Now, however, the anxious little woman, with a load of care that she was by no means used to weighing on her heart, was impelled to take advantage of the opportunity offered by Lucilla's reference to that momentous ball to put a question that had suddenly become to herself, tormentingly importunate.

"Has anything been heard of that Mr. Dalrymple lately?"

"Oh, yes," said Lucilla; "he is gradually getting better."

"Getting better!" echoed Beatrice, sharply. "Why, what is the matter with him? Is he ill?"

"Didn't you hear? He had a dreadful accident. He was breaking-in a young horse that was very wild, and it bucked him off, or did something, and he fell on his head. It is a wonder he didn't break his neck. No one saw it happen, for he was away on the plains by himself, and it was only when he did not come home at night that Mr. Gordon went to look for him.

They were a long time finding him, and he had been there for hours, and he was quite insensible. There were some wild dogs sniffing at him, as if he were really dead. Indeed, Mr. Gordon said, if they hadn't found him when they did, the dingoes would probably have made an end of him.

Was it not dreadful?"

Mrs. Reade was staring at the fire, not displaying that interest in the narrative that its tragic details demanded, apparently.

"When did it happen?" she asked quietly, without lifting her eyes.

"Oh, some time ago--in December. We did not hear of it until January.

But he is only now able to get out of bed and crawl about, poor fellow.

He was dreadfully hurt. His brain was affected, and the summer weather in that hot place was so much against him. And, of course, he couldn't have what he wanted up there, and was too bad to be moved. Mrs. Digby went there to nurse him--the Hales took the children for her. It was enough to kill her, so delicate as she is; but she would go. She idolises him almost. Mr. Digby went with her, and stayed till the worst was over. And Mr. Gordon was most devoted--he went all the way to Melbourne to consult the doctors there about him, travelling night and day."

"Were there no doctors nearer than Melbourne?"

"Yes, of course; they had two. But he wanted the best opinions. He is Mr. Dalrymple's partner, you know, and they were old friends before they came out here."

"And did Mr. Dalrymple seem to be any better after he got the Melbourne prescriptions?"

"No; it was not a case where doctors could do much. He seemed to rally a little while Mr. Gordon was away, but he had a bad relapse afterwards.

The weather became frightfully hot, and the fever of course got worse.

He was delirious for a whole fortnight, and then he was so low that he just seemed sinking. However, he must be an amazingly strong man naturally. He managed to struggle through it, and now he is getting about, and all danger is over, though Mrs. Digby says he is like a walking skeleton. I expect she will have brought him home with her by the time we go back; he will soon get well when she has him in her own house. I shall go over and see him," added Lucilla, compa.s.sionately; "and I shall ask him to come to Adelonga, as soon as he is strong enough, and let _me_ nurse him for a few weeks."

Mrs. Reade had before her mind's eye that photograph which her sister had shown her in Mrs. Digby's house. She saw every lineament of the powerful, impressive face distinctly--even in a photograph it was not a face that once looked at, could be forgotten; and she pictured to herself the changes that months of wasting illness would have made in it.

A warm rush of indignant pity, mingled with something near akin to admiration, filled her heart, which was wont to indulge itself in womanly weaknesses--an impulse to champion and befriend this man of so kingly a presence, whose sins, whatever they were, were balanced with so many misfortunes. And yet for a moment she could not help regretting that his fall from his horse had not broken his neck.

Ned, guiltily creeping into his dressing-room about half an hour later, never had the fumes of superfluous champagne dispersed from his brain so quickly. He saw his wife sitting by her own fireside, with her feet on the fender and her face in her hands, crying--actually crying--like any common woman.

CHAPTER IV.

"TO MEET MR. AND MRS. KINGSTON."

Rachel was away for nearly a year and a half, seeing all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them in the most luxurious modern fashion. It was such a tour as a romantic and imaginative woman born to a humdrum life would feel to be the one thing to "do" and die; and according to her account, she enjoyed it extremely. She came home very much improved by it in the opinion of her aunt and other good judges.

"Certainly," they said, "travel is the very best education: there is nothing like it for enlarging the mind, and for giving polish and repose to the manners."

Mrs. Kingston, indeed, when she took her place in the society of which her husband had long been so distinguished an ornament, was a very interesting study, as exemplifying this soundest of popular theories.

She was greatly altered in all sorts of ways. She had quite lost that bashful rusticity which had been Mrs. Hardy's despair, and in her unpretentious fashion, was really very dignified.

There was no hurry and flutter about her now as there used to be; none of that indiscriminate enthusiasm, which in her aunt's eyes branded her as a poor relation who "had never been used to anything nice." She expressed her appreciation of things smilingly and sweetly, with more or less of her natural bright frankness, but with a well-bred moderation and serenity that might have become a d.u.c.h.ess. To please her husband she wore rich raiment, "composed" by the most distinguished Parisian artists, and it symbolised the change that all her individuality seemed to have undergone.

She was no longer a girl, an _ingenue_, a bread-and-b.u.t.ter miss, a pretty little n.o.body; she was an experienced and cultured woman, a leader of society, fully equipped for that high position, with a just appreciation of her own importance, and relatively to that of other people's.

Indeed, there seemed to certain persons--Miss Brownlow amongst others--indications in her reticent and reposeful manner of a tendency to be exclusive, and to think a great deal too much of herself.

Mrs. Hardy, who was immensely interested in the unforeseen development, was beyond measure gratified by it--more especially as the young wife was evidently on the best of terms with her husband, though she had the good taste to refrain from drawing public attention to the fact.

Many apprehensions were set at rest by the sight of her entering a room on his arm, carefully and beautifully dressed, as if she had enjoyed dressing herself, and twinkling with diamonds everywhere, responding to respectful greetings with quiet grace, moving in her comparatively higher sphere as if she felt thoroughly at home in it. It seemed to the anxious matron that an end had been reached which justified all the means that had been taken to compa.s.s it.

Mrs. Reade was not so satisfied. She looked at the change in Rachel from another point of view. She did not like to see a girl who had been exceptionally girlish, turned into a sober woman with such unnatural rapidity.

Her sister Laura had come home, and was now settled at Kew, giving entertainments in a severely-appointed high-art house; she had had quite as much of the education of travel as Rachel--perhaps more, inasmuch as her young husband was a dabbler in _bric-a-bric_, and had a taste for old churches, and palaces, and pictures; whereas Mr. Kingston's interest in foreign cities, however famous, had chiefly concerned itself with the quality of the society and the cuisine of the hotels.

But Laura, though stored with information and experience, and lately the happy mother of twin daughters, was much the same as she had been in her maiden days--cheerful, enterprising, a rider of harmless hobbies, a great believer in herself, and in the force and variety of her fascinations.

She had improved and developed, of course, but the experiences of travel had not changed her as Rachel was changed.

The acute little woman who practically had never solved the meaning of love and marriage, and quite understood her disqualifications in this respect, yet had glimmerings of the state of things that existed in Rachel's heart. She knew--though she had come to the knowledge by slow degrees--that the girl was not weak all through, but only weak as the water-lily is,

"Whose root is fix'd in stable earth, whose head Floats on the tossing waves."

And that just as she had been tenacious of certain principles in her earlier life, when living with her father in an atmosphere which she had only her own instinct to teach her was tainted with dishonour, so she would hold fast to some other things, if they had taken root, with a secret, blind integrity in spite of her emotional fluctuations in the winds and waves of circ.u.mstance.

She had adapted herself to the conditions of her marriage with the pliant submissiveness of her disposition; but there was a part of her that refused to be reconciled to all the degradation that was involved, and it was a tough and vital part of her.

Since this was violently repressed, comprehending as it did all those aspiring ideals which had had so much poetry and promise, and which represented for her, in their loss as in their possession, the meaning of human happiness and the diviner aspect of human life, there was naturally a great vacuum somewhere--a great emptiness for which no compensating interests were available. Hence that serene inexpressiveness of mien and manner which had so mature and distinguished an air.

Mrs. Reade's own marriage was very much of the same pattern in one respect--it was but an outward and visible sign of marriage that had no inward and spiritual grace; but then she did not know what it was that she missed, and Rachel did. And the difference between the two cases was perfectly obvious to that intelligent woman.

On the return of Mr. and Mrs. Kingston to Melbourne, a number of fashionable parties were of course given in their honour. At the chief of these, a great ball in the Town-hall, the dramatic action of this story, temporarily suspended by our heroine's absence from the country which held all its elements in solution, so to speak, was suddenly set going again.

It was towards the end of October, just when the gay season of the races was about to set in, and when the spring was in its glory. It strangely happened to be also the anniversary of the night of her clandestine betrothal to Roden Dalrymple, which was the memorable last time--two whole years ago--that she had seen or heard of him.

Nowadays she never mentioned Roden Dalrymple's name. She had never mentioned it to her husband since he and she came to a certain understanding on their wedding-day, and her husband had scrupulously avoided mentioning it to her; which reticence on his part was odd and uncomfortable rather than considerate and delicate, inasmuch as she was intensely anxious to pursue the line of conduct that she had laid down for herself in her relations with him--to have no secrets and to tell the truth--and to bring their companionship into such harmony and sympathy as the nature of things made possible.

And since her return she had never even suggested the existence of her lost lover to any of those who might have given her information about him--not even to Beatrice. She "would not recognise that she felt" any interest in his existence.

Nevertheless, she lived in a perpetual, absorbing, all-pervading consciousness that he and she were "in the world together," and that the key to the whole system of the universe lay somehow in that fact.

And the years and months, and days and hours were all dates in the first place, and periods of time in the second; and every date was a register of ineffaceable memories of him, which she _could_ not destroy or ignore.

So on this great anniversary, as the hour approached which witnessed their last interview in the solitude of the half-built house (the boudoir was in the hands of the decorators now, and the sacred spot of floor was covered over with inlaid woodwork), she tried to put the thought of it out of her mind--tried to shut her eyes to the inevitable agonising and tantalising perception of what _might_ have been--and yet was acutely responsive to every tick of the clock on her mantelpiece, checking off the reminiscent moments one by one. She followed the events of that long-ago happy night perforce as an unquiet spirit "raised"

against its will.

"Now we were sitting together," she remembered, as the little clock struck nine silvery notes. "We were looking at the moonlight on the bay.

Ah, me, how lovely that moonlight was!"