There was a long silence between the two men.

Dr. Mallet looked at the famous soldier with interest and curiosity.

General Lingard was a remarkable-looking man apart from his reputation.

But there were lines on his seamed face that told of strain--an older strain than that induced by the shocking news which had just been told him. He had now pulled himself together; he was doubtless annoyed with himself for having been so terribly affected. But Mrs. Maule possessed a very compelling, vivid personality--even the doctor could not yet think of her as anything but living.

"I'm afraid, General Lingard, that I must prepare you for a rather painful ordeal. Mr. Maule wishes to see you, and if possible at once."

The other made an involuntary movement of recoil.

"To see me?" he repeated. "Why should he wish to see me?" And then he added hurriedly, "But of course I'll go and see him. He and--and Mrs.

Maule"--he brought out her name with an effort--"have both been most kind to me, though our acquaintance has been short."

Again there was a pause. And then Lingard said abruptly, "Well--shall I go up and see him now? I--I suppose you will come with me?" If restrained, there was no less an appeal in his hushed voice.

"I'll just go up with you, and then I'm afraid I shall have to leave you with him. Perhaps I ought to tell you that Mr. Maule took the news very quietly, General Lingard. He's in a sad state--a sad state. A man in that condition does not take things to heart in the same way that we who are hale and strong do."

As they pa.s.sed along the corridor, a housemaid was engaged in drawing down the blinds, and it was into a darkened room that Lingard was introduced by the doctor.

Richard Maule did not rise to receive the condolences of his guest. He was up and in his dressing-gown, and he sat huddled in a deep invalid chair. To Lingard's eyes he looked pitifully broken.

Various feelings--anger, contemptuous pity, and an unwilling respect for the man who had, only the day before, made up his mind to face the greatest humiliation open to manhood--all these jostled one another in the soldier's mind as he stood staring down at his host.

Their hands just touched--Lingard's icy cold, Richard Maule's burning hot.

"Thank you, thank you, General Lingard. I felt sure that I should have your sympathy."

There was an odd gleam in the stricken man's eyes, but the other, intent on preserving his own self-command, saw nothing of it.

"Do sit down. Yes, it's a strange, a most strange thing. She was always so strong, so well. Poor Athena! Thanks to you in a great measure, her last weeks of life were very bright and happy."

He looked furtively at Lingard. The man was taking his punishment like a Stoic. But bah! what were his sufferings to those which Maule himself had endured eight years before?

"I've troubled you to come to me," he continued, "not so much to receive your kind sympathy, as to speak to you of Jane--of Jane Oglander. She was, as you know, my poor wife's best friend--and in a very real sense.

This will be a most terrible shock to her. She would naturally receive the news better from you than from anyone else, and I really asked to see you that I might beg you to go at once, as soon as possible, over to the Small Farm. Thanks to my good friend Dr. Mallet, we have managed to establish a cordon round the house. But of course the truth will be known very shortly in the village--if, indeed, it is not known there yet."

Lingard rose from the chair on which he had reluctantly sat down in obedience to his host's wish.

"Yes," he said in a low, firm voice. "I will certainly do as you wish. I know how truly, how devotedly, Jane and Mrs. Maule loved one another."

"It would be idle for me to pretend to you, General Lingard, now that you have formed part of our household for nearly a month, that my poor wife and I were on close or sympathetic terms--" The other made a sudden restless movement. "It is, however, a comfort to me to feel that last night, for the first time for many years--" he was looking narrowly at his victim, and Lingard fell into the trap.

"I know--I know," he exclaimed hastily. "It must be a comfort to you now, Mr. Maule, to feel that you--that you--" he stopped awkwardly.

Richard Maule smiled a curious smile, and Lingard felt inexpressibly shamed, humiliated. But what was this Richard Maule was saying?

"Ah, so she told you! Strange--strange are the ways of the modern woman, General Lingard. But I suppose that to Athena you and Jane Oglander were as good as husband and wife. She thought that what she could say without impropriety to the one she could say to the other. Well, I won't keep you now. I should be sorry indeed if Jane heard what has happened from anyone but yourself."

CHAPTER XXI

"It is my life; I bring it torn and stained Out of the battles I have lost and gained; Once captured, won back from the enemy At a great loss; yet here I hold it still, My own to render up as now I do; I render it up joyfully to you, Choosing defeat: do with it as you will."

To be out of doors, away from that strange, unreal house of mourning, brought with it a sensation of almost physical relief.

Lingard walked rapidly along, on his way to the Small Farm. He was pursued, obsessed, by the horror of the fact. He felt as if he had never before realised the awful obliteration of death.

Many a mother, wife, sister, kept among the most precious of her treasures letters signed "Hew Lingard"--letters speaking in high terms of a dead son, of a dead husband, of a dead brother. But those men and lads on whose dead faces he had gazed had died the death which to Lingard and his like puts the crown on a soldier's life. He had lost comrades who had been dear to him and whose loss he had lamented sorely.

But never, never had the sudden cancelling, so to speak, of a human being brought with it this sense of chilling horror, of nothingness where so much had been.

And then there was something else--something which at once revolted and distressed him inexpressibly. The immediate past, the events of the last four weeks, became, in so far as they concerned the woman who was now lying dead, both fantastic and shameful.

Last night, for the first time, something of Athena's ruthless egotism had forced itself upon Lingard's perception. Hitherto he had been too deeply concerned with his own egotism, his own cruelty, his own remorse, to give thought to hers.

That she should have used Jane Oglander as her amba.s.sador to Richard Maule had shocked, nay more, had disgusted him, as soon as he had found himself away from the magic of her presence.

Wholly absorbed in the future, Athena, after her first words of eager grat.i.tude for Jane's intervention, had dismissed Jane from her mind, expelled her from her mental vision. Nay, she had gone further, for in answer to a muttered word from Lingard, she had at last said something which had jarred his taste, as well as roused that instinctive dog-in-the-manger att.i.tude which slumbers in all men with regard to any woman who has been beloved.

"Jane," Athena had said impatiently, "will end by marrying d.i.c.k Wantele.

But for me she would have done it long ago!" And angrily the listener's heart, his memory, had given Athena the lie.

After Mrs. Maule had left him the night before, Lingard had gone out of doors, and now chance brought him to the spot where he had stood for a long time staring at the long low house which now sheltered Jane Oglander, driven there, as he knew well, by his base, it now seemed his inconceivable, cruelty. How clearly he had visualised her last night!

Imagining her as widely awake as he was himself, but denied by a thousand scruples from the relief of being able to go out, alone, into the darkness and solitude. If they had met there last night, he might at least have told Jane of his fight--of his losing fight for his lost honour. Now she would always believe that he had surrendered without a struggle.

He walked on and into the curious, formal little garden of the Small Farm, even now gay with late autumn blossoms. The beams of a wintry sun lay athwart the picturesque old house.

From the first,--nay, not quite at first, but very soon,--Lingard had disliked Mabel Digby. He had thought of her as an ally of d.i.c.k Wantele, and at a time when he was still trying to lie to himself as to the nature of his attraction to Athena, he had often seen her clear brown eyes fixed on him with a puzzled, troubled expression. Even now he could not be sorry she was ill. He felt that to-day he could not have faced those honest, questioning eyes.

Lingard walked up to the porch, and rang the bell. By an odd twist, he began to think, as he stood there, how it would have been with him had it been Jane who was lying dead. Clearly he realised that Jane, dead, would still in a sense have been to him alive. But Athena? Athena was gone--gone into nothingness. He felt a tremor run through him, a touch of the old fever....

"Miss Oglander? I think she's upstairs with Miss Digby, sir. But I'll fetch her down. Will you come into the drawing-room?"

Lingard went through the hall into the long sitting-room which he remembered, as men remember a place to which they have been in dreams.

Jane had brought him there on the first morning after her arrival at Rede Place. They had not had a very pleasant walk, for each seemed to have so curiously little to say to the other, and Lingard, at least, had hailed with pleasure the moment when they had gone into the house.

He remembered that he had been amused and touched by the many mementoes of the Indian Mutiny the room contained--quaint coloured prints and amateurish drawings of Delhi, before and during the great epic struggle, curious engraved portraits of the various Mutiny veterans under whom Mabel Digby's father had fought,--signs of a hero-worship the old soldier had transmitted to his daughter.

He also recalled the feeling of acute irritation with which he had noticed Mabel Digby's look of shy congratulation at Jane and at himself.

She had been at once too shy and too well-bred to make any allusion to an engagement which was not yet announced, but there had been no mistaking her glance, her smile.

How long ago all that seemed! It might have been years--instead of only weeks.

He went and stood by the fireplace, and then stared up at Outram's portrait. Was that man, and were that man's comrades and contemporaries, whose virtues as well as whose courage have become famous as the virtues and the courage of ancient legendary heroes--were they untouched by the failings and weaknesses of our poor common humanity? It was certainly not true of their own immediate predecessors, or--or of their successors.