Dartmouth got up and walked slowly down the long room, his hands clasped behind him, his head bent. Heaven knew his "sins" had been many; and if disaster had never ensued, it had been more by good luck than good management. And yet--he could trace a certain punishment in every case; the woman punished by the hardening of her nature and the probability of complete moral dementia; the man by satiety and an absolute loss of power to value what he possessed. Therefore, for the woman a sullen despair and its consequences; for the man a feverish striving for that which he could never find, or, if found, would have the gall in the nectar of having let slip the ability to unreservedly and innocently enjoy.

And if sin be measured by its punishment! He recalled those years in eternity, with their h.e.l.l of impotence and inaction. He recalled the torment of spirit, the uncertainty worse than death. And Weir? Surely no two erring mortals had ever more terribly reaped the reward of their wrong-doing.

What did it signify? That he was to give her up? that a love which had begun in sin must not end in happiness? But his love had the strength of its generations; and the impatient, virile, control-disdaining nature of the man rebelled. Surely their punishment had been severe enough and long enough. Had they not been sent back to earth and almost thrown into each other's arms in token that guilt was expiated and vengeance satisfied? Dartmouth stopped suddenly as this solution presented itself, then impatiently thrust a chair out of his way and resumed his walk. The consciousness that their affection was the perpetuation of a l.u.s.tful love disheartened and revolted him. Until that memory disappeared his punishment would not be over.

He stopped and leaned his hand on the table. "I thought I was a big enough man to rise above conventional morality," he said. "But I doubt if any man is when circ.u.mstances have combines to make him seriously face the question. He might, if born a red Indian, but not if saturated in his plastic days with the codes and dogmas of the world.

They cling, they cling, and reason cannot oust them. The society in whose enveloping, penetrating atmosphere he has lived his life decrees that it is a sin to seduce another man's wife or to live with a woman outside the pale of the Church. Therefore sin, down in the roots of his consciousness, he believes it; therefore, to perpetuate a sinful love--I am becoming a petty moralist," he broke off impatiently; "but I can't help it. I am a triumph of civilization."

He stood up and threw back his shoulders. "Let it go for the present,"

he said. "At another time I may look at it differently or reason myself out of it. Now I will try--"

He looked towards his study door with a flash in his eyes. He half turned away, then went quickly into the little room and sat down before the desk. Every day he would make the attempt to write, and finally that obstinate wedge in his brain would give way and his soul be set free.

He drew paper before him and took up a pen. For an hour he sat motionless, bending all his power of intellect, all the artistic instincts of his nature to the luring of his song-children from that closed wing in his brain. But he could not even hear their peremptory knocks as on the nights when he had turned from those summonses in agony and terror. He would have welcomed them now and dragged the visitants into the sunlight of his intelligence and forced the song from their throats.

He took the poem from his pocket and read it over. But it gave him no inspiration, it dulled his brain, rather, and made him feel baffled and helpless. But he would not give up; and dawn found him still with his pen in his hand. Then he went to bed and slept for a few hours.

That day he gave little attention to his affairs. His melancholy, held at bay by the extraordinary experience through which he had pa.s.sed, returned and claimed him. He shut himself up in his library until the following morning, and alternated the hours with fruitless attempts to write and equally fruitless attempts to solve the problem in regard to Weir. The next day and night, with the exception of a few hours'

restless sleep, were spent in the same way.

At the end of the third day not a word had flowed from his pen, not a step nearer had he drawn to Weir. A dull despair took possession of him. Had those song-children fled, discouraged, and was he to be withheld from the one consolation of earthly happiness? He pushed back the chair in which he had been sitting before his desk and went into the library. He opened one of the windows and looked out. How quiet it was! He could hear the rising wind sighing through the yews, but all nature was elsewise asleep. What was she doing down at Rhyd-Alwyn?

Sleeping calmly, or blindly striving to link the past with the present? He had heard from her but once since he left. Perhaps she too had had a revelation. He wondered if it were as quiet there as here, or if the waves at the foot of the castle still thundered unceasingly on. He wondered if she would shrink from him when the truth came to her. Doubtless, for she had been reared in the most rigid of moral conventions, and naturally catholic-minded as she was, right, to her, was right, and wrong was wrong. He closed the window and, throwing himself on a sofa, fell asleep. But his dreams were worse than his waking thoughts. He was wandering in eternal darkness looking for someone lost ages ago, and a voice beside him was murmuring that he would never find her, but must go on--on--forever; that the curse of some crime committed centuries ago was upon him, and that he must expiate it in countless existences and eternal torment. And far off, on the very confines of s.p.a.ce, floated a wraith-like thing with the lithe grace of a woman whom he had loved on earth. And she was searching for him, but they described always the same circle and never met. And then, finally, after millions of years, an invisible hand clutched him and bore him upward onto a plane, hitherto unexplored, then left him to grope his way as he could. All was blackness and chaos. Around him, as he pa.s.sed them, he saw that dark suns were burning, but there was nothing to conduct their light, and they shed no radiance on the horrors of their world. Below him was an abyss in which countless souls were struggling, blindly, helplessly, until they should again be called to duty in some sphere of material existence.

The stillness at first was deathlike, oppressive; but soon he became aware of a dull, hissing noise, such as is produced on earth by the fusion of metals. The invisible furnaces were lost in the impenetrable darkness, but the heat was terrific; the internal fires of earth or those of the Bible's h.e.l.l must be sickly and pale in comparison with this awful, invisible atmosphere of flame. Now and then a planet, which, obeying Nature's laws even here, revolved around its mockery of a sun, fell at his feet a river of fire. There was stillness no longer. The roaring and the exploding of the fusing metals, or whatever it might be, filled the vast region like the hoa.r.s.e cries of wild beasts and the hissing of angry serpents. It was deafening, maddening. And there was no relief but to plunge into that abyss and drown individuality. He flew downward, and as he paused a moment on the brink, he looked across to the opposite bank and saw a figure about to take the leap like himself. It was a dim, shadowy shape, but even in the blackness he knew its waving grace. And she pointed down into the abyss of blind, helpless, unintelligent torment, and then--

XII.

Dartmouth suddenly found himself standing upright, his shoulders clutched in a pair of strong hands, and Hollington's anxious face a few inches from his own.

"What the devil is the matter with you, Hal?" exclaimed Hollington.

"Have you set up a private lunatic asylum, or is it but prosaic dyspepsia?"

"Becky!" exclaimed Dartmouth, as he grasped the situation. "I _am_ so glad to see you. Where did you come from?"

"You frightened your devoted Jones to death with one of your starvation moods, and he telegraphed for me. The idea of a man having the blues in the second month of his engagement to the most charming girl in Christendom!"

"Don't speak to me of her," exclaimed Dartmouth, throwing himself into a chair and covering his face with his hands.

"Whew! What's up? You haven't quarrelled already? Or won't the governor give his consent?"

"No," said Dartmouth, "that's not it."

"Then what the devil is the matter? Is--is she dead?"

"No."

"Was she married to some other man before?"

"No!"

"I beg your pardon; I was merely exhausting the field of conjecture.

Will you kindly enlighten me?"

"If I did, you would say I was a lunatic."

"I have been inclined to say so occasionally before--"

"Becky, Weir Penrhyn is my--" And then he stopped. The ludicrous side of the matter had never appealed to him, but he was none the less conscious of how ridiculous the thing would appear to another.

"Your what? Your wife? Are you married to her already, and do you want me to break it to the old gentleman? What kind of a character is he?

Shall I go armed?"

"She is not my wife, thank G.o.d! If she were--"

"For heaven's sake, Harold, explain yourself. Can it be possible that Miss Penrhyn is like too many other women?"

Dartmouth sprang to his feet, his face white to the lips.

"How dare you say such a thing?" he exclaimed. "If it were any other man but you, I'd blow out his brains."

Hollington got up from the chair he had taken and, grasping Dartmouth by the shoulders, threw him back into his chair.

"Now look here, Harold," he said; "let us have no more d.a.m.ned nonsense. If you will indulge in lugubrious hints which have but one meaning, you must expect the consequences. I refuse to listen to another word unless you come out and speak plain English."

He resumed his seat, and Dartmouth clasped his hands behind his head and stared moodily at the fire. In a few moments he turned his eyes and fixed them on Hollington.

"Very well," he said, "I will tell you the whole story from beginning to end. Heaven knows it is a relief to speak; but if you laugh, I believe I shall kill you."

"I will not laugh," said Hollington. "Whatever it is, I see it has gone hard with you."

Dartmouth began with the night of the first attempt of his suppressed poetical genius to manifest itself, and gave Hollington a comprehensive account of each detail of his subsequent experiences, down to the reading of the letters and the spiritual retrospect they had induced. He did not tell the story dramatically; he had no fire left in him; he stated it in a matter-of-fact way, which was impressive because of the speaker's indisputable belief in his own words. Hollington felt no desire to laugh; on the contrary, he was seriously alarmed, and he determined to knock this insane freak of Harold's brain to atoms, if mortal power could do it, and regardless of consequences to himself.

When Dartmouth had finished, Hollington lit a cigar and puffed at it for a moment, meditatively regarding his friend meanwhile. Then he remarked, in a matter-of-fact tone:

"So you are your own grandfather, and Miss Penrhyn is her own grandmother."

Dartmouth moved uneasily. "It sounds ridiculous--but--don't chaff."

"My dear boy, I was never more serious in my life. I merely wanted to be sure that I had got it straight. It is A.B.C. by this time to you, but it has exploded in my face like a keg of gunpowder, and I am a trifle dazed. But, to come down to deadly earnest, will you allow me to speak to you from the medical point of view? You know I had some idea at one time of afflicting the community with one more physician, until we stumbled on those coal mines, and my prospective patients were spared premature acquaintance with the golden stairs. May I speak as an unfledged doctor, but still as one burdened with unused knowledge?"

"You can say what you like."

"Very well, then. You may or may not be aware that what you are pleased to call the blues, or moods, are, in your case, nothing more or less than melancholia. When they are at their worst they are the form known as melancholia attonita. In other words, you are not only steeped in melancholy, but your brain is in, a state of stupor: you are all but comatose. These attacks are not frequent, and are generally the result of a powerful mental shock or strain. I remember you had one once after you had crammed for two months for an examination and couldn't pull through. You scared the life out of the tutors and the boys, and it was not until I threatened to put you under the pump that you came to. Your ordinary attacks are not so alarming to your friends, but when indulged in too frequently, they are a good deal more dangerous."

He paused a moment, but Dartmouth made no reply, and he went on.

"Any man who yields habitually to melancholia may expect his brain, sooner or later, to degenerate from its original strength, and relax the toughness and compactness of its fibre. Absolute dementia may not be the result for some years, but there will be occasional and painful indications of the end for a long s.p.a.ce before it arrives. The indications, as a rule, will a.s.sume the form of visions and dreams and wild imaginings of various sorts. Now do you understand me?"