"Aphrodite herself!"

"Ah! I felt you would know and recognize her at once--Yes, that is her name. Oh, I am glad!" and Halcyone clapped her hands. "She is my mother, and so, you see, I am never alone here, for she speaks always to me of love."

John Derringham looked at her sharply as she said this, and in her eyes he saw two wells of purity, each with an evening star melted into its depths.

And he suddenly was conscious of something which his whole life had missed--for he knew he did not know what real love meant, not even that which his mother might have given him, if she had lived.

He did not speak for a moment; he gazed into Halcyone's face. It seemed as if a curtain had lifted for one instant and given him a momentary glimpse into some heaven, and then dropped again, leaving a haunting memory of sweetness, the more beautiful because indistinct.

"Love--" he said, still dreamily. "Surely there is yet another and a deeper kind of love."

Halcyone raised her head, while a strange look grew in her wide eyes, almost of fear. It was as though he had put into words some unspoken, unadmitted thought.

"Yes," she said very softly, "I feel there is--but that is not all peace; that must be gloriously terrible, because it would mean life."

He looked at her fully now; there was not an atom of coquetry or challenge; her face was pale and exquisite in its simple intentness. He turned to the G.o.ddess again, and almost chaunted:

"Oh! Aphrodite of the divine lips and soulful eyes, what mystery do you hold for us mortals? What do you promise us? What do you make us pay? Is the good worth the anguish? Is the fulfillment a cup worth draining--without counting the cost?"

"What does she answer you?" whispered Halcyone. "Does she say that to live and fulfill destiny as the beautiful year does is the only good? It is wiser not to question and weigh the worth, for even though we would not drink, perhaps we cannot escape--since there is Fate."

John Derringham pulled himself together with an effort. He felt he was drifting into wonderland, where the paths were too tenderly sweet and flowered for him to dare to linger, for there he might find and quaff of the poison cup. So he said in a voice which he strove to bring back to earth:

"Where did you get the beautiful thing? She is of untold value, of course you know?"

Halcyone took the marble into her hands lovingly.

"She came to me out of the night," she said. "Some day I might tell you how--but not to-day. I must put her back again. No one knows but Cheiron and me--and now--you--that she is in existence, and no one else must ever know."

He did not speak; he watched her while she wrapped the head in its folds of silk.

"Aphrodite never had so true a priestess, nor one so pure," he thought, and a strange feeling of sadness came over him, and he thanked her rather abruptly for showing him her treasure, and they went silently back through Sir Timothy's rooms, and down the stair; and in the Italian parlor he said good-by at once, and left.

The wind had got up and blew freshly in his face. There would be a gale before morning. It suited his mood. He struck across the park, but instead of making for the haw-haw, he turned into Cheiron's little gate.

He wanted understanding company, he wanted to talk cynical philosophy, and he wanted the stimulus of his old master's biting wit.

But when he got there, he found Cheiron very taciturn--contributing little more than a growl now and then, while he smoked his long pipe and played with his beard. So at last he got up to go.

"I have made up my mind to marry Mrs. Cricklander, Master," he said.

"I supposed so," the Professor replied dryly. "A man always has to convince himself he is doing a fine thing when he gives himself up to be hanged."

CHAPTER XVII

John Derringham reached Wendover--by the road and the lodge gates--in an impossible temper. He had left the orchard house coming as near to a quarrel with his old master as such a thing could be. He absolutely refused to let himself dwell upon the anger he had felt; and if Fate had given him a distinct and pointed chance to ask the fair Cecilia for her lily hand, when he knocked at her sitting-room door before dinner, he would no doubt have left the next day--summoned again to London by his Chief--an engaged man. But this turn of events was not in the calculations of Destiny for the moment, and he found no less a person than Mr. Hanbury-Green already ensconced by his hostess's side. They were both smoking and looked very comfortable and at ease.

"I just came in to tell you I shall be obliged to tear myself away to-morrow," John Derringham said, "and cannot have the pleasure of staying to the end of the week in this delightful place."

Mrs. Cricklander got up from her reclining position among the cushions.

This was a blow. She wished now she had not encouraged Mr. Hanbury-Green to come and sit with her; it might be a lost opportunity which it would be difficult to recapture again. But she had felt so very much annoyed at Mr. Derringham's capriciousness, displayed the whole of the Monday, and then at his absenting himself to-day, having gone to see the Professor, of course--since he was out of the house at tea-time when she had sent to his room to enquire--that she had determined to see what a little jealousy would do for him. But if he were off on the morrow this might not be a safe moment to try it.

Mr. Hanbury-Green, however, had not the slightest intention of giving up his place, in spite of several well-directed hints, and sat on like one belonging to the spot.

So they all had to go off to dress without any longed-for word having been spoken. And Mrs. Cricklander was far too circ.u.mspect a hostess to attempt to arrange a _tete-a-tete_ after dinner under the eye of an important social leader like Lady Maulevrier, whom she had only just succeeded in enticing to stay in her country house. So, with the usual semi-political chaff, the evening pa.s.sed, and good-nights and good-bys were said, and early next day John Derringham left for London.

He would write--he decided--and all the way up in the train he buried himself in the engrossing letters and papers he had received from his Chief by the morning's post.

And for the next six weeks he was in such a turmoil of hard work and deep and serious questions about a foreign State that he very seldom had time to go into society, and when at last he was a little more free, Mrs. Cricklander, he found, had not returned from Paris, whither she always went several times a year for her clothes.

But they had written to one another once or twice.

He had promised in the last letter that he would go down to Wendover again for Whitsuntide, and this time he firmly determined nothing should keep him from his obvious and delectable fate.

Mrs. Cricklander had no haunting fears now. She could discover no reason for John Derringham's change towards her. Arabella had been mute and had put it down to the stress of his life. This tension with the foreign State, it leaked out, had been known to the Ministers for a week before it had been made public--that, of course, was the cause of his preoccupation, and she would simply order some especially irresistible garments in Paris, and bide her time.

He wrote the most charming letters, though they were hardly long enough to be called anything but notes; but there was always the insinuation in them that she was the one person in the world who understood him, and they were expressed with his usual cultivated taste.

It was sheer force of will that kept John Derringham from ever thinking of Halcyone. He resolutely crushed the thought of her every time it presented itself, and systematically turned to his work and plunged into it, if even a mental vision of her came to his mind's eye.

He felt quite calm and safe when, two days before he was expected at Wendover, the idea came to him to propose himself to the Professor, so as not to have to go and see him and endure his cynical reflections _after_ he should be engaged to his hostess.

Mr. Carlyon had wired back, "Come if you like," and on this evening in early June John Derringham arrived at the orchard house.

Cheiron made no allusion to the matter that had caused them to part with some breezy words upon his old pupil's side. Mrs. Cricklander or Wendover might not have existed; their talk was upon philosophy and politics, and contained not the shadow of a woman--even Halcyone was not mentioned at all.

Whitsuntide fell late that year, at the end of the first week in June, and the spring having been exceptionally mild, the foliage was all in full beauty of the freshest green.

It was astonishingly hot, and every divine scent of the night came to John Derringham as he went out into the garden before going to bed. A young setting half-moon still hung in the sky, and there were stars. One of those nights when all the mystery of life seems to be revealing itself in the one word--Love. The nightingale throbbed out its note in the copse amidst a perfect stillness, and the ground was soft without a drop of dew.

John Derringham, hatless, and with his hands plunged in the pockets of his dinner coat, wandered down the garden towards the apple tree, picking an early red rosebud as he pa.s.sed a bush--its scent intoxicated him a little. Then he went to the gate, and, opening it, he strolled into the park. Here was a vaster and more perfect view. It was all clothed in the unknown of the half dark, and yet he could distinguish the outline of the giant trees. He went on as if in some delicious dream, which yet had some heart-break in it, and at last he came to the tree where he and Halcyone had sat those seven years ago, when she had told him of what consisted the true point of honor in a man. He remembered it all vividly, her very words and the cloud of her soft hair which had blown a little over his face. He sat down upon the fallen log that had been made into a rude bench; and there he gazed in front of him, unconscious now of any coherent thought.

Suddenly he was startled by a laugh so near him and so soft that he believed himself to be dreaming, but he looked round and quickly rose to his feet, and there at the other side of the tree he saw standing the ethereal figure of a girl, while her filmy gray garments seemed to melt into the night.

"Halcyone!" he gasped. "And from where?"

"Ah!" she said as she came towards him. "You have invaded my kingdom.

Mortal, what right have you to the things of the night? They belong to me--who know them and love them."

"Then have compa.s.sion upon me, sweet dryad!" he pleaded, "who am but a pilgrim who cannot see his way. Let me shelter under your protection and be guided aright."

She laughed again--a ripple of silver that he had not guessed her voice possessed. Her whole bearing was changed from the reserved, demure and rather timid creature whom he knew. She was a sprite now, or a nymph, or even a G.o.ddess, for her brow was imperious and her mien one of a.s.sured command.

"This is my kingdom," she said, "and if you obey me, I will show you things of which you have never dreamed--" and then she came towards the tree and sat upon the high forked branch of the broken bough while she pointed with shadowy finger to the part which was a bench. "Sit there, Man of Day," she ordered, "for you cannot see beyond your hand. You cannot know how the living things are creeping about, unafraid now of your cruel power. You cannot discern the difference in the colors of the fresh young bracken and the undergrowth; you cannot perceive the birds asleep in the tree."