"I've written to Cousin Harry. I've told him what I mean to do. He must think it right; it's the only thing he's left me to do. But I've told him I can do it only on one condition. He'll have my letter to-morrow."

"On one condition? What?"

"I said to him that he gave me Blent because I was there, because he saw me there in the middle of it all. That's true. If I'd stayed here, would he ever have told his secret? Never! He wouldn't so much as have come to see me; he'd never have thought of me, he'd have forgotten all about me.

It was seeing me there."

"Well, seeing you, anyhow."

"Seeing me there--there at Blent," she insisted, now almost angrily. "So he'll understand what I mean by the thing I've asked of him. And he must obey." Her voice became imperious. "I've told him that I'm going back, going to stay there, and live there, but that he must never, never come there."

Mina started, her eyes wide-open in surprise at this heroic measure.

"I must never see him--if I can help it. Anyhow I must never see him at Blent. That's the only way I can endure it."

"Never see him! Never have him at Blent!" Mina was trying to sort out the state of things which would result. It was pretty plain what had happened; Cecily had felt the need of doing something; here it was.

Mina's sympathies, quick to move, darted out to Harry. "Think what it'll mean to him never to see Blent!" she cried.

"To him? Nothing, nothing! Why, you yourself came home just now saying that we were nothing to him! Blent's nothing to him now. It's for my own sake that I've said he mustn't come."

"You've begged him not to come?"

"I've told him not to come," said Cecily haughtily. "If it's his, let him take it. If it's mine, I can choose who shall come there. Don't you see, don't you see? How can I ever cheat myself into thinking it's mine by right, if I see Harry there?" She paused a moment. "And if you'd thrown yourself at a man's head, and he'd refused you, would you want to have him about?"

"N--no," said Mina, but rather hesitatingly; uncomfortable situations are to some natures better than no situations at all. "No, of course not," she added more confidently, after she had spent a moment in bracing up her sense of what was seemly.

"So I've ended it, I've ended everything. I posted my letter just before you came in, and he'll get it to-morrow. And now, Mina, I'm going back to Blent." She threw herself into an arm-chair, leaning back in a sudden weariness after the excited emotion with which she had declared her resolve. Mina sat on the other side of the table looking at her, and after a moment's looking suddenly began to sob.

"It's too miserable," she declared in wrathful woe. "Why couldn't he have said nothing about it and just married you? Oh, I hate it all, because I love you both. I know people think I'm in love with him, but I'm not. It's both of you, it's the whole thing; and now it never, never can go straight. If he got Blent back now by a miracle, it would be just as bad."

"Worse," said Cecily, "if you mean that then he might----"

"Yes, worse," moaned Mina. "It's hopeless every way. And I believe he's fond of you."

A scornful smile was Cecily's only but sufficient answer.

"And you love him!" Mina's sorrow made her forget all fear. She said in this moment what she had never before dared to say. "Oh, of course you do, or you'd never have told him he mustn't come to Blent. But he won't understand that--and it would make no difference if he did, I suppose!

Oh, you Tristrams!" Again her old despairing cry of revolt and bewilderment was wrung from her by the ways of the family with whose fate she had become so concerned. Southend had felt much the same thing over the matter of Harry and the viscounty. "So it all ends, it all ends--and we've got to go back to Blent!"

"Yes, I love him," said Cecily. "That evening in the Long Gallery--the evening when he gave me Blent--do you know what I thought?" She spoke low and quickly, lying back quite still in the att.i.tude that Addie Tristram had once made her own. "I watched him, and I saw that he had something to say, and yet wouldn't say it. I saw he was struggling. And I watched, how I watched! He was engaged to Janie Iver--he had told me that. But he didn't love her--yes, he told me that too. But there was something else. I saw it. I had come to love him then already--oh, I think as soon as I saw him at Blent. And I waited for it. Did you ever do that, Mina--do you remember?"

Mina was silent; her memories gave her no such thing as that. Her sobs had ceased; she sat listening in tense excitement to the history of the scene that she had descried, dim and far off, from the terrace of Merrion on the hill.

"I waited, waited. I couldn't believe--Ah, yes, but I did believe. I thought he felt bound in honor and I hoped--yes, I hoped--he would break his word and throw away his honor. I saw it coming, and my heart seemed to burst as I waited for it. You'd know, if it had ever happened to you like that. And at last I saw he would speak--I saw he must speak. He came and stood by me. Suddenly he cried, 'I can't do it.' Then my heart leapt, because I thought he meant he couldn't marry Janie Iver. I looked up at him and I suppose I said something. He caught me by the arm. I thought he was going to kiss me, Mina. And then--then he told me that Blent was mine--not himself but Blent--that I was Lady Tristram, and he--Harry Nothing--he said, Harry Nothing-at-all."

"Oh, if you'd tell him that!" cried Mina.

"Tell him!" She smiled in superb scorn. "I'd die before I'd tell him. I could go and offer myself to him just because he didn't know. And he'll never know now. Only now you can understand that Blent is--Ah, that it's all bitterness to me! And you know now why he must never come. Yes, as you say, it all ends now."

Mina came and knelt down by her, caressing her hand. Cecily shivered a little and moved with a vague air of discomfort.

"But I believe he cares for you," Mina whispered.

"He might have cared for me perhaps. But Blent's between."

Blent was between. The difficulty seemed insuperable--at least where you were dealing with Tristrams. Mina could not but acknowledge that. For Harry, having nothing to give, would take nothing. And Cecily, having much, was thereby debarred from giving anything. And if that miracle of which Mina had spoken came about, the parts would be exchanged but the position would be no more hopeful. The Tristrams not only brought about difficult situations--as Addie had done here--but by being what they were they insured that the difficulties should not be overcome. Yet at this moment Mina could not cry, "Oh, you Tristrams!" any more. Her sorrow was too great and Cecily too beautiful. She seemed again to see Addie, and neither she nor anybody else could have been hard to Addie.

She covered Cecily's hands with kisses as she knelt by her side.

"Yes, this is the end," said Cecily. "Now, Mina, for Blent and her ladyship!" She gave a bitter little laugh. "And good-by to Cousin Harry!"

"Oh, Cecily----!"

"No, he shall never come to Blent."

How would Harry take this decree of banishment? Mina looked up into her friend's eyes, wondering. But did not the dinner-party at Mr Disney's answer that?

XXIV

AFTER THE END OF ALL

"MY DEAR COUSIN--I shall faithfully obey your commands--Yours very truly, H. A. F. TRISTRAM." And below--very formally--"THE LADY TRISTRAM OF BLENT."

To write it took him no more than a moment--even though he wrote first, "The commands of the Head of the House," and destroyed that, ashamed of the sting of malice in it. To send it to the post was the work of another moment. The third found him back at his Blinkhampton plans and elevations, Cecily's letter lying neglected on the table by him. After half an hour's work he stopped suddenly, reached for the letter, tore it into small fragments, and flung the sc.r.a.ps into his waste-paper basket.

Just about the same time Cecily and Mina were getting into the train to return to Blent.

This returning to Blent was epidemic--not so strange perhaps, since mid-August was come, and only the people who had to stayed in town.

Harry met Duplay over at Blinkhampton; Duplay was to join his niece at Merrion in about ten days. He ran against Iver in the street; Iver was off to Fairholme by the afternoon train; Mr Neeld, he mentioned, was coming to stay with him for a couple of weeks on Friday. Even Southend--whom Harry encountered in Whitehall, very hot and exhausted--cursed London and talked of a run down to Iver's. Blentmouth, Fairholme, Iver's, Merrion--they all meant Blent. Cecily had gone, and Mina; the rest were going there--everybody except the man who three months ago had looked to spend his life there as its master.

And business will grow slack when autumn arrives; it is increasingly difficult for a man to bury himself in deeds, or plans, or elevations, or calculations, when everybody writes that he is taking his vacation, and that the matter shall have immediate attention on his return. Harry grew terribly tired of this polite formula. He wanted to build Blinkhampton out of hand, in the months of August and September. The work would have done him good service. He was seeking a narcotic.

For he was in pain. It came on about a week after he had sent his curt acknowledgment of Cecily's letter, laying hold of him, he told himself, just because he had nothing to do, because everybody was taking his holiday, and Blinkhampton would not get itself bought, and sold, and contracted for, and planned, and laid out, and built. The politicians were at it still, for two more hot, weary, sultry weeks, but they were of little use. Lady Flora had fled to Scotland, Disney was smothered in arrears of work which must be made up before he got a rest. London was full of strange faces and outlandish folk. "I must take a holiday myself," said Harry in a moment of seeming inspiration. Where, where, where? He suffered under the sensation of having nowhere whither he would naturally go, no home, no place to which he could return as to his own. He found himself wishing that he had not torn up Cecily's letter; he remembered its general effect so well that he wanted to read the very words again, in the secret hope that they would modify and soften his memory. His own answer met and destroyed the hope; he knew that he would have responded to anything friendly, had it been there.

Yet what did the letter mean? He interpreted it as Cecily had declared he would. When he held Blent, he held it in peace of mind, though in violation of law, till one came who reproached him in a living body and with speaking eyes; faced with that, he could find no comfort in Blent.

Cecily violated no law, but she violated nature, the natural right in him. To her then his presence would be intolerable, and she could not find the desperate refuge that he had chosen. Her only remedy was to forbid him the place. Her instinct drove her to that, and the instinct, so well understood by him, so well known, was to him reason enough. She could not feel mistress of Blent while he was there.

Indeed he had not meant to go. He had told Iver that in perfect good faith. It would have been in bad taste for him to think of going--of going anything like so soon as this. Whence then came his new feeling of desolation and of hurt? It was partly that he was forbidden to go. It was hard to realize that he could see Blent now only by another's will or sufferance. It was even more that now it was no question of refraining from going at once, in order to go hereafter with a better grace. He awoke to the idea that he was never to go, and in the same moment to the truth that he had always imagined himself going again, that Blent had always held a place in his picture of the future, that whatever he was doing or achieving or winning, there it was in the background. Now it was there no more. He could almost say with Mina and with Cecily herself, "This is the end of it."

What then of the impressions Mina had gathered from Mr Disney's dinner-party? It can only be said that when people of impressionable natures study others of like temperament they should not generalize from their conduct at parties. In society dinners are eaten in disguise, sometimes intentional, sometimes unconscious, but as a rule quite impenetrable. If Harry's had been unconscious, if the mood had played the man, the deception was the more complete.

He went to see Lady Evenswood one day; she had sent to express her desire for a talk before she fled to the country. She had much that was pleasant to say, much of the prospects of his success, of his "training-on," as easy-mannered Theo had put it to Mina Zabriska.

"And if you do, you'll be able to think now that you've done it all off your own bat," she ended.

"You've found out my weaknesses, I see," he laughed.