UNCONQUERED

A Romance

BY

MAUD DIVER

Author of "The Strong Hours," "Far to Seek," "Lonely Furrow," etc.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY MAUD DIVER

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE * MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

To MARY

IN REMEMBRANCE OCTOBER 10TH, 1901

"A turn, and we stand in the heart of things..." Browning.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The chapters dealing with France, and the incidents connected with these, are founded on fact. I merely mention this because it seems to me that the main incident gains in effect from the knowledge that it is not mere invention.—M. D.

CONTENTS

BOOK I.—BEL

BOOK II.—THE UTTER PRICE

BOOK III.—VIA CRUCIS

BOOK IV.—VIA LUCIS

CHAPTER I

"Whom does love concern save the lover and the beloved? Yet its impact deluges a thousand shores."—E. M. FORSTER.

Sir Mark Forsyth pushed back his chair, left the dinner-table, and strolled over to the bay-window. He drew out his cigarette-case, but apparently forgot to open it. He stood there, looking out across the garden, that merged into rocky spaces of heather and bracken, and culminated in an abrupt descent to Loch Etive. Low above the darkening hills the sunset splendour flamed along the horizon, and all the waters beneath were alight with the transient glory. But the man's face wore the abstracted air of one who dwells upon an inner vision. Though the subdued flow of talk behind him entered his ears, it did not seem to reach his brain. "Bobs," his devoted Irish terrier, crept out from under the table, and joining his master, made sundry infallible bids for attention, without success.

Presently alluring whiffs of cigarette smoke, intruding on his dreams, reminded Sir Mark of the unopened case in his hand.

"I vote for coffee on the terrace, Mother," he said, turning his eyes from the glory without to the dimness of the unlighted dining-room. "Then we'll have the boats out. There's going to be an afterglow and a half presently."

"I told Grant about the coffee two minutes ago, dear," Lady Forsyth answered, smiling; but her eyes dwelt a little anxiously on the silhouetted view of her son's profile, as he set a match to his cigarette. The straight, outstanding nose and square chin vividly recalled his dead father. But the imaginative brow was of her bestowing and a splash of light on his hair showed the reddish chestnut tint of her own people: the tint she loved.

"Come along, children," she added, including in that category four out of her five guests—two girls, unrelated to herself, Ralph Melrose, a Gurkha subaltern, and Maurice Lenox, an artist friend of Mark's.

Keith Macnair, professor of philosophy—his rugged face lined with thought, his dark hair lightly frosted at the temples—was the only genuine grown-up of her small house-party. A connection of her own, and devoted to both mother and son, he was so evenly placed between them in the matter of age that he could play elder brother to Mark or younger brother to Lady Forsyth as occasion required. And, whenever professional claims permitted, occasion usually did require his presence, in some capacity, either at Wynchcombe Friars or Inveraig. Between times, he lived and lectured and wrote philosophical books in Edinburgh; and never, if he could help it, did he fail to spend most of his summer holiday at Inveraig.

When the party rose from the table he joined Mark in the window; and as the two girls stood back to let Lady Forsyth pass out, she slipped an arm round each. Her love of youth and young things seemed to deepen with her own advancing years. But she had her preferences; and it was the arm round Sheila Melrose that tightened as they passed through the long drawing-room to the terrace, where coffee was set upon a low stone table in full view of the illumined lake and sky.

"It's splendid to have you safe back again, child," she said, releasing Monica Videlle and drawing Sheila down to the seat beside her. "India's monopolised you quite long enough. There's some mysterious magnetism about that country. People seem to catch it like a disease. And I was getting alarmed lest you might succumb to the infection."

Miss Melrose smiled thoughtfully at the sunset. "I'm not sure I haven't succumbed already!" she said in her low, clear-cut voice. "I have vague tempting dreams of going back with Ralph when his furlough is up; or with Mona, to help doctor her Indian women. But probably they'll never materialise——"

"More than probably, if I have any say in the matter!"

Lady Forsyth spoke lightly, but under the lightness lurked a note of decision. She had her own private dreams concerning this girl with the softly shining eyes under level brows, and the softly resolute lips that never seemed quite to leave off smiling even in repose.

At mention of India, Miss Videlle's thoughtful face came suddenly to life. "It would be lovely for me," she said. "Too good to be true!"

"Never mind, Miss Videlle," Maurice consoled her almost tenderly. "This ripping evening's not too good to be true. And I can put you up to some tips for squaring Lady Forsyth—in strict confidence of course!"

He bent towards her with a slightly theatrical offer of his arm, and they moved off to a seat near the ivy-covered wall, looking towards the distant rapids.

Lady Forsyth glanced after them with a passing twinge of concern.

The girl—a fairly recent acquisition of Sheila's—was shy and clever, with a streak of dark blood in her veins. She had done brilliantly at Oxford, and was now qualified to take up the medical work in India on which she had set her heart. Sheila had acquired her while going through a course of massage and magnetic healing, for which she showed so distinct a gift that she had serious thoughts of taking it up in earnest. A vague idea of going out with Monica Videlle had been simmering in her brain for the past week; but she had not spoken of it till to-night.

"Wonder what's come to old Mark," mused Ralph pensively, stirring his coffee. "Thought this picnic arrangement was all for his benefit——"

"Rather so!" Mark's voice answered him, as he and Macnair strolled round the corner of the house. "Hurry up with the coffee, Mums. I love dabbling my oars in the sunset. Lenox, old chap, you two might go on ahead and give the word."

They went on readily enough; and the rest soon followed them through the wilder spaces of the garden, down rocky steps to the bay, where sand and rough grass shelved gently to the water's edge. Here they found two boats already afloat, with Maurice and Monica—she was commonly called Mona—established in one of them.

Lady Forsyth, nothing if not prompt, privately consigned Ralph to that boat, Mark and Keith to her own. It was a heavenly evening, and she thanked goodness they were going to have it to themselves: quite a rare event since Maurice Lenox had discovered that superfluous Miss Alison.

"Coming to row stroke for us?" she asked as Mark handed her in.

He shook his head, smiling down at her.

"That's to be Keith's privilege! I'm for the other boat." But neither his smile nor the light pressure of her arm could atone for the refusal.

"Pointed and purposeless," she denounced it mentally; but within a very few moments his purpose was revealed.

"Down Connel way first, Keith," he called out, as he pushed off his own boat and sprang lightly in. "I want to run up to the village. Miss Alison and her friend might like to join us."

So they rowed towards Connel at his command: and for Lady Forsyth the pleasure of the outing was gone; the peace and beauty of the evening spoilt by fierce resentment against these intrusive strangers who had no authorised position in the scheme of things. And her natural vexation was intensified by concern for Sheila: though whether the girl took Mark's sudden and strange defection seriously it was impossible to tell. She wore that smiling, friendly graciousness of hers like a bright veil, that seemed to baffle attempts at intimacy, while it enhanced her charm. Even with Lady Forsyth, who loved her as a daughter, she had her reserves, notably on matters nearest her heart.

"After all, she knows the real Mark almost as well as I do," Mark's mother reflected by way of consolation. "And she's wiser than I am, in many ways, though she is nearly thirty years younger. I'm probably racing on miles too fast. He's barely known the girl a fortnight. He couldn't be so crazy!— All the same, he's no business to—it's distracting!" she concluded, her irritation flaming up again at sight of the two figures that were now approaching the shore, escorted by Mark.

Miss Alison, the taller one, had unquestionably height and grace to recommend her. Mark, who stood six feet in his socks, could barely give her a couple of inches; and the languid deliberation of her movements had, on Lady Forsyth, the same maddening effect as a drawl in speech. Her own brain and body were too quick, in the original sense of the word, not to make her a trifle intolerant towards the "half-alive"; and, rightly, or wrongly, Miss Alison was apt to produce that impression even on her admirers, though no doubt they expressed it differently.

Personal prejudice apart, Lady Forsyth preferred the girl's companion, Miss O'Neill, in spite of her wrong-headed zeal for the Suffrage and Home Rule. Had Bel Alison been out in search of a foil, she could have discovered none better than this big-hearted, fanatical woman of five-and thirty, shortish, and squarely built, with an upward nose, an ugly, humorous mouth, and a quantity of rough brown hair in a chronic state of untidiness. Lady Forsyth gathered that she was an active philanthropist, and that the incongruous pair shared a flat somewhere in Earl's Court. To outward seeming they had certainly nothing beyond the same address in common.

If Bel's movements were over-deliberate, Miss O'Neill's were apt to be sudden; and she strode into the boat with the decision of one given to putting her foot down to some purpose.

"Steady on! You evidently don't do things by halves!" Sir Mark remonstrated, laughing, and consigning her to a cushion in the bows. Bel had already usurped Maurice's seat astern, and Mark rowed stroke—this time without need of invitation. Then they turned about and moved slowly up the loch, dabbling their oars in the sunset fires and shivering the purple shadows of the hills.

And if for Helen Forsyth the pleasure of the evening was over, for Mark it had but just begun. And she knew it. Therein lay the sting. Though "the boy" was now very much a man, she could honestly have said, two weeks ago, that nothing beyond minor differences and mutual flashes of temper had marred the deep essential unity of their relation—a unity the more inestimably precious since he was now all she had left of her nearest and dearest on earth. Husband, daughter and younger son had all passed on before her into the Silence, and of her own people one brother alone remained. At the moment he was High Commissioner of New Zealand, and seemed disposed to stay on there indefinitely when his term of office expired. The Empire, he wrote, was a saner, sweeter, more spacious place of abode than twentieth-century England, which seemed temporarily given over to the cheap-jack, the specialist, and the party politician. And she—while loving every foot of her husband's country and her own—understood too well the frequent disappointment of those who came, on

rare and hardly earned leave, from the ends of the earth and failed to find, in picture-palaces and music-halls, in the jargon of Futurists and demagogues, the England of their dreams.

For this cause, her sole remaining brother had become little more than a memory and a monthly letter. Yet, could she never account herself a lonely woman, while she had Keith for friend and mentor, Mark for son, and Sheila for—more than possible—daughter. What business had this unknown girl to step into their charmed circle and unsettle the very foundation of things? Never, till to-night, had it seemed possible to Mark's mother that she could arrive at dreading the fulfilment of his heart's desire. Yet that was what it amounted to. Dread lurked behind her surface irritation. The touch of second sight in her composition made her vaguely conscious of danger in the air. Small wonder if she anathematised Maurice Lenox for his knack of picking up promiscuous strangers, and, in this case, aggravating his offence by failing to appropriate his own discovery.

CHAPTER II

"Quand on vous voit, on vous aime; quand on vous aime, où vous voit-on?"

For a while the two boats kept in touch, so that talk passed easily between them. Miss Alison spoke little. Silence rather became the fair pensive quality of her charm—and probably she knew it. The uncharitable supposition was Lady Forsyth's: and she was fain to confess that pensiveness and silence harmonised well with the fine, straight nose, the mass of dull gold hair, and eyes of that transparent blue which lacks warmth and depth, yet has a limpid beauty of its own, especially where the pupils are large and the lashes noticeably long.

Mark, too, had fallen silent: the worst possible sign. But Miss O'Neill atoned for all deficiencies by discoursing vigorously to Maurice's swaying shoulders, upon the latest developments of the suffrage campaign. Maurice, equal to any emergency, had no difficulty in airing his own views on the subject—as it were, through the back of his head—to one who had hammered shop windows with her own hand, though she graciously drew the line at firing churches and wrecking trains. Yet she was a woman of generous and, at times, noble impulses. The greater part of her small annuity was lavished on a very personal form of rescue work—and on Bel.

"It's rank injustice, say what you please," she declared in her strong vibrant tones, "to imprison and torture poor misguided girls who have the courage of the faith that's in them. The real blame lies on the heads of those who've driven us to extremes."

"That sounds very fine, Miss O'Neill, but I'm afraid it won't hold water," Macnair put in quietly from the other boat. "It has been the standing excuse of fanatics and—dare I add?—criminals all down the ages. Your latest forms of argument will simply harden and justify opposition to a cause that is not without certain elements of justice and right."

His pleasant voice had the clear, leisured enunciation of the scholar, a quality peculiarly exasperating to the red-hot enthusiast whose thoughts are, in the main, emotions intellectually expressed. "Justice and right indeed!" Miss O'Neill fairly hurled the words at him. "That's all we're asking, isn't it? And precisely what we'll never be getting under a man-made Government and man-made laws."

Macnair smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He had no mind to let argument and recrimination desecrate the peace and glowing beauty of a Highland summer evening; and with practised ease he slid into the calmer waters of generalisation, as much in the hope of weaning Lady Forsyth from troubled thoughts as for the pleasure of expressing his own.

"The truth is," he said, resting on his oars, while the boats drifted into a luminous bay, "every age, like every country, has its moral microbe; and the microbe of this one is 'Down with everything'; 'Can't; won't; shan't; don't; Pass it along the line,' that's about the tune of it, in all ranks. Kipling may or may not be a classic poet, but his Commissariat Camels puts the present-day spirit into a nutshell. For nearly a hundred years the world has been fed on a steady diet of revolt; and now we have the climax, distaste for duties and clamour for rights. The fine, brave old wisdom of acceptance is altogether out of court——"

Mark, withdrawing his gaze from Miss Alison's profile, treated him to a smile of amused approval. "Why this sudden access of eloquence, old man?" he asked; and Keith deliberately winked over his shoulder.

"Miss O'Neill there's to blame; and the modern world does seem rather egregiously modern when one's been living for months in a backwater with Pindar for company."

"Oh, Keith, have you really found time for your promised translation of the Odes?" Lady Porsyth—herself a translator of some distinction—leaned eagerly forward.

"I've been making time for a few of them," he answered, pleased with the success of his diversion, "by neglecting my Bergson book."

"Have you got them here?"

"Yes. They're in type, awaiting your consideration."

"Well done. You'll publish them, of course?"

He shook his head. "Not even to please you! I've simply been enjoying myself, exploring a little deeper into the heart of an old friend; one who could look life in the face without feeling convinced that he personally could have made a better job of it. One suspects even our poets, these days, of being propagandists in disguise. Pindar is as sublime and as useless as a snow-peak; and one can no more convey the essence of him in English than one could convey the scent of a rose in Parliamentary language! Yet one is fool enough to try!"

Sheila, who had been listening with her quiet intentness, remarked softly, "Why don't we all learn Greek?"

"Because the humanities are out of court in an age of scientific materialism. Wasn't there a promise, once, that I should teach you?"

The girl flushed with pleasure. "I thought you'd forgotten."

"And I thought Miss Videlle had persuaded you to give up everything for this massage you're so keen about."

Their talk took a more personal tone, and Lady Forsyth's attention strayed again towards the other boat. It had drifted a little farther off, and a change of seats was in progress between Mark and Miss Videlle. One moment his tall figure loomed against the dying splendour; the next, he sank cautiously down beside Miss Alison, who vouchsafed him a sidelong glance of welcome.

"We're moving on a bit, Mother," he sang out, seeing her face turned in their direction.

They moved on accordingly: and it did not occur to Lady Forsyth that Miss O'Neill, sitting alone in the bows, obscured from vision of the disturbing pair, was in much the same mood as herself. Lonely, passionate, and emotional, her thwarted womanhood had found in Bel Alison an object on which she could lavish at once the protective tenderness of a mother and the devoted service of a man. Unhappily, this last included a consuming jealousy of those who had a better natural right to the girl than herself. Diligently and skilfully, therefore, she had scattered seeds of prejudice against the unjust half of creation—which, by the way, she very much appreciated in units, while denouncing it in the mass. By way of a more positive deterrent, her slender means were taxed to the utmost that Bel might have cushions and flowers and curtains to suit her fastidious taste. No one, least of all Miss Alison, suspected the extent of her secret shifts and sacrifices. And, intermittently she had her reward. But no skill in self-deception could blind her to the fact that her lavish devotion

was as dust in the balance against the passing attentions of a baronet, lord of two estates, and a fine-looking fellow to boot. To-night the conviction rankled with peculiar keenness by reason of her suppressed irritation with Macnair.

"Shirking the issue. Just like a man!" she soliloquised wrathfully. "And dragging in his own trumpery translations by the heels. The conceit of the creatures! And the folly of them. Wasting good abilities over the vapourings of a musty old Greek poet. Blind as a bat, or simply not caring a snap that the world's crammed with evils crying out to be reformed. Let them cry, so long as he can scribble in peace...."