'It is a nervous complaint,' faltered Ida; 'he will soon get over it, I hope and believe, if we take proper care of him. He is very excitable, very unlike his old self; and you must not be astonished at anything he may say or do.'

'You don't mean that he is out of his mind?' said Bessie, with an awe-stricken look.

'No, no; nothing of the kind--at least, nothing that is likely to be lasting; but he has delusions sometimes--a kind of hysterical affection.

Oh, Bessie, I did not want you to know anything; I tried to keep you away.'

Bessie had her arms round her old friend, and Ida, quite broken down by the fears and agitations of the last six weeks, hid her face upon Mrs.

Jardine's shoulder and sobbed aloud. It was a complete collapse of heroic resolutions, of that unflinching courage and strength of mind which had sustained her so long; but it was also a blessed relief to the overcharged heart and brain.

'It is very selfish of me to plague you with my troubles,' she said, when Bessie had kissed and comforted her with every expression of sympathy and tenderness in the gamut of womanly love, 'but I wanted you to be prepared for the worst. And now, let me help you to change your gown, if you are going to make any change for dinner. The gong will sound in less than half-an-hour.'

'Oh, those gongs, they always fill me with despair!' cried Bess. 'I am never ready when ours begins to buzz through the house, like a gigantic, melancholy-mad b.u.mble bee. Of course I must change, dear; firstly, because I am smothered with dust, and sixthly, as Dogberry says, because I have brought a pretty gown to do honour to Wimperfield.'

And Bessie, rushing to her portmanteau, and tearing out its contents in a frantic way, shook out the laces and ribbons of a gracious Watteau-like arrangement in Madras muslin, while she chattered to her hostess.

'Shall I send for Jane Dyson?' the immaculate maid, who had lived with an archbishop's wife. 'She can unpack your things.'

'Not for worlds. I have oceans to tell you, and I should hate that prim personage looking on and listening. Such news, Ida: Urania is engaged.'

'At last!'

'That was what everybody said. This was her sixth season, and it was rapidly becoming a case of real distress, and she was getting blue, oh, to a frightful extent--a perambulatory epitome of Huxley-c.u.m-Darwin,--that's what our boys call her. And now, after refusing ever so many nice young men in the Government offices because they were not rich enough for her, she is going to make a great match, and marry a nasty old man.'

'Oh, Bessie! nasty and old!'

'Strong language, isn't it? but the gentleman has been to Kingthorpe, and there is no doubt about the fact. One wouldn't mind his being elderly if he were only a gentleman; but he is not.'

'Then why in mercy's name does Miss Rylance marry him?'

'Because he is Sir Tobias Vandilk, one of the richest men on the Stock Exchange. He is of Dutch extraction, they say; and this is supposed to account for his utter dest.i.tution with regard to English aspirates. He has a palace in Park Lane, and a park in Yorkshire; gives dinners of a most _recherche_ description every Thursday in the season; and immense shooting parties, at which I am told he and his friends slaughter quintillions of pheasants, and flood the London market every autumn; and it is whispered that he has lent money to royal personages.'

'Is Urania happy?'

'If she is not, I know who is. Dr. Rylance looks twenty years younger since the engagement. He was beginning to get weighed down by Urania. You remember with what a firm hand he managed her in days gone by! Well, after she took to Huxley and Darwin, and the rest of them, that was all over. She was always tripping him up with some little shred of scientific knowledge, fresh from Tyndall; always attacking his old-fashioned notions with some new light. He was as merry as a boy let loose from school when he came down to Kingthorpe the other day. He went to one of our picnics, and made himself tremendously agreeable. We took Sir Tobias to see the Abbey, and had afternoon tea there. He pretended to admire everything, but in a patronising way that made me savage; affected to think Wendover Abbey a little bit of a place, as compared with his modern barrack in Yorkshire, with its riding-school, tan gallop, range of orchard-houses, picture-gallery, and so on. And Urania's grandeur is something too large for words. "You and Mr. Jardine must come and stay with us at Hanborough some day," she said, as if she were promising me a treat; so I told her plainly that my husband's parish work made such a visit impossible. "Oh, but some day," she said sweetly. "Never," said I; "we are rooted in the chalk of Salisbury Plain." "Poor things!" she sighed, "what a destiny!"'

'And you all drank tea at the Abbey,' said Ida, musingly; 'dear old Abbey! I can fancy you there, in the long low library, with the afternoon sunlight shining in at the open windows, and Mary Stuart smiling at you from the panelling over one fire-place, and crafty Elizabeth looking sideways at you from over the other, and the Dijon roses clambering and twining round every lattice.'

'How well you remember the old place. Isn't it horrid of Brian to stay away all these years?'

'It is--rather eccentric.'

'Eccentric! It is positively wicked, when we know how agreeable he can make himself. Why, in that happy summer we spent at the Abbey he brightened all our lives. Didn't he, now, Ida?'

'He was very kind,' faltered Ida, like a slave giving evidence under torture. 'Have you heard from him lately?'

'Not for more than a year, but father hears of him through his London agent, and we know he is well. He sent us all lovely presents last Christmas--Indian shawls, prayer-rugs, ivories, carved sandalwood boxes.

The Vicarage is glorified by his gifts.'

The gong began booming and buzzing as Bessie pinned a big yellow rose among the folds of her Madras fichu, and Mrs. Jardine and her hostess went down to the drawing-room lovingly arms entwined, as in that long-ago holiday, when Ida was a guest at Kingthorpe.

Lady Palliser and Mr. Jardine were in the drawing-room talking to each other, while Brian paced up and down the room, pale and wan, as he had looked yesterday in the church. He offered his arm to Bessie at his wife's bidding, without a word. Mr. Jardine followed, with Lady Palliser and Ida; and the little party of five sat down to dinner with a blight upon them, the awful shadow of domestic misery. There are many such dinners eaten every day in England--than which the Barmecide's was a more cheerful feast, a red herring and bread and b.u.t.ter in a garret a banquet of sweeter savour.

For the first two courses Brian preserved a sullen silence. He ate nothing--did not even pretend to eat--and drank the sherry and soda-water which were offered to him without comment. With the third course the butler, who had supplied him with the prescribed amount of sherry, gave him plain soda-water. He looked at his tumbler for a moment or so, and burst out laughing.

'Byron used to drink soda-water at dinners when he was the rage in London society,' he said. 'It was _chic_, and Byron was like Sara Bernhardt--he would have done anything to get himself talked about.'

'I should have thought the fame he won by "Childe Harold" would have satisfied him, without any outside notoriety as a total abstainer,' said Mr. Jardine.

'Oh, if you think that, you don't know Byron,' exclaimed Brian. 'He wanted people always to be talking of him. A man may write the greatest book that was ever written, and the world will accept it, and put him on a pinnacle; but they soon leave off talking about him unless he does something. He must keep a bear in his rooms--quarrel with his wife--wear a pea-green overcoat--cross the Channel in a balloon--and go on doing queer things--if he wants to be famous. Byron was an adept in the art of _reclame_--just as Whistler is on his smaller scale. It wasn't enough for Byron to be the greatest poet of modern Europe, he wanted to be the most notorious rake and _roue_ into the bargain.'

'It was a curious nature,' said Mr. Jardine--'half gold and half tinsel.'

'Ah, but the tinsel caught the public. I really don't think, for a man who wants to make a stir in his generation, a fellow could have played his cards better than Byron did.'

'It is a life that one can only contemplate with infinite pity and regret--a great nature, wrecked by small vices and smaller follies,' said Mr. Jardine; and then Brian took up the strain, and talked with loud a.s.sertiveness of the right of genius to do what it likes in the world, launching out into a broad declaration of infidelity and rank materialism, which shocked and scared the three women who heard him.

Ida gave an imploring look at her stepmother, and they all three rose simultaneously, and hastily retired, driven away by that blatant blasphemy. John Jardine closed the door upon the ladies, and then went quietly back to his seat. He heard all that Brian had to say--he listened to his wild ramblings as to the voice of an oracle; and then, when Brian had poured out his little stock of argument in favour of materialism, had quoted Aristotle, and Holbach, and Hume, and Comte, and Darwin, and had perverted their arguments against a personal G.o.d into the divine right of man to ruin his soul and body, John Jardine, who had read more of Aristotle than Brian knew of all the metaphysicians put together, and who had Plato, Kant, and Dugald Stewart in his heart of hearts, gravely took up the strain, and made mincemeat of Mr. Wendover's philosophy.

Brian listened meekly, and did not appear to take offence when the Vicar went on to warn him against the peril here and hereafter of a life misspelt, a const.i.tution ruined by self-indulgence, talents unused, opportunities neglected. The pale and haggard wretch sat cowering, as the voice of reproof and warning went on, solemnly, earnestly, with the warm sympathy which springs from perfect pity, from the Christian's wide love of his fellow-men.

'For your wife's--for your own sake--for the love of Him in whose image you were made--wrestle with the devil that possesses you,' said John Jardine, when they had risen to leave the room, laying his hand affectionately upon Brian's shoulder. 'Believe me, victory is possible.'

'Not now,' Brian answered, with a semi-hysterical laugh. 'It is too late.

There comes an hour, you know, even in your all-merciful creed, when the door is shut. "Too late, ye cannot enter now." The door is shut upon me.

I fooled my life away in London. It was pleasant enough while it lasted, but it's over now. I can say with Cleopatra--"O my life in Egypt, O, the dalliance and the wit."'

They were in the hall by this time. The broad marble-paved hall, with its marble figures of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, of which n.o.body ever took any more notice than if they had been umbrella stands. They were crossing the hall on their way to the drawing-room, when Brian suddenly clutched John Jardine's arm and reeled heavily against him, with an appalling cry.

'Hold me!' he screamed; 'hold me! I am going down!'

It was one of the dreadful symptoms of his dreadful disease. All at once, with the solid black and white marble beneath his feet, he felt himself upon the edge of a precipice, felt himself falling, falling, falling, into a bottomless pit.

It was an awful feeling, a waking nightmare. He sank exhausted into John Jardine's arms, panting for breath.

'You are safe, it is only a momentary delusion,' said Mr. Jardine. 'Have you had that feeling often before?'

'Yes--sometimes--pretty often,' gasped Brian.

Mr. Jardine's wide reading and large experience as a parish priest had made him half a doctor. He knew that this was one of the symptoms of delirium tremens, and a symptom seen mostly in cases of a dangerous type.

He had suspected the nature of Mr. Wendover's disease before now; but now he was certain of it.

He went with Brian to his room, advising him to lie down and rest. Brian appearing consentient, Mr. Jardine left him, with Towler in attendance.

In the drawing-room the Vicar contrived to get a little quiet talk with Ida, while at the other end of the room Lady Palliser was expatiating to Bessie upon the minutest details of her boy's illness. He invited Ida's confidence, and frankly told her that he had fathomed the nature of Brian's disease.

'I have seen too many cases in the course of my parochial experience not to recognise the painful symptoms. I am so sorry for you and for him. It is a bright young life thrown away.'

'Do you think he will not recover?'