me two evenings previously for a demonstration of affection which I had carefully prepared, lest she, too, should have noticed the waning in my love. Upon this I had retreated, with a very odd mixture of feel-ings towards my fiancee, and there had been a reserve between us for the whole of the evening, which Edgar somewhat unwisely interfered to break. Looking upon myself as the injured person, I had resented the homily he felt himself called upon to administer, and though I made my peace with Helen next day, I avoided her brother. He made two or three good-natured overtures to me in the manner of an experienced nurse to a froward child, but on the morning of the shooting party I was still as far as ever from being reconciled to the paternal[21] intervention of Edgar the Wise and the Good.
'The Ladies!' cried one of the party, leaning lazily back on his arm and raising his glass.
'Say "Woman,"' I amended; 'it's more comprehensive.'
'Well, but "The Ladies!" ought to be comprehensive enough for you just now, Maude,' said some one, glancing mischievously at
Edgar, whose solemnity was increasing, and scenting something warmer than controversy.
'Not now, nor ever!' said I, with more daring than good taste. 'In "Woman" we can secretly worship an ideal better than ourselves. In "The Ladies" we must bow down to creatures lower than ourselves, whose beauty deceives us, whose frivolity degrades us, and whom nothing more sacred than our care and their own coldness protects[22] from the fate of fellow-women whom before them we do not dare to name.'
Everybody looked up in astonishment, and Edgar's red healthy face became purple with anger.
'A man who holds such opinions concerning ladies is probably better qualified to judge that other class which he has the singular
4
taste to mention in the same sentence with them.'
'Perhaps. It is easier to find mercy for victims than for tyrants.'
Edgar rose to his feet with the ponderous dignity of an offended giant.
'If I had known your opinions on this subject a little earlier, Mr. Maude, I should never have allowed you to form an alliance with my family.'
I rose too, as hot as he; and secretly alarmed and repentant at the lengths to which my recklessness had carried me, I was[23] not ready to submit to the didactic rough-riding of the man who had long ago himself instilled into me his own supreme contempt for the weaker sex.
'Perhaps I, Lord Edgar, should have thought the honour too dearly bought if I had known that it involved my acceptance of a self-appointed keeper of my conscience.'
Our host, Sir Wilfrid Speke, now interfered to calm the passions which were rapidly getting the better of us, and thrusting my gun under my arm, he literally carried me off, and marching me to a covert on the slope of a hill where was a noted 'warm corner,' he told me good-humouredly to 'let the birds have it,' and left me to myself and them.
I was in a very bad temper. Enraged by the recollection of Helen's simpering coldness, by her brother's recently-assumed dictator-ship, and by my own reckless want of[24] self-control a few minutes before, I was not in the mood for sport. Was this to be the result of my determination to take life more seriously, that I discovered my fiancee to be a fool, my most honoured friend a bore, and my-self capable of undreamt-of depths of bad taste and ill-temper? I would go back to my old life of languid chatter and irresponsible dissipation, I would content myself again with my fame as the 'handsomest man in town,' would accept my future wife for what she was, and not for what she ought to be, give her the inane, half-hearted attentions which were so much more to her taste than earnestness and devotion, and see thought and Lord Edgar at the devil.
I felt much more inclined to shoot myself than to open fire on the pheasants, but head-long carelessness, and not tragic intention, caused the accident which ensued. In getting through a gap in a hedge, my gun was[25] caught by a briar as I mounted to the higher ground on the other side; I tried to free it, and handling it incautiously, a sudden shock to my face and right shoulder told me that I had shot myself. I was blinded for the moment, and trying to raise my right arm I felt acute pain, and the next instant I felt the warm blood trickling down my neck.
I tried to walk, but I staggered about and could make no progress, so I leaned against a tree and shouted; but my head growing dizzy,
I soon found myself on the ground, filled with one wish--that I might live long enough for some one to find me, and receive the
last instructions by which I could atone to pretty Helen for the vulgar earnestness of my love.
My next recollection is of a dull murmur of voices heard, as it seemed, in the distance, then of pain grown suddenly more acute as I was moved; all the time I could see[26] nothing, and I had only just time to understand that I was being carried along by friends whose voices I recognised, when I fell again into unconsciousness.
I recovered to find myself back at Sir Wilfrid's; a doctor was dressing my wounded head and examining my shoulder; there was a bandage across my eyes, and on trying to speak I found that the right side of my face was also bound up. I passed the night in some pain, and must have been for part of it light-headed, as I discovered two or three days later, when Edgar, much moved, told me that
I had implored everybody who came near me to witness that I left all I possessed to Lady Helen Normanton, and had begged for the pen and paper I could not have used, to execute my proposed will.
During the next few days Edgar hardly left my bedside. My head and eyes were still kept tightly bandaged, so that I could[27] neither see nor speak, nor take solid food. Seeing me in this piteous condition, Edgar, like the good fellow he was, decided that sermons were out of season, and that I must be amused. His humour, however, being of a somewhat slow and cumbrous kind adapted to
his size, I took advantage of my enforced silence to let him joke on unheeded, while my own thoughts wandered dreamily away to my life of the past few years, and to the odd, quickly discovered mistake in which it had lately culminated. I was surprised by the persistency with which Helen's placid silliness tormented me, fresh instances of it coming every hour into my mind until I began to ask myself whether the little blue-eyed lady had really been born into the world with a soul at all. And so, no longer suffering bodily pain, I lay day after day, very much absorbed by my own self-questionings, and by strange dreams of a[28] new Helen, who came to me with the fair face and soft eyes of the old, but with bright intelligence in her gaze, whispering with her delicate lips words of love and tenderness.
5
I woke up suddenly one night, still hot with my sleeping fancy that this revised edition of my fiancee had been with me. I had seemed to feel her breath upon my cheek, even to feel the touch of her lips upon my ear, as she told me my illness had taught her how much she loved me. I thought I was answering her in passionate words with a great thrill of joy in my heart, when I woke up and found myself as usual in darkness and silence.
'Edgar!' I called out; 'Edgar!'
He answered sleepily from a little way off, 'Yes. Do you want anything?'
'No, thank you.' A pause.
'I say,' I went on a few moments later,[29] 'nobody has been in the room, have they?'
'No, no-o-body,' with a yawn. 'At least, I may have dozed, but I don't think----'
'No, of course not.' But I was horribly wide awake by this time. Some of the bandages round my head having been removed for the first time the evening before, I had liberty of speech again,
