The rumour, once it had fairly penetrated, spread over London in five days. It started in Kensington, ran thence all the way to Chelsea, skipped to Bloomsbury, and spread from these centres into Belgravia and Mayfair. In three weeks the tale of George Tanqueray and Jane Holland (Mrs. Hugh Brodrick) had invaded Hampstead and the Southwestern suburbs. It was only confirmed by the contemptuous silence and curt denials of their friends, Arnott Nicholson, Caro Bickersteth, Nina Lempriere and the Protheros.

In Brodrick's family it sank down deep, below the level of permissible discussion. But it revealed itself presently in an awful external upheaval, utterly unforeseen, and in a still more unforeseen subsidence.

There was first of all a split between Mrs. Heron and the Doctor. The behaviour of Eddy and Winny, especially of Eddy, had got on the Doctor's nerves (he had confessed, in a moment of intense provocation, to having them). Eddy one evening had attacked violently the impermissible topic, defending Jin-Jin (in the presence of his younger sister) from the unspeakable charge current in their suburb, taxing his uncle with a monstrous credence of the impossible, and trying to prove to him that it was impossible.

For the sake of the peace so beloved by Brodricks it was settled that Frances and her children should live with poor dear John in the big house in Augustus Road.

Brodrick then suggested that Gertrude Collett might with advantage keep house for Henry.

This arrangement covered the dreadful rupture, the intolerable situation at Moor Grange. Gertrude had contributed nothing to the support of the rumour beyond an intimation that the rupture (between her and the Brodricks) was dreadful and the situation intolerable. The intimation, as conveyed by Gertrude, was delicate and subtle to a degree. All that she would admit in words was a certain lack of spiritual sympathy between her and Mrs. Brodrick.

It was felt in Brodrick's family that, concerning Jane and Tanqueray, Gertrude Collett knew considerably more than she cared to say.

And through it all Brodrick guarded his secret.

The rumour had not yet touched him whom it most affected. It never would touch him, so securely the secret he guarded guarded him. And though it had reached Hampstead the rumour had not reached Rose.

Rose had her hands full for once with the Protheros, helping Mrs. Prothero to look after him. For Owen was ill, dreadfully and definitely ill, with an illness you could put a name to. Dr. Brodrick was attending him. Owen had consulted him casually the year before, and the Doctor had then discovered a bell-sound in his left lung. Now he came regularly once or twice a week all the way from Putney in his motor-car.

Rose had positively envied Laura, who had a husband who could be ill, who could be tucked up in bed and taken care of. It was Rose who helped Laura to make Prothero's big room look for all the world like the ward of a hospital.

Dr. Brodrick had wanted to take him away to a sanatorium, but Prothero had refused flatly to be taken anywhere. The traveller was tired of travelling. He loved with passion this place where he had found peace, where his wandering genius had made its sanctuary and its home. His repugnance was so violent and invincible that the Doctor had agreed with Laura that it would do more harm than good to insist on his removal. She must do as best she could, with (he suggested) the assistance of a trained nurse.

Laura had very soon let him know what she could do. She had winced visibly when she heard of the trained nurse. It would be anguish to her to see another woman beside Owen's bed and her hands touching him; but she said she supposed she could bear even that if it would save him, if it were absolutely necessary. Was it? The Doctor had admitted that it was not so, if she insisted—absolutely—for the present; but it was advisable if she wished to save herself. Laura had smiled then, very quietly.

In twenty-four hours she showed him the great room, bare and clean as the ward of a hospital (Rose was on her knees on the floor, bees-waxing it). The long rows of bookcases were gone, so were the pictures. He couldn't put his finger on a single small unnecessary thing. Laura, cool and clean in a linen gown, defied him to find a chink where a germ could lodge. Prothero inquired gaily, if they couldn't make a good fight there, where could they make it?

Henry, although used to these combats, was singularly affected as he looked upon the scene, stripped as it was for the last struggle. What moved him most was the sight of Laura's little bed, set under the north window, and separated from her husband's by the long empty space between, through which the winds of heaven rushed freely. It showed him what the little thing was capable of, day and night, night and day, the undying, indomitable devotion. That was the stuff a man wanted in his wife. He thought of his brother Hugh. Why on earth, if he had to marry one of them, hadn't he married her? He was moved too and troubled by the presence there of Tanqueray's poor little wife. Whatever view truth compelled you to take of Jane's and Tanqueray's relations, Tanqueray's wife had, from first to last, been cruelly wronged by both of them.

Tanqueray's wife was so absorbed in the fight they were making as to be apparently indifferent to her wrongs, and they judged that the legend of Jane Holland and George Tanqueray had not reached her.

It had not. And yet she knew it, she had known it all the time—that they had been together. She had known it ever since, in the innocent days before the rumour, she had heard Dr. Brodrick telling Mrs. Prothero that his sister-in-law had gone down to Chagford for three months. Chagford was where he was always staying. And in the days of innocence Addy Ranger had let out that it was Chagford where he was now. She had given Rose his address, Post Office, Chagford. He had been there all the time when Rose had supposed him to be in Wiltshire and was sending all his letters there.

She did not hear of Mrs. Brodrick's return until a week or two after that event; for, in the days no longer of innocence, his sister-in-law was a sore subject with the Doctor. And when Rose did hear it finally from Laura, by that time she had heard that Tanqueray was coming back too. He had written to her to say so.

That was on a Saturday. He was not coming until Tuesday. Rose had two days in which to consider what line she meant to take.

That she meant to take a line was already clear to Rose. Perfectly clear, although her decision was arrived at through nights of misery so profound that it made most things obscure. It was clear that they could not go on as they had been doing. He might (nothing seemed to matter to him), but she couldn't; and she wouldn't, not (so she put it) if it was ever so. They had been miserable.

Not that it mattered so very much whether she was miserable or no. But that was it; she had ended by making him miserable too. It took some making; for he wasn't one to feel things much; he had always gone his own way as if nothing mattered. By his beginning to feel things (as she called it) now, she measured the effect she must have had on him.

It was all because she wasn't educated proper, because she wasn't a lady. He ought to have married a lady. He ought (she could see it now) to have married some one like Mrs. Brodrick, who could understand his talk, and enter into what he did.

There was Mr. and Mrs. Prothero now. They were happy. There wasn't a thing he could say or do or think but what she understood it. Why, she'd understand, time and again, without his saying anything. That came of being educated. It came (poor Rose was driven back to it at every turn) of being a lady.

She might have known how it would be. And in a way she had known it from the first. That was why she'd been against it, and why Uncle and Aunt and her master and mistress down at Fleet had been against it too. But there—she loved him. Lady or no lady, she loved him.

As for his going away with Mrs. Brodrick, she "looked at it sensible." She understood. She saw the excuses that could be made for him. She couldn't understand her; she couldn't find one excuse for her behaviour, a married woman, leaving her husband—such a good man, and her children—her little helpless children, and going off for weeks together with a married man, let him be who he might be. Still, if it hadn't been her, it might have been somebody else, somebody much worse. It might have been that Miss Lempriere. If she'd had a hold on him, she'd not have let him go.

For deep-bedded in Rose's obscure misery was the conviction that Jane Brodrick had let him go. Her theory of Jane's guilt had not gone much farther than the charge of deserting her little helpless children. It was as if Rose's imagination could not conceive of guilt beyond that monstrous crime. And Jane had gone back to her husband and children, after all.

If it had been Miss Lempriere she would have been bound to have stuck, she having nothing, so to speak, to go back to.

The question was, what was George coming back to? If it was to her, Rose, he must know pretty well what. He must know, she kept repeating to herself; he must know. Her line, the sensible line that she had been so long considering, was somehow to surprise and defeat his miserable foreknowledge.

By Sunday morning she had decided on her line. Nothing would turn her. She did not intend to ask anybody's advice, nor to take it were it offered. The line itself required the co-operation and, in a measure, the consent of Aunt and Uncle; and on the practical head they were consulted. She managed that on Sunday afternoon. Then she remembered that she would have to tell Mr. and Mrs. Prothero.

It was on Sunday evening that she told them.

She told them, very shortly and simply, that she had made up her mind to separate from Tanqueray and live with her uncle.

"Uncle'll be glad to 'ave me," she said.

She explained. "He'll think more of me if he's not with me."

Prothero admitted that it might be likely.

"It's not," she said, "as if I was afraid of 'is taking up with another woman—serious."

(They wondered had she heard?)

"I can trust him with Mrs. Brodrick."

(They thought it strange that she should not consider Mrs. Brodrick serious. They said nothing, and in a moment Rose explained.)

"She's like all these writin' people. I know 'em."

"Yes," said Prothero. "We're a poor lot, aren't we?"

(It was a mercy that she didn't take it seriously.)

"Oh you—you're different."

She had always had a very clear perception of his freedom from the literary taint.

"But Mrs. Brodrick now—she doesn't care for 'im. She's not likely to. She'll never care for anybody but herself."

"What makes you think so?"

"Well—a woman who could walk off like that and leave 'er little children—to say nothing of 'er husband——"

"Isn't it," said Prothero, "what you're proposing to do yourself?"

"I 'aven't got any little children. She's leavin' 'er 'usband to get away from' im, to please 'erself. I'm leavin' mine to bring 'im to me."

She paused, pensive.

"Oh, no, I'm not afraid of Mrs. Brodrick. She 'asn't got a 'eart."

"No?"

"Not wot I should call a 'eart."

"Perhaps not," said Laura.

"I used to hate her when she came about the place. Leastways I tried to hate her, and I couldn't."

She meditated in their silence.

"If it's got to be anybody it'd best be 'er. She's given 'im all she's got to give, and he sees 'ow much it is. 'E goes to 'er, I know, and 'e'll keep on going; and she—she'll 'old 'im orf and on—I can see 'er doin' of it, and I don't care. As long as she 'olds' im she keeps other women orf of 'im."

Their silence marvelled at her.

"Time and again I've cried my eyes out, and that's no good. I've got," said Rose, "to look at it sensible. She's really keepin' 'im for me."

Down-stairs, alone with Laura, she revealed herself more fully.

"I dare say 'e won't ever ask me to come back," she said. "But once I've gone out of the house for good and all, 'e'll come to me now and again. He's bound to. You see, she's no good to him. And maybe, if I was to 'ave a child—I might——"

She sighed, but in her eyes there kindled a dim hope, shining through tears.

"Wot I shall miss is—workin' for 'im."

Her mouth trembled. Her tears fell.



LXVI

Between seven and eight o'clock on Tuesday evening, Tanqueray, in an execrable temper, returned to his home.

The little house had an air of bright expectancy, not to say of festival; it was so intensely, so unusually illuminated. Each window, with its drawn blind, was a golden square in the ivy-darkened wall.

Tanqueray let himself in noiselessly with his latchkey. He took up the pile of letters that waited for him on the hat-stand in the hall, and turned into the dining-room.

It smiled at him brilliantly with all its lights. So did the table, laid for dinner; the very forks and spoons smiled, twinkling and limping in irrepressible welcome. A fire burned ostentatiously in the hearth-place. It sent out at him eager, loquacious tongues of flame, to draw him to the insufferable endearments of the hearth.

He was aware now that what he was most afraid of in this horrible coming back was his wife's insupportable affection.

He turned the lights down a little lower. All his movements were noiseless. He was afraid that Rose would hear him and would come running down.

He went up-stairs, treading quietly. He meant to take his letters to his study and read them there. He might even answer some of them. Anything to stave off the moment when he must meet Rose.

The door of her bedroom was wide open. The light flared so high that he judged that Rose was in there and about to appear. He swung himself swiftly and dexterously round the angle of the stair-rail, and so reached his own door.

She must have heard him go in, but there was no answering movement from her room.

With a closed door behind him he sat down and looked over his letters. Bills, proofs from the "Monthly Review," a letter from Laura that saddened him (he had not realized that Prothero was so ill). Last of all, at the bottom of the pile, a little note from Rose.

She had got it all into five lines. Five lines, rather straggling, rather shapeless lines that told him with a surprising brevity that his wife had decided on an informal separation, for his good.

No resentment, no reproach, no passion and no postscript.

He went down-stairs by no means noiselessly.

In the hall, as he was putting on his hat, Susan came to him. She gave him a queer look. Dinner was ready, she said. The mistress had ordered the dinner that he liked. (Irrepressibly, insistently, thick with intolerable reminiscence, the savour of it streamed through the kitchen door.) The mistress had cooked it herself, Susan said. The mistress had told Susan that she was to be sure and make him very comfortable, and to remember what he liked for dinner. Susan's manner was a little shy and a little important, it suggested the inauguration of a new rule, a new order, a life in which Rose was not and never would be.

Tanqueray took no notice whatever of Susan as he strode out of the house.

The lights were dim in the corner house by the Heath, opposite the willows. Still, standing on the upper ground of the Heath, he could see across the road through the window of his old sitting-room, and there, in his old chair by the fireside he made out a solitary seated figure that looked like Rose.

He came out from under the willows and made for the front door. He pushed past the little maid who opened it and strode into the room. Rose turned.

There was a slight stir and hesitation, then a greeting, very formal and polite on both sides, and with Joey all the time leaping and panting and licking Tanqueray's hands. Joey's demonstration was ignored as much too emotional for the occasion.

A remark from Rose about the weather. Inquiries from Tanqueray as to the health of Mr. and Mrs. Eldred. Further inquiries as to the health of Rose.

Silence.

"May I turn the light up?" (From Tanqueray.)

"I'd rather you let it be?" (From Rose.)

He let it be.

"Rose" (very suddenly from Tanqueray), "do you remember Mr. Robinson?"

(No response.)

"Rose, why are you sitting in this room?"

"Because I like it."

"Why do you like it?"

(No response; only a furtive movement of Rose's hand towards her pocket-handkerchief. A sudden movement of Tanqueray's, restrained, so that he appeared to have knelt on the hearthrug to caress the little dog. A long and silent stroking of Joey's back. Demonstration of ineffable affection from Joey.)

"His hair never has come on, has it? Do you know" (very gravely), "I'm afraid it never will."

(A faint quiver of Rose's mouth which might or might not have been a smile.)

"Rose, why did you marry me? Wouldn't any other hairless little dog have done as well?"

(A deep sigh from Rose.)

Tanqueray was now standing up and looking down at her in his way.

"Rose, do you remember how I came to you at Fleet, and brought you the moon in a band-box?"

She answered him with a sudden and convulsive sob.

He knelt beside her. He hesitated for a moment.

"Rose—I've brought you the band-box without the moon. Will you have it?"

She got up with a wild movement of escape. Something rolled from her lap and fell between them. She made a dash towards the object. But Tanqueray had picked it up. It was a pair of Tanqueray's gloves, neatly folded.

"What were you doing with those gloves?" he said.

"I was mendin' them," said she.

Half-an-hour later Rose and Tanqueray were walking up the East Heath Road towards their little house. Rose carried Tanqueray's gloves, and Tanqueray carried Minny, the cat, in a basket.

As they went they talked about Owen Prothero. And Tanqueray thanked God that, after all, there was something they could talk about.



LXVII

Dr. Brodrick had declared for the seventh time that Prothero was impossible.

His disease was advancing. Both lungs were attacked now. There was, as he perfectly well knew, consolidation at the apex of the left lung; the upper lobe had retracted, leaving his heart partially uncovered, and he knew it; you could detect also a distinct systolic murmur; and nobody could be more aware than Prothero of the gravity of these signs. Up till now, he, Brodrick, had been making a record case of him. The man had a fine constitution (he gave him credit for that); he had pluck; there was resistance, pugnacity in every nerve. He had one chance, a fighting chance. His life might be prolonged for years, if he would only rest.

And there he was, with all that terrible knowledge in him, sitting up in bed, driving that infernal pen of his as if his life depended on that. Scribbling verses, he was, working himself into such a state of excitement that his temperature had risen. He displayed, Brodrick said, an increasing nervous instability. When Brodrick told him that (if he wanted to know) his inspiration was hollow, had been hollow for months, and that he would recognize that as one of the worst symptoms in his case, Prothero said that his critics had always told him that. The worst symptom in his case, he declared, was that he couldn't laugh without coughing. When Brodrick said that it wasn't a laughing matter, he laughed till he spat blood and frightened himself. For he had (Brodrick had noticed it) a morbid horror of the sight of blood. You had to inject morphia after every haemorrhage, to subdue that awful agitation.

All this the Doctor recounted to Laura, alone with her in her forlorn little drawing-room down-stairs. He unveiled for her intelligence the whole pathology of the case. It brought him back to what he had started with, Prothero's impossibility.

"What does he do for it?" he repeated. "He knows the consequences as well as I do."

Laura said she didn't think that Owen ever had considered consequences.

"But he must consider them. What's a set of verses compared with his health?"

Laura answered quietly, "Owen would say what was his health compared with a set of verses? If he knew they'd be the greatest poem of his life."

"His life? My dear child——"

The pause was terrible.

"I wish," he said, "we could get him out of this."

"He doesn't want to go. You said yourself it wasn't the great thing."

He admitted it. The great thing, he reiterated, was rest. It was his one chance. He explained carefully again how good a chance it was. He dwelt on the things Prothero might yet do if he gave himself a chance. And when he had done talking Laura remarked that it was all very well, but he was reckoning without Owen's genius.

"Genius?" He shrugged his shoulders. He smiled (as if they weren't always reckoning with it at Putney!). "What is it? For medicine it's simply and solely an abnormal activity of the brain. And it must stop."

He stood over her impressively, marking his words with clenched fist on open palm.

"He must choose between his genius and his life."

She winced. "I don't believe he can choose," she murmured. "It is his life."

He straightened himself to his enormous height, in dignified recoil from her contradiction.

"I have known many men of genius," he said.

"His genius is different," said she.

He hadn't the heart to say what he had always said, that Prothero's genius was and always had been most peculiarly a disease; but he did not shrink from telling her that at the present crisis it was death.

For he was angry now. He could not help being moved by professional animus, the fury of a man who has brought his difficult, dangerous work to the pitch of unexpected triumph, and sees it taken from his hands and destroyed for a perversity, an incomprehensible caprice.

He was still more deeply stirred by his compassion, his affection for the Protheros. Secretly, he was very fond of Owen, though the poet was impossible; he was even more fond of little Laura. He did not want to see her made a widow because Prothero refused to control his vice. For the literary habit, indulged in to that extent, amounted to a vice. The Doctor had no patience with it. A man was not, after all, a slave to his unwholesome inspiration (it had dawned on him by this time that Prothero had made a joke about it). Prothero could stop it if he liked.

"I've told him plainly," he said, "that what it means to him is death. If you want to keep him, you must stop it."

"How can I?" she moaned.

"Don't encourage him. Don't let him talk about it. Don't let his mind dwell on it. Turn the conversation. Take his pens and paper from him and don't let him see them again till he is well."

When the Doctor left her she went up-stairs to Owen.

He was still sitting up writing, dashing down lines with a speed that told her what race he ran.

"Owen," she said, "you know. He told you——"

He waved her away with a gesture that would have been violent if it could.

She tried to take his pen and paper from him, and he laid his thin hands out over the sheets. The sweat stood in big drops between the veins of his hands; it streamed from his forehead.

"Wait just a little longer, till you're well," she pleaded.

"For God's sake, darling," he whispered hoarsely, "leave me, go away."

She went. In her own room her work stood unfinished on the table where she had left it, months ago. She pushed it away in anger. She hated the sight of it. She sat watching the clock for the moments when she would have to go to him with his medicine.

She thought how right they had been after all. Nina and Jane and Tanqueray, when they spoke of the cruelty of genius. It had no mercy and no pity. It had taken its toll from all of them. It was taking its toll from Owen now, to the last drop of his blood, to the last torturing breath. His life was nothing to it.

She went to him silently every hour to give him food or medicine or to take his temperature. She recorded on her chart heat mounting to fever, and a pulse staggering in its awful haste. He was submissive as long as she was silent, but at a word his thin hand waved in its agonized gesture.

Once he kissed her hands that gave him his drink.

"Poor little thing," he said, "it's so frightened—always was. Never mind—It'll soon be over—only—don't come again" (he had to whisper it), "if you don't mind—till I ring."

She sat listening then for his bell.

Rose came and stayed with her a little while. She wanted to know what the Doctor had said to-day.

"He says he must choose between his genius and his life. And it's I who have to choose. If he goes on he'll kill himself. If I stop him I shall kill him. What am I to do?"

Rose had her own opinion of the dilemma, and no great opinion of the Doctor.

"Do nothin'," she said, and pondered on it. "Look at it sensible. You may depend upon it 'e's found somethin' 'e's got to do. 'E's set 'is 'eart on finishin' it. Don't you cross 'im. I don't believe in crossin' them when they're set."

"And if he dies, Rose? If he dies?"

"'E dies 'is way—not yours."

It was the wisdom of renunciation and repression; but Laura felt that it was right.

Her hour struck and she went up to Owen. He was lying back now with his eyes closed and his lips parted. Because of its peace his face was like the face of the dead. But his lips were hot under hers and his cheek was fire to her touch. She put her finger on his pulse and he opened his eyes and smiled at her.

"It's finished," he said. "You can take it away now."

She gathered up the loose sheets and laid them in a drawer in his desk. The poem once finished he was indifferent to its disposal. His eyes followed her, they rested on her without noting her movements. They drew her as she came towards him again.

"Forgive me," he said. "It was too strong for me."

"Never again," she murmured. "Promise me, never again till you're well."

"Never again." He smiled as he answered.

Dr. Brodrick, calling late that night, was informed by Laura of the extent to which he had been disobeyed. He thundered at her and threatened, a Brodrick beside himself with fury.

"Do you suppose," she said, "it isn't awful for me to have to stand by and see it, and do nothing? What can I do?"

He looked down at her. The little thing had a will of her own; she was indeed, for her size, preposterously over-charged with will. Never had he seen a small creature so indomitably determined. He put it to her. She had a will; why couldn't she use it?

"His will is stronger than mine," she said. "And his genius is stronger than his will."

"You overrate the importance of it. What does it matter if he never writes another line?"

It seemed to her that he charged him with futility, that he echoed—and in this hour!—the voice of the world that tried to make futile everything he did.

"It doesn't matter to you," she said. "You never understood his genius; you never cared about it."

"Do you mean to tell me that you—you care about it more than you care about him? Upon my word, I don't know what you women are made of."

"What could I do?" she said. "I had to use my own judgment."

"You had not. You had to use mine."

He paused impressively.

"It's no use, my child, fighting against the facts."

To Henry Laura was a little angry child, crying over the bitter dose of life. He had got to make her take it.

He towered over her, a Brodrick, the incarnate spirit of fact.

It was a spirit that revolted her. She stood her ground and defied it in its insufferable tyranny. She thought of how these men, these Brodricks, behaved to genius wherever they met it; how, among them, they had driven poor Jinny all but mad, martyrizing her in the name of fact. As for Owen, she knew what they had thought and said of him, how they judged him by the facts. If it came to that she could fight the Doctor with his own weapons. If he wanted facts he should have them; he should have all the facts.

"This isn't what's killing him," she said. "It's all the other things, the things he was made to do. Going out to Manchuria—that began it. He ought never to have been sent there. Then—five years on that abominable paper. Think how he slaved on it. You don't know what it was to him. To have to sit in stuffy theatres and offices; to turn out at night in vile weather; to have to work whether he was fit to work or not."

He looked down at her very quietly and kindly. It was when people were really outrageous that a Brodrick came out in his inexhaustible patience and forbearance.

"You say he had to do all these things. Is that the fact?"

"No," said Laura, passionately, "it's the truth."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean it's what it amounted to. They—they drove him to it with their everlasting criticism and fault-finding and complaining."

"I should not have thought he was a man to be much affected by adverse criticism."

"You don't know," she retorted, "how he was affected. You can't judge. Anyhow, he stuck to it up to the very last—the very last," she cried.

"My dear Mrs. Prothero, nobody wanted him to——"

"He did it, though. He did it because he was not what you all thought him."

"We thought him splendid. My brother was saying only the other day he had never seen such pluck."

"Well, then, it's his pluck—his splendour that he's dying of."

"And you hold us, his friends, responsible for that?"

"I don't hold you responsible for anything."

She was trembling on the edge of tears.

"Come, come," he said gently, "you misunderstand. You've been doing too much. You're overstrained."

She smiled. That was so like them. They were sane when they got hold of one stupid fact and flung it at your head. But you were overstrained when you retaliated. When you had made a sober selection from the facts, such a selection as constituted a truth, and presented it to them, you were more overstrained than ever. They couldn't stand the truth.

"I don't hold you responsible for his perversity," said the poor Doctor.

"You talked as if you did."

"You misunderstood me," he said sadly. "I only asked you to do what you could."

"I have done what I could."

He ordered her some bromide then, for her nerves.

That evening Prothero was so much better that he declared himself well. The wind had changed to the south. She had prayed for a warm wind; and, as it swept through the great room, she flung off her fur-lined coat and tried to persuade herself that the weather was in Owen's favour.

At midnight the warm wind swelled to a gale. Down at the end of the garden the iron gate cried under the menace and torture of its grip. The sound and the rush of it filled Prothero with exultation. Neither he nor Laura slept.

She had moved her bed close up against his, and they lay side by side. The room was a passage for the wind; it whirled down it like a mad thing, precipitating itself towards the mouth of the night, where the wide north window sucked it. On the floor and the long walls the very darkness moved. The pale yellow disc that the guarded nightlight threw upon the ceiling swayed incessantly at the driving of the wind. The twilight of the white beds trembled.

Outside the gust staggered and drew back; it plunged forward again, with its charge of impetus, and hurled itself against the gate. There was a shriek of torn iron, a crash, and the long sweeping, rending cry of live branches wrenched from their hold, lacerated and crushed, trailing and clinging in their fall.

Owen dragged himself up on his pillows. Laura's arm was round him.

"It's nothing," she said, "only the gate. It was bound to go."

"The gate?"

It seemed to her touch that he drew himself together.

"I said I'd come back—through it——" he whispered. "I shall—come back"—his voice gathered a sudden, terrible, hoarse vibration—"over it—treading it down."

At that he coughed and turned from her, hiding his face. The handkerchief she took from him was soaked in blood. He shuddered and shrank back, overcome by the inveterate, ungovernable horror.

He lay very still, with closed eyes, afraid lest a movement or a word should bring back the thing he loathed. Laura sat up and watched him.

Towards morning the wind dropped a little and there was some rain. The air was warm with the wet south, and the garden sent up a smell, vivid and sweet, the smell of a young spring day. Once the wind was so quiet that she heard the clock strike in the hall of the hospital. She counted seven strokes.

It grew warmer and warmer out there. Owen was very cold.

Laura ran down-stairs to telephone to the Doctor. She was gone about five minutes.

And Prothero lay in his bed under the window with a pool of blood in the hollow of the sheet where it had jetted, and the warm wind blowing over his dead body.



LXVIII

Laura Prothero was sitting with Jane in the garden at Wendover one day in that spring. It was a day of sudden warmth and stillness that brought back vividly to both of them the hour of Owen's death.

They were touched by the beauty and the peace of this place where Nicky lived his perfect little life. They had just agreed that it was Nicky's life, Nicky's character, that had given to his garden its lucent, exquisite tranquillity. You associated that quality so indivisibly with Nicky that it was as if he flowered there, he came up every spring, flaming purely, in the crocuses on the lawn. Every spring Nicky and a book of poems appeared with the crocuses; the poems as Nicky made them, but Nicky heaven-born, in an immortal innocence and charm.

It was incredible, they said, how heaven sheltered and protected Nicky.

He, with his infallible instinct for the perfect thing, had left them together, alone in the little green chamber on the lawn, shut in by its walls of yew. He was glad that he had this heavenly peace to give them for a moment.

He passed before them now and then, pacing the green paths of the lawn with Nina.

"No, Jinny, I am not going on any more," Laura said, returning to the subject of that intimate communion to which they had been left. "You see, it ended as a sort of joke, his and mine—nobody else saw the point of it. Why should I keep it up?"

"Wouldn't he have liked you to keep it up?"

"He would have liked me to please myself—to be happy. How can I be happy going on—giving myself to the people who rejected him? I'm not going to keep that up."

"What will you do?"

Laura said that she would have enough to do, editing his poems and his memoirs. Jane had not realized the memoirs. They were, Laura told her, mainly a record of his life as a physician and a surgeon, a record so simple that it only unconsciously revealed the man he was. George Tanqueray had insisted on her publishing this first.

"I hated doing it for some things," she said. "It looks too like a concession to this detestable British public. But I can't rest, Jinny, till we've made him known. They'll see that he didn't shirk, that he could beat the practical men—the men they worship—at their own game, that he did something for the Empire. Then they'll accept the rest. There's an awful irony in it, but I'm convinced that's the way his immortality will come."

"It'll come anyway," said Jane.

"It'll come soonest this way. They'll believe in him to-morrow, because of the things he did with his hands. His hands were wonderful. Ah, Jinny, how could I ever want to write again?"

"What will you do, dear child? How will you live?"

"I'll live as he did." She said it fiercely. "I'll live by journalism. It doesn't matter how I live."

"There are so many things," she said, "that don't matter, after all."

Nicky and Nina passed.

"Do you think," said he, "she's happy?"

"Who? Jane? Or Laura?"

"You can't think of Laura," said Nicky, gravely, "without him."

"That's it. She isn't without him. She never will be. He has given her his certainty."

"Of immortality?" Nicky's tone was tentative.

"Of the thing he saw. That is immortality. Of course she's happy."

"But I was thinking," Nicky said, "of Jane."

THE END