Chiltern's voice aroused her. He was standing in the breakfast room talking to the old butler. "You're sure there were no other letters, Starling, besides these bills? Honora became tense. "No, sir," she heard the butler say, and she seemed to detect in his deferential voice the note of anxiety suppressed in the other's. "I'm most particular about letters, sir, as one who lived so many years with your father would be. All that came were put in your study, Mr. Hugh." "It doesn't matter," answered Chiltern, carelessly, and stepped out into the garden. He caught sight of her, hesitated the fraction of a moment, and as he came forward again the cloud in his eyes vanished. And yet she was aware that he was regarding her curiously. "What," he said gayly, "still here? "It is too beautiful!" she cried. "I could sit here forever." She lifted her face trustfully, smilingly, to his, and he stooped down and kissed it. To give the jealous fates not the least chance to take offence, the higher life they were to lead began at once. And yet it seemed at times to Honora as though this higher life were the gift the fates would most begrudge: a gift reserved for others, the pretensions to which were a kind of knavery. Merriment, forgetfulness, music, the dance; the cup of pleasure and the feast of Babylonthese might more readily have been vouchsafed; even deemed to have been bargained for. But to take that which supposedly had been renounced virtue, sobriety, security, respect would this be endured? She went about it breathlessly, like a thief. Never was there a more exemplary household. They rose at half-past seven, they breakfasted at a quarter after eight; at nine, young Mr. Manning, the farm superintendent, was in waiting, and Hugh spent two or more hours in his company, inspecting, correcting, planning; for two thousand acres of the original Chiltern estate still remained. Two thousand acres which, since the General's death, had been at sixes and sevens. The General's study, which was Hugh's now, was piled high with new and bulky books on cattle and cultivation of the soil. Government and state and private experts came and made tests and went away again; new machinery arrived, and Hugh passed hours in the sun, often with Honora by his side, installing it. General Chiltern had been president and founder of the Grenoble National Bank, and Hugh took up his duties as a director. Honora sought, with an energy that had in it an element of desperation, to keep pace with her husband. For she was determined that he should have no interests in which she did not share. In those first days it was her dread that he might grow away from her, and instinct told her that now or never must the effort be made. She, too, studied farming; not from books, but from him. In their afternoon ride along the shady river road, which was the event of her day, she encouraged him to talk of his plans and problems, that he might thus early form the habit of bringing them to her. And the unsuspecting male in him responded, innocent of the simple subterfuge. After an exhaustive discourse on the elements lacking in the valley soil, to which she had listened in silent intensity, he would exclaim: "By George, Honora, you're a continual surprise to me. I had no idea a woman would take an interest in these things, or grasp them the way you do." Lordly commendations these, and she would receive them with a flush of gratitude. Nor was it ever too hot, or she too busy with household cares, for her to follow him to the scene of his operations, whatever these might be: she would gladly stand for an hour listening to a consultation with the veterinary about an ailing cow. Her fear was lest some matter of like importance should escape her. She had private conversations with Mr. Manning, that she might surprise her husband by an unsuspected knowledge. Such were her ruses. The housekeeper who had come up from New York was the subject of a conjugal conversation. "I am going to send her away, Hugh," Honora announced. "I don't believe your mother had one." The housekeeper's departure was the beginning of Honora's real intimacy with Starling. Complicity, perhaps, would be a better word for the commencement of this relationship. First of all, there was an inspection of the family treasures: the table-linen, the silver, and the china -Sèvres, Royal Worcester, and Minton, and the priceless dinner-set of Lowestoft to Honora that he spoke as one who re- Although by unalterable custom he submitted, at breakfast, the menus of the day to Hugh, the old butler came afterwards to Honora's boudoir during her struggle with the account books. Sometimes she would look up and surprise his eyes fixed upon her, and one day she found at her elbow a long list made out in a painstaking hand. "What's this, Starling?" she asked. "If you please, madame," he answered, "they're the current prices in the markets-here." She thanked him. Nor was his exquisite delicacy in laying stress upon the locality lost upon her. That he realized the magnitude-for her-of the task to which she had set herself; that he sympathized deeply with the spirit which had undertaken it, she was as sure as though he had said so. He helped her thus in a dozen unobtrusive ways, never once recognizing her ignorance; but he made her feel the more that that ignorance was a shameful thing not to be spoken of. Speculations upon him were irresistible. She was continually forgetting the nature of his situation, and he grew gradually to typify in her mind the Grenoble of the past. She knew his principles as well as though he had spoken them - which he never did. For him, the world had become awry; he abhorred divorce, and that this modern abomination had touched the house of Chiltern was a calamity that had shaken the very foundations of his soul. In spite of this, he had remained. Why? Perhaps from habit, perhaps from love of the family and Hugh,- perhaps to see! And having stayed, fascination had laid hold of him, — of that she was sure, and his affections had incomprehensibly become involved. He was as one assisting at a high tragedy not unworthy of him, the outcome of which he never for an instant doubted. And he gave Honora the impression that he alone, inscrutable, could have pulled aside the curtain and revealed the end. CHAPTER XIII OF THE WORLD BEYOND THE GATES HONORA paused in her toilet, and contemplated for a moment the white skirt that her maid presented. "I think I'll wear the blue pongee to-day, Mathilde," she said. The decision for the blue pongee was the culmination of a struggle begun with the opening of her eyes that morning. It was Sunday, and the time was at hand when she must face the world. Might it not be delayed a little while a week longer? For the remembrance of the staring eyes which had greeted her on her arrival at the station at Grenoble troubled her. It seemed to her a cruel thing that the house of God should hold such terrors for her to-day she had a longing for it that she had never felt in her life before. Chiltern was walking in the garden, waiting for her to breakfast with him, and her pose must have had in it an element of the self-conscious when she appeared, smilingly, at the door. "Why, you're all dressed up," he said. "It's Sunday, Hugh." "So it is," he agreed, with what may have been a studied lightness-she could not tell. "I'm going to church," she said bravely. "I can't say much for old Stopford," declared her husband. "His sermons used to arouse all the original sin in me, when I had to listen to them." She poured out his coffee. "I suppose one has to take one's clergyman as one does the weather," she said. "We go to church for something else besides the sermon - don't we?” "I suppose so, if we go at all," he replied. "Old Stopford imposes a pretty heavy penalty." |