"I am very sure of that--that your mother never forgets, I mean. One knows, at once, one can trust her down to the ground and on to the end of the ages."--Again she paused, as though rallying herself against a disinclination for further speech. "All captivating women aren't made on that pattern, unfortunately, you know, Sir Richard. A good many of them it's wisest not to trust anything like down to the ground, or longer than--well--the day before yesterday."

And without waiting for any reply to this cryptic utterance, she stepped swiftly round behind the carriage again, waved her hand from the door-step and then swung away, with lazy, long-limbed grace, past the waiting men-servants and through to the ruddy brightness of the hall.

Madame de Vallorbes settled herself back rather languidly in her place.

She was p.r.i.c.ked by a sharp point of curiosity, regarding the tenor of Miss St. Quentin's mysterious colloquy with Richard Calmady. She had been able to catch but a word here and there, and these had been provokingly suggestive. Had the well-beloved Honoria, in a moment of overscrupulous conscientiousness permitted herself to hoist danger signals? She wanted to know, for it was her business to haul such down again with all possible despatch. She intended the barometer to register set fair whatever the weather actually impending. Yet to inst.i.tute direct inquiries might be to invite suspicion. Helen, therefore, declined upon diplomacy, upon the inverted sweetnesses calculated nicely to mask an intention quite other than sweet. She really held her friend in very warm affection. But Madame de Vallorbes never confused secondary and primary issues. When you have a really big deal on hand--and of the bigness of her present deal the last quarter of an hour had brought her notably increased a.s.surance--even the dearest friend must stand clear and get very decidedly out of the way.

So, while the m.u.f.fled thud of the horses' hoofs echoed up from the hard gravel of the carriage drive through the thick atmosphere, and the bare limbs of the trees clawed, as with lean arms clothed in tattered draperies, at the pa.s.sing carriage and its occupants, she contented herself by observing:--

"I am grateful to you for driving me over, Richard. Honoria is very perfect in her own way. It always does me good to see her. She's quite unlike anybody else, isn't she?"

But Richard's eyes were fixed upon the blank wall of fog just ahead, which, though always stable, always receded before the advancing carriage. The effect of it was unpleasant somehow, holding, as it did to his mind, suggestions of other things still more baffling and impending, from which--though you might keep them at arm's length--there was no permanent or actual escape. The question of Miss St. Quentin's characteristics did not consequently greatly interest him. He had arrived at conclusions. There was a matter of vital importance on which he desired to speak to his cousin. But how to do that? Richard was young and excellently modest. His whole purpose was rather fiercely focused on speech. But he was diffident, fearing to approach the subject which he had so much at heart clumsily and in a tactless, tasteless manner.

"Miss St. Quentin? Oh yes!" he replied, rather absently. "I really know next to nothing about her. And she seems merely to regard me as a vehicle of communication between herself and my mother. She sent her messages just now--I hope to goodness I shan't forget to deliver them!

She and my mother appear to have fallen pretty considerably in love with one another."

"Probably," Madame de Vallorbes said softly. An agreeable glow of relief pa.s.sed over her. She looked up at Richard with a delightful effect of pensiveness from beneath the sweeping brim of her cavalier hat.--"I can well believe Aunt Katherine would be attracted by her,"

she continued. "Honoria is quite a woman's woman. Men do not care very much about her as a rule. There is a good deal of latent vanity resident in the members of your s.e.x, you know, Richard; and men are usually conscious that Honoria does not care so very much about them.

They are quite right, she does not. I really believe when poor, dreadful, old Lady Tobermory left her all that money Honoria's first thought was that now she might embrace celibacy with a good conscience.

The St. Quentins are not precisely millionaires, you know. Her wealth left her free to espouse the cause of womanhood at large. She is a little bit Quixotic, dear thing, and given to tilting at windmills. She wants to secure to working women a fair business basis--that is the technical expression, I believe. And so she starts clubs, and forms circles. She says women must be encouraged to combine and to agitate.

Whether they are capable of combining I do not pretend to say. These high matters transcend my small wit. But, as I have often pointed out to her, agitation is the natural att.i.tude of every woman. It would seem superfluous to encourage or inculcate that, for surely wherever two or three petticoats are gathered together, there, as far as my experience goes, is agitation of necessity in the midst of them."

Madame de Vallorbes leaned back with a little sigh and air of exquisite resignation.

"All the same, the majority of women are unhappy enough, heaven knows!

If Honoria, or any other sweet, feminine Quixote, can find means to lighten the burden of our lives, she has my very sincere thanks, well understood."

Richard drew his whip across the backs of the trotting horses, making them plunge forward against that blank, impalpable wall of all-encircling, ever-receding, ever-present fog. The carriage had just crossed the long, white-railed bridge, spanning the little river and s.p.a.ce of marsh on either side, and now entered Sandyfield Street. The tops of the tall Lombardy poplars were lost in gloom. Now and again the redness of a lighted cottage window, blurred and contorted in shape, showed through the gray pall. Slow-moving, country figures, pa.s.sing vehicles, a herd of some eight or ten cows--preceded by a diabolic looking billy-goat, and followed by a lad astride the hind-quarters of a bare-backed donkey--grew out of pallid nothingness as the carriage came abreast of them, and receded with mysterious rapidity into nothingness again. The effect was curiously fantastic and unreal. And as the minutes pa.s.sed that effect of unreality gained upon Richard's imagination, until now--as last evening in the stately solitude of the Long Gallery--he became increasingly aware of the personality of his companion, increasingly penetrated by the feeling of being alone with that personality, as though the world, so strangely blotted out by these dim, obliterating vapours, were indeed vacant of all human interest, human purpose, human history, save that incarnate in this fair woman and his own relation to her. She alone existed, concrete, exquisite, sentient, amid the vague, shifting immensities of fog. She alone mattered. Her near neighbourhood worked upon him strongly, causing an excitement in him which at once hindered and demanded speech.

Night began to close in in good earnest. Pa.s.sing the broad, yellowish glare streaming out from the rounded tap-room window of the Calmady Arms, and pa.s.sing from the end of the village street on to the open common, the light had become so uncertain that Richard could no longer see his companion's face clearly. This was almost a relief to him, so that, mastering at once his diffidence and his excitement, he spoke.

"Look here, Helen," he said, "I have been thinking over all that you told me. I don't want to dwell on subjects that must be very painful to you, but I can't help thinking about them. It's not that I won't leave them alone, but that they won't leave me. I don't want to presume upon your confidence, or take too much upon myself. Only, don't you see, now that I do know it's impossible to sit down under it all and let things go on just the same.--You're not angry with me?"

The young man spoke very carefully and calmly, yet the tones of his voice were heavily charged with feeling.

Madame de Vallorbes clasped her hands rather tightly within her sable m.u.f.f. Unconsciously she began to sway a little, just a very little, as a person will sway in time to strains of stirring music. An excitement, not mental merely but physical, invaded her. For she recognised that she stood on the threshold of developments in this very notable drama.

Still she answered quietly, with a touch even of weariness.

"Ah! dear Richard, it is so friendly and charming of you to take my infelicities thus to heart! But to what end, to what end, I ask you?

The conditions are fixed. Escape from them is impossible. I have made my bed--made it most abominably uncomfortably, I admit, but that is not to the point--and I must lie on it. There is no redress. There is nothing to be done."

"Yes, there is this," he replied. "I know it is wretchedly inadequate, it doesn't touch the root of the matter. Oh! it's miserably inadequate--I should think I did know that! Only it might smooth the surface a bit, perhaps, and put a stop to one source of annoyance.

Forgive me if I say what seems coa.r.s.e or clumsy--but would not your position be easier if, in regard to--to money, you were quite independent of that--of your husband, I mean--M. de Vallorbes?"

For a moment the young lady remained very still, and stared very hard at the fog. The most surprising visions arose before her. She had a difficulty in repressing an exclamation.

"Ah! there now, I have blundered. I've hurt you. I've made you angry,"

d.i.c.kie cried impulsively.

"No, no, dear Richard," she answered, with admirable gentleness, "I am not angry. Only what is the use of romancing?"

"I am not romancing. It is the simplest thing out, if you will but have it so."

He hesitated a little. The horses were pulling, the fog was in his throat thick and choking--or was it, perhaps, something more unsubstantial and intangible even than fog? The s.p.a.cious barns and rickyards of the Church Farm were just visible on the right. In less than five minutes more, at their present pace, the horses would reach the first park gate. The young man felt he must give himself time. He quieted the horses down into a walk.

"If I were your brother, Helen, I should save you all these sordid money worries as a matter of course. You have no brother--so, don't you see, I come next. It's a perfectly obvious arrangement. Just let me be your banker," he said.

Madame de Vallorbes shut her pretty teeth together. She could have danced, she could have sung aloud for very gaiety of heart. She had not antic.i.p.ated this turn to the situation; but it was a delicious one. It had great practical merits. Her brain worked rapidly. Immediately those practical merits ranged themselves before her in detail. But she would play with it a little--both diplomacy and good taste, in which last she was by no means deficient, required that.

"Ah! you forget, dear Richard," she said, "in your friendly zeal you forget that, in our rank of life, there is one thing a woman cannot accept from a man. To take money is to lay yourself open to slanderous tongues, is to court scandal. Sooner or later it is known, the fact leaks out. And however innocent the intention, however n.o.ble and honest the giving, however grateful and honest the receiving, the world puts but one construction upon such a transaction."

"The world's beastly evil-minded then," Richard said.

"So it is. But that is no news, d.i.c.kie dear," Madame de Vallorbes answered. "Nor is it exactly to the point."

Inwardly she trembled a little. What if she had headed him off too cleverly, and he should regard her argument as convincing, her refusal as final? Her fears were by no means lessened by the young man's protracted silence.

"No, I don't agree," he said at last. "I suppose there are always risks to be run in securing anything at all worth securing, and it seems to me, if you look at it all round, the risks in this case are very slight. Only you--and M. de Vallorbes need know. I suppose he must. But then, if you will pardon my saying so, after what you have told me I can't imagine he is the sort of person who is likely to object very much to an arrangement by which he would benefit, at least indirectly.

As for the world,"--Richard ceased to contemplate his horses. He tried to speak lightly, while his eyes sought that dimly seen face at his elbow. "Oh, well, hang the world, Helen! It's easy enough for me to say so, I dare say, being but so slightly acquainted with it and the ways of it. But the world can't be so wholly hide-bound and idiotic that it denies the existence of exceptional cases. And this case, in some of its bearings at all events, is wholly exceptional, I am--happy to think."

"You are a very convincing special pleader, Richard," Madame de Vallorbes said softly.

"Then you accept?" he rejoined exultantly. "You accept?"

The young lady could not quite control herself.

"Ah! if you only knew the prodigious relief it would be," she exclaimed, with an outbreak of impatience. "It would make an incalculable difference. And yet I do not see my way. I am in a cleft stick. I dare not say Yes. And to say No----" Her sincerity was unimpeachable at that moment. Her eyes actually filled with tears.

"Pah! I am ashamed of myself," she cried, "but to refuse is distracting."

The gate of the outer park had been reached. The groom swung himself down and ran forward, but confused by the growing darkness and the thick atmosphere he fumbled for a time before finding the heavy latch.

The horses became somewhat restive, snorting and fidgeting.

"Steady there, steady, good la.s.s," Richard said soothingly. Then he turned again to his companion. "Believe me it's the very easiest thing out to accept, if you'll only look at it all from the right point of view, Helen."

Madame de Vallorbes withdrew her right hand from her m.u.f.f and laid it, almost timidly, upon the young man's arm.

"Do you know, you are wonderfully dear to me, d.i.c.k?" she said, and her voice shook slightly. She was genuinely touched and moved. "No one has ever been quite so dear to me before. It is a new experience. It takes my breath away a little. It makes me regret some things I have done.

But it is a mistake to go back on what is past, don't you think so?

Therefore we will go forward. Tell me, expound. What is this so agreeably reconciling point of view?"

But along with the touch of her hand, a great wave of emotion swept over poor Richard, making his grasp on the reins very unsteady. The sensations he had suffered last evening in the Long Gallery again a.s.sailed him. The flesh had its word to say. Speech became difficult.

Meanwhile his agitation communicated itself strangely to the horses.

They sprang forward against that all-encircling, ever-present, yet ever-receding, blank wall of fog, to which the overarching trees lent an added gloom and mystery, as though some incarnate terror pursued them. The gate clanged-to behind the carriage. The groom scrambled breathlessly into his place. Sir Richard's driving was rather reckless, he ventured to think, on such a nasty, dark night, and with a lady along of him too. He was not sorry when the pace slowed down to a walk.

That was a long sight safer, to his thinking.

"The right point of view is this," Richard said at last; "that in accepting you would be doing that which, in some ways, would make just all the difference to my life."

He held himself very upright on the sloping driving-seat, rather cruelly conscious of the broad strap about his waist, and the high, unsightly driving-iron against which, concealed by the heavy, fur rug, his feet pushed as he steadied himself. He paused, gazing away into the silent desolation of the now invisible woods, and when he spoke again his voice had deepened in tone.

"It must be patent to you--it is rather detestably patent to every one, I suppose, if it comes to that--that I am condemned to be of precious little use to myself or any one else. I share the fate of the immortal Sancho Panza in his island of Barataria. A very fine feast is spread before me, while I find myself authoritatively forbidden to eat first of this dish and then of that, until I end by being every bit as hungry as though the table was bare. It becomes rather a nuisance at times, you know, and taxes one's temper and one's philosophy. It seems a little rough to possess all that so many men of my age would give just anything to have, and yet be unable to get anything but unsatisfied hunger, and--in plain English--humiliation, out of it."