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“He didn’t believe, then, in the curse?”

“Well, rather, he thought nothing about it. Until, that is, the time came when it took effect, to break his heart and end his life.”

“How do you mean?”

There was silence for a little. Alan had turned away his head, so that I could not see his face. Then–

“I suppose you have never been told the true story of why Jack left the country?”

“No. Was he–is he–?”

“He is one victim of the curse in this generation, and I, God help me, am the other, and perhaps more wretched one.”

His voice trembled and broke, and for the first time that day I almost forgot the mysterious horror of the night before, in my pity for the actual, tangible suffering before me. I stretched out my hand to his, and his fingers closed on mine with a sudden, painful grip. Then quietly–

“I will tell you the story,” he said, “though since that miserable time I have spoken of it to no one.”

There was a pause before he began. He lay there by my side, his gaze turned across me up the sunbright, autumn-tinted glen, but his eyes shadowed by the memories which he was striving to recall and arrange in due order in his mind. And when he did speak it was not directly to begin the promised recital.

“You never knew Jack,” he said, abruptly.

“Hardly,” I acquiesced. “I remember thinking him very handsome.”

“There could not be two opinions as to that,” he answered. “And a man who could have done anything he liked with life, had things gone differently. His abilities were fine, but his strength lay above all in his character: he was strong,–strong in his likes and in his dislikes, resolute, fearless, incapable of half measures–a man, every inch of him. He was not generally popular–stiff, hard, unsympathetic, people called him. From one point of view, and one only, he perhaps deserved the epithets. If a woman lost his respect she seemed to lose his pity too. Like a mediaeval monk, he looked upon such rather as the cause than the result of male depravity, and his contempt for them mingled with anger, almost, as I sometimes thought, with hatred. And this attitude was, I have no doubt, resented by the men of his own class and set, who shared neither his faults nor his virtues. But in other ways he was not hard. He could love; I, at least, have cause to know it. If you would hear his story rightly from my lips, Evie, you must try and see him with my eyes. The friend who loved me, and whom I loved with the passion which, if not the strongest, is certainly, I believe, the most enduring of which men are capable,–that perfect brother’s love, which so grows into our being that when it is at peace we are scarcely conscious of its existence, and when it is wounded our very life-blood seems to flow at the stroke. Brothers do not always love like that: I can only wish that we had not done so.

VII

“Well, about five years ago, before I had taken my degree, I became acquainted with a woman whom I will call ‘Delia,’–it is near enough to the name by which she went. She was a few years older than myself, very beautiful, and I believed her to be what she described herself–the innocent victim of circumstance and false appearance, a helpless prey to the vile calumnies of worldlings. In sober fact, I am afraid that, whatever her life may have been actually at the time that I knew her–a subject which I have never cared to investigate–her past had been not only bad enough irretrievably to fix her position in society, but bad enough to leave her without an ideal in the world, though still retaining within her heart the possibilities of a passion which, from the moment that it came to life, was strong enough to turn her whole existence into one desperate reckless straining after an object hopelessly beyond her reach. That was the woman with whom, at the age of twenty, I fancied myself in love. She wanted to get a husband, and she thought me–rightly–ass enough to accept the post. I was very young then even for my years,–a student, an idealist, with an imagination highly developed, and no knowledge whatever of the world as it actually is. Anyhow, before I had known her a month, I had determined to make her my wife. My parents were abroad at the time, George and Lucy here, so that it was to Jack that I imparted the news of my resolve. As you may imagine, he did all that he could to shake it. But I was immovable. I disbelieved his facts, and despised his contempt from the standpoint of my own superior morality. This state of things continued for several weeks, during the greater part of which time I was at Oxford. I only knew that while I was there, Jack had made Delia’s acquaintance, and was apparently cultivating it assiduously.