Chapter II: Part 2

"You made up my mind," said Madge; "but it comes to the same thing."

"Precisely. So please promise me not to do anything which a girl in your position should not do. There is no earthly harm in your walking with any penniless artist in the moonlight, if you were not situated as you are. But at the moment it is indiscreet."

"You are wrong if you suppose that Mr. Dundas said anything to me which could possibly be interpreted into a tender interest," said Madge. "He called attention to the moon merely in order to remark that it was out of drawing."

"That never occurred to me," said her mother, "though it would be a matter of total indifference whether he took a tender interest in you or not. I merely want your promise that you will not repeat the indiscretion."

"Oh, certainly," said Madge.

Lady Ellington had put her bedroom candle on Madge's dressing-table. As soon as she had received the assurance she required, she at once rose from her chair and took it up. But with it in her hand she stood silent a moment, then she put it down again.

"You have spoken again of things I thought were settled, Madge," she said, "and I should like your assurance on one point further. We agreed, did we not, that it would be far better for you to marry than remain single. We agreed also that you were not of the sort of nature that falls passionately in love, and we agreed that you had better marry a man whom you thoroughly like and esteem. Mr. Home is such a man. Is that correctly stated?"

"Quite," said Madge. "In fact, I don't know why I suggested that I should refuse him."

"You agree to it all still?"

Madge considered a moment.

"Yes; things being as they are, I agree."

"What do you mean by that exactly?"

Madge got up, and swept across the room to where her mother stood.

"I have long meant to say this to you, mother," she said, "but I never have yet. I mean that at my age one's character to some extent certainly is formed. One has to deal with oneself as that self exists. But my character was formed by education partly and by my upbringing, for which you are responsible. I think you have taught me not to feel--to be hard."

Lady Ellington did not resent this in the slightest; indeed, it was part of her plan of life never to resent what anybody did or said; for going back to first principles, resentment was generally so useless.

"I hope I have taught you to be sensible," she remarked.

"It seems to me I am being very sensible now," said Madge, "and you may certainly take all the credit of that, if you wish. I fully intend to do, at any rate, exactly what you suggest--to accept, that is to say, a man whom I both esteem and respect, and who is thoroughly suitable. For suitable let us say wealthy--because that is what we mean."

Lady Ellington qualified this.

"I should not wish you to marry a cad, however wealthy," she said.

Madge moved softly up and down the room, her dress whispering on the carpet before she replied.

"And it does not strike you that this is rather a cold-blooded proceeding?" she asked.

"It would if you were in love with somebody else. In which case I should not recommend you to marry Mr. Home. But as it is, it is the most sensible thing you can do. I would go further than that; I should say it was your duty."

Again Madge walked up and down without replying at once.

"Ah, it is cold-blooded," she said, "and I am doing it because I am cold-blooded."

Then she stopped opposite her mother.

"Mother, when other girls fall in love, do they only feel like this?" she asked. "Is this all? Just to feel that for the rest of one's life one will always have a very pleasant companion in the house, who, I am sure, will always deserve one's liking and esteem?"

Lady Ellington laughed.

"My dear, I can't say what other girls feel. But, as you remark, it is all you feel. You are twenty-five years old, and you have never fallen in love. As you say, you have to take yourself as you are. Good night, dear. It is very late."

She kissed her, left her, and went down the passage to her own room. She was a very consistent woman, and it was not in the slightest degree likely that she should distrust the very sensible train of reasoning which she had indicated to her daughter, which also she had held for years, that a sensible marriage is the best policy in which to invest a daughter's happiness. Lady Ellington's own experience, indeed, supplied her with evidence to support her view, for she herself was an excellent case in point, for her husband had been a man with whom she had never been the least in love, but with whom, on the other hand, she had managed to be very happy in a cast-iron sort of way. She felt, indeed, quite sure, in her reasonable mind, that she was acting wisely for Madge, and it was not in her nature to let an unreasonable doubt trouble her peace. But an unreasonable doubt was there, and it was this, that Madge for the first time, as far as she knew, seemed to have contemplated the possibility of passion coming into her life. There had been in her mind, so her mother felt sure, an unasked question--"What if I do fall in love?"

Lady Ellington turned this over in the well-lit chamber of her brain as she went to bed. But her common-sense came to her aid, and she did not lie awake thinking of it. She had made up her mind that such a thing was unlikely to the verge of impossibility, and she never wasted time or thought over what was impossible. Her imagination, it is true, was continually busy over likely combinations; there were, however, so many of these that things unlikely did not concern her.

The men meantime had gone to the smoking-room, and from there had moved out in general quest of coolness on to the terrace. The moon had risen nearly to the zenith, and no longer offended Evelyn's sense of proportion, and the night, dusky and warm, disposed to personal talk. And since neither Evelyn nor Philip had seen Tom Merivale for a year, it was he who had first to be brought up to date.

"So go on with what you were saying at dinner, Tom," said Evelyn. "Really, people who are friends ought to keep a sort of circulating magazine, in which they write themselves up and send it round to the circle. In any case, you of the three of us are most in arrears. What have you done besides growing so much younger?"

"Do you really want to know?" asked he.

"Yes."

Evelyn rose as he spoke and squirted some soda-water into his glass. They were sitting in the square of light illuminated by the lamps of the room inside, and what passed was clearly visible to all of them.

"You must sit quiet then," said Tom, in his low, even-toned voice, "or you will frighten them."

"Them? Whom? Are you going to raise spirits from the vasty deep?" asked Philip.

"Oh, no; though I fancy it would not be so difficult. No, what I am going to show you, if you care to see it--it may take ten minutes--is a thing that requires no confederates. It is not the least exciting either. Only if you wish to see what I have done, as you call it, though personally I should say what I have become, I can give you an example probably. Oh, yes, more than probably, I am sure I can. But please sit still."

The night was very windless and silent. In the woods below a nightingale was singing, but the little wind which had stirred before among the garden beds had completely dropped.

"Have you begun?" asked Evelyn. "Or is that all? Is it that you have been silent for a year?"

"Ah, don't interrupt," said the other.

Again there was silence, except for the bubbling of the nightingale. Four notes it sang, four notes of white sound as pure as flame; then it broke into a liquid bubble of melodious water, all transparent, translucent, the apotheosis of song. Then a thrill of ecstasy possessed it, and cadence followed indescribable cadence, as if the unheard voice of all nature was incarnated. Then quite suddenly the song ceased altogether.

There was a long pause; both Evelyn and Philip sat in absolute silence, waiting. Tom Merivale had always been so sober and literal a fellow that they took his suggestion with the same faith that they took the statements of an almanack--it was sure to be the day that the almanack said it was. But for what they waited--what day it was--neither knew nor guessed.

Then the air was divided by fluttering wings; Tom held his hand out, and on the forefinger there perched a little brown bird.

"Sing, dear," said he.

The bird threw its head back, for nightingales sing with the open throat. And from close at hand they all three heard the authentic love song of the nightingale. The unpremeditated rapture poured from it, wings quivering, throat throbbing, the whole little brown body was alert with melody, instinctive, untaught, the melody of happiness, of love made audible. Then, tired, it stopped.

"Thank you, dear brother," said Tom. "Go home."

Again a flutter of wings whispered in the air, and his forefinger was untenanted.

"That is what I have done," he said. "But that is only the beginning."

Evelyn gave a long sigh.

"Are you mad, or are we?" he asked. "Or was there a bird there? Or are you a hypnotist?"

He got up quickly.

"Phil, I swear I saw a bird, and heard it sing," he said excitedly. "It was sitting there, there on his finger. What has happened? Go on, Tom--tell us what it means."

"It means you are the son of a monkey, as Darwin proved," said he, "and the grandson, so to speak, of a potato. That is all. It was a cousin of a kind that sat on my finger. Philip, with his gold and his Stock Exchange and his business generally, does much more curious things than that. But, personally, I do not find them so interesting."

Philip, silent as was his wont when puzzled, instead of rushing into speech, had said nothing. But now he asked a question.

"Of course, it was not a conjuring trick," he said. "That would be futility itself. But you used to have extraordinary hypnotic power, Tom. I only ask--Was that a real nightingale?"

"Quite real."

Evelyn put down his glass untasted.

"I am frightened," he said. "I shall go to bed."

And without more words he bolted into the house.

Philip called good night after him, but there was no response, and he was left alone with the Hermit.

"I am not frightened," he said. "But what on earth does it all mean? Have a drink?"

Tom Merivale laughed quietly.

"It means exactly what I have said," he answered. "Come down to my home sometime, and you shall see. It is all quite simple and quite true. It is all as old as love and as new as love. It is also perfectly commonplace. It must be so. I have only taken the trouble to verify it."

Philip's cool business qualities came to his aid, or his undoing.

"You mean you can convey a message to a bird or a beast?" he asked.

"Oh, yes. Why not? The idea is somehow upsetting to you. Pray don't let it upset you. Nothing that happens can ever be upsetting. It is only the things that don't happen that are such anxieties, for fear they may. But when they have happened they are never alarming."

He pushed his chair back and got up.

"Ah, I have learned one thing in this last year," he said, "and that is to be frightened at nothing. Fear is the one indefensible emotion. You can do nothing at all if you are afraid. You know that yourself in business. But whether you embark on business or on--what shall I call it?--nature-lore, the one thing indispensable is to go ahead. To take your stand firmly on what you know, and deduce from that. Then to test your deduction, and as soon as one will bear your weight to stand on that and deduce again, being quite sure all the time that whatever is true is right. Perhaps sometime the world in general may see, not degradation in the origin of man from animals, but the extraordinary nobility of it. And then perhaps they will go further back--back to Pagan things, to Pan, the God of nature."

"To see whom meant death," remarked Philip.

"Yes, or life. Death is merely an incident in life. And it seems to me now to be rather an unimportant one. One can't help it. Whereas the important events are those which are within one's control; one's powers of thought, for instance."

Philip rose also.

"And love," he said. "Is that in one's control?"

Tom took a long breath.

"Love?" he said. "It is not exactly in one's control, because it is oneself. There, the dear bird has got home."

And again from the trees below the bubble of liquid melody sounded.

THIRD

Evelyn Dundas was sitting next morning after breakfast on the terrace, where what he alluded to as "the nightingale trick" had been performed the evening before, in company with the conjurer who had performed it. Philip and Madge Ellington had just gone down to the river, Lady Ellington who was to have accompanied them having excused herself at the last moment. But since a mother was in closer and more intimate connection with a girl than a mere chaperone, she had seen not the smallest objection to the two going alone. Indeed she had firmly detained Evelyn by a series of questions which required answers, from joining them, and, though deep in a discussion about art, she had dropped it in its most critical state when she judged that the other two had been given time to get under way. It had required, indeed, all her maternal solicitude to continue it so long, for she cared less for art or Evelyn's theories about it than for a week-old paper.

Like most artists, Evelyn had a somewhat egoistic nature, and since his personality was so graceful and interesting, it followed that many people found his talk equally so, especially when he talked about himself. For his egoism he had an admirably probable explanation, and he was at this moment explaining it to Tom Merivale, who had made the soft impeachment with regard to its undoubted existence.

"Ah, yes," he was saying, "an artist's business is not to put things down as they are, but to put them down as they strike him. Actual truth has nothing to do with the value of a landscape. The point is that the picture should be beautiful. And the same with portraits, only beauty there is unnecessary. You have to put down what you think you see, or what you choose to see."

"That shouldn't lead to egoism," remarked Tom. "It should lead you to the study of other people."

Evelyn shook his head.

"No, no," he said, "it leads you to devote yourself entirely almost to the cultivation of your own faculty of seeing. All fine portraits show a great deal of the artist, and perhaps comparatively little of the sitter. Why are Rembrandts so unmistakable? Not because the type of his sitters themselves was almost identical, but because there is lots of Rembrandt in each. You can't have style unless you are egoistic. In fact, for an artist style means egoism. I have heaps. I don't say or pretend it's good, but there it is. Take it or leave it."

Tom Merivale laughed.

"You are perfectly inimitable," he said. "I love your serious, vivid nonsense. That you are an egoist is quite, quite true. But how much better an artist you would be if you weren't. What you want is deepening. You don't like the deeps, you know. You haven't got any. You don't like what you don't understand; that very simple little affair last night, for instance, frightened you."

Egoists are invariably truthful--according to their lights--about themselves. Evelyn was truthful now.

"Yes, that is so," he said. "I don't pretend to wish to seek out the secrets of the stars. But I know what I like. And I don't like anything that leads into the heart of things. I don't like interiors and symbolism. There is quite enough symbol for me on the surface. What I mean is that the eyebrow itself, the curve of the mouth, will tell you quite as much as one has any use for about the brain that makes the eyebrow frown or the mouth smile. Beauty may be skin deep only, but it is quite deep enough. Skin deep! Why, it is as deep as the sea!"

Tom Merivale was silent a little.

"Do you know, you are an interesting survival of the Pagan spirit?" he said at length.

Evelyn laughed.

"Erect me an altar then at once, and crown me with roses," he remarked. "But what have I said just now that makes you think that?"

"Nothing particular this moment," he answered, "though your remarking that beauty was enough for you is thoroughly Greek in its way. No; what struck me was that never have I seen in you the smallest rudiment or embryo of a conscience or of any moral sense."

Evelyn looked up with real interest at this criticism.

"Oh, that is perfectly true," he said. "Certainly I never have remorse; it must be awful, a sort of moral toothache. All the same, I don't steal or lie, you know."

"Merely because lying and stealing are very inartistic performances," said Tom. "But no idea of morality stands in your way."

Evelyn got up, looking out over the heat-hazed green of the woods below them with his brilliant glance.

"Is that very shocking?" he asked, with perfectly unassumed _naïvetê_.

"I suppose it is. Personally, I am never shocked at anything. But it seems to me very dangerous. You ought to wear a semaphore with a red lamp burning at the end of it."

Evelyn half shut his eyes and put his head on one side.

"I don't think that would compose well," he said.

"That is most consistently spoken," said Tom. "But really, if you are ever in earnest about anything beside your art, you would be a public danger."

Evelyn turned round on this.

"You call me a Pagan," he said. "Well, what are you, pray, with your communings with nature and conjuring tricks with nightingales? You belong to quite as early a form of man."

"I know. I am primeval. At least I hope to be before I die."

"What's the object?"

"In order to see Pan. I am getting on. Come down to the New Forest sometime, and you shall see very odd things, I promise you. Really, Evelyn, I wish you would come. It would do you no end of good."

He got up, and taking the arm of the other man, walked with him down the terrace.

"You are brilliant, I grant you," he said; "but you are like a mirror, only reflecting things. What you want is to be lit from within. Who is it who talks of the royalty of inward happiness? That is such a true phrase. All happiness from without is not happiness at all; it is only pleasure. And pleasure is always imperfect. It flickers and goes out, it has scratching nails----"

Evelyn shook himself free.

"Ah, let me be," he said. "I don't want anything else. Besides, as you have told me before, you yourself dislike and detest suffering or pain. But how can you hope to understand Nature at all if you leave all that aside? Why, man, the whole of Nature is one groan, one continuous preying of creature on creature. In your life in the New Forest you leave all that out."

Tom Merivale paused.

"I know I do," he said, "because I want to grasp first, once and for all the huge joy that pervades Nature, which seems to me much more vital in itself than pain. It seems to me that pain may be much more rightly called absence of joy than joy be called absence of pain. What the whole thing starts from, the essential spring of the world is not pain and death, but joy and life."

"Ah, there I am with you. But there is so much joy and life on the surface of things that I don't wish to probe down. Ah, Tom, a day like this now; woven webs of blue heat, hot scents from the flower beds, the faces of our friends. Is that not enough? It is for me. And, talking of faces, Miss Ellington has the most perfectly modelled face I ever saw. The more I look at it, the more it amazes me. I stared at her all breakfast. And the charm of it is its consistent irregularity; not a feature is anything like perfect, but what a whole! I wish I could do her portrait."

Tom laughed.

"There would not be the slightest difficulty about that, I should say," he remarked, "if you promise to present it to her mother."

"Why, of course, I would. How funny it must feel to be hard like that. She is very bruising; I feel that I am being hit in the eye when she talks to me. And she knows how many shillings go to a sovereign."

"Twenty," remarked Tom.

"Ah, that is where you are wrong. She gets twenty-one for each of her sovereigns. And thirteen pence for each of her shillings, and the portrait of her daughter for nothing at all. Oh, Tom, think of it--with a background of something blue, cornflower, forget-me-nots, or lilac, to show how really golden her hair is. There's Mrs. Home."

Evelyn whistled with peculiar shrillness on his fingers to the neat little figure on the croquet lawn below them. She started, not violently, for nothing she did was violent, but very completely.

"Ah, it is only you," she said. "I thought it might be an express train loose. Are you not going on the river, dear Evelyn?"

"I was prevented," he said, jumping down the steps in one flying leap. "Dear Philippina----"

"What next? What next?" murmured Mrs. Home. "Oh, do behave, Evelyn."

"Well, Philip is your son, so you are Philippina. But why have prize-fighters in your house?"

"Prize-fighters?"

"Yes. Lady Ellington had my head in Chancery for ten minutes just now. She delivered a series of quick-firing questions. I know why, too; it was to prevent my going on the river. She was perfectly successful--I should think she always was successful; she mowed me down. Now will you tell me the truth or not?"

"No, dear Evelyn," said Mrs. Home rather hastily, guessing what was coming.

"Then you are a very wicked woman; but as I now know you are going to tell an untruth, it will do just as well for my purpose. Now, is Philip engaged to Miss Ellington?"

"No, dear; indeed he is not," said Mrs. Home.

"Oh, why not lie better than that?" said Evelyn.

Mrs. Home clasped her white, delicate little hands together.

"Ah, but it is true," she said. "It really is literally true, as far as I know."

Evelyn shook his head at her.

"But they have been gone half an hour," he said. "You mean--I tell you, you mean that they may be now, for all you know."

Mrs. Home turned her pretty, china-blue eyes on to him, with a sort of diminutive air of dignity.

"Of course you are at liberty to put any construction you please on anything I say," she remarked.

"I am," said he, "and I put that. Now, are you pleased at it?"

"She is charming," said Mrs. Home, hopelessly off her guard.

"That is all I wanted to know," said Evelyn. "But what a tangled web you weave, without deceiving me in the least, you old darling."

Tom Merivale had not joined Evelyn, but strolled along the upper walk through herbaceous borders. He had not stayed away from his home now for the past year, and delighted though he was to see these two old friends of his again, he confessed to himself that he found the call on sociability which a visit tacitly implied rather trying. More than that, he found even the presence of other people in the house with whom he was not on terms of intimacy a thing a little upsetting, for his year of solitude had given some justification to his nickname. For solitude is a habit of extraordinary fascination, and very quick to grow on anyone who has sufficient interest in things not to be bored by the absence of people. And with Tom Merivale, Nature, the unfolding of flowers, the lighting of the stars in the sky, the white splendour of the moon, the hiss of the rain on to cowering shrubs and thirsty grass was much more than an interest; it was a passion which absorbed and devoured him. For Nature, to the true devotee, is a mistress far more exacting and far more infinite in her variety and rewards than was ever human mistress to her adorer. Tom Merivale, at any rate, was faithful and wholly constant, and to him now, after a year spent in solitude in which no man had ever felt less alone, no human tie or affection weighed at all compared to the patient devotion with which he worshipped this ever young mistress of his. To some, indeed, as to Mrs. Home, this cutting of himself off from all other human ties might seem to verge on insanity; to others, as to Philip, it might equally well be construed into an example of perfect sanity. For he had left the world, and cast his moorings loose from society in no embittered or disappointed mood; the severance of his connection with things of human interest had been deliberate and sanely made. He believed, in fact, that what his inner essential self demanded was not to be found among men, or, as he had put it once to Philip, it was to be found there in such small quantities compared to the mass of alloy and undesirable material from which it had to be extracted, that it was false economy to quarry in the world of cities. More than this, too, he had renounced, though this second renunciation had not been deliberate, but had followed, so he found, as a sequel to the other; for he had been a writer of fiction who, though never widely read, had been prized and pored over by a circle of readers whose appreciation was probably far more worth having than that of a wider circle could have been. Then, suddenly, as far as even his most intimate friends knew, he had left London, establishing himself instead in a cottage, of the more comfortable sort of cottages, some mile outside Brockenhurst. In the tea-cup way this had made quite a storm in the set that knew him well, those, in fact, by whom he was valued as an interpreter and a living example of the things of which he wrote. These writings had always been impersonal in note, slightly mystical, and always with the refrain of Nature running through them. But none, when he disappeared as completely as Waring, suspected how vital to himself his disappearance had been. Anything out of the way is labelled, and rightly by the majority, to be insane. By such a verdict Tom Merivale certainly merited Bedlam. He had gone away, in fact, to think, while the majority of those who crowd into the cities do so, not to think, but to be within reach of the distractions that leave no time for thought. For action is always less difficult than thought; a man can act for more hours a day than he can think in a week, and action, being a productive function of the brain, is thus (rightly, also, from the social point of view) considered the more respectable employment.

The subject of this difficult doctrine, however, was more than content; as he had said, he was happy, a state far on the sunward side of the other. He seemed to himself, indeed, to be sitting very much awake and alert on some great sunlit slope of the world, untenanted by man, but peopled with a million natural marvels unconjectured as yet by the world, but which slowly coming into the ken of his wondering and patient eyes. For a year now he had consciously and solely devoted himself to the study and contemplation of life, that eternal and ever-renewed life of Nature, and the joy manifested therein. He had turned his back with the same careful deliberation on all that is painful in Nature, all suffering, all that hinders and mars the fulness of life, on everything, in fact, which is an evidence of imperfection. In this to a large extent he was identically minded with Christian Scientists, but having faced the central idea of Christianity, namely, the suffering which was necessary as atonement for sin, he had confessed himself unable to accept, at present at any rate, the possibility of suffering being ever necessary, and could no longer call himself a Christian. Happiness was his gospel, and the book in which he studied it was Nature, omitting always such chapters as dealt with man. For man, so it seemed to him, had by centuries of evolution built himself into something so widely different from Nature's original design, that the very contemplation of and association with man was a thing to be avoided. Absence of serenity, absence of happiness, seemed the two leading characteristics of the human race, whereas happiness and serenity were the chief of those things for which he sought and for which he lived.

This year's solitude and quest for joy had already produced in him remarkable results. He had been originally himself of a very high-strung, nervous, and irritable temperament; now, however, he could not imagine the event which should disturb his equanimity. For this, as far as it went alone, he was perfectly willing to accept the possible explanation that a year's life in the open air had wrought its simple miracle of healing on his nerves, and, as he had said to Lady Ellington, the perfection of health had eliminated the possibility of discontent.

But other phenomena did not admit of quite so obvious an interpretation; and it was on these that he based his belief that, though all that occurred must necessarily be natural, following, that is to say, laws of nature, he was experiencing the effects of laws which were to the rest of the world occult or unknown. For in a word, youth, with all its vivid vigour, its capacity for growth and expansion, had returned to him in a way unprecedented; his face, as Evelyn had noticed, had grown younger, and in a hundred merely corporeal ways he had stepped back into early manhood. Again, and this was more inexplicable, he had somehow established, without meaning to, a certain communion with birds and beasts, of which the "nightingale trick" had been a small instance, which seemed to him must be a direct and hitherto unknown effect of his conscious absorption of himself in Nature. How far along this unexplored path he would be able to go he had no idea; he guessed, however, that he had at present taken only a few halting steps along a road that was lost in a golden haze of wonder.

He strolled along out through the garden into a solitary upland of bush-besprinkled turf. Wild flowers of downland, the rock-rose, the harebell, orchids, and meadow-sweet carpeted the short grass, and midsummer held festival. But this morning his thoughts were distracted from the Nature-world in which he lived, and he found himself dwelling on the human beings among whom for a few days he would pass his time. It was natural from the attitude of this last year that Evelyn Dundas and Mrs. Home should be of the party in the house the most congenial to him, and the simplicity of them both seemed to him far more interesting than the greater complexity of the others. It would, it is true, be hard to find two examples of simplicity so utterly unlike each other, but serene absence of calculation or scheming brought both under one head. They were both, in a way, children of Nature; Mrs. Home on the one hand having arrived at her inheritance by cheerful, unswerving patience and serenity with events external to herself; while in the case of the other, his huge vitality, coupled with his extreme impressionableness to beauty, brought him, so it seemed to Tom Merivale, into very close connection with the essentials of life. But, as he had told his friend, Evelyn's attitude to life was instinctively Pagan; immoral he was not, for his fastidiousness labelled such a thing ugly, but he had apparently no rudiments even of conscience or sense of moral obligation. And somehow, with that curious sixth sense of prescience, so common in animals, so rare among civilized human beings who, by means of continued calculation and reasoned surmise of the future, which has caused it to wither and atrophize, Tom felt, just as he could feel approaching storms, a vague sense of coming disaster.

The sensation was very undefined, but distinctly unpleasant, and, following his invariable rule to divert his mind from all unpleasantness, he lay down on the short turf and buried his face in a great bed of thyme which grew there. All summer was in that smell, hot, redolent, the very breath of life, and with eyes half-closed and nostrils expanded he breathed it deeply in.

The place he had come to was very remote and solitary, a big clearing in the middle of trees, well known to him in earlier years. No road crossed it, no house lay near it, but the air was resonant with the labouring bees, and the birds called and fluted to each other in the trees. But suddenly, as he lay there, half lost in a stupor of happiness, he heard very faintly another noise, to which at first he paid but little attention. It was the sound apparently of a flute being played at some great distance off, but what soon arrested his attention was the extremely piercing character of the notes. Remote as the sound was, and surrounded as he was by the hundred noises of the summer noon, it yet seemed to him perfectly clear and distinct through them all. Then something further struck him, for phrase after phrase of delicious melody was poured out, yet the same phrase was never repeated, nor did the melody come to an end; on the top of every climax came another; it was a tune unending, eternal, and whether it came from earth or heaven, from above or below, he could not determine, for it seemed to come from everywhere equally; it was as universal as the humming of the bees.

Then suddenly a thought flashed into his mind; he sprang up, and a strange look of fear crossed his face. At the same instant the tune ceased.

FOURTH

It was not in Lady Ellington's nature to be enthusiastic, since she considered enthusiasm to be as great a waste of the emotional fibres as anger, but she was at least thoroughly satisfied when, two evenings after this, Madge came to her room before dinner after another punting expedition with Philip, and gave her news.

"It is quite charming," said her mother, "and you have shown great good sense. Dear child, I must kiss you. And where is Mr. Home--Philip I must call him now?"

"He is outside," said Madge. "I said I would go down again for a few minutes before dinner."

Lady Ellington got up and kissed her daughter conscientiously, first on one cheek and then on the other.

"I will come down with you," she said, "just to tell him how very much delighted I am. I shall have to have a long talk to him to-morrow morning."

There was no reason whatever why the engagement should not be announced at once, and in consequence congratulations descended within the half hour. Mrs. Home was a little tearful, with tears of loving happiness on behalf of her son, which seemed something of a weakness to Lady Ellington; Tom Merivale was delighted in a sort of faraway manner that other people should be happy; Evelyn Dundas alone, in spite of his previous preparation for the news, felt somehow slightly pulled up. For with his complete and instinctive surrender to every mood of the moment, he had permitted himself to take great pleasure in the contemplation--it was really hardly more than that--of Madge's beauty, and he felt secretly, for no shadow obscured the genuineness of his congratulations, a certain surprise and sense of being ill-used. He was not the least in love with Madge, but even in so short a time they had fallen into ways of comradeship, and her engagement, he felt, curtailed the liberties of that delightful relationship. And again this evening, having cut out of a bridge table, he wandered with her in the perfect dusk. Lady Ellington this time observed their exit, but cheerfully permitted it; no harm could be done now. It received, in fact, her direct and conscious sanction, since Philip had suggested to Madge that Evelyn should paint her portrait. He knew that Evelyn was more than willing to do so, and left the arrangement of sitting to sitter and artist. In point of fact, it was this subject that occupied the two as they went out.

"We shall be in London for the next month, Mr. Dundas," Madge was saying, "and of course I will try to suit your convenience. It is so good of you to say you will begin it at once."

Evelyn's habitual frankness did not desert him.

"Ah, I must confess, then," he said. "It isn't at all good of me. You see, I want to paint you, and I believe I can. And I will write to-morrow to a terrible railway director to say that in consequence of a subsequent engagement I cannot begin the--the delineation of his disgusting features for another month."

Madge laughed; as is the way of country-house parties, the advance in intimacy had been very rapid.

"Oh, that would be foolish," she said. "Delineate his disgusting features if you have promised. My disgusting features will wait."

"Ah, but that is just what they won't do," said Evelyn.

"Do you mean they will go bad, like meat in hot weather? Thank you so much."

"My impression will go bad," said he. "No, I must paint you at once. Besides"--and still he was perfectly frank--"besides Philip is, I suppose, my oldest friend. He has asked me to do it, and friendship comes before cheques."

They walked in silence a little while.

"I am rather nervous," said Madge. "I watched you painting this afternoon for a bit."

"Oh, a silly sketch," said he, "flowers, terrace, woods behind; it was only a study for a background."

"Well, it seemed to affect you. You frowned and growled, and stared and bit the ends of your brushes. Am I going to be stuck up on a platform to be growled at and stared at? I don't think I could stand it; I should laugh."

Evelyn nodded his head in strong approval.

"That will be what I want," he said. "I will growl to any extent if it will make you laugh. I shall paint you laughing, laughing at all the ups and downs of the world. I promise you you shall laugh. With sad eyes, too," he added. "Did you know you had sad eyes?"

Madge slightly entrenched herself at this.

"I really haven't studied my own expression," she said. "Women are supposed to use mirrors a good deal, but they use them, I assure you, to see if their hair is tidy."

"Your's never is quite," said he. "And it suits you admirably."

Again the gravel sounded crisply below their feet, without the overscore of human voices.

Then he spoke again.

"And please accept my portrait of you as my wedding present to you--and Philip," he said with boyish abruptness.

Madge for the moment was too utterly surprised to speak.

"But, Mr. Dundas," she said at length, "I can't--I--how can I?"

He laughed.

"Well, I must send it to Philip, then," he said, "if you won't receive it. But--why should you not? You are going to marry my oldest friend. I can't send him an ivory toothbrush."

This reassured her.

"It is too kind of you," said she. "I had forgotten that. So send it to him."

"Certainly. But help me to make it then as good as I can."

"Tell me how?" she asked, feeling inexplicably uneasy.

"Why, laugh," he said. "That is how I see you. You laugh so seldom, and you might laugh so often. Why don't you laugh oftener?"

Then an impulse of simple honesty came to her.

"Because I am usually bored," she said.

"Ah, you really mustn't be bored while I am painting you," he said. "I could do nothing with it if you were bored. Besides, it would be so uncharacteristic."

"How is that, when I am bored so often?" she asked.

"Oh, it isn't the things we do often that are characteristic of us," said he. "It is the things we do eagerly, with intention."

She laughed at this.

"Then you are right," she said. "I am never eagerly bored. And to tell you the truth, I don't think I shall be bored when I sit to you. Ah, there is Philip. He does not see us; I wonder whether he will?"

Philip's white-fronted figure had appeared at this moment at the French window leading out of the drawing-room, and his eyes, fresh from the bright light inside, were not yet focussed to the obscurity of the dusk. At that moment Madge found herself suddenly wishing that he would go back again. But as soon as she was conscious she wished that, she resolutely stifled the wish and called to him.

"Evelyn there, too?" he asked. "Evelyn, you've got to go in and take my place."

"And you will take mine," said he with just a shade of discontent in his voice.

"No, my dear fellow," said Philip. "I shall take my own."

He laughed.

"I congratulate you again," he said, and left them.

Philip stood for a moment in silence by the girl, looking at her with a sort of shy, longing wonder.

"Ah, what luck!" he said at length. "What stupendous and perfect luck."

"What is luck, Philip?" she asked.

"Why, this. You and me. Think of the chances against my meeting you in this big world, and think of the chances against your saying 'Yes.' But now--now that it has happened it couldn't have been otherwise."

Some vague, nameless trouble took possession of the girl, and she shivered slightly.

"You are cold, my darling?" he said quickly.

She had been leaning against the stone balustrade of the terrace, but stood upright, close to him.

"No, not in the least," she said.

"What is it, then?" he asked.

"It is nothing. Only I suppose I feel it is strange that in a moment the whole future course of one's life is changed like this."

He took her hands in his, and the authentic fire of love burned in his eyes.

"Strange?" he said. "Is it not the most wonderful of miracles? I never knew anything so wonderful could happen. It makes all the rest of my life seem dim. There is just this one huge beacon of light. All the rest is in shadow."

She raised her face to him half imploringly.

"Oh, Philip, is it all that to you?" she asked. "I--I am afraid."

"Because you have made me the happiest man alive?"

A sudden, inevitable impulse of honesty prompted Madge to speak out.

"No, but because I have perhaps meddled with great forces about which I know nothing. I like you immensely; I have never liked anyone so much. I esteem you and respect you. I am quite willing to lead the rest of my life with you; I want nothing different. But will that do? Is that enough? I have never loved as I believe you love me. I do not think it is possible to me. There, I have told you."

Philip raised her hands to his lips and kissed them.

"Ah, my dearest, you give me all you have and are, and yet you say, 'Is that enough?'" he whispered. "What more is possible?"

She looked at him a moment, the trouble not yet quite gone from her face. Then she raised it to his.

"Then take it," she said.

The night was very warm and windless, and for some time longer they walked up and down, or stood resting against the terrace wall looking down over the hushed woods. A nightingale, the same perhaps that had been charmed to Tom's finger two evenings ago, poured out liquid melody, and the moon began to rise in the East. Gradually their talk veered to other subjects, and Madge mentioned that Evelyn was willing to do her portrait.

"He will begin at once," she said, "because it appears his impression of me isn't a thing that will keep. He is putting off another order for it."

"That is dreadfully immoral," said Philip, "but I am delighted to hear it."

"Oh, and another thing. He gives it us--to you and me I think he said--as a wedding present."

"Ah, I can't have that," said Philip quickly. "That is Evelyn all over. There never was such an unthinking, generous fellow. But it is quite impossible. Why, it would mean a sixth part of his year's income."

"I know; I felt that."

Philip laughed rather perplexedly.

"I really don't know what is to be done with him," he said. "Last year he gave my mother a beautiful pearl brooch. That sort of thing is so embarrassing. And if she had not accepted it, he would have been quite capable of throwing it into the Thames. Indeed he threatened to do so. And he will be equally capable of throwing his cheque into the fire."

"All the same, I like it enormously," she said; "his impulse, I mean."

"I know, but it offends my instincts as a man of business. I might just as well refuse to charge interest on loans. However, I will see what I can do."

They went in again soon after this, for it was growing late, and found Lady Ellington preparing to leave the table of her very complete conquests. It had fallen to Evelyn to provide her with a no-trump hand containing four aces, and she was disposed to be gracious. The news, furthermore, that he would begin her daughter's portrait at once was gratifying to her, and she was anxious that the sittings should begin at once. As both they and he would be in town for the next month, the matter was easily settled, and it was arranged that the thing should be put in hand immediately.

Philip followed Evelyn to the billiard-room as soon as the women went upstairs, and found him alone there.

"The Hermit has gone to commune with Nature," he said. "He will die of natural causes if he doesn't look out. He called me a Pagan this morning, Philip. Wasn't it rude? And the fact that it is true seems to me to make it ruder."

Philip lit his cigarette.

"I'm going to be rude too, old chap," said he. "Evelyn, you really mustn't make a present of the portrait to Madge and me. It is awfully good of you, and just like you, but I simply couldn't accept it."

Evelyn shrugged his shoulders.

"Then there will be no portrait at all," he said shortly. "I tell you I won't paint it as an order."

Philip held out his hand.

"I appreciate it tremendously," he said. "It is most awfully good of you. But it's your profession. Hullo, here's the Hermit back."

Tom Merivale entered at this moment.

"Aren't we going to sit out to-night?" he said.

Evelyn rose.

"Yes, let's go out," he said. "Well, Philip, not a line will I draw unless you take it. Or I'll give it to Miss Ellington and not you."

"You really musn't," said Philip.

"But don't you see I want to paint her? I said so to you only the other day. Hang it all, I tell you that I do it for pleasure. I shall also be the vast gainer artistically. I've got an idea about her, in fact, and if you don't let me paint her I shall do it from memory, in which case it will not be so good."

An idea struck Philip.

"Well, paint me as well," he said, "and let me pay you for that."

Evelyn followed Tom out.

"Oh, I can't haggle," he said. "Yes, I'll paint you if you like. But I will paint Miss Ellington first. In fact, you shall be painted when I've nothing else to do. Well, Hermit, seen Pan to-day?"

"No, you scoffer," said Tom.

"Call me when you do. I should like to see him, too. Let's see, he was a man with goat's legs; sort of things you see in Barnum's."

Tom shifted in his chair.

"Some day, perhaps, you may think it serious," he said.

"I daresay; a man with goat's legs is not to be taken lightly," said Evelyn. "And he sits by the roadside, doesn't he, or so Browning says, playing the pipes? What pipes, I wonder? Bagpipes, do you suppose?"

Tom laughed; his equanimity was quite undisturbed even by chaff upon what was to him the most serious subject in the world.

"Ah, who was frightened at a nightingale coming to sit on my finger a few nights ago? Evelyn, if you are not serious, I'll frighten you again."

"Well, but is it bagpipes?" asked he.

Tom suddenly got grave.

"No, it sounded more like a glass flute very far off," he said. "No explanations are forthcoming, because I haven't got any."

Evelyn was silent a moment.

"And when did you hear this glass flute very far off?" he asked.

"Two mornings ago, up above the house in that big clearing in the woods," he answered. "I know nothing more about it. It frightened me rather, and then it stopped."

"What did it play?" asked Philip.

"A world-without-end tune," he said. "The catechising is now over. I shall go to bed, I think. I must leave to-morrow, Philip."

"I hoped you would stop a day or two longer. Must you really go?"

"I must, I find."

"Appointment with Pan in the New Forest," remarked Evelyn, dodging the cushion that was thrown at him.

Philip had to spend the inside of the next day in London, and left with Tom Merivale by an early train, leaving Evelyn alone with his mother, Lady Ellington, and Madge. It came about very naturally that Lady Ellington gravitated to Mrs. Home, and Evelyn, finishing his background sketch in front of a great clump of purple clematis, found Madge on the terrace when he went out, with an unopened book on her lap.

The book had lain there, indeed, in the same state for half an hour before he came, for Madge had been very fully occupied with her own thoughts. She had had a talk to her mother the night before, which this morning seemed to her to be more revealing of herself than even her own confession to Philip in their stroll on the terrace had been. She had told her just what she had told him, namely, that she gave him very willingly all that she knew of herself, liking, esteem, respect, adding out of Philip's mouth that this more than contented him. But then Lady Ellington, for the first time perhaps for many years, had made a strategical error, allowing her emotion, not her reason, to dictate to her, and had said--

"Ah, Madge, how clever of you."

She had seen her mistake a moment afterwards, and just a moment too late, for Madge had asked the very simple question "Why?" And the unsatisfactory nature of her mother's reply had given her food for thought.

For Lady Ellington had applauded as clever what was to her the very rudiment of honour, and she had supposed that her mother would say "How very stupid of you." Clearly, then, while extremely uncalculating to herself, Madge had succeeded in giving the impression of calculation to one who, she well knew, calculated. What, then, she asked herself, was the secret of this love of which she was ignorant, that rendered her confession of ignorance so satisfactory a reply?