"She looked like some lovely, pathetic child when she talked to me to-day," so his reflections ran "she and that fascinating Baba of hers, are just a pair of babies together, and yet--all the woman and the mother are in her, too," and, glancing round the formal room, Fergusson sighed, and made a great effort to turn his thoughts away from sudden alluring dreams of a home of his own, a home that would be really a home, not merely a place in which to live, where the centre of all its peace and happiness would be--his wife.

His wife? He laughed aloud, a little short laugh that rang discordantly in his ears. It was quite improbable that he would ever be able to afford to ask any woman to marry him, much less a dainty, delicately nurtured woman who--who----

Back into his mind flashed the picture which he had been resolutely thrusting from him, the picture of a lovely face, like some exquisite flower rising above a cloud of filmy lace and soft dark furs, the big feathers in her hat drooping against the gold of her hair. It was on Mrs. Nairne's doorstep that he had first met Cicely, and the picture of her as he saw her then in the pale wintry sunlight, seemed to haunt him all the more persistently, because side by side with it, he saw another, and strangely different picture. His own house in a South London road, its sordid surroundings, its unsavoury neighbourhood, all these made Cicely and her daintiness, seem like some princess belonging to another world.

"Pshaw, you poor fool!" Fergusson e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed aloud, when, his dinner ended, he retired to smoke in a small den, dignified by the name of smoking-room; "the sooner Dr. Stokes comes back and you clear out from here and return to the sober realities of life in Southwark, the better for you. Dreaming dreams and seeing visions is no part of your vocation."

He had reached this stage of his meditations, and had drawn up a chair to the writing-table, with a grim determination to finish an article for a medical journal, when the parlourmaid entering, handed him an exceedingly grubby note. It was briefly worded--

"Please come at once. He is dying."

There was no address, and the only signature was the one letter "M,"

but Fergusson at once understood what the message portended. The car, hurriedly ordered, was soon waiting for him at the front door; and, telling the man he would drive himself, the doctor glided quickly away in the direction of the lonely house in the valley.

"Shall I discover anything of the mystery belonging to the house?" he wondered, as he sped along the dark country roads, his own powerful lamps throwing a stream of light upon the road ahead; "or will the secret, whatever it is, die with that unfortunate man? Whatever he has done or been--and he has either done or been something out of the common, and something not very commendable--I am prepared to swear his crimes were crimes of weakness, not of wickedness. The man is weak through and through, and why that wonderful woman has poured out such a wealth of love upon him, is one of the problems of--womanhood."

He smiled as his meditations reached this point, and once again his thoughts flew back to that picture which had haunted them earlier in the evening, the picture of Baba's mother--fair, sweet, and dainty.

"Would she--be ready to love through good and ill--as that other woman had done?" he reflected; "would she be ready to act as a prop? or must she find someone to look up to, and depend upon?" and thinking these things, he drew up before the high wall and the green door, before which a lantern flung a feeble light upon the surrounding blackness.

Elizabeth admitted him; her face looked very worn, her eyes were heavy with want of sleep.

"He took a bad turn two hours ago," she said, in answer to the doctor's question; "he's going fast, and I can't get her to leave him, though it is killing her, too."

"It would only make her worse to try and take her away from him now,"

Fergusson said gently, knowing the good woman's devotion to her mistress, hearing the little shake in her voice as she spoke of Margaret; "if--the end has come, it will not be long; he has no strength to fight a long fight."

"_Strength?_" the servant muttered, a curious contempt in her accents; "you couldn't name him and the word strength in the same breath.

There! I've no business to talk like that of one who's dying, but--give me a strong man, give them me strong all the time--I can't do with them _weak_."

Fergusson made no reply. He saw that the woman, overwrought with long watching and anxiety, was temporarily deprived of her normal reticence and taciturnity, and he recognised that her outburst owed its origin to her great love for her mistress, and to that natural antagonism which a strong character is apt to feel towards the weak. Handing her his coat, he pa.s.sed rapidly along the corridor to the room, with which he was now familiar; and, going in softly, saw at a glance that the sick man in the bed was drawing very near to the Valley of the Shadow.

He lay propped up with pillows, and the beautiful woman known to Fergusson as Mrs. Stanforth, stood beside him, his head drawn close to her breast. Her arm was about him, and he had turned his face against her, as a child lays its face against its mother, his dim eyes fixed upon her with a look of almost pa.s.sionate adoration. With her free hand she stroked back the damp hair from his forehead, now and again wiping away the drops of sweat with a filmy handkerchief she held, and her eyes watched him with a hungry, loving look, that brought a lump into Fergusson's throat.

"To know that a woman will look into one's dying face with such a look as that, is worth everything," the thought flashed unbidden into his mind, as he stepped softly up to the bed, and laid a hand upon the patient's wrist. The dying man looked at him with a faint smile of welcome, but the woman did not move or glance at him. Her whole soul was wrapped up in the man she loved, the man who was pa.s.sing so fast away from her, into the silent land.

"Nearly--done---doctor," the man in the bed panted out, the smile still lingering on his face. "I--thought--I should have been afraid--but--now--the time has come--there--is--no fear."

His eyes left Fergusson, and lifted themselves to the face bending over him.

"You--rest--me--sweetheart," he said. "I--am never afraid--when you are--with me." As his eyes met hers, his smile acquired a strange radiance, and Fergusson all at once recognised the charm of the man--that magnetic something--which had won and held the love of such a woman as Margaret. Until this moment the reason for the weak man's hold over this woman had baffled, almost annoyed, Denis. Now, in a flash of illumination, it seemed to him he understood it.

He had seen at once that the dying man was already beyond all human aid; he gave him an injection of strychnine, but there was nothing else he could do, to ward off that dread visitor, whose feet had already crossed the threshold. Yet he felt that his presence in the house, if not in the room, would be a help to the woman so soon to be left desolate; and, having spoken a word or two of comfort and cheer, in that strong voice of his which carried comfort in its very tones, he moved away to the adjoining room.

"Call me if there is the slightest change," he whispered to Margaret; "you and he would rather be alone just now." She bent her head, and for the fraction of a second, her eyes met his. The misery in those deep eyes tore at his heart strings; his powerlessness to help this fellow-creature who was in such dire sorrow, hurt him, as if he had received some physical blow. Alone, in the next room, he seated himself by the fire, and tried to read a book he picked up from the table, but his thoughts refused to take in a single word of the printed page; he was conscious of nothing but the low murmur of voices from the bed he could just see through the open door. The words spoken by the two whom death was parting, he could not hear, but his heart ached intolerably for them both, for the man who was drifting into the Great Silence, for the woman who was being left behind.

"One long--failure--one long chapter of infamy--and wrong," the man's whisper barely reached the woman's ears, as she bent over him.

"But--you are sorry for it all now, my darling," she whispered back; "only think that you are sorry for the wrong; only think that--now."

"If you--forgive--surely--G.o.d forgives?" The dim eyes looked wistfully up at hers, and she stooped with an infinitely tender gesture, to kiss his ashen face.

"Surely, most surely, G.o.d forgives," she answered solemnly, the strength of her voice carrying conviction with it; "where there is a great love, there is great forgiveness, and----"

"Like--yours," he interrupted dreamily; "great love--such a great love--and a great--forgiveness. I--have heaped your life with misery and shame--and still--you forgive--still you love."

"Still I love," she whispered, a pa.s.sion of tenderness in the low-spoken words. "Max, love--real love--can't wear out or die, whatever happens. It has always been you--only you--you entirely, my man, my whole world."

At the last words, she drew his head more closely against her breast, and, bending over him, kissed him with a long lingering kiss.

"Only--me--in spite--of everything?"

"Only--you--sweetheart," she murmured; "only you--always."

"And--that other--who has been your friend--of whom you told me?" His voice was growing fainter.

"He has been--he is--my good and loyal friend," she answered; "he is nothing more to me than that. He could not ever be anything more."

"Perhaps--afterwards--when--I have gone--you and he----"

But she would not let him finish his halting, breathless sentence.

"He and I will never be more than friends," she said, very clearly, very firmly. "I could not love another man. There is not room in my heart for anyone but you."

A silence followed, a silence only broken by the dying man's difficult long-drawn breaths, by the occasional dropping of a coal into the grate, or the creaking of the heavy old furniture. And all the time Margaret stood immovable in her place, her arms about the dying man, his head close pillowed against her. All at once he spoke again, hurriedly, fearfully.

"You--are--sure--forgiveness," he gasped out. "G.o.d--will--forgive?"

"I am sure," she answered, and there was no quaver in her voice, only a great certainty; "there are no bounds to G.o.d's love. He will forgive.

He loves you, my dear. I am quite sure you need not be afraid."

She spoke as gently, in as simple language as though he had been a little child, and the fear slowly died out of his face. His eyes looked once again into hers, with a look of adoring love and reverence; then, with a tired sigh, the sigh of an over-weary child, his head sank back more heavily against her, and the gasping breath was still.

CHAPTER XV.

"I DO TRUST, CICELY, YOU KEEP HER IN HER PLACE."

"Your being in town for Christmas is quite an unusual occurrence, isn't it, Cousin Arthur?"

"Quite unusual; I may almost say, unprecedented. Dear Ellen and I, as you know, have the greatest horror of any prolonged stay in this Babylon, but, at the present moment, it is impossible to avoid it."

"And Cousin Ellen is bearing up pretty well?" Cicely could not keep the twinkle out of her eyes, although her voice was perfectly grave; but Sir Arthur, being, as has been said, totally devoid of humour, only observed the becoming gravity of tone, and not the twinkle.

"As well as can be expected," he responded, with a gloomy shake of the head, "but she dislikes hotels at all times, and at Christmas she doubly dislikes having to live a hotel life. We have our little festivities at home, quite small, unpretentious festivities, for the servants and the men on the estate, and we shall feel not taking part in them."

"And surely the servants will miss you?" Cicely said with her pretty gracious manner, whilst, it must be confessed, she inwardly wondered whether the Congreves' household staff would regret or be relieved, by the absence of their master and mistress at this festive season.