Apcar, Diana Agabeg. Susan.

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SUSAN ________

CHAPTER I Susan and Cousin Stephen Susan Malcolm was her name, she had never been called “Susie” or anything else, she had never had a pet name of any kind; all her friends united in agreeing that homely “Susan” was the last name her godfather should have given her, and yet to have abbreviated it to a “Susie” or “Suzette” would have been as ridiculous as to have called a woman with a Madonna face “Doll” or “Dolly”.

Why was she baptized by the cognomen of “Susan?” It did not belong to any of her kinswomen, it was not the name of a loved and esteemed friend given to her.

Susan had come into the world a weakly red-haired baby, and Mrs. Malcolm who was frantic: “Whoever told the child to get red Hair?” “Whoever knew an Armenian to possess a personal defect of this nature? One in a million, perhaps” “Well one in a million must fall to somebody’s share” Mr. Malcolm had endeavoured to say soothingly, but his wife had been unconsolable, and had turned away from this heinous offender against the canons of beauty; if Mrs. Malcolm’s thoughts had been defined, they might have found expression in the words “so young and so hardened”.

“It is not the little thing’s fault,” Mr. Malcolm had essayed once again in extenuation of its offense, “I assure you, Mariam I had an uncle who possessed hair of that colour, but it darkened as he grew into a man; I remember him with just a tinge of red in his beard”.

“And do you think she is going to have a beard and all the red from her head should travel to her chin?” asked Mrs. Malcolm indignantly.

“No! but dear, she will outgrow it as my uncle did; and remember also that we live under an Indian sun.”

Mrs. Malcolm had been dumb with exasperation, just for a little moment though, for in one moment she had recovered her speech again. “Was there ever a man like John for propounding the most absurd theories! Was the sun going to frizzle

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up the baby’s hair?” she asked. “Oh dear! Oh dear! As if all her troubles were not enough that a child of hers should go and get red hair!”

Then Susan’s grandmother, who at the time of Susan’s entrance into the world had had the story of an English novel read out to her, of a certain red-haired heroine named “Susan” whom nobody admired, but whom at last a man rich and clever and good, married and loved very much, took the little criminal into her arms and said that she should be called “Susan” and that when she grew up, a man rich and clever and good, would marry her and love her very much.

Susan had not yet fulfilled her grandmother’s prediction, but her father’s favourable prognostication had come to pass, she had however not only outgrown the red hair, but the delicacy of her childhood, and at twenty two years of age was a strong, straight, supple-limbed girl with the grace of a conscious womanhood in her development.

“However could they have given you such a name, dear? You so clever and charming” said an admiring female friend, and Susan had replied in the words of Juliet, with a slight variation and attenuation: “ ‘What’s Susan? It is nor hand nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a woman.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet’ “

“Call yourself ‘Susanne’ that would be a trifle elegant” had said another admiring friend, and Susan had shaken her head in non acquiescence. “ ‘Susanne’ would not make me happier or better so let me be ‘Susan’ as I have always been.”

As her godfather had long since been numbered with the majority, her friends were denied the chance of remonstrating with him for the share he had had in this “Susan” concern—the grandmother was also dead, and so by a tacit conformity the friends agreed at last it was best to be reconciled to the irretrievable, particularly as Susan herself was so serenely content.

Perhaps some of her friends considered that even “Susan” became beautiful as far as richness and contrasts of colouring, and loveliness of contour and features went; the red hair had darkened into black as her great uncle’s before her; but hair that curled and rippled and grew in luxuriant masses, eyes of eastern languor, of eastern shadow and brilliance, Susan had none of these things. She was beautiful when she walked into a room, when she welcomed her mother’s guests, when her face lighted up into a smile of recognition, or her soft hand clasped yours in a greeting or parting shake, when her low laughter floated out and died in a trill of musical cadence, and her pleasant voice was heard in the social throng; when (sweeter still) each varying emotion of her heart reflected the image in her face, lingering in the brown depths of her eyes, breaking into wordless utterance in the changing modulations of her voice, and when with the exquisite gentleness of manner, and grace of movement and gesture, the charm grew and grew, till after first having called Susan Malcolm a plain girl, you ended by thinking her a most charming woman.

Susan in the tout-ensemble was charming; imperceptibly the charm grew, and where it began and ended it was difficult to say; perhaps the fact could be accounted

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for in some measure by the quick, understanding sympathy, that lively interest in almost everything on earth that surrounded her; she was a woman in whom a man might find a good talker, and a good listener to ever so many varied subjects. She would sympathise with him on the frayed ends of his shirt collar as on his dearest interests and concerns, she could listen to the recitals of the light amusements of the day, and to a discovery of science, or the politics of a country.

Susan was by no means what would be dubbed a clever woman now-a-days, she had studied neither metaphysics nor pneumatics, she had scarcely spent an hour of her life on angles or parallelograms, indeed there were many branches of human learning that were as a dead letter to her, but men who came to converse with her never remembered that, they admired her for her sweet womanly grace and sweet womanly charm, and forgot everything else.

It was a July morning and Susan was economizing the time between chota hazri and breakfast. She had dressed early, and she sat in her room writing invitations for a Cinderella dance that was to take place on the following Tuesday; she paused for a moment with pen in hand and gazed out of the window near her, it commanded a view of the carriage drive and the gate of the house; it was a wet morning, and so she had preferred sitting in her cosy room. The rain came pattering against the glass which she had barred to shut out the gusts of wind, and trickled down the panes in straggling streams. Look at Susan for a moment as she gazes out of the panes of glass into space beyond; her face is rather angular in outline, and the features have transgressed the lines of regularity; the soft dark hair unbroken by a ripple, is gathered away from a forehead that could not be designated as either high or low; her dress of cambric with its embroidered trimmings and dainty ribbons wears well on her lithe figure; in the poise of her head, in the action of her right hand holding the pen, in the very folds of that simple dress gathered about her, there is a nameless grace that attaches itself to the woman. Nature in denying her the gift of face, had given her that.

Her room displayed the taste which was inherent in her, a comfortable looking bed, white counterpaned, a cool looking dressing table, pink calicoed, white muslined, lace trimmed, a scattered array of pictures on the walls, pictures here, there and everywhere with a few vivid coloured fans claiming fellowship, simple enough altogether, but making her room look bright and sweet and pretty. There were a great many books also, books of poetry and history, essays, biographies, novels, magazines, reviews, in a glass case, and on a shelf against the wall.

A general air of a little disregard to order prevailed in Susan’s room, the last review she was reading with her cutter between the leaves lay on the shelf, her French dictionary was there, with a slip of paper on which she had been jotting down some words, peering through the length and breadth of the book; her Armenian and English bibles which she read together to make comparisons of the translations, were lying just as she had left them, after perusal the day before; a glance at the toilet arrangements revealed traces of their latest use; notwithstanding, there was an air of decided comfort in her room, though without anything of a scrupulous neatness; Susan had been scolded and scolded and yet could never be scolded into that by her mother.

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In Mrs. Malcolm’s room never was a cushion tumbled on her sofa, never was there a crease in the spread of the counterpane on her bed, never a stray pin on her dressing table. All the toilet requisites were laid down with mathematical precision, all the pins stood on the pincushion like a regiment of soldiers, all the almirahs were carefully locked and all the keys in their appointed place by day and in their appointed place by night; Susan generally dispensed with keys, she liked to have her things opening to her touch at once; she never was and never could be scrupulously neat, a fact which her mother was never slow to dilate upon, (for somehow this daughter had never satisfied her heart) and for which “God be praised,” said Cousin Stephen to himself, it redeemed Susan from falling into crotchets in the coming years when youth should have passed to middle age; he thought it was this little habit of relaxation that kept her the perfect woman she was. Cousin Stephen loved this habit in Susan “It makes a woman a smiling house wife” he said, but of course he said it in strict confidence to himself. “It makes her tolerant of her husband’s pipe and cigars, of his slushy boots when they leave their mementos on her drawing room carpet; it gives a man a wife, who makes him feel as if every portion of his house was made for him and not he for any portion of it” Given a woman with a great self denying, self sacrificing spirit, above all pettiness of any kind; a woman with an unfailing serenity of temper, sweet to the core of her heart; what does he want with wire-drawn virtues, and stilted characteristics?

Cousin Stephen’s cup of life was very incomplete, Susan’s love would have set it brimming over.

He stood in the relationship of Cousin German to her father. She was twentytwo, and he was forty-three; he was not handsome, or distingue, or debonair, on the contrary he might be considered a trifle grave; he was devoid of all accomplishments except the ordinary ones of driving and riding, and so he thought himself possessing very poor chances of winning her (young, graceful, clever, charming); it never occurred to him to think that Susan was pretty, he loved her face as it was; pretty or plain, it was the dearest face to him in all the world.

Whether Cousin Stephen might or might not be considered a hero, had perhaps be better left out of discussion. His most intimate friends knew him for a man who had made the best us of his talents and the circumstances of his life, a man kindly, honest, true in his aims and principles, and wherewithal a man sobered. Not sobered out of his manhood, or a capacity for rejoicing in happiness, and stretching it out to others, as much as it lay in his power; but a man sobered into tolerance, into consideration, and into much pity; a man the green of whose youth had passed only to be mellowed into deeper, softer, richer tints, the autumn of whose life was warmed with a steadier sunshine though the shadows lay on the ground and whose meridian pathway was still wet with the dews of morning.

Cousin Stephen had taken to medicine as a profession, and as the years passed on, the early struggles of his career had met with their well merited success; Susan rejoiced in the reputation of her kinsman, but she loved him for all the good she had found in him; then again Cousin Stephen was a “Malcolm” and Susan felt as if he belonged to her and was of her, her heart could admit of no meum or teum where her own name was concerned; Susan’s love for her family name was like mother’s love, enduring to the end. Of love such as Cousin Stephen bore her, Susan’s mind did not

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contain a thought; nay, even essaying to look into the future she had pictured to herself what Cousin Stephen’s wife should be like, and of how she (Susan) would love her, if she gave to her kinsman the perfect fullness of a wife’s love, of that love, as Susan could define it, in its vastness, its depth, and strength of tenderness, exceeding all others.

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CHAPTER II What the Rose Might Know The rain came in smaller trickles down the panes of glass in Susan’s room as the girl went on with her work; the cards were written and slipped into their respective covers, she sighed as she put away the last, for every one of those dainty envelopes meant expense, and Susan knew how the expense was met if her mother did not.

“Let us give up this dance,” Susan had ventured to say; “there has been so much difficulty in meeting the month’s expenses; why add this fresh item?”

“It won’t cost much” Mrs. Malcolm had answered, “Cinderella dances never do; We are not going to have a sumptuous supper, and nothing to pay for musicians either, since you will do almost all the playing.”

Cousin Stephen did not dance, and Mrs. Malcolm was not a bit anxious that Susan should dance either; she preferred her daughter should sit the hours out at the piano with Cousin Stephen turning over the leaves of the music. Susan had ventured once more to effect a change in her mother’s wishes, then there had been a scene, as indeed when was there not, and the girl had been fain to hold her peace.

“If you were a step-child, you could not be more at variance with me!” Mrs. Malcolm would say in a burst of indignation, and Susan would walk away to her own room and perhaps shed a few tears in secret, not because of her mother’s anger, she was so used to that, she had given up feeling about it; but because of an undefined yearning, that no matter how long she was used to, still brought that mist of tears to her eyes.

Mrs. Malcolm was a good wife and mother, at least she would have been scandalized had any one told her she was not; she had fulfilled her marriage vows to the letter, inasmuch as she had been faithful to her husband. Yes! No man had had as much as a smile from her that had not been thoroughly platonic, in and out; not even in the days when her waist measured twenty inches, and her golden brown hair rippled over a delicately rounded face. If she let her expenses run beyond her husband’s means, why? She had been used to live well in her father’s house, and it

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was not her fault if a quarter century of marriage had not cured her of early habits; besides what else had she married for? She, the popular beauty; who though wedded at sixteen, had had more offers of marriage, and more men in love with her than she could count on her fingers. She could tell you too of all the sacrifices she had made during the latter years of her married life, all the worries and anxieties she had gone through. Oh yes! Many another wife would not have borne as much as she.

As a wife she had done her duty. She had ruled over her husband’s establishment and spent his money, she had sulked against him, snubbed him, increased his vexations, cares and anxieties where she might have assuaged them, but, she had been faithful to him; she had snubbed him in so much that she had snubbed out his individual existence; some of his friends spoke of him amongst themselves as “Mrs. Malcolm’s husband,” but, as Mrs. Malcolm often reminded “Mrs. Malcolm’s husband”, she had been faithful to him.

As a mother, Mrs. Malcolm had done her duty also in seeing that her children had been well-fed and well-clad; she had regarded their education in sending them to school at five years of age, and regularly scolding them or slapping them into certain hours of study at home. Susan had taken over the cares of the education of her younger brothers ever since she was grown up, but then, who had reared Susan?

Mrs. Malcolm never forgot that. She was doing her duty by her daughters now in trying to get them comfortably settled in life. Susan honest to the finger tips, discerned through her mother’s plottings and plannings and schemings, her strivings to get her daughters married, and shut her eyes that she should see no more.

If she was content to wear an old gown in order that Mariam might have a new one, Mrs. Malcolm considered herself a model of maternal devotedness and wifely considerateness; in rare moments she was a little proud of Susan, but she could not understand her, particularly when the girl denounced so many things as “taking advantage of Cousin Stephen’s kindness”, and considered so many items of household expenditure as necessary for curtailment “when papa cannot afford it”.

Mrs. Malcolm could not understand why she should refuse to take when Cousin Stephen did not refuse to give, and why her husband should not be bound to afford what his wife had been used to having all her life. “She was always a queer child” Mrs. Malcolm said to herself about Susan, she had always been strange, precociously thoughtful, exquisitely sensitive, drawing in into herself, repelled by as much as a glance, lavishing a wealth of affection on a battered doll, hugging to sleep puppy dogs in her arms, weeping profusely over the pages of story books, things of which Mrs. Malcolm’s childhood contained no reminiscences; but then, had she not come into the world with red hair?

Mrs. Malcolm considered herself to be a really good Christian; she was so soundly orthodox, she believed so implicitly in all the doctrines and tenets of her church, she resolutely abstained from animal food on Wednesdays and Fridays during Lent, and fasted two days in passion week with a view to working out the salvation of her soul; she believed in eternal damnation. A rainbow was once spoken of in her hearing as formed by the reflection and refraction of the sun’s rays, and Mrs. Malcolm had held up her hands in holy horror. “A rainbow was an arc set in the sky as a mark of God’s promise to Noah that there would not be another

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deluge upon the earth, it could not be reflections and refractions of the sun’s rays or reflections and refractions of anything else” and her orthodox ears would hear no more.

She was a little concerned about Susan’s religious views; her daughter was such a different sort of a Christian; not orthodox; oh dear me! Refuting dogmas and tenets, defining as “narrow minded bigotry” systems which (sanctioned by succeeding generations and made venerable by antiquity) had been inculcated by inspired Bishops and Archbishops, Patriarchs and Vartabeds ages and ages before she ever came into the world, and holding only to the faith of her own heart.

“Leave Susan to be guided by her own faith, it can never lead her into wrong,” Cousin Stephen would say, and as Mrs. Malcolm particularly wished Susan to marry him, she was prone to think also that the girl’s religions views might not harm her so much after all. However Mrs. Malcolm always felt that Susan gave her a great deal of trouble, more so than any of her children; she had such nicely balanced views of honour, such clearly defined principles, it was impossible to circumvent them, or bend them, or adapt them to circumstance; it was impossible to tell what flights those views of honour might not take, and those clearly defined principles were the square pegs that never slipped into round holes.

Mrs. Malcolm was never weary of singing Cousin Stephen’s praises to Susan, eloquence which was only as water spilled on the ground. The girl heard everything, but though she said nothing, she heeded nothing either; Susan thought her mother was distressing herself to no purpose, what use was there in telling her that Cousin Stephen was a man calculated in every way to make a woman happy, who valued and esteemed him more than herself? Her cheeks burned and her heart swelled indignant at her mother’s plottings, but the time had gone by to say a word in condemnation, she was tired of explosive arguments, and from her daughter’s silence Mrs. Malcolm flattered herself she was gaining ground on her daughter’s feelings for her darling scheme.

Cousin Stephen was in Susan’s thoughts as she laid aside the pile of envelopes. “Poor Cousin Stephen” she said, “he will eventually have to pay for it.”

And the sweet lines of her mouth grew hard. There is a poverty which men call “open poverty” and there is another known as; “genteel poverty,” but Susan questioned to herself if either of them were harder to bear than the poverty brought on by folly. At twenty-two years of age she was tired of it all; of the debts and shifts, the insane expenditure on the one hand, and the strivings and calculatings to make both ends meet on the other.

Susan drew forth a letter she had written the previous day and began adding a postscript to it. The letter was written to her brother Joakim in London completing his course for medicine, and whose expenses Cousin Stephen was defraying; her letter full of home news, was full also of stimulation to his energy, with her interest in his welfare and her affection running through all like a golden vein. It was all Susan, Susan whose letters came to Joakim as a beacon light from that far off home, which though it may not have been a particularly happy one, was yet knit to his heart by those vivid associations of childhood and early youth, and from which distance had softened the memory of the jars and frets.

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It was Susan who entered into the studies of the boys with her useful help, who knew the reason of her father’s failing health, his bent and drooping carriage, and the secret of that haggard smile on his lip, of how the firm of “Malcolm & Co.” had tided a crisis, and of how much of Cousin Stephen’s money had sunk in the firm, and of how much of his money still went to keep up their well appointed home, their horses and carriages. Mariam scarcely took a share in any of these things, she was four years younger than Susan, and never were there two sisters more unlike. A rounded lissome figure, glowing healthful flesh tints, a quantity of gold brown hair breaking into waves and ripples, a pair of scarlet lips curved like a cupid’s bow, and large, dark dreaming languorous eyes constituted Mariam the beauty of the family. Mariam was irresistibly pretty; with her rippling wealth of hair dressed up like a shining coronal on her shapely head, and the bewitching contrast on her face of lustrous dark shaded eyes, and the lips of a child in spring.

Mariam could do all the things that Susan could not; she could dance untiringly, play tennis untiringly, and submerge almost all her thoughts on a dress, rattling off the newest valses and polkas on the piano, whilst Susan’s repertoire contained music which had stirred the pulses and loomed into existence out of the dreams of the great Masters. A waltzing, shop-going, party-going daughter, beloved more in the family circle than that other one on whom its cares and burdens fell, and who took them up and bore them as if her heart never failed and her spirit never flagged in the fight.

Susan finished her postscript and pushing back her chair stood up to go out of the room, for one moment her fingers strayed softly and caressingly over the petals of a rose in a glass on the table, she bent down and kissed the flower; who could define the thrill that passed from the heart of the girl to the heart of the rose that sent up its breath of fragrance to her? Could the rose know? It had lain in her trembling clasp, it had rested on her bosom, it had been kissed by her lips, the rose might know: if bye and bye, the tears of the girl fell on the spot where the kiss had lingered; would the rose know?

On the threshold of her room, Susan paused. Mariam was playing a valse, and in the notes she seemed to hear the music of a voice that was sweeter to her than any music could be; last evening the band had played that valse in the gardens, he had come to their carriage and in the gathering dusk had slipped the rose into her hand and whispered “ ‘My Queen’” Susan’s heart quivered as she went out of the room and the rain came trickling down the glass panes, but she was thinking of the rose and ‘My Queen’ and the rain held no place in that hour.

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CHAPTER III “My Queen” Mrs. Malcolm’s drawingroom was of spacious dimensions, opening to a south verandah that ran almost along the breadth of the house; it was the evening of the same morning which introduced Susan to the reader; there had been sunshine during the day, but the rain was coming on again in a drizzling shower, making the aspect of earth and sky dull and heavy, and in the west not a single streak of crimson, or the faintest glimmer of golden light, relieved the sombreness of the black clouds gathering darker.

Susan had ensconced herself in a cane-chair in the verandah where a gleam of light fell across the pages of a book she had meant to read, the leaves of a fan palm in a pot near her, gently stirred by the breeze cast a flickering shadow on a portion of her neck and shoulders, its sharp tips now and again touching her hair; with her hands lying listlessly on her open book, her eyes looking dreamily into space, the grace of an unstudied negligence in the attitude of her limbs, Susan might have posed for a picture if only her face was pretty. The rose she had kissed in the morning, was fastened in the gathering of lace at her throat; its velvety petals drooped a little now in the midst of the lace, but it still gave off its perfume to the moist air, for the heart of the rose was sweet, and its perfume was calling up memories of the yesterday when the beauty of the rose was in the freshness of its bloom; the rose was fading, but the joy it had brought to her heart could not fade and die; no! never.

Yesterday it had been a fair evening, the crimson glory of the sunset, the warm golden light in the sky had glimmered on the waters of the river whose current had flown on and on in its unceasing stream, and as the shadows had stolen softly, the sighs of the coming air had been stilled by the music that floated out on its breezes. She had gone down from her carriage and walked with him, the music from without and the music from within quivering in her pulses, and the white light of the electric lamps lay on the smooth grass, shimmering the green with a weird silver; he had said the evening had been very sweet, and her quivering pulses had responded “Yes, it has been very sweet.”

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Golden Love! His eyes beamed it on her until her own fell beneath his gaze; his lips smiled it on her until she blushed with the sweetness of it, his arm in tender protection sent it in electric thrills through her veins. Ah heavens! In how many ways does a man teach a woman to love him, before he says “I love you.” The sweetness of those moments had come to her, when she had stood at the window of her room looking out into the shadows of the night. Earth could contain no more shadows for her, never again; for she held the lamp of his heart’s love in her hand, and the glory of that love fell over her head.

Oh! The gladness of loving, the deep deep sweetness of being beloved. Love!

Who shall trace thy magic pages? Who shall reveal in their fullness the height of thy joy, or the depth of thy misery? A word, a glance and we have traversed heaven or hell.

Yesterday she was so happy; she was happy still, she could not forget “My Queen” and all his soft murmured words; they brought the warmth and colour to the dull sky, the music to the drip drip of the rain, and the golden glimmer on the water’s current of yesterday to the current of her own live, and the river’s current was muddy with the soil from the earth’s bosom running on in its stream; was it emblematic of her own life’s?

The shadows of evening lengthened deeper around her, she was not depressed; if she let a single sad thought of doubt of him flit across her mind, she would be questioning his honour, his truth. Had she ever any reason to do that? Could her heart admit such a question when its every pulse was throbbing with its fealty?

Could such fealty admit such question? He loved her---and no love was too great or too good for him; and loving him---no trust too perfect.

The book she had with her was a favorite; she took it up to read at the page she had inadvertently opened: --“At first ‘twas like a frightful dream: Why should such terror even seem?

Again,--again,--it cannot be Woe for such wasting misery!

This watching love’s o’er clouding sky Though still believing it must clear; This closing of the trusting eye; The hope that darkens into fear, The lingering change of doubt and dread; All in the one dear presence fled.”

An unwelcome fear that she would not harbour swept over her heart; what had the story of the Lost Pleiad to do with her? Nothing! Nothing! For the sirocco breath of a man’s passion in its transient flame, had scorched the ethereal life of that poor lost spirit; but a man’s all cherishing love had crowned her as the Queen of his life. Had there been struggles in her own heart like those struggles in the heart of the poor Lost Pleiad? Could she understand with a feeling sympathy, that love pain of the other? She did not like to think over such things now in the midst of her dreams, and so she turned over the pages of the book to read out of another part.

“Long has been the cry of faithful Love’s imploring Long has hope been watching with soft eyes fixed above; When will the Fates, the Life of Life restoring

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When will he awaken?

Asks the midnight’s weary Queen.”

And she was dreaming of that old story, and the love that would not tire; she liked to dream of it, for the spirit of its faithfulness was in her then.

But lonely dreams however sweet in imagination, have not the power to keep us oblivious of the comforts of matter-of-fact flesh and blood, and, feeling the damp chills of a wet evening, Susan rose from her seat and entered the drawingroom.

Mariam’s voice could be heard talking to the younger ones in the landing. Susan, in no mood for conversation, slipped into the cushioned depths of a fauteuil. On the wall before her was a picture of “Vanity.” A ray of light fell across the fair face looking at itself in the glass, its scarlet lips parted into a smile of self-approbation; near the picture hung a plate painted over with a cluster of roses; Susan wondered if “Vanity” ever wished for a rose to place in her bosom, or if she was content to smile evermore into her own eyes in the glass? The rose would want kisses, the rose would want tears; had “Vanity” either of these to give? If “Vanity” was “My Queen” what manner of queen would she be? If Susan was queen? What a little exacting, much giving Queen she would be; she thought of it, and her face softened, her lips sweetened, and the eyelids drooped over the shining love in her eyes; her crown would be Loyalty, her scepter Tenderness.

The peals of the dinner gong sounded through the house; and Susan rose from her dreams to go down to dinner. It was a prosaic ending.

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CHAPTER IV. “He cometh not” The week begun so auspiciously for Susan had come to its close, and “My Queen” felt as if somehow her crown was displaced, there had been three dreary days, a spell of the August rains and he came not. He might have come if he wished, he might have made the opportunity if he cared, but yet he came not, though he had by so much subtle language intimated to her that he had crowned her with the love of his life, though he had called her “My Queen” and the queen had felt like Mariana in the moated grange. “He cometh not” she said, and her tears had fallen on the withered petals of the rose, the rose whose fragrance had intoxicated her heart, the gift rose that had brought her joy. She had thought so much of the Lost Pleiad’s story in these days when the rain fell drip drip, and the clouds lowered in the sky, and the warmth and colour and music were chilled, faded and hushed, and the joy was dead, for “My Queen” was discrowned now; she hardly dared acknowledge to herself why her heart boded so much ill. Why had her spirits sunk under a neglect so short! Had that one page in the Lost Pleiad’s story been written on her own heart even before, the night when she thought earth could contain no more shadows for her! Why did she think of Mariana in the moated grange with her wail of “he cometh not”? Why did she remember those other lines of the Lost Pleiad’s story, “Till days of anguish passed alone, Till careless look and altered tone Believe us from the rack to know Our last of fate, our words of woe?”

She sickened at the dread certainty. Welcome rack! Welcome torture of doubt! Against the dead hopeless stagnant blank of knowing.

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Sunday morning dawned with a golden splendour, the sun lay in bright beams on the wet earth, it glowed on the refreshened green of tree and shrub, and sent its warm darts into the hearts of the flowers that smiled beneath his rays. Susan had been to church miserable at heart, distracted in the midst of her devotions, she had looked in vain for one face amidst the congregation, the disappointment had almost brought the tears to her eyes, when at the closing of the mass, the priest officiating had uttered the words “And forsake not those who put their trust in Thee”

Susan’s heart had risen in one great wild prayer; and God knows it is, that our most fervent prayers are said when we feel the anchor of hope slipping from our grasp, even as our tenderest kisses are pressed on the face of our beloved dead.

Breakfast was got through with an effort by Susan. Cousin Stephen had not as usual on Sundays put in an appearance. The sick and the poor, the bed of pain and the bed of death claimed his care, and sometimes it seemed to Susan as if this humbler physician working out his far humbler work in an newer and another city, was the faithful servant of that Great Physician, whose work on earth had been to heal all manner of infirmities, and cure all manner of diseases. Who had sought out humanity as it was, erring, sinful, sorrowing, and held out His arms of succour, and turned towards them His face of love, and had spoken in His voice of kindness and sent no man comfortless away.

Mrs. Malcolm had been apprised in church of a little ailment of cough and cold and feverishness that had afflicted her sister, and so in sisterly solicitude she ordered her carriage after breakfast. Glad of an opportunity to secure Susan en tete a tete with Cousin Stephen when he would very likely look in during the day and have tiffin, Mrs. Malcolm told Mariam “you had better come with me to Aunt Sara’s,” whilst she suggested to Susan to stay at home. Susan gave a silent acquiescence, for reasons of her own she was anxious to do so, as well as to avoid showing any particular desire.

“This is a very clever arrangement” said Mariam to Susan in the room upstairs whilst putting on her hat. “Mother and I go out, and papa goes to sleep, and you are left at home to entertain Cousin Stephen; mother is spinning threads to be knotted into the net of matrimony.”

Susan’s eyes flickered and drooped as if she had committed a wrong. In her relation of motherhood, Mrs. Malcolm was sacred to her daughter. That first love of life warming our hearts in the cradle, growing with our growth, and strengthening with our strength, hallowed by a thousand memories that link the mother to her child, that love in its blessed realization Susan had never know, but the very sacredness of the tie claimed some manner of reverence from her heart; she could never forget Mrs. Malcolm was her mother or tolerate any reflections against her.

“You must not talk like that” she said, lifting up those drooping eyelids and looking steadily into Mariam’s face; “ and you must know neither Cousin Stephen and I harbour a single thought of such a thing.”

“Ahem!” answered Mariam with a little clearing of the throat that contained in it unspoken volumes, “ that is a subject on which you and I are likely to disagree”

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“Have durwaza bund” was Mrs. Malcolm’s last injunction to Susan, and Mariam whispered in her sister’s ear “durwaza bund leaves the field entirely free to Cousin Stephen,” For once in her life Susan deliberately violated a command of her mother’s.

Duty and inclination held a close conflict in her mind, and in the weakness of the flesh duty yielded; her unsophisticated conscience could not deceive itself. With a beating heart she felt she was doing wrong, and into her beating heart the question would obtrude itself as to whether any good could come of an act of disobedience that was even leavened with deceit; but durwaza bund meant shutting the gates on the face she was hungering to see, it meant depriving herself of a happiness that seemed to belong as it were to the spheres. He might call, he would surely call, how could she have durwaza bund? Instead of that she kept looking out from the venetian of one window, and then from another across the carriage drive; she could occupy herself with nothing, amuse herself with nothing to kill time, and thus wandered aimlessly about the house. She began to feel that no good ever yet came out of doing wrong, the flight of time was teaching her that, as the moments sped on without the fulfillment of the expectancy that was ending in disappointment, she felt it more when she had to receive a caller whom in the best of humours she regarded as something of a bore, and to talk to whom in her frame of mind was nothing short of a punishment. One o’clock struck, and Susan was looking out of a venetian again, Cousin Stephen’s brougham driving in was seen through a blurred gaze of tears. After she had hurriedly removed all traces of the tears by washing her face and seeking the aid of her powder box, Susan was ready to receive Cousin Stephan; he looked wearied and fatigued, and her loving eyes were quick to discern that.

“You look tired to-day dear” she said, motioning to a sofa and setting up a cushion for his head. “There, that would be comfortable! Would it not?”

Cousin Stephen stretched himself at length, he thought it so nice to be hovered over by Susan.

Mrs. Malcolm’s drawingroom was the cheeriest, airiest room to be found in any house. Besides the doors that opened out on the verandah towards the south, there were windows to the east. Susan ordered the punkah, and then opened one of the windows to let in light into the room; a warm sun held its place in the sky, but the cool shadows of a spreading neem covered the stretch of the east windows, and a gentle breeze came playing in. Susan drew a low seat towards Cousin Stephen’s sofa, a soft light fell over her face where she sat, and his eyes rested on her in a musing gaze.

“What are you thinking of, Cousin Stephen?” asked Susan. He repeated the question to her.

“I am thinking” she answered, “you would like a nice cigar, or nice little cigarette, and a delicious cold sherbet I have got ready for you.”

Cousin Stephen laughed. “A woman for adjectives” he said, but he was thinking no adjectives could exhaust praise of a soothing woman like Susan, his mind conjured up one of those endless home pictures with Susan as the revolving center, if he had only the privilege to clasp that loved form to his heart, to draw the dear face against his own, to know that of all others in the world this woman belonged to him.

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Susan had ministered to his wants, and she was seated by him again.

“Now tell me what has worried and saddened you, dear? What has made you so triste to-day.”

Cousin Stephen drew the cigarette out of his mouth, and watched the smoke curl upwards.

“I have just gone through a painful scene,” he said speaking slowly, “and I have been feeling in my inmost soul that truth and sincerity, honour and nobleness come like rare visitants into this world of ours.”

“Are you trying to be cynical, Cousin Stephen” said Susan, “it is not like you to feel bitter against the world.”

“I do not mean to be bitter, child; the world is not worth being bitter about, and railing at it never yet did anyone any good. But alas! For the frailty of its virtue and the wide-spreading of its selfishness, its falsehood and its deceit.”

“And yet it is a world in which we have seen truth shining as an undimmed star, and which contains in its hidden paths, sacrifices as great as that of Abraman’s of which no other man knoweth.”

“Truly it is so! And a world full of miseries, and heartaches, and heart yearnings, and wrongs of which the cries go up to heaven and God alone hears. A world that worships success and turns iconoclast as the first hammer of adversity strikes at its idols, a world where human passions work out their way, but in which Death is triumphant over all. If we could learn the lesson one single dead face teaches us, perhaps we would sin no more. Ah Susan! I have stood by dying bedsides, and I have closed dead eyes, and my heart has been sore and sick with the thought, that after all man’s greed and selfishness, his strivings and frettings in this world, six feet of its dark earth is the most he gets of it at the end; that after all his pride and vanity he is less remembered than a live dog. ‘Le roi est mort, vive le roi..’ Men discovered long ago that the world goes just by that. In youth and ignorance our faith asks for no tests to believe. We love, and we hate and despise without reason; in experience we are humble, we tolerate, and we pity. It is then perhaps we come nearest to the Being who made us, for it may be in Pity raised to a height our hearts can never feel, and encompassing a vastness our minds can never comprehend that makes God bear all things with us. It was Pity for which a Divine Love laid its life down on the Cross, that wept over Jerusalem in it yearning, and to the mockings and jeerings, and buffetings, could yet say in its death agony ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do,’ for were they not the pitiful things, the creatures of His hand” Susan’s eyes grew moist with a mist of unshed tears; she leaned forward and clasped her hands on her knees.

“That bleeding figure on the Cross, contained in itself not only the embodiment of pity, it was also the embodiment of that most difficult and exalted virtue, ‘to forgive’” A shade of pain passed over Cousin Stephen’s face.

“Oh child! What do you know of forgiving?” he said. “It is the severest struggle of the human spirit, the closest fight of feeling against feeling.”

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Not many days afterwards Susan remembered her own words and Cousin Stephen’s. There was a pause for a few moments, Cousin Stephen continued speaking again.

“The world might have its philosophy, but how utterly do we feel in ourselves that we are human; do you remember the lines of the sweet poetess: “Still for what so vain I hold, In my wasted heart grows cold.”

She was a woman always longing for something to rest her heart upon, and she sent up that wail from her heart; and that is what the stoutest of us feel, for our humanity will not let us philosophise. To me it seems, there never were the most stoical philosophers, but had human passions tugging at their heart strings, human shibboleths against which their their philosophy could not withstand. The cold reasonings of their mind dictated what they wrote, but their hearts felt otherwise, and how gladly had they exchanged all their philosophy for their hearts’ desire.

“Vanity of vanities” is only the cry of disappointment; in the expectation and fullness of the preacher’s hope, it had no place; but it is the saddest thing in our humanity, that that cry should have been the utterance of the man singled out for earth’s choicest blessings, the man who wrote for himself ‘And whatever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy’” Susan’s eyes looked at her kinsman with an expression that had in it the hope of youth.

“Is there not balm in Gilead?” she said. “God has given us love, in time, and beyond time.”

“Love in time, is very often bitterer than death; love that lies beyond time, is that which your sex understands and appreciates better than ours, and it makes you strong to suffer, stronger to suffer than man, since it is the only thing that can really comfort and satisfy, because it is the only thing that holds out an enduring hope.”

He rose from his seat and place one hand on her head, pushing up her face to him.

“If, Susan, a man loved a woman, truly, deeply, tenderly, with his whole heart, and with all his strength, do you think that loving her so, he could make that woman love him in return?”

“Often it is so I think, Cousin Stephen” said Susan, speaking her actual thought on the subject without any personal collaterals; “provided of course the woman’s heart is untouched, because I think” Susan’s voice faltered, “I think that to the woman who truly loves one man, the mere thought of admiration from another is revolting, however ----------,” There was a look on Cousin Stephen’s face that arrested the words on Susan’s tongue, he turned round on his heel and averted his face from her for a moment. “I must go now Susan,” he said. “I should have liked to have stayed to tiffin but I must be off, I shall be sure to come in to dinner however and have a game of Manille afterwards.”

He walked down the stairs, but Susan sat where he had left her, musing, wondering.

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Later on at night Susan stood at the window of her room looking out on the shadows, as she had looked out once before in the week that was past; she was very like a child of every day earth in her white night dress buttoned to the throat, her hair twisted into a top knot, and her feet in slippers. Such a description of a woman whose eyes were wet with the tears she wept for the absence of her lover, might not harmonise with the romance of love. A poet would have depicted her in flowing tresses blown about by the night wind, with the moonlight revealing the outline of her bare arm, and glimmering on the polish of her neck and bosom; but Susan lived and loved in every day prose, and no poet was there, whose finely wrought brain might have translated her into the glamour regions of his fancy.

The evening had been dreary for Susan, the night in spite of the distractions of Manille had proven dreary also. Susan’s trump cards had been –hearts—in a game that had admitted only two players, and she felt she was losing, no scorings of Manille could compensate her.

“O, my love, you are cruel to torture me so!” was her anguished cry in the solitude of her room as the tears of a “hope deferred” stole down her cheeks. Over her was a sky like an untroubled sea, and from under a cloudy haze the moon rose higher and higher in a luminous splendour that flooded the earth; the very beauty of the night impressed her with a deeper melancholy, it laid heavier the burden of the love of her youth on her heart.

___________

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CHAPTER V. Desillusonnee “Tired to death!” said Susan to Cousin Stephen as she stood under the gaselier, in the drawingroom, dressed in soft pink, her diaphanous draperies falling in artistic folds around her. Ask a woman when she is “tired to death” over anything, and she will tell you when her heart is not in it. It was the night of Mrs. Malcolm’s dance, and with all the straits of the household expenses on her mind Susan’s heart was not in it; and so she was as she said, “tired to death.” Besides she was wearied in her inmost spirit; doubts assailed her heart and trembling fears crushed out the existence of love’s hope. Cousin Stephen drew her arm through his.

“I must exercise professional authority over you, dear” he said. “I don’t like those dark circles under your eyes; you are looking wan, Susan.”

Susan winced under his searching gaze; she got up a breave smile however.

“Perhaps I have been overworking myself of late,” she said. Cousin Stephen was nevertheless not deceived; there was one secret in Susan’s life she guarded with jealous care, but which he had not failed to discover. It was his most exquisite torture, the rack on which his spirit lay stretched without hope of respite. As they stood in the lighted drawingroom alone together, the temptation came strong upon him to tell her “I love you so much Susan! Can you not love me a little?” It seemed to him as if he could hear the beat of his heart thudding against his side. His hand closed upon hers, and Susan looked up into his face with startled eyes, he dropped her hand and walked out of the room, into the landing, down the stairs, he could not be master of his feelings another moment. As he walked by himself under the portico, he felt he was an unhappy man; so he thought, a very unhappy man. He had worked and toiled and struggled into his present position yet without being able to lay any happiness to his heart. In his youth, an unfortunate passion had saddened years of his life, in his middle age he loved again, a woman so much younger than himself that it made him curse the very folly of the love; her childhood had grown up before him, and yet her sweet girlhood and sweeter womanhood had stolen into his heart unconsciously, unconsciously, until he felt it would be tearing up that heart by the roots to give her up to another. He stayed

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downstairs till the arrival of the guests. For the first time in his life he felt himself a coward; he wanted the shelter of the throng to meet again those eyes that had looked up so startlingly into his face.

“How do you do?” The words were uttered in a tone of careless insouciance; Susan’s pride grew restive at the tone and she made no reply. Susan’s love mastered her pride and she put her hand into the out-stretched palm before her. The speaker was an undeniably handsome man, apparently about five or six and twenty.

“I suppose you will be dedicated to the shrine of Euterpe all night, so I must not hope for any grace to be accorded to a votery of her swift footed sister.”: The words struck not only on her pride now, but on her heart.

“Oh, yes! I shall be playing all night.” She answered quietly; there was just a quiver in her voice, and a quiver passed over her face, but she felt as if all the pain in her heart was surging to her throat and choking her. Cousin Stephen standing by was a witness of the little scene. “O my tender Susan!” he murmured, “Must a man be a scoundrel to be loved by you?”

There were new arrivals claiming Susan’s attention. She went forward to greet them the handsome man was accosted familiarly on the shoulder by an acquaintance.

“Well Sarkies! How far did that little affair of last night’s progress? A pretty girl that! You were awfully spooney, but I give you credit for good taste.”

“My dear fellow, appearances deceive; I was awfully bored! The woman would insist spooning me, and I, well! What could I do? I could not break her heart? It is a plague you know at times to be a handsome fellow; the women will so tiringly and untiringly fall in love with you.”

The words ended with a low laugh, and the two men passed on to the dancing room. Cousin Stephen’s eyes glared savagely towards one retreating figure. “D---him!” he muttered fiercely between his teeth.

All the unattractive, awkward girls were Susan’s special care, her gracious welcome. Her kind forethought made the night pleasant for them; dancing men dreaded Miss Malcolm in her own house for one reason, she was always carrying them off to dance with girls nobody cared to dance with. Cousin Stephen was often delegated by her to do service as a drawing room Perseus, and he generally made a willing knight-errant. He would have been willing always were it not for the bitter sweet attraction of lingering by Susan, of attending to her wants, of turning over the pages of her music and thus making the tableau after Mrs. Malcolm’s heart. He brought her refreshments. Susan could not eat, but then sandwiches were nourishing, an ice and claret cup were refreshing, and so he stood by and took care that she had them.

“They wish me to play the lancers; ask Miss B------ to dance with you Cousin Stephen,” said Susan. “I am afraid she has not been enjoying herself tonight, poor girl.”

Cousin Stephen wondered how much Susan had been enjoying herself, and he could not help feeling how much he would have enjoyed dancing with her instead of Miss B------; but he went away nevertheless to do her bidding.

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“May I presume to install myself in Mr. Malcolm’s honoured place?” The same handsome man who had earlier in the evening expressed himself as “awfully bored” by the ladies who made love to him, approached the piano now.

Susan, honest to the finger tips, kind and generous to the finger tips, was proud to the finger tips also; he had slighted her from the moment of his arrival, and all the pride tingling in her veins would have sent a contemptuous retort. All the love ruling in her heart arrested the scornful words on her tongue.

“As you like,” she answered briefly.

“O, then I will stay here.” A minute passed and Gasper Sarkies spoke again.

“Your cousin has been devoted to-night, he seems to interest himself a great deal in you.”

A wild hope that he was in some unreasoning way, for some unreasoning cause jealous of Cousin Stephen, arose in Susan’s heart for a moment, but a glance at his face dispelled it the next; her pride was up in arms.

“He always did,” she said coldly. “Did you not know that he has always been fond of me?”

“You are frank! And you are fond of him in return, eh? I thought your sex were rather given to conceal such delicate matters.”

Such a purposed misunderstanding of her words, such a tone of light bantering after all that there had been between them after those soft murmured words of only a few evenings ago, after the gracious homage of “My Queen” when his eyes had looked down into her own, and the pressure of his had had closed upon hers. There was a crash of the notes. “How dare you insult me like this?” It was the only expression of her thoughts Susan could give utterance to them, but her face and voice conveyed a whole world of mortified pride, anger, and wounded love; the man standing beside her smiled consciously; his smile cut her through, and once more the notes crashed.

“Here Sarkies! Come away” called out one of the dancers unceremoniously.

“You are distracting Miss Malcolm’s attention!”

The playing went on smoothly again.

“Don’t be so high and mighty, Susan; why really! Are you not going to marry your cousin? You could not do a better thing for yourself, it is what everybody would call an excellent match; and I think it is time you and I gave up our boy and girl foolery. As for me, to tell you the truth, I like the unrestrictedness of a bachelor’s life too well; perhaps some ten years hence I might think of -------------,” There was a tremendous crash of the notes this time, and expostulations came pouring in from the dancers. “I say! You are spoiling our figure,” said one, “Talk another time, can’t you?” suggested another. One pretty little woman shook her finger at him, and asked where he had left his manners.

Susan looked at the dancers and smiled. Through the agony of the moment she felt a smile was needed from her, and smile she would though she died for it; she said a few words with a strained effort at talking steadily, but her voice sounded strange to her own ears. In after times Susan never recalled that hour without a shudder; the lights, the dancers. The music she played on and on mechanically while she felt as if she was playing away her life. With the rapidity of lightning had one imperative thought taken hold of her mind, she must act her part, she was

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senseless to everything else; her fine spirit proved itself equal to the occasion, but bye and bye when the reaction came, she wondered in a dazed numbed way how she had gone through it.

“It is all over, it is all over; I have lost all.” Susan felt as if she was telling herself that a hundred times a minute and as if she would never be done saying it; the patient, loyal enduring love of years had ended thus. The dance was over; one by one the guests had taken their leave and she was in her own room. There was no need to act a part any more, but she did not know why she was undressing so quietly, and combing out her hair as usual. Everything was being done as usual, and yet the whole world had changed; she had to sit and think before she could realize what had happened. She had loved and lost. She knew it at last, and a great blank seemed to have come into her life. As yet she could not feel the acutest stings of this sorrow, but a smarting sense of wrong accompanied the blank and sowed the first seeds of bitterness in her heart. “How could you do it?” was her passionate cry.

“How could you be so cruel? How could you break my heart so? To lure me on to love you; to lead me on to love you; and then to smite me in the face with that love; why not have left me alone? Why for an idle pastime have shattered my life?”

Is there in all this world so fair a thing as a girl’s life with its hopes and its dreams, its lovingness and its innocence? The woman who has wept out those dreams with her tears, who has burnt out those hopes in her own heart’s fire, whose fond beliefs have been quenched in the lying and deceiving thrust upon her, whose own truth has been the whip that has lashed her soul to its center; that woman looks back on that life and knows how fair it was. Susan looked back on yesterday and felt that she had been innocent. In the years past, through all the alternations of hope and despair she had loved and trusted; now all that trust had been condensed into this present. Bitterest experience was her teacher, and she was desillusionee; she had wept her best tears over a tinsel gilded clay idol, she had pressed insensate kisses on the cloven feet that had at last kicked her in the face. Love had come to her and she had welcomed it; the shimmer of its wings had allured her, the radiance of its light had dazed her eyes, its breath had intoxicated her soul, and its melody had vibrated on her heart. Love had come to her and touched her with angel kisses, and her whole being had blushed into a summer’s glory; she had once been a girl dreaming over he heart’s story, thrilling at her lover’s touch, blushing under the love light in his eyes, rejoicing at the love smile on his lips. Now, all that seemed so long ago, in a far distant time when she was young and innocent; that time was dead, and she was dead to everything.

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CHAPTER VI “Strangers Yet” “Gasper Sarkies has been making himself invisible of late; what does he mean by not calling? Though I do not know if it is not a good riddance of bad rubbish,” and Mrs. Malcolm leaned back in her chair, carefully adjusted a sock in her left hand and began mending it with nice precision. That was one thing which Mrs. Malcolm always did; she always religiously mended “John’s and the boys socks” and “my own stockings.” She could tell how she had slaved for them all; “John” had never to complain of a loose button or a frayed shirt collar or cuff, and her children had always gone about in garments that had never had a rent or a hole in them. Mrs. Malcolm had a rigid idea of her duties; it was a pity though that her duties so often altered according to circumstances and assumed protean natures.

“I do not approve of him,” continued Mrs. Malcolm addressing her remarks to Susan, who was seated by the durzee superintending the making of a dress. Susan had heard harangues against Gasper Sarkies times without number. She knew that her mother would approve of him if he had a good practice like Cousin Stephen’s a snug patrimony to inherit or presumably great expectations from a rich Uncle or Aunt. Often unruly thoughts would arise in her mind, as to how much her mother would approve of Cousin Stephen, if by some ruinous speculation and some untoward misfortune he lost the money he had saved and the practice he possessed; but against all such thoughts Susan put a deep black mark, and arraigned them as wicked, and set the deliberately down. A great old world reverence always held a paramount place in her heart; she never miscalculated the importance of the fifth commandment, “it is the first commandment under God,” she told herself.

“He is not what I call a proper young man,” said Mrs. Malcolm picking up the thread of her remarks again, whilst Susan’s attention was to all appearances entirely devoted to the durzee. “Did you notice how he was flirting with that poor girl Sophie the other night; he never means to marry at all, these sort of men never mean anything, but girls will be foolish enough to believe them.”

Mrs. Malcolm’s words were like a sharp stab that cut through her daughter’s heart; for once her daughter had felt the truth of her remark. Susan waited a moment and then walked away quietly to her own room. Oh! Those unwelcome tears that would gush through the fingers she pressed over her eyes to force them

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back; there was a sob in her throat, but she choked it down, she did not wish to be yielding to the pent up misery in her heart during the day. All day long in the presence of others she did her best to keep up an outward composure, but at night the torrents of her secret sorrow overflowed, and she passed through a vortex of delirious pain. Night after night Susan would sit with her face bent over her hands in bitterest recollections of the past that clung to her like an evil thing and would not be cast off; night after night she made those endless strivings to forget, she loathed her own pain and scorned it; she would live it down, she wished she could lie down and die. She was tired of the bitterness in her soul, of the torturing memory that left her no respite, of the longing and yearning and heart hungering, tired of the struggle of her life—he had been brutal to her—there was no need to tell her that, she knew it better than anyone could tell her,--he was not worth the regretting—there was no need to tell her that either, and yet she suffered. Nothing in her crossed and chequered life had ever held pain like this; no troubles, cares, griefs, and anxieties had ever crushed out the spring of her existence as this suffering she tried to put away from herself and could not. This was sorrow without any tender memories, without softening influences, which if they chastened, sweetened in the chastening; she had trusted as never woman trusted more, and her trust had been betrayed. There was nothing left to her but shame and bitterness; not even her pride, for her pride was broken into atoms. If she could only forget, if she could only wipe this dark chapter out of her life; but the days passed into weeks, and the weeks into months, and Susan found out that her memory was her foe, and that her misery mocked her strength. It was the old old story over again, and yet so bitter to bear in each and every telling; she could not help feeling it was hard that one should wound whilst the other should be wounded, that one should laugh whilst the other should bleed. She understood in a half realized manner (as we realize the shadow of a sorrow we vaguely but surely feel lies hidden in the future) that bitter thoughts were dangerous guests which carried Nemesis in their train; she began to feel they would avenge themselves on her own nature, and so she would pray “Take this bitterness out of my heart for I can of mine own self do nothing, and comfort me, even me also, oh! My Father.” Whilst she wept those bitter tears that sear the flesh as they trickle down the cheek. “Even out of this Marah cans’t Thou bring forth sweet!” was her anguished cry. “Though it be a deep festering wound, yet oh Great Healer! Thou cans’t heal it.” And yet even as she prayed conflicting emotions tore at her heart, for it seemed to her as if the stars in their still and serene light had never been so still and serene, than when she writhed in her misery, and they looked calmly and peacefully down from above. For Susan was passing through early stages of suffering. With her were the yearnings, the passionate pain, the weariness and despair of fruitless hope; as yet she knew nothing of that after math of healing, when the heart looks beyond itself to that something better and higher and holier, the hope of whose faith never cheats.

Cousin Stephen was often and often solicitous about her. “Dear, what is the matter with you?” he would ask, “You are not looking well, Susan.”

And Susan would smile up bravely into his face, and sometimes when most touched by his solicitations take his hands into her own and press her lips or lay her cheek against them.

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“Dear Cousin Stephen, there is nothing the matter with me; I am quite well.

You give me more attention than I ought to have.” And at such times as he stroked back her hair and caressed her cheek, he felt as if never was his self control taxed like this. How he would have guarded her, how he would have sheltered her from every little gust that blew over her life; and yet he had no power to draw her in from the fierce storm. He carried healing and solace to many, he could do nothing for the woman he loved; she needed not the skill of his art, nor, he felt, would she be comforted by his love.

Gasper Sarkis absented himself entirely from the Malcolms, and Mrs. Malcolm in the satisfaction of her heart gave up wondering and feeling her dignity hurt about it. He was an unfreighted vessel into which no prudent mother would care to see a daughter step; he carried no ballast. What were the materials that composed the vessel Mrs. Malcolm never troubled herself to enquire, the ballast was the matter of importance. Like many of her nation, Mrs. Malcolm had the proverbs in which her language was so rich at her finger ends. “Blest is the orchard from which the fox is estranged,” she repeated to herself; the words had an unctuous flavour for her.

In the few unavoidable occasions Susan had met Gasper Sarkies, she had set up an impenetrable barrier of reserve between themselves; his words had left but one course open to her in her manner towards him. They became strangers to each other; whatever she might feel, ostensibly in her manner there was nothing but a quiet dignity. Before she had met him with a soft shy, trembling joy; now it was with a self possession as calm as the light in her eyes.

Once it was in his absence or in his coldness that she felt misery; the lingering touch of his hand, the softened tones of his voice, the smile on his lips had contained rapture for her. Now his mere presence was her keenest torture; she wished with a wild longing for another world to be placed between them. In the days of her infatuated worship, she could not help discovering for herself that the man she loved was intellectually her inferior; but she had been willing to ignore all thought of it for the love that was so sweet. In the days that followed, she was discovering his moral worth; she was weighing and measuring it in the balance with a startling precision. A handsome face, a well proportioned figure a degage manner; a skill in driving, riding, dancing, flirting; and for these things she had been willing to lay down her heart at his feet. She was beginning to realise so many things she had never realised before, and in the bitterness of those hours was her youth passing away from her. To herself she had changed immeasurably, to others she was the same Susan with the exception of a quieted manner. Cousin Stephen alone noticed that Susan seldom laughed; often in observing her face he saw a far away look of pain in her eyes. There was one thing however that the others in the house noticed in common with him; Susan had lost her taste for music. It became irritating fact number two for Mrs. Malcolm, so much time and money spent in bye gone years, and now to give up practicing and playing altogether. A woman with a beautiful face might have afforded to have buried accomplishments, or never to have possessed any, but a plain girl like Susan to give up what Mrs. Malcolm considered the one accomplishment she possessed, was worse than her habits of untidiness, worse than her unconventional religious views.

Had a woman loved Susan as much as Cousin Stephen loved her; had she been as solicitous about her as he was, she had divined that the change in her might

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be attributed to the night when the notes of the lancers crashed. Cousin Stephen had come to be aware of the change, but he had come to his knowledge by such slow degrees that he could trace it to no particular source. “The scoundrel has shown himself in his true colours” he would soliloquise, (and here it must be mentioned that Gasper Sarkies had forfeited all claim to any other title in Cousin Stephen’s estimation). He felt that there had been at last a ruin of Susan’s hopes, and that she was breaking her heart over it. He thought she shrank from music because it disagreed with her fretting mood. “But she must be shaken out of herself,” he would say to himself; and so he would now and again, just to shake her out of herself, make an insistance for some music and on those nights Susan suffered more than usual.

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CHAPTER VII. Spirit Boil and Zero The old year had passed and the New Year had set in. Xmas, which the many in Calcutta celebrated, had come and gone with the old year, but a small community in the city celebrated Xmas later on the eighteenth of January. It was Susan’s Xmas, and Cousin Stephen’s, and Mrs. Malcolm’s, and of their countrymen and country-women in Calcutta. Cousin Stephen had bought Susan an amber set as a Christmas present. He fastened the necklace of beads round her throat and the bracelets on her wrists, and thrust the drops in her ears with her help, and then according to his favourite habit he stroked back her hair and kissed her tenderly on the lips; once, twice. Oh! How he blessed the privilege of his cousinship in such moments.

Time wore on; January was past, and February ended likewise. March was ushered in, the season was coming to its close, and the gay time of the year was over; the visitors were departing in flocks, the annual exodus to the hills had begun, and Calcutta was being thinned. Italian opera had numbered among the entertainments of the season. It was not every season that the Calcutta public were favoured with an entertainment of this nature, and it was not known that they were particularly appreciative about it either; but for the few who did appreciate, it counted as a treat. Cousin Stephen, always anxious to secure some little pleasure for Susan, had seldom missed buying her tickets; and Susan reluctant, more reluctant that she cared to show, submitted to the pleasure. “I declare, Susan!” he would say “You are something of an enigma to me now, I can’t understand how you have lost your taste for music, entirely.” In his own mind he thought that she had lost a taste for everything but sorrow, and he deemed it better that she should be dragged out to some little pleasures, than to be left to herself to fret her heart out over the wretch who was not worth a thought of hers; and Susan would think to herself---“Ah! If dear Cousin Stephen only know that the pleasure he would give me becomes unto me a torture”---she could not say that the music she so passionately loved cut through her now like a sharp knife; that in the sounds of all sweet melodies the agony of that hour she could never forget was acutely recalled

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to her. Because of that night, she felt with her woman’s instinct it was incumbent on her to keep rather than give up her character as a lover of music. Only of all masks to wear, that pressed against her life-breath closest.

Mariam yawned over an opera; she had even been known to doze over the latter scenes if unprovided with company that tended to keep her awake. So Mariam generally kept away, and Cousin Stephen and Susan generally went alone.

One night Susan had grown hysterical on the way home from the opera house, and upon Cousin Stephen had developed the pleasure and pain of soothing her. “Oh! Take me home; take me home just now,” she had whispered, with her eyes full of tears and clutching at Cousin Stephen’s arm when the curtain had fallen over the last act of “Faust”. “Don’t let us wait for the carriage to come round, let us go and find it ourselves,” she had reiterated trembling all over in nervous agitation; and he had hurried her away into the little side late to seek his carriage amongst the others.

The burst of tears that had followed when the carriage door closed upon them, intimated to Cousin Stephen that he had not been a minute too soon in getting her away. They were thrown very much together during the past season; they made the opportunities and sought each other,---he, for the sake of cheering her, and for the sake of the intoxicating sweetness of lingering beside her; and she, because she felt she had no other friend. He was experienced enough and clear-headed enough to know that so much of her companionship was bad for him, that it only made her if possible dearer; and yet he was throwing himself into this close companionship with the recklessness of a gamester. Some day in spite of his self-control he would tell her, and then-------he thrust away the thought of the future from him.

No one had been however, taking it altogether, as happy as Mrs. Malcolm during the past season. She had already planned out in her mind the arrangements of the wedding; a house full of guests crushing one against another; Mariam as bridesmaid looking divine in cream and ruby, and Susan in a lovely shimmering satin trailing more than a yard behind her. If Paris had not been so far away, obscured in the dim unknown, Mrs. Malcolm’s ambition would have soared to Worth. As it was, she was contenting herself with Moulard. She had thought out her own dress also; a rich moss green velvet and dead gold satin, with bonnet to match; she had consulted the columns of the ‘Queen’ and had satisfied herself that pink was the coulour de rigueur in Parisian circles on the night of the contract. It was not a custom of her nation to have a night of the contract, but a ceremony including the blessing of the wedding garments and the wedding rings was held on the eve of the marriage. Mrs. Malcolm arrived at the conclusion that this ceremony of her church was equivalent to the Parisian contract and so she decided that Susan should wear pink; she only felt some misgivings as to whether there would be a night of the said ceremony, or the marriage would have to be solemnised in another church instead of her own.

Her church prohibited marriage prohibited marriage within seven degrees of consanguinity; as however almost all the families in India came under this ban, the prohibition had been violated in some of the degrees times without number. Mrs. Malcolm, orthodox Armenian as she was, ventured (very humbly) but yet ventured, to differ in opinion from all the inspired Bishops and Archbishops, Patriarchs and Vartaleds with regard to this one tenet, which had also been sanctioned by

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succeeding generations and made venerable by antiquity. She maintained that in this one principle, her church had strained a pitch too extreme. She like to bring forward instances of the patriarchs of old; she quoted examples of Isaac and Rebekah, of Israel and Rachael; she had confused notions of Luther’s Reformation.

Was it not because he had married a nun? And was it not also because of the English King who had set aside the Pope’s decree against or something like that, there was nothing to prove that the English nation had not prospered ever afterwards. Along with her confused notions of the Reformation, she had confused notions of Luther’s nationality as well, and would jumble him up with the English race, in spite of all that Susan and even Mariam could do to enlighten her. Mrs. Malcolm once devoutly believed in certain little stories to Luther’s detriment; it was however at a time when Susan went about in short frocks and Cousin Stephen was in the hey-day of the love of his youth.

When her Priests visited at her house, she waylaid them into arguments about the right or wrong of relations marrying. There had been several instances wherein her church had married a man to his Cousin’s daughter; everyone of those instances had been accompanied with a great deal of fuss and objection before Episcopal permission had been obtained, and then again these cousinships had not been cousinships like Cousin Stephen’s. “That is what it is!” Mrs. Malcolm would say to herself, “John and Stephen are the sons of two brothers.” She ransacked her memory and could find no instance when such a relationship had been permitted marriage. Well! Thank goodness! There were Protestant churches and Protestant clergy who would marry if her own would not; and she could slip off her orthodox conscience the most strenuous objections of her church against the material advantage of getting a daughter excellently married. She was only anxious to know Cousin Stephen’s views on the matter, and she would contrive to waylay the unsuspicious Priests into arguments in his presence. But Mrs. Malcolm’s best laid schemes did “gang” not only “aft” but always agley.” Cousin Stephen preserved an inviolate silence on the subject; even when appealed to, he made some evasive answer. Alas! For the harassing anxieties of a mother with marriageable daughters, Mrs. Malcolm might have been unmixedly happy, were it not that her soul was at such times poured out within her like so much liquid; and at such time, all her fairy castles crumbled and sank into the dust.

She began to get more and more impatient when March was ushered in, and yet not a word had been spoken. Her consent had not been asked, her blessing had not been given; she had lain awake a whole night (whilst “John” slept peacefully on his pillow) meditating on the phrases with which she might most happily approach the matter of settlements; she had composed a nice little speech and learnt it off by heart. It was to tell Cousin Stephen how tremulously and yet how trustfully she consigned her dear Susan to his care, mingled with a little flattering compliment that was to bring the gap of years between them a little closer.

In March her assurance seemed to be melting, and her anxieties became more and more harassing; she began to have doubts as to the correctness of her line of conduct. Did Cousin Stephen actually contemplate marriage? Or was it that he loved Susan as the child that had grown up before him? Had she been wise in letting them be so much together? People had eyes, and people would talk, and

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people would draw their own conclusions; as it was, two or three of her lady friends had asked if they might congratulate her? Mrs. Malcolm had however put on her most positive air of surprise: “Dear me! Stephen had dandled Susan on his knee, and run about with her on his back; Stephen looked on his Cousin’s daughters like his own younger sisters.”

In March it was a comfort to her to think that though brimming all over with proud delight, she had been discreet enough to give the rumour of Susan’s marriage flat denials. It made her satisfied with herself, she was really an admirable woman; but nevertheless her spirits drooped to zero; she never however gave up praising Cousin Stephen. Mrs. Malcolm if consistent in nothing else, was consistent in the habit of eulogizing well-to-do unmarried men. “Whilst there is life, there is hope.”

Whilst a man was unmarried there was a chance of foisting a daughter on him.

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CHAPTER VIII. “They Come Not Single Spies” Mrs. Malcolm’s anxieties increased. March was over, and her darling hope still trembled on the horizon of uncertainty. She lay awake another whole night and schemed a new scheme; she must compromise Cousin Stephen. She must let this sort of thing go on for another two months or so, welcome him with open arms, shower sweeter smiles, repose greater trust in him, sing his praises louder, leave frequenter opportunities for compromising tete a tetes, and at the end of a certain period of time pounce upon him with the question “Now what does this mean, Stephen? When do you intend to marry Susan?” Her spirits rose high as she felt that her “veni, vidi, vici,” would be---I schemed and I have succeeded. She congratulated herself on possessing a finesse of contrivance; she had an idea she was one of those women who could practise consummate deceit with the seemingness of an angel’s innocence. Nay! Had circumstances so permitted it, one of those who could twist the destiny of a nation between her dainty fingers. She knew of women who had fooled men of more than average intelligence to the end of their natural lives, appearing half angels all the while; why could she not fool a man into marrying her daughter, and yet appear unto him as honesty personified.

There were Grad grinds who danced about like puppets, the strings held by connubial doves, with amiable Mammasin law behind the scenes. There were men, married to the last women in the world they were likely to have married; and only a little proper management had done it. A little proper management therefore on her part should not be wanting. Mrs. Malcolm thought out her role; she would be one of those good simple souls who babble out their heart’s core, and yet gain their heart’s desire in spite of obstacles and difficulties. Her amount of worldly knowledge made her think that nothing so sends men to sleep as apparent simplicity, whilst on the other hand nothing so sets them on guard as apparent penetration and wariness. The generality of men cherished an innate distrust of a clever woman, the generality of men laid their heads down on the lap of simplicity.

Mrs. Malcolm with her forty years would put on the simplicity of a new born babe.

Her forty years had not taught her that no simplicity however nicely put on could

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stand the test of an intimate acquaintance like Cousin Stephen’s; an acquaintance that with the close contact, the calm judgment of a platonic relationship, and the familiar knowledge of a lifetime, had got her character off by heart. Delilah had perhaps never betrayed Samson had she been thrown into the crucible of family acquaintance for him. Mrs. Malcolm’s cunning fell short of that perfect cunning which understands where it might, and where it might not safely beguile. With the most positive desire to play tricks, she had been denied their right art, and the fine sense to know where she bungled and blundered. Cousin Stephen’s thorough unconsciousness of manner had further lulled her into security; she had played so many tricks on him, and he had never betrayed his discovery of them, she felt confident there were not tricks that she might not still play with safety. She had an incipient idea also that Cousin Stephen was a sort of a “simple Simon” whom astute Mrs. Melcolm could lead by the nose, and she never gave him credit for some of that discernment which could divine the deceit it never stooped to practise.

Cousin Stephen had been thrown into the crucible of family acquaintance for Mrs. Malcolm, and Mrs. Malcolm had found out he was one of those foolish men who had thoughts of honour that would lead them to sacrifice interest and inclination to it. Mrs. Malcolm determined therefore to compromise Cousin Stephen by his honour.

Early in April was Susan’s birthday. Mrs. Malcolm had on a sudden grown economical; she had asked nobody to dinner that night except Cousin Stephen. In the evening she went out for her usual drive, taking “John” and Mariam along with her. “You ought to stay at home Susan” she said; it is your birthday, and Stephen might be likely to look in whilst we are out.” Mariam shrugged her pretty shoulders. “Rubbish!” was her ejaculation, loud enough for her mother to hear; Mrs. Malcolm affected loss of auricular powers.

“John” was waiting under the portico, hat in hand. Mrs. Malcolm went down the stairs and then grandly swept past her husband into the carriage. Mariam followed. Mr. Malcolm looked back, expecting Susan to come down.

“Where is Susan?” he asked.

“She is reading!” answered Mrs. Malcolm, adjusting her cushion; “do you expect Susan to give up her book and take a drive?”

Mr. Malcolm shook his head.

“She is getting more and more of an old woman, that girl!” he said; “she ought to borrow some of Mariam’s spirits.

Mariam sitting opposite giggled at her unsuspecting father; Mr. Malcolm smiled approvingly on his lovely daughter who could giggle with so much freshness of heart. “Mariam is the sunshine of the house!” he would occasionally remark.

Half an hour later, Cousin Stephen entering the house heard the strains of music from the drawingroom upstairs. “Susan playing! What a pleasant surprise!” he said to himself as he ascended the stairs. He waited on the steps and listened to the melody and the sweet mellow voice singing.

‘It flooded the crimson twilight, Like the close of an Angel’s Psalm, And it lay on my lover’s spirit, With a touch of infinite calm,

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The words seemed to be lingering over his heart.

‘I have sought but I seek it vainly, That one last chord divine’

The singer’s voice faltered, the last lines were sung tremulous and low.

‘It may be that Death’s bright Angel, Will speak in that chord again, It may be that only in Heav’n, I shall hear that grand Amen.’

The notes died away, and Cousin Stephen entered the drawingroom softly, in a half playful spirit of taking Susan by surprise.

That Susan was given to much secret fretting, Cousin Stephen had long ago divined, but he had never seen her in any abanmdonment of sorrow. She was seated with her head bowed low down over the piano in an attitude of stricken grief, and he could hear something of a convulsive sob that shook her frame. He did not know until that moment how much the sight of Susan’s grief could have affected him.

He guessed at the truth of her distress, and his hand trembled as he laid it on her shoulder; his voice grown husky, he could only say “Susan! Susan!”

Her first instinctive thought was to hide as much as possible this betrayal of a secret misery. She even made a desperate attempt at smiling; she tried to put on an unconscious manner and to say with affected indifference “Oh, you naughty Cousin Stephen! How you have startled me!” But her lips quivered as she spoke, and the ring of pain in her voice grated on her own ears.

No desperate attempt at concealing, no put on manner could however deceive Cousin Stephen; he did not even remember that the kindest thing to do by her then was to affect the unsuspiciousness which she was so anxious to secure. His heart was yearning over the woman he loved; he took her hands in his own and held them in a caress. His sympathy brought the quick tears that she strove in vain to repress, and Susan’s tears were as the climax to Cousin Stephen’s composure.

“Susan! Susan!” he said excitedly. “My love! My dearest! It maddens me to see you suffer like this; to see you breaking your heart over a scoundrel who is not worth a thought of yours; cannot my love comfort you? Cannot it atone in any way? Oh Susan! You do not know; but I have loved you so long, loved you for years, and loved you so well.”

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He paused, surprise, wonderment and dismay were passing over her face, her eyes gazed at him with a stunned look in them.

“My God!” he said bitterly “I only shock you.”

And then, for he had gone too far to retract, he clenched her hands in his grasp; he pleaded with her, for he felt in that moment as if his life depended on her answer.

“Susan, cannot you love me a little! Just a little. I will be content with whatever you give me; do not send me away.”

There was no answer, she had cast down her eyes, and would not look at him any more; the woman beside him seemed to be turning into stone; she did not seek to release her hands from his grasp; she said nothing, she might have been a statue of flesh as she stood there still and immovable. His clasp tightened on her hands and crushed them between his own.

“Susan! Say that you will love me a little; say just one word; say ‘Yes.’” But her lips never moved, she never spoke; he waited a few moments, his eyes fixed on her face, and then he released her hands.

“I will not stay to dinner to-night. Make what excuse you like for me; say I have a serious case,” and he walked out of the room.

It is wonderful how sometimes it is that in moments of intense despair we do not forget the veriest trifles. Cousin Stephen did not forget some excuse was necessary for his absence from Mrs. Malcolm’s table that night; he did not forget his hat and stick left on the stand in the vestibule downstairs; he did not forget the gold bangle he had brought as a birthday present for Susan; he put his hand into his pocket and felt it as he walked home; his gift had remained with him even as his love.

After Cousin Stephen was gone, Susan tried to realize whether she was dreaming or awake. She put up her hands to her forehead to rub off any hallucination that might be lingering there. This revelation of love had come like unto the sudden death of a dear and cherished life. The foreshadowings, the forewarnings had been unperceived by her; a passing suspicion occasionally, poophed and poohed at the next moment, and now the descent of an avalanche. But Oh! The aching for this very past blindness, now that she could read the whole past by the light of the present. She tottered to the verandah and sat down in one of the chairs, the same statue of flesh as when Cousin Stephen had held her hands and read his fate in her downcast face; she was stunned, morally paralysed with the shock.

To a woman as kind hearted as Susan, with such a modicum of vanity in her composition, for one is not prepared to say that Susan was without a modicum of vanity, and she herself would meekly acknowledge all the little weaknesses to which she was hear in the flesh; but to a woman in whom the milk of human kindness ran in such copious streams, the act of rejecting a suitor must ever be accompanied with more or less pain. If a thrill of triumph would come, it could not but be low pulsed and short lived. Nay! Strangled at its very birth. But what thrill of triumph could ever conceive itself into being in a case like this? Susan felt like many of us have felt, perhaps not once in our lives that “when sorrows come, they come not single spies” for her one sorrow had come on the heels of another.

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“Oh!” she said to herself, “if I had ever given him one glance from my eyes, one smile of my lips that had encouraged him to hope; I could not have forgiven myself, not to my dying day.”

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CHAPTER IX “Heart’s Blunders” “Has Stephen not come yet?” was Mrs. Malcolm’s first question when she returned home and sought out Susan in the verandah. Susan was glad of the dusk that shadowed her face as she said “Yes! He did look in for a few minutes a short while ago, just to say that he could not dine with us to-night.”

“Not dine with us!” exclaimed Mrs. Malcolm in mingled surprise and disappointment. “Why!” “He has a serious case that requires immediate and prolonged attendance; it is a poor dying woman I believe, I do not know exactly. I could not clearly understand what he said, he was in such a hurry to give his reasons and be off. I fancy it is a very friendless patient, and Cousin Stephen is taking a great deal of interest; he always does in friendless cases.”

Whenever Susan had any white lies to say, the words generally stuck in her throat and her tell-tale face peached upon her. She had always thought that if lies had to be said they ought at least to have a veil, or darkness for an ally to support them through; but though the evening’s dusk might have imparted to her a little extra nerve power, she had Cousin Stephen’s secret to guard, and that fact alone would have given her courage to have told her elaborate fiction in the clearest daylight without flinching. Mrs. Malcolm heard her through, and then Mrs. Malcolm’s exasperation got the better of Mrs. Malcolm’s discretion.

“It is shameful! Disgraceful! Shameful! Disgraceful, I say.” “What is shameful and disgraceful?” asked Susan in a cold voice. Her heart was very tender about Cousin Stephen then; she could not bear the slightest imputation against him.

“Cousin Stephen never does anything that is shameful or disgraceful; don’t connect him with such epithets, mother.”

Mrs. Malcolm was so pleased with Susan’s championship that she forgot to scold her for the tone she had assumed toward herself. Already in imagination she saw bridal wreath and veil fastened by a diamond star, on the shadowy outline of

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Susan’s head. If Susan had taken her own father’s part, Mrs. Malcolm would have called her a step child, and arraigned her as siding against her own flesh and blood; now she only remembered it was bad policy to have said anything against the man to whom she was trying so hard to get her daughter married; especially a daughter so difficult to manage, and with whom she was often at a loss how to proceed. Here was one of those instances of unintelligible inconsistency. She might praise Cousin Stephen until she had praised out her breath, and Susan would sit and hear with a face as serene as moonlight, and now at the first imputation against him there were signals of war hoisted in his cause, and by the very daughter who so meekly endured the daily scoldings and reproaches.

They were both alike, Susan and Cousin Stephen, so soft and so hard. Again and again their softness had given her courage to try her hand at moulding them, again and again her hand had struck at the unyielding rock beneath, and made her feel that here was material which defied the shaping of her touch. Even as she thought of all this Mrs. Malcolm sighed, and the bridal wreath and veil rolled off like mist into the evening shadows.

“Dear me, Susan! How impetuous you are!” she exclaimed. “You ought to know that I never meant to say anything against Stephen; and now tell me what birthday present did he bring you?”

“No present at all; I don’t suppose he could have had the time to think about it to-day.”

Once more Mrs. Malcolm’s exasperation might have got the better of Mrs. Malcolm’s discretion, but discretion held the reins tightly, and exasperation succumbed beneath its curb. It was not the want of the birthday present she felt sore at, but the want of the thought; it argued badly in favour of the matrimonial project. She said nothing, however, but left the verandah, much to her daughter’s relief.

Once in the drawingroom her exasperation found an outlet for its explosion.

The piano was there before her eyes, lying open for goodness knows how long. All the pleasure she might have felt at Susan taking to her old love again was forgotten; she went back to the door by which she had come in, and standing on the threshold scolded Susan for her carelessness in leaving the piano open.

A weary hour of simulated interest in common things whilst her mind held but one absorbing thought, a weary hour in which every nerve was strained to keep up a composed appearance, and then Susan found herself at last in her own room. Oh! Those blessed precincts in which her overcharged heart might find its relieving vent. Susan indulged in the privilege of a deep sigh as she crossed the threshold.

The night was warm and close, not a breath of wind came in through the open windows to cool the oppressiveness in the room. Susan shaded the light, and then drew aside the curtains. Undressing herself she laid down on the mat, she felt too weary even to sit up, and she could not bear to go to bed; she was so miserable, so miserable, she did not know what to do with her misery or how to bear it. What ties of kinship bound Cousin Stephen to Susan; what depth of affection, what esteem, what sweet friendship, what feelings of gratitude. She had done anything for him, and yet her love had gone further; and that he should love her in a way she would never love him in return; it was as real a sorrow to Susan as if it had been her own.

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Oh! She had never dared to look into his face after he had told her that he loved her; she had turned into stone at the thought of the humiliation she might have subjected him to, if she had ever looked into his eyes. The great tears rolled over her cheeks and she heard them drop on the mat. She felt as if her heart would burst and break at the thought that he suffered, and suffered for love of her; dear, good, kind, noble Cousin Stephen. The adjectives strung themselves one after another in her mind, and the tears rolled faster and faster.

“Susan!” Mariam drew aside the purdah of the door that communicated her room and Susan’s, and came in. “However you can be always doing that. I could not lie down on the mat for anything. Really! We do go by contraries, you and I.” Susan let her sister rattle on whilst she tried to recover herself to be able to speak in return; Mariam seated herself in a chair near where Susan was lying. “Is it a penance?” she asked, alluding to Susan’s position on the floor.

“No! a preference; the bed would be too warm.”

“Come to my room then and lie down under the punkah; it is stifling here.”

“You know I am not partial to the punkah, and I could not stand it to-night with such a headache as I have,” was Susan’s answer.

“Dear me! Why not have a pillow in that case?” suggested Mariam.

“I could not bear a pillow, it makes my head heavier.”

“And there is nothing I like so much as a soft pillow when I have a headache.”

“Perhaps your headaches are not like mine.”

“Perhaps not; and I should not care to have them if they are particularly nasty; let me get you some eau-de-cologne to bathe your temples with.”

Susan assented, and Mariam rose to fetch the eau-de-cologne. Susan received it and said “thank you” and Mariam sat down again.

The dialogue between the two sisters was at a standstill for a few minutes, Susan was bathing her temples with eau-de-cologne. Mariam was contemplating.

She had a comb in her hand which she passed listlessly through her loose tresses.

She put out one pretty foot and admired it, her neat ankle, her shapely calf and dimpled knee. She dropped the comb into her lap, put up her arms and crossed her hands over her head, and looked like the prettiest thing in all the world. Susan lying on the mat was in a complete shadow, the obscured light in the room found its way only to her bare legs; it revealed Mariam looking lovelier in her low necked chemise than many a drawingroom belle in silk and jewels.

Mariam put down her pretty arms and tossed off a luxuriant tress that had come straying along her neck and bosom; she had finished contemplating.

“Did you notice how very disappointed mother was to-night?” she said.

Susan made no answer. Mariam continued speaking.

“If you only knew how she imposed on that poor simpleton of a father this evening; I thought I should have died with laughter, and poor papa not finding it out at all.” And forthwith Mariam related all that had occurred, concluding with the remark “I do think mother hoped Cousin Stephen would propose to you this evening.”

Even under cover of the darkness Susan winced.

“She is a needless fidget: really she is!” said Mariam, tossing off another luxuriant tress over the back of the chair. “ Cousin Stephen decidedly means to

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marry you if he can; it is my idea he would have asked you long ago did he feel more sure about you.” “How silly you are Mariam!” exclaimed Susan, “How can you thing of anything so preposterous. You are perfectly absurd!”

Mariam opened her beautiful eyes wide. “Preposterous! Absurd!” she echoed. “My dear Susan, you have only been born yesterday.”

“Well! At lease I can lay claim to the merit of having been born before you.

You are talking the most atrocious nonsense, Mariam; go back to your room and sleep off your silliness.”

Mariam giggled as she had giggled in the carriage a few hours ago. She caught up her loose tresses between her hands and wound them into a knot; the loose hair worried her, and we wanted to speak comfortably; she leaned forward with elbow on knee.

“Really, Susan you are a greater simpleton than that poor dear papa!”

“And really, Mariam, you are highly imaginative!”

Mariam’s red lips parted into a compassionative smile, the smile of superior discernment.

“My dear Susan you are as simple as a child in some things!” Not a shade of distrust of Susan’s words lingered in Mariam’s mind, Susan had always been as clear as crystal with daylight shot through her, and Mariam had often felt that if truth was to be found in any part of world, it was to be found in Susan’s heart and on Susan’s lips. “Do you think,” she went on, “Cousin Stephen would be dangling about you in this manner if he did not care or mean to marry you? His is not a relationship that precludes marriage, it is quite apparent that all his happiness is to be found in your company and Cousin Stephen never assumes what he does not feel. Oh! I am perfectly convinced he means to marry you; he would not be so devoted otherwise, not for a day. Can’t you see mother is not the only mater familias with marriageable daughters who considers him a parti. But dear me! All their wiles fail to entangle him even for an instant; he is marble and adamant to all the charming young ladies. Men are entrapped or imposed upon, by their vices, their faults, or their weaknesses. Cousin Stephen has neither vices faults nor weaknesses, he is immaculate; he can never be led into a scrape, for he yields to no temptations; he would not whisper a single soft nothing into the ear of the daintiest woman, his honour would bristle up like a porcupine at the thought; he does not know how to flirt, he would not even if he knew, in principle.

“I can’t say I am particularly fond of him for all that,” continued Mariam by way of parenthesis. “His stiffnecked principles cut one like sharp angles; I prefer that dear soft papa, he is really the more lovable man of the two; I should scarcely like to marry Cousin Stephen even if he was a prince, but I have always thought you would harmonise perfectly with him.”

“Go to bed Mariam!” was Susan’s answer. “You have made my headache worse with all your chatter.”

But when Mariam was gone, Susan turned on her face on the mat and wept some of the most anguished tears of her life; there were dreams, faiths, affections of her young life shivered into fragments and calcined into dust; such tears were natural. She had loved one man and held on to her trust under circumstances that might have turned a babe into a sceptic. But how much cannot a great love bear,

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and still believe. Loving another man with a deep affection purely platonic, she had been blind to his half-concealed passion.

Heart’s blunders! Heart’s blunders! She said to herself, and yet even as she acknowledged that, as she felt humbled under the mistakes of her life, the foolish cry went out of her heart “Oh God! Our feelings are quicksands to which our happiness is engulphed; our feelings are raging torrents that carry our understanding off in their rush.” For Susan was young and she suffered with all the passionateness of youth, looking for nothing beyond its present suffering.

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CHAPTER X. The Die is Cast.

One, two, three days passed with Cousin Stephen’s non-appearance. Mrs. Malcolm was a seething cauldron. On the second day she lad looked in at his house on her way to the Strand, but was told that the ‘Sahib’ was not at home. The next morning she sent a servant with her enquiries, but the ‘Sahib’ was not at home again. “He is always out and never here,” she said in growing wrath.

“He must of necessity be out” said Susan, “how can he attend to his work if he stays at home?”

“But he seldom missed a day in coming to see us,” returned Mrs. Malcolm with greater vexation in her tone. She plied Susan with a dozen questions, but Susan was utterly ignorant of any reasons that might be keeping Cousin Stephen away; she could only think it must be the particular patient, or some other patient whose constant need of attendance left him no leisure. Mrs. Malcolm could not understand Susan either; she had of a sudden grown very much quieter still in her manner. Mrs. Malcolm began to have some undefined suspicions, without feeling sure in her mind whether there was a necessity for these suspicions.

On the evening of the fourth day, Mr. Malcolm returned from office with the astounding news that Cousin Stephen was going to Australia. Mrs. Malcolm shrieked out just one word. “What?” But Mr. Malcolm had learnt that tone in which it was uttered off by heart, it brought to his mind vivid recollections of past gales and cyclones. Always in blissful ignorance of the hopes and desires that agitated the bosom of his better half, never gifted with a perspicuity of mental vision that might discern the labyrinthine machinery of plots and schemes at high pressure work in his wife’s brain, Mr. Malcolm could not understand what combustible gases were bubbling into explosion. But, the familiar tone, he could never be mistaken in that; it carried a deep conviction to his heart of the impending hurricane, and Mr. Malcolm sighed in anticipation of it.

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Mr. Malcolm had slender skinny hands. On occasions of that ominous tone, one of those slender skinny members (that bore the appellation of “right”) went up with a nervous gesture to the bald circle on his head and rubbed it tremblingly. Mr. Malcolm had once been the happy possessor of thickly clustered curls, and the intimate friends who called him among themselves “Mrs. Malcolm’s husband” would say that perhaps his wife could best account for that smooth surface on which the curls had so thickly grown. In days gone by a sparkling diamond had glittered on the little finger of that same hand whose slenderness had then belonged to the stage when slenderness is a thing of beauty; but during the latter years that sparkling diamond had been converted into rupees to meet one of his constant exigencies. So now the diamond-less hand thinned from the slenderness of beauty to the slenderness of skinniness, went up with the habitual gesture and passed in the habitual manner over that one fatal spot, and Mr. Malcolm tried to vanish out of the room; but Mrs. Malcolm’s “John” uttered in the full force of the imperative mood recalled him to the endurance of his fate.

Mrs. Malcolm put her husband under a severe cross examination. She poured such a multitudinous host of “why?” and “wherefores?” on him, that, weak man as he was he began to feel it was hard on him to be made responsible for his Cousin’s folly. Further he was told a dozen times that “there never was known to be a man like him.” He was made to understand repeatedly “he had hidden himself when God was distributing brains,” and all this, because he did not know more of another man’s affairs than he had been told. In spite of the severe cross-examination there was nothing more to be elicited from him but that Cousin Stephen had looked in at his office during the day and announced his intention of going away to Australia.

Cousin Stephen had complained of fatigued energies, of an overworked nervous system, and the urgent necessity he had felt for a lengthened period of rest and change; he had made up his mind quite suddenly, and was very busy arranging his affairs.

“And I suppose he can do what he likes” said Mr. Malcolm by way of conclusion. He fondly hoped his remark might have the effect of oil on troubled waters; to his cost he found the result very different from his anticipation.

Mr. Malcolm was told that Cousin Stephen could not do as he liked, that he was a double dyed villain, inasmuch that he was a traitor to his own kin; that he had crept into his Cousin’s house a wolf in sheep’s clothing; that in the security of the unlimited trust reposed in him, he had made a pastime of a beloved daughter’s feelings, and laid that beloved daughter’s name open to the barbed tongue of scandal. Oh! He could make very fine speeches, like the hypocritical Pharisee he was; he would say that a man’s foes were those of his own household. All his fine speeches should be quoted against him now; he should be told they had found out for themselves that their foe was of their own household. Oh yes! They had trusted him entirely, like credulous fools as they were. He had been given a wide field for perpetrating his villainy and had proved himself an able worker. In one of his fine speeches he could bring forward the instance of Judas Iscariot; in the whole of Jerusalem it was one of the twelve who betrayed the Lord, betrayed him with a kiss, fell on his neck and said “Rabbi” and kissed him; he was Iscariot’s second self, the modern Iscariot. In the whole of Calcutta their own kinsman had been their

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betrayer; he had had the facilities of Judas, and had taken advantage of them like Judas did. He had betrayed them with his seeming affection for his family; he had used their own trust against them for their injury.

Throughout this tirade Mr. Malcolm had only been able to utter at intervals expostulatory ejaculations of “Mariam! Mariam!” he began to feel nettled at last.

The hurts to his own dignity had caused irritation upon irritation; besides Nature had not denied him a conscience, however much it may have been sat upon by his wife, and behind the name of his Cousin Stephen stood an array of kindnesses that seemed all to be calling on him to speak and vindicate the man thus lawlessly condemned.

“Stephen is as honest a man as this world ever held!” he said in a half assertive tone, as if dreading to contradict his wife and yet feeling himself bound to defend his Cousin. “Don’t I know him from his boyhood upwards; he would not tell a lie when he had broken his father’s gold watch, he did not even try to hide his act but acknowledged it straight off; he thrashed the biggest bully in the school for beating a small boy; he took a dozen stripes sooner than tell upon a schoolmate; he---------“ Mr. Malcolm’s defense was cut short; he was asked whether he was talking of a boy of tender years, or of a man hardened in the wickedness of the world?

“But goodness heavens! What has he done?” asked Mr. Malcolm, aghast. “which of our girls do you think he ought to marry?” and Mr. Malcolm looked round at both his daughters. Mariam’s countenance was replete with smiles; she was enjoying the fun of the scene, but there was such a look of blended anger and pain on Susan’s face that Mr. Malcolm felt there was no need to ask any further questions as to which daughter was concerned. “How can Stephen marry a daughter of mine?” he said amazedly, “it is against the canons of our church!”

Mrs. Malcolm called on the ghost of Job to land her patience; it was her misfortune to have a husband who was behind hand in everything in life. All their friends knew of Stephen’s unremitting devotion to Susan, and here was her own father asking, which of his daughters ought to marry? The whole world had progressed, and here was her husband perched like Noah’s ark on the summit of Arrarat, on the old fashioned of their old fashioned church. What if it was against the canons of the church? Were there not other churches in the city that would marry cousins of any and every degree? All they had to concern themselves about was the legality of the marriage and nothing else. If “John” did not know his duties as a father, she knew hers as a mother; and in her position of motherhood she was bound to protect her daughter’s interests. She would write to Stephen, she would go and see him personally and slap his villainies in his face.

“Indeed you will not!” The words were uttered in a tone as clear cold and decisive as Susan had never used in her life. Mr. Malcolm like a man in a trance heard Susan accusing her mother of injustice, of calumny against the noblest man that ever lived. He looked from one to the other, at the flustering rage and flushed cheeks of his wife, and the pale lips, the flashing eyes and quivering features of his daughter; and in his bewilderment as Mr. Malcolm’s skinny hand sought the smooth circle on his head it polished it with so much vigour that Mariam had to come to the rescue at last.

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“You poor dear papa! What are you about? You will rub the skin off that hapless head of yours.” And Mariam slipped her arm through his and led him out of the room.

“Poor papa!” she said in sympathy. “The double cyclone was too much for you.”

Mr. Malcolm caught his lovely daughter and pressed her to his heart as if she had been his only comfort.

“Susan is becoming a shrew!” he said testily.

Mariam had two soft corners in her heart to which Susan and her father could lay claim.

“You poor papa!” she said, “you do not understand Susan; she can never become a shrew; it is not in her nature; but she has very strong passions, stronger even than I thought, and her whole soul was up in arms for Cousin Stephen.”

“Susan has been fibbing outrageously,” Mariam thought to herself. “Let us talk no more of the infalliability of virtue, since even the high priestess of truth can tell lies under pressing necessities.” She decided in her mind that Cousin Stephen was going to Australia because Susan had refused to marry him; he must have received his fiat on the evening of her birthday, hence his unusual keeping away from them and the final madness of going to Australia. “Good heavens! What a rash act!” Marian soliloquized, “to throw up all his excellent practice and rush off to an unknown country. No man in his senses would do that unless he had some very deep reasons; it is a pity; a great pity for Cousin Stephen, and a great pity for Susan.” For however averse Mariam might have felt to Cousin Stephen’s ‘stiff necked principles’ she was not incomprehensive of the advantages marriage with him would secure Susan. “Of course I should never care to marry him, but then I never felt such a fondness for his company as Susan does. I never exalted him in my mind to the status of a sublime hero. When a woman can spend hours in a man’s company with pleasure and by preference, I don’t see why she cannot marry him. I think I can make a pretty clear guess why Cousin Stephen is sent away to Australia. Oh dear! If mother only had an inkling of it; Susan is still hankering after that graceless good-for-nothing, though I had hoped she had got over her infatuation, and the more is the pity. I should like to----well! I should really like to horsewhip him, for the ill luck he is to my sister. My dear foolish Susan!” Mariam thought regretfully, “If you were only half as sensible as I am, you would not throw away an excellent offer of marriage for a scapegrace who is not worth that----;” and in this stage of her thoughts Mariam snapped her fingers disdainfully. “Thank heaven I am not born with disastrous susceptibilities,” she mused; “if any man chooses to inflict self-torment on himself for my sake, it will not be my fault; I decidedly mean to make a comfortable marriage; good gracious! Taking a particular interest in a dear soft papa and a quixotic sister is trouble enough.”

Susan kept to her room the whole evening. Mariam hovered about her.

Throughout the long April evening Susan lay on her bed and sobbed passionately, as if she would sob her heart out; it was evident at last that she was quite hysterical, so Mariam administered all the remedies women resort to in such cases, until Susan quieted by degrees.

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“What an ado!” were Mariam’s farther musings. “I think I must search the world for another Don Quixote and get him married to Susan. I wouldn’t have far to go,” she reflected. “Cousin Stephen is Quixote in the living flesh, and Susan won’t marry him; she won’t marry him, but she will tell a cart load of fibs for his sake, a habit she had never acquired before. She won’t marry him, but she will grieve like the spirit of melancholy because she won’t; and she will of course fight out like a lioness when he is traduced, and then sob herself into hysterics. Dear me!

If ever there is an unruly thing that never gets trained, if ever there is a wearying, troubling, tormenting, comfort-dispelling imp of mischief, it is our left side tenant; but these Quixotes have left side tenants that are at eternal crusades against all their peace in life.”

Susan would have no dinner. Mariam insisted that she should at least eat something light which she served her in her own room with a cup of tea.

“That unfortunate man has no peace!” said Mariam to Susan as she kept her sister company after dinner.

“Who?” asked Susan.

“That poor papa! He is sent off now to Cousin Stephen.”

“Why?” Susan started up in her bed with a flash of temper.

“Pray don’t excite yourself again!” was Mariam’s answer. “Cousin Stephen is no longer a villain, but a dear relative, our own flesh and blood you know; and it is incumbent on us to take care of him. If he is sick, he must come and live with us to be looked after; if he is not really sick, why then he must be made to understand that he is ruining an excellent practice by going to Australia. We ought to take an interest in his welfare, if we don’t; who else is to do it? So ‘John’ has been sent off to persuade the sick boy to come and live with us and be nursed into health; or if it is only a refractory boy, to bring him to reason. Mother has retired to her room now, quite overcome with anxiety for our Cousin.”

“Then I suppose I shall find her there,” said Susan as she rose from her bed and slipped on a dressing gown. Mariam put up her hands in amazement; “What another cyclone?”

Susan sighed, her lips quivered, and tears filled her eyes. “No indeed!” she said “I have been wicked enough for once this evening.”

“What are you going to do then? To say that you will not be naughty again?”

“It is the only thing I ought to do.”

“Well, you are beyond me!” said Mariam as Susan walked out of the room.

Susan found it a difficult task to effect a reconciliation; in vain she stood by her mother’s chair and repeated again and again that she was sorry for all she had said and begged forgiveness. Mrs. Malcolm was for the time being inexorable; she arraigned Susan by every term of reproach that most aptly represented filial irreverence, and Susan felt in her heart that she deserved it; there was nothing in her mind to excuse her conduct to herself. Mrs. Malcolm could not be such an eloquent disclaimer against Susan’s failure of duty towards her mother, as Susan’s own conscience.

Such amenities as kisses and caresses were things rarely resorted to between mother and daughter. Susan gave and received periodical kisses on certain occasions, or else with a heart so full of penitence she might have utilized those

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able intercessors between herself and her mother’s wrath, but endearments were not habitual between Mrs. Malcolm and her children, so Susan stood silently by, and only repeated the cold formula of words.

“I am glad to see that you understand the heinousness of your conduct,” Mrs. Malcolm said at last, adding with a reluctant acknowledgement, “You never acted so unlike yourself before, you have as much surprised as pained me; you might have defended Stephen without being guilty of such gross disrespect to your mother.”

Susan bent her head in humble acquiescence.

“I hope it will be the last time!” she said fervently.

“I hope so!” returned her mother.

Mrs. Malcolm did not choose to remember, and Susan did not care to remind her either, that Mariam was a great deal more guilty of disrespect in the aggregate.

Mrs. Malcolm knew that so much penitence could never be forthcoming from Mariam, and she always wisely forbore to exact it.

Susan lingered in her mother’s room till her father’s return; she was anxious to know the result of his ambassadorship. Mr. Malcolm had much the same story to relate, with the only difference that he had returned with a strong conviction Cousin Stephen was suffering not only from nervous debility, but even from a weakness of the brain. At the remonstrances Mr. Malcolm had essayed he had only grasped his Cousin’s hand and exclaimed in an almost wild tone.

“No John, I must go away! I want change, I want rest, I want to forget myself!”

At this juncture Susan had slipped out of the room, not however without a suspicious glance from her mother.

Thoughts of the most painful nature banished sleep from Susan that night; dismal pictures of a lonely man past the elasticity of youth, driven away by the anguish of a hopeless love from the successful field of his labours, the scenes and ties of his life, and seeking a voluntary exile in a strange land harrowed her mind, each striking its poisoned dart; and this man knit to her heart by such deep affections; the loved kinsman, the dearest friend, oh! That he had only been content with such love as she gave him. She probed her heart and she knew that in her life she had loved only one being more than him, that in all the world she loved no one more than him now; but she did not want to marry him. What had she to do with marriage, poor stricken thing? The word echoed but to a wail in her heart. No! she did not want to marry him. She knew what she wanted. She wanted him to be Cousin Stephen all his life, she wanted that dream of the past to come back in all its rapture and all its pain, she wanted to love and trust again, she wanted to believe herself beloved as she had done in those days of her youth. She had suffered much in those days of her youth, but she felt in mad moments as if all that suffering were nothing against this hopelessness of having lost all. Pride had reared up her battlements, all that had been could never be again; but the yearning of her heart was for that very past that was no more. She wished it had not been killed and dead and buried in the silence of her heart, for so long as it lived her heart was young.

Now she felt life was only a bitter thing, a disappointing thing ending in weariness of itself. She was undergoing that intensely bitter affliction of the human spirit,

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when life feels worthless and the hope of the life beyond is still an unrealized dream.

At twenty-three we are capable of sorrowing extravagantly, unless it be in some exceptional cases. We have not yet learned to see “some strange comfort every state attend.” Cousin Stephen looked forward to his exile with eyes of hope; his relations with his Cousin’s family were so intimate that he must fly from the present; in foreign scenes he would battle with his sorrow and live it down; and then when he had learnt resignation to his fate, when time had blunted the keen edge of his grief, he would come back to his old life. His purse would be lighter by much, but there would still be left him enough for his wants. He knew he must calculate on the loss of his practice, which was by no means to be regained easily; but he cared very little for that also. For him there never would be the sweet cares of wife and child to provide for, and he meant rather to take up more free work than otherwise on his return. Susan could think of nothing but a broken hearted man crushed to the earth with his despair, and in whose desolate life not one sweet comfort would be left. He was to go in the desolateness of his heart without one familiar face to cheer his exile, on familiar hand to clasp his own, or one familiar voice to recall to him the scenes that were no more. By degrees a subtle reasoning stole into her thoughts, stirring up the bowels of compassion for Cousin Stephen.

Her own hopes were over, and now by one act of her life, just by a few little words---------what was she thinking of? In the hot April night she shivered with cold and grew sick and faint.

In the dark hours of the morning, Susan wrote a few lines and enclosed them in an envelope.

“Dear Cousin Stephen: I will marry you; do not go away to Australia SUSAN”

“The die is cast,” she said to herself as closing the envelope she threw herself down on her knees in prayer; and even as she prayed she sobbed bitterly.

“Give me of Thy help and Thy strength;” she prayed, “and be near me lest my spirit faint; give of Thy loving succour into the work of Thy hands, for I am but dust and ashes.”

She resolved to herself that her life would go to make up his happiness, and he should never know, never know what it cost her to make him happy.

Wearied with the agonizing emotions of the night, Susan laid down on her bed. But the soft sleepy influences of early dawn, the balmy cool succeeding the oppressiveness of the night brought her no sweet forgetfulness of slumber. With the first faint streaks of light in the sky, there was the flutter of feathered life in the trees; the cawing of the crows, the chirrup of the sparrows, and the shrill cry of the mainas joined together in their matutinal chorus, and with the quick awakening life of an April morning the crimson and gold heralds of the rising sun below the horizon, eclipsed the pale watch of the moon.

In morning light misery appears passé to the mind’s view. The most tempestuous passion of the night gives place for the time being to a jaded apathy, and Susan’s sleepless eyes sought the little note lying on her table with a dulled

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pain. With morning light she remembered the day that was ushered in; it was Palm Sunday.

Susan like all impressionable natures was effected by outward circumstances, and a few blistering tears stole down her cheeks.

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CHAPTER XI. Day Succeeds Night Mrs. Malcolm had gone to Church in no enviable mood. She had been exerting every endeavour, scheming every conceivable trick to get Susan disposed off, and had signally failed. In her time girls were married at fifteen and sixteen without the least difficulty, but the difficulty seemed now to find a marrying man.

Mrs. Malcolm thought what a fortunate woman her own mother was to have been born a generation before her. Mariam was four years younger than Susan, and as lovely as an angel. In spite of the dearth of marrying men, Mrs. Malcolm felt that she might cherish hopes of securing some prize for a daughter with so lovely a face.

But Susan, plain Susan; her plainness redeemed only by her charm of manner (which Mrs. Malcolm did not see) was a nightmare on her brain, a dead weight on her hands; and this unlucky Susan had given cause for offence again. It was Palm Sunday, an occasion when empty pews did not stand in occupantless array, and Susan pleaded a headache. She would not go to Church dressed in her best, and be charming to people, and make herself popular with all the Mothers and Sisters, the Cousins and Aunts of eligible men. Susan never had the least policy, never! Her most intimate lady friend was a woman with three struggling brothers, not one of them in a position to marry. Her second best friend was a woman with two married sons, and no brothers or nephews as collateral surroundings. On the other hand, she always held herself distantly aloof from another woman who had a millionaire brother yet unbound in the fetters of matrimony, on the sole plea of “I don’t like her.” Everybody made so much of the millionaire’s sister, everybody thought her a pattern of all the virtues. Her house was delightful, her taste was exquisite, her daughters were charming; men with unmarried sisters and unmarried daughters slapped her young son on the back and patted him on the shoulders; gracious ladies held her little girl’s cheeks between their soft hands and said “what a sweet child?”

Mrs. Malcolm herself was gush and undying friendship all over, and yet this unmanageable Susan held out nothing but courtesy of the barest and iciest. Mrs. Malcolm felt she had many sore points against her daughter; from her very birth she had set herself against her mother.

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Nothing had consoled Mrs. Malcolm, not even the sight of Mariam in the nattiest of bonnets and the prettiest of dresses sitting opposite her in the carriage, and looking if possible a degree lovelier than usual.

“Susan has unaccountable headaches latterly,” she remarked to Mariam as they drove to church. “She used to be the healthiest of girls.”

“Why not send her to Australia with Cousin Stephen for a change,” suggested Mariam, casting down demure eyes on the fan in her lap.

“She keeps too much at home; she should go out,” said Mr. Malcolm.

Mrs. Malcolm was sometimes given to awarding dignity and authority to her husband; it reminded him of those courting days when she had looked up sweetly into his face, and deferred to his opinion, and kept alive the glow of adoration in his heart.

“I should be so glad, John, if you could persuade her to act like other girls,” she said. “As for me, I think I must give up trying to manage her.”

On her way home from church, though a martyr to hunger, Mrs. Malcolm ordered her coachman to drive to Cousin Stephen’s determined to carry him away to breakfast with them; he was not going to be allowed to slip so easily through her fingers.

When her carriage drove under the portico of Cousin Stephen’s house, and Mrs. Malcolm bustled out and made her enquiries, the polite “chupprassi” making his humble “salaams” told her the “sahib” had gone out walking in the morning about nine o’clock and was not yet returned. “Did he know when the ‘sahib’ would be back?” The polite “chupprassi” did not know that; all he knew was that when “huzoor’s” “bearer” brought the letter, the “sahib” read it and went out at once.

“My ‘bearer!’” ejaculated Mrs. Malcolm in surprise. The polite “chupprassi” repeated his assertion. “Yes, ‘huzoor’s’ ‘ bearer.’”

Mrs. Malcolm turned away in disgust.

“I wonder of what use such a stupid man is to Stephen,” she said. The polite “chupprassi” resented nothing, he only made a deeper “salaam” as Mrs. Malcolm’s august form bustled back into the carriage and gave the order for home.

“What does he mean by hiding himself from us?” she asked her husband, who was engaged in the innocent occupation of plaiting palm leaves together.

A quarter century’s experience had not taught Mr. Malcolm to avoid making unsuitable remarks.

“He is not hiding himself, dear,” he explained.

“That is enough! That is enough!” answered the irate wife. “Nobody asked you to become your kinsman’s advocate. ‘For the village that can be seen, there is no need of signposts,’” Mariam put forward her little foot and nudged against her father’s toes, giving him a warning glance from her eyes to say nothing more.

Mrs. Malcolm muttered to herself, “Of all gifts, may God give a man understanding.” And happily for the moment the impending cyclone remained in abeyance.

Mrs. Malcolm’s beautiful face was sullen with displeasure. Mrs. Malcolm’s beautiful face suddenly beamed with the most cordial of smiles, and the comeliest

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of matrons stepped out of her carriage to greet Cousin Stephen standing with Susan beside him on the top of her own portico steps.

In breathless haste she told him that she had just looked in at his house in order to bring him away to breakfast with them, and was so glad to find that he had forestalled her. She insisted he was looking the picture of health, that he was only imagining himself sick, and ought to give up the madness of going to Australia. He stayed her gently. He had changed his mind about going to Australia, he was going to marry instead. “Susan has given me her consent,” he said. “Will you and John give yours?”

Day succeeds night. To the darkness of Mrs. Malcolm’s night had succeeded the effulgence of day. What could describe the glad surprise, the bewildered delight with which she heard Cousin Stephen’s announcement. In an agitation of joy she kissed, embraced and blessed Susan; and then she kissed, embraced and blessed Cousin Stephen. Her profusion of words made up for Mr. Malcolm’s silence. She had forgotten the graceful speeches, the little flattering compliments she had learnt off by heart. But she took it on herself to say that she and John gave their consent willingly; she and John were both happy beyond measure, and that to no one else could she and John have trusted their dear Susan with so much confidence.

The one Cousin sought the other’s hand and held it in his own.

“John!” he said, “I know what your prejudices are. You belong to the old school; but believe me no other man could love Susan more than I do, no one appreciate her worth better, or care more about her happiness.”

And so it was all done. Cousin Stephen was the happiest of men, and Susan wondered how such a momentous question of her life could have been settled so easily.

To Mariam the fact of Susan’s engagement to Cousin Stephen was mingled with anxiety and joy. She was happy over the advantages of the marriage in prospect, distressed about Susan’s personal feelings in the matter; worldly interests had always been at such a discount with Susan, her world lay within the borders of her own heart, she could never be happy outside it. With eager observation Mariam scanned her sister’s face and Cousin Stephen’s and she felt that if Cousin Stephen was looking younger by ten years, Susan was looking older by as many more; and there were tears left on Susan’s cheeks as Mariam kissed her. Later at night she sought her sister’s room. “Susan” she said “don’t marry Cousin Stephen if it makes you unhappy to do so.”

But Susan turned towards her with a calm self-possession.

“My dear Mariam, what nonsense! Why should I have consented to marry Cousin Stephen in that case?”

“You are not speaking the truth,” Mariam answered with gentle insistence.

“You refused him only a few days ago. I cannot fathom your motives now, but I am certain you are not happy; I wish you were, though.”

This was too much for Susan’s equanimity, and tears she would fain have repressed started to her eyes.

“If you are just a little unwilling, I would advise you to marry Cousin Stephen,” continued Mariam. “You will get over the unwillingness bye and bye;

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but if you are very unhappy, and if you mean to go on making yourself miserable, where is it all to end? It were better you did retract.”

Susan brushed away her tears.

“Hush Mariam! Hush! I have no wish to retract, not the least in the world.

Cousin Stephen is the best of men, and I must try to love him a great deal, and to feel very happy as his wife.”

They were brave words, but through the long watches of the night the woman who uttered them lay tossing on her bed, harrowed by conflicting emotions.

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CHAPTER XII. Quelque In spite of ‘all her troubles’ and what might be supposed their sobering effect, Mrs. Malcolm had the happy gift of keeping the gates of fairyland open to herself at forty. The fact of Susan’s engagement to Cousin Stephen laid the foundation of her children’s happiness and prosperity on a rock against which all storms were henceforth to beat in vain; as if Susan once engaged to be married to Cousin Stephen was to be eternally happy, and the glad to-day was to go on for ever and ever in a fairy tale, as if there were to be no dark shadows lying hidden in the future, no anxieties to blanch the dark hair once so offensively red, no cares to lay lines on that smooth young forehead, no sorrows to take the zest and elasticity out of life before that life was no more.

Mrs. Malcolm was delirious with joy, as a girl of sixteen when her lover presses his kisses on her lips, and she thinks life must go on for her only thus, for ever and ever. No change, no alteration, no sad to-morrow when her dream shall have vanished and fled; but only thus and thus, for ever and ever. Happy Mrs. Malcolm! With forty years to have preserved the illusions of sixteen.

Susan engaged to be married so well, it was impossible to tell what wonderful castles in the air she reared up for Mariam; and Mariam disposed off, a rich wife was secured for Joakim who was rising higher and higher to such marvelous heights of eminence, the little ones in the rear were coming forward also, and Mrs. Malcolm swelling with a pride Cornelia could not have rivaled.

But perfect happiness is not to be found in this world; not even when a darling hope, a dear desire meets with its long coveted fulfillment. There must at least be one little crumpled rose leaf. Susan had begged that her engagement should not be made public for a week. She felt as if it would in some little way lessen her distress to get used to the trial before the congratulations poured in upon her. “Let passion week pass.” Was the reason she gave Cousin Stephen; and he had said “let it be as you like my darling; have everything your own way; all I care about is that you are mine.”

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Mrs. Malcolm fussed and fidgeted. On the night of the very first day she gave Mt. Malcolm a certain lecture, and scolded out his old woman’s scruples, but she wanted to let all her dear friends know at once what an excellent thing she had done

by Susan, and to accept all their congratulations in the delicious pride of her heart.

She had nevertheless to keep all her proud delight to herself for a whole week, and only let it ooze out in vague hints and sighs of contentment.

The morning and evening service of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, Thursday in the forenoon, Thursday in the evening found Susan in her church. So often she had knelt there and prayed for help to bear all the doubt and yearning and the sickness of “hope deferred” of the love of her youth. Now she prayed for help to bear the burden of this other love that she had laid over her life.

“What is it going to be? A religieuse for a wife?” Cousin Stephen asked laughingly, as she stood dressed for the night service in white mull with a black lace bonnet fitting closely to her head. She put up the palm leaf punkah she held in her hand to her face, and laughed behind it in what seemed a pretty little affectation of manner, though in reality it was to hide the tears that would rise to her eyes. Susan wished to stay out the service, but the others preferred leaving the church earlier; so Cousin Stephen decided to see her home.

To Susan’s sad heart, the sad prayers, the low mournful chants depicting the betrayal and agonies of the crucified God felt sadder still. Never before had the impressive night service worked on her feelings in like manner. For her that night there was a new reading of the divine words “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.”

In that hour when the struggling light of morning meets with the darkness of night, when nature seems still hushed in her sleep, the glorious chant rang out in the dimmed church.

“Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill towards men; and praise to Thee in the highest, blessed art Thou oh! Lord our God.” The chant of praise pealed through the silence of the night.

“Holy one who sitteth at the right hand of the Father have mercy on us; for Thou only art holy, Thou only art exalted, Thou only art our Lord Jesus Christ.”

To Susan it felt as if the burden of her sorrow was rolling away from her heart. If she could only have knelt thus always with those calmest holiest thoughts, with this comfort in her soul, thus with earth so near to heaven, thus with the praise and supplications of the creature rising to its Creator.

The last gospel was read; once more through the silence the last beautiful chant rose in the words of praise, the last prayer was uttered, and in the light that was “not clear nor dark” the few remaining of the congregation walked out of the church.

Susan was rolling home in Cousin Stephen’s brougham. As his arm encircled her form, he drew her head gently down on his breast and kissed her lips.

“My darling,” he said, “what a happy man I am!”

But the next instant he was shocked to find Susan put up her hands to her face and burst into tears; a painful suspicion flashed through his mind, he drew away the arm that encircled her. “Susan!” he said gravely after the lapse of a few minutes, when he had had time to think, and she had had time to choke down her sobs.

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“Why did you cry so passionately just now when I kissed you? If you mistook your feelings when you consented to marry me, if you have repented your decision, it is not to late yet, dear. I will release you at once.”

His voice trembled as he spoke and she clutched at his hands convulsively.

“Oh hush! Do not say that again, only bear with me a little, just a little.”

“I will bear with you not a little, dearest; but a great deal, the most that a man could bear. But I am thinking of your happiness, Susan.”

She bent her face over his hands and kissed them before he could arrest the act.

“This is my happiness!” she said.

“Save me from the snares of my own heart, for it clingeth to madness and folly and perversity,” was Susan’s prayer, as she knelt by her open window and fixed her eyes upward to the skies where the light of dawn was breaking through the clouds. If only such a light would break over the darkness of her own heart, thus softly, gently, soothingly. It may be that in sorrow we have fancies, but such fancies that lift us to a trust higher and purer than our sphere, do they not bless our life indeed? Susan, crushed to the earth with the burden of her sorrow, sought for the strength and healing that come to us from beyond our earth. It may be if at first she had thoroughly realized the cost of her sacrifice, she might not have been generous enough to have precipitated herself into it; it may be after thoughts found her reasoning, calculating as to whether the gain to Cousin Stephen was worth the cost to herself. But the act once done, nothing could tempt her to undo it. “I will bear it all, sol help me God!” was her resolve.

Time in its flight smoothed out Mrs. Malcolm’s crumpled rose leaf; all her dear friends congratulated her on the excellent match Susan was about to make, all her dear friends hoped to see Mariam married next. Mrs. Malcolm in her turn hoped to see more than a score of other ladies married also. Even the millionaire’s sister, in spite of the ungracious manner with which Susan had all along treated her, expressed her share in the general happiness, and wished for the further happiness of seeing Mariam well settled in life. The most profuse thanks flowed from Mrs. Malcolm’s lips, a glorious vision flooded her mind and for the moment even accelerated the beating of her heart. She saw her lovely daughter like a ruby in a diamond setting, the mistress of a palatial home. She began to think that in her anxiety to get Susan married, she had been neglectful of Mariam’s training.

Mariam was decidedly more amenable to good sense than Susan, but she too was given to little unruly tendencies now and again. For instance, though she was always affable to the millionaire and his sister, she had a mischievous habit of taking off their pecularities behind their backs, and calling them naughty names.

Mrs. Malcolm felt there was a pressing necessity to put a stop to all that. Mariam should not be permitted the folly of damaging the chances of a splendid marriage for the pleasure of indulging in a profitless humour.

However her ‘joy was great’ r ‘joy was greater’ when Cousin Stephen brought his gifts for Susan. There were gems that had belonged to his mother, the residue of the jewels she had sold when the death of a dear husband brought pecuniary changes for her, and which she had kept in loving care for the son’s wife she had never lived to see. There was a string of pearls which he clasped round Susan’s

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neck, old diamonds of luminous whiteness left out of his grandmother’s ‘Khambara’ which Mrs. Malcolm sorted out for the setting of the star, a ruby as rich coloured a pomegranate seed, which was to be the center gem of a ring. A cashmere shawl, a counterpane of old Indian silk, silver key rings and a silver powder box, a gold thimble, a gold needle case, a pair of gold braid garters; so many things which in his mother’s generation were considered as necessary paraphernalia to the status of a gentlewoman and which she had laid aside for the woman who was to be his wife.

“How my mother would have loved you,” he had said. “She was overproud and overfond of me, but you would have satisfied her heart in every respect.”

Then he brought her the betrothal ring that had been his mother’s but he had had something engraved inside; he turned it towards her ere he slipped the ring on her finger. “Quelque” She looking into his eyes understood what he meant. She made a movement as if she would once more kiss those hands that held her own, but he lifted up her face. “Here my darling, here on my lips; even though it may be ‘Quelque’” “What does ‘Quelque’ mean?” Mrs. Malcolm had asked.

“It means,” said Susan keeping her face away from her mother “ ‘whatever.’ ‘whatsoever’” And what does Stephen mean by having ‘whatever’ or ‘whatsoever’ engraved inside his betrothal ring?”

“I suppose he means that we are to accept with each other whatever joys and sorrows life may bring us.”

“A long meaning for one word.”

“One little word sometimes means so much” said Susan.

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CHAPTER XIII. “Et Tu Brute” Crumpled rose leaves were however succeeding one another. Mrs. Malcolm was highly displeased at the slipshod manner in which Susan was betrothed. It was the custom of her nation to have the betrothal in the presence of a large number of relatives and friends; Cousin Stephen had fixed on no day, he had brought the ring with that absurd “Quelque” in it, had slipped it on Susan’s finger before even her mother was aware. Susan and Cousin Stephen made many propitiatory excuses, but before Mrs. Malcolm had got over the affront to her dignity and to a time-honoured custom, the priests she used to waylay into arguments about the tenets of marriage, visited her house with the express purpose of seeking her aid in the prohibitions of a marriage she had set her heart upon for years, and had lain awake at night scheming to bring about.

When the news had found its way inside the walls of the parochial building, the priests sitting in a conclave over it, had decided that certainly it was incumbent on them to remonstrate, to denounce this violation of a tenet of the church. They counted upon Mrs. Malcolm’s orthodoxy as the sheet anchor of their cause. She had always proved herself a staunch ally in the support of every dogma and doctrine and system; she announced the news to them herself.

“I am sure you will be happy to hear,” she said, “that our Susan is to be married to our Stephen.”

The good priests were aghast; they looked from one to another, they shook their heads simultaneously, they spoke in the same breath, in the same emphatic tone.

“Happy! No we are not happy at all! We are surprised beyond measure!”

Mrs. Malcolm laughed a short little laugh.

“Why?” she asked in the most naïve manner she could assume.

The senor priest took on himself the office of expostulator in chief; his confrere lower in authority contented himself with the part of seconding his superior.

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58 “Mariam lady is it you who asks us why?”

“Yes!” said the other, “it surprises us more than anything else that it should be

you.”

“Mariam lady,” continued the senior priest “we thought you were a pious, a devout daughter of our holy church; have you too gone over to the body of the unbelievers?”

“We felt always sure of you!” murmured the other.

Whatever may have been Mr. Malcolm’s personal experiences, Mrs. Malcolm was ever sweet and gracious in company. “No, Sir Father!” she said, smiling benignly. “People at my time of life do not alter their opinions or beliefs.”

“But how do you sanction the marriage of your daughter with her father’s brother’s son? It is a sin! It is against the customs of our church!”

“Our church will never perform the marriage,” added the other by way of affix.

Mrs. Malcolm expressed no regrets, she made no entreaties. She only said in a decided tone, “Then they must marry in a Protestant church, that is all!”

Amazement depicted itself in the faces of Mrs. Malcolm’s spiritual guides; each of them made a startled gesture of surprise.

“Woe to my head sister when you say that! Would you rebel against the laws of the church?”

“May God give grace to the world because of its offences!” exclaimed the second in a tone of prayer.

Mrs. Malcolm turned her face to the latter and laughed good naturedly; she then turned her face towards the elder and spoke.

“Sir Father; I have no wish to rebel against the laws of the church; but what are we to do? The marriage must take place!”

“The marriage must not take place, sister!”

Mrs. Malcolm smiled very sweetly, but Mrs. Malcolm spoke very firmly. “Sir Father, it is vain to tell me that; my daughter is betrothed to be married, and be married she will!”

The junior priest drew his chair nearer.

“Let me reason with you lady; and may God give grace to my speech that my arguments and entreaties should enter into your heart.”

“It will all be in vain, Sir Father!” answered Mrs. Malcolm in a tone that seemed to say she would admit of no arguments or entreaties.

“But hear me, sister!”

“What is the use, Sir Father! I am very sorry that I cannot conform to your wishes, but really we have no other help.”

“Ah sister! It is not my wishes, it is the law of God that I am preaching to you, our church forbids marriage within seven degrees of blood relationship.”

“It is what the Bishops and Archbishops, the Patriarchs and Vartabeds have deemed right and godly!” said the senior, taking up the defence of his cause again.

“The Bishops and Archbishops, the Patriarchs and Vartabeds have established some superfluities, Sir Father!” was Mrs. Malcolm’s unabashed reply. “They were influenced by an over religious zeal. Take the bible example of Isaac and

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Rebekah,” she continued. “The relationship was the very same as in the case of our Stephen and our Susan.”

She evidenced the case of Israel and Rachel. “That is even a degree closer,” she said triumphantly, “have not the Bishops and Archbishops, the Patriarchs and Vartabeds been at error in their inculcation of the marriage laws.”

The priests looked at each other, they then looked at Mrs. Malcolm. There was “et tu brute” in the expression of their eyes, Mrs. Malcolm shifted her own nervously. The senior priest, at a loss for farther arguments, solaced himself with the comforts of his snuff box; the other made a fresh appeal.

“O Sister! You have put aside your piety, but believe me you will repent much when the misfortunes attendant on a prohibited marriage like this befall your daughter.”

Mrs. Malcolm drew herself up stiffly.

“I never knew of any particular misfortune befalling marriages that are permissible by all Christian Churches over the world. Misfortunes come to us all, each life has its share, and I have known of particularly heavy misfortunes befalling marriages where there had been neither consanguinity nor affinity in the remotest degree.”

“Sister, would you assume yourself to be gifted with a higher grace for the interpretation of divine wishes than the inspired saints of our church?”

“Sir Father! God has given us free minds to think and act for ourselves; we are not bound to be slaves to other men’s opinions.”

“Oh yes, lady!” answered the astonished priest; “and yet you were once such a meek believer.”

“So am I now, Sir Father!” said Mrs. Malcolm, melting into graciousness again. “I have a great respect for all the doctrines and tenets of our church. They were certainly wise and good men who inculcated her laws, but really in some things they have carried their piety to an extreme degree. I respect even their overzeal,” she continued, “since it was a natural consequence of the dire persecutions our church has undergone’ the persecutions incited horror and hatred against unbelievers, and fanned the flame of religious zeal in the hearts of the fathers of our church till it grew to fanaticism. “We have a proof of their fanaticism in the very ceremony of our mass, for in the midst of the most touching supplications, at the close of the most sublime creed, the church launches forth an anathema against unbelievers; and that is not what Christ taught us to do, Sir Father.”

“Yes sister, yes!” answered the priest, shaking his head. “I have only one reply to give you, ‘The tongue that has no bone; as you twist it, so it will turn.’”

Mrs. Malcolm coloured hotly. “There is no use in arguing over the matter,” she said. “We can never agree.”

“And yet we always agreed!” sighed the senior priest.

Mrs. Malcolm took refuge in silence.

There was a further argument. Mr. Malcolm suggested that the Archbishop of the See should be written to, and his permission asked for the solemnization of the marriage in their own church. The priests admitted it was very doubtful as to whether the Archbishop would grant the permission, since there had never been

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precedence of a case like this. Mrs. Malcolm calculated the length of days that would necessarily intervene till the permission arrived at Calcutta; twenty-four days at the earliest for the postal carriage of a letter from Calcutta to Julpha, twenty-four days back again, and goodness knows how many days the Archbishop might be revolving over the giving or withholding of the permission; and the wedding was fixed on an early date in June. Mrs. Malcolm resolved in her heart that the wedding should not be postponed, though she professed herself willing the priests should write for the august mandate, by the favour of which the restrictions of the marriage laws could be modified.

Mrs. Malcolm had a vague fear of Susan. What, she could not exactly say; but she felt if she did not hurry and get her securely married something disastrous might happen, and it had been owing to her precipitation that the wedding day had been fixed.

“I do not approve of postponing the wedding,” she said to Cousin Stephen after the priests had taken their leave, and was quite pleased to find him cordially agreeing with her. An expression on Susan’s face whilst they spoke, made Cousin Stephen ask his betrothed a little while afterwards—“Dear, are you sorry at our arrangements?”

“It does not matter.” She answered. “If you are content so am I.” “What a meek little wife!” he said, as he drew her towards hi. “I know you feel it does matter, for I can read your heart dear; you love your church, you love her antiquity, you love her grandeur, her pomp and her splendour, you love the intense prayers as grand as sublime that thrill to your soul’s centre.” He caught her face between his hands and looked down into her eyes. “You have sacred feelings of your wife-hood, you would associate it with the church you loge; most womanly woman, I would not have you otherwise.” He released her face and passed his arm round her. “A strange, strange presentiment Susan, I do not know what it is; I never was superstitious. But I feel as if something would happen did I postpone the marriage. Could ever my love falter, could you ever be faithless to me, never one or the other; but I tremble at any delay that might come between making you securely mine, or else I would gladly have waited for the possibility of receiving the permission, as I, would have much preferred being married in our own church; besides, I know if would comfort you.

She thought if he only knew how little anything on earth could comfort her, but she told herself again that he should never know; that he might be spared such bitter knowledge was the unceasing prayer of her heart.

“Dear!” he said has he held her close to himself. “In the past that lies behind us, you have suffered and so have I; we have lived over glamour, we have lost entrancement, the golden illusions with their roseate linings have left us for ever.

But we have much in the work of the sober day, a great deal more in the hope of an evening time whose light shall be fairer than morning. ‘The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few.’ Have you ever realized the import of that verse, Susan? It is for such as us whom God has made stewards of His wealth in more or less degree, to go forth as labourers into His harvest; it is for such as us to bind the broken and scattered sheaves, and gather up the bruised clusters. Not only for my own selfish happiness, but even for such work in life. Oh sweet woman! I

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need your gentler spirit, your quicker sensibilities, your livelier sympathy, your more feeling heart.”

And she hearing his words prayed in her heart.

“O God, even so reconcile my heart; let me forsake all vain regrets, and go whither he leadeth me.”

At times he called her his “Kismet” his blest Kismet;” and at such times in the anguish of her heart she had almost cried out “God alone knows what ‘Kismet’ I shall be to you!”

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CHAPTER XIV. King Arthur The wedding preparations went on apace, and in the midst of all her triumph and delight, crumpled rose leaves gathered thick and fast for Mrs. Malcolm. Susan was always curtailing expenses which she deemed pressingly necessary. “O mother, do consider a little!” Susan would implore. She even ventured to remark that “Cousin Stephen did not pick up rupees in the streets, and poor papa was certainly not in the best of circumstances.” “There, that will do!” Mrs. Malcolm would stop her in a violent rage. “I know what you are going to say; your father is every day in danger of being dragged through the insolvent court, and everything in this house brought under the auctioner’s hammer.”

She scolded Susan very sharply for speaking of her betrothed as “Cousin Stephen.” “Cousin Stephen indeed! What girl ever Cousins the man she is going to marry? People hearing you, would think you were forced into this marriage; I used to call your father “beloved” directly we were engaged.”

She also scolded Susan because her figure was losing its curves, and her face growing worn and haggard. “What will people say?” she would remark. “A girl that is engaged ought to look radiant and blooming;” and consequently she forced an egg flip down her daughter’s throat every day, and got Cousin Stephen to prescribe her a course of tonics. The scoldings, the egg flips, and the tonics, were light matters to Susan. The trial to her outward composure and her inward feelings was Cousin Stephen’s solicitous care; it puzzled him to think what was the matter with her. Physically there was no cause for anxiety. “He could think of nothing except that she was by her mother nagged at and worried, and,” he acknowledged to himself “I don’t quite make up to her for the love of her youth?” He noticed that she never addressed him by name, she had given up calling him “Cousin Stephen,” but she never called him “Stephen;” and so little clouds swept over the sunshine of Cousin Stephen’s happiness, little darts of pain shot into his heart of which Susan did not know.

The knotty question as to whether Stephen could marry Susan in their own church was still undecided. The priests were clearly entitled to perform the

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marriage without Episcopal authority, it was as much as their office was worth; and further discussions and arguments had ended in the self-same manner. So Susan and Cousin Stephen were to be married in a Protestant church. Once Mrs. Malcolm sighed over the wedding cards. “Ah!” she said, ‘how I wish it had been printed here “at the Armenian church” instead of “at St. Paul’s Cathedral.” Susan filling the names in the cards, bent over them still lower with wet eyes.

“Don’t be a baby Susan!” Mrs. Malcolm scolded vigourously. “Every one Christian church is just as good as another. You will have the consolation of being as securely married as you would be in your own; for our church acknowledges the marriage of every other church, and though she won’t marry you, she will acknowledge your marriage all the same.”

Mrs. Malcolm had inspected her daughter’s establishment, she had looked over everything; from the drawing-room carpet to the cut class bottles on Susan’s toilet table filled with eau-de-cologne and opopanax, Susan’s favorite scents; and in spite of many crumpled rose leaves, her heart had overflowed with satisfaction.

The wedding day dawned at last, and at five o’clock in the evening fashion and beauty crowded at St. Paul’s. Mrs. Malcolm as the comeliest of matrons was even the proudest; she had made a flowing speech to Cousin Stephen earlier, confiding her treasure to him, and her eyes feasted on Susan in the trailing satin, with the diamond star glittering in the folds of the veil on her head. Her plain daughter was being married to a position few pretty girls in her rank of life had attained, and amid a galaxy of beauty her lovely daughter stood peerless.

Mariam’s was a face, loveliest amid the lovely women of her race, and as Mrs. Malcolm had anticipated, she looked “divine” as bridesmaid. The bride was forgotten, all eyes were turned to the entrancing loveliness of the bride’s sister.

Mrs. Malcolm’s friends whispered flattering compliments in church; they made open remarks in the house. She was told again and again that Mariam was “exquisitely lovely,” “bewitchingly pretty.” Mrs. Malcolm felt the room swimming round her; it was almost as good as a proposal.

Oh! But Mrs. Malcolm was happy; even Mr. Malcolm had got over certain prejudices that were given to obstinately asserting themselves in his heart, and was drinking more champagne that he had ever been known to do. On his wedding-day, doubts and fears that alloyed Cousin Stephen’s happiness were chased from his mind, and he seemed to have regained his youth.

“Everybody looks happy, but the bride!” It was an unfortunate remark overheard by the last man who should have heard it. Cousin Stephen shot a glance at his bride’s face, at her pallid cheeks and the expression of weariness in her eyes; and his joy was damped at this notice of her looks. She whispered to him that she was fatigued and wished everything was over; and he could not help contrasting his own feelings of pleasure and joyousness against this weariness of hers.

“Do you feel ill?” he asked, as amidst a shower of good wishes, hand shakings and embraces from friends and relatives they drove away to their home, to start for Darjiling in the forenoon of the next day.

“I feel stifled,” she answered. “I want a little more air than this carriage can give me, to breathe in.”

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He grew grave and silent; already he was asking himself whether his marriage was going to be productive of happiness or pain. He took up her fan, a delicate combination of satin and ivory that lay on her lap, and fanned her, and she lay back with closed eyes against the cushions. The moments were rolling her away from the home of her father to the home of her husband. Never as now, did she feel so acutely how much of this man’s happiness lay in her keeping; without opening her eyes she groped for his hand and held it in her own. She wanted to tell him, to make him understand in some dumb silent way, all the hungerings and yearnings, all the weakness and tremulousness of her heart. The carriage drove in through the gateway, without opening her eyes she knew she had arrived at her home, a nervous agitation weakened her in every limb. Cousin Stephen was speaking to her. She opened her eyes, she tried to rally strength and firmness, but as he assisted her out of the carriage Susan lost consciousness, and but for his strong arm would have fallen on her face on the very steps that led into the house. This was Cousin Stephen’s wedding day; this was his bride’s coming home. From the midst of the gaping servants he carried her upstairs to the rooms it had been such happy work for him to prepare for her coming. He felt then as if the strength of ten men were in his muscles, the passion of ten men in his veins, the bitterness of a life time in that hour when she lay inanimate, and he practiced the aids of his art to bring her back to consciousness again.

“Susan, why did you marry me?” was Cousin Stephen’s question as he faced her in her room a few hours later. “You have not married me for love; though I was fool enough to think that the very intenseness of my passion had won some reciprocity from you. You have not married me because I was what the world would call ‘a good offer’ since that would hold I know no consideration from you.

I cannot even suppose you to be actuated by such an unworthy motive as pique.

Why then have you married me?” He approached her and held her face between his hands, looking straight into her eyes; and she knew that not only had he made a guess at her secret feelings, but that he was even labouring under an exaggerated impression of them. “Tell me the truth Susan! I will have the truth; whatever it is; and nothing else but that. Speak!” he said “you owe it in fairness to me.”

She put up her hands and drew away those that held her face. “I will speak the truth. But Oh! It is so hard.”

“Even if it hurt you; never mind if it hurt me. It is best I should know. We are man and wife now; let us at least understand one another.”

She bent her brow over her hands, she felt as if she could not look into his face while she told him.

“Speak!” he said encouragingly, and nothing could be more trying than the kindness of his tone. She wanted to spare him everything, and she felt as if he would be spared nothing. He came and sat beside her, and without making any attempt at a caress, took one of her hands and held it in his own.

“Whatever the truth is, dear, it is necessary I should know; so tell it to me Susan. Tell me your reason for marrying me; for bringing me back to you after you had sent me away.”

“I was a miserable woman,” she said brokenly. “I felt that all happiness was dead for me in life; I could understand something of what you suffered, and it hurt

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me so to think of your pain. You had been so good, so kind, so generous, there was nothing I would not have done for you that I could. I meant that you should never know. I thought that I could hide all the misery in my heart and make you happy.”

He dropped his hand and struck at his forehead distractedly. “Oh Child!

Child! Did you think you could make me happy whilst your heart was bound up in another man?”

“What is the use of my heart being bound up?” she asked bitterly. “I loved and trusted with my whole life; what did I gain in return?”

He looked at her with a compassion and misery in his eyes that but harrowed her feelings the more. “Susan, you are tortured by mingled emotions; you suffer, and you are tormented by a wild wish to spare me suffering. But-----“ the words died away in his throat, how could he tell her. “We have laid a cross on our lives, you and I; and we can never lay it down again, we must bear it till death.” To him the future was a blank page on which no ray of hope might linger, so he thought.

He had never felt so hopeless of Susan’s love, as on the day that had made her utterly his own; it was “sorrow’s crown of sorrow” to him.

She sat with her face hidden in her hands, still and quiet, and he tore at the petals of some roses he had placed for her in the room that morning. Once a passionate pleading almost rose to his lips. “Love me Susan, love me a little; you are my wife now, and I love you so much.” But his hair had thinned with his years, his beard was streaked with silver, and her heart had chosen youth with his graces.

How could he tell she had sickened at all that long ago? And he only tore at the rose petals, and thought again and again that Fate had dealt him her heaviest blow.

In that moment all the sorrows of his life seem to rise up, and march rank and file before him; and he felt he had never suffered like this. Not on the day when a father’s dying hand had lain on his head and a father’s dying voice had bade him comfort his mother, and the lad of sixteen had been sobered into a man; not through all the tender sorrows connected with that mother’s memory; not even when he had kissed her dead eyes in the eternal farewell, and had felt as if the cup of life’s sorrow had overflowed for him; not through the early struggles of his career; not when the love of his youth had been given in vain; not through all the hopelessness and yearning, the doubt and fear and the anguish of the years of his love for Susan.

Ah! Not at any time had his life been such dust and ashes in his mouth.

Bye and bye he went up to her. He took off her hands from her face, and stroked back her hair gently as was his wont. She trembled, and he thought that she shuddered at his touch. “Don’t be afraid child, I will not force my love on you;” he said, unable to suppress the bitterness in his voice. “We are married now, and nothing can undo that; but we must think of a way of living out our lives. Don’t suppose I blame you dear,” he continued as she remained silent. “The Hand above deals out our joys and sorrows; if that which I value best in this world is to be denied me, I must acquiesce in the decree. I cannot fight against my fate. Would to God only I could retrieve my blunder, and for your sake set you free. Yours has been an act, of which only utterly unselfish women are capable, when carried away by a spirit of self-forgetfulness. I condemn myself for having accepted it so greedily; but oh!” he said with a quiver in his voice that smote through her, “I loved you so much!”

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Her face was buried in her hands again, and a rain of tears gushed through her fingers. His last footsteps died out of the room unheard by her. When she lifted up her face again he was gone, and she found herself alone.

By degrees her glance wandering mechanically round the room, for the first time discovered the draggled veil with the gleaming star in hit and the crushed wreath thrown on the floor. She began to have an idea he must have wrenched them of her head when he had carried her unconscious upstairs. She lifted them carefully and laid them on the sofa. She took the wreath in her hands and kissed it without knowing why; she recalled in that moment her feelings when the same wreath was being arranged on her head, but strangely her feelings were changing, she scarcely understood how. She took off her unfastened dress, her fingers lingering on the draggled draperies of the skirt, on the torn laces of the bodice with a woman’s regretful touch. Somehow the dress too had grown dear, she was loving it, because she had been married in it, and yet she wondered how she was loving it.

Only half an hour ago, and she thought herself a miserable wife; now everything that belonged to her marriage was growing dear. She looked round at the room taking in all of the details; her surroundings were so pleasant. She peeped out of them into the landing and into the drawingroom. It was all so nice. She had imagined captivity in a gilded cage; now she imagined her husband coming hp the stairs after a hard day’s work, and she making home pleasant and comfortable for him. Her glance took in the verandah beyond. Just the place Stephen would like to have afternoon tea of an evening when he was at home. Her mirror displayed her pallid face with the dark circles under her eyes, and the disheveled hair. She did not want Stephen to see her like that. As she combed out the tangled masses, she wondered also how curiously he had become “Stephen” for her and no longer “Cousin Stephen.” Ah yes! Stephen! Her husband. Conscience was hewing out the way to him; honour and truth leading her there. False Sentiment stood as if reflected in a glass; and then it lay shivered into fragments at her feet. What had he said! “We are married now, and nothing can undo that.” She was glad it could not be undone. “Would to God only I could retrieve my blunder, and for your sake set you free.” She did not want to be set free; she must go and tell him that, she must go and tell him that her bondage was sweet to her, and that she was only finding it out now. What else had he said? “I do not blame you dear,” oh no! He had never blamed her, he had always loved her;--the tears coursed each other heavily down her cheeks. He had never caused her a pang, never given her a slight, never an unkind word; always the same kind face, always the same kind voice, the same kind forethought and consideration, always, always. Her trembling limbs sank into the nearest seat she could find and she sobbed afresh. The unrestrained weeping did her good, and an infinite sweetness stole into her heart. She had discovered something for herself, she had discovered King Arthur; “not Lancelot, nor another” but King Arthur. Thank Heaven! For that she was a blameless Giunevere; and had lost no inch in Arthur’s esteem, no corner in Arthur’s love. Oh he loved her! He loved her! Only her! In all the width of the world he valued her best. The tears that streamed down her cheeks now, were the sweetest tears of her life; once his love had crushed her, now it was her triumph, and she must go and tell him that.

She sought to make herself acceptable in his eyes, and was pleased to look at

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herself again in the glass, surprised to see the change. The light of joy was in her eyes, the smile of love on her lips, her face had never seemed so radiant and sweet.

“Ah me!” she said softly to herself, “What cannot love’s happiness do for a woman’s.” She had slipped on a dainty dressing gown, something with ribbons and soft laces, that made her look what Nature had designed her for---“a charming woman.” She had fastened at her throat the loveliest rose out of the mass he had arranged for her, and fixed the gleaming star in her hair, and so she went down the stairs of her home to find him. Her instinct guided her to his study room. He had told her so often it was the room in the house he liked best, and so she felt sure he must be there. She stood at his door and called his name, twice, three times, before he answered her; then she drew aside the purdah and stood within the threshold. He was seated by his table. The change in his face arrested her steps; how he must have suffered, though he had said not a word of his pain, though he had talked so bravely of “only that he could retrieve his blunder, and for her sake set her free.”

She went up to him with a cry, her arms wound themselves round his neck. She pressed tenderest kisses on his brow and eyes and lips. “Oh Stephen! Don’t look that. I have come to tell you that I love you now.”

He looked at her vacantly, like a man in a trance.

“Don’t you hear what I say; I have come to tell you that I love you now!” she repeated.

He caught her slight form and crushed her in his clasp.

“For God’s love is this the truth? The entire truth!”

She brought her face nearer to his.

“The truth dearest, the entire truth!”

She twined her arms round his neck once more, she laid her cheek against his; she had such pretty ways of loving. “Oh my noble husband! Do you think it is such a difficult thing for a woman to love nobleness like yours? Your worst fault has been your Cousin Stephenship,” she added laughingly.

“You began by being Cousin Stephen.”

His clasp tightened on her, he is trying to realize what her words mean for him.

“My beloved, come nearer; let me hold you thus. Let me feel you are speaking unto my heart. Say ‘Stephen, I love you’” And her voice speaks unto his heart, “Stephen I love you!”

He does not need to ask any more questions; he can see the love shining in her eyes, and smiling on her face at him. He gathers her still closer; he murmurs words that die away in passionate kisses on her lips. “The Hand above deals out our joys and sorrows, the Hand alone has given me you. My Joy!”

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