Colonel Vautier entered; he had been to the cellar to get out a bottle of champagne in which to drink the health of Helena and the man she had chosen.

"Good evening, my dear Archie," he said. "I know Helena has told you her news."

Archie shook hands, and then his eyes went back to Helena again. She had never looked more entrancingly pretty, but she was made of wood. And then Jessie came in; they were all there, and dinner was ready, and down they went. In this wooden world, everything went on in precisely the same way as it had done when people were made of flesh and blood. Some cunning mechanical contrivance enabled them to talk and smile and eat: food tasted the same and so did the champagne in which presently they drank Helena's health. It was the same prickly, bubbly stuff, with a little sting in it, that he so seldom drank. But it unfroze the surface of the stricture that bound him, as when the first stir of a thawing wind moistens the surface of ice. He began to feel again, to be conscious that somewhere within him was a deep well of the waters of pain. But anything was better than that cataleptic insensibility, which was like being unconscious, and, all the time, knowing that he was unconscious.

They were not going out that night, and after dinner they sat down to a rubber of bridge, in which as usual Helena took Archie as a partner, because she always insisted that she could form some idea of the principles on which he played, whereas the other two but wandered in a starless and Cimmerian gloom when mated with him. But Helena claimed that her spiritual affinity with Archie enabled her to perceive that, when he declared hearts, he wished her to understand that he hadn't got any, and that she would do well to declare something different. "Bridge, properly understood," Archie had enunciated once, "is a form of poker: you must bewilder and terrify your adversary. And then the fun begins, and you get fined." What added to the hilarity was the concentrated seriousness which Jessie and her partner brought to bear on the game, and the miser's greed and avaricious eye with which Jessie was popularly supposed to see her score mounting. All these jokes, these squibs of light-hearted nonsense, were there to-night, but there was nothing behind them. It was as if they were spoken from habit; a frigid rehearsal of some pithless drama was going on; they were tinsel flowers stuck into arid and seedless ground, and sprang no longer from the warm earth.

The sense of wooden unreality soon began to close in again on Archie, with that utter absence of feeling which was so far more terrible than any feeling could be, that soulless insensitiveness as of a live consciousness that knew it was dead, and he rose from the table after Helena had delivered him from the consequence of some outrageous declaration, and went across to a side-table where were placed syphons and spirits. But now, instead of pouring himself out a glass of soda-water, he half filled his tumbler with whisky, and but added a cream of bubble on the top of it. Immediately almost his sense of touch with life returned; there stole back into himself and the figures of Colonel Vautier and Jessie the perception of their several identities, and into Helena the love with which he had endowed her. But that, and all that it implied, was better than feeling nothing at all. He knew, too, that when Jessie spoke to him, or looked at him, her voice and her eyes held for him a supreme and infinite sympathy. He could not reach it, but he knew it was there. Perhaps when he got used to those new conditions of nightmare existence, he could make it accessible, get into touch with it. At present he scarcely wanted it; he wanted nothing so long as this perception of life still ran in his brain, except Helena. He thought that she rather pitied him too, but it was not her pity he wanted, for it was she who had brought her pity on himself.

They played two or three rubbers; Jessie's miserly greed was assuaged by precisely the sum that Archie had won from Helena, and Colonel Vautier, after seeing him out, went back to his study to indulge himself in the cigar which was not permitted in the drawing-room, and the two sisters were left there. Helena's brain had long been busy, beneath the habitual jests of their game, over her future relations with Jessie, and she had come to the conclusion that the sooner they talked the matter out the better. She found that it affected her comfort to be practically not on speaking terms with her sister, and, since she had no shrinking from what might be a painful interview for others, she had made up her mind to ascertain exactly how Jessie meant to behave to her in the few weeks for which they would be in close daily and hourly contact, for Lord Harlow had expressed his mind very clearly about an early date for their wedding, and Helena entirely agreed with him.

Jessie, on her part, could scarcely manage to think about her sister at all. With Archie in front of her all evening she had barely been conscious of anything but his bitter and miserable disillusionment, his awakening from the dream that had become so real to him. She was still seated at the card-table, and with that need for trivial employment which so often accompanies emotional crises, she was building a house with the cards they had been using, devoting apparently her whole faculties to its breathless construction. The strong, beautiful hands which Archie had never noticed hovered over it, alighting with their building materials, putting each card delicately and firmly in place, and her grave face watched the ascending stories, as if Babylon the Great was rising again for the marvel of mankind. Then Helena sat down by her, and, leaning her arm on the table, caused a vibration that demolished Babylon from garret to cellar.

"Oh, Jessie, I'm so sorry," she said, and she was; the fall of an ingenious card-house was the sort of thing that provoked her pity.

Jessie swept the cards together and seemed about to get up.

"It doesn't matter," she said. "It is bed-time, isn't it?"

Helena put her head wistfully on one side.

"Aren't you being horribly unkind to me?" she said. She did not suppose it was much use playing on the pathetic stop, that made, as a general rule, so insincere a bleating in her sister's ears, but it was worth trying.

"I don't think there is any use in talking, Helena," she said. "If I am unkind, if I can't bear what you have done, it is because I simply can't help it."

Helena fingered the debris of the card-house with those more delicate fingers that could caress and claw so exquisitely. Essentially, she cared not one atom what Jessie thought of her, but she wanted not to be uncomfortable for the next few weeks.

"Ah, that is it?" she added. "You are satisfied to hate and detest me because you can't help it. That seems to you a final and unanswerable excuse. But nobody else may do anything because she can't help it."

"But you could have helped what you have done," said Jessie. "You made Archie think you cared for him. You let him fall in love with you on that assumption."

"He let himself fall in love with me," said Helena. "That was not my fault. Besides…"

She was silent a moment, weaving delicate spider-threads in her mind. She really wanted to propitiate Jessie just now, otherwise she would certainly have reminded her that she, anyhow, had allowed herself to fall in love with Archie, though she would not say that that was Archie's fault. It would have been amusing to suggest that, but it did not seem to tend towards reconciliation. She bent her graceful head a little lower over the fallen card-house. It had collapsed with tragic suddenness, even as Archie had collapsed.

"Besides," she went on, "it was open to Archie to propose to me. He did not. We were several weeks together at Silorno. And then I came to London and met Bertie. Was it my fault that I fell in love with him? I think you are horribly unkind to me."

Jessie came a step nearer.

"Are you in love with him?" she asked. "If you tell me you are in love with him…"

"Do you think I should marry him if I was not?" asked Helena, looking the picture of limpid, childlike innocence.

Jessie made no reply. She could not say that she believed Helena was in love with him, though she was assuredly going to marry him. She could not tell a lie of that essential kind; merely the words would not come.

"If I have wronged you in any way, Helena," she said at length, "I am most sincerely sorry for it. I ask your forgiveness unconditionally."

Helena rose, wreathed in tender smiles and liquid eyes.

"Darling, you have my forgiveness with all my heart," she said. "And may I ask you one thing? Will you try to feel a little more kindly towards me? If you only knew how your unkindness hurts me."

* * * * *

But Jessie, lying awake that night, striving, with all the sincerity that permeated her from skin to marrow, to make the effort that Helena had asked of her, made no headway at all. She utterly distrusted and disbelieved her. And somewhere, lying beneath the darkness of the windless night, was Archie, for whose happiness she would have given her heart's last blood. But all of it would not help him one atom while he, in the perverse dispensations of destiny, wanted only what he could not get, Helena's love. He could not get it because it did not exist. She did not love; the faculty had been denied her.

* * * * *

Suddenly she felt frightened about Archie. He had sunk somewhere out of reach this evening; a lid had shut down on him. Once or twice it had seemed to lift for a moment, and she remembered what made it lift.

BOOK III

CHAPTER IX

Late one afternoon about a week after, Archie was sitting with his old nurse, Blessington, in the room that had once been his day-nursery. He had left London the day after Helena had so honourably paid him the five half-crowns he had won from her, and since then he had been living here alone with his father. This evening, his mother and Jessie were coming down from town, his mother to remain here till she went up to London again for Helena's wedding which had been fixed for the end of the first week in August, while Jessie was but coming for a long week-end. Helena remained in town, where she was very busy shopping, and unpacking the lovely presents which Lord Harlow sent or brought to her, morning, noon, and night. They were really delightful presents, and the material of them was large precious stones, exquisitely set.

Archie had long made it a habit, when he was at home, to pay a visit to his old nurse before he went to dress for dinner. She had become housekeeper after the fledging of the family, and now, half-way through the decade of her seventies, did little more, when Archie was away, than sit white-haired and stately with her sewing or her knitting, and feel that she was very busy. But when Archie came home she would burst into violent activities, and constitute herself his nurse again, to whom he was always "Master Archie," and quite a little boy still. It mattered not one rap to her that he had his own valet, none other indeed than William, who in days gone by had fished him out of the lake, and received a gold watch and chain for the rescue, for Blessington was always in and out of his room, taking coats and trousers away to have buttons more securely adjusted, and loading her work-basket with piles of his socks and underclothing in which her eyes, still needle-sharp for all her seventy-five years, had detected holes that required darning. This habit of hers sometimes drove William nearly mad, for Blessington would take away all Archie's washing when it came back from the laundry, in order to inspect it thoroughly, and when his distracted valet wanted clean clothes, and applied to her for them, she would often entirely forget that she had taken them, and firmly deny the appropriation. Then William would craftily manage to get her to open her cupboard door, and lo, there was all Archie's clean linen. And Blessington would exclaim, "Eh, I must have taken it, and it went out of my head." Or she would abstract his sponge from the bathroom in order to put a stitch into it, and Archie, sitting in his bath, would find nothing to wash himself with. But Blessington was a sacred and a beloved institution, and as long as she was happy (which she most undoubtedly was when Archie was there to look after and inconvenience) no one minded these magpie-annexations of portable property.

* * * * *

Of all hours in the day Blessington loved best this evening visit of Archie's, when he sat among the tokens of his childhood, the play-table which now scarcely reached up to his knees, the little arm-chair, with its bar of wood strung through the arms so as to imprison and guard the sitter, the box of oak-bricks with which he used to build houses of amazing architecture, the depleted regiments of lead-soldiers which still stood on the mantel-shelf. Her great delight was to recall to him the days of his childhood, his naughtiness, the scrapes he got into, the whole patchwork of memories that retained still such lively and beloved colouring. And for him, too, during this last week, there had been in these talks a way of escape from this nightmare of his present experience; it was he himself, after all, who had put the coals on his mother's hearthrug, had fished for pike with William, had attended, in rapturous trepidation, the advents of Abracadabra. These days seemed much further off from him than they did from her, for a bitter impassable water lay between them and him, while for her they had only receded a little further into the placid and sunny distance of her days. But, when he talked them over with her, he could recapture a dreamlike illusion of getting back into a life of which the most alarming feature was the presence of his father. Over everything else there hung enchantment.

He was sitting now in Blessington's rocking-chair, having tried without success to squeeze himself into the imprisoning seat of his childhood, and she was recalling the awful episode of the burnt rug.

"Eh, whatever possessed you to go and do it," she said, "I can't understand to this day, Master Archie. I'm speaking of when you set fire to your mamma's rug."

"Tell me about that," said Archie.

"Well, it was on an afternoon when you had a cold, and your mamma had allowed you to sit in her room while she went out driving. And what must you do but empty all the fire from the hearth on to her rug. You nearly got a whipping for that from your papa!"

Archie remembered that moment quite well, and how he had stood in his father's study, frightened but defiant, and refusing to say he was sorry when he was not. Then his mother had come in and had pointed to a bottle on the table, and told his father that he ought to learn his lesson first before he gave Archie one… That had puzzled him at the time, though it was clear enough now. His father still had that lesson to learn, and Archie, during this last week, had begun to understand a little why his father had not yet learned it, if learning it implied the giving up of all that battles stood for.

He recalled himself with a jerk: he wanted to get back into the enchanted land which Blessington's reminiscences outlined for him.

"Yes, that hearthrug," he said. "That was a bad business, wasn't it, Blessington? What do you think put it into my head to empty the fire on to it?"

"Bless the boy, I don't know," said Blessington. "It was just mischief."

"Yes, but what's mischief?" asked Archie.

Blessington was a simple and direct theologian.

"Well, I shouldn't wonder if it's doing what Sapum wants you to do," said she, Sapum being her equivalent for the arch-enemy.

"I shouldn't wonder either," said Archie. "But it's rather beastly of Sapum to take possession of a very small boy with a bad cold in the head."

"Eh, he takes possession of us all, if we let him," observed Blessington. "But that was the naughtiest thing you ever did, dear. I wouldn't lay it up to you now."

"Was I good as a rule?" asked he.