The Tigress
by Anne Warner · English · Gutenberg #37236 · 424,128 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Tigress
Author: Anne Warner
Illustrator: R. F. Schabelitz
Release date: August 28, 2011 [eBook #37236]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37236
Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TIGRESS ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
THE TIGRESS
BY ANNE WARNER
AUTHOR OF "_The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary,_"
_The "Susan Clegg" Stories_, etc.
Frontispiece by
R. F. SCHABELITZ
NEW YORK
W. J. WATT & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
W. J. WATT & COMPANY
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
[Illustration: It pleased her to crouch on this, remembering how
Kneedrock had declared her to be the reincarnation of just such another
creature of the jungle.]
CONTENTS
I. ON A MOONLIGHT NIGHT IN SIMLA 7
II. A PSYCHOLOGICAL CONTRETEMPS 18
III. THE COBRA IN THE CORNER 29
IV. A WHITE SLIPPER AND A RED STAIN 38
V. THE QUESTION OF THE DEAD ALIVE 49
VI. A HARD MAN AND BITTER 59
VII. THE CROSS AND THE CROWN 69
VIII. IN A WORLD WITHIN A WORLD 80
IX. THERE'S A LASS IN DUNDEE! 91
X. A PRAYER AND A PROPHECY 102
XI. THINGS ONE SHOULDN'T SAY 113
XII. THE JOY OF INTEREST 123
XIII. SURPRISES FOR THE BROKEN-HEARTED 131
XIV. TRUTHS, KISSES, AND DUCAL ENNUI 140
XV. A LAST WALK AND A LAST APPEAL 149
XVI. WHERE AMOR LED 160
XVII. THE INTERVENTION OF THE UNFORESEEN 171
XVIII. AT CROSS SADDLE 182
XIX. FATE'S FEARFUL INGENUITY 187
XX. FIRES OF ONE KIND AND ANOTHER 191
XXI. AN END TO THE GOSSIP 200
XXII. THE INTERRUPTED HONEYMOON 211
XXIII. A MYSTERIOUS WIDOW OF BATH 222
XXIV. THE DISINTERESTED MARRIED MAN 233
XXV. THE INTERESTED MARRIED MAN 245
XXVI. THREE PERSONS GO THREE WAYS 250
XXVII. REASON TOTTERING ON ITS THRONE 261
XXVIII. INCARNATE OR REINCARNATE 269
XXIX. THE MANTLE OF HEROISM 280
XXX. A LETTER AND A LEGACY 292
XXXI. WHAT THEY KNEW AND THOUGHT 299
THE TIGRESS
CHAPTER I
On a Moonlight Night in Simla
"I do hope you are not going to weep!" said Nina.
She and he sat on a far-sheltered corner of the terrace in the gray
shadow, and she had just told him that "everything was over."
As "everything" had been going on for the best part of three months, it
was, perhaps, only natural that she should experience some concern as to
how he meant to take it.
He was slow to reassure her, and she was impatient. "Because," she
explained, "I never know just what to say or do when they weep. I'm
never at a loss at other times; but--"
"Of course I shall not weep," he protested at length, with something of
indignation in his tone. "Whatever gave you such an idea?"
"It isn't unusual," she explained. "Sometimes they storm. I've known
them to swear most awfully. But when they are young, as you are, they so
often just melt; and it is very trying, you know. Perhaps you'll swear.
I'd much rather have it so. There was Emborough, for instance. He--"
"If you don't mind," he cut in, "I'd prefer not to hear."
"Ah, I see!" she exclaimed quickly. "You are neither going to weep nor
storm. You are going to be just plain disagreeable. And if there is
anything I hate it is a man who mopes."
He was thinking very hard, and for the moment he had failed to follow
her. Disaster had dropped upon him like a bolt from the blue at the
moment of his greatest confidence.
It was at Simla where, Kipling says, "all things begin and many come to
an evil end;" and something, it seemed, had come to an end--evil or
otherwise--as well as the season and the last of the dances at Viceregal
Lodge.
Ten minutes ago he had been so convinced that the end was to be
"otherwise" that even now he couldn't believe it was to be evil.
"Why," he managed to say after a brief pause, "I don't understand you at
all. I--"
"No one ever has understood me," she assured him. "Even when I've gone
to the trouble of explaining they manage somehow to get the explanation
all upside down. It's very tiresome--very."
"I really thought you loved me! You--"
"They all think I love them. That's the odd part of it. I'm sure I never
told any one. And yet they are so conceited--Oh, why can't you men
appreciate being petted and amused, without imagining that it must be
inspired by adoration and coupled with a desire for life-long
attachment?"
"You promised to bolt with me," he asserted boldly.
Nina's chair jumped back three inches, impelled by the reflexes of a
slim but sturdy pair of long legs. Hers, not the chair's.
"I abominate a liar!" she announced firmly.
"So do I," he came back. "You did promise me. It was during that last
waltz."
"I am never responsible for what I say when waltzing."
"You admit it, then?"
"I admit nothing. I neither confirm nor deny. I don't know."
"But we came out here to arrange it. Or don't you remember that,
either?"
"I fancied it was because you wished to smoke."
"God!" he exclaimed suddenly. "How can you be so bitterly cruel!"
She may have been a reincarnated tigress--in after years there was a man
who always declared so--and then again she may not. It is quite possible
that circumstance and environment made her what she was.
Certainly at heart Nina Darling was not a bad woman. There were times
when she tried very hard to be a very good woman according to her
lights. And yet, somehow, somewhere within her she seemed to possess a
faculty for making men wretched.
The world--or a very large part of it--regarded it as an insatiable
craving, an unappeasable appetite--a sort of lust for personal
aggrandizement, growing out of personal vanity. But then the world knew
nothing of Nina Darling's secret--which made all the difference.
For right judgment a few facts will not serve. Unless we have them all
we are likely to fall into error. To argue from effect back to cause is
a very risky undertaking. And that was what most people did in Nina
Darling's case.
Young Gerald Andrews, of the civil service, the most recent victim, whom
she had had in leading strings ever since he came to Simla, fancied her
from the very first the most beautiful creature he had ever seen.
Now, stung by the lash of her scorn, the sheer fact of her
unattainableness seemed to redouble her charm.
There was something wraithlike about her. She appeared to hold kinship
with the moonlight, which in its loveliness overspread lawns and
flowerbeds near at hand and turned to opal the mists that hung and
swayed over the valley beneath them, where the lovely Annandale roses
were blowing.
Until now he had always thought that her big eyes were violet-blue. But
suddenly he saw opal lights in them and opal flame. And her gown was not
white and silver, as he had fancied, but spun of moonbeams and studded
with opals.
Her long, sinuous figure, more revealed than hidden by its gauzy
investure, suggested to him Lilith, and the medieval conception of an
angel as well.
He hardly expected an answer to the exclamatory question wrung from him
by the torture of her words, but she had it ready.
"Because I eminently prefer my matrimonial frying-pan to the blistering
coals of the illicit," she said coolly.
The boy--for he was scarcely more, big and handsome and strong though he
appeared--looked terribly wobegone. But on the comparison floated a
straw, and like the proverbial drowning man, he clutched at it.
"You admit it's a frying-pan," he reminded her.
"Sizzling hot," she told him. "I'm scorched through and through. My
heart's a cinder."
The straw went under, carrying him with it, but he still clung on. "Let
me take you out of it," he pleaded desperately.
But her shapely shoulders rose in a discouraging shrug.
"Into the fire?" she asked calmly.
"Into Elysium."
She laughed at that. "Worse," she said with a touch of cynicism. "The
home of the blessed dead! I'm not blessed and I'm not dead--and I don't
want to be!"
"You know I didn't mean that," he objected.
"The only other Elysium I know is Elysium Hill, with its doleful
deodars. A most distressing--"
Young Andrews interrupted her by springing up. "Oh, don't be so
frightfully literal!" he cried, annoyed to a point of misery. "You know
very well what I meant."
"If you're going to be rude--" she began threateningly. And on the
instant he was in his chair again, leaning forward, groping for her bare
hand.
"No, you mustn't!" she warned, drawing both hands out of reach. "You'll
only declare that I encouraged you."
At that he gasped audibly. "Encouraged me!" he exclaimed when he
breathed normally again. "Aren't you a little late with your caution? I
suppose I never have been encouraged."
"There! I knew you'd say it."
"Well, I've held your hands dozens of times, haven't I? More than that,
I've held you in my arms, and I've kissed your lips and your eyes and
your hair. Isn't that encouragement?"
She smiled calmly and whimsically.
"Yes. Encouragement for me. I couldn't resist you."
"Your heart isn't a cinder at all," he growled, frowning. "It's a stone!
How many other men have you treated like this?"
"None," she answered boldly. "I never treat two alike. I have too much
imagination for that. There are always variations."
His voice was very bitter as he said: "You'll meet your match some day.
I hope to God you will!"
"I've met him already," she returned. "He's the only man I care a straw
about."
"Your husband?" he hazarded.
"Good Heavens! No! Poor Darling! He doesn't deserve the life I lead him.
I'm charitable enough to wish him a better fate."
"What happened to your match then?"
"Now you are asking riddles," she said. "That question has never been
satisfactorily answered."
"You mean you don't wish to tell me, I suppose."
"I'd give anything in the world if I could. He was reported dead eight
years ago, but--"
"He isn't?"
"He wasn't then."
"How do you know?"
"He was heard from after."
"Then he's alive still--you know that much?"
"No," she replied languorously. "I don't know that much. He may have
died since, don't you see?"
"Let me find out for you," he proposed abruptly. "I'll--"
"You're very kind, but you'd have your trouble for your pains. He
doesn't want to be found, wherever he is, dead or alive, and I'll back
him against the world when it comes to having his own way."
She shivered slightly and drew the filmy scarf closer over her bare
shoulders. "Besides," she added, "when the message was sent he was
starting for 'the world's end,' and 'the world's end' is a big place to
find a man. The needle and the hayrick are child's play to it."
"I'm terribly interested," said young Andrews. "I am really. I didn't
believe you'd admit any chap was your match. Do you mind telling me what
he was like?"
"He was more than my match," she confessed. "He was something else, and
that is why no other man ever will be able to please me after his
newness has worn off."
"As mine has?"
"As yours has."
"Gad! But you're frank, Nina."
"I know it. It's my one admirable quality. I'm tired of you, Gerald. I
always get tired in the same place."
"The same place?" he repeated, puzzled.
"When they're not satisfied with a day and want to make it forever. The
mere thought of forever wearies me. I feel like killing a man when he so
much as hints at it."
"You haven't killed your husband," he reminded her.
"Ah, but how I have been tempted!" she laughed. "Some day I may."
"I know something of what a beast Darling is," he ventured. "I've heard
it at the club. They say--"
"Don't!" she begged. "I won't listen. It may all be true, but I'd rather
not hear it. I'm sorry for him. I'd only kill him to put him out of his
misery--to put us both out of our misery."
"Of course you don't mean that. You shouldn't say it."
She didn't contradict him, and for a little there was silence between
them. His thoughts reverted to the man who was her match--and more.
"And the other man?" he queried. "You said he was something else. What
else?"
"My mate," she said simply. And again the silence fell.
Presently her laugh rang out, clear and bell-like, startling her
companion from gloomy reverie. It jarred awfully. It was like dance
music at a funeral.
"I can fancy what else you've heard at the club," she began, the opal
lights in her eyes suddenly blazing. "They say I'm an angel, don't
they?"
"They wouldn't dare say anything else in my presence."
"To be sure"--bitterly--"that's condemnation enough in itself. Before
you they pronounced me a good and virtuous wife, I suppose. And behind
your back--Good Heavens, what must they not say behind your back!"
"You _are_ good and virtuous," he defended with boyish loyalty.
"Of course I am," she agreed. "I've driven one man to drink by marrying
him, and more than I can count by not. I'm an angel, truly. But it's so
hard to tell just what to do. I am my brother's keeper, and yet I go
through life adding each year to the army of the besotted."
It was not at all the trend that young Andrews had foreseen in bringing
Nina Darling to this shadowy corner of the terrace. Every fresh lead
made the situation more uncomfortable. He had been brimming over with
passion and sentiment, and here they had strayed away into a field rife
with some of life's hardest facts.
"Promise me," she begged, "that you won't desert the civil service for
the army--this army, my army!"
"God knows what I shall do, Nina!" he flung back desperately. "I banked
everything on you. I didn't think you'd fail me."
"I've failed every one that ever came into my life," was her candid
rejoinder. "Every time I crave and take a little passing pleasure some
one suffers, and I haven't a drop of vicious blood in my veins. I
believe I was cursed in my cradle."
He started to protest, but she shook her golden head dispiritedly. The
blues--rare visitors--had settled down upon her.
"If I had only met you first!" he cried. "If you had married me I would
have saved you."
"Don't!" she supplicated. "Please, please don't! I hate the
word--marriage. Who was it said: 'Love is a souffle that marriage
changes to a bread-and-butter pudding?' I've seen it borne out scores of
times. Soggy, indigestible stuff, without spice or flavor."
The melody of the dance music which all along had seeped to them in
harmonic murmur from the distant ballroom was now hushed.
In the distance, at the opposite end of the terrace, figures--single and
grouped--moved in silhouette across the glare from the lighted windows.
Along the garden paths there passed at intervals sentinel Ghurkas from
the viceroy's guard of honor.
Young Andrews's thoughts were long, long thoughts. He was sorry for the
woman, but he was still more sorry for himself. He had turned a little
away from her. His head was bowed, and his gaze was lowered to the
pavement at his feet.
Nina had risen before he was conscious of her movement. Then belatedly
he sprang up.
"It is late," she said. "The Ramsays are probably looking everywhere for
me. I mustn't keep them waiting."
But he scarcely heeded. He stepped very close to her and gripped her by
either arm.
"Tell me," he begged, low-voiced, earnest, "is there nothing in your
heart for me?"
"Oh, yes!" she answered quite casually. "Sympathy--oh, ever so much
sympathy!"
"And there can never be anything else?"
"There never can be anything else--except--"
She paused, and his hopes fluttered.
"Except--" he repeated.
"Gratitude. I am grateful. I was so afraid you were going to weep. And
you didn't."
CHAPTER II
A Psychological Contretemps
Young Andrews was a sensitive soul, but he was not unmanly. He fought
off the tears as long as he was conscious, but his pillow was wet in the
morning.
His station was "on the Bombay side," as they say in India. To be exact,
it was at Junnar. And he started down the next day, after sending Nina a
bouquet of Annandale's loveliest roses. But when he alighted from the
little branch railway line at Umballa, he halted.
The cantonment here was the home of the Darlings. But it was also the
home of Dinghal, a deputy commissioner, who was a friend of young
Andrews. So young Andrews lingered, and the deputy commissioner made him
welcome.
Hitherto he had regarded Dinghal as rather a bore. And in this he was
thoroughly justified. But since his two months at Simla the deputy
commissioner had acquired for him a distinct interest.
Dinghal knew the Darlings intimately, and his passion for gathering and
disseminating minor gossip, which had once been a fault, became now, in
the changed tastes of his visitor, an enviable virtue, especially as the
visitor found it the easiest thing in the world to direct the flow into
the one desired channel.
As a rule there was nothing vicious about Dinghal's gossip. It was so
pitifully tame and pointless that it wearied the listener to extinction;
for Dinghal was a kindly man, inclined to gloss over faults and failings
and to "play up" the good points of even the most unworthy.
This was another reason why young Andrews was so vastly entertained by
all the little talks they had about Colonel and Mrs. Darling. He had
heard enough of the other sort of thing in the club at Simla, and had
relished it then, in that Nina's husband was the chief victim, and at
that time his sympathies were all with Nina.
What he craved most now was unbiased truth. Which is sometimes a
panacea--and sometimes not.
"They're not happy, to be sure," Dinghal admitted with evident
reluctance. "But I don't know that either is to blame. Just a case of
mutual inadaptability that neither discovered until it was too late. I
knew Darling long before he married her, and I know people who knew
little Nina Calthrop when she was crowing in swaddling clothes.
"There's not a better family in England. Good people all of them. The
men have rather run to the army. You know how that goes in families.
She's a grand-daughter of old General Buddicomb, who distinguished
himself in Egypt in 1882.
"The general's sister, Nina's great-aunt, married the Duke of
Pemberwell. Fine people, I tell you. Then there was Kneedrock; a husky
young giant--viscount, you know--son of the Earl of Dumphreys, who went
to South Africa and never came back."
"Never came back?" echoed young Andrews questioningly.
"Reported killed at Spion Kop, I think it was. Body never brought home,
though. May have been Bloemfontein, I'm not sure. At any rate, they say
he was Nina's favorite cousin. She certainly took his loss very keenly.
"After her first wild grief she developed a mania for particulars. When
peace was arranged and the rank and file were coming home by the
shipload she lost no chance of getting every fact she could from every
officer she met.
"At the Pemberwell seat--Puddleford--she encountered Colonel Darling. It
was he, they say, who identified poor Kneedrock's remains, what there
was of them, and, of course, he held for her at that vital moment more
interest than any other man, woman, or child in the United Kingdom.
"She annexed him--body, soul, and breeches, as the saying is. And it
wasn't Darling's fault that he was flattered and fascinated, for Nina
was then barely twenty, and the rarest, flowerlike slip of a girl you
can imagine.
"You know what she is now. Beautiful, you think, eh? Everybody agrees
that Nina is beautiful; and she is. But five years in India, and--well,
let us say, the life of the mismated--haven't failed to rub some of the
bloom off the peach."
Mixed metaphors had no terrors for Dinghal, who evidently inherited from
somewhere a strain of Irish blood, despite his name, and treated "bulls"
as if they were pets.
"Was this fellow, Kneedrock, ever heard of afterward?" his listener
questioned. "Reported alive, I mean. It seems to me--"
"Oh, yes," Dinghal answered. "Every now and then a story crops up from
somewhere that he's been seen. But nobody believes it. If he's alive
there's no reason why he shouldn't go home, is there? The whole thing is
ridiculous on its face. Besides Darling saw him. Says he was practically
shot to pieces."
"I thought I'd heard it," returned young Andrews casually. And to
himself he said: "Kneedrock is the man she meant. Her cousin, her match,
and her mate--all in one."
"Yes," Dinghal went on, calmly filling his pipe, "Nina Calthrop was
something to covet; and, naturally enough, Darling coveted her.
"Then, on her side, there was gratitude, for the colonel had given her a
world of the sort of detail she wanted. She had cross-examined him like
a K. C., and he had answered fully and freely out of the overflowing
storehouse of his experience.
"If they could have gone on talking forever about that battle--I believe
now it was Spion Kop--they might have been happy yet. But in time she
pumped the cistern dry. There wasn't a crumb of fact or conjecture left
in Darling's larder that hadn't been rolled over and over and stripped
to its bare bones."
Young Andrews nearly howled. The mixture of figures was really superb.
"I fancy the pumping was pretty well finished before the wedding," the
recital continued; "but I'm not stating that as a fact. You see that was
quite six months after their meeting, and two years or more after
Kneedrock's taking off. And in that six months they had seen each other,
not continuously, but at intervals, for Darling was a very busy man.
"Their honeymoon, such as it was, was spent on a P. & O. steamer. I have
been told that they each discovered their wretched mistake before they
got to the Gulf of Aden. Take it for what it's worth.
"Conditions weren't all they might have been when they reached Umballa.
That is certain. Darling did his best to hide the rift in the lute; but
Nina never seemed to care a hang what people thought or said.
"Mind you, I'm not blaming her. I like the frankness of it. Not that she
complained or whimpered. Not she. But she just went wild. Flirted like
the very devil with anything and everything that came along.
"That was five years ago, mind you; and she hasn't mended her ways
since. There are some who say she is possessed of the seven devils that
the Lord cast out of Mary of Magdala, but--"
"It's a lie!" broke in young Andrews furiously. "She's--"
"Of course," Dinghal came back heartily. "I know that. She's not a bad
woman. But I've heard her painted blacker than the Black Knight of the
Black Lands.
"There is no question that more than one young fellow has gone straight
to perdition because of her--and some old fellows, too, for that matter.
But they were weaker sisters, who hadn't wit enough to save their skins
from Hades."
His listener writhed. The deputy commissioner's rhetoric was certainly
most trying.
"I don't suppose," he pursued, "that in the history of the world there
has ever been a married pair more lied about than the Darlings. Nothing
has been too bad for the victims of her charms to say about her; and for
years the gossips from here to Singapore have been telling wild tales of
the colonel's cruelty, wreaked in vengeance on his wayward _mem-sahib_.
"They've had her drawn and quartered, cut, bruised, and dislocated. To
believe the hundredth part of these stories she must, long ere this, if
she managed to survive, have been resolved into a more helpless,
unsightly cripple than the most distorted _Sadhu_ that makes hideous the
twice-yearly festivals at Tirupankundram. Yet I know there's not a
scintilla of truth in any one of them."
"I heard something of that sort at Simla," said Andrews, frowning.
"You can hear it anywhere. Whenever conversation flags in Anglo-India
some ass or knave will introduce the Darlings, and rehearse the latest
invention of the prolific and never-failing scandal-makers."
"But he's cruel to her, isn't he?"
"He's only cruel to himself," answered Dinghal. "He's killing his body
and soul with strong drink, and he's risking his temporal and eternal
future as an officer in his majesty's service and as a Christian
gentleman.
"I give you my word, Andrews, he's never spoken a harsh word to her nor
laid a heavy hand on her fair person. And yet he suffers the torments of
the damned because of her. It's a very painful situation."
Andrews said he didn't pretend to understand the thing, and would like
to have the key.
Dinghal hesitated a moment. Then he looked very impressive, and when he
spoke it was with lowered voice.
"I can give you the key in three words," he said.
He paused again, and Andrews waited.
"It is this," Dinghal divulged gravely: "He loves her."
The young man from the Bombay side was thoughtfully silent for a space.
Then, as the revelation sank in, he murmured, half to himself and out of
the abundance of his own recent experience:
"God pity him!"
"That's what I say," agreed Dinghal.
At the time of this conversation Andrews had not seen Darling. He met
him a night or two later at the Umballa Club, and a strange emotional
mix-up resulted. The young man's sentimental side was oddly stirred.
Darling appealed not only to his sympathy, but to his admiration.
It was true that he had been prepared for something of this kind by
Dinghal; but he never suspected that he could entertain more than a sort
of passive pity for Nina's husband. He had an innate dislike for weak
men, physically and morally.
In that respect--and in that only--Andrews was to a degree feminine.
Strength appealed to him as it appeals to women. And the fact that
Darling had given way to a dulling, deadening indulgence in alcoholic
excesses argued for a sort of moral cowardice.
But when he met the colonel he was surprised. It may have been that he
pictured him in advance as habitually maudlin, or sodden or morose.
Certainly he was no one of these. He had the look of a hard drinker, it
was true; but he carried his liquor well. More than that, he gave the
unmistakable impression of inherent strength and courage.
Darling was not a large man. He appeared to measure barely five feet
nine, and his weight could not have exceeded ten stone--apparently all
bone and sinew, with no sign of bloating.
Sandy-haired, pale blue of eye, his firm chin a trifle long, he was not
ill-looking. But his age must have doubled Nina's on their wedding day.
Before he and Andrews had chatted for five minutes a mutual liking was
established. They were both passionately fond of sport, and the fact
developed and was exchanged in that brief period of intercourse.
"If you've nothing better to do to-morrow," Darling suggested, "I'd be
glad to show you some of my trophies. What do you say to tiffin with me?
My wife is still in the hills, and we can talk big game without fear of
boring the other sex. Shall I expect you?"
Andrews knew that he should say he had met Mrs. Darling at Simla, but he
was so eager to answer "yes" that the opportunity got away from him at
the moment; and as it didn't again present itself, his failure to make
the truth clear was a harassing worry from that time on.
Moreover, though he could not repent, he reproached and upbraided
himself for having fallen in love with Nina. All that he had learned
since arriving at Umballa appeared only to add to her desirability.
Absence had indeed, in this instance, made the heart grow fonder.
That he had broken his journey here, not so much for the sake of
pumping Dinghal as for the chance of getting one more look at
her--possibly one more word with her--he had candidly to admit to his
better self. But he wished with all his heart that she was maid or
widow, or--if there must be a husband, that he was some other--almost
any other than Darling. He would have felt less a brute had it even been
Dinghal.
It was a psychological contretemps of the rarest sort, and distinctly
uncomfortable. He had found the colonel as infatuating in his way as his
wife was in hers, and, naturally, there were no means by which he could
reconcile the liking and the loving.
Even when he appeared at the Darling bungalow, the next day, the thing
got him by the throat, as it were, at every turn. For the trophies of
the sportsman and the all-too-feminine evidences of the chatelaine
clashed side by side; every clash echoing in young Andrews's soul.
Again and again he found his attention straying, for instance, from an
especially fine tiger-skin or the mounted head of a curiously horned
markhor to a dainty writing-desk that he knew at a glance must be
Nina's, or to a framed photograph of a group on an English lawn, in
which, instinctively, he detected Nina in the tall, girlish figure in
the white frock.
Indeed, the drawing-room seemed to be all Nina. He saw her
everywhere--in every chair, on every window-seat, and on every couch.
The dining-room was more divided; but the gun-room, of course, was all
Darling.
They lingered there the greater part of the afternoon. Every rifle,
every fowling-piece had its story, and there were many of them; for
Darling boasted a veritable armory.
It was here, too, that Andrews got some comprehension of the extent of
the officer's unbridled indulgence. He drank and smoked practically
continuously. One peg followed another with but the briefest
intermissions; and the civil-service man made no attempt to keep pace
with him.
If any effect was observable it was merely in a readier flow of
narrative, in a more extended and richer vocabulary. But, strangely
enough, from first to last, there was no mention of Mrs. Darling. And
his visitor, taking this in the nature of a warning, knowing what he
did, deemed it not only wiser but safer, now, to guard the fact of his
acquaintanceship.
In his closer study of Darling he had made a discovery which accounted,
he believed, in a measure, at least, for his strange appeal. Even in his
gayest moments there was a certain pathos in his expression.
Andrews had noted this the previous evening at the club, but had failed
to trace it. He found it now in a very perceptible droop, at intervals,
of the corners of his mouth. And it was as though he knew this and
struggled to avoid it which gave the impression of bearing up against
odds that were too great for him.
The afternoon was well spent before Darling would listen to his guest's
going. They were still in the gun-room when, at length, he rose for
departure. And then the colonel delayed it further by a proposal that he
consider joining Major Cumnock and himself on a hunting trip they were
planning.
"I'd love to, of all things," Andrews returned heartily. "But the fact
is my leave ends in another week, and I've got to report at Junnar by
the twenty-fifth. Otherwise, I shouldn't hesitate a second. I--"
And there he suddenly paused.
It was something in Darling's expression that arrested him first;
something that he couldn't just interpret. Afterward he told himself
that it was a most singular combination of rapture and pain.
Then he, too, caught the echo of voices--women's voices--and, the next
instant, one woman's voice rose clear above the chorus. It was Nina's.
CHAPTER III
The Cobra in the Corner
"My wife!" said Colonel Darling. And the way he said it was almost
reverential.
The tone struck young Andrews dumb. His chance had come again. He should
have said: "Yes? I had the pleasure of meeting her at Simla." But he
said nothing at all.
In dead silence he followed his host to the front veranda, where he came
plump upon Nina Darling and the Ramsays. That is to say, upon Mrs.
Ramsay, who was an American devotee of Kipling on a pilgrimage to the
shrines, and her daughter, Jane.
Mr. Ramsay, busy in Chicago or Milwaukee, or some other place in the
States, was not in evidence, and had not been.
It was clear to Andrews that Colonel Darling was about to greet his wife
with a kiss; but she forestalled it. She nodded to him perfunctorily;
said: "Oh, there you are, Jack!" in the most matter-of-fact fashion; and
turned away to stoop and caress the Irish terrier that was frantically
pawing at her skirt.
A lump rose in Andrews's throat at sight of the rebuff. His hope was
that the Ramsays hadn't noticed, for their eyes were on him at the
moment, and their surprise at seeing him there was manifest.
Darling made to cover up the awkward moment by presenting him all
around. Nina, whose astonishment at the meeting must have exceeded even
that of her friends, took refuge in the chilliest civility.
From nothing that she said could her husband possibly gather that she
and Andrews had so much as ever touched fingers before. And the Ramsays
were quick to follow her lead.
Nevertheless, the situation was far from comfortable, and the young man
got away at the very earliest opportunity.
Before he had reached the gate of the compound, however, the voice of
the colonel caught him up.
"I say, Andrews," he called, "don't forget to bring over that new
automatic pistol you were speaking of. I should like to have a look at
it if you don't mind."
And this eleventh-hour reminder gave him the excuse which later, in his
superconscientiousness, he deemed a necessity. More than ever now honor
and duty bade him flee; but a more insistent impulse urged another and
final talk with Nina.
For forty-eight hours he fought it, only to yield at the forty-ninth.
Having made sure that Darling was safely housed at the club, he rode
over to the bungalow with the excuse spoiling the set of his coat.
Nina saw it almost at once and spoke of it. For, the devil being good to
him, he had found her at home and alone.
"I knew your nose was out of joint," she said, "but what under the sun
has happened to your hip?"
"Oh, yes," he replied, taking the excuse from his hip-pocket and
placing it on a table close at hand. "I brought it over for the colonel.
He's rather keen about the new safety device and wanted to see it." And
he looked a trifle sheepish as he asked: "Does he happen by any chance
to be at home?"
"You may thank Heaven he isn't," she answered with a light laugh. "I'm
never at my best when he is within hailing distance. And you didn't come
to see him. I know that."
Then he looked more sheepish still.
"I dare say you've learned his habits in the last week, and you could
have found him at the club, you know," she added.
His laugh was rather mirthless as he said:
"Of course. What's the use of pretending? I saw him go in before I
started."
"Then you've forgiven me, I suppose. That is sweet of you."
"It's harder to forgive myself. I feel like a cur."
"I've known some very nice curs."
"But I don't feel like that sort," he insisted. "No, it's the sneaking,
thieving mongrel that I--" He broke off suddenly.
She had sat down and he dropped into a chair facing her.
"I'll tell you," he went on. "I've been persuading myself that I owed
you an explanation of my continued presence in Umballa and the narrowly
averted embarrassment of two days ago. I've been trying to make myself
believe that in that and that only lay my reason for wishing to see you
again."
"And there was another reason?"
"There was another reason," he admitted. "I wasn't honest with myself.
Gad! When a chap isn't honest with himself--"
"All men are like that," she told him. "The higher their ideals the less
frankly honest they are with themselves. They just won't admit the old
Adam in them."
"I haven't any will," he declared. "I haven't any pride."
She lay back in her chair, pleasantly amused.
"Of course you haven't," she said confidently. "I've taken them from
you. It was very wicked of me, wasn't it?"
"Do you do that to--to all of us?" he asked seriously.
"I'm afraid I do," she admitted. "But quite unconsciously. I don't mean
to. Oh, I never mean to."
"I've been trying to put you out of my mind, out of my heart. I've been
trying to kill my infatuation for you; but I haven't even stunned it.
When I thought I had my foot on its neck it went on binding me with
stronger chains."
And at that she laughed aloud.
"You're too funny," she said. "When did you think you had the horrid
thing down?"
"When I met your husband--and--and liked him."
"You did like him, then?"
"Very much indeed."
"What an odd taste! Those pale eyes of his have an uncanny effect on me.
It's something that goes through walls and floors; and it makes me quite
vicious. It brings out all the cat in me. I have an irresistible desire
to claw and rend."
"It must have followed you all the way to Simla, that last night," said
Andrews, dropping into a chair that faced her.
But Nina shook her golden head and her violet eyes slowly narrowed. He
observed that in the dusk, for the room was in the semi-gloom of a
single, red-shaded lamp in a far corner.
"No"--her voice was very low and purring--"I wasn't in the least catty
then. I was sorry for you. I was, really; but it couldn't go on. You can
see now that it couldn't go on."
"It might have gone on," he qualified, "if I hadn't met Colonel
Darling."
"You seem to forget that I had met him already--am married to him."
"Yes," he said; "but with you it's different. You joy in hurting him;
whereas I--why, I'd never have a moment's peace if I did anything that
would give him pain. I know I shouldn't."
She pretended to be surprised; though, for some reason, she was not in
the least.
"You're an odd boy," she drawled. "You mean that if I were to tell you
now that I had changed my mind, and was quite ready to go away with you,
you'd beg to be excused?"
He didn't answer at once. Candor bulked large in his character. Now that
she put it that way he wished to be very sure. It was not a matter to be
decided offhand, with Darling absent and Nina there before him,
temptingly precious in the magic witchery of the tinted half-light.
"No, I--I couldn't. I couldn't do him that injury," he declared at
length.
"And you swore you loved me?"
"I did. I do. I swear it still," he cried with sudden vehemence.
Nina laughed at his protestation.
"'Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more,'" she quoted.
"Is that it?"
"No, that isn't it," he denied earnestly. "I--"
"You love me a great deal, but you are so fond of Darling that you would
not pain him to make us both happy," she interrupted. And the sneer with
which she did it cut him to the quick.
"I don't think you've any right to put it that way," he returned.
"I am putting it your way, really," she came back. "It is as plain as
the nose on your face. You made the choice between us, and you took a
minute or so to make it. You didn't answer on impulse; you answered
after calm deliberation. I really don't see, Gerald, how you can argue
it otherwise."
"But it wouldn't make _you_ happy," he caught her up. "You've said it
wouldn't."
"Did I?" she asked indifferently. "I don't remember."
"You said it would make you miserable; that you'd never care a straw in
your life except for one man. You said that you'd married a man you did
not love, and that--"
She lifted a slim white hand as if to ward off a blow.
"Don't! Don't!" she cried. "No matter what I said. That was then, and
this is now. Besides, I don't always tell the truth. I am not as
deliberate as you are, you see. Sometimes I say things on impulse;
sometimes I lie with a direct purpose. And then, that night, I was not
quite myself, you know. I had had a silly dream and I allowed it to
affect me."
He drew his chair nearer and bent forward. He was by no means so sure of
himself as he had been a moment before. It was wonderful--those tones in
Nina's voice. They swayed his feelings against his better impulses. Her
voice had always been her most effective weapon. Even her beauty was
secondary to it.
He was conscious that his heart was pounding. It seemed to rise up
chokingly with every bound. And so he stammered:
"You--you mean--you--would reconsider?"
"Ah!" she murmured. "I don't know what I mean. Only--"
"Yes, yes," he hurried her. "Only--only--"
She turned her head aside and covered her face with the hand that had
checked his arraignment.
"I am so wretched!" It was little more than a whisper.
"No, no," he pleaded. "Nina, I beg of you."
His emotion swept him away, overriding all law, vaulting honor,
trampling scruples. The possibility of possession revived, and the
pathetic figure of Darling was forgotten.
He reached out for her, clasped her in his long, hungry arms; and,
yielding, she let him draw her close to him, her head nestling against
his shoulder.
"There, there," he murmured, smoothing her cheek with a hand nearly as
soft as a woman's. "I did not mean it--I swear I didn't mean it. I--I
love you more than anything in life."
Her arms wound about his neck, and he drew her up again until her gaze
was level with his own. But, even at that moment, he saw her eyes stray
across her shoulder and then suddenly grow wide as with alarm.
He felt, too, her whole figure tense, and instinctively there was
conveyed to him a contagious sense of lurking danger. He was about to
speak, to question, when, between lips barely parted, breathed rather
than whispered even, came:
"_A cobra--in the corner--where I'm looking! The pistol--quick--and
don't miss!_"
The pistol lay at his left hand, and he must needs swing quite around to
aim after getting it. But she slipped swiftly away from him to give him
free play, and he managed it very well indeed.
In the dim light he marked the cobra instantly, for a ray had been
caught by its glistening brown, upreared body, and its spread hood stood
out fairly distinct against the glazed panes of the long casement which
stood partly ajar.
Andrews fired, and the report echoed sharply against the dead silence of
the room. But there echoed, too, two other sounds, both puzzling and
disconcerting. One was a metallic ring, as of a struck gong, only
sharper and shorter, and the other was a hoarse, but muffled and
evidently restrained, cry of pain.
Man and woman were on their feet instantly. Three strides took Andrews
to the spot, and there he halted in amaze with a little exclamation of
astonishment. For the cobra had toppled over, not limp and outlying, but
stiffly; its coils intact, facing him, disklike.
It was an admirably modeled bronze.
In the perplexity following the discovery he turned questioningly to
Nina, who was close behind him. But she only lifted a warning finger and
made a sibilant sound with her lips, adjuring silence. And he noticed,
strangely enough, that the look of alarm which he had detected was--in a
lesser degree perhaps--still present.
She passed him, stepping over the bronze reptile; and, spreading wider
the casement, went out onto the veranda.
In the act of following, the fact of the muffled cry recurred to him.
Was it possible that the bullet, ricochetting from the metal casting,
had found a mark beyond the window?
With one foot across the sill a scream seemed to stop his heart from
beating. Certainly it held him motionless for a second or more. Yet he
recovered himself in time--just in time--to catch Nina in his arms as
she staggered backward, stunned and half-fainting. Nor was it any wonder
that she screamed and was stunned and half-fainted.
For fate chose that moment for making her "silly dream" come true. She
had seen a ghost on the veranda.
CHAPTER IV
A White Slipper and a Red Stain
The native servants, startled by the pistol-shot, flocked in haste to
the veranda. In the lead was Jowar, the Darlings' _khitmatgar_, whom
Nina hated. And he saw her in Andrews's arms.
It was only for an instant, however. The presence of Jowar revived her
like a cold shower, and she stood on her own feet with her chin in the
air.
"I saw a man running," she explained. "It must have been he that shot
through the window. Oh, how frightened I was!"
The _khitmatgar_ inquired as to which way the miscreant had run, and
Nina pointed in exactly the opposite direction from that in which she
had been facing when she staggered back into young Andrews's embrace.
Jowar set off in pursuit instantly, and the others followed. All, that
is, save Nina's _ayah_, who opportunely produced a bottle of
smelling-salts and passed it to the _mem-sahib_.
Sniffing at it, Mrs. Darling dismissed her.
When Nina and Andrews were back in the drawing-room and again quite
alone he saw that she was still trembling. Moreover, in spite of the
ruddy glow from the single lamp in the corner, she was as pallid as
ashes.
"Dearest," he murmured, hastily encircling her slim waist with a
supporting arm, "you are wonderful! Any other woman would be in
hysterics."
Very gently she extricated herself from his embrace.
"I haven't lived five years in India for nothing," she said.
"But what was it?" he asked. "Why did you want me to shoot? Why--"
"I fancied that devilish _khitmatgar_ was spying again," she hastened to
answer, slipping into a chair. "I saw something move--out there."
"And so you made me shoot at the bronze?"
"It's a very realistic bronze, isn't it?" she asked.
But he didn't answer. "Was it the _khitmatgar_?" he pressed.
And now she didn't answer.
"The bronze was a present," she went on instead. "Do you mind setting it
upright again?"
He did so. "Odd I never saw it before," was his comment. "I thought I'd
seen everything in this room. When I was here two days ago it seemed to
me that every object spoke of you. I missed nothing. And yet--"
"That came this morning," she told him. "A gift without a card."
Young Andrews frowned.
"It's a horrid thing," he said. "I don't like it."
"It's beautiful!"
"It's ill-omened. I feel it is."
He saw her shiver again, but she tried to smile. Her pallor had grown no
less.
"Tell me," he insisted, "_was_ it the _khitmatgar_, do you think?"
"Who else could it have been? He will tell Jack Darling he saw me in
your arms. And then--Hadn't you better be going? Aren't you overdue in
Junnar?"
"And leave you? Never!"
"But you must," she said calmly.
"When I go you go with me. Now that I know you love me--"
"I never said I loved you. I don't. I can't. I love but one man. I know
it now as never before. For just a moment I thought--" And there she
stopped.
"You thought?" he questioned, suddenly agitated.
"I thought I might forget. I thought perhaps you could make me forget. I
was, you see, so utterly weary of everything."
"You were right," he cried earnestly. "I can make you forget. I'll give
my whole life to it. I'll--"
He bent over her, but she drew away quickly with a gesture of repulsion,
which Andrews was quick to note. It cut him cruelly, and he stepped
back, pained and crestfallen.
In the instant of silence that ensued he swept her with a devouring gaze
from head to foot. Was he to lose her again--now, when for a second time
he had been so sure?
One dainty, white-shod foot was stretched out from beneath her skirt,
and as his eyes reached it a dark, smearlike stain across the toe
arrested his attention and awoke a question. Impulsively he dropped to
one knee and swept a finger across it.
"Nina!" he cried, springing up again, a note of alarm in his voice.
"Look! There is blood on your slipper. It couldn't have been the
_khitmatgar_. The bullet ricochetted and wounded some one. Who was it?"
She leaned forward, her heart pounding with sudden horror, and saw it
for herself.
"But how--" she queried, her breath short and quick.
"From the shrubbery at the side of the veranda. Your foot must have
touched the leaves. If it had been the _khitmatgar_ who was bleeding
like that he couldn't have hidden it."
She was up in an instant, crying: "What have I done? Oh, what have I
done?"
"Between us," said Andrews, "we've managed to wing some prowling beggar
of a native, I fancy. That's all." He said it in an effort to pacify
her, but he knew in his heart that it was no native.
He had known from the first that Nina's scream, emotion, and pallor were
results of the unexpected. Now he was more certain than ever that he was
right.
For quite a minute she paced the floor, wringing her hands. Then there
was a rap on the glass of the long window, and the tall, dusky,
white-clad Jowar stepped into the room. His expression was unusually
grave.
"The _mem-sahib_ is mistaken," he said. "The fleeing _sahib_ goes the
other way. He is wounded. We follow the _sahib_ until we see him enter
the compound of the hotel. All the way the _sahib_ leave trail of blood
behind."
Nina had halted, her hand clutching a curtain as if to stay herself. At
the words of the _khitmatgar_ she swayed, and but for Andrews would have
fallen, for the curtain stuff broke from its rings under her weight.
It was her companion who signed to Jowar that he might go. Then he
supported her to a settee and eased her down upon it.
* * * * *
The cantonment at Umballa, which is four miles from the native town,
boasts several hotels.
In a large upper room in one of these, not far from the bungalow of the
Darlings, a burly, bearded gentleman--who had registered a few hours
before as Henry Scripps, of Bombay--was at that moment impatiently and
in no little pain awaiting the appearance of the English surgeon who
lived nearest.
Around Mr. Scripps's left wrist was an improvised tourniquet, and the
water which filled the basin on the wash-stand was claret-colored.
Mr. Scripps had just succeeded in filling a brier pipe with his right
hand unaided, and was in the act of striking a match when his room door
was swung hurriedly ajar to admit Mayhan, of the Buff Hussars, with his
kit of surgical instruments.
"You've taken the devil's own time it appears to me," growled Mr.
Scripps. "Now you're here, for God's sake, make haste!"
The greeting took the young surgeon somewhat aback.
"Sorry you think so," he returned, leisurely opening his bag and
pretending that the catch had caught by way of retaliation. "As a matter
of fact, I came on the instant."
Scripps rumbled under his breath and emitted a volume of gray smoke.
"Shot in the hand, I understand," Mayhan went on, wrenching the bag open
at length with considerable fuss and feather.
Scripps grunted an affirmative.
"How did it happen?" the surgeon inquired, taking out a probe.
But the wounded man didn't answer. He dropped into a chair under the
light and said: "Come now, make haste."
Mayhan emptied the blood-stained water from the basin, poured some
fresh, and mixed an antiseptic in solution. Then he began cleaning the
wound.
"Rather nasty, that," he commented. "The bullet has dug in here between
the two outer metacarpal bones, and I'm not sure it hasn't shattered the
trapezium."
"Get it out," cried Scripps impatiently, "and talk about it afterward.
I'll grant you know the anatomy of the hand and the name of every bone
in it. That's about the first thing you're taught."
Mayhan gritted his teeth. The man was certainly a boor. Still there was
perhaps provocation in the pain he was suffering. Nevertheless, the
surgeon rather enjoyed the probing. He knew how he was hurting, yet his
victim wouldn't give him the satisfaction of wincing.
He drew it out at last and held it up to the light.
"I know that," he said, inspecting it. "A forty-five of the sort they
use in those new American automatics. Has yours the new safety device?"
Scripps's teeth let go his lip long enough to growl: "No! That was the
devil of it!"
As the young surgeon proceeded with his work of cleansing he continued
to chatter:
"I was hoping it had. I wanted to see it. Colonel Darling was speaking
of it last night at the club. There's a friend of his here--a young
fellow named Andrews, from over on the Bombay side--who has one. He's
promised Darling to show it him."
Scripps was pale from pain, but his grit was indomitable. He choked back
a groan and said:
"Darling? Colonel Darling? I think I know him."
"I dare say."
Scripps relapsed into silence again. The wound still hurt abominably.
"Darling distinguished himself at Spion Kop, you know," Mayhan gave
tribute as he unwound some iodoform gauze. "Fine chap, the colonel."
But his patient only grunted.
"Same man you know?" the other pressed.
Scripps nodded.
"I'll mention you're here."
There was no reply.
"Know him well?" inquired the surgeon guardedly.
Scripps had his lip in his teeth again, and it was bleeding; but he let
it go.
"Better than he knows me, apparently," he said with a grim smile.
"He'll remember your name, I suppose?"
"I'm sure he won't. He won't know who Scripps is from Adam."
Mayhan, mollified now in a measure by the man's fortitude, used the
cocain that he had denied him at first and proceeded with the dressing.
"If you're so keen on telling the colonel, just say you've seen
Nibbetts," the brusk one suggested.
"Nibbetts?"
"Yes. He'll know then."
"I'll remember. I'll probably see him to-night at the club. He may look
you up at once, if you don't mind. Fine fellow, the colonel."
The relief from the cocain was instantaneous, but Scripps's manner
showed no change.
"That's twice you said that," he rumbled. "There are some that don't
agree with you."
"I know," returned Mayhan. "Some never agree with any one. That's where
the word disagreeable comes from."
Scripps made no retort, and the dressing continued in silence. When it
was finished and Mayhan was repacking his kit, he ventured: "Nibbetts,
you said, didn't you?"
The merest movement of the tawny, leonine head gave assent.
"I'll tell him." And then the surgeon took a closer look. Scripps's
bearded chin was on his breast. His face, in spite of its tan, was
deathly white. "By the way," he added, "you'd better have a brandy peg.
You've lost some blood, you know, and--"
"That's my business," the other interrupted roughly. "You're a sawbones,
not a medical man. And a sawbones _sans merci_, at that. Otherwise
you'd have begun with the cocain, instead of ending with it."
Mayhan turned away without another word and made a wry face behind the
savage's back. Two minutes later he was down the stairs and in the hotel
porch, where he was confronted by young Andrews.
"I saw you go in," lied the latter nervously. "And I've been waiting for
you. What happened? I've a reason for asking."
The young surgeon, whose faculty for putting two and two together was as
acute as the next man's, sensed the reason at once.
"He won't die," he answered--"if that's what you want to know."
"Who won't die?" Andrews came back evasively. He had volunteered to get
what information he could for Mrs. Darling, and he was distinctly
uncomfortable under the attitude taken by this man whom he had started
to question.
"The boor upstairs who got in the way of someone's forty-five-caliber
automatic. It wasn't by any chance yours, I suppose?"
The blood rushed to Andrews's face, but in the dim light of the porch it
is probable that Mayhan failed to observe it.
"I don't indulge in indiscriminate pistol practice," he defended weakly.
"I heard a man had been wounded and came in here, and I strolled over to
inquire out of idle curiosity."
"He won't die," said Mayhan again, and prepared to move away.
"But who is he?" asked Andrews, following a step.
"The most insufferable beast I've met in years--name of Scripps."
"Army man?"
"No; civilian. Or uncivilian, rather."
"Badly hurt?"
"Hand torn up a bit. Anything else you'd like to know?"
Andrews hesitated. Then: "Say how it happened?"
Mayhan grinned toward the shadows.
"Oh, yes," he answered wickedly, "of course! Naturally, I asked him."
"Well--"
"You are curious, Andrews, aren't you?"
"Oh, if there's any secret about it--why, I--"
Mayhan laughed irritatingly; so irritatingly that his questioner was
tempted to silence him with his fist.
"No secret at all," the surgeon said, starting off. "It happened--purely
by accident."
Then young Andrews, nettled and thoroughly uncomfortable, hastened back
to Nina with his scant news. The name "Scripps" meant nothing to her.
But Mayhan, meanwhile, dropping into the club, exploded a bombshell. He
found Colonel Darling alone and brooding in his chosen corner, a tall
glass of Scotch and soda at his right hand.
"I say, colonel," he blurted, "just came from a chap who says he knows
you--or did. Name of Nibbetts."
Darling started so violently that his arm struck the table, jarred it,
and sent over the whisky glass, splashing.
For a moment his face flamed and the veins in his neck swelled to the
danger point. He gripped the chair-arms, and his throat emitted an
inarticulate gurgle.
The next minute he relaxed suddenly, pale as paper.
CHAPTER V
The Question of the Dead Alive
Colonel Darling's courage had never been questioned. But physical
courage is one thing and moral courage is another--very much another;
and it was physical courage in which Darling was strong.
It was beyond question that he could face overwhelming odds in the field
without "batting an eye-lash," as the saying goes. He had proved that
time and time again. Yet from unhappy wedlock he had fled like a craven
wolf and sought surcease in the bottle.
This should have spoken his type of weakness for all to hear. But his
fellow officers were deaf to the truth, forbearing to view the situation
from the only right and real standpoint, though the condition was
undeniably plain.
For the tidings brought by Mayhan the colonel was not in the least
prepared. Again moral courage was demanded, and again he exhibited the
white feather. To Mayhan's faith in his commanding officer the
exhibition was an astonishing setback. Darling had been bowled over by a
mere name.
Others, too, had heard and witnessed with much the same amazement. It
was very clear to them all that Colonel Darling had been thrown into a
white funk by the mere mention of the odd word "Nibbetts."
They could get it from no other angle, and they could reconcile it with
nothing they knew of their man. In view of subsequent events, their
attitude at this moment is important.
Darling was quite five minutes in pulling himself together. Then he
caught the doubt in Mayhan's eyes, and his first impulse was to
explain--or try to. But on second thought, realizing that there was
nothing for him to say, he ordered whisky and soda and held his peace.
And no man asked a question.
The clock pointed to five to eleven. At ten past Colonel Darling left
the club and walked to the hotel, which was less than a quarter of a
mile away. But there his cowardice caught him again, and he paused at
the gate of the compound.
The broad, shaded roadway was deserted, so that what followed went
unobserved. Back and forth, torn by indecision, he irritably and
fearsomely paced. For the uplift of his flagging, flaccid will he seemed
likely to require either the Archimedean lever or the Archimedean screw.
Fifteen awful minutes dragged torturously by before, in sheer
desperation, he entered the hotel and faced the clerk in charge, his
card in his hand.
"Send that to the Visc--" he began, only to pull himself up with a sharp
jolt.
The clerk in charge, not overburdened with wits, failed to catch the
significance of the abbreviation. He only stared and waited.
"Send that to Mr. Mayhan's patient," corrected the colonel, the sweat
beading on brow and chin, and turned to pace the floor as he had paced
the roadway.
The wait, though seemingly interminable, ended too quickly for his
wish, and his rap on the door of Mr. Scripps's room was hesitant and
feeble.
There came in answer an inarticulate rumble, and an instant later across
ten yards of floor space he gazed on the confronting Nibbetts, and
paused, speechless. But the confronting Nibbetts--the nickname by which
the Viscount Kneedrock had been best known to relatives and close
friends--was eminently more composed.
"I am indeed deeply honored," he said and bowed stiffly. The irony of
his tone was withering.
Darling, fighting himself for words, advanced a step or two. Then: "I
should never have known you," he ventured unfortunately.
The other laughed with a hoarse, grim bitterness.
"No?" he queried. "How odd!" And his caller colored to his eyebrows.
"Would you care to sit down?" the viscount continued, pushing a chair
forward with his uninjured right hand. The left, bandaged, was supported
by a sling. "It may help you to some self-possession."
But Colonel Darling, irritated, shook his head.
"I sha'n't detain you," he said. "But--I--you see--you see, I had to
make sure. I should never have believed, otherwise."
"You're quite sure you believe now?"
"Quite. Still, I can't understand. I would have sworn--"
"You did swear," Kneedrock interrupted. "That was the devil of it."
The colonel's lip twitched under his mustache.
"I never had a doubt," he averred. "I--I am unspeakably sorry."
"Much good that does. Still, it's no end decent that you should say so.
Yet, on the whole, I fancy you got rather the worst of it. Will you sit
down to oblige me? I've something I'd like to say to you."
Jack Darling, wretched as never before in his wretched life, slid limply
into the chair that waited.
"Can't I offer you something?" asked Kneedrock, his hand on the bell.
In spite of his pride and because of his misery the colonel accepted.
Certainly the viscount's was the more commanding presence. He seemed to
have taken the situation in hand at once. Darling was still the reverse
of composed. His eyelids twitched and his lips quivered.
The two men were nearly of an age. If there was any advantage here it,
too, was on the side of Kneedrock, who had just turned forty-four. But
in general appearance the colonel contrasted strongly for the better.
He was especially well groomed, whereas Nibbetts was at once leonine,
rugged, and nearly shabby. His tawny hair and beard were ragged and
uncared for. He gave the impression of having been out of the world in
which such things mattered. And this was true.
Having dispensed his hospitality, he reverted to his sneer. He was still
standing when he said:
"I assume Mrs. Darling never showed you my letter of six years ago."
His voice aroused the officer, who was in a reverie.
"Your--your letter?" he queried uncertainly.
"My letter from Zanzibar, in which I said I was starting for the world's
end."
"Yes, I saw that."
"And still you refused to believe? How often our wishes guide our
reason."
Something of resentment, of indignation, struck a light in Darling's
pale eyes, but his voice held to a monotone.
"I couldn't. I--" He hesitated, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and
wiped his perspiring brow. "You see, I--I didn't know your hand,
and--well, the signature might have been any one's. It was, if I
remember, your Christian name only."
"You mean you suspected that Nina was playing you a trick?"
"I--I didn't say so."
"Others saw it, I suppose? Others that knew me? Those that did know my
hand?"
"Yes, I fancy they did. I heard the question discussed."
"What question?"
"The question of the miracle. The question of the dead alive."
Kneedrock's lip curled and his huge shoulders stretched their sinews.
"Huh!" he grunted. "After all, it didn't matter. You'd already married
her. You'd already begun to reap tares."
Now the pale eyes of Darling flashed ominously. "You've no right to say
that," he said shortly with irritation.
"I'm not alone in saying it," returned the honorable viscount calmly.
"I've heard it in the islands of the south seas. You didn't fancy it
was a secret, I hope?"
Colonel Darling was silent.
"She's led you a pretty dance, I dare say."
Still Colonel Darling was silent.
"I understood, too, that the worm had turned? Pray pardon the simile."
Colonel Darling being still silent, Kneedrock smiled.
"I was fool enough to come all the way back here with the idea of
punishing you," he pursued. "But I've changed my mind about that. You're
getting punishment enough, that's plain. So I am going to thank you
instead. I know now what was spared me. Darling, you have my sympathy;
you have really."
Darling got suddenly to his feet. "Damn your sympathy!" he cried. "I
don't know what you've heard. But I do know it isn't true."
And at that the viscount laughed. "I haven't heard anything," he
retorted. "I've seen. And I'm like you--I believe what my eyes tell me.
Your eyes told you I was butchered to death at Spion Kop, and you
couldn't be convinced I wasn't until you saw me here to-night
resurrected. You wouldn't take my written word, and I can't take your
spoken word. The evidence to the contrary is too strong."
The colonel was again silent. He lifted his glass and drained it.
"I'm glad you called," Kneedrock continued. "Not that I needed any
further conviction, but--"
"Further conviction?" Darling broke in. "I thought--"
"That you were yourself the only conviction. Oh, no. I knew before you
came. I saw before you came. I had already made up my mind to go back
without seeing you."
Darling gazed at him in mingled amazement and perplexity.
"I--I don't understand," he faltered. "You--you've seen Nina, perhaps?"
"I've seen Nina."
"And it was she who told you?"
"She hasn't spoken to me. I am going away without so much as a word from
her or to her."
The colonel's perplexity waxed greater. "Will you kindly tell me what
under Heaven you're driving at? It's all a riddle to me--a damned--"
"I'll not tell you another word," the other answered. "You must know all
I do--and more, I dare say. Why should I add anything to the bare fact
that I know where the fault lies, and that it is not in you?"
"Because you've said too much to leave it where it is," Darling
insisted. "You must say it. You must say what you saw, and where and
when you saw it."
But then Kneedrock laughed again in his grim, bitter fashion.
"You're not my superior officer here, remember," he came back. "I obey
no commands but my own; and I refuse to submit to dictation."
The red flag of anger overspread Darling's visage.
"I infer that you have been spying," he charged.
"You may infer what you please--even that if it gives you any
satisfaction. I shall not presume to dictate to you, either."
At that instant the bandaged hand protruded by chance a bit beyond its
sling, and Darling's gaze rested upon it.
"I begin to see," he said more calmly.
The other noted the look and caught the inference. "Oh, this!" he
exclaimed, holding it up. "Rather nasty."
"How did you get it?" asked the colonel boldly.
"Man-eater," was the answer. "Vicious beast!"
"You've been in the jungle, then?"
Kneedrock calmly began refilling his pipe. "Didn't Mayhan tell you?" he
queried.
"Not a word."
"Ah! Yes, I've been in the jungle, and I stumbled on a she-tiger's
lair." It was not intentional, but the manner of the speech gave it a
significance aside from the phrasing.
Darling was standing by a table, and as he dropped his eyes musingly
they rested on a small object that lay beside the tray of decanters and
glasses. In an instant he was holding it up.
"May I have this?" he asked. It was a .45-caliber bullet, and the blood
on it was still damp.
"No," refused Kneedrock flatly.
"I fancied not," rejoined the colonel. "You're keeping it as a souvenir,
I suppose."
"I'm keeping it as evidence," the viscount said, lighting his pipe.
* * * * *
Later that night Jack Darling did an utterly unheard of thing. He
knocked loudly on the door of his wife's bed-chamber and demanded
admittance.
Nina, who had not yet fallen asleep, sat up in alarm, gathered herself
together with an effort, and then, strangely enough, admitted her
husband without protest. And if there can be a comparison in unheard of
things, this was still more utterly unheard of.
She had turned up the reading-lamp, which, being shaded and its glow
directed toward a limited area, did little more than make the general
darkness of the room visible. Then she sat down on the bed's edge within
the glow's circumference and waited.
Jack Darling didn't sit down. He stood in the shadow biting the ends of
his mustache, his hands behind him, and his gaze, which was fixed on
Nina, narrowed. She felt in her heart that something momentous was about
to transpire; and it would be idle to say she was without suspicion of
the underlying cause. For the report brought her by young Andrews had
fallen far short of either satisfying or giving adequate relief to her
anxieties.
Still she was not prepared for her husband's first and deliberately
spoken sentence, which was:
"I have just come from Harry Kneedrock."
Nina wanted to scream then, but she couldn't. Her breath came too short.
And she needed every bit of breath she could draw, because her heart had
grown suddenly big in her breast and was pounding fearfully.
She felt, too, that if she opened her mouth it must pop out. It was only
by breathing rapidly and keeping her lips tight-closed that she kept it
in.
"He arrived in Umballa this evening early," Jack Darling pursued. "He
saw you and got an ugly shot in the hand from--this."
He held something up which caught and reflected all the diffused light
that had stolen outside the illuminated circle; and she saw it was the
Andrews automatic. Still she couldn't have spoken had death threatened
her for her silence.
"I found it in the drawing-room. Its magazine lacks a single cartridge.
I've talked to Jowar, and everything fits. But there's something that
Kneedrock won't say and that Jowar doesn't know. So I've come to you for
it, and you'll tell me. You must."
He waited a moment for her to say something, but she was still mute. Her
eyes were all pupils. They appeared like two black holes in a face
devoid of any tint of color, for her lips were blanched and her lifted
brows were hidden behind her drooping hair.
"I must know what it was that Kneedrock saw," he pressed.
Her hands were gripping the mattress on either side of her--gripping it
until her finger-nails doubled and then broke.
"And I must know why he was shot at," he added.
And then Nina, who had been doubling all the while, broke, too. Before
Darling could reach her she pitched forward, a hunched heap on the
floor.
CHAPTER VI
A Hard Man and Bitter
It was the next morning, and Nina's _ayah_ sat on a chair in the
passage, guarding the door of her mistress's room. To all comers she
gave the same answer--her _mem-sahib_ was sleeping after a night of
wakefulness and must not be disturbed.
She gave it to Colonel Darling no less than three times--once before
breakfast, once after, and again before he rode away for parade, his
eyes bloodshot and his hands all a-tremble.
And all the while the room behind the door was as empty of life as a
hatched egg-shell. For in the darkest hour of a gray dawn, closely
veiled, Nina had stolen away with her _ayah_ escorting, and had taken
refuge with the Ramsays, who had a small bungalow within the hotel
compound--the same hotel, be it added, which sheltered "Mr. Henry
Scripps, Bombay."
Of course she told the Ramsays her story--or, which is closer to fact,
_a_ story. Some of it was truth, but it was neither all the truth nor
nothing but the truth. She believed dissemblance necessary, and so she
had no hesitation in dissembling.
Her main purpose was to escape for a while from Darling and his
unanswerable questions, and in the meantime to obtain at all hazards an
interview with Kneedrock. She hadn't the faintest idea what the
viscount purposed doing, but whatever it was she must stop him.
She knew from what young Andrews had told her that he was masquerading
under the name of Scripps. So as Scripps she spoke of him in relating
her tale of embarrassment to her American friend, Sibylla Ramsay, while
Sibylla's daughter, who should have been fast asleep, sat by and
listened with apparently adult understanding.
She implied without actually saying so that she had once had a more or
less violent flirtation with Mr. Scripps; that her husband knew of it,
and that she feared the consequences of his present presence in Umballa.
Therefore it was imperative that she see him and urge his departure at
the very earliest possible moment.
She couldn't receive him in her own home, but she'd like to receive him
in theirs; and she did hope they would not regard it as an imposition on
their friendship and good nature.
"Well, I should say not," returned Sibylla. "I think it's just the
loveliest thing. I'm mad over romance, Nina, you know. And this is _so_
romantic."
"Do you mind if I peep at him, dear Mrs. Darling?" asked Jane, nervously
gathering her kimono more closely about her slim limbs. "I know he's
handsome from his name. It isn't beautiful. Men with beautiful names are
always so disappointing."
"You may peep all you care to, my dear," said Nina, "but you mustn't
listen. Otherwise I'd suggest that you hide behind the piano or under
the sofa. May I write him a note, Sibylla, and bribe your maid to
deliver it?"
"You may serenade him from my front veranda if you care to, dear, and
I'll beckon him when he comes to his window. But if you think the note
idea more discreet, adopt it by all means."
So Nina wrote the note and then sat in a fever of impatience until the
dawn grew brighter and the hands of the watch on her wrist circled to a
more reasonable morning hour.
She had recovered some measure of poise, but the experience of the night
had left its marks upon her, and the uncertainty as to whether Kneedrock
would come or refuse to do so, coupled with the prospect of the meeting,
which she both longed for and feared, filled the waiting period with a
nervous tension that fretted and rasped.
She had begged him to send her an answer, if only verbal. But the maid
returned without so much as a syllable. And so her waiting in
uncertainty was prolonged. Meanwhile she drank the black coffee with
which Sibylla plied her with the assurance that its sustaining power was
superior to her habitual tea.
At ten minutes to nine, by the watch on her wrist, just as the fourth
cup had been placed in her somewhat steadied hand, the maid who had
carried the note brought proof of its delivery by announcing that Mr.
Scripps awaited Mrs. Darling's pleasure in the bungalow drawing-room.
Sibylla and Jane were both wonderfully pleased and excited, and Nina,
who had expected this moment, if it ever came, quite to overcome her
with emotional agitation, surprised herself with a calmly self-contained
placidity which she naturally attributed to the stimulation of the
caffein.
Even the shock of Kneedrock's changed appearance--for he was almost
unrecognizably changed in the nine years since their parting--failed to
disturb her inner tranquillity. Only her voice betrayed her. It quavered
just the least bit as she spoke the old name.
"Hal!" No one but she had ever called him that.
For his part he husbanded his words. He had taken a place with his back
to the mantel and stood there in unmoving silence with his hands clasped
behind him--the one still bandaged, but the sling discarded--and his
brow drawn with a half frown.
Nina put out a hand tentatively and drew it back when he continued
motionless.
"Perhaps you did not wish to see me," she said, nettled.
"You might have thought of that before sending me your extraordinary
message." Those were the first words he spoke.
"It would have made no difference," she returned, pausing by the piano
and steadying herself by resting a hand on its top. "I had to see you,
whether you wished it or not. If you had not come here I should have
gone into the hotel."
"I can't for the life of me see what is to be gained by it," he
protested.
"There may be nothing gained unless you will believe me."
It was scarcely possible that he could miss the pathos of the words,
even if he missed the pathos in the tone. Yet his only answer was a
cynical smile.
"I want you to know that the shot which hurt you was not intended for
you."
Then he laughed cruelly. "No?" he questioned with feigned surprise.
"Still, you must admit that your lover's habit of firing at random
through drawing-room windows isn't a perfectly safe amusement at best.
He's liable to pot some one, you know."
Her face was crimson. "He's not my lover," she denied indignantly.
"Pardon me. I judged only from what I saw. It was quite evident he was
not your husband. I am curious, seeing that he is not your lover, or one
of them, what privileges you reserve for them."
"I have no lover or lovers," she protested.
"Dear me!" he said with mock astonishment. "How dreary your poor life
must be! I had fancied quite the contrary."
"It was I who told him to shoot," she confessed. "He shot at a bronze
cobra in the corner."
"Then he's a worse shot than I thought."
"Oh, he hit the cobra, nevertheless. The bullet glanced."
"Yes," he agreed. "I know. It glanced at me and caught my hand. I
suppose the possibility of such a thing didn't occur to either of you."
"I didn't want him to kiss me," she defended at some sacrifice of truth.
"In another second he would have, and I told him there was a cobra in
the corner to distract him. Besides I meant to frighten our
_khitmatgar_. I thought it was he who was spying. And it happened to be
you."
"Yes," he admitted calmly. "I came all the way from Melanesia to spy.
But I'm rather a novice at it, and got winged the first time. Too bad, I
say."
"Then I'm not sorry. You deserved it."
"At all events," he told her, "I saw enough to send me back. I'm not
fitted for civilization. I prefer the real savage to the counterfeit. I
infinitely prefer the original tigress with her stripes to the
reincarnated creature with her soft hands and her rose-leaf cheeks."
She didn't hear the last. It was quite lost upon her.
"You--you are going back?" she questioned, her breath short.
"To-night," he told her. "I've had enough. I'll get the boat at Calcutta
that brought me."
She tried to realize the situation, but she couldn't in the least. It
was all most extraordinary--she knew that. Nine years ago she had been
tumultuously in love with this hulking cousin of hers.
Then, on sheer impulse, instigated by the devil within her, yet without
the faintest thought of disloyalty, she had flirted riotously with the
new curate, and Nibbetts had gone away to war in South Africa in a pet,
without so much as a word of farewell.
In an incredibly short time had come the tidings of his death, and what
with her crushing sense of irreparable loss and her ravening conscience
all the world changed its colors from gay to dun.
Now the nine years of intervening space had rolled themselves into a
pellet and dropped out of the actual. There was nothing real in time or
place but this--he was there across the little room, alive, whole; and
she was here, and they were talking as if yesterday had dated their
parting. It was most extraordinary.
He was going so soon, too, and she had so much, so very much, to say.
"But you mustn't," she said simply.
In his answering look was amused amazement. "Oh, I mustn't, eh? And why
mustn't I?"
"Do I have to tell you?" But her eyes were turned away.
"Yes, if you wish me to understand."
"Have--have you forgotten--everything?" And still she did not face him.
He turned sidewise and laid his left arm along the mantel-shelf to rest
his injured hand.
"Most things," he answered, "thank God!" And when she did not speak he
added: "You set me so fine an example in expeditious forgetting,
remember, I had to profit by it."
"I never forgot," was her denial.
"For one who never forgot, you managed to mess things up a great deal,
it seems to me."
"I think I was mad," she admitted, her eyes on the floor.
"I doubt if you were ever anything else," he told her bluntly. "And a
man's a fool to trust a mad woman."
"Oh, I'm sane now," Nina told him. "Quite, quite sane. And I was
hoping--" She paused, uncertain of her phrasing.
"Yes," he encouraged dubiously.
"That you might help me to put things straight," she finished.
He was not altogether sure of her meaning, but he chose to put upon it
the worst possible construction.
"Why not let your friend of last night assist?" he asked coolly. "He
seems rather expert with firearms. Mistakes are so easy, you know. He
could shoot at the bronze cobra again, for instance, and aim a little
high."
And at that she faced him.
"You never used to be so bitter," she said. "You can't think what you're
saying."
"I've fed on bitterness. I always think the worst, and I'm usually
justified. I can't see any way to undo your tangle except by murder!"
Nina shivered, and Kneedrock saw it; but she said nothing.
"I'm glad you didn't pretend to be shocked," he told her. "Only as a
rule you're not very keen on quick deaths. You prefer the cat-and-mouse
process. You like to play with your victim before adding the final
finishing stroke."
"Who's catty now?" she asked simply.
But he made no answer. He moved over to the sofa where lay his hat and
walking-stick and took them up.
"Better wait until I'm out of India," he went on cynically. "I might be
brought back to testify, and that would be awkward."
"You're going now?" she asked distressfully.
"Only to the hotel. I can't sail until the twenty-seventh. Would you
mind waiting until after the first?"
"But you haven't told me a thing," she deplored, ignoring his cruel
implication. "Where have you been all the years? What have you been
doing? Why have you hidden yourself? There is so much I want to know."
"There is so much you'll never know," he returned. "Why bother with any
of it? The title dies with me. I'm not robbing any one, remember."
"You're robbing me," she said desperately, and took a step toward him.
"Oh, Hal, if you only knew!"
He retreated a pace, smiling grimly.
"I'll have to ask you to stop that sort of thing, Nina," he said
gravely. "You may as well know at once that I won't listen to it."
She sank down upon the sofa where his hat and stick had been, a red lip
held by white teeth to check its quivering.
Kneedrock moved toward the door.
Abruptly, swept by a wave of impetuosity, she sprang up and ran to him.
"Hal! Hal! Take me with you. I won't--I can't let you go from me again!"
Already he had swung the door ajar and stood now in the opening.
"I'm afraid you'll have to," he said, his tone cold and hard as steel.
"Still I'm glad you asked me. It has paid me for coming half-way round
the world."
The door swung sharply shut with Kneedrock on the outside.
At the same moment the door at the opposite end of the room opened, and
Jane Ramsay stood on the threshold.
"I was peeping," she cried. "He's homelier even than his name. And--and
I hate him!"
"So do I," cried Nina, bracing herself. But she didn't in the least; and
Jane Ramsay knew she didn't.
When Colonel Darling returned from parade the _ayah_ was gone from the
passage-way outside his wife's room. He entered to find Nina up and
dressed. And he found her quite ready to answer his questions.
She told him truthfully what Kneedrock saw through the window, and she
told him with equal truth why Andrews fired the shot.
More than that, she told him that his false identification of Kneedrock
at Spion Kop had wrecked three lives, and that it was a dear price to
pay for one man's carelessness or stupidity.
And that night there was a tragedy in the Darling bungalow.
CHAPTER VII
The Cross and the Crown
It was the very last thing Nina expected--to see Kneedrock again; but
she did. He called that night after dinner on his way to the railway
station, and the motor-car waited for him at the porch. For a minute she
fancied he might have relented and was really, after all, going to take
her with him. But, if so, he had planned in the worst possible way, the
day for Lochinvar enterprises having long since passed and gone, and
Colonel Darling--miracle of miracles--being still at home, not having
gone to the club.
She rushed into the drawing-room expectant, or half so, and then at a
sight of her caller knew that her expectancy was without grounds. For
Kneedrock with his well hand was holding out something to her, which she
saw almost immediately was a small jewelry box.
"I came very near forgetting it," he said, "though I brought it with me
all the way just to see it safe in your hands. It is a gift from my poor
dear mother."
The poor dear marchioness had always been very fond of Nina, but she had
died just before the breaking out of the Boer War and at the period of
Nina's flirtation with the curate.
Nina Darling opened the jewelry box and took out a curiously fashioned
ring. The setting was a cross of diamonds and the band was shaped like
a crown of points.
"It is lovely," she said.
"It is symbolic," he contributed. "Still I don't see that it applies
very appositely to your state. You don't bear your cross at all
gracefully, and you certainly don't deserve a crown."
"I should like to know who does," she retorted.
"Oh, there are some martyrs left. There's your husband, for instance.
You might turn the ring over to him."
"Jack is a saint," replied Nina. "I'm busy wondering all the time how he
keeps his temper."
"And he does, then?"
"Always. He's so good to me I hate him."
"There's something wrong with you. You're not normal."
"I know it. My emotions are all reversed. I'd give anything to be like
other women; but I can't be."
Kneedrock was smiling incredulously. "You fool yourself, I believe," he
said, "just as you fool others. You are an odd creature."
He looked at his watch and sat down on one end of the settee. She was
already occupying the other.
"Jack's going away in the morning," she told him; "to be gone a month.
Why don't you stay?"
"Because I mean never to give you a chance to make a fool of me again.
Now you have the truth of it."
"He's off on a shooting trip."
"I wonder he doesn't shoot himself, poor beggar."
"That's the only goodness he could do me that I'd appreciate," she said
with a light laugh.
Kneedrock's hulking shoulders gave a clumsy shrug.
"You ought to be flayed," he declared.
She was silent for a brief moment. Then she said: "Hadn't I better tell
Jack you are here? The _khitmatgar_ will if I don't; and I've no desire
to add to the sins I should be flayed for."
"I suppose it would only be civil. Though I'm not keen on seeing him
again," was the answer. "I'd no notion he was at home."
Nina stood. "He's in the gun-room. I sha'n't be a moment." And she was
gone.
The seconds ticked into a minute and she was not back. Two, three, five
minutes followed without bringing her. Kneedrock's time was slipping
away, and he had none too much to spare.
In some impatience he got to his feet and sauntered across the room.
Then, seeing the bronze cobra, which was not altogether unfamiliar, he
stooped interestedly to examine it; and he found the bullet-mark.
But still Nina remained absent. To miss his train meant to miss his
boat. Yet he felt that he could not go without at least a final word. He
would, he must, therefore, make an effort to find her.
The door through which she had gone stood open before him. Of the plan
of the bungalow he knew nothing; but he left the room and turned in
haste down a dim-lit passage.
It may have been a few seconds later or it may have been
minutes--Kneedrock swore afterward that it was at that very
instant--that Jowar, the _khitmatgar_, busy in his pantry cleaning
silver, was startled by a muffled detonation that shook the frail
dwelling as might an earthquake.
He had been bent over his work; but the report brought him to the
upright with a jerk. The soup tureen he was handling turned over and
rolled to the floor. For the briefest moment he stood dazed, irresolute.
Then, kicking the tureen aside, he shot out of the pantry, ran through
the dining-room, the drawing-room, the passage--all empty--until he came
of a sudden to the open door of the gun-room, against the jamb of which,
pressed close, with pallid face and wide, wild eyes, was Mrs. Darling.
Above her head rolled a little cloud of gray smoke. In his nostrils was
the acrid smell of gunpowder.
In the room Lord Kneedrock was on his knees, and Jowar's first
impression, as he gave it at the investigation, was that it was he who
had been injured. On the floor beside him lay a double-barrel shot-gun,
which the _khitmatgar_ picked up. And as he stooped to do this he saw
that over which the caller was bending.
Between a table and a chair, one leg gruesomely resting across a stool,
stretched grimly stark and still the form of his master, Colonel
Darling.
The head was in the table's shadow. But as Jowar drew closer he got
sight of that which drove all the blood from beneath the dark pigment of
his features. Whatever had happened it had made it impossible that he
should ever look upon his master's face again.
There was no face there. It had been quite demolished.
At the same instant Kneedrock, sick at the sight, turned away to meet
the _khitmatgar's_ sinister gaze. Already it seemed the room was
swarming with pressing, curious, excited native servants.
Nina had vanished, led away by her _ayah_. Later he learned that the gun
found by Jowar had been examined. Both barrels were empty; but there was
only one discharged shell.
The motor-car, waiting at the porch to take him to his train, was
speeded for surgeons and medical men, as if, under the circumstances,
there could be one faint ray of hope even. The garrison was advised, and
the whole cantonment knew as if by magic.
Mr. Scripps, of course, couldn't go to Calcutta or anywhere else. He was
as fast in Umballa as if there were chains on his hands and feet.
And it stood to reason, coming thus conspicuously before practically the
whole British population, he could not hope to escape recognition.
Dinghal, the deputy commissioner, for instance, knew him at once as
Viscount Kneedrock; and with Dinghal's fund of memory-stored fact and
gossip, it was natural enough that he should put two and two together.
And when it is said that figures never lie, the sum of two and two is
the exception that proves the rule. By adding these you can get about
any result you choose.
Of Colonel Darling's tragic taking off there followed a rigid
investigation.
The one person who knew the exact facts, or should have known them, was
his widow. But Nina didn't and couldn't remember. The shock had wiped
her memory as clean as a sponged slate.
For days she lay in a state between stupor and coma. When she came out
of it she recalled that she had dreamed, but she couldn't remember the
dream. It was awful, terrible, she knew that. But that was all she did
know.
They had to tell her that Darling was hurt. She treated the tidings with
indifference. Then they told her that he had been shot and that it
wasn't certain how it happened. She thought he had gone on a shooting
trip with Major Cumnock, and that the accident had happened in the
jungle.
In the end they made her understand that he was dead; that his brains
had been blown out in the bungalow gun-room, and that she was with him
at the time. But she convinced them that she knew no more of it than she
did of the fourth dimension, which was nothing at all.
Kneedrock, after frankly admitting his identity, swore to the facts as
he knew them.
The native butler, Jowar, however, persistently contradicted him in one
particular by averring that the viscount was in the gun-room when the
shot was fired, as he himself was the first to enter it afterward, when
he had found the Englishman bending over Darling's body and had picked
up the gun which was lying at the viscount's right hand.
The word of a _khitmatgar_, however, had little weight against the sworn
testimony of a British nobleman. The court agreed that death was the
result of accident.
Those who knew certain matters which were aside from admissible evidence
took the verdict with several grains of salt, and pointed out that in
the matter of seeking motives for murder the authorities had been
criminally remiss.
These knowing ones were about equally divided in opinion. The dissenting
feminine element was inclined to believe that Mrs. Darling was the
slayer. Whereas the doubting Thomases of the community would not put the
responsibility past Kneedrock, who, they argued, had returned from
hiding in a far corner of the globe, intent upon getting Jack Darling
out of the way.
And for both of these views Dinghal, with his long tongue, innocent of
venom still perhaps, but poisonous nevertheless--was largely
responsible.
Young Andrews, risking everything, was still delaying his return to his
post at Junnar. He simply must see Nina before going. He refused to
abandon hope.
Once, after repulsing him, she had more than half-yielded. She had
repulsed him a second time, it was true; and he did not overlook the
significance of the return of Kneedrock, whom she had called her "match"
and her "mate."
The odds were overwhelmingly against him. That he knew. But there might
still be a chance. And he would make certain before--No, he questioned
whether he could return to Junnar with that last hope gone. It might be
that he--He didn't know. He wasn't going to face it until it was before
him.
Then, in some roundabout way a whisper got to him that Mrs. Darling was
much better. The Ramsays, for example, had been to see her.
He had all along been leaving a card for her every day or so. Now he
scribbled a line on the card, asking that she would give him a
few--just a very few minutes.
He hardly dared fancy that she would. But she did.
Except for her mourning, he found her very little changed.
"I thought you were at work ages ago," was how she greeted him.
He spoke then of the cards he had left. He had sent her some flowers,
too.
"I've had no interest in anything," she told him. "There are hundreds of
cards here. Some day I may look at them, and still I may not. Every
officer in Umballa has sent me flowers, and some of the enlisted men as
well. But I do thank you."
"You've never once thought of me, I believe," he reproached.
"That's true," she replied, "I haven't. I've had so much to think of,
and it hurts me to think. So I've let Lord Kneedrock do most of the
thinking for me."
"It hurts to be forgotten so quickly," he said, his big brown eyes
suddenly misty.
"I've been trying to forget so much," Nina confessed.
"And me--did you have to try very hard to forget me?"
"I hadn't begun on you yet. You see, you didn't even occur." She noticed
the mist, and added: "I'm sorry."
"You're not a bit," he declared. "You like to hurt me, I believe. But
I'll make you remember."
She felt like laughing for the first time since the news of Darling's
death was brought to her.
"Please don't," she pleaded.
"Don't make you remember?"
"Oh, you can't do that! I mean, please don't weep. You promised me once
you wouldn't, you know."
He rose, frowning, the last hope dead, and she sat regarding him through
drooped lashes.
"Good-by!" he muttered, and began backing toward the door.
She waited until his hand was on the knob. Then:
"Good-by, Gerald!" she said, smiling. "I'm so glad I had strength enough
not to bolt with you when you asked me."
"Why?" he asked, desperately seizing an excuse to linger.
"Because you are so good-looking, and I do get so tired of looking at
good-looking men."
When he got back to Dinghal's quarters young Andrews tried to cut his
own throat, mainly to make Nina remember him. That he didn't succeed in
the act was due primarily to a nervously irresolute hand, and
secondarily to his friend Dinghal, who suspected and arrived in the nick
of time.
In the excitement of the ensuing moment the young man told Dinghal every
word of the conversation with Mrs. Darling; and the deputy commissioner,
as he clumsily drew the edges of the shallow cut together and fastened
them with court-plaster, waxed more and more indignant; for he was very
fond of Gerald Andrews, and declared that if she didn't kill her husband
it was not because she was not capable of it.
It seems probable that he did not confine the expression of this
opinion, either, to the privacy of his own dwelling. For guests at a
dinner-party which he attended that same evening quoted him to the same
effect--exaggerated, possibly, in the retelling--and the report in time
trickled into the hearing of Kneedrock.
Thereupon the viscount called upon the deputy commissioner, and some hot
words passed between them. Dinghal, it seems, made no attempt whatever
to disguise his opinion.
"I don't care a damn what you think," returned Nina Darling's cousin.
"That's your own business; the inalienable right of man and beast is to
think whatever they please. But when a man gossips or a dog snarls, that
changes the matter. They both deserve correction."
Dinghal was not the most robust of men, but he was no coward. As has
been said, he was rarely malicious. As a rule, he rehearsed his story,
and left it to his hearers to draw their own conclusions.
This time, through sheer loyalty to young Andrews, he had erred, and he
knew it. But he was far from admitting this to Kneedrock.
"And in the present instance the correction is to be administered--how?"
he asked.
"By me--with this," was the viscount's answer, holding up his doubled
right hand.
"You mean your purpose is to punch my head?"
"Precisely," returned the other.
"You must be mad, Lord Kneedrock. Remember that I am a civil officer in
his majesty's service. If you feel that I have injured you or yours in
any way, there is a recognized means of adjustment. There are the
courts."
"The courts are too slow and indecisive."
"Nevertheless, if you dare lay a hand on me I shall test them. I give
you fair warning."
Kneedrock laughed his irritating laugh.
"You are quite meeting my opinion of you," he said. "You are a cur and a
poltroon."
The deputy commissioner's face flamed. "If you dare repeat that," he
snapped, "I shall--"
"Go to the courts, I assume."
The viscount saw his fingers double into his palms. "You are a liar and
a scandalmonger!" he flung at him. And at this Dinghal drew back his
fist.
"Although you have the advantage," he flared, "no man may blackguard me
and go unpunished!"
"My left hand is crippled," said Kneedrock. "I shall not use it." And as
Dinghal aimed a blow at his chin, he guarded with his right.
The bout lasted something over four minutes, during which Kneedrock
landed at will. There was no instant when he did not command.
Now and again, to encourage his adversary to face further punishment, he
permitted him to get in a body blow, or accepted a glancing tap on neck
or cheek. And by way of finale he broke Dinghal's somewhat protuberant
nose.
Three days later he and Nina took ship at Bombay and sailed for
England.
CHAPTER VIII
In a World Within a World
"I'd rather have a whole cab-driver to myself than share a peer of the
realm with another woman," said Mrs. Darling.
She had been in England eighteen months, and the shadow of her tragedy,
which never bore very heavily, had lifted.
She sat in a basket chair on the lawn at Puddlewood, dressed all in
filmy white, and sipped tea with the Duchess of Pemberwell, her
great-aunt, in the shade of one of Puddlewood's ancient oaks. In her lap
lay an unopened copy of the _Times_.
"Is he a cab-driver, then?" inquired the duchess, taking her literally.
"Yes," Nina laughed, "a heavenly cab-driver. He threads the milky way.
Some say aviator."
"Oh, Nina!"
"He's very nice, I assure you, my dear. Not an ounce of fat on him. All
bone and sinew and nerve."
"And--a Yankee," added the duchess belittlingly.
"A free-born American," corrected her great-niece, "and with the
loveliest accent. You should hear him say: 'Evah at you' se'vice, Miss'
Dahling.' You'd fall in love with him yourself."
"And this aviator person is yours exclusively?"
"Undividedly. Isn't it nice?"
"I think I should prefer Nibbetts myself; or Sir George Grey, or--well,
scores I could name."
"I dare say. You married the duke. Your taste speaks for itself, dear
aunt."
Though the duchess made no retort, she appeared annoyed. She poured
herself a fresh cup of tea and sipped it in silence. Nina opened her
paper.
She was still turning the pages when his grace sauntered over, halted,
and gazed for a moment at the spread tea-table. He was small, bald and
peaked, with tiny black eyes like shoe-buttons.
"There isn't any seed-cake," he complained. "I can't take tea without
seed-cake. You know I never take tea without seed-cake, do I, Doody?"
Doody was his pet name for his duchess.
"No, you don't," she said. "It's too bad. There was only a little, and
Nina ate it."
Nina, who had not been listening, looked up.
"What's that I ate?" she asked.
"Doody says you ate all the seed-cake," explained the duke.
"Oh, I believe I did. It was exceptionally good, too. I wish there had
been more."
"You don't wish it half as much as I," and there was a suspicion of
querulousness in his grace's tone.
"He's flying at Doncaster to-day," Nina observed, devouring the aviation
news, and already forgetful of the duke and the seed-cake.
"Who's flying?" he asked sharply.
"Pierson," answered Nina. "My David."
"Then I hope he jolly well breaks his neck," was the snapping rejoinder
as his grace wheeled about and set off for the castle to admonish his
housekeeper.
Having exhausted the aviation news, Mrs. Darling turned to the American
cables. Everything American now held for her a magnified interest.
Presently she slapped the page out flatter and interestedly bent her
head closer.
"Fancy!" she exclaimed a moment later, sitting up straight. "He's been
sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment."
"Your David?" asked the duchess indifferently.
"Certainly not. He's poor but honest. J. Sprague Ramsay, of Chicago, the
multimillionaire banker, whose wife and daughter I knew in India. I
don't in the least understand it--it's for lending himself money from
his own banks or something. It's too bad. Poor, poor Sibylla. And Jane
was just coming to a marriageable age. It will spoil all her chances."
"It should be a lesson to you, Nina. I should think you'd feel
disgraced. You associated with the family of a convict. You must curb
your indiscriminate freedom. You must, really."
"Pooh!" cried her great-niece. "The Ramsays were charming. It wasn't
their fault that J. Sprague borrowed more than he had a right to."
Her great-aunt's disapproval of Americans in general and of the American
aviator in particular, had the usual effect of disapproval when brought
to bear on an independent spirit. It whetted Nina's ardor for the daring
and intrepid David Pierson.
She not only attended the meetings at which he flew, but on repeated
occasions she flew with him. Her infatuation was the talk of her friends
and her enemies.
As a matter of fact the American was by no means a bad sort. He came of
good, honest stock, was fairly well educated, and possessed a
comfortable income from Kentucky tobacco plantations, which he had
inherited.
With the coming of autumn, however, the inevitable happened. He proposed
marriage to the young widow who had led him to believe he had only to
ask to be given. And Nina refused him flatly.
David Pierson, however, was a distinctly different type from young
Andrews. His eyes didn't grow misty and he didn't weep. He was, in fact,
a distinctly different type from any of the men she had jilted or
repulsed. He didn't storm and he didn't sulk.
On the contrary, he caught hold of her shoulders and he shook her until
her teeth chattered. And then, not in the least gently, he boxed both
her ears, and walked out, leaving her in a towering rage.
Out of sheer revenge, rather than for any other reason, she began almost
at once to encourage the attentions of a certain cabinet minister. She
let him hold her hand and send her books of amorous verses with marked
stanzas.
More than that, she invited veiled paragraphs in the society journals,
hinting at a pending betrothal, and mailed each issue, blue-penciled, to
the aviator's home address in Louisville.
But with the cabinet minister Nina Darling went no further than she had
with any of the others. She shunted him by making him madly jealous,
first, and then openly casting him aside for one of the poets to whose
passionate lines he had been the means of introducing her.
In the next three years she ran sort of continuously amuck against the
susceptible, strewing her world with broken, bleeding hearts. And all
the while the one man for whom she would gladly have given her life
looked on with a sneer and a cynic smile, and said harsh, cruel things
to her and of her, in season and out.
There were those who held that it was due in a large measure to Lord
Kneedrock that the ugly mystery of poor Darling's horrid death was not
permitted to rest in the grave with the victim.
Still there may have been injustice in this, for there were still quite
as many to say that Kneedrock shot him because he coveted Nina for
himself, as there were that it was Nina or that it was suicide.
Wherever two or three were gathered together in Vanity Fair, one was
sure to hear the phrase: "Poor Darling!" and without waiting very long
for it, either.
Someone said "Poor Darling!" at Bellingdown, one day in late March, and
as usual the Umballa tragedy was threshed out all over again, though it
was nearly five years gone, and to separate a fresh grain of truth from
the chaff was nigh hopeless.
"Oh, Nina couldn't," Lady Bellingdown insisted. "I've seen a lot of her,
and I could tell."
Lord Waltheof, who was the "tame cat" of the household, a tall, slim,
dark man, reminded her that Mrs. Darling couldn't remember what
happened.
"Oh, you're wrong about that, Wally," put in Charlotte Grey, the fair,
thin bride of Sir George, who was up in town with Lord Bellingdown.
"You're wrong about that. She didn't remember at first, but she does
now. Nibbetts told me so. She remembers, but she doesn't speak of it.
That is rather suspicious, you know."
"She's a widow without a sorrow," Kitty Bellingdown declared. "She never
loved Darling; we all know that."
"She doesn't know what love is," asserted the bride, who was missing her
husband terribly. "She has passion, but no affection."
"Has she been casting sheeps' eyes at Shucks?" It was Waltheof who
asked. "Shucks" was Sir George's nursery name. It is a mark of the
bluest blood to carry some such absurd nursery cognomen from the nursery
to Eton, or Harrow, or Winchester, and then on to one or the other of
the universities.
"She'd better not," Charlotte returned, her eyes snapping.
"I--I didn't know." And Waltheof slyly pinched Lady Bellingdown's
shoulder as he stood behind her chair.
"I've always thought Nibbetts had a hand in it," Lord Waltheof ventured.
"It was odd, his turning up just at that time, you must all admit that.
Eight years he buried himself, God only knows where, and then all of a
sudden he appears in Umballa, and the very next night poor Darling is
mysteriously shot. Then back he comes to London and takes up the old
life, just as if he had never been away and nothing had happened."
Lady Kitty nodded. "That's perfectly true," she said. "Does any one know
where he was?"
"Yes," the tall man answered. "We all know generally. But only one man
accurately. His solicitor was informed all the while. When I want a
secret kept that's the man I'm going to employ."
"I'd see him right away if I were you," suggested Charlotte, and Lady
Bellingdown frowned.
"I believe Nibbetts would marry Nina to-morrow if she'd say yes,"
Waltheof continued. "But she won't. She won't say yes to any man. Once
was enough for her. That's flat."
"If he cares so much for her he has a poor way of showing it. I've never
heard him give her a civil word." The bride spoke out of the richness of
her experience.
"I'm certain she cares for him," averred Lady Bellingdown. "And he's a
brute to her."
"It's the crime that stands between them," Waltheof said with decision.
"Nibbetts is queer. And it's that that's preyed on his mind until he's
not quite all there, don't you know."
"Everybody knows his father is queer," contributed their hostess.
They dropped the subject after a while without getting a step further
than when they started. But they didn't drop gossip. Dinghal, with his
broken nose, would have been in his element at Bellingdown. But he was
still in Umballa, suffering tortures from catarrh.
"Caryll Carleigh's to be married on the twelfth." Lady Kitty flung the
announcement to Lady Charlotte.
"So soon?"
"Yes. They've hurried it, because the girl's mother, who is the most
restless of mortals, wants to go to China or somewhere. She's just back
now from Egypt. Her daughter was with friends at Capri for the winter.
That's where Caryll met her. They are Americans, you know."
"So I heard. I do hope Caryll will be happy; but it is a risk. Americans
are always divorcing. They're so lacking in repose."
"He tells me she's adorable."
"Oh, of course. Still he might, don't you think, have done better at
home? English girls fit in so much better."
"I dare say. But one never could advise Caryll. He's most exasperatingly
headstrong." The young baronet was her nephew and she knew.
"I've met Mrs. Veynol and her filly," Waltheof put in. It was after
dinner, and he had been sipping liqueurs and smoking cigarettes alone in
the dining-hall. "She's exasperatingly headstrong, too. Not my choice
for a mother-in-law."
Lady Bellingdown twisted her long neck to give him a smile. He was
behind her chair as usual. "Caryll never met Mrs. Veynol until a week
ago. It was all arranged by correspondence," she said.
"Who was Veynol?" asked Charlotte Grey. "It seems to me I've heard the
name, but--"
"South African diamond man. She married him after a week's acquaintance
at Cape Town, and he died in five months and left her a Mrs. Croesus,"
Waltheof made clear. "The girl calls herself Veynol, too, but that isn't
her name, of course."
"Americans hold their names so lightly, don't they?" observed Charlotte.
"George says they change them at the drop of the hat."
"Due principally to the divorce courts and the bankruptcy laws,"
explained the man illuminatingly. "They're a rum lot out there."
He had never been to America; but the average Briton invariably assumes
a wisdom if he has it not, especially when conversing with the dependent
sex.
As events turned out, however, Rosamond Veynol didn't change her name
again on the twelfth of April. For some reason which was not altogether
made clear the wedding was postponed.
The published report was that Miss Veynol was ill, but Miss Veynol was
not ill in the least, as a number of eye-witnesses who saw her in Paris,
where she was temporarily residing, stood ready to prove.
There was no end of question, naturally, and there was no end of gossip.
This condition lasted for three months. And then, to society's intense
surprise, it received invitations for the nuptial ceremony at St.
Margaret's, Westminster, and for the wedding breakfast at Mrs. Veynol's
recently leased establishment in Park Lane.
Lady Bellingdown was up in town for the express purpose of selecting a
wedding gift, in which Lord Waltheof had kindly volunteered to
assist--"Donty-Down," her lord and master, being in Paris just
then--when she chanced upon Nina Darling coming out of a shop in New
Bond Street and looking absolutely radiant.
"The widow without a sorrow!" she exclaimed, grasping both her hands and
kissing her through her veil. "I called you that the other day, and now
I see how well it suits you."
"If it was the other day you were wrong," Nina returned. "But to-day you
are right. I feel as free as the robins in St. James's Park. I have just
sent the most importunate of Austrian archdukes about his business, and
I breathe freely for the first time in six weeks."
"My dear, you are incorrigible. Aren't you ever going to make some
deserving man happy?"
"There is no such animal," declared this outrageous flirt. "I am a
righteously avenging Nemesis. I dispense to man his just deserts."
"You are _la belle dame sans merci_."
"Tell me of Nibbetts, Mrs. Darling," Waltheof cut in suggestively. "I've
not seen him in months."
"Nor I," replied Nina. "He's been in Dundee. I hear he's in love with a
Scotch lassie. I suspect she's a marmalade-maker."
"Really!" exclaimed the tame cat, taking her seriously. "Too devilish
bad!"
"Yes. Isn't it? Fancy how tired he must get of smelling orange peel
every time he kisses her hand!" She made a grimace and turned back to
Kitty Bellingdown. "You didn't come up for the season? Why?"
"I've been wretched. So upset over Caryll's affair. I hadn't the heart
to face any one. But now it's all quite straightened out, you know, and
I'm so glad for the boy's sake."
"Do tell me what it was," Nina urged. "I heard the mother fell in love
with him and was jealous of the girl."
"No, it wasn't that," was the non-committal reply.
"Odd, but I haven't seen Caryll since we were kiddies. How has he grown?
Handsome?"
"Oh, very. A sweet boy. He'd make any woman happy."
"Then he's a phenomenon. I wish I might have met him."
Waltheof laughed. "He seems to have had trouble enough," he said.
But Sir Caryll Carleigh's troubles weren't over by any means. At the
last minute the wedding invitations were recalled and the presents
returned. A fortnight later his aunt received from him the following
letter, dated from a village in Perthshire:
DEAR AUNT KITTY: I'm up here spearing salmon and all that sort of
thing, don't you know, and trying to forget. It was a beastly
cropper--this wedding mess--and I've gone to pieces over it, for I
did love Rosamond awfully. Such a ripping girl! Twenty thousand a
year in her own right, too, left her by that diamond chap, just for
taking his rotting name. Sounds like a disinfectant or some chemist
stuff to me. Veynol. Pah!
However, she decided at the last minute that she liked it better
than Carleigh, and there you are. And here am I, most fearfully cut
up. I'll never get over it. I jolly well know I sha'n't. It is a
sickener, I can tell you, and I'm thinking strongly of going in for
the church--joining some order or brotherhood or some such silly
old thing.
One thing I am sure of. I'll never look a woman in the face again.
I hate the whole bally lot. Of course, you're not in this, you
know--for you have been a good sort all through. Regular top-hole,
you are. But I mean other women--girls--and all that rubbishy lot.
And now, dearest and best of aunties, I've a favor to ask. This
mess-up, you know, has cost me a pretty penny, and the truth is,
I'm stony. Do send me a tenner by return of post. I'll pay you back
when I sell the engagement ring. It's ripping. It is really.
Your affectionate but heart-broken nephew,
CARYLL.
CHAPTER IX
There's a Lass in Dundee!
Into Nina's flat in Mayfair, one rare August morning, entered Lord
Kneedrock, unannounced. He found her in her little drawing-room
arranging flowers in a vase--flowers not a whit more lovely than
herself.
"Whose?" he asked, nodding toward them. It was his first and only word,
and she had not seen him for two months.
She went him one better--one letter better.
"Mine."
"Who sent them?"
"The florist."
"Who paid for them?"
"Nobody as yet. His bill won't be in until the first of the month."
"Who ordered them?"
"I did. Anything more?" She seemed delighted.
He strode over to an open, awninged window and dropped into an
invitingly cushioned chair. He was still bearded, still rather leonine,
but he was better groomed than in those days in India.
He employed a tailor that was an artist in his craft, and a hair-dresser
that was no less so. After a fashion he was almost attractive.
"I am to infer then that there is no present adoring cavalier."
"No," she answered. "Not since last Friday. He has sailed, I believe, to
offer his services to the Mexican revolutionists."
"Ah!" he leaned back and gazed pensively over his interlocked fingers.
His eyes rested on a bronze in the opposite corner.
"You've never thanked me for that," he said casually.
Nina followed his gaze. "Thanked _you_?" she asked.
"Who else?"
"For the cobra?" For it was the cobra with the history that he continued
to regard.
"For the cobra."
"You mean you were the one that sent it to me? There was no card with
it--no name."
"I picked it up in Calcutta and fancied it might please you. Eve and the
serpent, you know. Rather delicately significant--What?"
She was staring at him, astounded. After all these five years he had
unsealed his lips. She noticed his scarred left hand, recalled the part
that the bronze had played in that, too--and wondered the more.
"Some day," he said in an undertone that had become habitual, "I'll send
you a bronze tigress. That will make the symbolism complete."
"Do--do you so much mind, then?" she asked yieldingly. "I mean about my
amusements."
"Your _one_ amusement?" The sneer, the cynicism was in his tone again.
"Good God, no! Why should I?"
"You seemed to resent it. I--I'll be very good, if you wish."
"I don't wish anything about it. To be candid, it interests me, when I
happen to think of it. You're a type. And I always did like types. The
men you first charm and then devour are types, too--types of the
weakling. They could never win my sympathy."
"No one has ever encouraged me to be different," she said, turning back
to her flowers.
He waited a long moment, his lips parted. Then he said: "No? I dare say
not."
She came to him, a white carnation in her hand, and, bending over,
caught his coat-lapel between thumb and finger. But, noting her
intention, he drew it away.
"No, no," he cried sharply. "Not for me. I am no _petit maitre_."
She was about to retreat abashed, but he gripped her wrist and held it,
and her cheeks flushed crimson. Then he let it go.
"I was looking at the ring," he said. "I see you still wear it."
"I'm still bearing my cross," she returned, "but I've given up hope of
the crown."
"I told you to give it to poor Darling," he reminded her. "It should
have been buried with him."
She made no rejoinder, but stuck the carnation among the gold of her
hair. Almost at the same moment one of the doors was pushed ajar and an
enormous staghound, black to a hair, slipped in and began nuzzling
Nina's hand.
"Another present?" inquired Nibbetts, looking the beast over.
"Yes. A loan rather--my Irish soldier of fortune left Tara with me to
keep his memory green, I fancy."
She patted his head, and into her eyes he looked unutterable things.
"You've bewitched the creature, that's clear," said her caller. He laid
a hand on the hound's back and was answered by a low growl. "Surly
brute!" he added.
"He senses in you his master's rival," she suggested roguishly.
"God forbid!" snarled Kneedrock.
"Tell me about the marmalade maid," Nina begged, sitting down and taking
Tara's head in her lap. "The maid of Dundee."
"I was visiting a man I knew in Tahiti," Nibbetts answered frankly. "And
it happens he has a niece. I ran away from her."
"Why?" Nina asked simply.
"For the best reason in the world," he told her. "I was getting to like
her too well. That's why I'm here this morning. You're a perfectly
incomparable antidote for that sort of thing."
"She's like her marmalade, perhaps--too cloyingly sweet," said Nina,
indifferently.
"Her marmalade?" questioned Nibbetts, his brow knitting.
"Doesn't she make it, then? I can't think of Dundee in any other
connection. Don't all the women there peel oranges?"
"She doesn't." He could be very literal at times.
"What does she do? How in the world does she spend her time?"
"She spends most of it, I fancy, talking to her parrot."
"Her parrot! How odd! Hasn't she any one else to talk to?"
"Only one other--her uncle. And he doesn't understand."
"But the parrot does, I infer?"
"Thoroughly. The Tahitian parrots are very wise little birds."
Nina's laugh rippled. "It talks back, of course."
"Most certainly. One must talk back to her--even if it is only a
parrot."
"And what does she talk about? What do they talk about, I mean?"
The viscount took his time answering. The pause lent emphasis to his
words.
"Of me, mostly, I fancy."
"How dull it must be for them!" Nina observed, and Kneedrock's eyes,
twinkled. He was really amused.
"Mustn't it?" he chuckled. "Damnably! Still, you can see the picture.
Ideal subject for a _genre_ canvas. What?"
"Oh, perfect," agreed Nina, but she didn't smile. She patted the hound's
head and answered the pathetic look in his appealing eyes.
"I'm afraid you've been unkind to her, Hal," she said presently.
"I'm afraid I have," he admitted. "I--" But he thought again and held
his peace.
"Why?" she asked.
"Perforce. As a peer I'm bound to respect the laws of the realm. You
didn't, but I must."
"I thought--But you know what I thought."
"Poor Darling," he said cryptically. Still there was nothing cryptic
about it to Nina. She quite understood.
"I'm very good now," she asserted. "It's hard, but I do try. You must
know how I do try."
"Why don't you keep out of temptation?" he asked, standing up. "Why
don't you run as I do?"
"I've already told you. There's that in me which is too strong for my
will. And the one man that could help me--won't."
He tossed his great tawny head in signal of annoyance. "Tommyrot! You
like it. You've got a cruel streak. That's the whole explanation."
"I haven't," she denied, with rising indignation. "I'm too
tender-hearted. That's half my trouble. When I meet a nice man who is
hungry for my kisses I can't deny him."
"And after you've given you cut his throat or blow his brains out. You
are a national menace. You should be either locked up or banished."
She rose, and the hound beside her pressed against her legs.
"Are you going to Bellingdown?" she inquired, ignoring his outbreak.
"Kitty tells me she has asked you."
"I'm not sure. Are you?"
"Yes--on Thursday."
"Then I'll not," he said decisively. "No house is big enough for both of
us at the same time."
"I'll promise not to eat you," she smiled.
"I'm not afraid of that. You're too devilish careful of your digestion
to undertake it. But you'll be eating some other poor chap; and I don't
enjoy the spectacle."
"But if I promise to fast?"
"I don't believe in your promises. You've broken every one you ever
made me. No, I sha'n't go down. You'll have an open field."
But when Nina traveled down on the appointed day, accompanied by her
maid, the black staghound, and innumerable bags and boxes, Nibbetts was
the first man she met.
"One of the chauffeurs is ill and the other drunk," he explained, "so I
volunteered to fetch you. They'll send a groom down for your luggage
later."
"But I must have a dinner-gown," she complained, "and suppose--"
"We can strap one box on behind, I fancy--if we must."
"We certainly must. I can't pin all my hopes of a presentable first
appearance to a stupid groom's ideas of expediency and expedition."
He offered no explanation of his change of plan, and Nina forbore to ask
him. It developed later, however, that he had already been at
Bellingdown for two days.
The Duke and Duchess of Pemberwell were there, too--as were also Sir
George and Lady Charlotte. Lord Bellingdown was at home for the
shooting, but Waltheof was expected that evening.
"And that's all?" asked Nina, to whom Nibbetts had conveyed this
inclusive _personnel_ of the house-party.
"All at present," he answered. "There may be one or two more to-morrow
for the week-end."
"You don't know who?"
"I don't know who. I'm sorry we can't offer you better sport. The
prospective prey so far is neither numerous nor promising. In decency,
you know, you must keep your paws off Wally."
He was a distant cousin of Kitty Bellingdown and understood the
situation thoroughly.
"I hate that man," said Nina. "Long, black, sardonic creature!"
"That reminds me," said Nibbetts. "What's become of the hound?"
Mrs. Darling glanced back. "He's following. Would you mind driving a
little slower. Tara's out of training."
"You'll be late for tea."
"Bother the tea!" she exclaimed. "I can't have the beast winded. My
soldier of fortune would never forgive me."
Then Kneedrock did something to the gear and the car shot ahead faster
than ever. So they reached the house in ample time, with Tara nowhere in
sight.
"And I'll never be able to replace him," Nina mourned. "The breed's
dying out."
"Like that of good women," growled Nibbetts.
Lady Bellingdown, coming forward in the hall to meet them, overheard:
"Is he ballyragging you again, dear?" she asked, while Nina lifted her
veil for the impending greeting. "He's quite impossible."
"He's ballyragging the sex. We shall have to combine to crush him."
"Women will never combine on anything," was his gruff comment. "They're
too jealous of one another. The fight for suffrage is foredoomed."
Nina and Kitty kissed and said sweet things to each other, and the
viscount turned away with a sneer and a scowl.
"There's always plenty of seed-cake here," whispered the duke, finding a
place beside Nina at tea. "Very good seed-cake, too. Much better than
at Puddlewood. Let me help you to some."
He put a piece on her plate and she leaned over to get something quite
confidential from the duchess, who sat on the end of the lounge nearest
the fire. "Even if I am English I want to be warm," was a _bon mot_ of
her youth, still quoted, and still being lived up to.
"I've the very latest word in the Carleigh affair," she whispered behind
her hand, with a stolen glance toward Lady Bellingdown, who was busy
over the teacups. "Come to my room before dinner and I'll tell you."
Nina nodded, and then the two chattered commonplace for a moment to
throw off suspicion. When Nina sat up again her seed-cake was gone and
the duke was chuckling.
"But where is it?" she asked, perplexity in her violet eyes.
His grace pointed to the floor at her farther side. Tara was lying
there. "He's yours, I suppose. He took the seed-cake at a gulp. Fine
staghound that. I had a pair like him once. I say, Doody, didn't I have
a fine pair of black staghounds once?"
"Yes, Pucketts." That was the duke's nickname from the cradle.
"Everything's foxhounds nowadays. But when I was younger," he went
on--and on--and on.
Nina, delighted to see the animal once more, was caressing his long ears
and mumbling baby-talk to him.
In the privacy of the guest-suite she occupied the duchess smoked one
cigarette after another and told Nina Darling that it was Sir Caryll
himself who had broken the engagement at the last minute, and not the
prospective mother-in-law, as the world had it.
"But why? I thought he was madly in love with the girl."
"Oh, he was. But you see he learned something in a most accidental way,
and when he asked Rosamond about it, she confirmed it with perfect
candor. It seems her own father--Mrs. Veynol's first husband--is a
convict. He is still in prison somewhere in the States.
"The whole story--without names, of course, but going just as far as
they dared go--appeared last week in _British Society_. I don't take the
scurrilous sheet, of course; but my maid does, and she gave it to me to
read. I've been wondering if Kitty saw it."
"Perhaps it isn't true," Nina suggested.
"It must be. That's one thing about those wicked society papers--they're
almost always right. Otherwise they wouldn't dare, don't you know. It's
that that makes them so objectionable."
Nina left her great-aunt and flew to her own room with barely time to
dress. There she found her hostess, already in full dinner regalia,
awaiting her.
"I felt I must see you at once, dear," began Lady Bellingdown. "I've
such a favor to ask you. You can do something for me now that I shall
never forget as long as I live. And I don't know a solitary other woman
that could do it."
Nina's suspicions ran at once to Lord Waltheof.
"If it's--" she began--but was checked instantly.
"You could never possibly fancy. It isn't anything you'd think. It's
about Caryll Carleigh."
"About Caryll Carleigh?"
"Yes. He's been in Scotland, you know, practically buried, and growing
worse--more morose, more heart-sick every day. He's had a fearful
knocking down, and I've been worried about him--no end."
"Well?" pressed Nina, groping. She couldn't in the least see what she
had--or could have--to do with it all.
"I want you to take him in hand--to make him forget."
"I! But how?"
"Here. He's coming. I've just had a wire. He has already started. He
will be here to-morrow for tea."
Nina hesitated for just a second. "I--I'll do my best," she said at
length.
CHAPTER X
A Prayer and a Prophecy
"Poor darling!" sighed the duchess.
The hall was forty feet wide, eighty feet long, and fifty feet high. It
was banked with palms and chrysanthemums and with Michaelmas daisies in
silver pots. Yet the words echoed.
"You mean--" questioned Kneedrock, frowning.
The electricity behind a million prisms up aloft was well shaded, and
the six dozen candles amid the pictures and bric-a-brac were
half-smothered in pink frills. Moreover, Kneedrock had just come in and
was still some distance off. Yet the frown was clearly seen.
"Oh, I didn't mean Darling. I didn't mean Darling at all," the duchess
corrected quickly.
"We--we were speaking of Caryll," explained Lady Bellingdown, her hand
upon the teapot's handle. "We're all thinking of him, you know. He'll be
here now--any minute."
"I don't see why you asked him," growled Kneedrock roughly, as was a
cousin's privilege. "He'll get no comfort here."
"Nina, remember," reminded the duchess, very interested in her bread and
butter.
Then the noble viscount growled at her grace. "He'll get no comfort out
of Nina. She'll chew him up alive and throw back the bones, as a snake
does."
"Oh dear!" put in Lady Kitty deprecatingly. "You're always so hard upon
her."
"It's Nibbetts's way," soothed the duchess, looking very kindly at him.
In spite of a lingering unkemptness, he was indeed a fine object to
view--massive and leonine. "He always puts things a bit boldly."
"Boldly?" he echoed. "Ugh! Why, the fellow, you know, is all knocked up.
Can't go anywhere. Has been off spearing fish for a month, quite alone.
And then you ask him here and throw him to Nina's teeth and claws. Ha!"
A minute before the comparison was ophidian, now it was feline. He was
nearly as bad as Dinghal.
The duke, who was sitting in a corner of the huge lounge, very much
hunched up and nibbling seed-cake as fast as his little, lean jaws would
work, spoke defensively between nibbles.
"Maybe she'll amuse him," he said thickly, his mouth full. "Nina's very
amusing when she likes. She's often made me laugh. I like Nina."
"I think she's a very delightful young woman," joined in the duchess, in
order that her allegiance to her great-niece might not be open to
question. "We shall have her at Puddlewood this autumn. We always have
her at Puddlewood."
"And she makes life very interesting. Yes, she does," added the duke
before taking a fresh nibble. "I always like her to come. Don't I,
Doody?"
The duchess hastened with the required confirmation.
"Yes, Pucketts always has liked--" But there her grace stopped short.
There was a slight noise at the end of the hall, and the attention of
every one was at once directed toward the door. It was a fact that the
entire party was on the tiptoe of expectancy. Every soul there was
speculating on how Carleigh would look and how he would act.
"No," said Lady Bellingdown, speaking in the assured tone of one who
knows--and yet she had paused to listen, too--"that will not be he. I
heard carriage wheels a minute ago. But we've sent a car for him."
She glanced nervously about. "Really, you know," she added, "you mustn't
all stare so when he does come in. You must treat him absolutely as if
nothing had happened. He is so frightfully sensitive, you know."
"I should think he would be," observed Nibbetts, lounging suddenly down
on a settee and speaking in his usual resonant tone that was distinctly
audible far and near. "I should think he would be."
"It was really her mother," said Charlotte Gray, who hadn't read
_British Society_ and was not in the duchess's confidence. "It was all
her mother. It's a very shocking story. It's Borgian. It's Medicean.
It's not a bit our present Georgian. Not in the least."
She was looking at Kneedrock, but she was talking for her own amusement,
since every one knew all this, and she must have been aware of it.
"It's better not to talk of it," cautioned Lady Bellingdown, by way of
gentle rebuke. "Donty feels that it will be wisest not to speak of it
while the poor boy is in the house."
Whereupon Lord Waltheof, from his customary place behind her chair,
voicing his somewhat superior knowledge of affairs at Bellingdown, said:
"He's going early Monday. It won't be a very long strain."
"Going early Monday, is he?" queried the duke, nibbling faster than
ever. "That won't help much. We're all going early Monday, too."
The door at the far end of the hall opened just then to admit Sir George
Grey--a handsome, slight boyish fellow, with curling chestnut hair.
"Oh, it's Shucks!" cried Charlotte, setting down her teacup and running
forward to meet her husband, of whom, being still a bride, she was
extremely fond.
"Those were the carriage wheels," discerned the duke, cutting into
another seed-cake while his hostess was over behind the palms for a word
with the newcomer. "They were Grey's wheels, Doody," he elucidated to
the duchess, who was back toward him at the moment. "They were Grey's
wheels."
"I hear," said the duchess.
The footman was bringing fresh tea.
"I'm late," said Sir George, coming around to the fire. "Hello,
Nibbetts!"
Then he nodded generally to the others. "I got shot in the back," he
went on jovially, "and they had to undress me. And then I had to dress
again, of course."
"Who shot you?" asked Lady Bellingdown, with the well-bred interest of a
well-bred hostess. "Were you badly shot?"
When gentlemen go shooting, to be shot is so common that no one very
much minds. Even Sir George's wife, loving him as she did, managed to
preserve a stoical silence. To have appeared upset would have been very
bad form.
"I don't know," answered the victim. "I don't know who shot me. I was
ahead with Donty Down, and I heard Donty yell, and then--there I was
peppered. He vows he saw the shot coming."
"How amusing!" cried the duke, delighted. "It is amusing. Donty's always
funny."
"Was he shot, too?" asked Donty's wife.
"No, he--"
The door creaked beyond and the butler came tumbling forward to whisper:
"Sir Caryll Carleigh."
Then he was really there before them--the hero of the biggest harvest of
talk in recent years.
There had been nothing like it since the memorable day when Nina came
back from India under the protection of her cousin, the viscount, and
every one had a different version of everything.
He was very pale, a slender, brown-eyed youth with his underlip
twitching nervously. To all appearances he was quite scared. Still, he
certainly was really there.
Naturally there was a flutter--a perfectly visible flutter--for had it
not been repeatedly and authoritatively stated that this love-wreck
would never be repaired and float in his own especial "swim" again?
Grenfell and the icy coast of Labrador perhaps, or a government berth in
Manchuria--but never home society again. Never, never!
And now he was here. His aunt, Lady Bellingdown, hurried forward, her
hands extended.
"My dear Caryll! _So_ glad to see you again. You know every one here,
I'm sure. We're all _so_ glad to see you. _So_ glad, you know."
He bent and kissed her hand very prettily. Then he bravely cast his big,
dark eyes over the rest of the group, taking them all in, individually
as well as collectively.
He knew them, every one. Yes, they were all kinsfolk or friends, whose
wedding presents he had returned a month before.
It was a trying pair of seconds, through which the duke's seed-cake
cheeped like a canary.
"Did you come straight from town?" Waltheof asked in a carefully
careless tone. Then he remembered. Very stupid of him; but now too late
to mend.
He was standing back to the fire, and the violent agitation of his
coat-tails, beneath which his hands were locked, was to the observant
ones sign and symbol of his embarrassment.
"I've been in Scotland for a month," returned Carleigh, coloring deeply
and seeking a seat.
Every one felt that it was unpardonable in Waltheof to have said "town"
to the man who was the center of its talk.
"Oh, Scotland!" exclaimed the duke, as if the fact that the boy had been
there was the very remotest thing from his knowledge. "Very amusing
place, Scotland. Lovely place, too, Scotland. We went there on our
honeymoon. I say, Doody, that was where we went, wasn't it?"
The duchess looked daggers at her duke. Fancy having a husband so lost
to the fitness of things as to mention honeymoons in the presence of one
who might have been on his at the moment--but wasn't!
"One goes there for the shooting now," she said, to ease the blow. "You
always go there for the shooting."
"Not the last time," denied his grace; "it was the closed season--the
last time." Then he took another piece of cake.
The duchess didn't quite know whether mention of the closed season was
or was not painfully pertinent. "Scotland's so gray," she said in a
confidential aside to Waltheof.
Lady Bellingdown was looking beseechingly here and there, praying for
some one to say something. It was Kneedrock who responded.
"I hate Scotland," he growled. "I know a girl up there that--" He broke
off, leaving them to think anything, and concluded: "I wish I could keep
away from the bally place."
Then Lady Bellingdown wished that he hadn't. It was positively awful!
Everybody looked at everybody in furtive consternation. Her hand
trembled and she spilled Carleigh's tea all over.
He had risen in expectation of nourishment and was standing beside her.
With a frozen smile, as she changed saucers, she gasped:
"Nina is here. You remember her, don't you? She's a widow now, you know.
Very sweet, very bright. Extremely good company."
"Was she happily married?" Caryll asked, trying to look unconcerned.
"Why--er-r--I don't know. They went out to India, and he was killed in
an accident. Cleaning a gun, you know. It was never very clear how it
happened. Nobody ever knew. She's in half-mourning still."
"They were _not_ happy," contributed Kneedrock in his resounding
undertone. Then he lounged close. "I know," he added sharply. "She's a
tiger come human, and Darling was her prey--some of her prey."
Lady Bellingdown was trying to laugh, though not very successfully.
"What awful things you say, Nibbetts!" she sighed.
Carleigh stared in silence.
"It's true," the viscount pursued. "She's a reincarnated man-eater. She
likes to take chaps and tear them and maul them and drive the souls out
of them with pats that they're too far gone to feel!"
Every one was listening. Carleigh's pallor had gone white as paper. But
it was the whiteness of intense interest rather than of alarm.
"Oh, I say!" exclaimed the duke, swallowing hurriedly. "I say,
Kneedrock! What you mean is that she's uncommonly amusing. That's so,
and that's all you mean. Only you put it a bit strongly. But that's what
you mean."
Nibbetts shrugged his broad, heavy shoulders.
"Have it your own way," he grumbled. "I know what I mean, and I know
what I know. You just watch her eyes get narrow, and then you wait a
month. They narrow when a new man appears; and in a month she's licking
his blood from her paws!"
"Oh, how very rude you are!" Lady Bellingdown chided. "Really, you know,
I won't have it. You sha'n't say another word. No, I won't have it!"
Carleigh looked down at his tea. A queer flush had succeeded the
pallor--a flush of still livelier interest to which Kneedrock's remarks
had stung him.
He wondered what a reincarnated tigress would be like. A pleasant thrill
charged through him for the first time in quite five weeks.
And just then the door at the end of the hall opened and Nina Darling
trod lightly in. She had been walking and still had on her hat--a hat of
yellow felt with cocks' plumes sifting backward.
In her hand she carried a man's walking-stick, and by her side stalked a
great black staghound.
Sir Caryll took her all in instantly. And remembering the reference to
half-mourning, wondered whether it was expressed in the hound. Certainly
there was no other sign, for her frock was a pale tan frieze and her
boots were but a shade darker.
"I am very late," she cried, and her clear voice rang across them like a
bell. "But I am forgivable. I found the quaintest little church, and I
have been praying. Yes, only fancy! I've been down on my knees begging
not to do wrong, because--" she looked at them all and laughed--"because
I feel just like doing wrong and I don't want to."
"You'll do it," snarled Kneedrock, _sotto-voce_.
"You know Caryll Carleigh, don't you, dear?" asked Lady Bellingdown.
She turned her big violet eyes his way, and he, watching eagerly, saw
them fold to slits, just as Kneedrock had said. And Kneedrock saw them,
too.
"And you prayed to be kept from mischief, eh?" he mused. "But of course
you didn't mean it."
She crossed to Carleigh's side and sat down there. "And I prayed for
others, too," she told him. "For you." With a laugh. "You need it; don't
you?"
"I need it," he answered shortly. "Yes, surely."
She pulled off her heavy gloves and gave them, with the stick, to the
staghound, which walked gravely away at once.
"Did you walk far?" Lady Bellingdown asked.
"Rather. To the Pine Needles."
"Why, that's twelve miles," said Lord Waltheof.
"Perhaps."
Carleigh stared more frankly at her--at her head of gold, her brow of
fairest ivory, set with gems of living amethyst beneath; at her long,
sinuous figure, which suggested Lilith and the medieval conception of an
angel as well.
When she lifted her eyes to him and smiled, he realized that it was the
first really natural smile that he had encountered in a month.
Something cold within him warmed once more. The feminine then still held
that which could affect him. His heart, after all, was not utterly dead.
He returned the smile, and the slits grew yet more narrow. And as they
had seemed to young Andrews, on a night at Simla, and to Heaven only
knows how many other men at Heaven only knows how many other places, so
they seemed to him--cleft opals, with the devil splitting the hairs of
the lashes that kept them from scorching a mere masculine mortal.
"I remember you as a little girl," he murmured.
"First blood," said Kneedrock, who had been listening, in a half-whisper
to the duke.
"Yes, but you know she'll brace him up," returned his grace. "She really
will. My word, but she's very bracing, is Nina. I like her. I always
have."
"He'll be very glad to creep back, scratched and minus one ear, and
marry his fiancee in six months," rejoined the honorable viscount with
bitter cynicism.
"Do you really think so?" asked the duke.
"Think so! I know it," yawned Kneedrock. "She doesn't care who rattles
the bones, once she's had the meat."
CHAPTER XI
Things One Shouldn't Say
When the men came in after dinner that evening Mrs. Darling sat alone in
a huge red satin _causeuse_; one of those queer, hard, tufted royal
things that fashion pitched in among the wigs and powder of one past
period.
She wore a gown of gray gauze with bands of beaded and jeweled fringe at
corsage and knees. Few women can wear gray. Nina could, and did.
The other women were grouped near, talking, but not with her. They had
not shunted her; but she had gone apart and sat so. It was her way when
the time for the reappearance of the men drew near. Nobody misconstrued.
They all understood.
"And yet, how she does make a party go, you know!" whispered her hostess
to the duchess. "She's really quite wonderful at it."
"I like her," confessed the duchess. "She's such nice lines about her
waist, too, hasn't she?"
"Y-yes," faltered Lady Bellingdown, "she's quite a picture. I do wish
Nibbetts wouldn't pitch into her so. It's very nasty of him."
"But Caryll will never believe what he says," the duchess offered
comfortingly. "Men never do."
As she spoke the doors slid apart and the six men straggled in in
procession, scattering slowly like a flock of settling birds. Each
married man tried to avoid his wife and rather missed the mark.
Caryll Carleigh walked to where Mrs. Darling sat, circled her and took
the other end of the red tufted thing that was made for two. She just
smiled.
All the rest began to talk at once. The air warmed with: "They made it a
point to drive through once a year and preserve the right of way--" "He
said: 'Don't hurry!' but she took it and the branch caught her and
carried her off--" "Oh, no, it wasn't that winter; it was when I was in
Malta--" and so on, and so on.
Sir Caryll lifted his eyes and lowered his voice. "Do you know, I was
sure my heart was dead. I was certain of it. But now I begin to doubt."
She smiled still, staring straight before her.
"Do look at me," he pleaded. "Your eyes are so wonderful. Like an
elixir. They give me back all that I have lost. Do look at me."
"Do you know," she asked, complying with his request, "that I'm
considered a very bad woman?"
"I don't believe it."
"Oh, but I am. You ask Lord Kneedrock. He'll tell you. He has a hash
about a reincarnated tiger that he tells every one. He calls my hands
claws."
She looked down at her hands then and Caryll's gaze followed hers. They
were wonderful hands, every finger a psychic index.
"Some day I'll let you hold one for a little," she said, moving them
slightly. "You can judge for yourself what they're like then."
He was conscious of the most curious of thrills. It coursed through him
from head to toes. It stimulated him, wonderfully. It redoubled his
courage.
"Adieu, ordinary rules!" his heart cried. "To the front and fire!" And
his voice said: "Has Kneedrock ever held them?"
"Oh, yes. Ever so many have. I'm making a study of holding hands. Some
men keep boring into your palm with their thumb, and some like to grind
all your knuckle-bones together, crosswise. They never seem to think how
the woman may feel."
"I fancy, under such circumstances, if I were you, I should say
something," said Sir Caryll, laughing.
She looked at him, seriously. "What, for instance?"
"'Oh, you hurt! Let go!'"
"I'll try to remember," she said, without a smile. "You think that is
better than just bearing it?"
"Yes. Unless you like it."
"Oh, I never like it. I grew weary of it long ago. Men are all so
dreadfully alike. Unless you are going to be different, I--Are you going
to be different?"
"I'm heart-broken," said Carleigh, not quite seriously. "Perhaps that
constitutes a difference."
"I know exactly how it feels to be heart-broken." She nodded wisely.
"You feel that it will kill you; but it doesn't. The third day one takes
pudding, as usual."
"Tell me," he pleaded suddenly, "did you love your husband?"
"Oh, no," she answered with emphasis. "What a stupid question!"
"What went on before he died?"
She laughed. "Lots," was her laconic answer.
"Were you very lonely?"
"No. I had compensation."
He felt a violent throb through all his veins.
"A lover?" he asked boldly.
Instantly her eyes came to his. "You really do think bad of me, then?"
Her tone was reproachful. "You think that when I said people considered
me a very bad woman they meant baddest bad, and that they considered
right?"
"No," he corrected. "I didn't stop to think. What I said just jumped
into my head. I'm curious about you--that's all."
"I'm not going to tell you my story," she declared. "You ask Kneedrock.
He'll tell you that I shot my husband to marry another man, and that the
other man begged to be excused. Kneedrock's very entertaining when he
begins to be confidential about me."
"How can you joke about such things?"
"I joke about everything. It's my way of getting on."
"But such an awful tale!"
"Oh, dreadful!" she said, easily.
He felt a bit uncertain and his laugh showed it. "The other man was an
idiot," he told her.
"Quite so," she assented.
There was a movement among the others. They were going to have bridge.
All had risen and their backs were turned. Quickly he laid his hand upon
hers. Then:
"Oh, how you interest me!" he exclaimed, below his breath. "You've had a
bad time, too. I know it. I feel it. You'll tell me, and I'll tell you,
and there'll be something in the world I'll care about again. You see, I
thought--I really was sure--that all the caring about things had been
killed in me forever."
Her hand was quiet beneath the throbbing of his own. He had a singular
hand for a man--one of those rare hands that pale and flush, that shiver
and burn.
It burned now, but hers had no responding heat or throb. If his quivered
with a passionate call for some response, the response came not. He had
to recognize that no sleeping ardor stirred to the call of his caress.
But her eyelids drooped lower and lower until her lashes lay close
against her cheeks, and then as he looked--and longed--he saw suddenly
with an ecstatic thrill of surprise and delight that tears shone among
them.
"You feel--something?" he murmured breathlessly. "What?"
"I feel for you," she answered. "You are so young. How old are you? Do
you mind telling me?"
Certainly he had not expected that answer. "I am twenty-six," he said.
"But why?"
"Twenty-six!" Her eyes were still closed. "I am thirty," she said
softly. "That is why."
He felt quite bewildered; in a maze as to her meaning. "I know you've
had a bad time, too," he said again. "You'll tell me all about it, won't
you? Don't join the bridge crowd. They'll be playing there for hours,
and we can sit here and have ourselves to ourselves. Do! Do! I want to
know such a lot, and you'll tell me all."
She drew her hand gently away. "Will I?" she whispered. "Will I,
truly?"
He seized her hand a second time, "Yes--yes, you will. You're going to
be so kind--so good--to me. You're going to let me have your trouble to
think of instead of mine. I'm so tired of the ceaseless agony of mine. I
didn't do anything, you know. 'Fore God, I didn't do anything. It was
all a plot, and now they've ruined her life and mine. Perhaps it was a
plot with you, too."
"No," she breathed. "With me it was a plan."
"Never mind the difference," he protested. "They say, you know, that I
was in love with the mother. I wasn't. Really, I wasn't. But they told
her and the engagement was broken. It was all the most horrible thing
imaginable. You'll hear it on all sides.
"Of course no one would believe that story about you, but every one
believes the one about me. They haven't ruined you, but they have ruined
me. And then people think that Scotland should have helped me." He
paused, quite pale, his voice shaking.
His hand had closed harder and harder on hers, and now he drew it
nearer. When he had pressed it between both of his own for a long
minute, he felt a painful point within his palm, and, freeing her, he
looked. On her third finger sparkled a diamond cross.
It was a great, awkward thing to be attached to a ring, although lovely
enough in itself. The cross had marked his flesh. He turned her hand and
saw that the ring was shaped and carven like a crown--a crown with
points.
"The cross and the crown?" he questioned then. "Your own design?"
"His mother's," she said, still with closed eyes. "If I had been his
wife it would have been mine. But as I can never be his wife he gave it
to me to wear--because I loved him."
"The man who backed out?" Carleigh asked.
"The same man," she made answer.
"Stupid idiot!"
"With all my heart."
With which she opened her eyes and rose abruptly.
"You are very young," she said in the most casual of tones. "Oh, dear,
but you are so very young. When you've gone further on in life you'll
know that very few of those that really love can ever marry. I almost
think that it is the first sign of a great love to be separated. And a
good thing too. It leaves one one's dreams."
The tone startled him, but the matter of her speech suited. She moved
toward the fire. Kneedrock stood there, facing the chimney-piece.
"What are you doing?" she asked him, gaily. "Have you stopped playing?"
"They don't want me just now," he said.
Carleigh felt annoyed; but he followed close after her.
"We were talking of such interesting things," she went on, still
addressing the viscount's back.
"I dare say. What for instance?" he asked, without turning.
"I've told Sir Caryll that you will tell him all of my story," she
pursued, ignoring the question. "You will--won't you?"
"The whole of it?"
"Yes."
"I hope that it will interest him more than it does me."
"If it bores you to repeat it, you needn't," said Nina, gently. "But it
is rather dramatic, you know. I mean that night, and all that happened."
"Poor Darling!" muttered Kneedrock.
Carleigh felt most uncomfortable.
"Nibbetts was there, you know," she explained tranquilly. "He was always
a friend of the family."
"We're first cousins," said the viscount shortly.
"And once--once, in India--he fought for my good name," she continued,
easily.
"The good name of the family," the cousin corrected--unnecessarily it
seemed to Sir Caryll.
"It came to the same thing," she added.
Carleigh wished that the other man would go back to the game and thus
end this bewilderingly frank conversation. And the next instant he did,
and they two were alone again.
"You _have_ had a hard time," he said, quickly. "I fancy I ought to know
all about the story, Mrs. Darling, but I don't. I haven't any
connections in the army. We are all diplomatic people. It's very stupid
in us, I suppose."
"Not quite that," she returned. "I've sometimes thought that we are
stupid to go in for the army so strongly. But it is all an affair of
blood and bigness, I imagine."
He laughed. "Blood and bigness," he repeated. "How cleverly you put it!
And with us it is--"
"Brains and littleness," she cut in.
Then he laughed again, outright. So outright that those at the tables
heard, threw up their heads, listened, and then bowed their heads
again, masking significant smiles.
"There is no one like Nina," Lady Bellingdown commented under her
breath.
"Oh, he is saved, if you mean that," Sir George declared lightly.
"I told you so," reminded the duke, proudly. "I said: 'Nina will wake
him up.' She always wakes everybody up. She says what you wouldn't think
she'd say, and it wakes one up most uncommonly."
And they went forward with their game. For that matter so did Mrs.
Darling and Carleigh.
"Are you stopping here for long?" he asked.
"For as long as I can stand it."
"You mean--"
She clasped her hands behind her head and gazed intently into the very
soul of the embers. "I mean that I soon choke and stifle in the close
air of man. I am happier alone."
Freshly startled, he stared afresh. "It's always bad, then?" he asked
sympathetically. "You don't get over it?"
"It's always bad." She paused a second or more, and then turned toward
him, her eyes narrowed in that characteristic style which Kneedrock had
described so harshly.
"But it is glorious, all the same," she cried with an odd little soft
rapture. "You haven't come to that yet. You've not gone on to where one
fights for the mere joy of loving love, in life, as one fights for
breath in a suffocating pit. Why shouldn't I love to love? I love to do
it. I love it all. I'd double the stakes at every loss, if I could. Do
you follow me?"
"N-no," stammered Sir Caryll, a trifle stunned by the sudden shock of a
boomerang idea. "N-no--I--er--I--"
"But you will to-morrow," she declared, nodding at him. "You will
to-morrow. I'll go first and you'll follow."
"Oh, if you mean that--"
"I never give up," she asserted. "I never will--"
"Does it look hopeless?" he broke in, laughing.
"I will tell you that to-morrow."
"When to-morrow?"
"We'll get off an hour before luncheon. I'll be down here waiting for
you at a quarter to twelve precisely."
"You'll find _me_ waiting," said Carleigh, smiling.
CHAPTER XII
The Joy of Interest
The next morning the sun soared radiant. Carleigh, handed his stick by
his valet, was conscious, too, of a personal soaring radiance: a
condition so unusual and unexpected that it metaphorically struck him in
the face.
"Oh, no," he reminded his lovelornity with emphasis, "it cannot possibly
be!" Yet he knew joy to be all over him.
Not even the fourteen rare old engravings of early Christian martyrs and
their martyrdom, with which the corridor was cheerfully embellished,
could dampen his bubbling gaiety.
One cannot, indeed, take much interest in hangings and burnings and
other tortures when one is going to have an hour alone in the open with
a pretty woman who says things that--as the duke put it--you wouldn't
think she would.
In the hall below he found the great black staghound--sole symbol of her
mourning--waiting in majestic solitude beside a chair that bore a
slender switch of a cane and a rough gray Burberry.
Mrs. Darling, herself, was not there; but the hound, the cane, and the
coat--the morning being cold--showed that she had not forgotten her
appointment.
Carleigh strolled over to the fire and lighted a cigarette. He felt so
delightedly content. Presently his hostess swept quickly in from
another room and nodded at him with the good cheer that no one had of
late dared exhibit before him.
"You're going out with Nina," she said, evidently well-posted. "We're
all driving to lunch with the men in the open. Can't you and she find
your way there, too?"
"We'll try, but don't wait for us," he answered, really blithely.
Then it abruptly rushed over him how much he had been eased of his pain
in these few hours, and he went up and kissed Lady Bellingdown's cheek
impulsively, with: "Oh, Aunt Kitty! When will you have a spare minute
for me, alone? I've such a lot to tell you."
In his way he was as uncontrolled as Nina, and quite as given to
bursting forth in unwary speech.
"Tell it all to her, dear boy," she advised, looking up into his flushed
brightness. "She's such a sweet, sympathetic woman. And she'll help you.
She helps every man. She has wonderful ways with her."
"You recommend her as a confidante?"
"Yes, indeed."
"But why, aunt? Why?"
"Oh, she has a way with her that brings men out of themselves. I don't
know just what it is, because I'm a woman, and she never has it with
women. But I know that she has it. She was always like that. And then
she grew more so after her marriage. There was a while when no one knew
just what the end would be, but she pulled through quite straight."
"There was a story?"
"When a woman is magnetic, my dear Caryll, there is always a story."
"Who will tell it me?"
"She will, if you ask her, I fancy."
He smiled again. "I am so interested. If you knew the relief--the
rest--the absolute joy of feeling an interest in something again!"
"I know, dear boy. It's been bad. But Nina will help you. She helps
every one. Ah, here she is now!"
And she was; tall and withy as a willow-wand; more wondrous, it seemed
to Caryll, by daylight than nightlight, because more clearly seen.
"Good-morning! Good-morning!" she cried, a hand to each. "What a
glorious day! The bang-bang of the guns woke lazy me; but I thanked
Heaven that I was a woman and went to sleep again directly."
Lady Bellingdown laughed, and kissing her hand to both, vanished quickly
through a curtained archway opposite.
Then Mrs. Darling all at once altered. First she glanced at Carleigh,
and then at the floor. "Have you been waiting long?" she queried.
"Hours," he declared, gloating over her confusion. He picked up the coat
and offered her the cane. With a quick, fleeting smile, she took both;
and then they were off; the funereal Tara at their heels.
Across the Italian garden they went, and then across the Dutch garden,
and the French garden to the genuine English park. When their feet
clapped gaily on the smooth, sodden mosaic of leaves, he turned to her,
exclaiming:
"Life has become suddenly full again for me. I am really happy. And yet
this time yesterday I was a misanthrope--a blighted creature. Think of
that! It is your witchcraft."
But she shook her head.
"No," she contradicted firmly. "Not my doing at all. Manlike you wish to
attribute all good and evil to some cause. But as a matter of fact you
were already cured. I am but the 'top-stones of the corner.'"
"No, no, not at all," he denied gravely. "I was blighted, I--"
"Then you are blighted still," she declared. "What has happened is that
you are just enough intoxicated to forget for a little. I've benumbed
you. That's all."
"I beg to differ."
"Differ to beggary, if you will. Nevertheless, I know. I know I am
right."
"I am divinely happy. I--" he began again. But she went on unheeding:
"We shall flirt, you and I, and we shall go pretty far. But we shall not
fall in love and we shall not marry, because of two very excellent
reasons."
"And they are?"
"A man and a woman."
"What woman? What man?"
She tossed her head in a way that might have signified anything.
"You mean that we love others--you and I?" he hazarded.
She laughed distractingly.
"Perhaps you love," he pursued. "But I am heart-free."
She walked on in silence.
"I don't ask the name of the man, for that's your affair. But no woman
lives who can stand in the way of my bolting with you or marrying you if
I choose."
"You are very positive," she said at length. "What if I am the woman and
you are the man?"
For a second or two he stared blankly. "Oh," he said, crestfallen. "I
see. Thanks!"
"Don't let us discuss such serious subjects as ourselves," she proposed.
"Look at the sky and the swans--but be careful not to slip--and
recollect that forgetfulness was the nectar upon which the gods
subsisted."
"Quite so. There!" He squared his shoulders, but he looked at neither
the sky nor the swans. He looked directly at her.
"I suppose I have just proposed to you and been refused; but, after all,
what does it matter? Already I have forgotten the trifling episode. I've
drunk of the gods' nectar. It saves one's reason occasionally. Because I
have been able to forget, I have been able to live."
"You deserve the cross for heroism," she said. "I think you are
wonderful."
He colored becomingly. "Spare my modesty," he pleaded. Then: "Look here!
Now that we're quite alone, tell me your story."
"Tell me yours first."
"Oh, mine's so very hideous. But I don't mind telling you. My fiancee's
mother, who had been out of the country for years, came back to find her
little girl grown up, so she--well, she managed to break it all off--"
His voice slipped a note, and, turning, she saw that his face was
working.
"I can't tell you more," he said, with a choke. "I'm not as brave as I
thought. I can't help remembering. You'll find plenty to tell you that I
loved the mother. She wasn't very old, you know."
"Why didn't you marry her?"
At her question he stopped short in the path.
"What's the matter?" she asked, turning.
"Why, I never thought of that way out," he answered, going white and red
alternately.
"What a funny man you are!" cried Nina, startled. "Perhaps you will
marry the mother yet. How old is she?"
"About thirty-seven."
"And rich?"
"Oh, yes. She's an American." As if riches and Americans were
synonymous.
"Better marry her."
"I like you better just at present," returned Carleigh.
"Thanks, awfully. But I've told you what woman will stand in the way of
your serious views about me. Besides, I'd never dare risk such a man as
you. Everything will right itself, some day."
"Nothing can be right ever."
"Never?"
"Never."
"Ah, you've not told me all the story then?"
"Of course not. I never shall. I never can."
For a few steps they walked on in silence.
"Do tell me your--your story," he faltered. "Tell me what you can--what
you'd like to."
"My story? My stories, you mean. I'm all stories." And she laughed her
merry laugh.
"But _the_ story?"
"Oh, _the_ story!" She paused for the space of a heart-beat, and her
eyes were serious. "Even that began with my birth," she continued. "It's
rather long, you see, to tell on a short walk. It's a war story. I was
born to battle; and not being a man, and medieval, was appointed to
eternal combat with myself."
"With victory for the prize," he suggested.
She thought for a second; then dropped her head. "I don't know. No one
can tell. Perhaps--perhaps not."
"But you can tell me some of it--me," he insisted.
"But it's so hopeless," she said wearily. "And you're really too young
to know what I mean when I talk. Then, too, it's such a horrid story.
Just as yours is, you know.
"Mixed love and straight-out killing haven't been respectable since the
time when Catherine de' Medici shoved every pleasant way of getting on
under a cloud. How I do wish I had lived when you could kill a man by
shaking hands! If that were possible now, I know what I'd do to lots of
men."
"What?" asked Carleigh, quickly.
"I'd never shake hands any more. I'd kiss them all instead. It would be
so humane and blameless--and nice."
He felt all the blood in him bound out of his heart to meet her whimsy.
"You darling!" he cried ecstatically. "What could be nicer? A fig for
your tragedies. We'll just flirt--and--and--"
He seized her and was drawing her into a close embrace. His face was
scarlet, his pupils distended.
"The guns are just there on the hill," she said, ever so calmly. "Better
wait!"
Carleigh released her with reluctance, but his expanded pupils were
still devouring her.
"I _am_ a new man," he whispered passionately. "Darling, oh, darling!
I'm so glad I came."
Neither of them saw the tall form of Lord Kneedrock, who, at a little
distance stood watching them, a bitterly satirical smile upon his lips.
CHAPTER XIII
Surprises for the Broken-Hearted
A little beyond, the forty beaters stood huddled together like a pack of
hounds.
The head-keeper, that personage of indescribable majesty and humility,
was consulting with Bellingdown, who looked very anxious.
The duke was taking a last sip and a nibble, while his hostess begged
him not to hurry. All the rest were lighting cigarettes.
"You smoke, of course," Carleigh was asking Mrs. Darling.
"Of course."
"Shall I give you a light?"
"Thanks."
"I stick to a pipe," said Kneedrock, dragging one out of his huge,
shapeless pocket.
"It is a nice thing," volunteered the duke. "I often smoke one at home.
I say, Doody, don't I often smoke a pipe at home?"
"Yes, he does," the duchess verified. "He smokes one all the time at
Puddlewood."
"Shall we join the guns?" Lady Bellingdown asked, rising and addressing
the women generally.
"I can't," refused Charlotte Grey. "I can't see things killed. Sometimes
they cry out, and it makes me dreadfully ill."
Bellingdown turned about with a worried air. "Here, Greggy, what do you
say? Hemmings thinks the spinney there to the left. I'd thought only of
Daggs Farm, and so on by the mill."
Sir George, whom they called "Greggy," looked as if the whole of the Far
East was hanging on his nod. He silently considered.
"I tell m'lud that the spinney's quite fresh, sir," said Hemmings,
touching his cap respectfully. "M'lud saw a fine bag off there last
year, sir."
"What do _you_ say?" pleaded Lord Bellingdown, quite visibly agitated.
The other men gathered about, all obviously perturbed.
"Hand me my field-glasses," commanded Sir George. "My man has them."
Sir George's man, carrying Sir George's two guns, came hurriedly forward
with Sir George's field-glasses. Every one pressed close and glanced
back and forth between the baronet and the spinney, which was an
exceedingly ordinary spinney with some fir-trees beyond.
The owner of the field-glasses raised them, adjusted them, lowered them,
readjusted them, raised them again and took a long look.
"I should toss up for it," he decided, without deciding.
"What an old fool he is!" the duchess observed confidentially into the
ear of Charlotte Grey, who started visibly.
"Who do you mean?" asked Lady Grey sharply.
Then the duchess started, too.
"I thought you were Nina Darling," she confessed. "I meant the
head-keeper, of course. Who else could I mean?"
"Oh!" said Lady Grey coldly.
"But where is dear Nina?" the duchess blandly inquired. "Such a charming
person! She always livens one up so. I'm really very fond of Nina. We do
so enjoy her whenever she comes to Puddlewood."
"She's just getting out of sight there," replied Lady Grey, still more
coldly. "That's Sir Caryll with her. It seems he's given up shooting
since his jilting."
"Shall we go on with the guns?" queried Lady Bellingdown. "It's just as
you like, duchess."
"Oh, if I can do as I like I'll go home with the china and the butler
and the pony-cart," her grace answered. "It would be something new to
do."
Kneedrock laughed and hooked his arm through hers.
"I've a nice upholstered car turning up at three," he told her in an
undertone. "Be patient and I'll provide for you."
"But there are two cars waiting now," said the duchess. "Oh, I see.
You're making a joke. But such a poor joke, Nibbetts, dear."
"Do let us settle on what to do," begged the hostess. "Shall we walk
with the guns or go home at once?"
"And is it to be the spinney or Daggs Farm?" cried the host. "Come, now,
we can't wait about all day, you know."
"But we often wait about an hour after luncheon at Puddlewood, you
know," objected the duke. "I say, Doody, don't we often wait about an
hour after luncheon at Puddlewood?"
"Mrs. Darling and Sir Caryll are quite out of sight now," announced
Charlotte Grey, slinging her blue scarf around her throat. "I wonder
what they're saying."
* * * * *
As a matter of fact, at just that second they were not saying anything.
They were stopping and trying to think, and their pulses were
interfering rather too much for cool comfort.
They were at the Lower Stream Stile, which was a picture spot in the
park. At the moment the picture had the deeper meaning always added by
human figures.
Nina sat on the second step of the stile, and Sir Caryll sat on the
lowest, cuddled in close by her feet. He had her hand in his and his
eyes were raised to her face.
Affairs had moved on very fast--even since luncheon half an hour ago.
"Tell me the truth--your husband is really dead?" the man demanded
passionately. "It isn't some horrible spasmodic playfulness of yours to
talk loneliness and all that while really--"
"No," answered Nina, nestling her fingers closer and speaking in a warm,
low voice. "No, he's really dead. He was cleaning his guns and one was
loaded. So careless in his boy, wasn't it? No, it's quite all so.
Really, I am marriageable, eligible, and all the rest of it."
Carleigh kissed the nestling fingers. "To think that I ever fancied I
knew what love was before!" he murmured. "You dear! You darling! May I
call you Nina?"
"But you've called me Nina three times already since luncheon."
"Have I? I didn't know it. Dearest, I do not know what I am doing or
saying any more. You have me wound all in and out around these fingers.
"Do you know, I thought I knew a little bit about love and about women,
and about what men and women could mean to one another. But I was a baby
at the game. I knew the lines, don't you know, but I didn't know their
expressiveness. I was a child playing with the letters of the alphabet."
"You saw the symbols, but you didn't know their meaning?"
"Exactly so."
"But now you know."
"Now I know."
Nina hugged herself seductively together. "Isn't it deliciously,
delightfully dangerous to sit like this and think that if any one should
appear anywhere there would be such an outbreak of talk as would even
cause last month to pale with envy?"
He kissed her hand. "I'd love it all," he said. "I can hold no dearer
wish than to share a scandal with you. 'There goes the man who made off
with Mrs. Darling!' How I should look down with contempt on all less
clever men!"
Nina rippled gaily. "You know you do this rather well," she praised.
"I'm sure that whoever peeped would fain believe the lie."
"I hope so."
"I'm sure of it. I'll tell you how flirting compares with marriage. It's
like the best rouge and the real color. You can manage the rouge; the
real color you can't."
"You're so charming!" he exclaimed, rather absorbing the hand. "And, oh,
I'm so happy! When we go home, should they guess, what will it matter?"
She laid her free hand on his shoulder. "I'd mind," she said gently. "I
don't want them to talk. I'm asked to the house to comfort you; not to
catch you or cure you."
"But, Nina, my darling, what can it matter? You will marry me some day
soon."
She started so violently that the old stile creaked and bid fair to fall
down. The staghound, which had been lying quietly on the grass at their
feet, started up, too. Carleigh saw his bared fangs and heard his ugly
growl.
"Oh, dear!" he protested, trying to pull her back into her place. "Why,
what is it?"
"Don't say it!" she cried, in a tone of violent protest. "Don't! Don't!
I'm perfectly willing to play with you at love; but don't speak of
marriage.
"When men say that word it always brings me to my senses. I remember,
then. The good in me comes back. I get my devil into harness once more.
Have I sinned again? Have I fallen into the pit afresh? Does this man
really and truly mean what he says? No, no, no! Oh, no!"
He did pull her down, and he got his arm around her.
"Why, love! Why, precious!" he murmured soothingly. "Dear, dear girl!
Darling Nina!"
"I don't love you!" she cried vehemently. "I never can love you! I do
love one man and I can't love any other. It's no use trying."
And then she was out of his grasp, striking him away as roughly as his
other betrayer had done.
Carleigh stood paralyzed. In some ways he was little more than a boy.
But--if a boyish heart that had swelled with newborn hope was shrunken
suddenly by old, wizened despair--there was at any rate one man-thing
about him, for presently he turned his back to her and that ghastly
moan--the sob of a suffering man--fell on her ear.
At that Nina came down the two mossy steps and looked at him with
curious irresolution, her hand pressed against her lips.
There was a long moment. There was another sob. Then, having drawn close
to him, she placed her fingers on his arm.
"What can I do?" she whispered. "I'm so sorry."
He sobbed again. "You can love me," he whispered.
"But I love some one else."
"He doesn't love you. I do."
"But I love him."
"And I love you."
He reached back his arm and pulled her around in front of him. His eyes
were shut, his face was wet. He held her hard against his bosom. Their
lips met.
* * * * *
The staghound's growl ended the long, dumb seconds. It was provoked by
Kneedrock, who was beside them.
Carleigh didn't care in the least. In spite of her struggling he held
her fast, and his voice rang almost fiercely as he said:
"Don't tell this yet. You see we are going to be married."
"Yes?" observed the viscount, without a trace of wonder or any other
emotion. "I wish you joy."
With that she wrenched herself free. "No, no!" she cried in a passion of
protest. "It isn't so! It's not true! I have refused him. You know my
story, Hal! You know how it is with me!
"I can never marry any man but one. I told him so, but he wouldn't
believe it. And then he cried and I kissed him. You tell him that I can
never marry him. Tell him everything."
Kneedrock's lip curled in a cynical half-smile.
"It's not my story to tell," was his retort. "I don't understand it. I
never do understand love-stories. It's quite enough for me to go about
alone without any love-story of my own and come suddenly upon
broken-hearted people like yourselves."
Carleigh was deepest crimson. "You might spare Mrs. Darling at all
events," he said haughtily.
Kneedrock glanced at him indifferently. "I'm not being rough with any
one," he returned. "I haven't any faith in human nature, so stiles never
give me shocks."
He paused a brief moment and looked over their heads at the gray sky.
Neither of them spoke.
"I say," he added suddenly. "Do you know it's long past three? You'll
both be jolly late for tea unless you make haste. I'm off." And he was
gone.
"I wonder what will happen next," Nina hazarded as she watched Nibbetts
disappear over the crest of the hill. Then she turned to Carleigh with a
most enticing smile.
"Well, as we know one another pretty well now, perhaps you had better
take me in your arms and kiss me very nicely once more, for it is quite
possible we may never have another chance."
Carleigh could hardly place himself. Whether he was in his right senses
or had all at once lost his reason--turned lunatic--he couldn't just
tell for the life of him.
Nevertheless, he eagerly obeyed her suggestion. He took her in his arms
and he kissed her--not once, but thrice.
Then they walked home.
CHAPTER XIV
Truths, Kisses, and Ducal Ennui
Carleigh, in his room before dinner that evening, took his head in his
hands and wondered.
He wondered a long time, but nothing very clear resulted. Then he
rebrushed his disordered hair until it was smooth and shining once more,
and went down.
The dinner guests were Mr. Telborn and the Marchioness of Highshire, who
happened to be legally man and wife. Both of them were exceedingly lofty
personages.
"We wouldn't have come if we had known the Greys were here," the
Marchioness said confidentially to Lady Bellingdown, with a slight frown
as they sat waiting. "Mr. Telborn never liked him, anyway, and since the
affair of--"
The marchioness rested her case there.
"Where's that old Rembrandt copy of yours now?" Telborn asked his host,
fixing his glass in his eye and glaring about the room. "It used to hang
over there."
"Oh, that's up in London on exhibition," writhed his lordship. "Some vow
it's real, you know."
"Real--huh!" returned Telborn expressively.
"Well now, it may be real, you know," said the duke, coming forward with
valor. "And if it isn't, ever so many good pictures are copies. I say,
Doody, haven't we a lot of copies at Puddlewood?"
But the duchess was otherwise interested.
"You've heard about Emily, of course," she was saying, addressing the
marchioness. "The poor thing's run off with the second coachman. A very
nice-appearing man, I believe. But it seems that he has one wife
already."
"How terrible!" exclaimed Mrs. Darling, who was sitting close to the
fire, yet shivered slightly.
"People do run off sometimes," reminded Carleigh, who was standing
beside her. "I don't know that it's so terrible. It settles things
quickly."
"But not when the man's married; only when the woman's married," the
duchess qualified. "When the woman's married it does settle things, of
course; but when the man's married, it doesn't.
"I will say this--a husband left in the lurch is always much more
obliging at helping to set things straight than is a woman. Think of the
Betterton-Nyns! They've been waiting for ten years. So has Captain
Leigh."
"I wonder why people who love one another don't bolt oftener," said
Carleigh in a low voice to Nina, dragging a chair near as the duchess
turned away and perching himself on its arm. "Conventionality is a very
ghastly thing, with which I have less patience every hour."
"If they both want to, they generally do," she replied without smiling.
"But they must _both_ want to."
"Well, then, why don't the Betterton-Byns, or whatever's the name--I
never heard of them before--do it, then?"
"Why, they have done it. They've been off for years. In Alaska or
somewhere. Betterton-Nyn, not Byn, is the name they took. It's Claudius
Synge and Elsie Fairweather, don't you know."
"No, I didn't know," said Carleigh, much shocked. "And who is Captain
Leigh?"
"Leigh Fairweather, of course."
"Oh, of course."
After this came the dinner, and then coffee in the rose-pink
picture-room, the royal blue picture-room being closed for the week to
all but decorators.
Nina had slipped away, and the other women were having a thoroughly
enjoyable time talking about her.
"She doesn't really want him, does she?" the marchioness asked Lady
Bellingdown. "I thought that there was something very bad about him. If
he's so nice, why didn't the mother marry him herself?"
"That's what every one is asking," said the duchess, noting her
hostess's embarrassment. "I'm sure I think he's very nice myself. And so
pathetic, too. We're going to ask him to Puddlewood later."
"I don't think that Nina will ever marry again," observed Charlotte
Grey.
"And yet, you know, she'd be rather dear to marry," the duchess
commented. "I always liked Nina Darling. Of course, we understand that
she shouldn't. Yet she's very nice."
"Poor Colonel Darling!" sighed Lady Bellingdown reflectively.
"He's at rest now," said the duchess. "Poor soul! And yet," she added,
"I did always like Nina."
"We all like her," agreed Lady Bellingdown. "And Caryll, who only came
last night, is not only consoled, but desperately in love again, which
is a great triumph for her particular talent."
"Yes," the marchioness agreed. "They say Caryll did have a hard time.
Fancy! A mother jealous of her own daughter. Strange persons, those,
Americans!"
"She almost killed Caryll," declared his aunt warmly. "The poor fellow
was nearly crazed."
"He might do worse than marry Nina," the duchess decided. "There are a
few years' difference in their ages, but that doesn't matter nowadays
since Lady Grandison's leap in the dark. Ten years' difference there,
and they're like a pair of turtle-doves."
"I know," said Lady Grey in her meditative way. "It wouldn't be bad, of
course; but, then, Nina would never have him. She has her own story, you
know."
"I know," said the duchess.
Nina, coming out of her own room to run back downstairs, ran into the
arms of a man instead.
"Oh!" she cried in surprise; not in alarm.
"I saw you run away," laughed the right man's voice in her ear. "So I
ran, too. Kiss me again and I'll make a bargain with you. Let me make
all the love I please, and I'll promise not to speak of marriage again."
He had her locked fast against his breast. "You promise me something,"
she suggested. "Go to Harry--to Kneedrock, you know--and get him to tell
you my story. You'll never want to marry me then; and I'll have a clear
conscience."
"What rot! Fancy my fussing over your story! What do I care about your
story?"
"But you must know it," she insisted, "because, you see, it will make it
easier for both of us. After a while--when you've married that
girl--you'll be glad that I was honest with you."
He was kissing her.
"I shall never marry the girl," he declared. "I shall marry you."
She laid her cheek against his shoulder. "If you marry me I shall get
rid of you somehow," she whispered. "I love love, but I simply hate
husbands. It won't do to marry me. You ask Kneedrock. He knows."
She could feel his heart flopping about in his bosom.
"You--you extraordinary creature!" he faltered.
"Yes, isn't it awful?" she asked. "I think myself it is shocking. But I
can't help it. I am made so."
He tried to laugh and failed.
"Do you want to kiss me any more?... No?... Then step off my gown and
I'll run back downstairs."
* * * * *
Sunday went off well. Some went to church and some didn't. Carleigh
didn't. Nina didn't. They went for a walk instead.
"This is heavenly," said the man. "I'm so happy. You are an enchantress.
I feel that before I met you I never knew what anything meant."
"Men all say that," she affirmed. "Men are very stupid. They get a
little chain of pearly speeches together, and then they expect women to
fancy that no other man ever even so much as saw a pearl before."
"Say what you please," he cried, all but caroling in his joy. "Only let
me be by to hear, and let there be woods ahead where I may kiss you
again."
"It's odd you should enjoy kissing me," she returned placidly. "It's
droll. That's another thing I find charming in men. It's the energy with
which they kiss a new woman."
Carleigh laughed heartily. "How rippingly you put it!" said he. "Come
now, how many men have kissed you?"
"This year or in my whole life?"
"Either."
She considered a little and then she yawned. "I don't see the good in
troubling to count. I know now that you are not really in love, so why
bother further?"
"Bother further? Not really in love? What do you mean?"
"Why, my dear boy, don't get huffed. Surely even you know that a man
really in love can't put up with a conversation like that. Of course,
I'm asked here to cure you of the blues; not to plunge you into a fresh
trap. You know that. And it's nice to see how well I do it."
"So you think I'm not really in love, eh?"
"I jolly well know you aren't."
There was a slight pause while Carleigh thought fast and furiously. Nina
walked on, _insouciante_. He was the least of her troubles.
After a little they entered the woods. Then he finished reflecting and
took up talking again.
"So you are just flirting with me?"
"Only that."
"And yet you know as well as I do that in every flirtation there lies
the seed of a pure and passionate love."
She shook her head. "Not with me. My flirtations are pure, but my
passionate love is all seed--gone to seed."
"The seed can be replanted," he suggested.
"More than planting must go toward my future harvest. I tell you frankly
that my spade-and-harrow days are over."
"Let me spade and harrow."
"Oh, what rot it all is!" she exclaimed abruptly. "I'm so deadly weary
of everything."
"Quite so," he interrupted eagerly. "So am I. We'll go away. I'll get a
post somewhere. And we'll shunt all our troubles."
"I'd grow tired too soon," said Nina slowly. "You see, you wouldn't grow
tired, but I should."
Carleigh hardly knew how to take that.
"I'm so interesting," she continued--"so fascinating--what you will. And
a man always enjoys my talk while it's going on. But I'm tired of my own
talk and want a change."
He smiled. "Keep still," he said, "and perhaps I'll give you one."
"That's a very old joke," she rebuked sorrowfully. "Oh, I can be quite
certain of being bored to death with you. I mustn't consider you for a
minute."
"What's to be done about me, then?"
"Oh, you will make up with the girl some day, and then--" she stopped.
"And then?"
"Oh, how you will hate yourself!"
* * * * *
Meanwhile--or later, between church and luncheon--Waltheof, in the
billiard-room, was chalking a cue. "It will be a good lesson," he said.
"He needs a shaking up."
"He'll get a shaking up," said the duke. "I say, Nibbetts, won't
Carleigh get a shaking up?"
"It's wicked--all of it," declared Kneedrock gruffly. "I've never loved
a woman in my life"--which was a lie--"but I've notions about things.
Nina is unreasonable."
"You think so because you've never loved a woman," said Sir George.
"A woman is unreasonable because she is a woman--" began Nibbetts, but
Sir George cut in before he could finish:
"And a man's unreasonable because she is a woman, too," he laughed.
"Don't preach, but walk out and find them, if you feel it is really your
duty to chaperon your cousin. All I can say is what I've often said
before--poor Darling!"
"No, I won't go out and find them," Kneedrock refused, pitching his huge
bulk down on the window seat. "It's none of my business."
"More's the pity," was Sir George's comment. "I'll tell you what I
think. It ought to be your business. That's what every one of us
thinks."
An ugly white look overspread the viscount's rugged visage, and the
subject was dropped.
Later, however, in the privacy of his wife's room, the duke said
more--much more.
"Doody, it's rotten how they go on here about dear Nina." That was how
he began it. He repeated himself a great deal, and he appealed to the
duchess for verification with every other sentence. But his finish was
almost impassioned.
"I'm getting very sick of the whole thing, I'll be dashed if I'm not. Of
course she shot her husband, or Kneedrock shot him, and of course
Carleigh is in love with his fiancee's mother.
"But I say it's very tiresome to have to hear about 'em all the time.
I'm very tired of hearing of 'em all the time. I say, Doody, you know
I'm tired of hearing of 'em all the time. Don't you, Doody?"
"Yes," answered the duchess, "and I am, too. I'm sure I don't want to
hear any more about them now. Do ring the bell for Olivette, and go to
your room."
CHAPTER XV
A Last Walk and a Last Appeal
Monday, of course, meant the breaking up of the party and the conclusion
of Nina's mission. She had done what she could and she was delighted to
think that for once in her misguided career she had actually performed a
service not wholly selfish.
As Carleigh emerged from the breakfast-room, where he and his aunt were
among the last, Lady Bellingdown slipped her arm through his, saying:
"Well, my dear boy, we've done you good, haven't we?"
He glanced back over his shoulder to indicate whom he had in mind--for
Nina had come down but a minute before--last of all--and said, smiling:
"She's a wonder."
"Isn't she? Doesn't she say the most startling things? She's a bomb made
animate."
"One is always wondering what will come next," he declared. "I'm
wondering it just now."
As he proposed it himself, he might very easily have foreseen it without
waste of speculation. They took a long walk--the last of their series of
long walks.
"And now," said lover to loved as they went at swinging pace through the
park, the staghound as usual at their heels, "where do you go next?"
"Carfen," she answered. "Just beyond the border of Carlisle."
"I know them," he announced delightedly. "I'll get myself asked."
But Nina shook her head. "Don't," she adjured. "Because if you do, I'll
leave."
He stopped short in his stride. "In Heaven's name, why?" he asked, his
astonishment and dismay undisguised.
"Because I will not have you ruined with your fiancee," was her calm
answer.
"My dear girl, I have no fiancee. That's all over."
"Oh, no, it isn't."
"Oh, yes, it is."
She freed the hand he had been holding and then slipped it into his
again. Then they walked on.
"Love's never over," she observed wisely. "You'll only care the more for
her later." Then she raised her eyes and beheld him deeply crimson.
"With me it's all over," he declared in a voice that shook with mingled
feelings. "You don't know of what you speak. It couldn't possibly be
made up. I couldn't marry her. I couldn't possibly live in the house
with--with--" He stopped short.
"It will straighten out," said Nina calmly. "Such things do, you know."
"Not this kind. Wait--look!" He opened his coat, thrust his hand within,
and drew a jewel from some hidden pocket. It was a ring which he held
out to her.
She took it from him, and her eyes opened very wide. For a brief space
she gazed at him pensively and silently.
"Of what are you thinking?" he asked.
"I was wondering if you had it always with you."
"Always."
"Does your man transfer it from one suit to another?"
He had not expected just that question, but he repeated himself.
"Always," he said a bit stiffly, and added: "Do you want it?"
"Her ring?" she cried with an arrogant little laugh. "No, indeed."
He looked at her and then at the ring in her fingers. It was a rather
remarkable pearl, surrounded by faintly bluish diamonds.
"Pearls mean tears," she said.
"Then throw it away!" he commanded irritably. "I don't want it, either."
He saw her, without another word, toss it off into the forest mold. In
spite of his command he had not expected that. It gave him a start.
"Perhaps the stones were not real," she said lightly. "Were they?"
"Yes," was all that he could answer.
"What an effective bit that would make on the stage," she suggested. "A
man bidding a woman throw away a rope of pearls if she would not accept
them as a gift from him, and she taking him at his word and pitching
them into the sea."
"You are a strange creature," he commented. "Fancy chucking off a ring
in that manner!" It was very plain to be seen that he was annoyed.
"I know," she said seriously. "And I'd chuck myself away just as gaily
if it were possible to do it completely. I was on the verge of doing it
once in India. I thought anything would be better than the things that
were."
"Why didn't you, then?"
"I couldn't. I was prevented. My whole life was changed again at that
very instant."
"And what happened?"
"The man I was going to chuck myself away on cut his throat."
Carleigh gasped. "Killed himself?"
"Not quite," Nina answered coolly. "He was prevented, too. But he
carries the scar. Every time he shaves he must think of me."
"My dear girl," he remonstrated. He was still thinking of the ring. It
was of such value that he began to question whether she was quite in her
right mind. "You do let one in for thrilling experiences. That I must
say."
"Now as then," she admitted, stopping short. "I've been very horrid,"
turning her head until her eyes looked directly into his. "I'm not just
myself to-day. I don't know why I threw your pearl away. Come back with
me and I'll pick it up."
"Can you find it, do you think?" he asked, palpably pleased.
"Of course. I threw it on the bare roots. I meant to pick it up on our
way back."
He was smiling now, as transparent as any schoolboy. "You are most
awfully odd, you know," he said, vastly solaced. "But if we pick it up,
you must let me put it on."
"No, no."
"Yes, yes."
"Well, if you insist. But it will mean nothing."
When they reached the spot both looked searchingly about. Carleigh went
down on his knees and soiled his sensitive hands delving among the bare
roots. Nina tossed aside bits of mold with the toe of her boot. But the
ring was not found.
"Never mind; it's been a thrilling experience. You said so yourself,"
she remarked lightly. "And it isn't every day that a man gets a really
new sensation, you know. And that was utterly new to you, I'm sure."
But Carleigh was far from accepting it with the same indifference. He
made an effort to appear nonchalant, but throughout the rest of their
walk he again and again relapsed into silence. The loss of the ring
would not be kept down.
When finally they returned to Bellingdown it was to find the house full
of smoke. The party lunched in the murk, choking between bites.
"That chimney always draws badly," her ladyship informed everyone with
the utmost calm.
Then all the doors were opened, and they had coffee in the
billiard-room.
Carleigh ate no luncheon and drank no coffee.
"They've had trouble," whispered Lady Grey to Kneedrock significantly,
as they stood together by one of the billiard-room windows. "See!" she
added, pointing. "He's been walking alone. I do wonder if he really did
offer himself and if she really did refuse him."
Carleigh came in a few moments later, and he was evidently depressed.
"I'm perfectly sure she refused him," Lady Grey decided. But Kneedrock
only shrugged his broad, burly shoulders.
Carleigh had been to search more carefully for the ring. But he had not
succeeded. And now it came to him gloomily that should he ever renew
his engagement with Rosamond Veynol--of course he had no intention of
doing so; but if he ever should--he would have to invent some lie and
tell it her.
Still, losing the ring--and losing it under such very unpleasant
conditions--was the first circumstance that had ever presented the
possibility of a renewal to him in a concrete form.
After he had gone up to his room Nina rose from the deep seat where she
had been buried in the current _Revue des Deux Mondes_, and crossed to
where Nibbetts--Charlotte Grey having left him--now stood alone by the
window, staring out over the desolate garden.
"I want to speak to you, Hal," she said earnestly, and turning, saw that
the others--all in a waiting mood, as they were about to go--were
clustered before the fire. "I want to speak to you, seriously," she
emphasized, and laid a hand on his arm.
"It's no use, Nina," he returned roughly, shaking off the plaintive
hand. "I am the one man you can't cajole. Don't touch me."
But she still stood there, her eyes downcast. "I want to be good, Hal,"
she declared, her tone all contrition. "You know how hard I try. I'm
trying uncommonly hard this time; but he's so tempting.
"Please do me a favor. I'm not asking much. I'm not really. Chain him
up, won't you? Don't--oh, don't let him follow me. No good can come of
it. He'll never go back to them if I spoil him any more. Interfere. You
can if you will. Do--please, do!"
A look of utter disgust spread over the man's face.
"You make me so devilish angry," he growled below his breath. "One
expects this kind of thing from men. But not from women."
"Men go a bit further than I do," she rejoined. "But never mind that. I
beg you to do something. Disable him, why don't you? It will be a mercy
to us all. He isn't strong enough to stand it, you know. Take him away,
at least."
Kneedrock hunched his great shoulders. "The weakling!" It was as if the
word were an oath. "And you! Weaker still, yet filled to the brim with
the very devil."
"I know I'm bad," she said, in the simplest possible way. "But it's not
my fault, Hal. It's the spoiled joy that was never allowed. I'm all for
love, and I've never had it. That's all."
"Love!" he sneered with bitterest contempt. "What rot for you to speak
of love! Poor Darling, with his brains blown out! The silly ass! I
wonder he doesn't--" He had meant to say "haunt you," but he stopped
short.
"He does," she replied, quite as if he had finished. "But live men do it
more. Listen, Hal--rough as you are you've always been very good to me.
Only you and I know how good. Be good again. Take him away. Otherwise I
can't promise, and--you know I can't marry him."
"Why don't you marry him, damn it?" he asked cruelly.
She looked up into his face wistfully. "Why don't I?" and there was a
quaver in her voice. "Ah, why don't I?"
He made no answer.
"Love is the only safeguard that I have," she continued. "If I didn't
love--" she paused.
"Couldn't Carleigh hold you to--to something?"
"Nothing could hold me."
"Oh, hell!" growled the honorable viscount with excessive force.
She smiled serenely. "You will get him away, I know. He's such a boy.
You'll do that for me, won't you, Hal?"
"His grace's car," announced the butler, quietly. And the duke started
up, loquaciously, as usual.
"I say, we must be getting on. Good-by, old man! I have enjoyed myself.
Good-by, Lady Bellingdown! Come, Doody! Good-by, Lady Grey! Come, Doody!
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