The gentle appeal of the action--the hundred memories it evoked--was instantaneous and supreme. In a sudden irrepressible tide, her grief, her uncertainty of the future, her home-sickness inundated her soul.

With a quick gesture she flung away both pride and restraint; and, hiding her face against the dog's rough coat, cried as if she had been a child.

PART III

CHAPTER I

It was nine o'clock on a morning four years after the wedding at Carrigmore; the season was late spring; the scene was Italy; and Florence--the city of tranquillity made manifest--lay at rest under its coverlet of sun and roses. In the soft, early light, the ma.s.sed buildings of the town seemed to blend together until, to the dazzled eyes, the Arno looked a mere ribbon of silver as it wound under its bridges; and the splendid proportions of the Duomo became lost in the blue haze that presaged the hot day to come.

The scene was vaguely beautiful, viewed from any of the hills that guard the city; but from no point was its soft picturesqueness more remarkable than from the terraces and windows of a villa that nestled in a curve of the narrow, winding road between San Domenico and Fiesole. This villa, unlike its neighbours, was long and low in structure; and in addition to the stone urns, luxurious flowering plants, and wide, painted jalousies common to Italian houses, it boasted other and more individual attractions--to be found in a flight of singularly old marble steps that led from one level of its garden to another; and in the unusual magnificence of the cypresses that grew in an imposing semi-circle upon the upper terrace.

It was under the shade of these sombre trees that a breakfast table stood, awaiting occupation, on this particular morning at the hour of nine. The table in itself formed a picture, for in the warm shafts of sun that slipped between the cypress trees, silver and gla.s.s gleamed invitingly, while in their midst an immense Venetian bowl filled with roses made a patch of burning colour. Everything was attractive, refined, appetising; and yet, for some undiscernible reason, the inmates of the villa appeared in no haste to enjoy the meal that awaited them.

For fully ten minutes after the coffee had been laid upon the table, the Italian man-servant stood immovably attentive, his back stiff, his glance resting expectantly upon the verandah; then his natural interest in the meal caused him to alter his position and cast a sympathetic eye upon the coffee in imminent danger of growing cold.

Five more minutes pa.s.sed. He looked again at the villa; sighed, and gracefully flicked a fly from the basket of crisp rolls. Then suddenly he stood newly erect and attentive, as his quick ear caught the swish of a skirt and the sound of a light step. A moment later Clodagh emerged upon the sunny terrace, followed by her dog Mick.

At any period of existence, four years is a span of time to be reckoned with. But when four years serves to bridge the gulf between childhood and womanhood, its power is well-nigh limitless. As Clodagh stepped through the long window of her room and came slowly out into the morning light, it would have been a close observer who would, at a first glance, have recognised the unformed girl of four years ago in the graceful, well-dressed woman moving forward through the Italian sunshine. On a second glance, or a third, one would undoubtedly have seen traces of the long, undeveloped limbs in the tall, supple figure; caught a suggestion of the rough luxurious plait in the golden-brown hair coiled about the well-shaped head; and have been fascinated by numerous undeniable and haunting suggestions in contour and colouring.

But there memory would have hesitated. The Clodagh who had scoured the woods, scrambled over the rocks, and galloped across the lands of Orristown was no longer visible. Another being, infinitely more distinguished, infinitely more attractive--and yet vaguely deprived of some essential quality--had taken her place. In the four years that had pa.s.sed since she left Ireland she had, from being a child, become a woman; and below the new beauty that nature had painted upon her face lay an intangible, a poignantly suggested regret for the girlhood that had been denied her.

As she stepped out upon the terrace, she paused for a moment and her eyes travelled mechanically over Florence--warm, beautiful, inert.

Then, with the same uninterested calm, she turned slowly towards the breakfast table; but there her glance brightened.

"Oh, letters!" she said aloud; and with an impulsive movement, she hurried forward, letting her elaborate muslin dress trail unheeded behind her.

Scarcely seeing the profound bow with which the man-servant greeted her, she picked up the letters, and scanned them one by one. Then as she disappointedly threw the last back upon the table, she half turned, in acknowledgment of a measured step that came across the terrace from the direction of the house. At the same moment Mick p.r.i.c.ked up his ears and slowly wagged his tail, while the Italian servant bent his body in a fresh salutation.

Milbanke--for his was the second step that had disturbed the silence--came forward without haste. Reaching the table, he took Clodagh's left hand and pressed it; then he stooped methodically and patted the dog's head.

"Good-morning!" he said gravely. "Are there any letters?"

"Yes, four; and all for you--as usual."

He smiled, un.o.bservant of the slightly tired irritability of Clodagh's tone.

"Ah, indeed!" he said. "That is pleasant. Is there one from Sicily?

Scarpio promised to let me have the latest details of the great work."

He took up the four letters and carefully studied the envelopes. As he came to the last, his thin face became animated.

"Ah, this is satisfactory!" he exclaimed. "I knew he would not fail me.

What wonderful--what fascinating work it must be!"

He tore the envelope open and began to peruse the letter.

While he scanned the opening lines, Clodagh watched him absently; but as the first page fluttered between his fingers, she gave a slight, involuntary shrug of the shoulders and, moving round the table, sank into the seat that the servant drew forward for her. Then, with an uninterested gesture, she poured out two cups of coffee.

For a while there was silence save for the turning of the letter in its recipient's hand; the occasional snap of Mick's teeth as he attempted to catch a fly; and the thousand, impersonal sounds of lazy, outdoor life that rose about them. At last Milbanke looked up, his face tinged with mild excitement.

"This discovery is very remarkable," he said. "Sicily will obtain a new importance."

Clodagh smiled faintly.

"In the antiquarian's eyes," she said with unconscious irony. There was no bitterness and no impatience in her voice. She spoke as if stating a fact that long familiarity had rendered absolutely barren.

Looking back over the four years of her marriage, it seemed to her that her life had been one round of archaeological discoveries--all timed to take place at the wrong season. She vividly remembered the first of these events; the discovery of some subterranean pa.s.sages in the neighbourhood of Carrara, which had taken place two months after her arrival in Italy, while life yet retained something of the dark, vague semblance usually a.s.sociated with a nightmare. Still desperately home-sick and unreasonably miserable in her new position, she had eagerly grasped at Milbanke's suggestion that they should visit the scene of these excavations. But with this first essay, her interest in discoveries had taken permanent flight.

The heat had been tremendous; the country parched and unsympathetic; the a.s.sociations terribly uncongenial. She remembered the first morning, when she and Nance, stifling in their black dresses, had by tacit consent stolen away from the party of fellow enthusiasts to which Milbanke had attached himself; and climbing to the summit of a low, olive-crowned hill, had sat tired, silent, and unutterably wretched, looking out upon the arid land.

But that excursion had been the prelude to a new era. Visits to various antiquities had succeeded each other with dull regularity, broken by long, uneventful sojourns in the green seclusion of the villa at Florence. Then the first break had occurred in the companionship of the trio. Nance had been sent home to an English school.

Clodagh's acceptance of this fiat had been curiously interesting--as had been her whole att.i.tude towards Milbanke and his wishes. From the day on which she recognised that the state of matrimony was something irrevocably serious, she had taken upon herself an att.i.tude of reserved surrender that was difficult to a.n.a.lyse--difficult even to superficially understand. By a strangely immature process of deduction, she had satisfied herself that marriage was a state of bondage, more or less distasteful as chance decreed--a state in which, by a fundamental law of nature, submission and self-repression were the chief factors necessary upon the woman's side.

As sometimes happens when there is a great disparity in years, the wedded state had widened instead of lessening the gulf between Milbanke and herself. It had cast a sudden, awkward restraint upon the affection and respect that his actions had kindled in her mind, while inspiring no new or ardent feelings to take its place. Ridiculously--and yet naturally--her husband had become an infinitely more distant and unapproachable being than her father's friend had been. And to this new key she had, perforce, attuned her existence.

With a greater number of years--even with a little more worldly experience--she might have made a vastly different business of her life; for, at the time of his marriage, Milbanke had been hovering upon the borderland of that fatuous love in which an old man can lose himself so completely. If, in those first months, she had permitted any of the ardour, any of the fascination of her nature to shine upon him, she might have led him by a silken thread in whatever direction she pleased. But three factors had precluded this--her youth, her inexperience, her entire ignorance of artifice. In her primary encounter with the realities of life, she had lost her strongest weapon--her frank, unswerving fearlessness; and in lieu of this she had, in the moment of first panic, seized upon the nearest subst.i.tute, and had wrapped herself in an armour of reserve.

And on this armour, the weapons of Milbanke's love had been turned aside. There had been no scenes, no hara.s.sing disillusionment; but gradually, inevitably his original att.i.tude with regard to her--his shy reticence, his uncertainty, as in the presence of some incomprehensible quality--had returned. He had slowly but surely withdrawn into himself, turning with a pathetic eagerness to the interests that had previously usurped his thoughts. With the nervous sensitiveness that warred continuously with his matter-of-fact precision, he became uncomfortably conscious of occupying a false position, of having made an indisputable--almost a ridiculous--mistake; and he had taken a blind leap towards the quarter in which he believed compensation to lie.

While Clodagh, vaguely divining this--vaguely remorseful, of what she scarcely knew--had held her own enthusiasms more rigidly in check, schooling herself into acquiescence with every impersonal suggestion that he chose to make.

From this had arisen the pursuit of the antique in whatever corner of Europe--and at whatever season of the year--circ.u.mstances might decree.

To Clodagh, the pilgrimages had seemed unutterably wearisome and unutterably foolish; but there is a great capacity for silent endurance in the Irish nature. Quick-blooded though it may be, it possesses that strong fatalistic instinct that accepts without question the decree of the G.o.ds. The spirit of revolt is not lacking in it; but it requires a given atmosphere--a given sequence of events--to bring it into activity. At two-and-twenty Clodagh was weary of her husband, of herself, of her life. But precisely as her father had fretted out his existence in the quiet monotony of Orristown, she had accepted her fate without thought of question.

In the second year, when they had travelled to England with Nance, Milbanke had suggested a visit to Ireland, but this proposal she had declined. The days when every fibre of her being had yearned for her own country were pa.s.sed; and the idea of return had lost its savour.

As she sat now, sipping her coffee and gazing abstractedly down to where the hot sun glinted on the Arno, it seemed to her that her life--the glorious, exuberant state that she had been accustomed to call her life--had drifted incredibly far away; that it lay asleep, if not already dead, in some intangible realm widely beyond her reach. She thought of Nance away at her English school, and unconsciously she envied her. To be fifteen, and to be surrounded by young people!

Involuntarily she sighed; and Mick, ever acutely sensitive to her change of mood, turned and pressed his cold nose against her knee.

Mechanically she put down her hand and pulled one of his soft ears; then suddenly she raised her head, attracted by an exclamation of impatience in Milbanke's usually placid voice. Looking up, she saw that he had opened a second letter.

"What is it?" she asked, her momentary curiosity dropping back to indifference. "Was that last intaglio unauthentic after all?"

Milbanke glanced up with an annoyed expression. "This does not concern the intaglio," he said. "This is from Barnard--David Barnard, who acts as my broker, and looks after my business affairs. You have heard me speak of him."

"Of course. Often." An expression of interest awakened in Clodagh's face.

"Well, this letter is from him--written from Milan. Most tiresome and annoying its coming at this juncture!" He scanned the letter for the second time. "I particularly want to run down into Sicily before Scarpio leaves."

"And does the letter prevent you?" There was interest and a slight hopefulness in the tone of Clodagh's voice.

"I am very much afraid that it does."

"But why?"