a scarcely perceptible uneven shifting of her figure. " In Miss Hamesthwaite's mind philanthropy appears to rank as an intellectual nettle-rash," he observed critically. " Some people get nettle- rash at forty." Gallia had fallen into a smiling melancholy. "It's usually a youthful disease, all the same," she said. " I have been so long grow- ing up," she continued, with an air as though she had just perceived the fact. " You know when you are grown up because you accept things. I scarcely can yet, I want to fight everything and have everything new and made new again." Denyer and Gurdon smiled discreetly and politely in admiration of her lighted face. " What an innocent lady !" said Essex sweetly. GALLIA. 255 " Still at the age of comparatives. Good. Bad. Indifferent." She turned to him. " Prophesy, if you like," she cried. " I know you want to! That I shall come to an even mean, yes ? "Well, it is quite possible." CHAPTER XXVI. There are only two kinds of people in society, and each kind is admittedly equally tedious. There is the person who thinks one should " be oneself" at all hazards, and the person who thinks that at no hazard should one be oneself, but always someone else. At the first blush, the first-named commends himself most to an honest mind, but before de- claring for him it may be well to pause. Change and recreation are the inevitable food of man. Sooner or later the human being who has decided in favour of "being oneself" will take a holiday, draw a long breath, and decide, for refreshment's sake, to be someone else. It is at this juncture that you may meet him, and how are you to know ? Equally inconvenient, and even more common, is the second breed of human — he whose creed perceives a certain indecency, at any rate an im- politeness and an inexpediency, in being one- self, and who is customarily engaged in being someone else. This person is equally certain to pack his bag, so to say ; expand his chest, and, with defiance in his eye and custom beneath his heel, decide to " be himself." And if at this 256 GALLIA. 257 point you have fallen in with him — well, how are you to know ? The worst of the business is, that it is usually on the occasion of a handsome crisis in their lives that people behave in this way. And if you yourself are mixed up in the crisis— if it is your crisis too ? At any rate, there is comfort in knowing that a crisis is the finest setting for a mistake. Seldom, if ever, does a mistake have fair play and become fully recognised unless it is made at a crisis. Fortunately, it usually is, and that is why we hear so much about mistakes. When Dark Essex kissed and passionately loved Gallia in the Cloisters of Westminster — was he being himself or someone else ? And was it his moment of change, or his age of cus- tom ? Had he prefaced his abandon with this unspoken flash of thought : " By heavens, I'll act like any other man" ? Or with this : " For once, then, a mad once, I'll let myself go" ? Gallia had often wondered. So had Essex. It formed an interesting speculation for his leisure moments, and to facilitate its study he sought Gallia's so- ciety— or rather her neighbourhood — from time to time. As a part of this seeking, he decided to accept the invitation for the day on Hindhead. The advent of Miss Janion to the Hall had decided Gallia on making this expedition; she, entertained a wholesome fear of the "maiden- • r 22* 258 GALLIA. up-to-date," if left, for whole consecutive hours, loose about the house and grounds. Gertrude was a person who liked to " do something." She came down in the best of clothes and conse- quently in the best of spirits too, prepared to do any number of things, and in appropriate dresses. " Shillinglee ?" she cried, as Gallia ran over the names of the house party. " How amusing ! How is it, I wonder, that one never goes to a country house without meeting the man one last refused? And he always takes you down to dinner, too." " Well, in point of fact, I had" — Gallia began vaguely. "I know! Of course; you had arranged it! My dear, don't alter the table for me. I've gone through it with others, and I can again." Gallia laughed. "You'll accept him this time," she said. " Shall I? I believe I shall. He said so the other day at the Prince's garden party, I remem- ber. What a gathering! never in all my life have I seen" — and so the chitter-chatter had run on. While the household was still at breakfast, there was heard the heavy clopping of under- bred hoofs upon the drive, and when they looked out, there was Essex, mounted on some strange quadruped he had hired from his inn at Hidden- fold. GALLIA. 259 " Ah, but you haven't felt him trot !" he said, with academic gravity, as he came into the breakfast hall and shook hands. "You see he is accustomed to working front horse in a team of three. I call him, most incorrectly, the Teamster." " Well, I think you had better abandon him and see what we can do," Lord Hamesthwaite called from his little table near the fire. Breakfast was agreeably broken up at three little tables, and Gallia and Margaret were in a square window embrasure, supported by Gurdon and Lord Shillinglee. Robbie was described as not up yet. Mrs. Essex was described as not down yet. Gertrude was described as not dressed yet. Everyone admitted that it was a lovely day. Mr. Essex sank into a chair and tapped his boots. Gallia noted, with a feeling of dislike, when she handed him a peach with a bit of ice in place of the stone, that his feet were too small. In the Cloisters, just when he took her hands, she had observed that his hands were too small. It was a blemish in so handsome a man; a blemish that gave her a feeling of discomfort. They were to start in twenty minutes. " JS"ow may I order you something that corre- sponds to one's idea of a horse — or will you prefer driving ?" she said hospitably. 260 GALLIA. For a second the crazed suggestion lightened in Essex's brain that he would first like to know if she were riding or driving. Then he reflected, sensibly, that of course he wouldn't have cared to know anything of the kind. Any woman would have perceived that Gallia's snowy spotted muslin was never put on to be taken off again in such a hurry. In her hat she had followed Margaret's plan ; it arched eave-like above her hair ; but over it, as she was driving, she had carried a broad wisp of incredibly soft French lisse, which broke in a foaming bow under her chin. Beside her, Margaret, in the green of young willows, and a hat trimmed with their garlands, seemed the most delectable of summer morsels. Gertrude wore a coaching dress from Paris, which had to be seen to be credited. In time they started. Gallia drove Mr. Denyer behind her Norfolk trotter. The main party came on the coach, Lord Shillinglee proudly exercising his only known and proven talent, handling with beautiful dexterity what Gallia called her scratch team. The picturesquely English start from the fine old house was greatly enhanced by the solitary equestrian. Mr. Essex had abandoned the Team- ster to the heaviest oats the brute had ever en- countered, and was mounted on Gallia's black hunter. This exquisite beast had not done a GALLIA. 261 day's work for many months, and only enough exercise to keep him in condition. "When he came out of the stable, shining like a looking- glass, and as supple as a Persian cat, Gallia apologised for his flesh. " If you are determined to ride, you shall at least have a good day," she said, as she looked over his hitting with a careful eye. " Spain's paces are really divine." Spain proceeded to illustrate this the moment his rider's weight was in the saddle. "You could ride him on a thread of silk," Gallia said proudly, as she watched the beast playing with his feet, " hut you'll soon see what Spain is made of." " Liquorice and aguardiente, I should think," said Robbie. Gurdon looked on, and wished he had been riding also. 3$o man should miss an oppor- tunity of riding when he wants to make an im- pression on a woman, provided he never loses his temper with a horse and can ride. " When you first went to Spain, how did you make yourself understood in the wild places?" an obvious association of ideas led Margaret to ask, as they bowled down the avenue. " Oh, I learnt some Spanish in Paris ; short sentences, you know. There was a little girl there, daughter of an old model, who put lots of useful tips in my way. Of course you remem- 262 GALLIA. ber young Lemuel, Gurdon !" He leaned over and threw this question behind Lord Hames- thwaite's shoulders to Mark. " Oh, yes, perfectly," Gurdon answered, won- dering what had put the girl into Robbie's mind. But he was destined to receive no information, for Robbie was a scatter-brain, and any notions of sequence in conversation were foreign to his type. Gurdon had excellent reason not to forget the girl; at that moment he had in his pocket a brief note from her, forwarded from his club. She was still in Brighton ; she was almost strong. "It was so gay and jolly after town; she hoped he was amusing himself wherever he was. She had got the cheque all right. The doctor thought another fortnight would quite set her up ; he was such a nice doctor; quite young; he had sent her tickets for two afternoon concerts." He mentally conned over all the short, shallow sen- tences. He was sorry for the girl, not because of her position, but because of her nature. She must so certainly go one way. A man's most pleasing inconsistency is his earnest pity of an unfortunate. It gives the good people hope of his redemption ; it assures the average, clear- headed people that there is no possible hope of hers. He was sitting where he could see a stretch of exquisite country on every side of him ; feeling the exhilaration in the light rush of summer air ; GALLIA. 263 within touch of the fluttering laces that came warm from Margaret's neck and tapped his cheek, and were recovered and apologised for, made fast and blown loose again, — Margaret, the woman he had at one time thought he loved. In front of him, a bright speck upon the road, sometimes basely swallowed by a covetous hedge curve or a greedy group of trees, was the little cart crowned by the white figure of Gallia. Sitting there, it struck him that surely no man ever saw the cobweb threads of his destiny so thickly floating in the air before him. Now one tickled his face and now another. Now it was Margaret and her whilom charm that he thought of; now it was Gallia and the strong fascination she had for him. Then it was the letter in his pocket. He remembered that other coach-drive in Paris two years ago, when he had sat beside Mont Voisin and talked horse-breeding in the latest cuvee of Paris French — when he had been troubled by those underthoughts about his career. Then he had not been getting on. Since ? "Well, since had come his private secretaryship — not to the man he wanted, but still, to a very good man. Then Denyer's return home, unexpected, too good to hope for, as it had seemed. And a few chance words must have passed between Denyer and Lord Hamesthwaite. The Colonial Secre- tary must not know what he had owed, frankly and directly, to the discretion of one humble 264 GALLIA. underling in the big office ; an underling who, happening to have a little money, had conceived the idea of spending his two months' rest in Africa, the country whose name was under his eyes some fifty times a day. Lord Hamesthwaite must know, or wherefore this sudden patronage ? Mark was far too clever to think of it as any- thing else. Life seen from this coach-top was somewhat different indeed ! His alertness had served him very well. So had money which he had put away carefully when his father died, and there was more of it left yet. A less acute young Englishman would never have imagined it worth his while to take the particular journey Mark had taken ; to fall into intercourse with the particular men Mark had thought it well to meet ; to get to know the facts of a case as Mark had got to know them ; to earn the personal commendation of the strong man on, the spot, John Denyer ; to ignore the fact of his connection with the big office at home as Mark had ignored it; to come home and hold his tongue about the whole business as Mark had held his. "Distrait, am I? I beg your pardon!" he said, in answer to a playful poke from Mrs. Essex. " I was thinking about the last time I was coaching ; it was from Paris to Auteuil and back. I was thinking of the astonishing differ- ence in the outlook." GALLIA. 265 "Ah, quite so. The races, I suppose? Oh, a very gay scene in France, of course. I remem- ber, when I paid my daughter a visit, we were driving, and saw the people coming hack from Longchamps. Different indeed ! One could not imagine a sweet Surrey road holding such a company." They were pulling up the steep winding ascent to Hindhead, the breath of the pines was about them, the air was full of the hum of ardent bees constraining the heather to an early bloom. Upon the links of road visible some mile or two behind was Essex on the slim black Spain. In front was the green cart, with the brilliant Norfolk bay throwing himself at his collar, and Gallia's smiling face turned backward, as it seemed, looking at him. Gurdon's road had changed indeed. 23 CHAPTER XXVII. "You see, it's not as though I had a sixpence in the world." Mr. Leighton raised himself to a more upright position on the heather and made the familiar gesture of pulling his watch from his pocket. " Look here !" the chain came out neatly, and was found to have a curious piece of copper money attached to it. " You see what time it is with me !" he added, with a touch of easy tragedy. " Oh, you don't really mean" — He interrupted the soft note of shocked amuse- ment in Margaret's voice. " Indeed I do. Had to, positively, to get down here." " How dreadful for you !" " So we should be as poor as possible at first. But not for long. I have lots of old stuff that would feed the Spring Exhibitions for some time to come. And I should paint portraits. I should get on at that, I know. You see, to be a por- trait-painter, you only want two things." Robbie screwed up his face and tried to look practical. " You want to paint the right people, and you want to paint 'em in the right way." 266 GALLIA. 267 " Yes," said Margaret, with deep sympathy in her face. " Now, as to the right people, I should be in rare case. Grannie would help me to rope in the right people." She nodded. " And as to the right way — well, you see my way in that big plein air I'm doing of you." " You mean the grey, gold, and bluish-purple one ?" She might well ask. Robbie had at least five canvases on the way. " Yes, that's it. I'm painting people in greyish gold and purple just now. I mean, that's how I see them, you know. "Well, after all, a man only wants a manner." He put his hand through his yellow hair and pulled several stray locks down over his cedar-coloured forehead. "So that we should be perfectly independent, you know; I'm sure you couldn't bear to feel de- pendent on anyone, and I know I couldn't. And Grannie makes a lovely background to a fellow's life." Margaret laughed. She was one of those women with a silver laugh. They are really the nicest kind. " Oh, Robbie," she cried, " don't make your- self out such a dreadful goose and such a naughty boy as well, or I don't think I really can" — " Now don't say it, Margaret, or you'll regret it ! You do love me, you must love me, for I 268. GALLIA. have loved you ever since that day in Paris when I first saw you. You remember ? It was your first morning at the studio, and you didn't know your way about. I shall never forget the colour in your face when it dawned on you that you were in the wrong studio. You looked divine ! The fellows talked of you all morning." " It was one of the most frightful moments of my life," said Margaret faintly. "By heavens, what a subject picture that would be! I see the whole thing; I should treat it as an upright. Your face would be the warmest note of colour, the prevailing tones would be grey, and the faint pinks of the model would support your pink blush. I shall do it ! I shall call it ' A Rose in Error.' No, ' An Er- rant Rose.' You wait." " Robbie, you think of nothing but painting me." " You're wrong. I think much more of loving you. I have thought of that since ever I've known you." " Hush !" She raised up a white and very pointed forefinger. " Don't say that. There was one time when you didn't think of me at all. But we won't talk of it any more." She sighed and drooped her serious eyes. " My darling girl, we must talk of it, if you are to be so madly mistaken as all that. I swear that I have loved you ever since I have seen GALLIA. 269 you. I may have been a bit wild. I may not have been all the time just what you would have wished me to be — and what your love will always keep me." He took her hand and kissed it, and looked up at her with deep sincerity in his face. She responded to it by leaning forward and putting her lips to his forehead. It was the first time she had volunteered the smallest caress, and for a moment he lost his head. It was much credit to him that he found it again and continued. "But you have kept me straight." This he said, spacing the words to give them more emphasis. She looked at him rather wonderingly. " Why, dear, you can't imagine the things I might have been up to in Paris." " Don't tell me, Robbie ! I'd much rather not know." "My dear child, I wasn't going to tell you. How can you suppose that I would ?" He put both his arms round her, which brought his head on her shoulder, since she was seated on a tree- root somewhat above him. " Don't let us talk of it any more now, dear. There is nothing, Margaret, I swear it to you, nothing that any good woman would not be able to forgive. You know there are vast differences in men ; I can't explain 'em to you exactly, but there are. I don't lay claim to many shining virtues, but among men, you know, and by men, you under- 23* 270 GALLIA. stand, I should come out pretty well. For I've never been a bad chap, really." Whether memory suppressed an echo in Mar- garet's mind cannot be told; at anyrate, they were very happy after this, so happy that they forgot everybody but themselves ; which is the only trustworthy symptom of true happiness. Fortunately, most of the party had expected that this picnic would " bring matters to a head" between Mr. Leighton and Miss Essex. The dependence of the upper classes in England upon picnics as an emotional opportunity is positively pathetic. The excellent meal, which forms the inevitable prelude to that moment at which one may get away and talk with the only person one desires to talk to, was over. It had been accompanied by no greater excitement than a wonder as to what had become of Mr. Essex. He had been at most a mile and a half behind them when last seen, and yet he had never appeared. A footman had been despatched to the inn at which he had been advised to leave Spain, and had returned with the curious intelligence that the horse was in the stable and that Mr. Essex was in the inn. Mr. Essex had asked for a room, and some ink, pens, and paper, and had left orders that he was not to be disturbed. " Seized with an inopportune attack of literary creativeness," Gurdon had observed, smiling; GALLIA. 271 and nobody found a better explanation to offer. " Sucb an odd boy be always was !" his mother plaintively added, not without some pride in his oddity, however. So lunch had passed over without him, and then Margaret and Robbie had wandered off, taking advantage of irregularities in the rolling heathland and other bits of cover with a deftness that would have put a detachment of infantry to the blush. The rest permitted an opposite direction to attract them, and strolled quietly along, Denyer and Mark Gurdon walking on each side of Gallia at first. There was nothing particular to do. The object of the expedition had been the drive, and they were to drive home by another road, which would give them an extra five miles and a great deal of delightful scenery. Returning from the walk, Gallia went on in advance to give her orders about putting in the horses. Leaning up against the coach she dis- covered Mr. Essex, with that peculiar air of coolness, paleness, and dark handsomeness that distinguished him. "Really, at the top of that three-mile hill, Spain and I had worked so hard that we were both unfit to join the party. The landlord deeply sympathised with my condition, and he and his man put me' through a wonderful twenty 272 GALLIA. minutes. It seems they have a great experience in towelling the cyclists. After that I lay down; after that, I am ashamed to say, I went to sleep." These explanations flowed smoothly from Mr. Essex, and wore an air of such truth that the footman packing a hamper close by paused in his work and marvelled. Gallia had turned to Mrs. Essex with some laughing allusion to the cause of her son's dis- appearance. "Do not be any quicker than you can help with the horses," Essex remarked, catching the groom's eye and bidding adieu to half a sover- eign at the same moment. The man understood him, and passed the word to his helpers. " May I claim the last ten minutes of this delightful hour, Miss Hamesthwaite ?" Essex said, approaching her as she stood in brisk talk with Mark Gurdon. She looked up at him at once — the curious still atmosphere of strength and hidden thought about the man always com- manded her attention. " I should like to show you the greatest curiosity in the neighbourhood, and I think you may have missed it. It lies over here." "Mr. Essex excites my interest!" she said to Mark. " "Well, then, don't disappear when Brownie is put in, because she will not stand, and you know I am to drive you home." "Whether this remark disturbed Essex or not, GALLIA 273 he certainly spoke no word as they walked off together. " But you said it was over there ?" protested Gallia, pointing with her parasol, and then opening it suddenly. " Truly," he rejoined, altering the direction of his steps. Still they went on in silence. "What were you doing at the inn?" Gallia asked, as they descended a hill among the pine trees. "I was writing to you," answered Essex quietly. "To me?" — she looked up in surprise at his face. With a sudden change of his absorbed manner, he met her eyes and put life into his glance. " To you. See this !" he showed her an en- velope with her name upon it. " Shall we sit down here on the edge of this little pool? It looks deep, doesn't it ?" Gallia was conscious that the day had changed, that her frame of mind must alter to be in keep- ing with it, that something serious was coming to her. There was no fascination, no magnetism about Essex's glance, but there was, now and then, a curious deep, still fondness in its depths, which lingered for a very little moment, just long enough to obtain recognition, and then left mockery, of himself as much as others, in its place. 274 GALLIA. " I have changed my mind about my letter : I shall throw it away," he said. "Don't do that ! It would spoil the heather." Essex laughed. " What a pity I am not a sentimental fellow !" said he; "there is a beautiful opportunity for bitterness there. !Nb, we will dig a hole — and ■ bury it. Some little mice will gnaw it up and make nests of it, and still smaller mice, of a fleshy shade, shall nestle in it, — good." He began to make a hole just between them as they sat. Still digging, efliciently enough, with a long silver cross that hung on his watch-chain but never dangled publicly upon his waistcoat, he began speaking. " Don't be impatient, Gallia : this is the last of me." "What is?" " This little talk to-day, and this buried letter." " Don't bury the letter — let me read it first." " And bury it after ? !Nb, indeed. Some let- ters are meant to be buried. I see that in any ease you would wish this one buried, so my last service shall be to bury it for you." " Your last — and your first service." He looked up. " That's not true. I have done, first and last, a great deal for you, Gallia. First and last, good or bad, I have done a great deal. For six years I have been a great deal in your life; often I GALLIA. 275 have involuntarily given the tendency to your thoughts. When we met, what were you like ? Ah ! how different you were !" "I remember myself perfectly. I could cry now for what I suffered! How hard I have taken everything! How brackish and bitter every experience of my first youth tasted ! Drowned in sea-water, life has been for me. I was hot-spirited, raw, impatient; clever, sensi- tive, shy, vain, self-conscious; Avith an abnor- mally developed sense of the ridiculous ; too shy even to cherish a fine ideal inside myself. Then you came along, and how much bitterer and more brackish things seemed to you ! What a cynicism I found in you ! What crude brutality you served out to me !" She recapitulated these Ahings as though they had been long unthought of in her mind, as though she saw and recog- nised them clearly now at last for the first time. Neither looked at the other, they stared out across the wonderful waves of green Surrey far into the blue of Sussex. "Yes. I spoilt you and warped you — unin- tentionally, of course. I used to think of you much more than I would ever admit, you know. Then, when I was tutoring in Greece and trail- ing cubs about Asia — those strange letters that you wrote to me. Three of them I remember, in about two years." " I used to be moved to write them after long 276 GALLIA. spells of a lonely sort of misery and dissatisfac- tion. Usually at night." " Once by moonlight — so you said." " Quite true ; one does that sort of thing at a certain time in one's life. And your replies ! Good heavens ! ' I perceive in the lower corner what you would no doubt wish me to consider a tear-drop. Do not, dear lady, do not impress so honest an object as the bedroom ewer, to support these figments of the imagination.' " Gallia laughed with a suspicion of sadness in the voice, sadness for those old days when such nonsense had made her so miserable. He joined in even less gleefully. Then they both said the same thing at the same moment, which often happens, but has, nevertheless, an odd enough effect. Gallia. " I was so fearfully in love with you, you see !" Essex. " You were so fearfully in love with me, you see !" At this they laughed again. " "Well, it was that, I suppose," Essex said] and then, looking at her, added. " The thing has evened itself up since, hasn't it ?" She did not answer. " Let me see the letter before you put it in." " No ; the letter belongs to something that has no further existence." " And was it not the curiosity you wanted to 6how me ?" GALLIA. 277 " No. Iwas the curiosity — and still am. But not of the same sort. I have repented me of the evil." " Why ?" " I didn't know you were going to drive Gur- don home, before. I do now : that little fact has changed my life-plan. I can't help feeling you are right to drive Gurdon home and marry him afterwards. I think he will do very well. He is really quite a fine fellow, Gurdon, and he will have all the position you care about. I know you don't care for family." Gallia had not interrupted any of these state- ments regarding her future course of action. She contented herself by saying, " My dear Dark, we haven't any family ourselves. Nice, middle- class people raised to uncomfortable prominence by a vulgar title." " No doubt," he assented calmly. " Still, that's just why you might have been expected to stand out for family, you know." "We can do without it. Money I have in plenty. Gurdon will achieve all the position necessary for a man to have. He has the kind of talent that is indispensable to a Conservative Government. They can't get on without the keen talent of business men. Look at papa! They got in papa, in the face of enormous Cabinet opposition, to morphine the Colonies after the machinations of a Marquis. Forgive 24 278 GALLIA. me all those silly m's. And see how it has worked. The Radicals have had to stoop and collar labour to keep them going, the Tories have stooped too and collared the shopkeepers — our- selves— to keep them going." "A facile explanation, Gallia, with as much truth in it as any woman can arrange artistically in her statements." " I was talking of Gurdon's position as it affects himself, not as it affects me, for it doesn't affect me. It's as a man that Gurdon appeals to me." " You are perfectly right," said Essex smoothly, dusting his small, sallow hands with a handker- chief; " he has all the manly qualities." "He has. He's got virility, alertness, no vague nebulous tract of country between the place where his ideas are born and the place where they are shaped for practice. He is keen and gamey and lifey. Then he's got iron self- control, a princely obstinacy, an imperial power of faithfulness." Essex assented with his head several times. " Added to which, he is a hand- some fellow, with all the bone and muscle and blood and fibre that a man ought to have — not wasted by athletics, nor injured by slothful- ness." " My dearest girl," Essex said, when the list of Gurdon's virtues was full, " he's the very man for you. Marry him. Marry him by all means !" GALLIA. 279 "I am glad you think it is all right," said Gallia heartily. " There's nothing in which two heads are more conspicuously better than one, than in deciding a point of this kind. The suc- cessful marriage is when you happen to want the man that other people would have chosen for you." " Entirely so. People have proved thousands of millions of times that it's the last move to base upon one opinion only, and that your own." "Well, you see why I'm going to marry him?" "Oh, I do." " And I explained all my views to you before — as to what I expected to arrive at for myself." " You did indeed." " Dark, you aren't being sympathetic : what's the matter 1" " JSTothing, dear." There was a pause, during which they sat as before, looking over to blue Sussex. Gallia's face was a little discontented. " And now," taking out his match-box, " let us burn the letter. On second thoughts, I won't let mice nibble it to pieces. Ashes are, I believe, employed as a fertiliser. Do you think a sprig of white heather would be so obliging as to spring on the grave of my hopes ?" " Your hopes f" " That letter was to tell you that — Do you mind putting up your parasol ? I can't get this 280 GALLIA. match to light; thanks ! — You see, I didn't know- till now that you had decided." " Yes, I think I have decided." " Do you mind telling me, are you going to love G-urdon at all ?" " I like the ' am I going to,' " she laughed. " No, Dark. The thing is not written in that key. I finished loving anyone — you know when." " I know when. "When I began to love you." " Was it ? "Well, that was the nick of time." Her eyes were on the flames of the thin cream- laid note-paper of the inn. " I would not ask to see that letter, though, of course, I would like to have seen it, just as much as you would like to have shown it me. I believe I can control the woman in me some- times." " My dear," Dark Essex looked up with a naif illumination of face and a very delicate playful- ness of voice, " that's your one failing ! — Now," rising as she rose, " shall we fly in the face of custom by not kissing each other ?" She smiled her sweetest, her most delicious smile, and walked with a graceful floating sort of swiftness over the heather. Very soon they could see the coach— the reins were just being buckled at that moment. Something had de- layed the men. "All the same," said Gallia, turning to him GALLIA. 281 and pausing, "I think one may over-do one's sacrifices, in order to fly in the face of custom. "We run the risk of giving custom too much im- portance." Essex made a gesture of despair, and indeed he felt some in his heart. " If he'd had a pinch more of the common vices of a man about him," commented Gallia to herself, with the whimsical network showing on her forehead. " I swear I'm so accustomed to acting as if I've no feelings, that I begin to think I haven't any !" was Essex's reflection. Essex was a distinctly clever fellow, but he lacked a great deal of valuable common knowl- edge. For instance, he had never heard that there is often precious little fighting in the soldier who is too good at drill. 24* CHAPTER XXVIIL " Ten miles — with plenty of hill — in fifty-four minutes." Gurdon took out his watch to make a calcula- tion. They were on the level just then. " Really, it is good ! Do you think driving fast can make one hot, or is it really very warm ?" " It is warm, but you are at a certain strain to watch the road when we are going so fast, and the excitement heats you." " She is perfectly sure-footed, and I have never known her to stumble — but of course one must — Hullo ! Aha !" At that instant the horse had stumbled — it was only a small stumble, but Gallia pulled up immediately. " I'll go back and see what it was." Mark got promptly out and walked along the road; there was an inch deep of powdery sand in the track, and among it more than one rounded stone. He came back and reported, and they went on again, but Gallia's brow was knitted. The next two miles were covered much more slowly, and conversation was somewhat dis- jointed. " There ! I was afraid of it, she's going lame 282 GALLIA. 283 of that near fore ! Never in all the four years that I have had her has she known one minute's lameness. She must have strained herself in recovering. We shall come very soon to the Noah's Ark Inn ; I will etop there and rest her for half an hour." " "We might have tea, perhaps ?" Mark knew much better than to offer to look after the horse; he went and found the ostler, however, and then he set himself to ordering tea and strawberries in a quaint little sitting- room looking out upon a garden choked with flowers. The strain was rather more serious than she had imagined, and Gallia was about twenty minutes in getting a hot-water bandage on the leg, after having bathed it as long as the hot water of the " Noah's Ark" — a tap which had small popularity, apparently, and was little in- quired for — held out. She came in at length and described her labours. "And I am afraid, do you know, that we must go home by train ?" " Very well. "What a pity for the little horse ! You will want to take him too. Shall I get a man to go to the station, and see if by any means a horse-box can be had ?" She gratefully accepted this suggestion, and Mark went to put it in force at once. "At anyrate," she said to herself, as she 284 GALLIA. arranged her hair at the oblong glass on the over-mantel, — " At anyrate, he is a person of resource in little things. So tremendously necessary. He is the kind of man who would miss the last train, and arrive just the same. And one has to admire that. "Whereas, poor Dark — dear, dear ! how much one could love Dark for being totally without that sort of quality !" Gurdon came in at that moment. " It is all right ; the man has gone. And I just gave him a telegram to the stationmaster at Haslemere, asking him to put a horse-box on to the 6.35 from there; so that even if there is none at this little place, you will probably get one all the same." " "What a useful person you are !" Gallia looked laughingly at him. This fresh proof of his readiness in little things amused her. " Do you dislike useful people ?" " How should I ? Ah, here is tea !" She helped the dumb, heavily - breathing country girl to spread the table, then she lifted a pot of musk from the window and put it in the centre. "What a gracious sort of thing to do ! thought Mark. They sat down. As is usual in the country, the bread was greyish and a little sour, the butter was salt and out of a tub, the jam was somebody or other's whole squashed fruit, and GALLIA. 285 the tea someone else's best bonded, which recalled the delicious hay of a year ago. They had no fresh eggs, and they had no cream, and they had no water-cress. But Gurdon was in love with Gallia Hamesthwaite, so it didn't matter. And Gallia Hamesthwaite was in love with logic, so it didn't matter. "Ah!" he put down his cup with rapture; "friendly Brownie ! But the Brownies belong to the good folks, don't they ?" " They do. And this time their little doings will be the means of keeping us away from our friends till eight o'clock, and making papa very anxious." " He surely won't be so anxious when he reflects that you are with me?" Gurdon said rather foolishly, with the carelessness of a person who is wanting to say one particular thing, and bestows the least possible attention upon any other subject that may happen to come up. He received a look of cool inquiry from Gallia. " He will be anxious about you too. Brownie should have taken care of both of us, and Brownie didn't." "Brownie has been the means of our being alone here together," said Gurdon boldly. " I seem never to have found you alone in my life till now." " Why should you have expected to ? The 286 GALLIA. way we all live is calculated always to bring people together in droves, not alone together." " But how can you get to know anyone whom you persistently meet in droves ?" " Somehow or other, even in London, you do find yourself alone with people who want to know you, and whom you want to know." Gallia spoke musingly, the long dim cloister at West- minster rising before her eyes. " It has never yet happened to me." " It has happened to you here to-day." Still there was the cloud of elsewhere in her eyes, the tentative remote tone in her voice. Mark was no psychologist and it did not disturb him. " ' And He and She the hanquet scene completing, With dreamy words and very pleasant eating,' " he said contentedly, holding up a really quite presentable strawberry. She smiled upon him. " Something has put me in mind of a poem I once knew, I have thought of it at intervals all day. I wonder if you know it ?" " Let me hear it." He said it. He had a good voice ; he said it very well. There is no need to detail the poem. Everybody has had such a poem in his mind on such an occasion ; everybody will remember some of it. It was quite the usual poem. GALLIA. 287 "You have a great feeling for poetry," said Gallia thoughtfully, when he had finished. "For a practical kind of fellow, I believe music and poetry have far too much meaning for me." " Do you like your life salted with poetry ?" she asked thoughtfully still. " If I could get it," Mark answered, smiling ; " if not, I am prepared to do without it." " An unusual attitude for you, Mr. Gur- don." " Very, I admit — I'm seldom prepared to do without what I want. As you will have guessed, or someone may have told you, I am a very ambitious man." She laughed. " I have guessed — and every- body has told me besides." " Think of the most ambitious design I could entertain — towards you, for instance." He had courage, but he lowered his voice and he spoke slowly, very slowly. Gallia looked at him ; her face and eyes were not unkind, and there was a gleam of playfulness in them. " I think of it," she said. " And you can put it aside at once." He lifted his shoulders slightly, as though to get a better breath. " I am so in earnest," he said, with a good deal of effort. " Gallia, I am so in earnest." He 288 GALLIA. clasped his right hand round his left, pressed them so, till the white pattern of each finger was shown above each knuckle, then, still clasped, he dropped them between his knees. " Think what I want — I want to make you my wife !" " Now, why ?" said Gallia, not flippantly but with interest. " That's only the second most ambitious design I can think of, but tell me why?" He missed the parenthesis, the answer to that " why" was burning in him so hotly. He stam- mered his reply, seemed to reject the first part of his answer, and said, with great restraint, " Because I admire you more than any woman I have ever seen. And because I admire you more than I could admire any woman in the world, seen or not seen." She looked at him critically. " You shall tell me more of that later. It is my turn to say something. You sha'n't suffer the unfairness of the average proposal scene if I can help it." " The unfairness ?" " Yes. A man has to say all the humble, un- comfortable things, — in the sweat of his brow, — and a girl listens calmly and allows smiles to dawn at intervals. We won't do that. We'll try and be more honest. So it is my turn now. I have thought for some little time of marrying you, and to spare you any further anxiety, I GALLIA. 289 may tell you that I had decided to if you spoke of it." Mark recognised the tremendous individuality of this speech, and took both her hands in a grasp of great strength, a grasp that trembled from his desire not to crush those hands too tightly. " Gallia !" It was a cry of great joyfulness ; the astonishing whiteness of his face gave way before a rush of blood. " But you mustn't accept me yet," he said, — " not like that. I have things to tell you, things about myself. You must know them before you say that" — he inhaled sharply, with a musical note in his breath — " that you will take me." " Of course we shall have to talk about it a very great deal. But if I tell you a few things, it will save time. And we can do the talking at greater leisure." " That reminds me" — he seized his watch and then leapt up ; " how dare there be trains ?" He took her hand again, even as he looked for and rang the bell. " "We must leave instantly if we are to walk Brownie to the station." Gallia, without another word, flew out of the room. Mark gave the girl who came half a sovereign, and followed to the stable-yard. The harness had already been stowed in the little cart. And Gallia came out of the stable leading a still limping Brownie by a borrowed halter. s t 25 290 GALLIA. They set off, Mark beside her, she leading her horse. The lane that Mark and Gallia followed seemed to lead into the heart of a lemon-and- silver evening rather than to any landward point. They were silent for a little time. Then Mark, after many inward hesitations, took her free hand and held it. The conversation, so hurriedly concluded, seemed a little difficult to take up. " There are so many things I must tell you, so much to explain, so much to put you in pos- session of," Gallia began perplexedly, as they went along, " and this doesn't seem the occa- sion. This is not a serious occasion, it is a sen- timental occasion;" she placed a dreadful in- flection on the word sentimental, which made Gurdon apprehensive. " This lane, the scent of those queen-of-the-meadows, the honeysuckle and roses, that sky over there above the fir trees, is too much for me ; the whole thing is a stage set, and we are puppets ! I can't be serious!" He listened very sympathetically. "And the press of centuries of tradition is weighing on me and pulling and dragging me." She shook her head and threw it up as a horse does when unused to harness. " I can't be my- self. All the dead women in the world who have done identical things at such moments are coercing me, are pushing and constraining me GALLIA. 291 to act as they did. And if I do, I sha'n't mean it — it won't be me, it will be them — all the women who have been loved and who have gone before. "What chatter it is to talk of being free, or of getting free ! as if we ever could ! Make her the moment and the man, and every woman takes to sentiment smiling, as a little yellow fluffy duckling flounders quacking to a pool. Oh, what chatter — what chatter it has all been, this talk of freedom ! Sometimes there are moments in life when one actually sees a little further — when emotion and excitement lift one above the shoulders of the colder crowd. Free ? Individually free ? Poor women, if that is what we want ! We undo one knot in order to be 'free' to tie another. "Women are like members of an Alpine party — looped each to one long rope. Even I, who have no sentiment in me, my hands and arms would know perfectly how to clasp you." Mark shivered with sudden passion. " That would be instinct," he said in a whis- per. " It would not ! It would be heredity ! Savage man and woman did not make love as we do, they had no instinct of that kind. You eat and hunt and kill and sleep and marry by instinct — but there is no primary instinct of love-making. It is heredity. A trick of heredity. Hands, arms, and lips are born with the cunning of it, 292 GALLIA. and whether one feels like it or not has little enough to do with it." Mark admired her the more for this fire, though it puzzled him. " Gallia, can't you see what a lovely thing it is, this sweet instinct in women — in all good true women — to respond to, and to love the man who loves them." " No, Mark, I can't see it — I never could see it. It has heen my misery always to see the ugly side of love and love-making. And I feel caught in a net now, a net of sentiment. No, you are not the fowler ; it isn't your fault. It's the sea- son and the sky and the flowers, and the whole of nature's clever 'ticing-trap. Mark, pick me some honeysuckle, get me some meadow-sweet — let me take Queen Nature's shilling if I must." In half a