He led the way to the brown-and-gold craft, and helped the lady to get into it. She sat down on one of the big seats.

"That is the luggage," she said, speaking Italian in a low voice, and pointing to the second carriage from which the maid was stepping. The two boatmen hastened towards it. In a few minutes maid and luggage were installed in a big black gondola, oared by two men standing up, and the brown boat, with the two lads in white and the veiled woman, glided out on the calm water.

The day was a grey dream, mystical in its colourless silence. Blue Italy was shrouded as the woman's face was shrouded. The speechlessness of Nature environed her speechlessness. She was an enigma set in an enigma, and the two rowers looked at her and at the sunless sky, and bent to their oars gravely. A melancholy stole into their sensitive dark faces. This new _padrona_ had already cast a shadow upon their buoyant temperaments.

She noticed it and clasped her hands together in her lap. She was not accustomed yet to her new _role_ in life.

The boat stole on. Como was left behind. The thickly-wooded shores of the lake, dotted with many villas, the tall green mountains covered with chestnut trees, framed the long, winding riband of water which was the way to Casa Felice. There were not many other boats out. The steamer had already started for Bellagio, and was far away near the point where Torno nestles around its sheltered harbour. The black gondola was quickly left behind. Its load of luggage weighed it down. The brown boat was alone in the grey dream of the sunless autumn day.

Behind her veil Lady Holme was watching the two Italian boys, whose lithe bodies bent to their oars, whose dark eyes were often turned upon her with a staring scrutiny, with the morose and almost violent expression that is the child of frustrated curiosity.

Was it true? Was she in real life, or sitting there, watching, thinking, striving to endure, in a dream? Since the accident which had for ever changed her life she had felt many sensations, a torrent of sensations, but never one exactly like this, never one so full of emptiness, chaos, grey vacancy, eternal stillness, unreal oppression and almost magical solitude as this. She had thought she had suffered all things that she could suffer. She had not yet suffered this. Someone, the Governing Power, had held this in reserve. Now it was being sent forth by decree.

Now it was coming upon her. Now it was enveloping her. Now it was rolling round her and billowing away on every side to unimaginably remote horizons.

Another and a new emotion of horror was to be hers. Would the attack of the hidden one upon her never end? Was that quiver of poisoned arrows inexhaustible?

She leaned back against the cushions without feeling them. She wanted to sink back as the mortally wounded sink, to sink down, far down, into the gulf where surely the dying go to find, with their freezing lips, the frozen lips of Death. She shut her eyes.

Presently, with the faint splash of the oars in the water, there mingled a low sound of music. The rower nearest to her was singing in an under voice to keep his boy's heart from succumbing to the spell of melancholy. She listened, still wrapped in this dreadful chaos that was dreamlike. At first the music was a murmur. But presently it grew louder. She could distinguish words now and then. Once she heard _carissima_, a moment afterwards _amore_. Then the poison in which the tip of this last arrow had been curiously steeped began its work in her. The quivering creature hidden within her cowered, shrank, put up trembling hands, cried out, "I cannot endure this thing. I do not know how to. I have never learnt the way. This is impossible for me. This is a demand I have not the capacity to fulfil!" And, even while it cowered and cried out, knew, "This I must endure. This demand I shall be made to fulfil. Nothing will serve me; no outstretched hands, no wailings of despair, no prayers, no curses even will save me. For I am the soul in the hands of the vivisector."

Along the lake, past the old home of La Taglioni, past the Villa Pasta with its long garden, past little Torno with its great round oleanders and its houses crowding to the shore, the boatman sang. Gathering courage as his own voice dispersed his melancholy, and the warm hopes of his youth spread their wings once more, roused by the words of love his lips were uttering, he fearlessly sent out his song. Love in the South was in it, love in the sun, embraces in warm scented nights, longings in moonlight, attainment in darkness. The boy had forgotten the veiled lady, whose shrouded face and whose silence had for a moment saddened him. His hot, bold nature reasserted itself, the fire of his youth blazed up again. He sang as if only the other boatman had been there and they had seen the girls they loved among the trees upon the shore.

And the soul writhed, like an animal stretched and strapped upon the board, to whom no anaesthetic, had been given.

Never before would it have been possible to Lady Holme to believe that the mere sound of a word could inflict such torment upon a heart as the sound of the word _amore_, coming from the boatman's lips, now inflicted upon hers. Each time it came, with its soft beauty, its languor of sweetness--like a word reclining--it flayed her soul alive, and showed her red, raw bareness.

Yet she did not ask the man to stop singing. Few people in the hands of Fate ask Fate for favours. Instinct speaks in the soul and says, "Be silent."

The boat rounded the point of Torno and came at once into a lonelier region of the lake. Autumn was more definite here. Its sadness spoke more plainly. Habitations on the shores were fewer. The mountains were more grim, though grander. And their greyness surely closed in a little upon the boat, the rowers, the veiled woman who was being taken to Casa Felice.

Perhaps to combat the gathering gloom of Nature the boatman sang more loudly, with the full force of his voice. But suddenly he seemed to be struck by the singular contrast opposed to his expansive energy by the silent figure opposite to him. A conscious look came into his face. His voice died away abruptly. After a pause he said,

"Perhaps the signora is not fond of music?"

Lady Holme wanted to speak, but she could not. She and this bright-eyed boy were not in the same world. That was what she felt. He did not know it, but she knew it. And one world cannot speak through infinite space with another.

She said nothing. The boy looked over his shoulder at his companion.

Then, in silence, they both rowed on.

And now that the song had ceased she was again in the grey chaos of the dream, in the irrevocable emptiness, the intense, the enormous solitude that was like the solitude of an unpeopled eternity in which man had no lot.

Presently, with a stroke of his right oar, the boy who had sung turned the boat's prow toward the shore, and Lady Holme saw a large, lonely house confronting them on the nearer bank of the lake. It stood apart.

For a long distance on either side of it there was no other habitation.

The flat, yellow facade rose out of the water. Behind was a dim tangle of densely-growing trees rising up on the steep mountain side towards the grey sky. Lady Holme could not yet see details. The boat was still too far out upon the lake. Nor would she have been able to note details if she had seen them. Only a sort of heavy impression that this house had a pale, haunted aspect forced itself dully upon her.

"Ecco Casa Felice, signora!" said the foremost rower, half timidly, pointing with his brown hand.

She made an intense effort and uttered some reply. The boy was encouraged and began to tell her about the beauties of the house, the gardens, the chasm behind the piazza down which the waterfall rushed, to dive beneath the house and lose itself in the lake. She tried to listen, but she could not. The strangeness of her being alone, hidden behind a dense veil, of her coming to such a retired house in the autumn to remain there in utter solitude, with no object except that of being safe from the intrusion of anyone who knew her, of being hidden from all watching eyes that had ever looked upon her--the strangeness of it obsessed her, was both powerful and unreal. That she should be one of those lonely women of whom the world speaks with a lightly-contemptuous pity seemed incredible to her. Yet what woman was lonelier than she?

The boat drew in toward the shore and she began to see the house more plainly. It was large, and the flat facade was broken in the middle by an open piazza with round arches and slender columns. This piazza divided the house in two. The villa was in fact composed of two square buildings connected together by it. From the boat, looking up, Lady Holme saw a fierce mountain gorge rising abruptly behind the house.

Huge cypresses grew on its sides, towering above the slate roof, and she heard the loud noise of falling water. It seemed to add to the weight of her desolation.

The boat stopped at a flight of worn stone steps. One of the boys sprang out and rang a bell, and presently an Italian man-servant opened a tall iron gate set in a crumbling stone arch, and showed more stone steps leading upward between walls covered with dripping lichen. The boat boy came to help Lady Holme out.

For a moment she did not move. The dreamlike feeling had come upon her with such force that her limbs refused to obey her will. The sound of the falling water in the mountain gorge had sent her farther adrift into the grey, unpeopled eternity, into the vague chaos. But the boy held out his hand, took hers. The strong clasp recalled her. She got up. The Italian man-servant preceded her up the steps into a long garden built up high above the lake on a creeper-covered wall. To the left was the house door. She stood still for an instant looking out over the wide expanse of unruffled grey water. Then, putting her hand up to her veil as if to keep it more closely over her face, she slowly went into the house.

CHAPTER XVIII

DESPAIR had driven Lady Holme to Casa Felice. When she had found that the accident had disfigured her frightfully, and that the disfigurement would be permanent, she had at first thought of killing herself. But then she had been afraid. Life had abruptly become a horror to her. She felt that it must be a horror to her always. Yet she dared not leave it then, in her home in London, in the midst of the sights and sounds connected with her former happiness. After the operation, and the verdict of the doctors, that no more could be done than had been done, she had had an access of almost crazy misery, in which all the secret violence of her nature had rushed to the surface from the depths. Shut up alone in her room, she had passed a day and a night without food. She had lain upon the floor. She had torn her clothes into fragments. The animal that surely dwells at the door of the soul of each human being had had its way in her, had ravaged her, humiliated her, turned her to savagery. Then at last she had slept, still lying upon the floor. And she had waked feeling worn out but calm, desperately calm. She defied the doctors. What did they know of women, of what women can do to regain a vanished beauty? She would call in specialists, beauty doctors, quacks, the people who fill the papers with their advertisements.

Then began a strange defile of rag-tag humanity to the Cadogan Square door--women, men, of all nationalities and pretensions. But the evil was beyond their power. At last an American specialist, who had won renown by turning a famous woman of sixty into the semblance of a woman of six-and-thirty--for a short time--was called in. Lady Holme knew that his verdict must be final. If he could do nothing to restore her vanished loveliness nothing could be done. After being closeted with her for a long time he came out of her room. There were tears in his eyes.

To the footman who opened the hall door, and who stared in surprise, he explained his emotion thus.

"Poor lady," he said. "It's a hopeless case."

"Ah!" said the man, who was the pale footman Lady Holme had sent with the latch-key to Leo Ulford.

"Hopeless. It's a hard thing to have to tell a lady she'll always be--be--"

"What, sir?" said the footman.

"Well--what people won't enjoy looking at."

He winked his eyes. He was a little bald man, with a hatchet face that did not suggest emotion.

"And judging by part of the left side of the face, I guess she must have been almost a beauty once," he added, stepping into the square.

That was Lady Holme now. She had to realise herself as a woman whom people would rather not look at.

All this time she had not seen Fritz. He had asked to see her. He had even tried to insist on seeing her, but so long as there was any hope in her of recovering her lost beauty she had refused to let him come near her. The thought of his eyes staring upon the tragic change in her face sent cold creeping through her veins. But when the American had gone she realised that there was nothing to wait for, that if she were ever to let Fritz see her again it had better be now. The bandages in which her face had been swathed had been removed. She went to a mirror and, setting her teeth and clenching her hands, looked into it steadily.

She did not recognise herself. As she stood there she felt as if a dreadful stranger had come into the room and was confronting her.

The accident, and the surgical treatment that had followed upon it, had greatly altered the face. The nose, once fine and delicate, was now coarse and misshapen. A wound had permanently distorted the mouth, producing a strange, sneering expression. The whole of the right side of the face was puffy and heavy-looking, and drawn down towards the chin.

It was also at present discoloured. For as Lady Holme lay under the car she had been badly burnt. The raw, red tinge would no doubt fade away with time, but the face must always remain unsightly, even a little grotesque, must always show to the casual passer-by a woman who had been the victim of a dreadful accident.

Lady Holme stared at this woman for a long time. There were no tears in her eyes. Then she went to the dressing-table and began to make up her face. Slowly, deliberately, with a despairing carefulness, she covered it with pigments till she looked like a woman in Regent Street. Her face became a frightful mask, and even then the fact that she was disfigured was not concealed. The application of the pigments began to cause her pain. The right side of her face throbbed. She looked dreadfully old, too, with this mass of paint and powder upon her--like a hag, she thought. And it was obvious that she was trying to hide something.

Anyone, man or woman, looking upon her, would divine that so much art could only be used for the concealment of a dreadful disability. People, seeing this mask, would suppose--what might they not suppose? The pain in her face became horrible. Suddenly, with a cry, she began to undo what she had done. When she had finished she rang the bell. Her maid knocked at the door. Without opening it she called out:

"Is his lordship in the house?"

"Yes, my lady. His lordship has just come in."

"Go and ask him to come up and see me."

"Yes, my lady."