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than itself. His wife's love gave him little consolation. Of his real struggles, his real troubles, she knew nothing. Elisabeth, on her side, was painfully conscious that a barrier was growing up between them. She laid the blame of it on herself, for she thought it had begun when her baby girl (the only child she had ever had) died of croup at six weeks old, and she, seeing that her husband did not mourn it as she did, had reproached him as indifferent. She asked his pardon silently, in little ways, many times, but Ezra did not understand or notice. He was not in the least angry with her, merely absentminded.

Neither was his religion of any help to him. All these years he had gone regularly to "meeting," first with his father and then with Elisabeth. Had he lived in a Catholic country he would probably have been a devout man, in his youth at any rate. The Catholic ritual would have answered to an inborn need in his nature. Worship as conducted at the meeting-house in Veryan Church town left that need altogether unsatisfied; and Ezra, who was bound to feed it somehow, ended by adopting a religion of his own, which, unknown to him, bore a certain resemblance to that of some mediæval mystics.

He had heard much of the scheme of salvation, predestination, reprobation -all these he rejected. He held that the Divine Spirit manifested itself throughout nature, and most of all in human nature. All systems of religion or philosophy, which strove to curb and deny the instincts of that nature, he held to be guilty of resistance to the Spirit of God.

One day he got a jubilant note from Mr. Evans, enclosing a letter from the editor of the Cosmopolitan Review, who wrote that he would be pleased to publish Mr. Higgins's poem "Falling Stars" in an early issue. "That will

stand you three guineas," wrote Mr. Evans; and so, in due time, it did.

Ezra spent the three shillings on a neckerchief for his wife, who, on receiving it, ran away to cry over it. It would have been better if she had cried on Ezra's shoulder.

The three pounds Ezra locked up in his desk. Every night he took them out and looked at them. The first stirrings of hope are often only an added heart-ache. They were so to him; nevertheless his mind was made up.

In the summer of that year he wrote to his landlord, and gave notice to quit his farm at Michaelmas. Not till all the arrangements were made did he tell his wife what he had done. She had always been a submissive wife, and more than that a thoroughly loyal one, but she felt that she had been insulted by his silence.

"And where be we goin' to live to?" she asked, in a thin, cold voice. Ezra's eyes flashed with excitement. "To London."

"And what be we goin' to live on?" "Don't you be afeard," Ezra retorted, speaking broadly in his suppressed agitation, "you shall live as well as you live here."

He made a fresh resolve to keep his literary work a secret from her till it had brought him fame.

Elisabeth had learnt in the last few years to feel much and say very little. She said little when the time came for flitting and she had to pack the few possessions she could take away with her. The incoming tenant had bought the furniture, and thereby the wrench of parting was made shorter for her and yet more bitter.

Very early one morning, while Ezra still slept, she stepped out into the dewdrenched croft, and, sitting down on a lump of granite, looked about her. She was much too tired to stand. On her left lay gorse and bracken, a low, gray wall, and, beyond it, the open moorland

edged by a rim of silvery, misty sea; on her right lay the empty fields-"our fields" her heart still called them-and the old bare, square, granite house. Tears blinded her eyes, but she choked them resolutely down.

Suddenly the dull ache at her heart grew into an agonizing pain, a horrible oppression seized her; she had to fight for breath. She believed she was on the point of death, but the attack passed off, leaving her weak and shaken. She could think now, and she remembered that the doctor who had attended her when her baby was born had told her that she had a weak heart, and must try to avoid over-fatigue and over-excitement. After all, perhaps, Ezra was right, and she had worked too hard for her strength. In London, as he said, she would have no outdoor work; she would sit and sew like a lady.

It was a September evening, chilly, for the wind was north, brilliant, because even over London it had swept the sky clear. From the window of her new home-a bed sitting-room, high up at the back of a house in a street off the Vauxhall Bridge Road-Elisabeth could see the western sky as it turned from pale blue to glowing green. She had eaten her solitary evening meal, and had washed up the "cloam," as in her mind she still called the plates and tea-cups. It was idle to sit by the window doing nothing, but it saved lampoil. Ezra was out for the evening, and would not be back till late. The solemn light of the after-glow brightened her reddish hair, and spiritualized her pale face, emphasizing the blue shadows under her eyes and the faint hollows which broke the curve from cheek to chin that had once been so delicately perfect. Some months of a sedentary life had made her figure stouter and more matronly than of old, but girlhood still lingered in her face.

She had lived for nearly a year in this dreary lodging, and though she rebelled against the dulness and confinement of her new life, and suffered from its unwonted discomforts, and had drooped visibly in the close heat of a London August, she had known no actual hardship. Ezra had been forced to tell her that he hoped to make a livelihood by writing. Beyond this bare fact he had told her nothing. She knew that they were living on their tiny capital, and a dull anxiety oppressed her daily. Sometimes the abject, degraded poverty of the street haunted her like a ghastly presage. Would she and Ezra ever come to that??

Just now her cares were forgotten. It was a Thursday, market-day at St. Pirans, and, as she watched the sky above the huddled house-roofs, she could see herself and Ezra driving homewards, side by side, in their high two-wheeled cart, along a road on either side of which stretched gorse, and heather, and blackberry bushes, fold upon fold of wild waste land, with here and there a few hobbled sheep cropping the edges of it. Tall bracken nodded to them in the breeze as they rolled by. This was the season which the children called "ferny summer." She could hear the sharp tap of the cob's hoofs on the hard road, could feel the delicious freshness of the crisp air against her cheek.

Suddenly the happy fancy vanished as a ray of gaslight streamed in at the open door. She looked up, wondering

ly.

"What, Ezra, back already?"

Without speaking, Ezra shut the door behind him, and came and stood close before her. Some instinct made her rise to her feet. Her heart began to beat violently.

"Lizzie," said her husband, and his deep voice trembled slightly, "I have brought you home my first book, which has just been published. It will bring

us in money, and be the beginning of better days."

Elisabeth stretched out two shaking hands and caught his arm.

"Oh, Ezra," she said, "I might have trusted you. I haven't been what I belonged to be."

He stooped and kissed her tenderly. "You've been a good wife to me always; no man ever had a better. I must go out again-I must. Light the lamp, and read my book by it. Here it is; take it."

Elisabeth's fingers closed mechanically on the book. She was too moved for ready speech. Before she had found words to express her bewildered pride and joy, Ezra had left her, calling out, "I'll be back presently!" and had clattered down the stairs like a boy.

Elisabeth lit the lamp, and washed her trembling hands, lest any oil might have rested on them. Then she sat down to the table, and fingered Ezra's first book with awe and glad agitation. It was a small, long-shaped volume, bound in dark-green cloth. She opened it at random, and saw verses, in clear, delicate print, on the thick, roughedged, cream-colored pages.

""Tis poetry," said Elisabeth, in a hushed voice.

She was very fond of poetry, though she had failed once, unwittingly, to appreciate Ezra's. She had even bought, out of her egg-money, Longfellow's poems, and "A Thousand and one Gems of Poetry," and the reading of them had been a lasting pleasure to her. No revelation of her husband's powers could have impressed her with a deeper reverence than this small volume, on the fly-leaf of which was printed in bold red lettering, "Gismondo, and other Poems, by Ezra Higgins." The page turned of itself, and on the one beyond it she read, "To my wife, Elisabeth."

She hardly understood the meaning

It

of a dedication, yet she needed no explanation of Ezra's intention in writing those four words which made the book hers as well as his. Hot tears gathered under her eyelids, but she rubbed them away. This was no time for crying, and a drop might stain the page. was her habit to begin at the beginning of any book, even a poetry book. Ezra's book began with the ballad of Gismondo of Rimini. Through the medium of Elizabethan literature, he had come under the spell of the Italian Renaissance, its outburst of triumphant humanity, and its strange unhuman tragedies.

He had found the ideal hero of the Renaissance in Sigismondo Malatesta, tyrant of Rimini, soldier of fortune, patron of learning, and lover of the "divine Isotta," and had made his life and love the subject of a ballad, full of force and beauty, admirable, on the whole, though unequal. It was the outcome of his own "new birth," and he had put into it all the rebellion against a narrow life and a narrow creed which had been fostered by long repression, and was free to break forth at last. He had not hampered himself with historical accuracy. Of Isotta, the learned and strong-souled woman, whom her admirers called divine, he had made a woman strong only by virtue of her passion, divine only by virtue of her beauty, and its power over the passions of men. Gismondo he had unconsciously idealized.

Elisabeth had never heard of these people, and regarding them as creations of her husband's genius, was at first too much impressed to quite realize, much less criticise, what she read. When she read how the girl Isotta looked down from her window on the boy Gismondo, riding by in triumph, a conqueror already, and how their eyes met, and their hearts went out to one another, a strange delicious thrill gave quick response within her, mak

ing her turn pale and smile. At the point where Gismondo forced poison on his wife, Polissena, because her existence was an offence to the woman he loved, Elisabeth shuddered, foreseeing the awful doom which must reward such guilt. But the doom was long delayed. Her eyes devoured the verses, which seemed to bite into her brain. They sang the triumph of love-earthstained, sin-stained, blood-stained-and proclaimed it glorious and divine. They told how Gismondo, attacked by his enemies, having fought till no hope remained, took refuge with Isotta in the consecrated church he had built, not to the glory of God, but to the glory of her he loved, and died in her arms on the high altar steps, and the poet called upon mankind-pitiful, enslaved mankind, which, bound down by iron creeds, dies without having lived-to envy him his love and his death.

Elisabeth read on and on, glancing through one poem after another with feverish haste.

Meanwhile, through the gaslit streets, a happy man was coming home to her. Ezra had been down to the river. As he stood watching its steady flow, he had felt the restless excitement die down within him till his thoughts became lucid and calm. One thing in the past he looked back upon deepened the joy of those quiet moments. He had been a kind and faithful husband to Elisabeth. Also, he had not clouded her life with the shadow of his own miseries, struggles, and disappointments; he had waited for the moment when he could come to her with his finished work in his hand. Again and again, on his way back, he thought of this and was glad.

*

On reaching the threshold of the room which was his home, Ezra Higgins stood still.

Elisabeth had not noticed his entrance. She was sitting with her el

bows on the table, and her hands placed so as to shield her eyes from the glare of the unshaded lamp. Was it possible, he thought, that she had been crying, crying over his book?

"Lizzie," he said, tenderly. "Liz

zie!"

There was a difference in the intonation of the two words, for before he uttered the second Elisabeth had stood up suddenly, turning towards him a white face, and eyes that had no tears in them, yet filled him with a vague dread.

"Ezra," she said, "I've read some of it, and I'm fo'ced to tell you that it's a bad, wicked book, and 'tis a shame to me to think that you have written it."

Her words came fluently, without hesitation.

"You write about a man who was a murderer and an adulterer, and a woman that you'd never let me speak tothat I hope that you'd never let me speak to and you make them out grand and noble instead of miserable sinners against the Almighty. And there's worse than that in it-blasphemy." There was silence for a moment. Ezra Higgins felt stunned.

For ten long years his wife had submitted to him in all things, unmurmuringly, unquestioningly. "Ezra knows best," had been her formula. "I must know best," had been his. It came to his aid now, and kept back his gathering wrath.

"Lizzie," he said, "it's because you don't understand it. You're talking

nonsense."

Elisabeth's eyes flamed.

"Then I'll talk sense for once! You've put my name in that book, so I've a share in it. You must choose between it and me. All these years I've believed you to be an honest, God-fearin',' Christian man, and all the while you were acting a lie. If you are going to teach people that the more like we are

to the beasts that perish, the nearer we are to God-and that book teaches it-I will go back to my own home. "Tis all I can do."

"Lizzie, you can't mean it!" He went nearer to her; she made a movement as if to push him from her.

"Don't come near me," she said; "you've broken my heart."

"How about mine?" Ezra asked. Presently he said again, imploringly this time:

"Lizzie, you can't mean it?"

She stood very still, and her face, which he could see only dimly, seemed to him as hard and pitiless as if it had been carved in stone. Then he turned away and left her. Yet his hand lingered on the door-handle, and he went downstairs very slowly. No voice called to him from the landing, “Ezra, come back!"

· Elisabeth had dropped into a chair. Ever since her husband last spoke she had been battling with a sense of faintness. Gradually it passed off; but her brain remained confused and bewildered. She had no recollection of what had taken place, only a vague feeling that some irreparable misfortune had come upon her.

She heard a dull, loud sound-the shutting of the front door. Presently her eyes fell on the little green volume of poetry. Strength and memory were coming back to her. She remembered what had passed between her and Ezra; and, clearest of all, she remembered his face as she had last seen itthe face of a stricken man. Just before that he had spoken to her, but a sound like the roaring of the sea had prevented the words from reaching her. Не had not known that she could not hear them, could not answer them. She had driven him from her into the evil streets, where despair tempts men to death and worse than death. This was Elisabeth's last distinct thought. After this she had no time for thinking.

She put on a hat and threw a shawl round her. A minute later the streetdoor banged again, and Elisabeth stood on the pavement.

Having reached the Vauxhall Bridge Road, she turned instinctively to the left. Elisabeth had a horror of London crossings, and the crossing at the end of the road, where the 'buses kept driving in and out of Victoria Station, was one she would never face. Tonight she crossed it without a tremor. She turned the corner into Victoria Street. Here the pavement was much clearer, and she saw a figure which had some likeness to Ezra's passing in and out under the gas-lamps. She began to run. Mercifully, no one stopped her. She fled as other panting, terrified human creatures may have fled, over that very ground, toward the great Sanctuary. At the end of the street she stood still, clinging to a lamp-post.

In the wide, dim space before her cab-lamps flashed and figures hurried to and fro. Elisabeth saw only Ezra's face. She fled on. She was following by instinct the way most familiar to her. This was their every evening walk-her's and Ezra's-past the Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. Sometimes they spent hours sitting in the little public garden close to the clock tower and facing the river. By the time she reached Abington Street she was nearly spent. She knew that her strength was failing, and a great terror seized her lest she might fall and be trodden under foot. She prayed that she might at least reach the garden, and realized suddenly that she was opposite it. She darted across the road. She was at the gate, but the gate was locked.

A slow step came along the pavement. Ezra had also thought of the garden as a place of escape from the restless movement of the street, and had forgotten that at that hour it would be shut. He was very tired.

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