Henry James

Poor Richard

Henry James

(1843–1916)

Poor Richard

(1885)

Table of Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

I

Miss Whittaker’s garden covered a couple of acres, behind and beside her house, and at its further extremity was bounded by a large pasture, which in turn was bordered by the old disused towing-path beside the river, at this point a slow and shallow stream. Its low, flat banks were unadorned with rocks or trees, and a towing-path is not in itself a romantic promenade. Nevertheless, here sauntered bareheaded, on a certain spring evening, the mistress of the acres just mentioned and many more beside, in sentimental converse with an impassioned and beautiful youth.

She herself would have been positively plain, but for the frequent recurrence of a magnificent smile—which imparted a charm to her somewhat undistinguished features—and (in another degree) for the elegance of her dress, which expressed one of the later stages of mourning, and was of that voluminous abundance proper to women who are both robust and rich. The good looks of her companion, for very good they were, in spite of several defects, were set off by a shabby suit, as carelessly worn as it was inartistically made. His manner, as he walked and talked, was that of a nervous, headstrong man, wrought almost to desperation; while she had the air of a person a good deal bored but determined to be patient. A brief silence, however, had at last fallen upon them. Miss Whittaker strolled along quietly, looking at the slow-mounting moon, and the young man gazed on the ground, swinging his stick. Finally, with a heavy blow, he brought it to earth.

“Oh, Gertrude!” he cried, “I despise myself.”

“That’s very horrid,” said Gertrude.

“And, Gertrude, I adore you.”

“That’s more horrid still,” said Gertrude, with her eyes still on the moon. And then, suddenly and somewhat impatiently transferring them to her companion’s face—“Richard,” she asked, “what do you mean when you say you adore me?”

“Mean? I mean that I love you.”

“Then why don’t you say what you mean?”

The young man looked at her a moment. “Will you give me leave to say all I mean?”

“Oh dear!” Then, as he remained silent, “I wait for your words,” Gertrude added.

Yet he still said nothing, but went striking vehemently at the weeds by the water’s edge, like a young fellow who sees that he is in the wrong whatever line he takes.

“Gertrude!” he suddenly exclaimed, “what more do you want than the assurance that I love you?”

“I want nothing more. I am quite satisfied with that. You yourself seemed to wish to pile it up.”

“Either you won’t understand me,” cried Richard “or”—darting a vicious glance at her—“you can’t!”

Miss Whittaker stopped and looked thoughtfully into his face. “In our position if it becomes you to sacrifice reflection to feeling, it becomes me to do the reverse. Listen to me, Richard. I do understand you, and better, I believe, than you understand yourself.”

“Oh, you think me a baby, I know!”

But she continued, heedless of his interruption. “I thought that, by leaving you to yourself awhile, your feelings might become clearer to you. But they seem to be growing only more confused. I have been so fortunate, or so unfortunate, I hardly know which,”—and she smiled faintly—“as to make you like me. That’s all very well, but you must not make too much of it. Nothing could make me happier than to be liked by you, or by any one else. But here it must stop with you, as it stops with others.”

“It does not stop here with others.”

“I beg your pardon. You have no right to say that. It is partly out of justice to others that I speak to you as I am doing. I shall always be one of your best friends, but I shall never be more. It is best I should tell you this at once. I might trifle with you awhile and make you happy (since upon such a poor thing you seem to set your happiness) by allowing you to suppose that I care for you in another way; but the end would soon come, and then where should we be? You may, in your disappointment, call me heartless now—I freely give you leave to call me anything that will ease your mind—but what would you call me then? Friendship, Richard, is an excellent cure for love. Here is mine.” And she held out her hand.

“No, I thank you,” said Richard, gloomily folding his arms. “I know my own feelings,” and he raised his voice. “Haven’t I lived with them night and day for weeks and weeks? Great heaven, Gertrude Whittaker, this is no fancy! I’m not one of that sort. My whole life has gone into my love. God has let me idle it away hitherto only that I might begin it with you. Dear Gertrude, hear me! I have some, at least, of the faculties of a man. I know I’m not respectable, but I honestly believe I should repay any one who would bear with me. It’s true I have neither worked, nor persisted, nor studied, nor earned a cent. But, on the other hand, I have never cared for any woman before. I have waited for you. And now—now, after all, I am to sit down to simple liking—to friendship! The devil! Be friends with men whom you don’t make mad! You do me!”

An honest flush rose to Gertrude’s cheek. “So much the worse for you!” she cried, with a bitter laugh. “So much the worse for both of us! But what is your contention? Do you wish to marry me?”

Richard flinched a moment under this tacit proposition suddenly ringing in the air, but not from want of heart. “You have named it,” he said.

“Well, then, I only pity you the more for your consistency. I can only entreat you again to rest content with what I have offered you. It’s not such a bad substitute, Richard, as I understand it. What my love might be I don’t know—I couldn’t answer for that; but of the kind of interest I take in you I am very sure. We both have our duties in this matter, and I have resolved to take a liberal view of mine. I might lose patience with you, you know, and turn away from you altogether—leave you alone with your dreams, and let you break your heart. But it’s rather by seeing more of me than by seeing less that your feelings will change.”

“You don’t mean it! And yours?”

“I have no doubt they will change, too; not in kind, but in degree. The better I know you, I am sure, the better I shall like you. The better too you will like me. Don’t turn your back upon me—I speak the truth. You will get to entertain a serious opinion of me—which I’m sure you haven’t now, or you wouldn’t talk of my making you mad. But you must be patient. It’s a singular fact that it takes longer to learn to live on rational terms with a woman than to fancy one adores her. A sense of madness is a very poor feeling to marry upon. You wish, of course, to leave off your idle life and your bad habits—you see I am so thoroughly your friend that I am not afraid of touching upon disagreeable facts, as I should be if I were your ‘adored’. But you are so indolent, so irresolute, so undisciplined, so uneducated”—Gertrude spoke deliberately and watched the effect of her words—“that you find a change of life very difficult. I propose, with your consent, to appoint myself your care-taker. Henceforth my house will be open to you as to my dearest friend. Come as often and stay as long as you please. Not in a few weeks, perhaps, nor even in a few months, but in God’s good time, you will be a capable young man, in working order—which I don’t consider you now, and which I know you don’t consider yourself. But I have a great opinion of your talents,” (this was very shrewd of Gertrude) “and even of your nature. If I turn out to have done you a service, you will not want to marry me then.”

Richard had silently listened, with a deepening frown. “That’s all very pretty,” he said; “but it’s humbug—humbug from beginning to end. What’s the meaning of all that rigmarole about the inconsistency of friendship and love? Such talk is enough to make one curse. Refuse me outright, and send me to the devil, if you must; but don’t bemuddle your own brains at the same time. Ah, one little word knocks it all to pieces: I want you for my wife! You make an awful mistake in treating me as a boy—a deadly mistake. I am in working order—I began to live properly when I began to love you. I have sworn off drinking as effectually as if I hadn’t touched a drop for twenty years. I hate it, I loathe it—I have drunk my last. No, Gertrude, I am no longer a boy—you have cured me of that. Hang it, that’s why I love you! Don’t you see? Ah, Gertrude,”—and his voice fell—“you are a great enchantress! You have no arts, you have none of the airs and graces of the girls that are called pretty; but you are an enchantress without them. It’s your nature. You are so divinely, damnably honest! Those clever things you just said were meant for a dash of cold water, but you can’t drown me by holding me under a spout. You will say it’s nothing but common sense. Very likely; but that is the point. Your common sense captivates me—it’s for that that I love you.”

There was something now so calmly resolute in his tone that Gertrude was sickened. She found herself weaker than he, while the happiness of both of them demanded that she should be stronger.

“Richard Maule,” she said, “you are unkind!” There was a tremor in her voice as she spoke, and as she ceased speaking she burst into tears. A selfish sense of victory took possession of the young man. He threw his arm about her; but she shook it off. “You are a coward, sir!” she cried.

“Oh, softly!” said Richard, flushing angrily.

“You go too far; you persist beyond decency.”

“You hate me now, I suppose,” said Richard, brutally, like one at bay.

Gertrude brushed away her tears. “No, indeed,” she answered, sending him a dry, clear glance. “To hate you I should have to have loved you. I pity you still.”

Richard looked at her a moment. “I don’t feel tempted to return the feeling, Gertrude,” said he. “A woman with so much diplomacy as you needs no pity.”

“I have not diplomacy enough to read your sarcasm, sir; but I have good-nature enough to excuse it, and I mean to keep my good-nature to the end. I mean to keep my temper, I mean to be just, I mean to be conclusive, and not to have to return to this matter. It’s not for my pleasure, I would have you know, that I go into all this; I have nerves as well as you. Therefore listen to me once again. If I don’t love you, Richard, in your way, I don’t; and if I can’t, I can’t. We can’t love by will. But with friendship, when it is once established, I believe the will and the reason may have a great deal to do. I will, therefore, put the whole of my mind into my friendship for you, and in that way we shall perhaps be even. Such a feeling—as I shall naturally show it—will, after all, not be very different from that other feeling you ask—as I should naturally show it. Bravely to reconcile himself to such difference as there is is no more than a man of honour ought to do. Do you understand me?”

“You have an admirable way of putting things. ‘After all’ and ‘such difference as there is’! The difference is the difference of marriage and no-marriage. I suppose you don’t mean that you are willing to live with me without that ceremony?”

“You suppose correctly.”

“Then why do you falsify matters? A woman is either a man’s wife, or she isn’t.”

“Yes; and a woman is either a man’s friend, or she isn’t.”

“And you are mine, and I am an ungrateful brute not to rest satisfied! That’s what you mean! Heaven knows you are right”—and he paused a moment, with his eyes on the ground. “Don’t despise me, Gertrude,” he went on—“I am not so ungrateful as I seem. I am very much obliged to you for the pains you have taken. Of course I understand your not loving me. You would be a grand fool if you did; and you are no fool, Gertrude.”

“No, I am no fool, Richard. It’s a great responsibility—it’s dreadfully vulgar; but, on the whole, I am rather glad.”

“So am I. I could hate you for it; but there is no doubt it’s why I love you. If you were a fool you might love me; but I shouldn’t love you, and if I must choose, I prefer that.”

“Heaven has chosen for us. Ah, Richard,” pursued Gertrude, with admirable simplicity, “let us be good and obey heaven, and we shall be sure to be happy.” And she held out her hand once more.

Richard took it and raised it to his lips. She felt their pressure and withdrew it.

“Now you must leave me,” she said. “Did you ride?”

“My horse is at the village.”

“You can go by the river, then. Good-night.”

“Good-night.”

The young man moved away in the gathering dusk, and Miss Whittaker stood for a moment looking after him.

II

To appreciate the importance of this conversation the reader must know that Miss Gertrude Whittaker was a young woman of four-and-twenty, whose father, recently deceased, had left her alone in the world, with a large fortune, accumulated by various enterprises in that part of the State. He had appointed a distant and elderly kinswoman, by name Miss Pendexter, as his daughter’s household companion; and an old friend of his own, known to combine shrewdness with integrity, as her financial adviser. Motherless, country-bred, with rather thick features, Gertrude on reaching her majority had neither the tastes nor the manners of a fine lady. Of a vigorous, active constitution, with a warm heart, a cool head, and a very pretty talent for affairs, she was, in virtue both of her wealth and of her tact, one of the principal persons of the county-side. These facts had forced her into a prominence which she made no attempt to elude, and in which she now felt thoroughly at home. She knew herself to be a power in the land; she knew that, present and absent, she was continually talked about as the rich Miss Whittaker; and although as modest as a woman need be, she was neither so timid nor so nervous as to wish to shirk her implied obligations. Her feelings were indeed, throughout, strong, rather than delicate; and yet there was in her whole nature, as the world had learned to look at it, a kind of genial discretion which attracted universal respect. She was impulsive, yet circumspect; thrifty, yet open-handed; literal, yet addicted to joking; keenly observant of human distinctions, yet almost indiscriminately hospitable; with an immense fund of common sense beneath all; and yet beyond this—like the priest behind the king—and despite her preponderantly prosaic and, as it were, secular tone, a certain latent suggestion of heroic possibilities which he who had once become sensible of them (supposing him to be young and enthusiastic) would linger about her hoping to elicit, as you might stand and inhale a florid and vigorous dahlia which, for an instant, in your passage, should have proved delightfully fragrant. It is upon the actual existence, in more minds than one, of a mystifying sense of this desultory aroma that our story is based.

Richard Maule and Gertrude Whittaker were old friends. They had, in the first place, gone democratically to the town-school together, as children; and then their divergent growth, as boy and girl, had been conscious of an elastic bond in a continued intimacy between Gertrude and Fanny Maule, Richard’s sister, who, however, in the fulness of time had married and followed her husband to California. With her departure the old relations of habit between her brother and her friend had slackened and gradually ceased. Richard had grown up a rebellious and troublesome boy, with a disposition combining stolid apathy and hot-headed eagerness in equal, contradictory proportions. Losing both of his parents before he was well out of jackets, he had found himself at the age of sixteen in possession actual, and as he supposed uncontested, of the paternal acres. It was not long, however, before those turned up who were disposed to question his immediate ability to manage them; the result of which was, that the property was leased for five years, and that Richard was taken bodily possession of by a maternal uncle, living on a farm of his own some three hundred miles away. Here our young man spent the remainder of his minority, ostensibly learning agriculture with his cousins, but actually learning nothing. He had very soon established, and had subsequently enjoyed without a day’s interval, the reputation of an ill-natured fool. He was dull, disobliging, brooding, lowering. Reading and shooting he liked a little, because they were solitary pastimes; but he was very slow in acquiring the arts which help a man to live happily with others. It was possible to get on with him only because he was at once too selfish and too simple for mischief. As soon as he came of age he entered upon the enjoyment of the old place on which his boyhood had been passed, and to which he appeared to cling the more perversely as it was known to be very thin land. He avoided his neighbours, his father’s former associates; he seemed to take pleasure in braving their disapproval of his queer proceedings; he informed them that he wanted no help but what he paid for, and that he expected to work his farm for himself and by himself. In short, he proved himself to their satisfaction egregiously ungrateful and conceited. They were not slow to discover that his incapacity was as great as his vanity. In two years he had more than undone the work of the late lessee, who had tried some clever experiments on the thankless soil. At the end of three years people spoke of him as cracked; it seemed to those who observed him that there was something so wanton in his errors as really to impugn his sanity. He appeared to have accepted this view of his condition, and to have given up all pretence of work. He went about silent and sullen, like a man who feels that he has a quarrel with fate. About this time it became generally known that he was often the worse for liquor; and he hereupon acquired the deplorable reputation of a man worse than unsociable—a man who boozes alone—although it was still doubtful whether this practice was the cause or the effect of his poor crops. About this time, too, he began again to see something of Gertrude Whittaker. For many months after his return he had been held at his distance, together with most of the local swains, by the knowledge of her father’s extreme hostility to all suitors and fortune-hunters, and then, subsequently, by the illness preceding the old man’s death. When, however, at last, on the expiration of her term of mourning, Miss Whittaker opened to society her long-blockaded ports, Richard had, to all the world’s amazement, been among the first to profit by this extension of the general privilege and to cast anchor in the wide and peaceful waters of her friendship. He found himself at this moment, considerably to his surprise, in his twenty-fourth year; that is, a few months younger than the heiress.

It was impossible that she should not have gathered from mere juxtaposition an impression of the poor figure he cut in the world, and of his peculiar relation to his neighbours and his own affairs. Thanks to this impression, Richard found a very warm welcome—the welcome of easy compassion. Gertrude gave him all the back-news of his sister Fanny, with whom he had dropped correspondence, and, impelled by Fanny’s complaints of his long silence, ventured upon a friendly recommendation that he should go straight home and write a letter to California. Richard sat before her, gazing at her out of his dark eyes, and not only attempting no defence of his conduct, but rejoicing dumbly in the utter absence of any possible defence—his exposure seemed so delightful. He wished he could be scolded like that every day or two; nothing had ever touched him so softly. He carried away an extraordinary sense of general alleviation; and forthwith began a series of visits which, in the space of some ten weeks, culminated in the interview I have set before the reader. Painfully diffident in the company of most women, Richard had not from the first known what it was to be shy with Gertrude. As a man of the world finds it useful to refresh his social energies by an occasional tête-à-tête of an hour with himself, so Richard, with whom solitude was the rule, derived a certain austere satisfaction from an hour’s contact with this young lady’s quick wits and good-humour, her liberal way of life and active charity. Gradually, however, from a salutary process, this became a regular luxury. It was now pleasant to go to Gertrude because he enjoyed the contagion of her own success—because he witnessed her happiness without a sensation of envy—because he forgot his entanglements and bad habits—because, finally, his soul slept away its troubles beneath her kind, clear eye, very much as his body had often slept away its weariness in the shade of a murmuring apple-tree. But the soul, like the body, will not sleep long without dreaming; and it will not dream often without wishing at last to tell its dreams. Richard had one day ventured to impart his visions to Gertrude, and the revelation apparently had not been at all to her taste.

The fact that this blundering youth had somehow worked himself into an intimacy with Miss Whittaker very soon became public property among their neighbours; and in the hands of these good people, naturally enough, received an important addition in the inference that—strange as it might seem—she was going to change her name for his. He was, of course, regarded as a very lucky fellow, and the prevalence of this impression was doubtless not without its effect on the forbearance of certain long-suffering creditors. And even if she was not to marry him, it was further argued, she yet might lend him money; for it was assumed without question that the necessity of raising money was the mainspring of Richard’s suit. It must be declared without delay that this assumption was precipitate and unfair. Our hero had faults enough, but a mercenary habit was not one of them; nor was an excessive concern on the subject of his debts one of his virtues. As for Gertrude, wherever else her perception of her friend’s feelings may have been at fault, it was not at fault on this point. That he loved her as desperately as he tried to make her believe she indeed doubted; but it never occurred to her to question his disinterestedness. And so, on the other hand, it was strictly because she was not in love with him that she resisted him, and not on account of the disparity of their fortunes. In accepting his very simple and natural overtures to friendship, in calling him ‘Richard’ in remembrance of old days, and in submitting generally to the terms of their old acquaintance, she had foreseen no dangerous complications. She had regarded him as one more helpless human being to ‘look after’. She had espoused his interests (like all good women, Gertrude was ever more or less of a partisan) because she loved his sister and because she pitied himself. She would stand to him in loco sororis. The reader has seen that she had given herself a long day’s work.

It is not to be supposed that Richard’s comparatively pacific retreat at the close of the walk by the river implied any instinct of resignation to the prospects which Gertrude had opened to him. It is explained rather by an intensity of purpose so deep as to believe it could take its time. This was not the end of his suit, but the beginning. He would not give in until he was positively beaten. It was all very well, he reflected, that Gertrude should reject him. Such a woman as she ought properly to be striven for, and there was something ridiculous in the idea that she should be easily won, whether by himself or by another. Richard was a slow thinker, but he thought more wisely than he talked; and he now took back all his angry boasts of accomplished self-mastery and humbly surveyed the facts of the case. He was on the way to recovery, but he was by no means cured, and yet his very humility assured him that he was curable. He was no hero, certainly, but he was better than his life; he was no scholar, but, in his own view at least, he was not an ass. He was good enough to be better; he was good enough not to sit by the hour soaking his limited understanding in whiskey. And at the very least, if he was not worthy to possess Gertrude, he was yet worthy to strive to obtain her, and to live for evermore upon the glory of there having been such a question between himself and the great Miss Whittaker. He would raise himself then to that level from which he could address her as an equal, from which he would have the right to insist on something. How he would do this he was at a loss to determine. He was conscious of a great deal of crude intention, but he cursed the ignorance which was such an obstacle to his doing anything in particular. He longed vaguely for some continuous muscular effort, at the end of which he should find himself face to face with his mistress. But as, instead of being a Pagan hero, with an enticing task-list of impossibilities, he was a plain New England cultivator, with a bad conscience, and nature with him and not against him—as, after slaying his dragon, after renouncing liquor, his work was a simple operation in common sense—in view of these facts he found but little inspiration in his prospect. Nevertheless he fronted it bravely. He was not to obtain Gertrude by making a fortune, but by making himself a man, by learning to live. But as to learn to live is to learn to work, he would find some use for his valour. He would keep sober and clear-headed; he would retrieve his land and pay his debts. Then let her refuse him if she could—or if she dared!

Meanwhile Gertrude, on her side, sat quietly at home, turning over in her own fashion a dozen little plans for her friend’s redemption and for making the stream of his passion turn some other mill. Not but that she meant rigorously to fulfil her part of the engagement to which she had invited him in that painful scene by the river. Yet, with however much of the same firmness and mildness she might still meet him, she could not feel secure against repeated intrusion without the knowledge of a partial change, at least, in Richard’s own attitude. Such a change could only be effected through some preparatory change in his life; and a change in his life could be brought about only by the introduction of some new influence. This influence, unfortunately, was hard to find. However positively Gertrude had dwelt upon the practical virtue of her friendship, she was, on further reflection, led to ask herself whether it mightn’t be helped in its work. He was welcome enough to that, but he needed something more. It suddenly occurred to her, one morning, after Richard’s image had been crossing and recrossing her mental vision for a couple of hours with wearisome pertinacity, that a world of good might accrue to him through the acquaintance of a person so clever, so superior as Captain Severn. There was no one who would not be better for knowing such a man. She would recommend Richard to his kindness, and him she would recommend to Richard’s—what? Here was the rub! Where was there common ground between Richard and such a one as he? To beg him to try to like Richard was easy; to ask Richard to care for him was absurd. If Richard could only know him the matter would take care of itself—he would take a fancy to him in spite of every prejudice. But to begin to praise any object to her young friend was just the way to make him hate it. He himself was such a subject for pity that it had never occurred to her to recommend any one to his benevolence. All the world seemed above him, and he was therefore out of sorts with all the world. If she could put her hand on some creature less favoured of nature and of fortune than himself, he might feel some sympathy for such a being. Captain Severn had, to her knowledge, not been a darling of destiny, but he was apparently quite contented with his lot, and thus he was raised several degrees above Richard, who would be certain to find a tacit rebuke in his resignation. Still, for all this, Gertrude would bring them together. She had a high opinion of the Captain’s generosity, and if Richard should wantonly throw away such a chance the loss would be his own. It may be thought that in this enterprise Captain Severn was somewhat inconsiderately handled. But women have been known to show their affection for a man by sending him as a missionary to the cannibals. These words suggest the propriety of a short description of the person to whom they refer.

III

Edmund Severn was a man of eight-and-twenty, who, having for some time combated fortune and his own inclinations as a mathematical tutor in a country-college, had, on the opening of the war, transferred his abilities to a more heroic field. The regiment of volunteers to which he belonged, and which was now a part of the army of the Potomac, had been raised in Miss Whittaker’s district, and she had given almost every man in it—as a rich woman could do—some sign that her thoughts were with him. His soldiership, like his scholarship, was solid rather than brilliant. He was not destined to be heard of at home, nor to be lifted out of regimental work; but on many an important occasion in Virginia he had proved himself in a modest way a very useful officer. Coming up, early in the war, with a severe wound, to be nursed by a married sister who was domiciled in Gertrude’s neighbourhood, he was, like all his fellow-sufferers within a wide circuit, very soon honoured with a visit of anxious inquiry from Miss Whittaker, who was as yet known to him only by report, and who transmitted to him the warmest assurances of sympathy and interest, together with the liveliest offers of assistance; and incidentally, as it were, to these, a copious collection of specimens from her hot-house and store-room. Severn had taken the air for the first time in Gertrude’s own cushioned barouche, which she had sent to his door at an early stage of his convalescence, and which of course he had immediately made use of to pay his respects to his benefactress. He was taken aback by the humility with which, on this occasion, betwixt smiles and tears, she protested that to be of service to the suffering brave was a sacred privilege. The Captain liked her on the spot, and thought of nothing else as he drove home. Half-a-dozen visits, during the ensuing month, more than sufficed to convert him into what is called an admirer; but as the weeks passed by he perceived there were great obstacles to his ripening into a real aspirant. Captain Severn was a serious man; he was conscientious, discreet, deliberate, unused to act without a definite purpose. He liked to see where he was going, and never went far simply because the country was pretty; he wanted to know where he should arrive. In pursuance of this tradition he had asked himself whether he was prepared to face the consequences of falling in love with our young lady. Since he had taken a vow, a twelvemonth before, not to marry until, by some means or another, he should have an income to point to, no great change had come to pass in his fortunes. He was still a poor man and an unsettled one; he was still awaiting his real vocation. Moreover, while subject to the chances of war, he thought it wrong to draw a woman on; he shrank in horror from the thought of converting some fresh girl into a figure of mourning. Miss Whittaker pleased him as he had never been pleased, but that seemed to him no reason for recanting his principles. He could no more afford to marry a rich woman than a poor one. When he should have earned enough money for two to live upon, then he would be free to marry whomsoever he might fancy—a beggar or an heiress. The truth is that the Captain was a great deal too proud. It was his fault that he could not bring himself to forget the difference between his poverty and Gertrude’s wealth. He would of course have resented the insinuation that the superior fortune of the woman he loved could seem to him a reason for not declaring his love; but there is no doubt that in the case before us the sentiment in question didn’t dare—or hadn’t as yet dared—to lift its head. Severn had a deep aversion to being in debt. It is probable that, after all, he would have accepted obligations gracefully enough from a person with certain rights; but while a woman was as yet neither his mistress nor his wife, the idea of being beholden to her was odious to him. It would have been a question with one who knew him whether at this juncture these logical ice-blocks were destined to resist the warmth of Gertrude’s charms, or gradually to evaporate and flood the position. There would have been no question, however, but that he could keep up his consistency only at the cost of a considerable moral strain. At this moment, then, Severn had made up his mind that Gertrude was not for him, and that it behoved him to walk very straight. That Miss Whittaker, with a hundred rational cares, was anything less than supremely oblivious of him individually, it never occurred to him to suspect. The truth is that Gertrude’s private and personal emotions were entertained in a chamber of her heart so remote from the portals of speech that no sound of their revelry found its way into the world. She thought of her modest, soldierly, scholarly friend as a gentleman who would perhaps some day take to wife some woman, who, however nice she might be, couldn’t be as nice as he. But what was she to him? A local roadside figure—at the very most a sort of millionaire Maud Müller—with whom it was pleasant for a lonely wayfarer to exchange a friendly good-morning. Her duty was to fold her arms resignedly, to sit quietly on the sofa and watch a great happiness sink below the horizon. With this impression on Gertrude’s part it is not surprising that Severn was not wrenched out of himself. The prodigy was apparently to be wrought—if wrought at all—by her taking her loss for granted. This left nothing between them but her casual hospitality, and the effect of that method, as yet, upon Severn had been none other than its effect upon all the world. It kept him in his best form. They talked and fraternised, and moreover they watched each other, but they breathed not a word of what each was thinking about most. It was with perfect honesty, therefore, that she had rebutted Richard’s insinuation that the Captain enjoyed any especial favour. He was only another of her social pensioners.

The result of Gertrude’s meditations was that she despatched a note to each of her two friends, requesting them to take tea with her on the following day. A couple of hours before tea-time she received a visit from one Major Luttrel, who was recruiting for a United States regiment at a large town, some ten miles away, and who had ridden over in the afternoon, in accordance with a general invitation conveyed to him through an old lady who had bespoken Miss Whittaker’s consideration for him as a man of delightful manners and wonderful talents. Gertrude had replied to her venerable friend, with her wonted alacrity, that she would be very glad to see Major Luttrel should he ever come that way, and then had thought no more about him until his card was brought to her as she was dressing for the evening. He found so much to say to her that the interval passed very rapidly for both of them, before the simultaneous entrance of Miss Pendexter and of Gertrude’s guests. The two officers were already slightly known to each other, and Richard was introduced to each of them. They eyed the distracted-looking young farmer with some curiosity. Richard’s was at all times a figure to attract attention; but now he was really dramatic (so Severn thought at least) with his careless garments, his pale, handsome face, his dark mistrustful eyes, his nervous movements. Major Luttrel, who struck Gertrude as at once very agreeable and the least bit in the world insufferable, was, of course, invited to remain—which he straightway consented to do; and it soon became evident to Miss Whittaker that her little plan would have no fruit. Richard practised a certain defiant, conscious silence, which, as she feared, gave him eventually a very pretentious air. His companions displayed that half-confessed effort to shine and to outshine natural to clever men who find themselves concurring to the entertainment of a young and agreeable woman. Richard sat by, wondering in splenetic amazement whether he were an ignorant boor or they were only a pair of grimacing comedians. He decided, correctly enough, in substance, for the former hypothesis; for it seemed to him that Gertrude’s extreme accommodation (for as such he viewed it) of her tone and her manner to theirs was only another proof of her tremendous cleverness. How magnanimous an impulse on Richard’s part was this submission for the sake of the woman he loved to a fact damning to his own vanity, could have been determined only by one who knew the proportions of that vanity. He writhed and chafed under the polish of tone and the variety of allusion by which the two officers consigned him to insignificance; but he was soon lost in wonder at the richness of resource of their hostess. For a moment it seemed to him that she ought to spare him an exhibition by which he could only be mortified—for didn’t she know his thoughts, she who was the cause of them all? But the next instant he asked himself, with a great revulsion of feeling, whether he was afraid to see the proof of how superior she was to himself. As he gulped down the sickening fact of his comparative, nay, his absolute ignorance of the great world represented by his rivals, he felt like anticipating its consequences by a desperate sally into the very field of their conversation. To some such movement Gertrude was continually inviting him by her glances, her smiles, her questions, by certain little calculated silences. But poor Richard knew that if he should attempt to talk he would choke; and this assurance he imparted to his friend in a look piteously eloquent. He was conscious of a sensation under which his heart was fast turning into a fiery furnace, destined to consume all his good resolutions. He could not answer for the future now. Suddenly, as tea was drawing to a close, he became aware that Captain Severn had sunk into a silence very nearly as helpless as his own, and that he was covertly watching the progress of a lively dialogue between Miss Whittaker and Major Luttrel. He had the singular experience of seeing his own feelings reflected in the Captain’s face; that is, he discovered there an incipient jealousy. Severn too was in love!

IV

On rising from table Gertrude proposed an adjournment to the garden, where she was very fond of entertaining her friends at this hour. The sun had sunk behind a long line of hills, far beyond the opposite bank of the river, a portion of which was discernible through a gap in the intervening wood. The high-piled roof and chimney-stacks, the picturesquely crowded surface, of the old patched and renovated farm-house which constituted Miss Whittaker’s residence, were ruddy with the declining rays. Our friends’ long shadows were thrown over the smooth grass. Gertrude, having graciously gone to meet the gentlemen’s desire for their cigars, suggested a stroll toward the river. Before she knew it she had accepted Major Luttrel’s arm; and, as Miss Pendexter preferred remaining at home, Severn and Richard found themselves lounging side by side at a short distance behind their hostess. Gertrude, who had noticed the taciturnity which had suddenly fallen upon Captain Severn, and in her simplicity had referred it to some unwitting failure of attention on her own part, hoped to make up for her neglect by having him at her own side. She was in some degree consoled, however, by the sight of his conjunction with Richard. As for Richard, now that he was on his feet and in the open air, he found it easier to speak.

“Who is that fellow?” he asked, nodding toward the Major.

“Major Luttrel, of the —th Artillery.”

“I don’t like his face much,” said Richard.

“Don’t you?” rejoined Severn, amused at his companion’s bluntness. “He’s not handsome, but he looks like a soldier.”

“He looks like a scoundrel, I think,” said Richard.

Severn laughed outright, so that Gertrude glanced back at him. “Dear me! I think you put it rather strongly. He seems to me a very pleasant member of society.”

Richard was sorely perplexed. He had expected to find acceptance for his bitterest animadversions, and lo! here was the Captain fighting for his enemy. Such a man as that was no rival. So poor a reviler could be but a poor adorer. Nevertheless, a certain new-born scepticism in regard to his old fashion of measuring human motives prevented him from adopting this conclusion as final. He would try another question.

“Do you know Miss Whittaker well?”

“Tolerably well. She was very kind to me when I was ill. Since then I have seen her a good many times.”

“That’s a way she has, being kind to people who are in trouble,” Richard remarked, with a shrewdness which he thought superior. But as the Captain merely puffed his cigar responsively, he pursued, “What do you think of her appearance?”

“I like it very much,” said the Captain.

“She isn’t beautiful,” said Richard, with calculation.

Severn was silent a moment, and then, just as Richard was about to dismiss him from his thoughts, as neither formidable nor satisfactory, he replied, with some emphasis, “You mean she isn’t pretty. She is beautiful, I think, in spite of the irregularity of her face. It’s the sort of face you don’t forget. She has no features, no colour, no lilies nor roses, no attitudes; but she has looks, expressions.”

Severn spoke Richard’s mind as well as his own. That ‘She isn’t beautiful’ had been an extempore version of the young man’s most cherished dogma, namely, She is beautiful. The reader will remember that he had so translated it on a former occasion. Now, all that he felt was a sense of gratitude to the Captain for having put it so much more finely than he, the above being his choicest public expression of it. But the Captain’s eyes, somewhat brightened by his short but significant speech, were following Gertrude’s slow steps. Richard saw that he could learn more from them than from any further oral declaration, for something in the lips beneath them seemed to indicate that they had judged themselves to have said enough, and they were obviously not the lips of a simpleton. As he thus deferred, with unwonted courtesy, to the Captain’s silence, and transferred his gaze sympathetically to Gertrude’s shapely shoulders and to her listening ear, he gave utterance to a tell-tale sigh—a sigh which there was no mistaking. Severn looked about; it was now his turn to probe a little. ‘Good heavens,’ he exclaimed, ‘that boy is in love with her!’

After the first shock of surprise he accepted this fact with rational calmness. Why shouldn’t he be in love with her? ‘Je le suis bien,’ said the Captain; ‘or, rather, I’m not.’ Could it be, Severn pursued, that he was a favourite? He was an underbred young farmer, but it was plain that he had a soul of his own. He almost wished indeed that Richard might turn out to be in Gertrude’s good graces. ‘But if he is,’ he reflected, ‘why should he sigh like the wind in the chimney? It is true that there is no arguing for lovers. I, who am out in the cold, take my comfort in whistling most impertinently. It may be that my friend here groans for very bliss. I confess, however, that he scarcely looks like a gratified swain.’

And forthwith this faint-hearted gentleman felt a twinge of pity for Richard’s probable ill-luck; and as he compared it with the elaborately defensive condition of his own affections he felt a further pang of self-contempt. But it was easier to restore the equilibrium of his self-respect by an immediate cession of the field than by contesting it against this wofully wounded knight. ‘Whether he wins her or not, he’ll fight for her,’ the Captain mused; and, as he glanced at Major Luttrel, he felt there was some comfort in that. He didn’t fancy the Major so very much.

They had now reached the water’s edge, where Gertrude, having made her companion pause, turned round to await her other guests. As they came up Severn saw, or thought he saw (which is a very different thing), that her first look was at Richard. The ‘admirer’ in his breast rose fratricidal for a moment against the quiet observer; but the next it was pinioned again. ‘Amen,’ said the Captain; ‘it’s none of my business.’

At this moment Richard was soaring very high. The end of his bad feelings had been a sudden exaltation. He looked at the scene before him with all sorts of remarkable ideas. Why should he stand tongue-tied, sulking at opportunity, when all nature beckoned him into the field? There was the river-path where, a fortnight before, he had found an eloquence attested by Gertrude’s tears. There was the admirable Gertrude herself, whose hand he had kissed and whose waist he had clasped. Surely, he was master here! Before he knew it he had begun to express himself—rapidly, nervously, almost defiantly. Major Luttrel having made an observation about the prettiness of the river, Richard entered upon a description of its general character and its superior beauty in that part of its course which traversed his own property, together with an enumeration of the fish which were to be found in it and a story about a great overflow ten years before. He spoke with sufficient volubility, but with a kind of angry shyness, his head thrown back and his eyes on the opposite bank. At last he stopped, feeling that he had given proof of his manhood, and looked towards Gertrude, whose eyes he had been afraid to meet until he had seen his adventure to a close. But she was looking at Captain Severn, under the impression that Richard had secured his auditor. Severn was looking at Luttrel, and Luttrel at Miss Whittaker; and all were apparently so deep in observation that they had marked neither his speech nor his silence. ‘Truly,’ thought the young man, ‘I’m well out of the circle!’ But he was determined to be patient still, which was assuredly, all things considered, a very enlightened resolution. Yet there was always something spasmodic and unnatural in Richard’s magnanimity. A touch in the wrong place would cause it to collapse. It was Gertrude’s evil fortune to administer this puncture. As the party turned about toward the house Richard stepped to her side and offered her his arm, hoping in his heart—so implicitly did he count upon her sympathy, so almost boyishly, filially, did he depend upon it—for some covert token that his heroism, such as it was, had not been lost upon her.

But Gertrude, intensely preoccupied by the desire to repair her fancied injustice to the Captain, shook her head at him without even meeting his eye. “Thank you,” she said; “I want Captain Severn;” who forthwith approached.

Poor Richard felt his feet touch the ground again, and at that instant he could have flung the Captain into the stream. Major Luttrel placed himself at Gertrude’s other elbow, and Richard stood behind them, almost livid with spite, and half resolved to turn upon his heel and make his way home by the river. But it occurred to him that a more elaborate vengeance would be to follow the trio before him back to the lawn, and then show them how well he could dispense with their company. Accordingly, when they reached the house he stood aloof and bade Gertrude a grim good-night. He trembled with eagerness to see whether she would make an attempt to detain him. But Miss Whittaker, reading in his voice—it had grown too dark to see his face at the distance at which he stood—the story of some fancied affront, and unconsciously contrasting it, perhaps, with Severn’s clear and unwarped accents, obeyed what she deemed a prompting of self-respect, and gave him, without her hand, a farewell as cold as his own. It is but fair to add that, a couple of hours later, as she reviewed the incidents of the evening, she repented very characteristically of this little act of justice.

V

Richard hardly knew how he got through the following week. He found occupation, to a much greater extent than he suspected, in a sordid yet at the same time heroic struggle with himself. For several months now he had been leading, under Gertrude’s inspiration, a very decent and sober life. So long as he was at comparative peace with Gertrude and with himself, such a life was more than easy; it was delightful. It produced a moral buoyancy infinitely more delicate than the exhilaration of liquor. There was a kind of fascination in keeping the score of his abstinence. Having abjured excesses, he practised temperance after the fashion of a novice: nothing would suit him but not to drink at all. He was like an unclean man who, having washed himself clean, remains in the water to splash about. He wished to be religiously, superstitiously pure. This was easy, as I have said, so long as his goddess smiled, even though it were as a goddess indeed—as a creature unattainable. But when she frowned and the heavens grew dark, Richard’s sole dependence was in his own good intention—as flimsy a trust for an upward scramble, one would have predicted, as a tuft of grass on the face of a perpendicular cliff. Flimsy as it looked, however, it served him. It started and crumbled, but it held, if only by a single fibre. When Richard had cantered fifty yards away from Gertrude’s gate in a fit of stupid rage, he suddenly pulled up his horse and gulped down his passion, swearing an oath, that, suffer what torments of feeling he might, he would not at least break the continuity of his reform. It was enough to be drunk in mind; he would not be drunk in body. A singular, almost comical feeling of antagonism to Gertrude lent force to this resolution. ‘No, madam,’ he cried within himself, ‘I shall not fall back. Do your best! I shall keep straight.’ We recover from great offences and afflictions by the aid of the same egotism they were perhaps meant to chasten. Richard went to bed that night fasting as grimly as a Trappist monk; and his foremost impulse the next day was to stupefy himself with some drudgery. He found no task to his taste; but he spent the day so actively, in mechanically getting rid of the time, that Gertrude’s image found no chance to be importunate. He was engaged in the work of self-preservation, the most serious and absorbing work possible to man. Compared to this question of his own manhood it sometimes seemed not very important, after all, that Gertrude should listen to him. He tried later to build up a virtue by the most ruthless experiments and tests. He took long rides over the country, passing within a stone’s throw of as many of the scattered wayside taverns as could be combined in a single circuit. As he drew near them he sometimes slackened his pace, as if he were about to dismount, pulled up his horse, gazed a moment, then, thrusting in his spurs, galloped away again like one pursued. At other times, in the late evening, when the window-panes were aglow with the ruddy light within, he would walk slowly by, looking at the stars, and, after maintaining this stoical pace for a couple of miles, would hurry home to his own dim and lonely dwelling. Having successfully performed this feat a certain number of times, he found his desire for Gertrude coming back to him, but bereft in the interval of a jealousy which now seemed to him to have been fantastic. One morning, at any rate, he leaped upon his horse and cantered back to Miss Whittaker’s.

He had made himself comparatively sure of his will; but he was yet to acquire the mastery of his impulses. As he gave up his horse, according to his wont, to one of the men at the stable, he saw another animal, which he recognised as Captain Severn’s. “Steady, my boy,” he murmured to himself, as he would have done to a frightened steed. On the steps of the house he encountered the Captain, who had just taken his leave. Richard gave him a nod which was intended to be very friendly, and Severn nodded back, but didn’t speak. Richard observed, however, that he was very pale, and that he was pulling a rosebud to pieces, as he walked; whereupon our young man quickened his step. Finding the parlour empty, he instinctively crossed over to a small room adjoining it, which Gertrude had converted into a conservatory; and as he did so, hardly knowing it, he lightened his heavy-shod tread. The glass door was open and Richard looked in. There stood Gertrude, with her back to him, bending apart with her hands a couple of tall flowering plants, and looking through the glazed partition behind them. Advancing a step, and glancing over the young girl’s shoulder, Richard had just time to see Severn mounting his horse at the stable-door, before Gertrude, startled by his approach, turned hastily round. Her face was flushed hot, her eyes brimming with tears.

“You!” she exclaimed, sharply.

Richard’s head swam. That single word was so charged with an invidious distinction that it seemed the death-knell of all his hopes. He stepped inside the room and closed the door, keeping his hand on the knob.

“Gertrude,” he said, “you love that man!”

“Well, sir?”

“Do you confess it?” cried Richard.

“Confess it? Richard Maule, how dare you use such language? I am in no humour for a scene. Let me pass.”

Gertrude was angry; but as for Richard, it may almost be said that he was mad. “One scene a day is enough, I suppose,” he cried. “What are these tears about? Wouldn’t he have you? Did he refuse you, as you refused me? Unfortunate creature!”

Gertrude looked at him a moment with concentrated scorn. “You poor idiot!” she said, for all answer. She pushed his hand from the latch, flung open the door, and moved rapidly away.

Left alone, Richard sank down on a sofa and covered his face with his hands. It burned them, but he sat motionless, repeating to himself, mechanically, as if to avert thought, ‘You poor idiot! you poor idiot!’ At last he got up and made his way out.

It seemed to Gertrude, for several hours after this incident, that she had a remarkably strong case against fortune. It is not necessary to repeat here the words she had exchanged with Captain Severn. They had come within an ace of a mutual understanding, and when a single movement of the hand of either would have jerked aside the curtain that hung between them, some malignant influence had paralysed them both. Had they too much pride?—too little imagination? We must content ourselves with supposing so. Severn had walked blindly across the yard, saying to himself, ‘She belongs to another’, and adding, as he saw Richard, ‘and such another!’ Gertrude had stood at her window, repeating, under her breath, “He belongs to himself, himself alone.” And as if this was not enough, when misconceived, slighted, wounded, she had turned back to her old, passionless, dutiful past, on the path of retreat to this asylum Richard Maule had arisen to forewarn her that she should find no peace even at home. There was something in the impertinence of his appearance at this moment which gave her a feeling that fate was against her, and there even entered into her mind a certain element of dread of the man whose passion was so insistent. She felt that it was out of place any longer to pity him. He was the slave of his passion, but his passion was strong. In her reaction against Severn’s exaggerated respect, it gratified her, after a little, to remember that Richard had been brutal. He, at least, had ventured to insult her—he had loved her enough to forget himself. He had dared to make himself odious in her eyes, because he had cast away conventional forms. What cared he for the impression he made? He cared only for the impression he received. The violence of this reaction, however, was the measure of its duration. It was impossible that she should walk backward so fast without stumbling. Brought to her senses by this accident, she became aware that her judgment had deserted its post. She smiled to herself as she reflected that it had been taking holiday for a whole afternoon. ‘Richard was right,’ she said to herself. ‘I am no fool. I can’t be a fool if I try. I am too thoroughly my father’s daughter for that. I love that man, but I love myself better. Of course, then, I don’t deserve to have him. If I loved him in a way to merit his love, I would sit down this moment and write him a note telling him that if he does not come back to me I shall die. But I shall neither write the note nor die. I shall live and grow stout, and look after my chickens and my flowers and my colts, and thank the Lord in my old age that I have never done anything immodest. Well! I am as He made me. Whether I shall ever deceive others, I know not; but I certainly shall never deceive myself. I am quite as sharp as Gertrude Whittaker; and this it is that has kept me from making a fool of myself and writing to poor Richard the note that I wouldn’t write to Captain Severn. I needed to fancy myself wronged. I suffer so little—I needed a sensation. So, shrewd Yankee that I am, I thought I would get one cheaply by taking up that unhappy boy. Heaven preserve me from the heroics, especially the economical heroics! The one heroic course possible I decline. What, then, have I to complain of? Must I tear my hair because a man of taste has resisted my unspeakable charms? To be charming you must be charmed yourself, or at least you must be able to be charmed; and that apparently I am not. I didn’t love him, or he would have known it. If you won’t risk anything how can you demand of others that they shall?’

But at this point of her meditations Gertrude almost broke down. She felt that she was assigning herself but a dreary future. Never to be loved but by an intemperate, uneducated boy, who would never grow older, was a cheerless prospect, for it seemed to convert her into a kind of maiden-aunt. Yet her conscience smote her for her meditated falsity to Richard, her momentary readiness to succumb to the temptation to revert to him out of pique. She recoiled from this thought as from an act cruel and immoral. Was he any better suited to her now than he had been a month before? Was she to apply for comfort where she would not apply for counsel? Was she to drown her vexation at losing Captain Severn in a passion got up for the occasion? Having done the young man so bitter a wrong in intention, nothing would appease her magnanimous remorse (as time went on) but to repair it in fact. She went so far as to regret the harsh words she had cast upon him in the conservatory. He had been insolent and unmannerly, but he had an excuse. Much should be forgiven him, for he loved much. Even now that Gertrude had imposed upon her feelings a sterner regimen than ever, she could not defend herself from a sweet and sentimental thrill—a thrill in which, as we have intimated, there was something of a tremor—at the recollection of his strident accents and his angry eyes. It was far from her to desire a renewal, however brief, of this exhibition. She wished simply to efface from the young man’s morbid mind the impression that she really scorned him, for she knew that against such an impression he was capable of taking the most reckless and ruinous comfort.

Before many mornings had passed, accordingly, she had a horse saddled, and, dispensing with attendance, took her way to his straggling farm. The house-door and half the windows stood open; but no answer came to her repeated summons. She rode round to the rear of the house, to the barn-yard, thinly tenanted by a few common fowl, and across the yard to a road which skirted its lower extremity and was accessible by an open gate. No human figure was in sight; nothing was visible in the hot stillness but the scattered and ripening crops, over which, in spite of her nervous solicitude, Miss Whittaker cast the glance of a connoisseur. A great uneasiness filled her mind as she measured the wide fields, apparently abandoned by their young master, and reflected that she perhaps was the cause of his absence. Ah, where was Richard? As she looked and listened in vain, her heart rose to her throat, and she felt herself on the point of calling wistfully upon his name. But her voice was stayed by the sound of a heavy rumble of cart-wheels, beyond a turn in the road. She touched up her horse and cantered along until she reached the bend. A great four-wheeled cart, laden with masses of newly-broken stone and drawn by four oxen, was slowly advancing towards her. Beside it, patiently cracking his whip and shouting monotonously, walked a young man in a slouched hat and a red shirt, with his trousers thrust into his dusty boots. As he saw Gertrude he halted a moment, amazed, and then advanced, flicking the air with his whip. Gertrude’s heart went out to him in a sigh of really tender relief. Her next reflection was that he had never looked so well. The truth is that, in this rough adjustment, the native barbarian appeared to his advantage. His face and neck were browned by a week in the fields, his eye was clear, his step seemed to have learned a certain manly dignity from its attendance on the heavy bestial tramp. Gertrude, as he reached her side, pulled up her horse and held out her gloved fingers to his brown, dusty hand. He took them, looked for a moment into her face, and for the second time raised them to his lips.

“Excuse my glove,” she said, with a little smile.

“Excuse mine,” he answered, exhibiting his sunburnt, work-stained hand.

“Richard,” said Gertrude, “you never had less need of excuse in your life. You never looked half so well.”

He fixed his eyes upon her a moment. “Why, you have forgiven me!” he exclaimed.

“Yes, I have forgiven you—both you and myself. We both of us behaved very absurdly, but we both of us had reason. I wish you had come back.”

Richard looked about him, apparently at loss for a rejoinder. “I have been very busy,” he said, at last, with a simplicity of tone slightly studied. He was always wishing to produce an effect upon her, and it seemed to him just then that this was the way.

It was a certain instinct of calculation, too, that forbade Gertrude to express all the joy which this assurance gave her. Excessive joy would have implied undue surprise; and it was a part of her plan frankly to expect the best things of her companion. “If you have been busy I congratulate you. What have you been doing?”

“Oh, a hundred things. I have been quarrying, and draining, and clearing, and doing a lot of chores. I thought the best thing was just to put my own hands to it. I am going to make a stone fence along the great lot on the hill there. Wallace is for ever grumbling about his boundaries. I mean to fix them once for all. What are you laughing at?”

“I am laughing at certain foolish apprehensions that I have been indulging for a week past. You are wiser than I, Richard. I have no imagination.”

“Do you mean that I have? I haven’t enough to guess what you do mean.”

“Why, do you suppose, have I come over this morning?”

“Because you thought I was sulking on account of your having called me an idiot.”

“Sulking, or worse. What do I deserve for the wrong I have done you?”

“You have done me no wrong. You reasoned fairly enough. You are not obliged to know me better than I know myself. It’s just like you to be ready to take back that bad word, and try to make yourself believe that it was unjust. But it was perfectly just, and therefore I have managed to bear it. I was an idiot at that moment—a nasty, impudent idiot. I don’t know whether that man had been saying sweet things to you. But if he had you wouldn’t have objected—your face told that; I should have been less than a man, I should be unworthy of your—your affection, if I had failed to see it. I did see it—I saw it as clearly as I see those oxen now; and yet I bounced in with my own ill-timed claims. To do so was to be an awful ass. To have been other than an ass would have been to have waited, to have backed out, to have bitten my tongue off before I spoke, to have done anything but what I did. I have no right to claim you, Gertrude, until I can woo you better than that. It was the most fortunate thing in the world that you spoke as you did: it was even kind. It saved me all the misery of groping about for a starting-point. Not to have spoken as you did would have been to let me off far too easy; and then, probably, I should have sulked, or, as you very considerately say, done worse. I had made a false move in the game, and the only thing to do was to repair it. But you were not obliged to know that I would so readily admit my move to have been false. Whenever I have made a fool of myself, before, I have been for sticking it out, and trying to turn all mankind—that is, you—into a fool too, so that I shouldn’t be an exception. But this time, I think, I had a kind of inspiration. I felt that my case was desperate. I felt that if I adopted my folly now I adopted it for ever. The other day I met a man who had just come home from Europe, and who spent last summer in Switzerland. He was telling me about the mountain-climbing over there—how they get over the glaciers, and all that. He said that you sometimes came upon great slippery, snow-covered slopes that end short off in a precipice, and that if you stumble or lose your footing as you cross them diagonally, why, you go shooting down, and you’re gone; that is, but for one little dodge. You have a long walking-pole, with a sharp end, you know, and as you feel yourself sliding—it’s as likely as not to be in a sitting posture—you just take this and ram it into the snow before you, and there you are, stopped. The thing is, of course, to drive it in far enough, so that it won’t yield or break; and in any case it hurts infernally to come whizzing down upon this upright pole. But the interruption gives you time to pick yourself up. Well, so it was with me the other day. I stumbled and fell; I slipped, and was whizzing downward; but I just drove in my pole and pulled up short. It nearly tore me in two; but it saved my life.” Richard made this speech with one hand leaning on the neck of Gertrude’s horse, and the other on his own side, and with his head slightly thrown back and his eyes on hers. She had sat quietly in her saddle, looking down at him. He had spoken slowly and deliberately, but without hesitation and without heat. ‘This is not romance, it’s reality,’ thought Gertrude. And this feeling it was that dictated her reply, divesting it of sentiment so effectually as almost to make it sound trivial.

“It was fortunate you had an alpenstock,” she said.

“I shall never travel without one again.”

“Never, at least, with a companion who has the bad habit of pushing you off the path.”

“Oh, you may push all you like,” said Richard. “I give you leave. But isn’t this enough about myself?”

“That’s as you think.”

“Well, it’s all I have to say for the present, except that I am tremendously glad to see you, and that of course you will stay awhile.”

“But you have your work to do.”

“Oh, I say, never you mind my work. I have earned my dinner this morning, if you have no objection; and I propose to share it with you. So we will go back to the house.” He turned her horse’s head about, started up his oxen with his voice, and walked along beside her on the grassy roadside, with one hand on the horse’s mane and the other swinging his whip.

Before they reached the yard-gate Gertrude had thought over what he had just said to her. ‘Enough about himself,’ she said, silently echoing his words. ‘Yes, heaven be praised, it is about himself. I am but a means in this matter—he himself, his own character, his own happiness, is the end.’ Under this conviction it seemed to her that her part was appreciably simplified. Richard was learning wisdom and self-control, and to exercise his reason—such was the suit that he was destined to gain. Her duty was as far as possible to remain passive, and not to interfere with the working of the gods who had selected her as the instrument of their miracle. As they reached the gate Richard made a trumpet of his hands, and sent a ringing summons into the fields; whereupon a farm-boy approached, and, with an undisguised stare of amazement at Gertrude, took charge of his master’s team. Gertrude rode up to the door-step, where her host assisted her to dismount, and bade her go in and make herself at home, while he busied himself with the bestowal of her horse. She found that, in her absence, the old woman who administered her friend’s household had reappeared, and had laid out the preparations for his mid-day meal. By the time he returned, with his face and head shining from a fresh ablution and his shirt-sleeves decently concealed by a coat, Gertrude had apparently won the complete confidence of Mrs Catching.

Gertrude doffed her hat, and tucked up her riding-skirt, and sat down, face to face with her entertainer, over his crumpled table-cloth. The young man played the host very tenderly and naturally; and Gertrude hardly knew whether to infer from his perfect self-possession that her star was already on the wane, or that it was higher in the heavens than ever. The solution of her doubts was not far to seek; Richard was absolutely at his ease in her presence. He had told her indeed that she intoxicated him; and truly, in those moments when she was compelled to oppose her quiet surfaces to his crude unrest, her whole presence seemed to him to have a kind of wine-like strength. He had told her that she was an enchantress, and this assertion, too, had its measure of truth. But her spell was a steady one; it sprang not from her beauty, her wit, her grace—it sprang from her character. In other words, Gertrude exercised the magnificent power of making her lover forget her face. Agreeably to this fact, his most frequent feeling when he was with her was a consciousness of the liberty to be still—a sensation not unlike that which in the early afternoon, as he lounged in his orchard with a pipe, he derived from the sight of the hot, vaporous hills. He was innocent of that delicious trouble which Gertrude’s thoughts had touched upon as a not unnatural result of her visit, and which another woman’s fancy would perhaps have demanded as an indispensable proof of its success. ‘Porphyro grew faint,’ the poet assures us, as he stood in Madeline’s chamber on Saint Agnes’s eve. But Richard did not in the least grow faint now that his mistress was actually filling his musty old room with her voice, her touch, her looks; that she was sitting in his unfrequented chairs, trailing her skirt over his faded carpet, casting her perverted image upon his cheap mirror, and breaking his daily bread. He was not fluttered when he sat at her well-served table and trod her muffled floors—why then should he be fluttered now? Miss Whittaker was herself in all places, and (once granted that she was not in trouble) to be at her side was to drink peace as fully in one place as in another.

Richard accordingly ate a great working-day dinner in Gertrude’s despite, and she ate a small one for his sake. She asked questions, moreover, and offered counsel, with very sisterly freedom. She deplored the rents in his table-cloth and the dismemberments of his furniture; and although by no means absurdly fastidious in the matter of household elegance, she could not but think that Richard would be a happier and a better man if he were a little more comfortable. She forbore, however, to criticise the poverty of his domestic arrangements, for she felt that the obvious answer was that such a state of things was the penalty of his living alone; and it was desirable, under the circumstances, that this idea should remain inarticulate.

When at last Gertrude began to bethink herself of going, Richard broke a long silence by the following question: “Gertrude, do you love that man?”

“My dear sir,” she said, “I refused to tell you before, because you asked the question as a right. Of course you do so no longer. No—I don’t love him. I have been near it—but I have missed it. And now good-bye.”

For a week after her visit Richard worked with renewed tenacity and felt like a hero. But one morning he woke up with all his courage gone, and limpness and languor in its place. He had been straining his faith in himself to an extreme tension, and the chord had suddenly snapped. In the hope that Gertrude’s tender fingers might repair it he rode over to her, towards evening. On his way through the village he found people gathered in knots, reading fresh copies of the Boston newspapers over each other’s shoulders, and learned that tidings had just come of a great battle in Virginia, which was also a great defeat. He procured a copy of the paper from a man who had done with it, and made haste to Gertrude’s dwelling.

She received his story with all the passionate imprecations and regrets that were then in fashion. Before long Major Luttrel presented himself, and for half-an-hour there was no talk but about the battle. The talk, however, was chiefly between Gertrude and the Major, who found considerable ground for differing opinion, she being a rabid Republican, and he in cool opposition. Richard sat by, listening apparently, but with the detachment of one to whom the matter of the discourse was of much less interest than the manner of those engaged in it. At last, when tea was announced, Gertrude told her friends, very frankly, that she would not invite them to remain—that her heart was too heavy with her country’s woes and with visions of carnage and suffering, to allow her to play the hostess—and that in short she was in the humour to be alone. Of course there was nothing for the gentlemen but to obey: but Richard went out cursing the law under which, in the hour of his mistress’s sorrow, his company was a bore, not a cure. He watched in vain, as he bade her farewell, for some little sign that she would like him to stay but that as she wished to get rid of his companion civility demanded that she should dismiss them both. No such sign was forthcoming, for the simple reason that Gertrude was sensible of no such undercurrent. The men mounted their horses in silence, and rode slowly along the lane which led from Miss Whittaker’s stables to the highroad. As they approached the top of the lane they perceived in the twilight a mounted figure coming towards them. Richard’s heart began to beat with an angry foreboding, which was confirmed as the rider drew near and disclosed the features of Captain Severn. Major Luttrel and he, being bound to exchange some greeting, pulled up their horses; and as an attempt to pass them in narrow quarters would have been a greater incivility than even Richard was prepared to commit, he likewise halted.

“This is ugly news, isn’t it?” said Severn. “It has determined me to go back to-morrow.”

“Go back where?” asked Richard.

“To my regiment.”

“Are you quite on your feet?” asked Major Luttrel. “How is that hole in your side?”

“It’s so much better that I believe it can finish getting well down there as easily as here. Good-bye, Major; perhaps we shall meet again.” And he shook hands with Major Luttrel. “Good-bye, Mr Maule.” And, somewhat to Richard’s surprise, he stretched over and held out his hand to him.

Richard felt that it was tremulous, and, looking hard into his face, thought he saw there a kind of agitation, of choked emotion. Hereupon his fancy coursed back to Gertrude, sitting where he had left her, in the sentimental twilight, alone with her heavy heart. With a word, he reflected, a single little word, a look, a gesture, this happy man whose hand I hold can heal her distress. ‘Oh,’ he cried to himself, ‘that by this hand I might hold him fast for ever!’

It seemed to the Captain that Richard’s grasp was needlessly protracted and severe. ‘What a fist the young horse-breaker has!’ he thought. “Good-bye,” he repeated aloud, disengaging himself.

“Good-bye,” said Richard. And then he added, he hardly knew why, “Are you going to bid good-bye to Miss Whittaker?”

“Of course I am. Isn’t she at home?”

Whether Richard really paused or not before he answered, he never knew. There suddenly arose such a tumult in his bosom that it seemed to him several moments before he became conscious of his reply. But it is probable that to Severn it came only too soon.

“No,” said Richard; “she’s not at home. She is out for the evening. We have just been calling.” As he spoke he shot a glance at his companion, armed with a challenge of his impending denial. But the Major just met his glance and then dropped his eyes. This slight motion was a horrible revelation—he had served the Major too!

“Dear me, I’m so sorry,” said Severn, slacking his rein—“I’m so very sorry!” And from his saddle he looked down toward the house more longingly and regretfully than he knew.

Richard felt himself turning from pale to consuming crimson. There was a simple sincerity in Severn’s words which was almost irresistible. For a moment he was on the point of shouting out a loud denial of his falsehood. ‘She is there, she’s alone and in tears, awaiting you! Go to her—and be damned!’ But before he could gather his words into his throat they were arrested by Major Luttrel’s cool, clear voice, which, in its urbanity, seemed to mock at retractation.

“My dear Captain,” said the Major, “I shall be very glad to take charge of any message.”

“Thank you, Major. Pray do. Say how extremely sorry I was. It was my last chance. Good-bye again.” And Captain Severn hastily turned his horse about, gave him his spurs and galloped away, leaving his friends standing alone in the middle of the road. As the sound of his retreat expired, Richard, in spite of himself, drew a long breath. He sat motionless in the saddle, hanging his head.

“Mr Maule,” the Major remarked at last, “that was very brilliantly done.”

Richard looked up. “I never told a lie before—never!”

“Upon my soul, then, you did it uncommonly well. You did it so well I almost believed you. No wonder poor Severn did!”

Richard was silent; then suddenly he broke out, “In God’s name, sir, why don’t you call me a blackguard? I have done a beastly act!”

“Oh come,” said the Major, “you needn’t mind that with me. We will take everything that’s proper in the way of remorse for granted—consider that said. I feel bound to let you know that I am really much obliged to you. If you hadn’t stopped him off, how do you know but that I might have done so?”

“If you had, I would have given you the lie in your teeth.”

“Would you, indeed? It’s very fortunate, then, that I held my tongue. If you will have it so, I won’t deny that your little invention sounded very ugly. I’m devilish glad I didn’t have anything to do with it, if you come to that.”

Richard felt his wit sharpened by his red-hot scorn—a scorn far greater for his companion than for himself. “I am glad to hear that it did sound ugly. To me it seemed beautiful, holy, just. For the space of a moment it seemed absolutely right that I should say what I did. But you saw my fault in its horrid nakedness, and yet you let it pass. You have no excuse.”

“I beg your pardon. You are immensely ingenious, but you are remarkably wrong. Are you going to make out that I am the guilty party? Upon my word, you are a cool hand. I have an excuse. I have the excuse of being interested in Miss Whittaker’s not having other people running after her.”

“So I suppose. But you have no disinterested regard for her. Otherwise—”

Major Luttrel laid his hand on Richard’s bridle. “Mr Maule,” said he, “I have no wish to talk metaphysics over this matter. You had better say no more. I know that your feelings are not of an enviable kind, and I am therefore prepared to be good-natured with you. But you must be civil yourself. You have done a nasty thing, you are ashamed of it, and you wish to shift the responsibility upon me, which is more shabby still. My advice is that you behave like a man of spirit and swallow your little scruples. I trust you are not going to make a fool of yourself by any apology or any fancied reparation. As for its having seemed holy and just to do what you did, that is mere gammon. A fib is a fib, and as such is often excusable. As anything else—as a thing beautiful, holy, or just—it’s quite inexcusable. Yours was a fib to you, and a fib to me. It serves me, and I accept it. I suppose you understand me. I adopt it. You don’t suppose it was because I was frightened by those big black eyes of yours that I held my tongue. As for my having a disinterested regard for Miss Whittaker, I have no report to make to you about it. I will simply say that I intend, if possible, to marry her.”

“She’ll not have you. She’ll never marry a cold-blooded cheat.”

“I think she’ll prefer him to a hot-blooded one. Do you want to pick a quarrel with me? Do you want to make me lose my temper? I shall refuse you that satisfaction. You have been a coward, and you want to frighten some one before you go to bed to make up for it. Touch me and I’ll kill you, but I propose not to notice your animadversions. Have you anything to say? No? Well, then, good evening.” And Major Luttrel started away.

It was with white rage that Richard was dumb. Had he been but a cat’s-paw after all? Heaven forbid! He sat irresolute for an instant, and then turned suddenly and cantered back to Gertrude’s gate. Here he stopped again; but after a short pause he went in over the gravel, with a fast-beating heart, wishing Luttrel had been there to see him. For a moment he fancied he heard the sound of the Major’s returning steps. If he would only come and find him at confession—it would be so easy to confess before him! He went along beside the house to the front, and stopped beneath the open window of the drawing-room.

“Gertrude!” he cried softly, from his saddle.

Gertrude immediately appeared. “Mercy—you!” she exclaimed.

Her voice was neither harsh nor sweet; but her words and her intonation recalled vividly to Richard’s mind the scene in the conservatory and they seemed to him keenly expressive of disappointment. He was invaded by a mischievous conviction that she had been expecting Captain Severn, or that at the least she had mistaken his voice for the Captain’s. The truth is she had half imagined it might be—Richard’s call having been little more than a loud whisper. The young man sat looking up at her, silent.

“What do you want?” she asked. “Can I do anything for you?”

Richard was not destined to do his duty that evening. A certain indefinable dryness of tone on Gertrude’s part was the inevitable result of her finding that that whispered invocation came from poor Richard. She had been following her own thoughts. Captain Severn had told her a fortnight before that, in case of news of a defeat, he should not await the expiration of his leave of absence to return. Such news had now come, and it was clear to her that her friend would immediately take his departure. Naturally he would come and bid her farewell, and still more naturally she had her vision of what might pass between them at such a crisis. To tell the whole truth, it was under the pressure of these reflections that, twenty minutes before, Gertrude had dismissed our two gentlemen. That this long story should be told in the dozen words with which she greeted Richard will seem strange to the disinterested reader. But in those words poor Richard, with a lover’s clairvoyance, read it at a single glance. The same rush of resentment, the same sinking of the heart that he had felt in the conservatory took possession of him once more. To be witness of Severn’s passion for Gertrude—that he could endure. To be witness of Gertrude’s passion for Severn—against that obligation his reason rebelled.

“What is it you wish, Richard?” Gertrude repeated. “Have you forgotten anything?”

“Nothing—nothing!” cried the young man. “It’s no matter.”

He gave a great pull at his bridle, and almost brought his horse back on his haunches, and then, wheeling him about on himself, he thrust in his spurs and galloped out of the gate.

On the highway he came upon Major Luttrel, who stood looking down the lane.

“I’m going to the devil, sir!” cried Richard. “Give me your hand on it.”

Luttrel held out his hand. “My poor young man,” said he, “you are quite out of your mind. I’m sorry for you. You haven’t been making a fool of yourself?”

“I haven’t made it better—I have made it worse!”

Luttrel didn’t quite understand, but he breathed more freely. “You had better go home and go to bed,” he said. “You will make yourself ill by all these gyrations.”

“I—I’m afraid to go home,” said Richard, in a broken voice. “For God’s sake, come with me!”—and the wretched fellow burst into tears. “I am too bad for any company but yours,” he cried, in his sobs.

The Major winced, but he took pity. “Come, come,” said he, “we shall wriggle through. I will go home with you.”

They rode off together. That night Richard went to bed miserably drunk; although Major Luttrel had left him at ten o’clock, adjuring him to drink no more. He awoke the next morning in a violent fever; and before evening the doctor, whom one of his hired men had brought to his bedside, had come and looked grave and pronounced him very ill.

VI

In country districts, where life is quiet, small accidents loom large; and accordingly Captain Severn’s sudden departure for his regiment became very rapidly known among Gertrude’s neighbours. She herself heard it from her coachman, who had heard it in the village, where the Captain had been seen to take the early train. She received the news calmly enough to outward appearance, but a great tumult rose and died in her breast. He had gone without a word of farewell! Perhaps in the hurry of sudden preparation he had not had time to call upon her. Still, bare civility would have dictated his dropping her a line of writing—he who must have read in her eyes the feeling which her lips refused to utter, and who had been indebted to her for considerable attentions. It was not often that Gertrude threw back into her friends’ teeth their acceptance of the hospitality which it had been placed in her power to offer them; but if she now mutely reproached Captain Severn with ingratitude, it was because he had failed further than in appearing to forget what she had done for him—he had also lost all remembrance of the way she had done it. It is but natural to expect that our dearest friends will give us credit for our deepest feelings; and Gertrude had constituted Edmund Severn her dearest friend. She had not, indeed, asked his assent to this arrangement, but she had made it the occasion of all kinds of tacit vows; she had given him the flower of her womanly charity, and, when his moment came, he had turned from her without a look. Gertrude shed no tears. It seemed to her that she had given her friend tears enough, and that to expend her soul in weeping would be to waste something that was now too precious. She would think no more of Edmund Severn. He should be as little to her for the future as she was to him.

It was very easy to make this resolution: to keep it Gertrude found another matter. She could not think of the war, she could not talk with her neighbours of current events, she could not take up a newspaper, without reverting to her absent friend. She was haunted with the idea that he had not allowed himself time really to recover, and that a fortnight’s exposure would send him back to the hospital. At last it occurred to her that common decency required that she should make a call upon Mrs Martin, the Captain’s sister; and a vague impression that this lady might be the depositary of some farewell message—perhaps of a letter—which she was awaiting her convenience to present, led her at once to undertake this social duty. The carriage which had been ordered for her projected visit was at the door when, within a week after Severn’s departure, Major Luttrel was announced. Gertrude received him in her bonnet. His first care was to present Captain Severn’s message of good-bye, together with his regrets that he had not had a spare moment to come and see her. As Luttrel performed this office he watched his hostess narrowly, and was considerably reassured by the unflinching composure with which she listened to it. The turn he had given to Severn’s farewell had been the fruit of much mischievous cogitation. It had seemed to him that, for his purposes, to represent the absent officer as alluding hastily and mechanically to Miss Whittaker would be better than to represent him as not alluding at all, for that would have left a boundless void for the exercise of Gertrude’s fancy. And he had reasoned well; for although he was tempted to infer from her calmness that his shot had fallen short of the mark, yet in spite of her silent and almost smiling assent to his words it had made but one bound to her heart. Before many minutes she felt that Captain Severn’s excuse had done her a world of good. ‘He had not a spare moment!’ Indeed, as she took to herself its full expression of indifference, she felt that her hard, forced smile was deepening into a sign of a lively gratitude to the Major.

Major Luttrel had still another task to perform. He had spent half-an-hour on the preceding day at Richard’s bedside, having ridden over to the farm, in ignorance of his illness, to see how matters stood with him. The reader will already have surmised that the Major was not a person of fastidious delicacy: he will therefore be the less surprised and shocked to hear that the sight of the poor young man—prostrate, fevered, delirious, and to all appearance rapidly growing worse—filled him with an emotion by no means akin to despair. In plain terms, he was very glad to find Richard a prisoner in bed. He had been racking his brains for a scheme to keep his young friend out of the way, and now, to his exceeding satisfaction, the doctors relieved him of this troublesome care. If Richard was booked for typhoid fever, which his symptoms seemed to indicate, he would not, even assuming he should get well, be able to leave his room for many weeks. In a month much might be done; with energy everything might be done. The reader has been all but directly informed that the Major’s present purpose was to possess himself of Miss Whittaker’s confidence, hand and fortune. He had no money and he had many needs, and he was so well advanced in life—being thirty-six years of age—that he had no heart to think of building up by slow degrees a career which had not yet taken the luxurious shape he desired. A man of refined tastes, too, he had become sensible, as he approached middle age, of the many advantages of a well-appointed home. He had therefore decided that a wealthy marriage would spread the carpet of repose. A girl of rather a fainter outline than Gertrude would have been the woman—we cannot say of his heart; but, as he argued, beggars can’t be choosers. Gertrude was a young lady with standards of her own; but, on the whole, he was not afraid of her—he was abundantly prepared to do his duty. He had, of course, as became a man of observation, duly weighed his drawbacks against his advantages; and after all his arithmetic there was a balance in his favour. The only serious difficulty in his path was the possibility that, on hearing of Richard’s illness, Gertrude, with her confounded benevolence, would take a fancy to nurse him in person, and that in the course of her ministrations his delirious ramblings would force upon her mind the damning story of the deception practised upon Captain Severn. There was nothing for it but boldly to face this risk. As for that other fact, which many men of a feebler spirit would have deemed an invincible obstacle, Luttrel’s masterly understanding had immediately converted it into the prime agent of success—the fact, namely, that Gertrude’s affections were already engaged. Such knowledge as he possessed of the relations between Miss Whittaker and his comrade in the Volunteers he had gained by simply watching and taking little notes. These had been numerous, and on the whole his knowledge was accurate. It was at least what he might have termed a good working knowledge. He had calculated on a passionate reactionary impulse on Gertrude’s part, consequent on Severn’s apparent delinquency. He knew that in a generous woman such an impulse, if left to itself, would not go very far; but on this point it was that his policy bore. He would not leave it to itself: he would take it gently into his hands, spin it out, play upon it, and mould it into a clue which should lead him to the point he wanted to reach. He thus counted much upon his skill and his tact; but he likewise placed a becoming degree of reliance upon his fine personal qualities—qualities a little too stiff and solid perhaps to be called charms, but thoroughly adapted to inspire confidence. The Major was not a handsome fellow; he left that to people who hadn’t the beauty of cleverness: but his ugliness was of a masculine, aristocratic, intelligent stamp. His figure, moreover, was good enough to compensate for the absence of a straight nose and a fine mouth; and he looked like a man of action who was at the same time a man of culture and of society.

In her sudden anxiety on Richard’s behalf Gertrude soon forgot her selfish heart-ache. The carriage which was to have conveyed her to Mrs Martin’s was used for a more disinterested purpose. The Major, prompted by a strong faith in the salutary force of his own presence, having obtained her permission to accompany her, they set out for the farm and soon found themselves in Richard’s darkened room. The young man was immersed in a sleep from which it was judged imprudent to arouse him. Gertrude, sighing as she compared his bare bedroom with her own upholstered quarters, drew up a mental list of objects indispensable which she would immediately send him. Not that he had not received, however, a sufficiency of homely care. The doctor was assiduous, and old Mrs Catching full of rough good-sense.

“He asks very often after you, Miss,” she said, addressing Gertrude, but with a sly glance at the Major. “But I think you had better not come too often. I am afraid you would work him up more than you would quiet him.”

“I am afraid you would, Miss Whittaker,” remarked the Major, who could have hugged Mrs Catching.

“Why should I work him up?” asked Gertrude. “I am used to sick-rooms. I nursed my father for a year and a half.”

“Oh, it’s very well for an old woman like me, but it’s no place for a fine young lady with a tail to her gown,” said the goodwife, looking at Gertrude’s muslins and laces.

“I am not so fine as to desert a friend in distress,” said Gertrude. “I shall come again, and if it makes the poor fellow worse to see me, I shall stay away. I am ready to do anything that will help him to get well.”

It had already occurred to her that in his unnatural state Richard might find her presence a source of irritation, and she was prepared to remain in the background. As she returned to her carriage she caught herself reflecting with so much pleasure upon Major Luttrel’s kindness in expending a couple of hours of his valuable time on so unprofitable an object that, by way of expressing her satisfaction, she invited him to come home and dine with her.

After a short interval she paid Richard a second visit, in company with Miss Pendexter. He was a great deal worse; he lay there emaciated, exhausted, stupid; the issue seemed very doubtful. Gertrude immediately pushed on to the county-town, which was larger than her own, sought out a professional nurse, and arranged with her to relieve Mrs Catching, who was worn out with sitting-up. For a fortnight, moreover, she received constant tidings from the young man’s physician. During this fortnight Major Luttrel carried on his siege.

It may be said, to his credit, that he had by no means conducted his suit upon that narrow programme which he had drawn up at the outset. He very soon discovered that Gertrude’s rancour—if rancour there was—was a substance impalpable to any tactile process that he was master of, and he had accordingly set to work to woo her like an honest man, from day to day, from hour to hour, trusting so devoutly for success to momentary inspiration that he felt his suit dignified by a certain flattering faux air of genuine passion. He occasionally reminded himself, however, that he might really be more indebted to the favour of accidental contrast than Gertrude’s life-long reserve—for it was certain she would not depart from it—would ever allow him to measure.

It was as an honest man, then—a man of impulse and of action—that Gertrude had begun to like him. She was not slow to perceive what he was ‘after’, as they said in that part of the world; and she was almost tempted at times to tell him frankly that she would spare him the intermediate steps and meet him at the goal without further delay. She knew very well that she should never fall in love with him, but it was conceivable she might live with him happily. An immense weariness had somehow come upon her, and a sudden sense of loneliness. A vague suspicion that her money had done her an incurable wrong inspired her with a profound disgust for the care of it. She felt cruelly hedged out from human sympathy by her bristling possessions. ‘If I had had five hundred dollars a year,’ she said, in a frequent parenthesis, ‘I might have pleased him.’ Hating her wealth, accordingly, and chilled by her isolation, the temptation was strong upon her to give herself up to that wise, brave gentleman who seemed to have adopted such a happy medium betwixt loving her for her money and fearing her for it. Would she not always stand between men who would represent the two extremes? She should make herself decently secure by an alliance with Major Luttrel.

One evening, on presenting himself, Luttrel read these thoughts so clearly in her eyes that he made up his mind to speak. But his mind was burdened with a couple of facts of which it was necessary that he should disembarrass it before it could enjoy the freedom of action the occasion required. In the first place, then, he had been over to see Richard Maule, and had found him suddenly and unexpectedly better. It was unbecoming, however—it was impossible—that he should allow Gertrude to dwell long on this pleasant announcement.

“I tell the good news first,” he said, gravely. “I have some very bad news, too, Miss Whittaker.”

Gertrude sent him a rapid glance. “Some one has been killed?”

“Captain Severn has been shot,” said the Major—“shot by a beastly guerilla.”

Gertrude was silent—no answer seemed possible to that immitigable fact. She sat with her head on her hand and her elbow on the table beside her, looking at the figures in the carpet. She uttered no words of commonplace regret, but she felt as little capable of giving way to serious grief. She had lost nothing, and, to the best of her knowledge, he had lost nothing. She had an old loss to mourn—a loss a month old, which she had mourned as she might. To surrender herself to passion now would have been but to impugn the sincerity of what had already taken place in her mind. When she looked up at her companion she was outwardly calm, though I must add that a single glance of her eye directed him not to presume upon it. She was aware that this glance betrayed her secret; but in view both of Severn’s death and of the Major’s position such revelations were of little moment. Luttrel had prepared to act upon her hint, and to avert himself gently from the topic, when Gertrude, who had dropped her eyes again, raised them with a slight shudder. “I am very cold,” she murmured. “Will you shut that window beside you, Major? Or stay, suppose you give me my shawl from the sofa.”

Luttrel brought the shawl, placed it on her shoulders, and sat down beside her. “These are cruel times,” he said, with studied simplicity. “It is always the best that are taken.”

“Yes, they are cruel times,” Gertrude answered. “They make one feel cruel. They make one doubt of all one has learnt from one’s pastors and masters.”

“Yes, but they teach us something new also.”

“I am sure I don’t know,” said Gertrude, whose heart was so full of bitterness that she felt almost malignant. “They teach us how mean we are. War is an infamy, Major, though it is your trade. It’s very well for you, who look at it professionally, and for those who go and fight; but it’s a miserable business for those who stay at home, and do the thinking and the—the missing! It’s a miserable business for women; it makes us more spiteful than ever.”

“Well, a little spite isn’t a bad thing, in practice,” said the Major. “War is certainly an abomination, both at home and in the field. But as wars go, Miss Whittaker, our own is a very satisfactory one. It involves important issues. It won’t leave us as it found us. We are in the midst of a revolution, and what is a revolution but a turning upside down? It makes sad work with our habits and theories—our traditions and convictions. But, on the other hand,” Luttrel pursued, warming to his task, “it leaves something untouched which is better than these—I mean our capacity to feel, Miss Whittaker.” And the Major paused until he had caught Gertrude’s eyes, when, having engaged them with his own, he proceeded. “I think that is the stronger for the downfall of so much else, and, upon my soul, I think it’s in that we ought to take refuge. Don’t you think so?”

“To feel what?” Gertrude inquired.

“Affection, admiration, hope!” said the Major. “I don’t advocate fiddling while Rome is burning, you know. In fact, it’s only poor unsatisfied devils that are tempted to fiddle. There is one sentiment which is respectable and honourable, and even sacred, at all times and in all places, whatever they may be. It doesn’t depend upon circumstances, but they upon it; and with its help, I think, we are a match for any circumstances. I don’t mean religion, Miss Whittaker,” added the Major, with a significant smile.

“If you don’t mean religion,” said Gertrude, “I suppose you mean love. That’s a very different thing.”

“Yes, a very different thing; so I have always thought, and so I am glad to hear you say. Some people, you know, mix them up in the most extraordinary fashion. I don’t regard myself as an especially religious man; in fact I believe I am rather remiss in that way. It’s my nature. Half mankind are born so, or I suppose the affairs of this world wouldn’t move. But I believe I am a good lover, Miss Whittaker.”

“I hope for your own sake you are, Major Luttrel.”

“Thank you. Do you think now you could entertain the idea for the sake of any one else?”

Gertrude neither dropped her eyes, nor shrugged her shoulders, nor blushed, nor whimpered. If anything, indeed, she turned somewhat paler than before, as she sustained her companion’s gaze and prepared to answer him as directly as she might.

“If I loved you, Major Luttrel, I should value the idea for my own sake.”

The Major, too, blanched a little. “I put my question conditionally,” he answered, “and I have got, as I deserved, a conditional reply. I will speak plainly, then, Miss Whittaker. Do you value the fact for your own sake? It would be plainer still to say, Do you love me? but I confess I am not brave enough for that. I will say, Can you? or I will even content myself with putting it in the conditional again, and asking you if you could; although, after all, I hardly know what the if understood can reasonably refer to. I am not such a fool as to ask of any woman—least of all of you—to love me contingently. You can only answer for the present, and say yes or no. I shouldn’t trouble you to say either if I didn’t conceive that I had given you time to make up your mind. It doesn’t take for ever to know Robert Luttrel. I am not one of the great unfathomable ones. We have seen each other more or less intimately for a good many weeks; and as I am conscious, Miss Whittaker, of having shown you my best, I take for granted that if you don’t fancy me now you won’t a month hence, when you shall have seen my faults. Yes, Miss Whittaker, I can solemnly say,” continued the Major, with genuine feeling, “I have shown you my best, as every man is in honour bound to do who approaches a woman with those predispositions with which I have approached you. I have striven hard to please you”—and he paused. “I can only say, I hope I have succeeded.”

“I should be very insensible if all your kindness and your politeness had been lost upon me,” Gertrude said.

“In heaven’s name don’t talk about politeness!” cried the Major.

“I am deeply conscious of your devotion, and I am very much obliged to you for urging your claims so respectfully and considerately. I speak seriously, Major Luttrel,” pursued Gertrude. “There is a happy medium of expression, and you have taken it. Now it seems to me that there is a happy medium of affection, with which you might be content. I don’t love you—no, not at all. I question my heart, and it gives me that answer. The feeling that I have is not a feeling to work prodigies.”

“May it at least work the prodigy of allowing you to be my wife?”

Gertrude was silent a moment. “If you can respect a woman who gives you her hand in cold blood, you are welcome to mine.”

Luttrel moved his chair and took her hand. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” said he, raising it to his moustache.

“Oh, Major Luttrel, don’t say that,” she answered. “I give you a great deal; but I keep a little—a little,” said Gertrude, hesitating, “which I suppose I shall give to God.”

“Well, I shall not be jealous,” said Luttrel.

“The rest I give to you, and in return I ask a great deal.”

“I shall give you all.”

“No, I don’t want more than I give,” said Gertrude.

“But, pray,” asked Luttrel, with an insinuating smile, “what am I to do with the difference?”

“You had better keep it for yourself. What I want is your protection, sir, your advice, your support. I want you to take me away from this place, even if you have to take me down to the army. I want to see the world under the shelter of your name. I shall give you a great deal of trouble. I am a mere mass of possessions: what I am is nothing to what I have. But ever since I began to grow up, what I am has been the slave of what I have. I am weary of my chains, and you must help me to carry them.” And Gertrude rose to her feet, as if to inform the Major that his audience was at an end.

He still held her right hand; she gave him the other. He stood looking down at her, an image of manly humility, while from his silent breast went up a thanksgiving to favouring fortune.

At the pressure of his hands Gertrude felt her bosom heave. She burst into tears. “Oh, you must be very kind to me!” she cried, as he put his arm about her, and she dropped her head upon his shoulder.

VII

When once Richard’s health had taken a turn for the better, it began very rapidly to improve. “Until he is quite well,” Gertrude said one day to her accepted suitor, “I should like him to hear nothing about our engagement. He was once in love with me himself,” she added, very frankly. “Did you ever suspect it? But I hope he will have got better of that sad malady, too. Nevertheless, I shall expect nothing reasonable from him until he is quite strong; and as he may hear of my new intentions from other people, I propose that, for the present, we confide them to no one.”

“But if he asks me point-blank,” said the Major, “what shall I answer?”

“It’s not likely he will ask you. How should he suspect anything?”

“Oh,” said Luttrel, “that gentleman is one of your suspicious kind.”

“Tell him we are not engaged then. A woman in my position may say what she pleases.”

It was agreed, however, that certain preparations for the marriage should meanwhile go forward in secret, and that the ceremony itself should take place in August, as Luttrel expected to be ordered back into service in the autumn. At about this moment Gertrude was surprised to receive a short note from Richard, so feebly scrawled in pencil as to be barely legible. ‘Dear Gertrude,’ it ran, ‘don’t come to see me just yet. I’m not fit to be seen. You would hurt me, and I should shock you. God bless you! R. MAULE.’ Miss Whittaker explained his request to herself by the supposition that a report had come to him of Major Luttrel’s late assiduities (which it was impossible should go unobserved); that, leaping at the worst, he had taken her engagement for granted; and that, under this impression, he could not trust himself to see her. She despatched him an answer, telling him that she would await his pleasure, and that, if the doctor would consent to his having letters, she would meanwhile occasionally write to him. ‘She will give me good advice,’ thought Richard impatiently; and on this point, accordingly, she received no account of his wishes. Expecting to leave her house and close it on her marriage, she spent many hours in wandering sadly over the meadow-paths and through the woodlands which she had known from her childhood. She had thrown aside the last ensigns of filial regret, and now walked, sad and splendid, in bright colours which those who knew her well must have regarded as a kind of self-defiance. It would have seemed to a stranger that, for a woman who had freely chosen a companion for life, she was curiously spiritless and sombre. As she looked at her pale cheeks and dull eyes in the mirror she felt ashamed that she had no fairer countenance to offer to her destined lord. She had lost her single beauty, her smile, and she would make but a ghastly figure at the altar. ‘I ought to wear a calico dress and an apron,’ she said to herself, ‘and not this glaring finery.’ But she continued to wear her finery, and to lay out her money, and to perform all her old duties to the letter. After the lapse of what she deemed a sufficient interval she went to see Mrs Martin, and to listen dumbly to her narration of her brother’s death and to her simple eulogies.

Major Luttrel performed his part quite as bravely, and much more successfully. He observed neither too many things nor too few; he neither presumed upon his success nor hung back from the next steps. Having, on his side, received no prohibition from Richard, he made his way back to the farm, trusting that with the return of reason his young friend might be disposed to renew that anomalous alliance in which, on the hapless evening of Captain Severn’s farewell, he had taken refuge against his despair. In the long, languid hours of his early convalescence Richard had found time to survey his position, to summon back piece by piece the immediate past, and to frame a general scheme for the future. But more vividly than anything else there had finally disengaged itself from his meditations a kind of horror of Robert Luttrel.

It was in this humour that the Major found him; and as he looked at the young man’s gaunt shoulders, supported by pillows, at his face, so livid and aquiline, at his great dark eyes, which seemed to shine with the idea of their possessor’s taking a fresh start, it struck him that an invincible spirit had been sent from a better world to breathe confusion upon his hopes. If Richard hated the Major, the reader may guess whether the Major loved Richard. Luttrel was amazed at his first remark.

“I suppose you have got her by this time,” Richard said, calmly enough.

“Not quite,” answered the Major. “There’s a chance for you yet.”

To this Richard made no rejoinder. Then, suddenly, “Have you had any news of Captain Severn?” he asked.

For a moment the Major was perplexed at his question. He had assumed that the news of Severn’s death would have come to Richard’s ears, and he had been half curious, half apprehensive as to its effect. But an instant’s reflection now assured him that the young man’s estrangement from his neighbours had kept him hitherto, and might still keep him, in ignorance of the truth. Hastily, therefore, and inconsiderately, the Major determined to make this ignorance last a little longer; it was always so much gained. “No,” said he, “I have had no news. Severn and I are not on writing terms.”

The next time Luttrel came to the farm he found the master sitting up in a cushioned, chintz-covered arm-chair, which Gertrude had sent him the day before out of her own dressing-room.

“Have you got her yet?” asked Richard.

The note of provocation in his tone was so strong that the Major ceased to temporise. “Yes, I have ‘got’ her, as you elegantly express it. We are engaged to be married.”

The young man’s face betrayed no emotion.

“Are you reconciled to it?” asked Luttrel.

“Yes—so far as anything goes.”

“What in the name of all that’s conceited could you do? Explain yourself.”

“A man in my state can’t explain himself. I mean that, however much I hate you, I shall accept Gertrude’s marriage.”

“It will be very kind of you. And you will be a wise man,” the Major added.

“I am growing wise. I feel like Solomon on his throne, in this chair. But I confess, sir, I don’t see how she could have you.”

“Well, there’s no accounting for tastes,” said the Major, good-humouredly.

“Yes, but I thought hers was better.”

They came to no more express understanding than this with regard to the future. Richard continued to grow stronger, and to put off, in the same measure, the renewal of his intercourse with Gertrude. A month before he would have resented as an insult the intimation that he should ever be so resigned to lose her as he found himself now. He would not see her for two reasons: first, because he felt that it would be—or that at least, in reason, it ought to be—a painful experience to look upon his old mistress with a coldly critical eye; and secondly, because, justify to himself as he would his new-born indifference, he could not entirely cast away the suspicion that it was a last remnant of disease, and that, when he stood on his legs again under the sky and among those natural things with which he had long since established a sort of sensuous communion, he would feel, as with a tumultuous rush, the return of his impetuous manhood and of his old capacity. When he had smoked a pipe in the outer sunshine, when he had settled himself once more to the long elastic bound of his mare, then he would see Gertrude. The reason of the change which had come upon him was that she had disappointed him—she who had used to seem to him above his measure altogether. She had accepted Major Luttrel, a man whom he despised; she had so mutilated her magnificent nature as to match it with his. The validity of his dislike to the Major, Richard did not trouble himself to examine. He accepted it as an unerring instinct; and, indeed, he might have asked himself, had he not sufficient proof? Moreover he laboured under the sense of a gratuitous wrong. He had suffered a great torment of remorse to drive him into brutishness, and thence to the very gates of death, for an offence which he had deemed mortal, and which was, after all, but a phantasm of his excited conscience. What a fool he had been—a fool for his passionate fears, and a fool for his penitence! Marriage with Major Luttrel—such was the end of Gertrude’s imagined anguish. Such, too, we hardly need add, was the end of that idea of reparation which had been so formidable to Luttrel. Richard had been generous; he would now be just.

Far from impeding his recovery, these reflections hastened it. One morning in the beginning of August Gertrude received notice that he was in her house. It was a still, sultry day, and Miss Whittaker, her habitual pallor deepened by the oppressive heat, was sitting alone, in a white morning-dress, languidly fanning aside at once the droning flies and her equally importunate thoughts. She found the young man standing in the middle of the drawing-room, booted and spurred.

“Well, Richard,” she exclaimed, with some feeling, “at last you are willing to see me!”

As his eyes fell upon her he started and stood almost paralysed, heeding neither her words nor her extended hand. It was not Gertrude he saw, but her ghost.

“In heaven’s name, what has happened to you?” he cried. “Have you been sick too?”

Gertrude tried to smile, in feigned surprise at his surprise; but her muscles relaxed. Richard’s words and looks reflected more vividly than any mirror the blighted state of her person, the extreme misery of her soul. She felt herself growing faint. She moved backward to a sofa, and sank down.

Then Richard felt as if the room were revolving about him and his throat were choked with imprecations—as if his old extravagant passion had again taken possession of him, like a mingled legion of devils and angels. It was through the most unexpected pity that his love returned. He went forward and dropped on his knees at Gertrude’s feet. “Speak to me!” he cried, seizing her hands. “Are you unhappy? Is your heart broken? Oh, Gertrude! what have you come to?”

Gertrude drew her hands from his grasp and rose to her feet. “Get up, Richard,” she said. “Don’t talk so wildly. I am not well. I am very glad to see you. You look well.”

“I have got my strength again—and meanwhile you have been failing. You are unhappy, you are wretched! Don’t say you are not, Gertrude: it’s as plain as day. You are breaking your heart.”

“The same old Richard!” said Gertrude, trying to smile again.

“Would that you were the same old Gertrude! Don’t try to smile; you can’t!”

“I shall!” said Gertrude, desperately. “I am going to be married, you know.”

“Yes, I know. I don’t congratulate you.”

“I have not counted upon that honour, Richard. I shall have to do without it.”

“You will have to do without a great many things!” cried Richard, horrified by what seemed to him her blind self-immolation.

“I have all I ask,” said Gertrude.

“You haven’t all I ask, then! You haven’t all your friends ask.”

“My friends are very kind, but I marry to suit myself.”

“You have not suited yourself!” retorted the young man. “You have suited—God knows what!—your pride, your despair, your desolation!” As he looked at her the secret history of her weakness seemed to become plain to him, and he felt a desire to throttle the man who had taken a base advantage of it. “Gertrude!” he cried, “I entreat you to go back. It’s not for my sake—I’ll give you up—I’ll go a thousand miles away, and never look at you again. It’s for your own. In the name of your happiness, break with that man! Don’t fling yourself away. Buy him off, if you consider yourself bound. Give him your money. That’s all he wants.”

As Gertrude listened the blood came back to her face and two flames into her eyes. She looked at Richard from head to foot. “You are not weak,” she said, “you are in your senses, you are well and strong; you shall tell me what you mean. You insult the best friend I have. Explain yourself! you insinuate odious things—speak them out!” Her eyes glanced toward the door, and Richard’s followed them. Major Luttrel stood on the threshold.

“Come in, sir!” cried Richard. “Gertrude swears she will believe no harm of you. Come and tell her that she’s wrong! How can you keep on persecuting a woman whom you have brought to this state? Think of what she was three months ago, and look at her now!”

Luttrel received this broadside without flinching; he had overheard Richard’s voice from the hall, and he had steeled his heart for the encounter. He assumed the air of having been so amazed by the young man’s first words as only to have heard his last; and he glanced at Gertrude mechanically, as if to comply with them. “What’s the matter?” he asked, going over to her and taking her hand; “are you ill?” Gertrude let him have her hand, but she forbore to meet his eyes.

“Ill! of course she’s ill!” cried Richard, passionately. “She’s dying—she’s consuming herself! I know I seem to be playing an odious part here, Gertrude, but, upon my soul, I can’t help it. I look like a betrayer, an informer, a sneak, but I don’t feel like one! Still, I will leave you, if you say so.”

“Shall he go, Gertrude?” asked Luttrel, without looking at Richard.

“No. Let him stay and explain himself. He has accused you—let him prove his case.”

“I know what he is going to say,” said Luttrel. “It will place me in a bad light. Do you still wish to hear it?”

Gertrude drew her hand hastily out of Luttrel’s. “Speak, Richard!” she cried, with a passionate gesture.

“Ah, you won’t enjoy it,” said Richard. “Gertrude, I have done you a vile wrong. How great a wrong I never knew until I saw you to-day so miserably altered. When I heard that you were to be married I fancied that it didn’t matter much, and that my remorse had been wasted. But I understand it now, and he understands it too. You once told me that you had ceased to love Captain Severn. It wasn’t true—you never ceased to love him—you love him at this moment. If he were to get another wound in the next battle, how would you feel—how would you bear that?” And Richard paused for an instant, with the force of his interrogation.

“For God’s sake,” said Gertrude, “respect the dead!”

“The dead! Is he dead?”

Gertrude covered her face with her hands.

“You beast!” cried Luttrel.

Richard turned upon him savagely. “You’re a precious one to talk!” he roared. “You told me he was alive and well!”

Gertrude made a movement of speechless distress.

“You would have it, my dear,” said Luttrel, in a superior tone.

Richard had turned pale, he began to tremble. “Excuse me, Gertrude,” he said, hoarsely, “I have been deceived. Poor, unhappy woman! Gertrude,” he continued, going nearer to her and speaking in a whisper, “I killed him.”

Gertrude fell back from him, as he approached her, with a look of unutterable horror. “I and he,” said Richard, pointing at Luttrel.

Gertrude’s eyes followed the direction of his gesture, and transferred their scorching disgust to her suitor. This was too much for Luttrel’s courage. “You eternal tormentor,” she moaned at Richard, “speak out!”

“He loved you, though you believed he didn’t,” said Richard. “I saw it the first time I looked at him. To every one but you it was as plain as day. Major Luttrel saw it too. But he was too modest, and he never believed you cared for him. The night before he went back to the army he came to bid you good-bye. If he had seen you it would have been better for every one. You remember that evening, of course. We met him, Luttrel and I. He was all on fire—he meant to speak. I knew it; you knew it, Luttrel: it was in his fingers’ ends. I intercepted him. I turned him off—I lied to him and told him you were absent from home. I was a coward, and I did neither more nor less than that. I knew you were waiting for him. It was stronger than my will—I believe I should do it again. Fate was against him, and he went off. I came back to tell you, but my damnable jealousy strangled me. I went home and drank myself into a fever. I have done you a wrong that I can never repair. I would go hang myself if I thought it would help you.” Richard spoke slowly, softly, explicitly, as if irresistible Justice in person had her hand upon his neck and were forcing him down upon his knees. In the presence of Gertrude’s dismay nothing seemed possible but perfect self-conviction. In Luttrel’s attitude, as he stood with his head erect, his arms folded, and his cold gray eye fixed upon the distance, it struck him that there was something atrociously insolent; not insolent to him—for that he cared little enough—but insolent to Gertrude and to the dreadful solemnity of the hour. Richard sent the Major a look of the most aggressive contempt. “As for Major Luttrel,” he said, “he was but a passive spectator. No, Gertrude, by heaven!” he burst out; “he was worse than I! I loved you, and he didn’t!”

“Our friend is correct in his facts, Gertrude,” said Luttrel, quietly. “He is incorrect in his inferences. I was a passive spectator of his deception. He appeared to enjoy a certain authority with regard to your wishes—the source of which I respected both of you sufficiently never to question—and I accepted the act which he has described as an exercise of it. You will remember that you had sent us away on the ground that you were in no humour for company. To represent you, therefore, to another visitor as absent seemed to me rather officious, but still pardonable. You will consider that I was wholly ignorant of your relations to that visitor; that whatever you may have done for others, Gertrude, to me you never vouchsafed a word of information on the subject, and that Mr Maule’s words are a revelation to me. But I am bound to believe nothing that he says. I am bound to believe that I have injured you only when I hear it from your own lips.”

Richard made a movement as if to break out upon the Major; but Gertrude, who had been standing motionless, with her eyes upon the ground, quickly raised them, and gave him a look of imperious prohibition. She had listened, and she had chosen. She turned to Luttrel. “Major Luttrel,” she said, “you have been an accessory to something that has been for me a very serious pain. It is my duty to tell you so. I mean, of course, a perfectly unwilling accessory. I pity you more than I can tell you. I think your position more pitiable than mine. It is true that I never made a confidant of you. I never made one of Richard. I had a secret, and he surprised it. You were less fortunate.” It might have seemed to a dispassionate observer that in these last four words there was an infinitesimal touch of tragic irony. Gertrude paused a moment while Luttrel eyed her intently, and Richard, from a somewhat tardy instinct of delicacy, walked over to the bow-window. “This is the most distressing moment of my life,” she resumed. “I hardly know where my duty lies. The only thing that is plain to me is that I must ask you to release me from my engagement. I ask it most humbly, Major Luttrel,” Gertrude continued, with warmth in her words and a chilling coldness in her voice—a coldness which it sickened her to feel there, but which she was unable to dispel. “I can’t expect that you should give me up easily; I know that it’s a great deal to ask, and”—she forced the chosen words out of her mouth—“I should thank you more than I can say if you would put some condition upon my release. You have done honourably by me, and I repay you with ingratitude. But I can’t marry you.” Her voice began to melt. “I have been false from the beginning. I have no heart to give you. I should make you a despicable wife.”

The Major, too, had listened and chosen, and in this trying conjuncture he set the seal to his character as an accomplished man. He saw that Gertrude’s movement was final, and he determined not to protest against the inscrutable. He read in the glance of her eye and the tone of her voice that the perfect dignity had fallen from his character—that his integrity had lost its bloom; but he also read her firm resolve never to admit this fact to her own mind nor to declare it to the world, and he was gratified by her forbearance. His hopes, his ambitions, his visions, lay before him like a heap of broken glass; but he would be as graceful as she was. She had divined him, but she had spared him. The Major was inspired.

“You have at least spoken to the point,” he said. “You leave no room for doubt or for hope. With the little light I have I can’t say I understand your feelings, but I yield to them religiously. I believe so thoroughly that you suffer from the thought of what you ask of me that I will not increase your suffering by assuring you of my own. I care for nothing but your happiness. You have lost it, and I give you mine to replace it. And although it’s a simple thing to say,” he added, “I must remark that I thank you for your implicit faith in my integrity,” And he held out his hand. As she gave him hers Gertrude felt horribly in the wrong; and she looked into his eyes with an expression, so humble, so appealing, so grateful, that, after all, his exit may be called triumphant.

When he had gone Richard turned from the window with a tremendous sense of relief. He had heard Gertrude’s speech, and he knew that perfect justice had not been done; but still there was enough to be thankful for. Yet now that his duty was accomplished, he was conscious of a sudden lassitude. Mechanically he looked at Gertrude, and almost mechanically he came towards her. She, on her side, looking at him as he walked slowly down the long room, his face indistinct against the deadened light of the white-draped windows behind him, marked the expression of his figure with another pang. ‘He has rescued me,’ she said to herself; ‘but his passion has perished in the tumult.’ “Richard,” she said aloud, uttering the first words of vague kindness that came into her mind, “I forgive you.”

Richard stopped. The idea had lost its charm. “You are very kind,” he said, wearily. “You are far too kind. How do you know you forgive me? Wait and see.”

Gertrude looked at him as she had never looked before; but he saw nothing of it. He saw a sad, plain girl, in a white dress, nervously handling her fan. He was thinking of himself. If he had been thinking of her he would have read in her lingering, upward gaze that he had won her; and if, so reading, he had opened his arms Gertrude would have come to them. We trust the reader is not shocked at this piece of information. She neither hated him nor despised him, as she ought doubtless in consistency to have done. She felt that there was a gallantry in him, after all, and in this new phase he pleased her. Richard, on his side, felt humbly the same truth, and he began to respect himself. The past had closed abruptly behind him, and poor tardy Gertrude had been shut in. The future was dimly shaping itself without her image. So he did not open his arms.

“Good-bye,” he said, holding out his hand. “I may not see you again for a long time.”

Gertrude felt as if the world were deserting her. “Are you going away?” she asked, tremulously.

“I mean to sell out and pay my debts, and go to the war.”

She gave him her hand, and he silently shook it. There was no contending against the war, and she gave him up.

With their separation my story properly ends, and to say more would be to begin a new story. It is perhaps my duty, however, expressly to add that Major Luttrel, in obedience to a logic of his own, abstained from revenge; and that, if time has not avenged him, it has at least rewarded him. General Luttrel, who lost an arm before the war was over, recently married Miss Van Winkel, of Philadelphia, and seventy thousand a year. Richard engaged in the defence of his country, with a commission in the Volunteers, obtained with much difficulty. He saw a great deal of fighting, but he has no scars to show. The return of peace found him in his native place, without a home and without resources. One of his first acts was to call dutifully and respectfully upon Miss Whittaker, whose circle of acquaintance was now much enlarged, and included even people who came from Boston to stay with her. Gertrude’s manner was kindness itself, but a more studied kindness than before. She had lost much of her youth and her simplicity. Richard wondered whether she had pledged herself to spinsterhood, but of course he didn’t ask her. She inquired very particularly into his material prospects and intentions, and offered urgently to lend him money, which he declined too borrow. When he left her he took a long walk through her place and beside the river, and, wandering back to the days when he had yearned for her love, assured himself that no woman would ever again be to him what she had been. During his stay in this neighbourhood he became reconciled to one of the old agricultural magnates whom he had insulted in his unregenerate days, and through whom he was glad to obtain some momentary employment. But his present position is very distasteful to him, and he is eager to try his fortunes in the West. As yet, however, he has lacked the means to emigrate with advantage. He drinks no more than is good for him. To speak of Gertrude’s impressions of Richard would lead us quite too far. Shortly after his return she broke up her household, and came to the bold resolution (bold, that is, for a woman young, unmarried, and ignorant of manners in her own country) to spend some time in Europe. At our last accounts she was living in the ancient city of Florence. Her great wealth, of which she was wont to complain that it excluded her from human sympathy, now affords her a most efficient protection. She passes among her fellow-countrymen abroad for a very independent, but a very contented woman; although, as she is by this time nearly thirty years of age, some little romantic episode in the past is vaguely alluded to as accounting for her continued celibacy.

The End