"Only for a day and a night."

"A night, too?" Margaret exclaimed; for on the occasional visits her father had paid to London he had gone and returned on the same day. "It sounds wonderful."

He thought out his words before speaking, as if in his own mind he saw the outcome of things that were going to happen. "All the same," he said, "you will probably be glad to come back."

"Yes, father, yes," she exclaimed, joyfully; "but then I shall know, I shall have seen and remember it all. Dear mother!" and she turned to her again, hungry for her sympathy.

Mrs. Vincent always understood, and she put her arm round Margaret, while she asked her husband, "Where will you stay if you don't come back till the next day, and will Margaret's things be good enough?"

"We shall stay--oh, at the Langham, I suppose. Of course they will be good enough."

He went back to his papers and took up the two letters again. The one from his brother was merely a reiteration of what he had said before.

The important part in it was that which concerned his health. Lately there had been disturbing threats; it was possible that symptoms might develop which would hurry the inevitable. It was to take a specialist's opinion, so far as might be gathered from a letter, to see his lawyers, and to arrange for a probable voyage in the near future that Mr. Vincent was going to London. But it was the other letter that he lingered over, the one written on gray paper with violet ink. Long ago that handwriting had greeted him every morning. It had been a symbol of happiness, of all the world to him. He read the letter again:

"You will be surprised to hear from me after all these years; but I heard from Cyril lately; he gave me your address, and I feel that I must write to you. He told me of your marriage, and that you have a daughter. I knew nothing about you before, except what I gathered from your articles in the _Fortnightly_. Do you never come to London? If you do, come and see me; we will avoid all reference to painful by-gones and meet as old friends. I was near you last summer. I drove over with my girl and Tom Carringford (you remember his father) to look at a house we thought of taking. If I had known--

"Let me hear from you. I want to be told that I am forgiven for all the trouble I caused you, and that you will one day come and shake my hand. Perhaps you will bring your child to see me.

"Yours always,

"HILDA LAKEMAN."

Gerald Vincent sat and thought of the years ago and of a ball--it seemed a strange thing for him to remember a ball--and a long, maddening waltz; he could hear the crash of the "Soldaten Lieder" now, the long-drawn-out end, and the hurrying to the cool air. The girl on his arm wore a black dress--she was in mourning for her sister, he remembered--and some lilies were at her waist. The scent of them came back to him through all the years. He saw the people pa.s.sing in the dim light; they had drawn back--he and she--so as not to be seen; he heard the sound of laughter, the buzz of voices, the uneasy beginning of the next dance. He remembered her perfect self-possession, and his own awkwardness, that had made him let the opportunity to speak slip by; but it had seemed to him that words were unnecessary. Looking back, he felt that she had been interested in the hour rather than sharing it, and he wondered, with a little sorry amus.e.m.e.nt at the remembrance of her manner, how much or how little she had really felt. He thought of the summer that followed, of days on the river in late July, when the London season was in its last rushing days, the sound of oars, the trailing of the willows at the water's edge, the visits to house-boats, the merry little luncheon-party on the point at Cookham. Mrs. Berwick had been the discreetest of chaperons, and when they had drunk their coffee--vile coffee it had been--he and Hilda had wandered off while the others stayed drowsily behind. How strange it was to think of it all! He could feel still her arms clinging round his neck, and hear her low, pa.s.sionate whisper--"Yes, yes, I love you--I love you--I love you!"

Words had never come easily to him, and he had been ashamed of his dumbness when she could find them. Remembering them now, her tones rang false. He thought of his ordination, and the happy winter when gradually he had put aside the foolish dissipations, and work and love made up his life; of the curacy he held for a little while. Hilda had been full of some scheme; he understood it dimly when he went to the bishop's palace and she had whispered--it was the first sign of what was coming--"Who knows but that some day we shall be installed here, you and I?" The bishop gave him a living later, and she cried, triumphantly: "I made father do it. It's the first step. I shall never be satisfied till you are on the top one." The speech worried him, grated on him all through the long first evening by his vicarage fire, though he tried to forget it. He read her letter the next morning almost desperately; luckily it had been a simple, affectionate one, and he thanked G.o.d for it, and prayed that all her desire might be, as his was, in the doing of the work before them, in the good they might bring to others, and not in the reward they would personally reap from it. There had been a happy time after that, just as if he had been heard. He remembered his simple faith in her, his peace and security in those days, with wonder. At the end of the summer he had not wanted to leave his parish so soon after going to it, so he stayed on through August and September while Hilda went with her people to the Engadine. A man came down to stay with him--a queer chap, Orliter, of All Souls, professor of philosophy now at a Scotch university. Orliter brought a cartload of books with him; he read them all day and smoked, and Gerald did the same. Then followed talks that grew more and more eager; often enough the night pa.s.sed and daylight came while they were still arguing--nights that were symbolical of the darkness he walked through, and then the slow dawn of what seemed to him to be the truth.

It wanted courage to do the rest, but he had done it. There had been the difficult interview with the bishop, and the long, miserable one with Hilda, who had treated his new views as though they could be thrown aside as easily as a coat could be taken off. She had implored him to remember that they meant the blighting of his career, social ruin, the desertion of his friends, the breaking of her heart. It would be impossible, she had explained to him, to marry a man her friends would not receive--a man without position or prospects or money, with only talents which he was evidently going to apply in a wrong direction, and opinions that would create a little desert round him. He had looked at her aghast. To him truth was the first condition of life and honor; to her it was of no consequence if it spelled inexpediency. Her att.i.tude resulted in his writing some articles that made his position worse in a worldly sense; but he loved her all the time, his infatuation even became greater as he saw the impossibility of sympathy or agreement between them. But he was too strong a man to let pa.s.sion master him; besides, it seemed as if all the time, afar off, Truth stood with the clear eyes that in later years had been his wife's attraction to him, and, cool, calm, and unflinching drew him to her--away from the woman who protested overmuch, from the Church that pointed upward to an empty sky, from all the penalties and rewards of religion. Whether his conclusions are right or wrong, a man can but listen to the dictates of his soul and conscience. And so Gerald Vincent turned his back on all that he had believed and loved, but remained an honest man. While he was in Italy, squarely facing the ruin of his life, he heard of Hilda's marriage. There had been a quarter of a column about it in the daily papers. He read it a little grimly. A few years later he heard of her husband's death, but there had been no sign of her in his own life till the letter came that morning. He read it again, then locked it away in a desk.

He heard his wife's footsteps pa.s.s the door. He rose and looked out.

She was standing in the porch with her back to him and her face towards the garden, for she and Nature were so near akin that on grave and silent days they seemed to need each other's greetings. He stood beside her, and looked silently down at her face with a little sense of thankfulness, of grat.i.tude, for all the peaceful years he owed her, and he saw with a pang the deep lines on her face and the grayness of her hair, as Margaret had done only an hour before.

"Why, father," she said, with a little smile, "what is it?" Then, with sudden dread, she asked, "Is he worse? Does he want you yet?"

"I'm afraid it won't be long," he answered; "but I shall be able to tell you better when we come from town."

Hannah grumbled, of course, when she heard of the journey. Then, grumbling being useless, she busied herself in seeing that Mr. Vincent's portmanteau was dusted out, and that the key, which was tied to one of the handles by a bit of string, turned properly in the lock. And a strange old bag, made of brown canvas and lined with stuff that looked like bed-ticking, was found to carry the few things that Margaret was to take. It was the one that Hannah herself often used when she went to Petersfield, and therefore obviously good enough for any other member of the household. But Mr. Vincent looked at it with surprise; he remembered in his youth seeing the under-gardener's son set off for Liverpool, and the bag he carried was just like this one.

"I think we must buy something else for you in London, Margey," he said.

"Oh, I dare say you'll do a great deal when you get there," Hannah struck in, sharply. "It's to be hoped you'll take her to see Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, to say nothing of the City Temple and the Tabernacle and Exeter Hall. It would be as well for her to see that, in one way or another, people have thought a good deal of religion, though you and others like you put yourselves above it." She waited, but Mr.

Vincent showed no sign of having heard her. "I'm afraid that one day you'll find you have made a mistake," she went on. He pulled out a little pouch and rolled up a cigarette.

"Are you going to drive us to the station yourself?" he asked.

"I suppose I'd better," she answered. "I don't know what's come to that boy lately. If I send him over to Haslemere he never knows when to get back."

So the cart came round on Monday morning. Mr. Vincent and Hannah got up in front, and Margaret behind, with the portmanteau and the canvas bag on either side of her. Mrs. Vincent stood waving her handkerchief till they were out of sight, then went with a sigh to the best parlor, thinking it would be as well to take advantage of her husband's absence and give it an extra tidying.

The postman came a little later. He trudged round to the back door, where he sat down on a four-legged stool that the boy had painted gray only last week, and prepared for a little talk with Towsey.

"Have you heard that the house on the hill is let?" he was saying. "Some one from London has taken it for the whole summer."

"What have you brought, postman?" Mrs. Vincent asked. He handed her a letter for Hannah. A smile came to her lips when she saw it. "It's the hand that directed the Christmas card," she said to herself. "And it's my belief that Mr. Garratt's coming at last."

VI

Margaret was in the seventh heaven when they reached London. The drive from Waterloo to the Langham--the bridge, the stream of people, the shops--were all bewildering. She could have sung for joy as they drove along in the hansom.

"It appears to please you," Mr. Vincent said, with a little smile.

"It does! It does!" she exclaimed. "Only I should like to walk along the pavements--"

"You shall presently."

"And look into all the windows--"

"I'm afraid I couldn't stand that."

"I wish we had to buy something, then we should go into a shop."

"We will," he said, and presently put his hand through the little door at the top of the hansom, which was in itself an excitement to her. They stopped at a trunk shop.

"But, father--" She was breathless.

"We must get you a Gladstone bag," he explained.

She tripped into the shop after him. It was like entering the ante-room of an enchanted land, for did not great travellers come here before they started for the North Pole or the South, to fight battles, or to go on strange missions to foreign courts? No one guesses the happy extravagance of a young girl's heart on all the first times in her life--the dreams that beset her, the pictures she sees, the strange songs that ring in her ears.

"That's a great improvement," Mr. Vincent said when they re-entered the cab and a good, serviceable, tan-colored Gladstone had been safely put on the top. "We will throw the other away when you have taken out your things."

"Oh no, father--it's Hannah's."

"True. She can take it away as part of her trousseau." Mr. Vincent laughed at his own little joke. He looked young, he was almost gay, as if he, too, felt that they had come out on a wonderful journey in this simple one to town. But he had suddenly discovered a new pleasure in life; for it had not occurred to him that Margaret was so unsophisticated, or that there could be so much that was new to her.

Everything was a joy, even the little sitting-room at the Langham. This, she thought, was what rooms in London looked like--rooms in hotels, at any rate. But though a new experience came upon her every moment, all the time at the back of her head she saw a white road with clumps of heather and gorse beside it, and a church on a hill; a mile farther there was a duck-pond and a lane that led to Woodside Farm; already, even through her impatience to see more of this wonderful London, she looked forward to the first glimpse of her mother's face watching for them on the morrow.

"I'm afraid I shall have to leave you here for an hour or two. I have come to London on business," Mr. Vincent said. "But I must try and show you some sights presently, though I'm not good at that sort of thing.

Perhaps we might go to a theatre to-night--"

"Oh! But what would Hannah say?" At a safe distance it was amusing to think of Hannah's wrath.

"I don't know." It amused him, too. "But it shall be something that won't hurt us very much. I believe "King John" is going on still. I will try and get places for it while I am out."