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    STUDIES IN LOVE
    AND IN TERROR

    BY

    MRS. BELLOC LOWNDES

    (Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes)

    _Short Story Index Reprint Series_


    BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS
    FREEPORT, NEW YORK


    First Published 1913

    PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




CONTENTS

                                 PAGE

    PRICE OF ADMIRALTY              1

    THE CHILD                      99

    ST. CATHERINE'S EVE           131

    THE WOMAN FROM PURGATORY      187

    WHY THEY MARRIED              227




PRICE OF ADMIRALTY

    "O mort, vieux capitaine, il est temps! levons l'ancre! Ce pays nous ennuie, O mort! Appareillons!" I

Claire de Wissant, wife of Jacques de Wissant, Mayor of Falaise, stood
in the morning sunlight, graceful with a proud, instinctive grace of
poise and gesture, on a wind-blown path close to the edge of the cliff. At some little distance to her left rose the sloping, mansard roofs of
the Pavillon de Wissant, the charming country house to which her husband
had brought her, a seventeen year old bride, ten long years ago. She was now gazing eagerly out to sea, shielding her grey, heavy-lidded
eyes with her right hand. From her left hand hung a steel chain, to
which was attached a small key. A hot haze lay heavily over the great sweep of deep blue waters. It
blotted out the low grey line on the horizon which, on the majority of
each year's days, reminds the citizens of Falaise how near England is to
France. Jacques de Wissant had rejoiced in the _entente cordiale_, if only
because it brought such a stream of tourists to the old seaport town of
which he was now Mayor. But his beautiful wife thought of the English as
gallant foes rather than as friends. Was she not great-granddaughter to
that admiral who at Trafalgar, when both his legs were shattered by
chain-shot, bade his men place him in a barrel of bran that he might go
on commanding, in the hour of defeat, to the end? And yet as Claire stood there, her eyes sweeping the sea for an as yet
invisible craft, her heart seemed to beat rhythmically to the last verse
of a noble English poem which the governess of her twin daughters had
made them recite to her that very morning. How did it run? Aloud she
murmured:

    "Yet this inconstancy is such,
     As you too shall adore--"

and then she stopped, her quivering lips refusing to form the two
concluding lines. To Claire de Wissant, that moving cry from a man's soul was not dulled
by familiarity, or hackneyed by common usage, and just now it found an
intolerably faithful echo in her sad, rebellious heart, intensifying the
anguish born of a secret and very bitter renunciation. With an abrupt, restless movement she turned and walked on till her way
along the path was barred by a curious obstacle. This was a small
red-brick tower, built within a few feet of the edge of the cliff. It
was an ugly blot on the beautiful stretch of down, all the uglier that
the bricks and tiles had not yet had time to lose their hardness of line
and colour in the salt wind. On the cliff side, the small circular building, open to wind, sky and
sea, formed the unnatural apex of a natural stairway which led steeply,
almost vertically, down to a deep land-locked cove below. The irregular
steps carved by nature out of the chalk had been strengthened, and a
rough protection added by means of knotted ropes fixed on either side of
the dangerous descent. In the days when the steps had started sheer from a cleft in the cliff
path, Jacques de Wissant had never used this way of reaching a spot
which till last year had been his property, and his favourite
bathing-place; and he had also, in those same quiet days which now
seemed so long ago, forbidden his daughters to use that giddy way. But
Claire was a fearless woman; and she had always preferred the
dangerous, ladder-like stairs which seemed, when gazed at from below, to
hang 'twixt sky and sea. Now, however, she rarely availed herself of the right retained by her
husband of using one of the two keys which unlocked the door set in the
new brick tower, for the cove--only by courtesy could it be called a
bay--had been chosen, owing to its peculiar position, naturally remote
and yet close to a great maritime port, to be the quarters of the
Northern Submarine Flotilla. Jacques de Wissant--and it was perhaps the only time in their joint life
that his wife had entirely understood and sympathized with any action of
her husband's--had refused the compensation his Government had offered
him; more, in his cold, silent way, he had shown himself a patriot in a
sense comparatively few modern men have the courage to be, namely, in
that which affected both his personal comfort and his purse. *       *       *       *       *

After standing for a moment on the perilously small and narrow platform
which made the floor of the tower, Claire grasped firmly a strand of the
knotted rope and began descending the long steps cut in the cliff side. She no longer gazed out to sea, instead she looked straight down into
the pale green, sun-flecked waters of the little bay, where seven out of
the nine submarines which composed the flotilla were lying
half-submerged, as is their wont in harbour. A landsman, coming suddenly upon the cliff-locked pool, might have
thought that the centuries had rolled back, and that the strange sight
before him was a school of saurians lazily sunning themselves in the
placid waters of a sea inlet where time had stood still. But no such vision came to Claire de Wissant. As she went down the
cliff-side her lovely eyes rested on these sinister, man-created
monsters with a feeling of sisterly, possessive affection. She had
become so familiarly acquainted with each and all of them in the last
few months; she knew with such a curious, intimate knowledge where they
differed, both from each other and also from other submarine craft, not
only here, in these familiar waters, but in the waters of France's great
rival on the sea.... It ever gave her a thrill of pride to remember that it was France which
first led the way in this, the most dangerous as also the most
adventurous new arm of naval warfare: and she rejoiced as fiercely, as
exultantly as any of her sea-fighting forbears would have done in the
terrible potentialities of destruction which each of these strange,
grotesque-looking craft bore in their narrow flanks. It was now the hour of the crews' midday meal; there were fewer men
standing about than usual; and so, after she had stepped down on the
sandy strip of shore, and climbed the ladder leading to the old
Napoleonic hulk which served as workshop and dwelling-place of the
officers of the flotilla, Madame de Wissant for a few moments stood
solitary, and looked musingly down into the waters of the bay.