the cheerful optimism of sanders was borne out by events, if not in letter at any rate in spirit, and harry, on waking, received the most encouraging reports from the sick-room. mr. francis had slept well for the greater part of the night, and though he would take his breakfast in bed, he expected to be down by the middle of the morning. he particularly desired that harry should be told, as soon as he woke, how completely he had recovered from his attack, and sent him his dear love.
here, at any rate, was great good news. again and again during the night harry had woke from anxious, feverish dreams of that ghastly, masklike face and sonorous breathing; all the earlier hours seemed a constant succession of agonized awakenings. now it would be the white, mottled face which grew ever larger and nearer to his own, that tore him almost with a shriek from his uneasy slumber, after long, paralyzed attempts to move; now it would be the breathing that got louder and yet more guttural till the air reverberated with it. again and again he had sat up in bed with flying pulse and damp forehead, and lit a match[pg 125] to see how much more of the night there was still to run; or looking for any sound of movement from his uncle's room at the end of the passage, he would think he heard steps along the corridor, and a stealthy opening or shutting of midnight doors. once it was a spray of jasmine tapping at his window which woke him with a start, and thinking that some evil news was knocking at his door, it was with an effort that he controlled his throat sufficiently to bid the knocker enter. but about the time of the first hint of the mid-summer dawn, when birds were beginning to tune their notes for the day, and the bushes and eaves grew merry with chirrupings, he fell into a more peaceful sleep, and woke only on the rattle of his blinds being rolled up.
his heart leaped as he received his uncle's message, and he got up immediately, and putting on only a dressing gown and slippers, went out with a rough towel over his arm for a dip in the lake before breakfast. the sluice at the lower end of it, where a cool ten feet of water invited him, lay not more than a couple of hundred yards from the house, across a stretch of nearly level lawn, and hidden from both road and house by a screen of bushes. sleep still lingered like cobwebs in drowsy corners of his brain, but all the horror of the evening and its almost more horrible repetitions during the earlier hours of the night had been swept away by the news of the morning, and it was with a thrill of pleasure, as indescribable as the scent itself of this clean morning,[pg 126] that he drank deep of the freshness of the young day. the sun was already high, but the grass that lay in the shadow of house and bush was still not dry of its night dews, and a thousand liquid gems brushed his bare ankle. the gentle thunder of the sluice made a soft low bass to the treble of birds and the hum of country sounds, that summer symphony which pauses only for the solo of the nightingale during the short, dark hours. the lightest of breezes ruffled the lake, scarcely shattering the mirrored trees and sky that leaned over it, and harry stood for a moment, white and bare to the soft wind, with the sun warm on his shoulders, wondering at the beauty of his bath. then, with arms shot out above his head, and his body braced to a line, he sprang off the stone slab of the sluice and disappeared in a soda water of bubbles and flying spray.
surely that moment, he thought, as he rose again to the surface, was the crown and acme of bodily sensation. the sleep had been swept from him; house, bed, pillows, and darkness had gone; he was renewed, starting fresh again, cool and clean, with all the beautiful round world waiting for him. expectancy and hope of happiness, interest, awakening love, were all strung to their highest pitch in his completeness of bodily well-being; his soul was moulded in every part to its environment, freed of its bodily burden, and with a song in his mouth he stepped out of the water for the glow of the towel.
he sauntered leisurely back to the house,[pg 127] purring to himself at the delight which the moment gave him. how could there be men who found their pleasure in eating and drinking, in the life of crowded rooms and smoky towns, when in half the acres of all england and round all its coasts were such possibilities? how, above all, was it possible to exist for a moment, if one had not the privilege of being violently in love? then, with a laugh at himself, he suddenly found that he was hungry, ravenous, and his step quickened.
half an hour later he was seated at breakfast, but already the first mood of the day was past. he had for an hour gone free, untrammelled by all the obligations which events and circumstances entail, but now he was captured again. one thing in particular wove a heavy chain round him. he had seen with amazed horror the effect on his uncle of that news that he had thought would be so welcome. was it reasonable to suppose, then, that if a name alone produced so ill-starred a result, he could bear the sight of the girl? after the catastrophe of the night before it would be cruelty of a kind not to be contemplated to return again to the subject. the disappointment was grievous. that visit of lady oxted's and evie's, so bright in anticipation that his mind's eye could scarcely look on it undazzled, must be given up. plain, simple duty, the ordinary, incontrovertible demands of blood and kinship, compelled him to it. his own happiness could not be purchased at the cost of[pg 128] suffering to that kindly old man; and who knew how much he might be suffering even now?
then, with the mercurial fluctuation of those in love, he fell from the sky-scraping summits into a black, bottomless gulf of despondency. evie could not come here, she could never come here, he told himself. and at that, and all which that implied, he pushed his chair quickly back from the table, and left a half-eaten breakfast. his reasonable mind could not make itself heard; it told him that he was pushing things comically far; that he was imagining an inconceivable situation, when he concluded that a young man must not marry because of the feeling of his great-uncle on the subject; but his mood was not amenable to reason. the world had gone as black as an east wind, and all the flowers were withered.
he heaved a lover's sigh, and, going out of the glass door into the garden, walked moodily up and down the lawn for a space, consumed with pity, half for himself, half for his uncle. directly above were the windows of his own bedroom, wide open, and a housemaid within was singing at her work. farther on were the two rooms in which his uncle chiefly lived, a big-sized dressing room in which he slept, and next door the bedroom which he had turned into a sitting room. these windows were also open, and harry, even on the noiseless grass, trod gently as he passed them, with that instinct for hushed quiet which all feel in the presence of suffering. "poor old fellow! poor, dear old fellow!" he thought to[pg 129] himself, with a pang of compunction at the shock he had so unwittingly caused that cheerful, suffering spirit.
then, suddenly, as he passed softly below, there came from the windows, mingling in unspeakable discord with the housemaid's song, a quick shower of notes from a flute.
harry paused. the player was evidently feeling his fingers in the execution of a run, and a moment afterward the dainty, tripping air of "la donna é mobile" came dancing out into the sunlight like a summer gnat. twice the delicate tune was played with great precision and admirable light-heartedness, which contrasted vividly with the listener's mood, and was instantly succeeded by some other italian air, unknown to the lad, but as gay as a french farce.
harry had paused, open-mouthed, with astonishment. his own thoughts about his kinsman, sombre and full of tenderness, were all sent flying by the cheerful measure which the kinsman was executing so delightfully. a smile began to dawn in the corners of his mouth, enlightenment returned to his eye, and, standing out on the gravel path, he shouted up.
"uncle francis!" he cried; "uncle francis!"
the notes of the flute wabbled and ceased.
"yes, my dearest fellow," came cheerfully from above.
"i am so glad you are so much better! may i come up and see you?"
[pg 130]
"by all means, by all means. i was just on the point of sending sanders down to see if you would."
harry went up the stairs three at a time, and fairly danced down the corridor. sanders, faithful and foxlike, was outside, his hand on the latch.
"you will be very careful, my lord," he said. "we mustn't have mr. francis agitated again."
"of course not," said harry, and was admitted.
mr. francis was lying high in bed, propped up on pillows. the remains of his breakfast, including a hot dish, of which no part remained, stood on a side table; on his bed lay the case of the beloved flute.
"ah, my dear boy!" he cried, "i owe you a thousand and one apologies for my conduct last night. sanders tells me i gave you a terrible fright. you must think no more of it, you must promise me to think no more of it, harry. i have had such seizures many times before, and of late, thank god, they have become much rarer. i had not told you about them on purpose. i did not see the use of telling you."
"dear uncle francis, it is a relief to find you so well," said harry. "sanders told me last night that he knew how to deal with these attacks, which was a little comfort. but i insist on your seeing a really first-rate doctor from town."
mr. francis shook his head.
"quite useless, dear harry;" he said, "though it is like you to suggest it. before now i have[pg 131] seen an excellent man on the subject. it is true that the attack itself is dangerous, but when it passes off it passes off altogether, and during it sanders knows very well what to do. besides, in all ordinary probability, it will not recur. but now, my dear boy, as you are here, i will say something i have got to say at once, and get it off my mind."
harry held up his hand.
"if it will agitate you in the least degree, uncle francis," he said, "i will not hear it. unless you can promise me that it will not, you open your mouth and i leave the room."
"it will not, it will not," said the old man; "i give you my word upon it. it is this: that moment last night when you told me what you told me was the happiest moment i have had for years. what induced my wretched old cab horse of a constitution to play that trick i can not imagine. the news was a shock to me, i suppose—ah! certainly it was a shock, but of pure joy. and i wanted to tell you this at once, because i was afraid, you foolish, unselfish fellow, that you might blame yourself for having told me; that you might think it would pain or injure me to speak of it again. you might even have been intending to tell miss aylwin that you must revoke your invitation. was it not so, harry?" and he waited for an answer.
harry was sitting on the window sill playing with a tendril of intruding rose, and his profile was dark against the radiance of the sky outside.[pg 132] but when on the pause he turned and went across to the bedside, mr. francis was amazed, for his face seemed, like moses's, to have drunk of some splendour, and to be visibly giving it out. he bent over the bed, leaning on it with both hands.
"ah! how could i do anything else?" he cried. "i could not bear to be so happy at the cost of your suffering. but now, oh, now——" and he stopped, for he saw that he had told his secret, and there was no more to say.
mr. francis, seeing that the lad did not go on with the sentence, the gist of which was so clear, said nothing to press him, for he understood, and turned from the seriousness of the subject.
"so that is settled," he said, "and they are coming, you tell me, at the end of the month. that is why you want the box hedge cut, you rascal. you are afraid of the ladies being frightened. i almost suspected something of the kind. and now, my dear boy, you must leave me. i shall get up at once and be down in half an hour. ah, my dear harry, my dear harry!" and he grasped the hand long and firmly.
harry left him without more words, and strolled out again into the sunlight, which had recaptured all its early brilliance. had ever a man been so ready and eager to spoil his own happiness, he wondered. half an hour ago he had blackened the world by his utterly unfounded fears, all built on a fabric of nothingness, and in a moment reared to such a height that they had[pg 133] blotted the very sun from the sky, and like a vampire sucked the beauty from all that was fair. a thought had built them, a word now had dispelled them.
he went round to the front of the house, where he found a gardener busy among the flower beds, and they went together to examine the great hedge. it would be a week's work, the man said, to restore it to its proper shape, and harry answering that it must therefore be begun without delay, he went off after a ladder and pruning tools. then, poking idly at its compacted wall with his stick as he walked along it, harry found that after overcoming the first resistance, the stick seemed to penetrate into emptiness, though the whole hedge could not have been less than six or eight feet thick. this presented points of interest, and he walked up to the end, far away from the house, and, pushing through a belt of trees into which the hedge ran, proceeded to examine it from the other side. here, at once, he found the key to this strange thing, for, half overgrown with young shoots, stood an opening some five feet high, leading into the centre of the hedge, down which ran a long passage. more correctly speaking, indeed, the hedge was not one, but two, planted some three feet apart, and this corridor of gloomy green lights led straight down it toward the house. at the far end, again, was a similar half-overgrown door, coming out of which one turned the corner of the hedge and emerged on to the gravel sweep[pg 134] close by the house, immediately below the windows of the gun room.
to harry there was something mysterious and delightful about this discovery, which gave him a keen, childlike sense of pleasure. to judge from the growth over the entrances to the passage, it must have been long undiscovered, and he determined to ask his uncle whether he remembered it. then, suddenly and unreasonably, he changed his mind; the charm of this mystery would be gone if he shared it with another, even if he suspected that another already knew it, and, smiling at himself for his childish secrecy and reserve, he strolled back again to meet the gardener to whom he had given orders to clip it. there must be no possibility of his discovery of the secret doors; the box hedge should be clipped only with a view to the road; the other side should not be touched—a whited sepulchre. these orders given, he went back to the house to wait for the appearance of mr. francis.
the latter soon came downstairs, with a great panama hat on his head, round which was tacked a gaudy ribbon; he hummed a cheerful little tune as he came.
"ah, harry!" he said, "i did not mean you to wait in for me on this glorious morning, for i think i will not go fast or far. long-limbed, lazy fellow," he said, looking at him as he sat in the low chair.
harry got up, stretching his long limbs.
[pg 135]
"lazy i am not," he said; "i have done a world full of things this morning. i have bathed, i have breakfasted, i have listened to your music, i have given a hundred orders to the gardeners, at least i gave one, and i have read the papers. where shall we go, uncle francis?"
"where you please, as long as we go together, and you will consent to go slowly and talk to me. i am a little shaky still, i find, now that i try my legs; but, harry, there is a lightness about my heart from your news of last night."
"it is good to hear you say that, for i can not convey to you how i looked forward to telling you. and you feel, you really feel, all you said to me?"
mr. francis paused.
"all, all," he said earnestly. "the past has been expunged with a word. that burden which so long i have carried about is gone, like the burden of christian's. ah! you do not know what it was! but now, if she—miss aylwin—believed it, she would not come within a mile of me; if her mother still believed it, she would not let her, and lady oxted would not let her. a hard, strange woman, was mrs. aylwin, harry. i told you, i remember, what passed between us. but it is over, over. yes, yes, the healing comes late, and the recompense; but it comes—it has come."
"i do not know mrs. aylwin," said harry. "i have never ever seen her. but i can answer[pg 136] for it that miss aylwin believes utterly and entirely in your innocence."
"how is that? how is that?" asked mr. francis.
"she told me so herself," said harry. "how strange it all is, and how it all works together! i told her, you must know, the first evening i met her, about the luck, and last week, when i was down with the oxteds, i told her, uncle francis, about the awful troubles you had been through, particularly—particularly that one. at the moment i did not know that she was in any way connected with the harmsworths. i knew of her only what i had seen of her. and then, in the middle, she stopped me, saying she knew all, saying also that she entirely believed in you."
mr. francis walked on a few steps in silence, and harry spoke again.
"perhaps i ought not to have told her," he said, "but the luck held. she was the right person, you see. and somehow, you will agree with me, i think, when you see her, she is a person to whom it is natural to tell things. she is so sympathetic—i have no words—so eager to know what interests and is important to her friends. yes, already i count myself a friend of hers."
"then her mother had not told her all?" asked mr. francis, with the air of one deliberating.
"not all; not your name. she had no idea[pg 137] that she was talking to the nephew of the man about whom she had heard from her mother."
mr. francis quickened his pace, like a man who has made up his mind.
"you did quite right to tell her, harry," he said, "quite right. it would come to her better from you than from any one else. also, it is far better that she should know before she came here, and before you get to know each other better. i have always a dread of the chance word, so dear to novelists, which leads to suspicion or revelations. how intolerable the fear of that would have been! we should all have been in a false position. but now she knows; we have no longer any fear as to how she may take the knowledge; and thank you, dear harry, for telling her."
the next two or three days passed quietly and busily. there were many questions of farm and sport to be gone into, many balancings of expenditure and income to be adjusted, and their talk, at any rate, if not their more secret thoughts, was spread over a hundred necessary but superficial channels. among such topics were a host of businesses for which mr. francis required harry's sanction before he put them in hand; a long section of park paling required repair, some design of planting must be constructed in order to replace the older trees in the park, against the time that decay and rending should threaten them. all these things and many more, so submitted mr. francis, were desirable, but it would[pg 138] be well if harry looked at certain tables of estimates which he had caused to be drawn up before he decided, as he was inclined to do, that everything his uncle recommended should be done without delay. items, inconsiderable singly, he would find, ran to a surprising total when taken together, and he must mention a definite sum which he was prepared to spend, say, before the end of the year, on outdoor improvements. things in the house, too, required careful consideration; the installation of the electric light, for instance, would run away with no negligible sum. how did harry rank the urgency of indoor luxuries with regard to outdoor improvements? if he intended to entertain at all extensively during the next winter, he would no doubt be inclined to give precedence to affairs under the roof; if not, there were things out of doors which could be mended now at a less cost than their completer repair six months hence would require.
mr. francis put these things to his nephew with great lucidity and patient impartiality, and harry, heavily frowning, would wrestle with figures that continually tripped and threw him, and in his mind label all these things as sordid. but the money which he could immediately afford to spend on the house and place was limited, and he had the sense to apply himself to the balancing. at length, after an ink-stained and arithmetical morning, he threw down his pen.
"electric light throughout, uncle francis,"[pg 139] he said, "and hot water laid on upstairs. there is the ultimatum. the house is more behindhand than the park. therefore the house first."
"you see exactly what that will come to?" asked mr. francis.
"yes; according to the estimates you have given me, i can afford so much, and the park palings may go to the deuce. one does not live in the park palings, and, since you mention it, i daresay i shall ask people here a good deal next winter. let's see; this is mid-june. let them begin as soon as lady oxted and miss aylwin have been, and they should be out of the house again by october; though the british workman always takes a longer lease than one expects. i shall want to be here in october. oh, i wish it were october. pheasant-shooting, you know," he added, in a tone of apology.
he tore up some sheets of figures, then looked up at his uncle.
"you will like to have people here, will you not, uncle francis?" he asked. "there shall be young people for you to play with, and old people for me to talk to. and we'll shoot, and, oh, lots of things."
he got off his chair, stretching himself slowly and luxuriously.
"thank goodness, i have made up my mind," he said. "i thought i was never going to. come out for a stroll before lunch."
whether it was that the multiplicity of these arithmetical concerns came between the two, or,[pg 140] as harry sometimes fancied, his uncle was not disposed to return to that intimacy of talk which had followed his strange seizure on the first night, did not certainly appear. the upshot, however, admitted of no misunderstanding, and, engrossed in these subjects, the two did not renew their conversation about miss aylwin and all that bordered there. as far as concerned his own part, harry did not care to speak of what was so sacred to him, and so near and far; she was the subject for tremulous, solitary visions; to discuss was impossible, and to trespass near that ground was to make him silent and awkward. no great deal of intuition was necessary on mr. francis's part to understand this, and he also gave a wide berth to possible embarrassments.
the sunday afternoon following, harry left again for london, for he was dining out that night. he said good-bye to his uncle immediately after lunch, for at the country church there was a children's service which mr. francis had to attend, since he was in charge of a certain section of the congregation—those children, in fact, who attended his class in the village sunday school.
