CHAPTER XIII

Thanks to Lady Valleys, a patroness of birds, no owl was ever shot on
the Monkland Court estate, and those soft-flying spirits of the dusk
hooted and hunted, to the great benefit of all except the creeping
voles.  By every farm, cottage, and field, they passed invisible,
quartering the dark air.  Their voyages of discovery stretched up on
to the moor as far as the wild stone man, whose origin their wisdom
perhaps knew.  Round Audrey Noel's cottage they were as thick as
thieves, for they had just there two habitations in a long, old,
holly-grown wall, and almost seemed to be guarding the mistress of
that thatched dwelling--so numerous were their fluttering rushes, so
tenderly prolonged their soft sentinel callings.  Now that the
weather was really warm, so that joy of life was in the voles, they
found those succulent creatures of an extraordinarily pleasant
flavour, and on them each pair was bringing up a family of
exceptionally fine little owls, very solemn, with big heads, bright
large eyes, and wings as yet only able to fly downwards.  There was
scarcely any hour from noon of the day (for some of them had horns)
to the small sweet hours when no one heard them, that they forgot to
salute the very large, quiet, wingless owl whom they could espy
moving about by day above their mouse-runs, or preening her white and
sometimes blue and sometimes grey feathers morning and evening in a
large square hole high up in the front wall.  And they could not
understand at all why no swift depredating graces nor any habit of
long soft hooting belonged to that lady-bird.

On the evening of the day when she received that early morning call,
as soon as dusk had fallen, wrapped in a long thin cloak, with black
lace over her dark hair, Audrey Noel herself fluttered out into the
lanes, as if to join the grave winged hunters of the invisible night.
Those far, continual sounds, not stilled in the country till long
after the sun dies, had but just ceased from haunting the air, where
the late May-scent clung as close as fragrance clings to a woman's
robe.  There was just the barking of a dog, the boom of migrating
chafers, the song of the stream, and of the owls, to proclaim the
beating in the heart of this sweet Night.  Nor was there any light by
which Night's face could be seen; it was hidden, anonymous; so that
when a lamp in a cottage threw a blink over the opposite bank, it was
as if some wandering painter had wrought a picture of stones and
leaves on the black air, framed it in purple, and left it hanging.
Yet, if it could only have been come at, the Night was as full of
emotion as this woman who wandered, shrinking away against the banks
if anyone passed, stopping to cool her hot face with the dew on the
ferns, walking swiftly to console her warm heart.  Anonymous Night
seeking for a symbol could have found none better than this errant
figure, to express its hidden longings, the fluttering, unseen rushes
of its dark wings, and all its secret passion of revolt against its
own anonymity....

At Monkland Court, save for little Ann, the morning passed but
dumbly, everyone feeling that something must be done, and no one
knowing what.  At lunch, the only allusion to the situation had been
Harbinger's inquiry:

"When does Miltoun return?"

He had wired, it seemed, to say that he was motoring down that night.

"The sooner the better," Sir William murmured: "we've still a
fortnight."

But all had felt from the tone in which he spoke these words, how
serious was the position in the eyes of that experienced campaigner.

What with the collapse of the war scare, and this canard about Mrs.
Noel, there was indeed cause for alarm.

The afternoon post brought a letter from Lord Valleys marked Express.

Lady Valleys opened it with a slight grimace, which deepened as she
read.  Her handsome, florid face wore an expression of sadness seldom
seen there.  There was, in fact, more than a touch of dignity in her
reception of the unpalatable news.

"Eustace declares his intention of marrying this Mrs. Noel"--so ran
her husband's letter--"I know, unfortunately, of no way in which I
can prevent him.  If you can discover legitimate means of dissuasion,
it would be well to use them.  My dear, it's the very devil."

It was the very devil!  For, if Miltoun had already made up his mind
to marry her, without knowledge of the malicious rumour, what would
not be his determination now?  And the woman of the world rose up in
Lady Valleys.  This marriage must not come off.  It was contrary to
almost every instinct of one who was practical not only by character,
but by habit of life and training.  Her warm and full-blooded nature
had a sneaking sympathy with love and pleasure, and had she not been
practical, she might have found this side of her a serious drawback
to the main tenor of a life so much in view of the public eye.  Her
consciousness of this danger in her own case made her extremely alive
to the risks of an undesirable connection--especially if it were a
marriage--to any public man.  At the same time the mother-heart in
her was stirred.  Eustace had never been so deep in her affection as
Bertie, still he was her first-born; and in face of news which meant
that he was lost to her--for this must indeed be 'the marriage of two
minds' (or whatever that quotation was)--she felt strangely jealous
of a woman, who had won her son's love, when she herself had never
won it.  The aching of this jealousy gave her face for a moment
almost a spiritual expression, then passed away into impatience.  Why
should he marry her?  Things could be arranged.  People spoke of it
already as an illicit relationship; well then, let people have what
they had invented.  If the worst came to the worst, this was not the
only constituency in England; and a dissolution could not be far off.
Better anything than a marriage which would handicap him all his
life!  But would it be so great a handicap?  After all, beauty
counted for much!  If only her story were not too conspicuous!  But
what was her story?  Not to know it was absurd!  That was the worst
of people who were not in Society, it was so difficult to find out!
And there rose in her that almost brutal resentment, which ferments
very rapidly in those who from their youth up have been hedged round
with the belief that they and they alone are the whole of the world.
In this mood Lady Valleys passed the letter to her daughters.  They
read, and in turn handed it to Bertie, who in silence returned it to
his mother.

But that evening, in the billiard-room, having manoeuvred to get him
to herself, Barbara said to Courtier:

"I wonder if you will answer me a question, Mr. Courtier?"

"If I may, and can."

Her low-cut dress was of yew-green, with, little threads of flame-
colour, matching her hair, so that there was about her a splendour of
darkness and whiteness and gold, almost dazzling; and she stood very
still, leaning back against the lighter green of the billiard-table,
grasping its edge so tightly that the smooth strong backs of her
hands quivered.

"We have just heard that Miltoun is going to ask Mrs. Noel to marry
him.  People are never mysterious, are they, without good reason?  I
wanted you to tell me--who is she?"

"I don't think I quite grasp the situation," murmured Courtier.  "You
said--to marry him?"

Seeing that she had put out her hand, as if begging for the truth, he
added: "How can your brother marry her--she's married!"

"Oh!"

"I'd no idea you didn't know that much."

"We thought there was a divorce."

The expression of which mention has been made--that peculiar white-
hot sardonically jolly look--visited Courtier's face at once.  "Hoist
with their own petard!  The usual thing.  Let a pretty woman live
alone--the tongues of men will do the rest."

"It was not so bad as that," said Barbara dryly; "they said she had
divorced her husband."

Caught out thus characteristically riding past the hounds Courtier
bit his lips.

"You had better hear the story now.  Her father was a country parson,
and a friend of my father's; so that I've known her from a child.
Stephen Lees Noel was his curate.  It was a 'snap' marriage--she was
only twenty, and had met hardly any men.  Her father was ill and
wanted to see her settled before he died.  Well, she found out almost
directly, like a good many other people, that she'd made an utter
mistake."

Barbara came a little closer.

"What was the man like?"

"Not bad in his way, but one of those narrow, conscientious pig-
headed fellows who make the most trying kind of husband--bone
egoistic.  A parson of that type has no chance at all.  Every mortal
thing he has to do or say helps him to develop his worst points.  The
wife of a man like that's no better than a slave.  She began to show
the strain of it at last; though she's the sort who goes on till she
snaps.  It took him four years to realize.  Then, the question was,
what were they to do?  He's a very High Churchman, with all their
feeling about marriage; but luckily his pride was wounded.  Anyway,
they separated two years ago; and there she is, left high and dry.
People say it was her fault.  She ought to have known her own mind--
at twenty!  She ought to have held on and hidden it up somehow.
Confound their thick-skinned charitable souls, what do they know of
how a sensitive woman suffers?  Forgive me, Lady Barbara--I get hot
over this."  He was silent; then seeing her eyes fixed on him, went
on: "Her mother died when she was born, her father soon after her
marriage.  She's enough money of her own, luckily, to live on
quietly.  As for him, he changed his parish and runs one somewhere in
the Midlands.  One's sorry for the poor devil, too, of course!  They
never see each other; and, so far as I know, they don't correspond.
That, Lady Barbara, is the simple history."

Barbara, said, "Thank you," and turned away; and he heard her mutter:
"What a shame!"

But he could not tell whether it was Mrs. Noel's fate, or the
husband's fate, or the thought of Miltoun that had moved her to those
words.

She puzzled him by her self-possession, so almost hard, her way of
refusing to show feeling.' Yet what a woman she would make if the
drying curse of high-caste life were not allowed to stereotype and
shrivel her!  If enthusiasm were suffered to penetrate and fertilize
her soul!  She reminded him of a great tawny lily.  He had a vision
of her, as that flower, floating, freed of roots and the mould of its
cultivated soil, in the liberty of the impartial air.  What a
passionate and noble thing she might become!  What radiance and
perfume she would exhale!  A spirit Fleur-de-Lys!  Sister to all the
noble flowers of light that inhabited the wind!

Leaning in the deep embrasure of his window, he looked at anonymous
Night.  He could hear the owls hoot, and feel a heart beating out
there somewhere in the darkness, but there came no answer to his
wondering.  Would she--this great tawny lily of a girl--ever become
unconscious of her environment, not in manner merely, but in the very
soul, so that she might be just a woman, breathing, suffering,
loving, and rejoicing with the poet soul of all mankind?  Would she
ever be capable of riding out with the little company of big hearts,
naked of advantage?  Courtier had not been inside a church for twenty
years, having long felt that he must not enter the mosques of his
country without putting off the shoes of freedom, but he read the
Bible, considering it a very great poem.  And the old words came
haunting him: 'Verily I say unto you, It is harder for a camel to
pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of Heaven.' And now, looking into the Night, whose darkness
seemed to hold the answer to all secrets, he tried to read the riddle
of this girl's future, with which there seemed so interwoven that
larger enigma, how far the spirit can free itself, in this life, from
the matter that encompasseth.

The Night whispered suddenly, and low down, as if rising from the
sea, came the moon, dropping a wan robe of light till she gleamed out
nude against the sky-curtain.  Night was no longer anonymous.  There
in the dusky garden the statue of Diana formed slowly before his
eyes, and behind her--as it were, her temple--rose the tall spire of
the cypress tree.