The Way of the Spirit

THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT

“Oh! I never looked there; I did not think – “ and she checked herself.

“Hi! that’s one of mine,” exclaimed Rupert, pointing to a battered tin case with Lieutenant R. Ullershaw, R. A., painted on it.

“I remember that box,” said Edith. “I can see it now standing in the hall of your house with the name in beautiful, fresh, white letters. I came to say good-bye to you, but you were out.” “You are very observant!” he said, looking at her with curiosity. “Well, it has seen some wear since then – like its owner.” “Yes,” she said demurely; “only the difference is that the wear has much improved you,” and she glanced at the tall, sol-

dier-like form before her with admiration in her eyes.

“Don’t pay me compliments,” Rupert replied, colouring. “I am not accustomed to them; and if you do, I shall be obliged to return them with interest.”

“You can’t,” Edith answered merrily. “There is nothing of me to be seen in this cloak.”

“Except your face, which is beautiful enough,” he blurted out, whereat it was her turn to colour.

“There,” he went on awkwardly, as at length the cab started, piled up with luggage. “It was awfully kind of you to come to meet me, all alone too, and so late. I never expected it, and I am most grateful.”

“Why, Rupert, how can you suppose that I should do anything else? Unless I had broken my leg or something, I should have been there if it had been three in the morning. It’s the greatest pleasure I have had for a long while, and, Rupert, I – I mean we – are all so proud of you.”

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“Oh, please don’t, Edith,” he broke in. “I have done nothing more than my duty, not very well always, and have been rewarded much above my merits, while many better men were overlooked – perhaps because I am supposed to have prospects. Say no more about it or we shall quarrel.”

“Then I won’t. I don’t want to quarrel, I want to be friends with you, for I haven’t many. But you mustn’t be angry if I can’t help feeling proud all the same that one among the lot of us has at last done something worth the doing, instead of wasting his time and strength and money in every sort of horrid dissipation, like horse-racing and gambling.”

Rupert muttered something about such occupations always leading to trouble.

“Yes, indeed,” she answered; “and you mustn’t think me a prig for speaking like that, for I am not good myself a bit. I wish I were. But we had such a lesson lately, with that wretched Dick with whom I was brought up like a sister, you know, and scandals in the paper, and all that sort of thing, that I can’t help feeling rather bitter, and glad that there is one of us whose name appears in the papers in another way.”

As she spoke the light of a passing carriage-lamp fell full upon her earnest face and wide blue eyes, and Rupert understood how pure and beautiful they were.

Certainly had she so designed it, Edith could have found no better way and opportunity of making an excellent first impression upon the somewhat simple mind of her cousin Rupert.

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At length the growler lumbered up to the well-remem- bered door of the little house in Regent’s Park that he had left so many years ago.

“Go in, Rupert, go at once,” said Edith. “Your dear mother is wild to see you. I’ll pay the cab.”

He hesitated a little, then muttering that it was very good of her, gave way, and ran rather than walked up the steps and through the door which the servant had opened at the sound of wheels, up the stairs also, to the drawing-room on the first floor. And here at last, seated in an invalid-chair, her stiff arms outstretched to clasp him, and words of joy and blessing upon her pale lips, he found the beloved mother whom he had not seen for so many years.

“Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen – “ she murmured presently, and broke off, for her tears choked her.

Rupert rose from his knees by her side, and turning his head away, said in a gruff voice that he must go to see about the luggage. So down he went to find Edith and the two servants struggling madly with his things which the grumpy cabman had refused to bring in.

“Leave go, Edith,” he said angrily. “How can you? Why did you not call me?”

“Because I wouldn’t interrupt you,” she gasped, “but oh, Rupert, do you pack your boxes full of lead, or are all your savings in them?”

“No,” he answered; “only a couple of stone steles and a large bronze Osiris – an Egyptian god, I mean. Go away, you

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girls, I will see about them to-morrow; my night things are in the bag.”

They went readily enough, who desired no further acquaintance with the Colonel’s boxes, one down to the kitchen, the other upstairs with the bag, leaving Rupert and Edith alone.

“Imagine,” she said – “imagine a man who travels about with Egyptian gods in his portmanteau instead of clothes! Well, Rupert, I have sacrificed my best gloves on the altar of your gods,” and she held up her hand and showed the kid split right across.

“I’ll give you another pair,” he ejaculated, still covered with confusion, as they passed together into the dining-room where his supper was waiting.

“Dear me,” said Edith, “this unwonted exercise has made me very hot,” and she threw off first her long cloak, and then her hat, and stood before him in the lamplight.

Oh, she was beautiful, beautiful! or so thought this dweller in deserts, whose heart and mind were soft as wax with joy and thankfulness, and who for years had scarcely spoken to English ladies.

Certainly the promise of Edith’s youth had been fulfilled. The perfect shape, so light and graceful, and yet so tall, the waving hair of rich gold that gleamed like a crown upon her white brow, the large, deep blue eyes, the fine-cut features, redeemed from pride by the rounded cheeks and chin; the gliding, measured movements; all these graces remarkable enough separately, when considered as a whole, made of Edith a most attractive and gracious, it not an absolutely lovely woman. Then and there her charm went home to him; although as yet

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CHAPTER IV

A BUSINESS CONVERSATION

Edith, who was not an early riser, breakfasted in her own room. At half-past nine on the morning following Rupert’s arrival the maid as usual brought up her tray, a newspaper – the Morning Post – and three letters. Two of these were of a sort with which she was very familiar, unpaid millinery bills, but the third was addressed in Lord Devene’s unmistakable handwriting, that was of as hard and uncompromising an appearance as his own face. Throwing aside the bills with a shrug of her rounded shoulders, she opened her noble relative’s epistle. It was brief and to the point:

“Dear Edith, – Come round after breakfast if you can. I shall be in till 10.45, and wish to speak to you. – Yours,

“Devene.”

“Bother!” she said, as she laid it down. “I shall have to scurry through my dressing and take a cab. Well, he must pay for it. I wonder what he wants.”

Lord Devene now lived at Grosvenor Square. Even in the minds of the most progressive latter-day agnostics primeval superstitions are apt to linger. Perhaps it was some sentiment of the sort which causes an African savage to burn the hut

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where a death has occurred and build himself a new one, that induced Lord Devene to sell the Portland Place house after the tragic decease of his first wife, at far below its value, and buy himself another, though it is fair to add that the reason he gave for the transaction was the state of the domestic drains. However this may have been, Lady Devene Number Two never slept in the haunted chamber of Lady Devene Number one.

At 10.46 precisely Edith paid off her cab at the spacious steps of the Grosvenor Square mansion.

“Is Lord Devene in?” she asked of the butler, the same quiet, dark individual who had filled the office years ago in Portland Place.

“Yes, Miss Bonnythorne,” he answered respectfully; “but I was just brushing his hat,” and he glanced doubtfully at the clock.

“Show me in, Talbot; he wishes to see me,” she said, and Talbot bowed in acquiescence.

Although no orders had been given to that effect, it was understood in this establishment that what Miss Bonnythorne desired was to be done.

A few seconds later she was ushered into the long library behind the dining-room, at the end of which Lord Devene was engaged in stamping a letter on a beautiful buhl writing-table near the window.

“Ah! my dear Edith,” he said, in his hard, clear voice, as she glided slowly towards him, “you are only just in time. Another half-minute and I should have been gone.”

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“Half a minute is as good as a century,” she answered. “Lots of things can happen in half a minute, Cousin George. One might die in it, for instance.”

“Yes,” he replied, “or be born, which is worse, or commit a murder, or engage oneself to be married, or as you justly remark, do lots of things. Life is made up of half-minutes, isn’t it – most of them very bad ones,” and he looked at her and smiled that peculiar smile of his which never seemed to get away from the region of his mouth. Pleasant-natured people generally smile with their eyes, others of a different character from their lips alone, like a dog, which is apt to give a sarcastic air to that variable and modified expression of inward satisfaction.

Lord Devene had changed a good deal since last we met him. Then he was sandy-coloured, now he had become grey; indeed his peaked beard was quite white. The wrinkles upon his face also had deepened very much, and even in that not over-lighted room black crow’s-feet were visible beneath his quick, restless eyes. Advancing age had laid its hand upon him although he was barely sixty-tree. Also, he had lost something of his old defiant air; his iron will and resolution seemed to have weakened beneath the attacks of circumstance. He hesitated sometimes and looked at the other side of an argument; he was less sure of his deduced facts, less resolute in their application to his private affairs.

“You look tired,” said Edith, as he came forward and kissed her cool, pink cheek.

“Tired!” he exclaimed, with something like a groan and sinking into a chair. “Would you not be tired if you had scarce-

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ly closed your eyes for three nights? Edith, I can’t sleep, and I don’t know what is to be the end of it, I don’t indeed.”

She threw an anxious glance at him, for these two, notwithstanding the difference of their age and sex, were bound together by strong ties of sympathy, and she was really grieved that he should be ill.

“I am so sorry,” she said, in a gentle voice. “Insomnia is a terrible nuisance, but don’t trouble yourself too much about it, the fit will pass off.”

“Yes,” he answered grimly, “it will pass off, because I shall take drugs this evening. I always do the fourth night, though I hate them.”

“Those stuffs sometimes lead to accidents, Cousin George,” replied Edith, pretending to be absorbed in tracing the flowers of the carpet with the point of her umbrella, but really watching his weary face from beneath her long eyelashes.

“Yes, they sometimes lead to accidents,” he repeated after her, “as I have good reason to know. But after all, accidents are not always undesirable. I daresay that life still seems a very pleasant thing to you, Edith, yet others may think differently.” “You ought not to, Cousin George, with your position and

wealth.”

“I am old enough to know, Edith, that position and wealth, which you rate so highly, do not necessarily spell happiness, or even content. After all, what am I? A rich peer at whose name old women and clergymen turn up their eyes, they don’t quite know why, and whom men are afraid of because I can say sharp things – just one of the very common crowd of rich peers, no more. Then for my private life. Nothing interests me

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now; like the Roman Emperor I can’t find a new excitement, even horse-racing and high stakes bore me. And at home, you know what it is. Well, I am not the first man who has bought a cow and found that she can butt – and bellow.”

Edith smiled, for the vigour of the allusion tickled her. “You know my one hope,” he went on, almost with passion,

“or if you don’t, you are old enough and have brains enough to understand. I wanted sons sprung from a quiet, solid stock, sons who could make some use of all this trash of titles and of riches which it is too late for me to do myself; men who would bear an honourable name and do honourable deeds, not fritter away their youth in pleasures as I did, or in what I took for pleasures, their manhood in the pursuit of idle philosophies that lead nowhere, and the accumulation of useless cash, and their old age in regrets and apprehensions. I wanted sons, it was my one ambition, but – “ and he waved his hand through the empty air – “where are my sons?”

Now Edith knew Lord Devene to be a hard man where his interests were concerned, wicked even, as the word is generally understood, as for instance, Mrs. Ullershaw would understand it. Thus he would gibe at morality and all established ideas, and of every form of religion make an open mock. Yet at this moment there was something so pathetic, so tragic even, about his aspect and attitude, that her heart, none of the softest, ached for him. It was evident to her that his cold, calculated system of life had utterly broken down, that he was exceedingly unhappy – in fact, a complete failure; that although, as he had so often demonstrated, there exists nothing in the world beyond the outward and visible, of which our brain and

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