panelled hall and ran his eye over its gleaming floor and walls, almost nodding to the two suits of armour that stood one on each side of a big, doorless doorway. This led into another hall, from, and round, which ran a wide staircase and galleries right up to the top of the house, for, from the floor of that hall one could look up to a glass roof three stories above. He pictured it and past scenes enacted in it, and a woman with slow and stately grace, ascending and descending.
Nothing seemed to have changed in those two and a half decades since she had come here, a bride, and he had visited her after seven years of exile. He had come, half in the hope that the sight of her in her own home, the wife of another man, would cure him of the foolish love that kept him a lonely bachelor, half in the hope that it would do the opposite, and be but a renewal of love.
He had been perversely glad to find that he loved the woman, if possible, more than he had loved the girl; that a callow boy's calf-love for a maiden had changed to a young man's devotion to a glorious woman; that she was to be a second Dante's Beatrice.
Again and again, at intervals of years, he had visited the shrine, not so much renewing the ever-burning fire at her altar, as watching it flame up brightly in her presence. Nor did the fact that she regarded him so much as friend that he could never be more, nor less, in any way affect this undeviating unprofitable sentiment.
At thirty, at thirty-five, at forty, at forty-five, he found that his love, if not unchanged, was not diminished, and that she remained, what she had been since their first meeting, the central fact of his life--not so much an obsession, an idée fixe, as his reason for existence, his sovereign, and the audience of the play in the theatre of his life.
And, each time he saw her, she was, to his prejudiced eye, more desirable, more beautiful, more wonderful. . . .
Yes--there was the fifteenth-century chest in which reposed croquet mallets, tennis rackets, and the other paraphernalia of those games. She had once sat on that old chest, beside him, while they waited for the dog-cart to take him to the station and back to Africa, and her hand had rested so kindly in his, as he had tried to find something to say--something other than what he might not say. . . .
Opposite to it was the muniment-box, into which many an abbot and holy friar had put many a lead-sealed parchment. It would be full of garden rugs and cushions. On that, she had sat beside him, after his dance with her, one New Year's Eve. . . .
Same pictures of horse and hound, and bird and beast; same antlers and foxes' masks and brushes; same trophies he had sent from Nigeria, specially good heads of lion, buffalo, gwambaza, and gazelle.
From these his eye travelled to the great fire-place, on each side of which stood a mounted Lake Tchad elephant's foot, doing menial service, while above its stone mantel, a fine trophy of African weapons gleamed. One of his greatest satisfactions had always been to acquire something worthy to be sent to Brandon Abbas--to give her pleasure and to keep him in mind.
And now, perhaps, was his real chance of giving her pleasure and keeping himself, for a space, very much in her mind. He pulled the quaint old handle of a chain, and a distant bell clanged.
A footman approached, a stranger.
He would enquire as to whether her ladyship were at home. But as he turned to go, the butler appeared in the doorway from the inner hall.
"Hallo, Burdon! How are you?" said Lawrence.
"Why, Mr. George, sir!" replied the old man, who had known Lawrence for thirty years, coming forward and looking unwontedly human.
"This is a real pleasure, sir."
It was--a real five-pound note too, when the visitor, a perfect gent, departed. Quite a source of income Mr. Lawrence had been, ever since Henry Burdon had been under-footman in the service of her ladyship's father.
"Her Ladyship is at the Bower, sir, if you'd like to come straight out," he continued, knowing that the visitor was a very old friend indeed, and always welcome. "I will announce you."
Burdon led the way.
"How is Lady Brandon?" enquired Lawrence, impelled to unwonted loquacity by his nervousness.
"She enjoys very good health, sir--considering," replied the butler.
"Considering what?" asked Lawrence.
"Everythink, sir," was the non-committal reply.
The visitor smiled to himself. A good servant, this.
"And how is his Reverence?" he continued.
"Queer, sir, very. And gets queerer, poor gentleman," was the answer.
Lawrence expressed regret at this bad news concerning the chaplain, as the Reverend Maurice Ffolliot was always called in that house.
"Is Mr. Michael here?" he asked.
"No, sir, he ain't. Nor none of the other young gentlemen," was the reply. Was there anything unusual in the old man's tone? . . .
Emerging from the shrubbery, crossing a rose-garden, some lawn-tennis courts, and a daisy-pied stretch of cedar-studded sward, the pair entered a wood, followed a path beneath enormous elms and beeches, and came out on to a square of velvet turf.
On two sides, the left and rear, rose the great old trees of a thickly forested hill; on the right, the grey old house; and from the front of this open space the hillside fell away to the famous view.
By wicker table and hammock-stand, a lady reclined in a chaise longue. She was reading a book and her back was towards Lawrence, whose heart missed a beat and hastened to make up for the omission by a redoubled speed.
The butler coughed at the right distance and upon the right note, and, as Lady Brandon turned, announced the visitor, hovered, placed a wicker chair, and faded from the scene.
"George!" said Lady Brandon, in her soft deep contralto, with a pleased brightening of her wide grey eyes and flash of beautiful teeth. But she did not flush nor pale, and there was no quickening of her breathing. It was upon the man that these symptoms were produced by the meeting, although it was a meeting anticipated by him, unexpected by her.
"Patricia!" he said, and extended both hands. She took them frankly and Lawrence kissed them both, with a curiously gentle and reverent manner, an exhibition of a George Lawrence unknown to other people.
"Well, my dear!" he said, and looked long at the unlined, if mature, determined, clever face before him--that of a woman of forty years, of strong character and of aristocratic breeding.
"Yes," he continued.
"Yes 'what,' George?" asked Lady Brandon.
"Yes. You are positively as young and as beautiful as ever," he replied--but with no air of gallantry and compliment, and rather as a sober statement of ascertained fact.
"And you as foolish, George. . . . Sit down--and tell me why you have disobeyed me and come here before your wedding. . . . Or--or--are you married, George?" was the smiling reply.
"No, Patricia, I am not married," said Lawrence, relinquishing her hands slowly. "And I have disobeyed you, and come here again without bringing a wife, because I hoped you might be in need of my help. . . . I mean, I feared you might be in trouble and in need of help, and hoped that
