The Way of the Spirit | Page 4

for himself in the army.
Presently the butler, a dark, melancholy-looking person, opened the
door, and Rupert saw at once that the man was strangely disturbed;
indeed, he looked as though he had been crying.
"Is Lady Devene in?" Rupert asked as a matter of form.
"In, sir, yes; she'll never go out no more, except once," answered the
butler, speaking with a gulp in his throat. "Haven't you heard, sir,
haven't you heard?" he went on wildly.
"Heard what?" gasped Rupert, clutching at the door frame.
"Dead, Mr. Ullershaw, dead--accident--overdose of chloral they say!
His lordship found her an hour ago, and the doctors have just left."
* * *
Meanwhile, in the room above, Lord Devene stood alone,
contemplating the still and awful beauty of the dead. Then rousing
himself, he took the hearth-brush, and with it swept certain frail ashes
of burnt paper down between the bars of the low grate so that they
crumbled up and were no more seen.
"I never believed that she would dare to do it," he thought to himself.
"After all, she had courage, and she was right, I am worse than she
was--as she would judge. Well, I have won the game and am rid of her
at last, and without scandal. So--let the dead bury their dead!"
* * *

When Rupert, who had come up from Woolwich that morning, reached
the little house in Regent's Park, which was his mother's home, he
found a letter awaiting him. It had been posted late on the previous
night, and was unsigned and undated, but in Clara's hand, being written
on a plain sheet, and enclosed, as a blind, in a conventional note asking
him to luncheon. Its piteous, its terrible contents need not be described;
suffice to say that from them he learned all the truth. He read it twice,
then had the wit to destroy it by fire. In that awful hour of shock and
remorse the glamour and the madness departed from him, and he, who
at heart was good enough, understood whither they had led his feet.
After this Rupert Ullershaw was very ill, so ill that he lay in bed a long
time, wandered in his mind, and was like to die. But his powerful
constitution carried his young body through the effects of a blow from
which inwardly he never really quite recovered. In the end, when he
was getting better, he told his mother everything. Mrs. Ullershaw was a
strong, reserved woman, with a broad, patient face and smooth,
iron-grey hair; one who had endured much and through it kept her
simple faith and trust in Providence--yes, even when she thought that
the evil in her son's blood was mastering him, that evil from which no
Ullershaw was altogether free, and that he was beginning to walk in the
footsteps of his father and of that ill guide and tempter, his cousin, Lord
Devene. She heard him out, her quiet eyes fixed upon his face that was
altered almost into age by passion, illness and repentance--heard him
without a word.
Then she made one of the great efforts of her life, and in the stress of
her appeal even became eloquent. She told Rupert all she knew of those
brilliant, erratic, unprincipled Ullershaws from whom he sprang, and
counted before his eyes the harvest of Dead Sea apples that they had
gathered. She showed him how great was his own wrong-doing, and
how imminent the doom from which he had but just escaped--that
doom which had destroyed the unhappy Clara after she was meshed in
the Ullershaw net, and corrupted by their example and philosophy
which put the pride of life and gratification of self above obedience to
law human or Divine. She pointed out to him that he had received his
warning, that he stood at the parting of the ways, that his happiness and

welfare for all time depended upon the path he chose. She, who rarely
spoke of herself, even appealed to him to remember his mother, who
had endured so much at the hands of his family, and not to bring her
grey hairs with sorrow to the grave; to live for work and not for
pleasure; to shun the society of idle folk who can be happy in the midst
of corruption, and who are rich in everything except good deeds.
"Set another ideal before your eyes, my son," she said, "that of
renunciation, and learn that when you seem to renounce you really gain.
Follow the way of the Spirit, not that of the Flesh. Conquer yourself
and the weakness which comes of your blood, however hard that may
be. Self-denial is not really difficult, and its fruits are beautiful, in them
you will find peace. Life is not long,