"No. Nurse is taking him. It will do him good--and you. Is anything

specific the matter?"

She looked at him and shook her head. "I am tired," she repeated.

"Very well. I'll give you some phosphites--and you had better go for a
walk. You need air."

The old man bustled away, and Brigit, after a few minutes' reflection,
went to her mother's room.

"I am going to town, mother," she began, without preamble, "and in a day
or so I shall join Tommy at Margate. Dr. Long says I had better go,
but--I have some things to see to first."

Lady Kingsmead, who was blackening her eyebrows before her glass,
turned, one eye made up, the other very undressed-looking in its natural
condition.

"But--you'll come back, Brigit? You aren't angry any more?"

"I--I don't know, mother. I--am so tired, I can't think."

Lady Kingsmead took up a letter that lay beside her and handed it to her
daughter. "Read this--dear," she said rather humbly. And Brigit read:

"Dear Tony," it ran, in a curious irregular, downward-trending
hand, "I've been awfully bad again, or I should have written before. I
was at the Joyselles' yesterday, and they told me that the danger is
over. I am so glad, poor old girl. How are you? And how is Brigit? I
hope she will believe you when you tell her about that day after I saw
her in Tite Street. I told her that you did not believe me and went for
me, but she wouldn't listen to me, and I don't blame her. I'm pretty
bad. I shan't last long, I think. Heart's getting bad, too. May I come
down and see you some time? Joyselle tells me the wedding is to be next
month----"

Brigit crushed the letter violently in her hand and threw it down, her
face distorted with anger.

"Poor old Gerald," commented her mother absently. After a pause she
turned. "Brigit--I give you my sacred word of honour that I did not
believe him that day. I never doubted you for a second. But he was so
queer--so ill--that I was alarmed, and was trying to comfort him when
you came in.

"Do you believe me?" she added, after a long pause.

Brigit, who stood by the window, nodded without turning.

"Oh, yes, I believe you," she said indifferently.

Then, before her mother could again speak, the girl left the room.

On her own table she found another letter, and to her surprise
recognised Carron's writing in the address. With a sudden foreboding of
evil, she sat down and opened the letter.

It was very long, written in pencil, and began:


"Before God, I swear you wronged your mother in thinking she believed
what I said about you that day in Pont Street. Before God, I give you my
word. Brigit, I am going to die; I cannot live. I don't like to live.
The world is abominable. I hate everybody. I hate you. I hate God. The
only way I can forget is to take morphine, and it is beginning to go
back on me. Sometimes I don't feel it at all. And it is only the last of
many friends to desert me----"


There were four pages of this, growing more and more incoherent, and
then at the last, the writer went on, his writing suddenly larger and
more distinct, as if he had taken pains to render it legible:


"I am going to die, Brigit, so good-bye. If you would have married me I
should not have done this. It is all your fault.    "Gerald Carron."


For an instant her indignation at the incredible cowardice of the man
crushed every other feeling. Then a thrill of horror came over her.
Looking again at the last page she saw below the signature:

"If you will come to see me at five o'clock to-morrow, and are kind to
me, I won't do it."

Returning to her mother's room the girl handed her the letter. "Read the
last page," she said briefly.

Lady Kingsmead shuddered. "We must wire him. We'll tell him to come down
here--he must be mad--I--oh, Brigit!"

Brigit shook her head. "Of course he's mad. But we must go to him. We'll
wire from the station."

Hurrying her distracted mother to the train, the girl settled into a
corner and remained in unbroken silence until they reached town.

"It is odious, disgusting of him," she broke out in the hansom as they
went up St. James Street. "When he is quieted down, mother, you must
make him understand that I absolutely refuse to accept the
responsibility of his deeds. I never could bear him."

Lady Kingsmead nodded. "It is the morphine he takes. He must go into
one of these great cure places--or no, that is for drinking, I
believe----"

They had reached the house and gone up the stairs before she spoke
again. "I hope he won't be violent," she declared, "I wish you hadn't
insisted on coming. A wire would have done every bit as well----"

No one answering the ring, Brigit tried the door on which a card bearing
Carron's name was neatly tacked.

To her surprise the door was open, and crossing the little ante-chamber
the two women went into the sitting-room.

Lying on his face by the fireplace, in which red ashes still glowed,
Gerald Carron lay dead, a revolver near him, his face in a small pool of
blood.




CHAPTER FOURTEEN


Lady Kingsmead fainted dead away for once in her life, dropping in a
huddled heap near the man she had loved and unloved.

Brigit stared at them for a moment, wondering vaguely which of them was
dead, which only fainting. Then, just as she was kneeling to raise her
mother to a better position, the door opened and two men, one of them
Giacomo, Carron's valet, entered in great haste.

The second man was, he explained, a doctor, whom the valet had gone for
on finding his master's body.

The next few minutes were minutes that Brigit never forgot. The Italian
servant, chattering and weeping, the young doctor helping her to loosen
Lady Kingsmead's tight clothes; his hurried explanations and questions;
the very closeness of the air, with the smell of gunpowder still faintly
perceptible.

Lady Kingsmead, laid upon Carron's bed, came to in a few minutes in
violent hysterics, and the young doctor, when he had given her a
soothing draught, insisted on the two women leaving.

"I must send for the coroner," he explained, "and it will be unpleasant.
Your cab is still at the door, I think? May I have your address?"

He was very civil and sympathetic, this young medico, but he was also
rather too obviously impressed by his own importance and this gruesome
occasion. Brigit gave him the address of her flat, and helping her
mother into a four-wheeler, as more suitable than a hansom, the two
women drove away towards Kensington.

"I hadn't been in his room for years," sobbed Lady Kingsmead, forgetting
her complexion. "Did you see the pastel of me on the wall between the
windows? And I gave him the clock, too, for his thirty-fifth birthday.
Oh, Brigit! He loved me insanely, poor Gerald, perfectly madly, and so
did I." She broke off, to her daughter's relief, and sobbed again.

Brigit's flat was warm and smelt unaired. Two or three letters lay on
the mat inside the door, a huge blue-bottle boomed at a window trying to
get out.

Lady Kingsmead lay down on Maidie Compton's Chesterfield and wept
loudly. "Oh, Gerald, Gerald, how we loved each other," she wailed. "He
would have died for me. He very nearly killed himself----"

Suddenly the foolish woman sat up and pointed an accusing finger at her
daughter. "And it is all your fault," she cried bitterly; "he said so in
that letter--my poor love. Your fault, and you my daughter. You broke
his heart, you tortured him, and you took him from me. I--I _hate_ you."

Brigit stared coldly at her. "Don't make a fool of yourself, mother,"
she said. "You know perfectly well that there is not a word of truth in
what you say."

"There is, there is! It was when you began to grow up that he ceased
loving me. It is all your fault. He wrote it to you. You are to blame;
you murdered him, his blood is on your head! And I scolded him when he
told me about you and Joyselle. I refused to believe him. Oh, Gerald,
Gerald!"

How much she believed of what she said it is impossible to say, but her
lack of self-control and her immense egotism were such that together
they made a formidable force to argue against.

Brigit sneered as she looked down at her. "For Heaven's sake, don't be
so ridiculous," she said impatiently. "And don't--lie."

"I am _not_ lying. He told me about you and Joyselle, and I believe him.
Yes I do, I believe him. You are in love with the man, and that's why
you don't marry his son----"

"Look here, mother," Brigit's temper was rising fast. "Answer one
question quietly, will you? Do you believe what Gerald Carron told you
about me and Joyselle?"

And Lady Kingsmead, whose hysterical excitement was now well beyond
control, screamed out that she did believe it.

Brigit rose. "Very well. Think as you like. And--good-bye."

She left the house without a word, and taking a hansom went straight to
Golden Square.

Félicité, who was alone, kissed her kindly and insisted on giving her
tea. This, however, Brigit refused. Desperate as she was, she had come
to the point of feeling that she could never again accept the little
woman's hospitality. What she was going to do she did not know, but she
was not going to marry Théo, and she would never again come to Golden
Square.

"No, thanks," she said gently, "I want to see your husband, so as you
think he is there, I will rush up to Chelsea. You look tired--_petite
mère_."

Félicité smiled. "I am. I have been turning out our room and re-hanging
all the pictures. But I like doing it. How is dear Tommy?"

"Much better, thanks. He is going to Margate to-morrow--to the sea, you
know."

Félicité went downstairs with her and kissed her again at parting. "Théo
will be very glad you are in town," she said. "And you, my daughter--do
things go better with you?"

Touched by the kind light in her innocent eyes, Brigit lied. "Ah, yes,
much better, thank you," she returned; "everything is all right."

And when she was in her hansom hurrying Chelseawards, she felt with a
sigh that it was a harmless lie.

"She is a dear, poor Félicité, and when Victor has told her that I will
not marry Théo, and I have gone away--she will be less troubled."




CHAPTER FIFTEEN


As she went up the stairs in the house in Tite Street, Brigit recalled
the occasion of her other visit there and shuddered. Poor Carron. Could
it have been partly her fault?

And that was her only tribute to his memory. Essentially selfish though
the girl was, she was no hypocrite, and it did not occur to her now to
make excuses for the man simply because he was dead.

But it had been just here at the turning of the dusty stairs that he had
waylaid her on her way down after her first love scene with Joyselle,
and she could not pass without recalling it.

Then she had been gloriously happy, feeling, because she and Victor
loved each other, that the world was theirs; now she came a
broken-willed, frightened woman, to plead with the man who had put her
out of his life, to take her back. She would tell him that no matter
what happened, she would never marry Théo, and--then, when he realised
that she meant this, she would beg him to take her back.

And remembering the last days she trembled.

She knocked at his door, and a short, familiar bark answered the sound.
Papillon. But-ter-fly.

Joyselle opened the door, which had been locked, and when he saw her,
his face, already sombre, darkened ominously.

"Brigitte--what do you want?" he asked, not offering to let her in.
Behind him, on a table, she saw his violin-case--unopened, and her heart
gave a glad hope. He had not been working. He had been, she hoped,
unable to work.

"May I come in, Victor?" she asked.

Still he did not move. "Why?" he asked uncompromisingly.

"Because I have things to tell you. Don't be afraid. I am not going to
make a scene----"

He drew aside, and she went in and closed the door. Papillon sprang at
her with delight, and she laughed sadly.

"_He_ is glad to see me," she said; "aren't you, Yellow Dog?"

Joyselle shrugged his shoulders and sitting down on the sofa lit a
cigarette. "Well?" he asked after a pause.

Brigit sat down by him and took off her gloves.

"Victor--why have things--been as they have been of late?"

"You know why."

"Because the father in you is stronger than the lover?"

"I have never been your lover," he retorted harshly, hurling the words
at her as if they had been an accusation.

She winced. "I am speaking English. Well--was it your loyalty to Théo
that--that changed you?"

"I have been loyal, have I not? _Juste ciel!_" Rising, he walked about
the great room, his hands clasped behind him. "My conduct was
magnificent, was it not? Don't quibble with words, Brigit. In plain
language, I was a scoundrel, a beast, and now I am trying to behave--not
like a gentleman, but like a decent man. And why you won't let me, I
don't know."

He was suffering, she saw with a sigh of relief.

"Then you still love me?" she asked coolly.

"Yes. Does a man change in a week? You are a child. Now tell me what you
have come for--if you have any object other than your usual one of
seeing how much I can endure, and then--go. I am strong, and you cannot
make me change my mind, and I--I despise you for trying to make of
me--the--_thing_ I was at one time. But I am not made of stone, and you
hurt me--almost too much."

His voice was very even and low-pitched, but she shrank back in her
corner and hastened to answer.

"You wrong me. I have not come to tempt you. I have come--to tell you
that nothing in the world nor out of it can induce me to marry Théo."

"You will not----"

"No, I will not marry him."

Papillon, who had unearthed a long-cherished bone in a dark corner under
a Dutch cabinet, dragged his treasure across the floor and laid it at
his master's feet with a pleased growl.

"You will not marry Théo?"

"No."

She had risen, and the two faced each other defiantly, while the little
dog between them wagged his tail with joy.

"Why?" asked Joyselle sharply.

"Because--I cannot. I have dawdled and dallied, and refused to face
things long enough. Now I see that the worst crime I could commit
against him would be to marry him. I love you. Whether you love me or
not, I love you, and I always shall. And I ask you as a great favour to
tell Théo for me that I cannot marry him."

"But what are you going to do?"

His voice trembled and he spoke very slowly.

"I am--going away. I don't know where. To Italy, probably, with the
Lenskys. And I shall, I daresay, marry in the course of time."

"Whom are you going to marry?" he cried furiously, forgetting that she
had just said that she loved him, and mad with jealousy.

She laughed. "_Qui sait?_ I don't. Possibly Lord Pontefract--he has just
come back from the Andes--possibly someone whom--you do not know."

"Then," returned Joyselle very quietly, "I will kill him."

And she could have laughed aloud.

"You will tell Théo?" she asked, picking up her gloves.

"No, I will not. I cannot. And you shall not go. Or, yes--Brigit--you
shall go--with me. If you will not marry him, then there is nothing
between us. I have fought, I have done my best, but I can bear no more.
We will go, you and I----"

Catching her in his arms he held her close, whispering incoherent,
broken words in her ear, while the little yellow dog, thinking it was a
game, snapped playfully at her trailing skirts.

"You will go with me, my woman? You and I alone, all alone? For ever and
ever and ever?"

And putting her arms round his neck she answered, "Yes, I will go with
you. For ever."




CHAPTER SIXTEEN


Brigit Mead did not go to bed at all that night. All night she worked in
her little flat making her plans, packing, and writing letters.

She had burnt her boats and the relief was great. Having broken with her
mother, there was no need for her to write to Kingsmead. To Tommy she
sent a note, saying that she was going away, but would write soon and
explain.

To Pam Lensky she wrote a rather long letter, for there were some few
things she wanted made clear.


"Dear Pam,"--she began abruptly--"I am going away with Victor
Joyselle. I wonder if you will blame me? In case you do, here is my only
defence. I hate my present life, I am miserable without Joyselle, and he
is miserable without me. My mother, with whom I have been on fairly
decent terms since Tommy has been ill, is hopeless. Gerald Carron shot
himself to-day, and mother, just, I honestly believe, to indulge her own
taste for sentimental scenes, turned on me about him and pretended to
believe a story he told her just before I left Pont Street--that I was
Joyselle's mistress, in fact. If she believed the story I would forgive
her, though it is not true, but I cannot forgive the kind of mind that
can amuse itself with such vulgar melodrama. I have always disliked my
mother, and now I simply cannot bear her any longer.

"And I have no other ties except Tommy. Tommy, to whom I shall write
before long, is nearly well. He will be forbidden to come to see me, but
he will come, and I do not think it will hurt him.

"As to Théo, Pam, I am deeply grieved. He is a remarkably nice young
man, but I cannot marry him, and the mere fact of his father's loving me
will not much hurt him. Whatever his father does, Théo in the long run
thinks right, and he, too, will forgive us.

"Then there is poor Félicité. She has been very kind to me, but she has
been stupid and over-self-confident, and I cannot consider her. I must
consider him. She will suffer and I am indeed sorry, poor soul, but
he--he shall be happy. So good-bye, Pam. Remember your own father and
mother, and understand. We go to Paris by the eleven o'clock train
to-morrow, and thence--to Arcadia, as your people used to say. My love
to you.                                             "Brigit."


Re-reading this letter, which she was far too self-engrossed to consider
selfish, Brigit addressed it.

Then she looked over her clothes, packed them in three boxes, one of
which she labelled, "To be called for," the other two of which were to
go with her.

It was long after one when she had finished her work and sat down to
rest. She was not tired, nor did she feel any special excitement. It had
happened, that was all, and it seemed to her that she had always
foreseen this night, with its letter writing and packing.

To-morrow at this time they, she and Victor, would be in Paris. And then
they would go--where-ever he chose. She did not care.

And, although she did not know it, this unformulated mental attitude was
the first sign in her of any approach to an unselfish love.

Through the long hours she sat in her brilliantly lighted little
sitting-room, waiting for day. At five o'clock she switched off the
electricity and opened the blinds. A wan light came in.

"It is day. It is _to-day_," she told herself aloud, her beautiful mouth
quivering with happiness. "In four hours he will come."

She made herself a cup of tea and then lay down on the sofa where her
mother had lain the day before, and went to sleep.

She dreamed that she stood in a sloping, very green meadow; in the
distance a flock of dingy sheep browsed, and some invisible person was
playing a pipe! "_Il etait une bergère hé ron, ron, ron_,"--it was the
nursery song Joyselle had played to Tommy when the little boy was ill.
She smiled and moved her head.

Then suddenly she was awake, and Théo stood before her. "Brigit," he
said quietly, "my mother is dead. Will you come to father?"




CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


Félicité had died in her sleep beside her husband. An hour before he had
waked, and, lying quietly by her, thinking no doubt of the woman for
whom he was going to desert her, he had by chance touched her hand as it
lay on the counterpane, with the shabby black rosary in it, and--the
hand was cold.

They had not called a doctor, for there was no doubt that she was dead,
and she had hated doctors. She had been very happy the day before, and
in the evening she had asked Joyselle to play to her, a thing she very
rarely did. He had played, they had drunk some Norman cider, and gone to
bed early.

"Father was tired," Théo added, as the hansom stopped.

Brigit dared not speak. Could it be that Joyselle had told her, after
they had gone to their room? He would have had to tell her either then
or the next day--to-day. He had not feared to tell her, for his delirium
was such that he feared nothing, and besides, she was always very
gentle.

"She will understand," he had told Brigit, "that I cannot help it."

Had he told her? Had the last beats of that gentle heart been unhappy
ones, or had the Madonna, to whom she prayed with such simple
confidence, spared her that supreme shock, and allowed her to die
happy, with her man beside her?

"Father has not spoken since--since the first," Théo whispered as they
crept up the stairs. "I--he rather frightens me."

The door of Félicité's room was closed, and for several seconds Brigit
dared not open it. Then, very softly, she turned the handle, and
motioning Théo not to follow her, went in.

On the bed, the counterpane drawn smoothly over it, the little figure,
with the rosary still between its fingers; and kneeling by the pillow,
his silvery hair flowing forward, Joyselle.

He started on hearing the door open, and after a pause, rose.

"She is dead," he said slowly. "My wife is dead."

Brigit caught at a chair as she saw his face, for it was the face of an
old man, blanched and wrinkled and hollow-eyed.

"My wife is dead," he repeated.

Then he turned to the table, and seeing her shabby old red-lined
work-basket, took it up and held it to his breast.

As he stood, his back to her, as to one who did not belong there, who
was an intruder, he began to cry, great slow tears dropping into the
basket, wetting the red lining, and, no doubt, rusting the very needle
she had used yesterday.

Brigit saw his face in the glass.

"Oh, Victor," she faltered, her hands clasped.

He turned and pointed to the bed.

"You will excuse me," he said, with an evident effort to be polite, "but
I cannot talk. My wife is dead."

And the girl turned and crept from the room. She understood. And she
left him as he wished, alone with his wife, who was dead.

Going quietly downstairs, she went to the nearest flower shop and bought
a great mass of the yellow-crumple-leaved roses that Joyselle had once
told her grew in Normandy.

Then she went back to Golden Square.

"He will not leave her, Brigitte," Théo told her as he met her on the
stairs, "and the doctor is troubled about him. He says--the shock has
been almost too great for--for his mind. I--I knew he loved her--oh,
_petite mère chérie_--but I never knew how much. Ah, my dear, they had
grown together in the twenty-six years they were man and wife, and now
she has left him----" The young man put his arm on the balustrade and wept
quite simply and unrestrainedly.

Joyselle, who was sitting by his wife, looked up when Brigit entered
with the roses, but he did not speak.

"I have brought these--for _her_--Beau-papa," the girl faltered, and he
rose.

"Thank you. Yes, she loved roses--ma Félicité."

Brigit noticed, with a thrill of horror, remembering what the doctor had
said, that he spoke not quite distinctly; his tongue was a little thick.

"Let us," she said, laying her hand on his shoulder, "thank God that
she died so happily, with you by her side."

He passed his hand over his forehead where the halo of hair lay so
untidy.

"Yes. Let us thank God. You see, _ma fille_--I have not been a good man.
I have loved many women--or thought I did. I have betrayed her love for
me; I have--_enfin_, I have not been good. But--it all meant nothing.
She was the bride of my youth, the companion of my--of my young
manhood." He stammered again, and went on with the slight difficulty she
had noticed before, "and--I know now that after all, and in spite of
all, I have loved only her. _Félicité, ma vieille, tu m'entends?_"

He laid the roses on the pillow near her little peaceful face, and then
sat down again.

"My wife is--dead," he added.


THE END.