"At times I did--yes, at times I did--but we won't go into that. Is she ill--really ill?"

Ramsay spoke deliberately, after a minute's thought:

"Yes, she is probably very ill. The heart is certainly in a dangerous state. I thought she would have slipped away this morning, when they called me in--the collapse was so serious. She is not a strong woman, and she had a bad attack of influenza last week. Then she was out all last night, wandering about, evidently in a state of great excitement. It was as bad a fainting fit as I have ever seen."

"It would be impossible to move her?"

"For a day or two certainly. She keeps worrying about a boy--apparently her own boy?"

"I will see to that."

Ramsay hesitated a moment and then said--"What are we to call her? It will not be possible, I imagine, to keep her presence here altogether a secret. She called herself, in talking to Miss Alcott, Madame Melegrani."

"Why not? As to explaining her, I hardly know what to say."

Buntingford put his hand across his eyes; the look of weariness, of perplexity, intensified ten-fold.

"An acquaintance of yours in Italy, come to ask you for help?"

suggested Ramsay.

Buntingford withdrew his hand.

"No!" he said with decision. "Better tell the truth! She was my wife. She left me, as she has told the Alcotts, and took steps eleven years ago to make me believe her dead. And up to seven years ago, she passed as the wife of a man whom I knew by the name of Sigismondo Rocca. When the announcement of her death appeared, I set enquiries on foot at once, with no result. Latterly, I have thought it must be true; but I have never been quite certain. She has reappeared now, it seems, partly because she has no resources, and partly in order to restore to me my son."

"Your son!" said Ramsay, startled.

"She tells me that a boy was born after she left me, and that I am the father. All that I must verify. No need to say anything whatever about that yet. Her main purpose, no doubt, was to ask for pecuniary assistance, in order to go to America. In return she will furnish my lawyers with all the evidence necessary for my divorce from her."

Ramsay slowly shook his head.

"I doubt whether she will ever get to America. She has worn herself out."

There was a silence. Then Buntingford added:

"If these kind people would keep her, it would be the best solution.

I would make everything easy for them. To-morrow I go up to Town--to the address she has given me. And--I should be glad if you would come with me?"

The doctor looked surprised.

"Of course--if you want me--"

"The boy--his mother says--is abnormal--deficient. An injury at birth. If you will accompany me I shall know better what to do."

A grasp of the hand, a look of sympathy answered; and they parted.

Buntingford emerged from the little Rectory to find Alcott again waiting for him in the garden. The sun had set some time and the moon was peering over the hills to the east. The mounting silver rim suddenly recalled to Buntingford the fairy-like scene of the night before?--the searchlight on the lake, the lights, the music, and the exquisite figure of Helena dancing through it all. Into what Vale of the Shadow of Death had he passed since then?--

Alcott and he turned into the plantation walk together. Various practical arrangements were discussed between them. Alcott and his sister would keep the sick woman in their house as long as might be necessary, and Buntingford once more expressed his gratitude.

Then, under the darkness of the trees, and in reaction from the experience he had just passed through, an unhappy man's hitherto impenetrable reserve, to some extent, broke down. And the companion walking beside him showed himself a true minister of Christ---humble, tactful, delicate, yet with the courage of his message. What struck him most, perhaps, was the revelation of what must have been Buntingford's utter loneliness through long years; the spiritual isolation in which a man of singularly responsive and confiding temper had passed perhaps a quarter of his life, except for one blameless friendship with a woman now dead. His utmost efforts had not been able to discover the wife who had deserted him, or to throw any light upon her subsequent history. The law, therefore, offered him no redress. He could not free himself; and he could not marry again. Yet marriage and fatherhood were his natural destiny, thwarted by the fatal mistake of his early youth. Nothing remained but to draw a steady veil over the past, and to make what he could of the other elements in life.

Alcott gathered clearly from the story that there had been no other woman or women in the case, since his rupture with his wife. Was it that his marriage, with all its repulsive episodes, had disgusted a fastidious nature with the coarser aspects of the sex relation? The best was denied him, and from the worse he himself turned away; though haunted all the time by the natural hunger of the normal man.

As they walked on, Alcott gradually shaped some image for himself of what had happened during the years of the marriage, piecing it together from Buntingford's agitated talk. But he was not prepared for a sudden statement made just as they were reaching the spot where Alcott would naturally turn back towards the Rectory. It came with a burst, after a silence.

"For God's sake, Alcott, don't suppose from what I have been telling you that all the fault was on my wife's side, that I was a mere injured innocent. Very soon after we married, I discovered that I had ceased to love her, that there was hardly anything in common between us. And there was a woman in Paris--a married woman, of my own world--cultivated, and good, and refined--who was sorry for me, who made a kind of spiritual home for me. We very nearly stepped over the edge--we should have done--but for her religion. She was an ardent Catholic and her religion saved her. She left Paris suddenly, begging me as the last thing she would ever ask me, to be reconciled to Anna, and to forget her. For some days I intended to shoot myself. But, at last, as the only thing I could do for her, I did as she bade me. Anna and I, after a while, came together again, and I hoped for a child. Then, by hideous ill luck, Anna, about three months after our reconciliation, discovered a fragment of a letter--believed the very worst--made a horrible scene with me, and went off, as she has just told me,--not actually with Rocca as I believed, but to join him in Italy. From that day I lost all trace of her. Her concealment of the boy's birth was her vengeance upon me. She knew how passionately I had always wanted a son. But instead she punished him--the poor, poor babe!"

There was an anguish in the stifled voice which made sympathy impertinent. Alcott asked some practical questions, and Buntingford repeated his wife's report of the boy's condition, and her account of an injury at birth, caused by the unskilful hands of an ignorant doctor.

"But I shall see him to-morrow. Ramsay and I go together. Perhaps, after all, something can be done. I shall also make the first arrangements for the divorce."

Alcott was silent a moment--hesitating in the dark.

"You will make those arrangements immediately?"

"Of course."

"If she dies? She may die."

"I would do nothing brutal--but--She came to make a bargain with me."

"Yes--but if she dies--might you not have been glad to say, 'I forgive'?"

The shy, clumsy man was shaken as he spoke, with the passion of his own faith. The darkness concealed it, as it concealed its effect on Buntingford. Buntingford made no direct reply, and presently they parted, Alcott engaging to send a messenger over to Beechmark early, with a report of the patient's condition, before Buntingford and Dr. Ramsay started for London. Buntingford walked on. And presently in the dim moonlight ahead he perceived Geoffrey French.

The young man approached him timidly, almost expecting to be denounced as an intruder. Instead, Buntingford put an arm through his, and leaned upon him, at first in a pathetic silence that Geoffrey did not dare to break.

Then gradually the story was told again, as much of it as was necessary, as much as Philip could bear. Geoffrey made very little comment, till through the trees they began to see the lights of Beechmark.

Then Geoffrey said in an unsteady voice:

"Philip!--there is one person you must tell--perhaps first of all. You must tell Helena--yourself."

Buntingford stopped as though under a blow.

"Of course, I shall tell Helena--but why?--"

His voice spoke bewilderment and pain.

"Tell her _yourself_--that's all," said Geoffrey, resolutely--"and, if you can, before she hears it from anybody else."

CHAPTER XII

Buntingford and French reached home between ten and eleven o'clock. When they entered the house, they heard sounds of music from the drawing-room.

Peter Dale was playing fragments from the latest musical comedy, with a whistled accompaniment on the drawing-room piano. There seemed to be nothing else audible in the house, in spite of the large party it contained. Amid the general hush, unbroken by a voice or a laugh, the "funny bits" that Peter was defiantly thumping or whistling made a kind of goblin chorus round a crushed and weary man, as he pushed past the door of the drawing-room to the library. Geoffrey followed him.

"No one knows it yet," said the young man, closing the door behind them.