CHAPTER VThe big mansion of which she was the pampered, cherished darling, lay solemn, pompous, solid, dark, behind her. Before her, the pavement, wet after a summer shower, shone in the lamplight. Dark, waving shadows against the driving clouds, with their fitful patches of moonlit sky, were the trees in the enclosure, dangled by the wind. She hurried along--turning down the first by-street she came to--and emerging at its end into one of the principal thoroughfares, she hailed a crawling hansom."Regent's Park, Clarence Gate," she said, in a muffled voice, as she sprang lightly in.To be dashing along the lighted streets to meet the absconded swindler who had dared to take advantage of her girlish folly to make her his wife by law, was delirious work. Cowering back in the corner of the hansom, she gazed with sickened misery at the gay shop-windows, at the crowded omnibuses, at the cheery passengers who carelessly stepped along the pavement, looking as if all life were matter-of-fact, plain sailing, "above-board." A hundred shrill voices seemed clamouring in her ears--"turn back--turn back! Face the worst, but be honest!" She had almost flung up her arm and, opening the trap, bid the driver return, when the memory of Vansittart--of his love--of his kiss--came surging upon her with redoubled force."If I am a coward, I shall lose him!" cried her whole nature, fiercely. No! She must battle through: she must circumvent her enemy--the enemy to her love, and Vansittart's.But how?"I will dare him," was her instinct. "I will tell him to claim me if he can!" But that was the madness of passion. Reason bade her use other means."One must fight a man with his own weapons," she told herself, as the hansom dashed along Gloucester Place, and she knew her time was short. It was now nearer nine than eight--she had seen that by an illuminated clock over a shop.Hewas to be at their trysting-place of old, when she had lodged with her old nurse in a street in Camden Town, at eight. "He lied to me from the first moment to the last. I must lie to him. I will pretend I have cared for him! It will put him off his guard," she thought, as, with a double fee to the cabman, who said "thank-ye, miss," with odious familiarity, she scurried away in the darkness, and crossing the wet road, turned up that which led to the Inner Circle.There was no chance of forgetting the spot where they two had last met! As she neared it, a slim, dark figure stepped out from the shadow."My wife," he exclaimed, in emotional tones. He would have embraced her, but she slipped away and leant up against the paling."You can call me that--after leaving me all these years--not knowing whether you were alive or dead," she panted hoarsely. Under any circumstances emotion was natural, so she made no effort to conceal it."I? It was you who would not reply to my letters!" he exclaimed bitterly. "I wrote again and again, under cover to your miserable old nurse--and don't say you never had them! The last came back to me--'not known.' But the others did not--they would have if they had not reached!""If she had them, she never gave them to me!" she said truthfully. "And I don't wonder! I was so utterly wretched when I read of your--your--flight--that I told her--all! I had to--I should have gone raving mad if I had kept it to myself!""Well, all that is over and done with, thank goodness!" he exclaimed, cheerfully, after a brief pause. "I will not scold you for misjudging me--you were but a child! But you are a woman now, of age, your own mistress! I have been fortunate of late, or I should not be here. Speculations of mine have turned up trumps--and not only that, but I have friends in the City who will introduce me to your uncle, and if you only play your cards well, our real wedding shall be followed by a sham one, and Mrs. Victor a'Court will take a very nice place in society. My dear, cash opens all doors, and I have it!""Some one is coming," she said feebly. His speech had called forth all her powers of endurance, and, while bracing herself to bear up as she did, Nature determinedly asserted itself. She felt cold and giddy--her limbs seemed as if they did not belong to her."Only a Bobby," he said, with a light vulgarity which seemed the last straw. As she turned to walk along by his side, she tottered."Don't do that, or the Bobby will think you are drunk," he said, coarsely, holding her up by the arm. His detested touch achieved what her slackening courage had failed to do. She felt suddenly strong with a new, fierce emotion--was it hate?"I cannot understand how you can be well off--or, indeed, how you can be here at all," she softly began, as the policeman marched solemnly on before them, the light of one of the occasional lamps gleaming on his wet weather cape. "I thought----""You mean, your old nurse thought!" he went on angrily. "You--you were not capable of suspecting me, if that old wretch had not put it into your head! My love, I was a victim of circumstances. The people I was with were a rotten lot. They accused me to protect themselves. They were bankrupt three years ago! Mercier was not my real name. My father was Victor Mercier a'Court. It suited me to use it, that's all! What--you don't believe me?""You told me lies then--why should I believe you?" she boldly said."Because you are my wife! It will not pay me to tell you untruths--nor will it pay you to doubt me!" he savagely retorted. "I had expected a welcome! Instead, I am treated like this! It is enough to exasperate a saint--and I don't profess to be that! Come, let us talk business, as you don't feel inclined for love. You are mine, and I mean to have you. You understand? I have waited for you all these years, and precious hard work it has been, I can tell you, for plenty of girls as good-looking as you made a dead set at me--and girls with loads of oof, too! If I don't get you by fair means, I will have you by foul--it is for you to select. By Jingo, it would serve you right if I went to that wretched uncle of yours to-morrow, and claimed you!"She stopped short and confronted him. The moon, breaking through the driving clouds, shone full on her face. Beautiful, corpse-like in its sombre, set expression, there was that in her great, shining eyes which gave him, hardened worldling though he was, a slight shock. He felt he had gone too far."Drop the tragedy queen, do, and be my own little darling once more!" he wheedled, and would have embraced her, but she slid away as he approached."Listen!" she began, in clear, determined tones, in which there was neither fear nor hesitation, "unless you treat me with consideration, decency, respect--unless you can give me time to arrange matters so that to avow myself your--wife--will not ruin me, body and soul, I swear before God that I will put a barrier between myself and you which will separate us for ever.""Pah, pah, pah, spitfire!" he sarcastically said, swinging his umbrella and beginning to walk onward. "I know what you mean! You have some romantic idea of suicide. You are not the kind of girl who kills herself, I can tell you that--so that threat won't hold water with me. Come now, don't let us waste time quarrelling. What do you propose to do? Before I tell you my ideas, let's hear yours.Place aux dameswas always my motto."During her long vigil, scheme after scheme of escaping him and of belonging irrevocably to Vansittart, one plan wilder than another, had agitated her mind. She had at last arrived at one set conclusion--Victor Mercier must be cajoled into giving her time. Events would decide the rest."All I ask of you is to wait," she pleaded earnestly, vehemently. "Give me time to find some way of introducing you to friends, and through them to uncle and aunt--then I can begin seeming to encourage you, and feel my way----"He burst into a derisive laugh."Rats!" he cried brutally. "That sort of thing won't do for me, my dear wife, I can tell you! I see you are as big a baby as ever--you need some one badly to teach you your way about! No, no! I want you at once--who and what's to prevent me from taking possession of my lawful property? There is only one thing for us to do: to bolt together--and to leave them completely in the dark as to your fate. I hear that those two old prigs who wouldn't give bite or sup to your father when he was a dying man are dead nuts on you. We must make 'em suffer, my darling! We must madden them till they are ready to do anything and everything if they can only find you alive. And we must talk it over--so that your disappearance may be a regular thunderbolt! Can you come to my lodgings to-morrow evening? I want you to myself--it's natural, isn't it? This road, quiet as it is, is hardly the place for husband and wife to meet, is it? What? You can't come?" His voice hoarsened--he clutched her arm so fiercely that she gave a faint cry. "You don't want me?" he exclaimed, in tones which to her strained ears seemed those of deadly menace. "If you don't--I know you, you see! I have not forgotten your kisses, if you have mine--it means another man! And if it does, I will have no mercy on you, do you understand? None!""How dare you?" Once more she faced him, this time in an access of desperation. "How dare you accuse me of crime? My coldness, my absolute refusal to listen to any man is so well known that it has been common talk in society! More than once I have felt that uncle has suspected me--and, indeed, he has sounded me----"In her earnestness she was off guard, and drawing her to him, he suddenly threw his arms about her neck and kissed her lips--a long, violent, almost savage kiss."There--go home and think of that!" he said, with a triumphant chuckle, as she staggered away and almost fell against the fence. "And take this address. I shall be here every evening at the same hour. And if you don't come--well, you had better come, that's all! I am not in a very patient humour."She made her way out of the Park at his side, dazed, trembling. When at last he consented to leave her, and hailing a hansom, she clambered in, she leant back, and for a few minutes was barely conscious. She came to herself with a sob."Will God have mercy on me?" she wailed. "I was so--so--very young!"CHAPTER VIJoan made her way home--how, she hardly knew. In the confusion of thought succeeding that terrible interview which had successfully shown her she was in the power of a merciless tyrant, instinct guided her. After Victor Mercier had put her into a cab, and she had alighted from it in a thoroughfare near her uncle's house, she let herself in with the latchkey she had playfully annexed, little dreaming how she would need to use it--and meeting no one as she made her way up to her room, locked herself in to face her misery alone.As she tossed and writhed through the long, miserable night she almost despaired. Perhaps she would have utterly and entirely lost heart, had not a thought flashed upon her mind--an idea she welcomed as an inspiration."There is only one way to escape the grip of that savage tiger--flight!" she told herself. Although the sole tie between them was the hasty ceremony in a Registrar's office he had cajoled her into years ago--although she had met him but once afterwards before he absconded and disappeared, and that was in the very spot where their interview a few hours before had taken place, she believed, indeed she knew, that for her to try to undo that knot would entail publicity--disgrace--even shame--that if she endured the ordeal, she would emerge unfit to be Vansittart's wife. Ifheforgave her, even her uncle--society could and would never overlook the smirch upon her fair girlhood. She would bear a brand."Victor gave me the idea, himself," she told herself, with a bitter smile at the irony of the fact. "He--the man who is legally my husband until he chooses to renounce me"--in her ignorance of the law she fancied that Victor Mercier might divorce her quietly in some way, if he pleased--"proposed that we should disappear together, and frighten my uncle into a concession. What if I disappeared alone--and only allowed one person to find me--Vansittart?"That Vansittart loved her passionately, with all the fervour and intensity of a strong, virile nature, she knew. Whether the love was mad enough to fall in with any wildly romantic proceeding, she had yet to discover."He will seek me as soon as he can!" she correctly thought. As she was crossing the hall after breakfasting with her uncle, who--in his hopes that his only niece and adopted daughter and heiress was thinking better of her aloofness to mankind, and melting in regard to his favourite among her many admirers, Lord Vansittart--had been unwontedly urbane and affectionate, a telegram was brought to her."If I may see you at twelve, noon, do not reply.--Vansittart."At noon her uncle would be at his club, and her aunt had, she knew, an appointment with her dressmaker in Bond Street. She went to her room and spent some little time in deciding upon her toilette. How did she look best, or, rather, how should she be attired to appeal most strongly to Vansittart's imagination and senses?Most women are born with subtle instincts in regard to the weakness of manhood, especially the manhood already to a certain extent in their power. Joan hardly knew why she felt that a certain dishabille--a suggestion of delicacy and fragile helplessness in her appearance, would place Vansittart more entirely at her mercy; but it was with this conviction that she attired herself in a white, soft, silken and lace-adorned tea-gown, with lace ruffles about her smooth, rounded throat and wrists--a robe that fell away from a pink silk underdress which, fitting tightly about her waist, showed the rich, yet girlish curves of her beautiful form to the fullest advantage.Her hair had been wound somewhat carelessly but classically about her small head by Julie, who was rather excited at having received an offer of marriage. Joan had listened sympathetically--she had encouraged the girl in her love affair, more, perhaps, because it would serve her own interests, being one which was to remain a secret from "his parents in France" until they had seen Julie, and therefore subject to mysterious "evenings-out" and holidays taken, with other explanations to the housekeeper. Altogether there was a certain softness about her whole appearance, Joan considered, as she anxiously gazed at her reflection in the many mirrors she passed proceeding to her boudoir, which was on the same floor as the drawing-rooms, and opened upon a small balcony full of flowers, with a peep of the enclosure and the Park beyond, just under the red and white awning.It was eleven when she entered her room and set herself to write a whole host of letters. She had barely finished three before a brougham dashed up to the hall door. She started up, her heart beating, her cheeks aflame."It cannot be--why, it is hardly a quarter to twelve," she thought, glancing at the Dresden china clock. But even as she spoke she heard his voice--those musical, resonant, manly tones she loved--and in another moment the groom of the chambers announced, "Lord Vansittart," with an assurance which seemed strange to Joan, unaware of the freemasonry below stairs which enlightened the domestic staff as to the wishes and opinions of the master of the house.As he came in, tall, his fair, wavy hair flung back from his broad brow; his large, frank eyes alight, his cheeks aglow with passion; some suggestion of a conqueror in his mien--his very fervour and exultation were infectious--she could have fallen into his arms and abandoned herself to his embraces as if there were no obstacle to their mutual love.As it was she merely gave one limp, chill hand into his eager clasp, and cast down her eyes as he said: "I am early--I could not help it--Joan, Joan, what is it? You are not glad to see me"--his voice faltered."Sit down--won't you?" she said, and she sank into a low chair and motioned him to one out in the cold--but he would not understand--he drew a light low chair quite near to hers, and fixed her with an intent, anxious gaze."Last night you behaved--as if--you cared a little for me," he began, almost reproachfully."Last night--I was a fool!" she bitterly said. "I let you see too much.""Why too much?" he drew eagerly nearer. "Joan, my beloved--the only one in the whole world I care for--for, indeed, you have all my love, all--I am yours, body and soul!--what can come between us if you love me? And you do! I know you do! I feel you don't want to--and I don't wonder, I am not good enough, no one can be--but if you love me, I and no other man, ought to be your husband!""Understand--I beg, pray, implore you to understand," she began, slowly, painfully--this holding her wild instincts in check was the most terribly hard battle she had ever fought--"I have sworn to myself never to marry. Years ago my uncle was hard, cruel to my parents: they literally died, half-starved, because he would not help them. When he adopted me I did not know this. I had some work to accept his kindness after I did know. But never, never will I accept a dowry, a trousseau, from him--yet I will not explain why--nor will I go to any man a pauper. Now perhaps you can see why--I feel--I can only do justice to myself, and show mercy to him--by remaining as I am!""You mean to allow this folly about your uncle to come between you and me?" he cried imperiously. His compelling grasp closed upon her wrists. "Joan, Joan, do not throw away my life and yours by such an absurdity--such a whim!"He gazed into her eyes with his so brimful of intensity of passion that they seemed to draw her towards him. She struggled against yielding to the appeal, the yearning in his face--and he, he watched the struggle--and as she gave a little sob, which was virtually a cry for mercy, he drew her to him--he took her in his arms--she was on her knees, in his embrace, her heart beating against his, their lips clinging to each other.Long--so it seemed to Joan--was she enwrapped in that delirium of bliss she might have imagined, weakly, but had never felt in all its fierce, oblivious ecstacy. Then she held him from her."Oh, what shall I do?" she wailed--and clasping his knee she leant her face upon her cold trembling hands."You dear, innocent child! Do, indeed!" he almost merrily exclaimed, stooping and kissing her fair wreaths of shining hair. "Why exactly as you like! I don't care a fig for your uncle--at least, as regards what he can give you--I have enough for you and a family of brothers and sisters, too, if you had one. All I want isyou, do you understand, you! You have only to dictate terms--I surrender unconditionally!"CHAPTER VII"You have only to dictate terms--I surrender unconditionally!"Could she have heard aright? Joan lifted her pale, miserable face--miserable with the woe of reality after the delirious joy of being clasped to her lover's heart--and slowly shook her head."I have no terms to dictate," she slowly, dismally said. "I cannot go through a secret engagement! It would be impossible to keep it secret, either. Uncle will guess! Why, I have hardly been decently civil to any man who seemed as if he had ideas of marriage--he will know at once--and then--every one else would know--oh, I could not bear it! It would drive me mad!"She spoke vehemently--and there was a wild, dangerous gleam in her eyes which he did not like. Perhaps the mental trouble it must have been to the sensitive orphan to accept bounty from the cold-blooded man who had let her father, his brother, die unsuccoured, had brought about hysteria. He had read and heard of such cases. It behoved him to come to his darling's rescue--to cherish and care for her--ward off every danger from one so beautiful, so helpless, so alone. As he gazed at her, an extraordinary idea flashed upon him--like lightning it illumined the darkness--the way he must go seemed to stand out plain before him."My dearest, there is a way out of our difficulty so simple, so obvious, that it seems to me a waste of time to discuss anything else!" he said, tenderly, gravely. "You are of age--you are entitled to act for yourself! Let us be married as soon as possible and start in my yacht for a tour round the world! I can manage everything secretly: you will only have to walk out of the house one fine morning and be married to me, and we will take the next train to wherever the yacht will be waiting for us, and be off and away before your absence has been remarked and wondered at! I will leave explanations to be sent to your uncle at the right moment, acknowledging ourselves eccentric, romantic, blameable, perhaps, but not unforgivable--saying that we knew so long a honeymoon would be unpalatable, so we took French leave--why do you shiver dearest?" He bent anxiously over her. "Joan! Won't you trust me?""Trust you!" she gazed up at him with that startling expression of mingled love and woe into his face--a look he had seen in a great picture of souls suffering in Hades--an expression too full of agony to be easily forgotten. "Only it seems too much to expect! It cannot possibly happen--those good things don't, in this miserable life!""You are morbid, dearest, if I may dare to say it," he tenderly said, drawing her into the arms with which he vowed to shelter and defend her from all and every adverse circumstance which might ever threaten her peace and content. And he set himself to comfort, hearten, encourage her drooping spirits, as he painted the joys of their future life in the most glowing terms at his command, during the rest of what was to him their glorious hour together. To a certain extent he thought he had succeeded. At least, Joan had smiled--had even laughed--although the tragic look in those beautiful eyes--absent, hunted, terror-stricken, desperate--was it only one of those things, or all?--had not been superseded by the expression of calm satisfaction it would be such relief and joy to him to see there."Something is wrong--but what?" he asked himself, after he had stayed luncheon, and at last succeeded in tearing himself away. "Is it only that fact--a miserable one to so tender yet passionate a nature--that while she is loaded with luxuries by her uncle, her parents died almost in want because he withheld the helping hand? It may be! Well--anyhow--the best thing for her is absolute change--as soon as possible--and that she shall have!"* * * * *Victor Mercier--it was his real name, his father, a meretricious French adventurer, had married his mother for a small capital, which he had got rid of some time before he ran away and left his wife and infant son to starve--had left Joan the eventful night of their meeting after long years--in a towering rage.His was a nature saturated with vanity and self-love. From childhood upwards he had believed himself entitled to possess whatever he coveted--the law ofmeum and tuumwas non-existent in his scheme for getting as much out of life as it was possible to get. Naturally sharp, and with good looks of the kind that some women admire, he had not only made a willing slave of his mother, but when, some years after, the news of his father's death came to her, she married again, a widower with a charming little daughter, step-father and pseudo-sister also worshipped at his shrine.Then he ingratiated himself with an employer so that he was entrusted with the sole management of the branch business at C----. Here, he "splurged"; spent money freely, and--when he heard that the pretty schoolgirl he had succeeded in establishing a flirtation with was the only surviving member of the weakly family represented by the wealthy Sir Thomas Thorne--he grew more and more reckless in the expenditure of his master's money and in his falsifying of the accounts. Like many others of his kind, he overreached his mark. When he paid a flying visit to London to marry Joan before she was adopted by her uncle--her mother had just died--it occurred to the head of his firm to "run over" to C---- and audit the books. The day of Mercier's secret marriage he heard that "the game was up," and his only means of escape, instant flight and lasting absence.It was quite true that his firm failed a couple of years later. But he had then just established himself as partner in a drinking-bar in the unsavoury neighbourhood of a gold mine in South Africa. The lady of the establishment had fallen in love with him, and there was, in fact, money to be made all round about by one who was not too particular in his morals and opinions. Suddenly, the neighbourhood grew too hot for him, and he found it convenient to remember that the rich Miss Joan Thorne must now be twenty-one and ready to be claimed as his wife.So he returned with money enough to make a show, later on, of being rich, at least for a month or two. The first thing was to find Joan: the next to meet her.An acquaintance made in his comparatively innocent boyhood happened to be now confidential valet to the Duke of Arran. He sought him out, flattered, and--without confiding his real story to him--made him his creature by using a certain power of fascination which had helped on his unworthy career from its beginning.Paul Naz got him engagements as "extra hand" on state occasions in noblemen's houses; he had fulfilled three of these before he attained his end and encountered Joan at the Duke's--Paul consented to pay court to Julie le Roux, Miss Thorne's maid, so as to keep his old playfellow informed as to the doings of the family, who, he told him, owed his late father a considerable sum of money, which he wished to recover privately to save scandal. That very night Paul was taking Julie to see Mercier's so-called half-sister act in a transpontine theatre. "Vera Anerley," as she had stage-named herself, had been on tour with a popular piece--was absent at the time of Victor's return--and had appealed to his vanity by her wild emotion when they met. He was to see her on the stage, and to have a word with Naz, who had had to probe Julie in a certain direction, after he left his "wife" in the Regent's Park.When he had watched Joan's hansom speed away in the darkness, Victor Mercier walked along, then--hailing a passing cab, was driven to the theatre. As he went he anathematized Joan in the strongest of mining oaths."Like all the rest," he bitterly thought. "Always another man--they must have a man hanging about them!"Alighting at the theatre, he met Naz, a fair, innocent-looking Frenchman, coming out. He joined him, saying "Come and have a drink.""You have lost much by being late, your half-sister is adorable!" said Naz, as they stood together at the bar of a neighbouring public-house."No doubt!" said Mercier carelessly. "So is your Julie, eh? By the way, how is Julie's mistress? Any news?""As I said," returned Naz, in an undertone. "The beautiful creature is trapped at last, by a lover who has been out of the country to try and forget her, shooting big game! They ride--meet--he was with her when I posted you in the corridor that night. They passed me, you must have seen him.""Him--who?" muttered Mercier. There was a gleam in his eyes."Lord Vansittart," replied Naz. "The Duchess has been heard to say it was a settled thing!"CHAPTER VIIIThe Duke's valet prattled on until the second and third liqueurs had solaced his being. Then Victor glanced darkly at the clock."Let us go," he roughly said.The softspoken Naz only thought that the delightful fluid which warmed and comforted his gentle self had had a reverse effect upon his old friend, so--following him gently as Mercier stalked gloomily into the theatre and up to the dress circle, which was well-packed with honest citizens and their wives in their ordinary habit as they lived--he returned to his seat by Julie, and left him to his own devices.The third act was over. In the fourth Mercier's so-called "sister" had plenty to do. She was a peccant wife, revisiting home in disguise, and seeking her husband's pardon. It was a pathetic scene, when she sought her husband and discovered herself. Throwing off her disguise--she was got up as an old woman--she emerged sweet, fascinating, in a white dress, with her black hair in Magdalen-like confusion, and sinking at his feet, alternately implored and adored with such passion and intensity that tears rolled down the feminine auditors' cheeks, and the house literally rose to her."And all that passion is mine, to take or leave as I please," was Victor's saturnine comment, as he leant back in his seat with folded arms and frowned darkly at the stage. He well knew that his amorous dalliance with his step-father's daughter, when he had had nothing more to his taste to dally with, had succeeded in inspiring her with so violent a devotion to him that, if he had not pitied, he might have come to loathe her. When she was a mere pretty, stupid schoolgirl, going to and fro to her middle-class girls' school, satchel in hand, he had had but little patience with her absorption in him and his career. But now that he saw her on the stage, beautiful with an undeniable beauty, full of grace and spontaneity, and possessed of that power which passion gives, he thrilled with mingled desire and satisfaction.Strange ideas rose up in his mind--ideas of a subtle revenge upon Joan--of intense and vivid gratification to himself."Joan will be my wife--my bondslave, to be dealt with how I please, and when I please; and as long as I kiss and caress her no one dare interfere, if I choose that she shall spend almost her life in my arms with my lips on hers," he grimly told himself. "But--Vera loves me--and if I am Vera's lover while I am Joan's uxorious husband, Joan's pride will not allow her to accuse me, even if she suspects! And how her proud, snobbish soul will hate my giving her half my love--as an Eastern potentate gives it to his appointed spouse, while his real devotion is his favourites'!"The idea gave him a peculiar and indescribable pleasure. It seemed, indeed, to restore his equilibrium. As the curtain fell, he left the auditorium and made his way round to the stage door, as he had promised Vera to do."I wish to see Miss Anerley--which is her dressing-room?" he asked, when, after cautiously traversing a dark, unsavoury alley, he had pushed open the swing door, had entered a dimly-lit corridor where a sickly gas flame was flaring in the draught in its wire cage, and met a man coming towards him."You are her brother? Come this way, please." The good-natured acting-manager of the touring company, an eager little man in shabby evening dress, escorted Victor along a passage to a door on which "Miss Vera Anerley" was pasted, and knocked."It's your brother, Miss Anerley," he called out."Thanks! Wait one moment, Victor, will you?" cried a pretty, girlish voice."All right." Victor paced the narrow, damp-smelling corridor, hearing the thumps and shouts from the stage, intermingled with a murmur of melodramatic music now and then from the orchestra--making way occasionally for a stage carpenter in shirt-sleeves, or an actor hurrying from his dressing room--until Vera looked out. "I am so sorry to have kept you--come in," she said caressingly, and she pulled him gently in and closed the door."Tell me, how do you like me?" she eagerly cried, clasping his hand with both hers. There was no reserve between these two--if, indeed, propinquity had not established complete freedom from what Victor termedgênelong ago--and she gazed up into his face with eyes transparent, shining, darkly blue as sapphires, eyes so brilliant that in admiring them he hardly noticed the coarse red and white grease paint which thickly coated her delicate skin, or the bistre rings around those beautiful orbs. "Victor! Speak! If you are not satisfied, I shall chuck the profession--dearly as I love my work, I couldn't stand it!""Silly child!" He patted her hand, and looked round for a seat. There were two broken chairs in the large, bare, cellar-like "dressing-room," with its high window shrouded by a torn and dirty red curtain and its dresser-like table with looking-glasses the worse for wear under the flaring gas jets. But he shook his head at them. "I'll sit here," he said, perching himself on one of the big dress-baskets under the pegs hung with feminine garments. "By George! what a room for a future Lady Macbeth to dress in, to be sure! My dear, don't gasp! That's your style, tragedy, melodrama, bloodcurdling! You're a damned passionate little witch, that's what you are--and I expected as much."She gave him a rapturous glance as she drew a deep sigh of relief and satisfaction, and sank in a graceful, unstudied attitude upon one of the crippled Windsor chairs; and he dryly lighted a cigarette, and gazed critically at her. She was very fair! Small, with an oval face under glossy masses of dark silken hair; slight and graceful, with a child's hands and feet, and a tiny waist; yet the shoulders rising from her blue ball-dress with its gaudy wreaths of pink flowers were softly rounded--and the contour of neck and bust he considered "simply perfect." He ground his teeth and spat viciously on the blackened boards--there were only pieces of old carpeting here and there--as he remembered his wife--and her supposed lover, "Lord Vansittart." "What a cursed shame!" he thought. "They wallow in wealth--and I and this child--bah! there is something to be said for anarchy, after all!""You look--well, I feel I should like to kiss you," he grimly said.She blushed under her paint. Since her woman's love had waxed so strong, all the former boy-and-girl intimacy went for nothing--she was shy of him."If you did you would spoil my 'make-up' and would get a dab or two of paint on your nose," she said, with slight embarrassment. It was just that coy fear of him in the abandonment of her passionate love which fired Victor Mercier when he was near her. Fierce though his mingled desire of, and hatred for, Joan had been, and still was, she had never thrilled him, stirred his whole nature, as this girl, the companion of his youth, had the power to do."You mean to say that is greasepaint on your shoulders?" he said, rising. He crossed the room, and, although she laughingly expostulated, he bent and kissed them--then lifted her chin and kissed her throat."Are you angry?" he said mockingly, gazing down into her eyes with an intent, triumphant expression."You know--very well--I could not be angry--withyou!" she murmured, lifting them, dewy with tenderness, with fervour, to his.Victor started, and stepped suddenly away. The door was flung open, and a young woman dressed in nurse's costume rushed in."Vera, what are you about? You'll keep the stage waiting! I beg your pardon, I'm sure," she exclaimed.Vera sprang up, and with a glance in a glass and a wild pat of her hair, ran off. The young woman turned to him."It was a near go that time; but I think she's saved it," she said, somewhat dryly. "You're her brother-in-law, or step-brother, or whatever it is, ain't you? She's been all on wires to-night because you were in front! She's a good sort, is Vera! We all cottoned to her when she got the post. But the stage-manager's got a grudge against her, and that's why I ran off to get her on in time. He'd have fined her as soon as look at her! You see he's taken a fancy to her, and she won't have anything to say to him. I tell her she's a fool for her pains--he's a young fellow with plenty of brains, and his people have loads of money. But there! She won't hear of it! I hope you're pleased with us, Mr., Mr.--a'Court? You are? That's a good job!"Victor Mercier left Vera's colleague a few minutes later with the understanding that he would wait for his "sister" at the stage door. When Vera came out into the dark alley he met her, drew her hand under his arm, and marching her out into the thoroughfare hailed the first hansom he met."Get in!" he commanded. Then he gave the address to the driver.CHAPTER IXThe hansom drove swiftly along through the muddy streets. Victor sat silently by his companion. His nature was strung up to its fullest tension. First had come the exasperating blow--the discovery that his jealous surmise had been right--the wife he called wife because of those few words spoken in a registrar's office, alone, loved another man--perhaps was even secretly his. Then had come the surprise of Vera's beauty--grace--talent--and the conviction of her great passion for himself."I will secure her," he grimly told himself. "I must tell her--something! To know there is 'another woman' will make her irrevocably my own." It was thus he correctly or incorrectly judged womankind.Vera leant back in the corner of the cab, and gazed--rapt, if anxious--at his dark, handsome profile, visible now and again in the moonlight which flashed white radiance upon the puddles and silvered the wet slates of the roofs. Did he love her? Could he care for her? She was ready to follow him like a little dog through the world--if necessary, through disgrace unto death. For, as her sex will do, while she had worshipped him as her hero, she had acknowledged that he could err. When he had been "wanted" by the police she knew that he was "in trouble," if through folly rather than ill-doing; and while he had left his broken-down mother without a hint as to his fate, owing her the money she had borrowed that he might not starve while in hiding, it was Vera who had kept a roof over her widowed step-mother's head--who had toiled and slaved for the lodgers all day, and danced and "walked on" at the theatre all night. Yes--unconsciously she avowed that her idol had feet of clay. But as she sat at his side, the blood raced madly through her veins--her heart beat so strongly against her chest that she could hardly breathe--she had to clench her hands so that they should not clasp his arm--bite her lips lest they should play her false in furtive kisses of the shoulder so tantalizingly near hers."I am a fool perhaps," she bitterly mused: "But--he is so splendid--so delightful!" She gave an involuntary sob--it was so terribly, cruelly convincing that her passion was unreciprocated, that while she was trembling and palpitating with emotion he should sit gloomily gazing out into the darkness with arms folded like Napoleon at St. Helena.He heard it."You little darling, what is the matter?" he suddenly said--then his arms closed about her, she was clasped to his breast, her cold lips were warmed into life by a long, close kiss; and there she lay, in an earthly heaven, until they crossed a bridge over the Thames, now a fairy river like quivering, molten silver in the moonlight, flowing between mystic palaces whose windows glowed red in the shadowy façades, and the cab halted at the end of the street.On his sudden and unexpected return, he had occupied the rooms vacated by a lodger called away to his mother's deathbed in Wales, in the house which was really Vera's, for she paid the rent, but which his mother literally lived by. All the rooms except a parlour and attic she let to students of the huge hospital in the neighbouring thoroughfare.The windows of the little house all glittered white save one--that of the "front parlour.""Mother is still up," said Vera disappointedly--to cool down and behave as a sister after that kiss was a terrible prospect! But let into the silent house by Victor's latch-key, they found the little parlour silent also, and empty, although one burner of the gasalier above the little dining table neatly laid for supper was alight.On the table was a slip of paper: "Excuse me, I am so tired--Mother," was written on it.Vera trembled a little. "Come, Victor, you must have some supper," she said coaxingly."Presently," he said, looking her over with a proprietary glance. "Take off that cloak! Wait, I will do it for you."He went to her. As he unfastened the clasp of the old evening cloak she felt his touch upon her throat--it seemed to make her weak, almost faint. Then he flung it aside--it fell on the floor--and seating himself on the horsehair sofa he drew her down upon his knee."You are all mine! Do you understand?" he imperiously said; and his dark eyes had a sinister, commanding expression as they gazed into hers which frightened her a little, in spite of her unbounded faith and adoration. "All mine! I could take you--or leave you--as I please! You acknowledge it?"She nodded. To know he cared enough to make love to her overcame any poor scraps of pride that fluttered idly in the wild gale of her passion for him."Yes," she murmured humbly."Kiss me, then--let me feel there is one woman in the world worth the taking!" he said, with scathing irony. At that moment he told himself scornfully that they might all be everlastingly banished to Sheol except this one, and he would not turn a hair. He could look coolly over the edge of space and watch their torments with less compunction than he had felt gazing at the disembowelled horses in a Spanish bull-fight.She threw her arms about his neck, and gazed adoringly into his eyes, before she fell yieldingly into his embrace and allowed him to kiss her again and again."Oh, I love you, I love you!" she murmured in her ecstasy. Unlike poor Joan, she had no burdened conscience dragging her back from the reciprocation of her lover's passion."You do, do you?" he asked suddenly, with one of his swift changes of mood, loosing her, and rising to his feet, taking out his cigarette case. "Suppose I were to test you, eh? Frankly, I don't believe in one of your sex!" He gave a sneering laugh, as he struck a match, and, lighting a cigarette stuck it between his lips. "Little wonder, considering that the old gentleman below sent one of his hags to work my downfall! Surely you--a woman--guessed that a woman was at the bottom of all--my--trouble?"During that silent drive in the cab he had resolved what complexion he would put upon "that wretched business," as he termed his defalcations and consequent flight: in other words, what lies he would tell this trusting, devoted girl."W--What?" she stammered--turning deadly white and gazing at him as if in those words she had heard her death-sentence."The old game! A woman pursuing a man," he said, with scornful irony. Why would these women be so terribly tragic? It spoilt sport so abominably! "Don't be jealous! I called her a hag--and she was one! I won't tell you who she was--it wouldn't be fair. But she made a dead set at me--and I kept her at bay until my good nature let me into one of those beastly traps good-natured fellows fall into. I backed a bill for a chum, and he played me false, and left me to pay up. I borrowed money from the business, and then the governor suddenly came down upon me for it. I had to take her money and her with it. Nothing would do but I must marry her! Well, I did, and before I had had time to replace the sum I had borrowed, the governor stole a march on me, and found it out! I begged her to settle matters, but she refused! So there was nothing to do but to bolt--and remain away--live with the old cat I would not! What is the matter? She is less than nothing to me--more, I hate, loathe, and despise her!"She had sunk back with a groan and covered her face with her hands. He seated himself and drew her passionately to him."Come, come, there is no harm done! I mean to have you, d'ye hear? And soon! And as my wife! What else do you think? I heard to-night there is a man in the case. I mean to be free, with a capital to make merry on for the rest of our lives! I've only to play my cards properly, and you've only to keepmum. Can you, do you think? Can you keep everything I do and say to yourself, and help me a bit now and then? If you can, you'll be my wife! If you can't, you won't. That's flat.""You know what I think of you!" she moaned, gazing piteously at him. "You know you are the whole world to me--that I would be tortured and killed rather than betray you!""What is there to groan about, then?" he cried impatiently, springing up. "Upon my word, you are enough to rile a man into chucking you, that you are!""What is there to groan about?" she repeated bitterly. "What a question to ask--when you tell me--you are married--when there is a woman alive who has the right to call--you--husband!""Not for long, make your mind easy about that!" he grimly remarked. He had made an unalterable resolve that in some way or another this girl should atone to him for Joan's shortcomings--yet should herself benefit to Joan's loss: and he set himself to such a lengthened course of cajolery and fascination of his admirer then and there, that the veils of night were shifting and lifting, furtive nightbirds crept from their lairs and fled along the streets as if scared by the dawn--and the light still glowed in that window of Number Twelve, Haythorn Street.
CHAPTER V
The big mansion of which she was the pampered, cherished darling, lay solemn, pompous, solid, dark, behind her. Before her, the pavement, wet after a summer shower, shone in the lamplight. Dark, waving shadows against the driving clouds, with their fitful patches of moonlit sky, were the trees in the enclosure, dangled by the wind. She hurried along--turning down the first by-street she came to--and emerging at its end into one of the principal thoroughfares, she hailed a crawling hansom.
"Regent's Park, Clarence Gate," she said, in a muffled voice, as she sprang lightly in.
To be dashing along the lighted streets to meet the absconded swindler who had dared to take advantage of her girlish folly to make her his wife by law, was delirious work. Cowering back in the corner of the hansom, she gazed with sickened misery at the gay shop-windows, at the crowded omnibuses, at the cheery passengers who carelessly stepped along the pavement, looking as if all life were matter-of-fact, plain sailing, "above-board." A hundred shrill voices seemed clamouring in her ears--"turn back--turn back! Face the worst, but be honest!" She had almost flung up her arm and, opening the trap, bid the driver return, when the memory of Vansittart--of his love--of his kiss--came surging upon her with redoubled force.
"If I am a coward, I shall lose him!" cried her whole nature, fiercely. No! She must battle through: she must circumvent her enemy--the enemy to her love, and Vansittart's.
But how?
"I will dare him," was her instinct. "I will tell him to claim me if he can!" But that was the madness of passion. Reason bade her use other means.
"One must fight a man with his own weapons," she told herself, as the hansom dashed along Gloucester Place, and she knew her time was short. It was now nearer nine than eight--she had seen that by an illuminated clock over a shop.Hewas to be at their trysting-place of old, when she had lodged with her old nurse in a street in Camden Town, at eight. "He lied to me from the first moment to the last. I must lie to him. I will pretend I have cared for him! It will put him off his guard," she thought, as, with a double fee to the cabman, who said "thank-ye, miss," with odious familiarity, she scurried away in the darkness, and crossing the wet road, turned up that which led to the Inner Circle.
There was no chance of forgetting the spot where they two had last met! As she neared it, a slim, dark figure stepped out from the shadow.
"My wife," he exclaimed, in emotional tones. He would have embraced her, but she slipped away and leant up against the paling.
"You can call me that--after leaving me all these years--not knowing whether you were alive or dead," she panted hoarsely. Under any circumstances emotion was natural, so she made no effort to conceal it.
"I? It was you who would not reply to my letters!" he exclaimed bitterly. "I wrote again and again, under cover to your miserable old nurse--and don't say you never had them! The last came back to me--'not known.' But the others did not--they would have if they had not reached!"
"If she had them, she never gave them to me!" she said truthfully. "And I don't wonder! I was so utterly wretched when I read of your--your--flight--that I told her--all! I had to--I should have gone raving mad if I had kept it to myself!"
"Well, all that is over and done with, thank goodness!" he exclaimed, cheerfully, after a brief pause. "I will not scold you for misjudging me--you were but a child! But you are a woman now, of age, your own mistress! I have been fortunate of late, or I should not be here. Speculations of mine have turned up trumps--and not only that, but I have friends in the City who will introduce me to your uncle, and if you only play your cards well, our real wedding shall be followed by a sham one, and Mrs. Victor a'Court will take a very nice place in society. My dear, cash opens all doors, and I have it!"
"Some one is coming," she said feebly. His speech had called forth all her powers of endurance, and, while bracing herself to bear up as she did, Nature determinedly asserted itself. She felt cold and giddy--her limbs seemed as if they did not belong to her.
"Only a Bobby," he said, with a light vulgarity which seemed the last straw. As she turned to walk along by his side, she tottered.
"Don't do that, or the Bobby will think you are drunk," he said, coarsely, holding her up by the arm. His detested touch achieved what her slackening courage had failed to do. She felt suddenly strong with a new, fierce emotion--was it hate?
"I cannot understand how you can be well off--or, indeed, how you can be here at all," she softly began, as the policeman marched solemnly on before them, the light of one of the occasional lamps gleaming on his wet weather cape. "I thought----"
"You mean, your old nurse thought!" he went on angrily. "You--you were not capable of suspecting me, if that old wretch had not put it into your head! My love, I was a victim of circumstances. The people I was with were a rotten lot. They accused me to protect themselves. They were bankrupt three years ago! Mercier was not my real name. My father was Victor Mercier a'Court. It suited me to use it, that's all! What--you don't believe me?"
"You told me lies then--why should I believe you?" she boldly said.
"Because you are my wife! It will not pay me to tell you untruths--nor will it pay you to doubt me!" he savagely retorted. "I had expected a welcome! Instead, I am treated like this! It is enough to exasperate a saint--and I don't profess to be that! Come, let us talk business, as you don't feel inclined for love. You are mine, and I mean to have you. You understand? I have waited for you all these years, and precious hard work it has been, I can tell you, for plenty of girls as good-looking as you made a dead set at me--and girls with loads of oof, too! If I don't get you by fair means, I will have you by foul--it is for you to select. By Jingo, it would serve you right if I went to that wretched uncle of yours to-morrow, and claimed you!"
She stopped short and confronted him. The moon, breaking through the driving clouds, shone full on her face. Beautiful, corpse-like in its sombre, set expression, there was that in her great, shining eyes which gave him, hardened worldling though he was, a slight shock. He felt he had gone too far.
"Drop the tragedy queen, do, and be my own little darling once more!" he wheedled, and would have embraced her, but she slid away as he approached.
"Listen!" she began, in clear, determined tones, in which there was neither fear nor hesitation, "unless you treat me with consideration, decency, respect--unless you can give me time to arrange matters so that to avow myself your--wife--will not ruin me, body and soul, I swear before God that I will put a barrier between myself and you which will separate us for ever."
"Pah, pah, pah, spitfire!" he sarcastically said, swinging his umbrella and beginning to walk onward. "I know what you mean! You have some romantic idea of suicide. You are not the kind of girl who kills herself, I can tell you that--so that threat won't hold water with me. Come now, don't let us waste time quarrelling. What do you propose to do? Before I tell you my ideas, let's hear yours.Place aux dameswas always my motto."
During her long vigil, scheme after scheme of escaping him and of belonging irrevocably to Vansittart, one plan wilder than another, had agitated her mind. She had at last arrived at one set conclusion--Victor Mercier must be cajoled into giving her time. Events would decide the rest.
"All I ask of you is to wait," she pleaded earnestly, vehemently. "Give me time to find some way of introducing you to friends, and through them to uncle and aunt--then I can begin seeming to encourage you, and feel my way----"
He burst into a derisive laugh.
"Rats!" he cried brutally. "That sort of thing won't do for me, my dear wife, I can tell you! I see you are as big a baby as ever--you need some one badly to teach you your way about! No, no! I want you at once--who and what's to prevent me from taking possession of my lawful property? There is only one thing for us to do: to bolt together--and to leave them completely in the dark as to your fate. I hear that those two old prigs who wouldn't give bite or sup to your father when he was a dying man are dead nuts on you. We must make 'em suffer, my darling! We must madden them till they are ready to do anything and everything if they can only find you alive. And we must talk it over--so that your disappearance may be a regular thunderbolt! Can you come to my lodgings to-morrow evening? I want you to myself--it's natural, isn't it? This road, quiet as it is, is hardly the place for husband and wife to meet, is it? What? You can't come?" His voice hoarsened--he clutched her arm so fiercely that she gave a faint cry. "You don't want me?" he exclaimed, in tones which to her strained ears seemed those of deadly menace. "If you don't--I know you, you see! I have not forgotten your kisses, if you have mine--it means another man! And if it does, I will have no mercy on you, do you understand? None!"
"How dare you?" Once more she faced him, this time in an access of desperation. "How dare you accuse me of crime? My coldness, my absolute refusal to listen to any man is so well known that it has been common talk in society! More than once I have felt that uncle has suspected me--and, indeed, he has sounded me----"
In her earnestness she was off guard, and drawing her to him, he suddenly threw his arms about her neck and kissed her lips--a long, violent, almost savage kiss.
"There--go home and think of that!" he said, with a triumphant chuckle, as she staggered away and almost fell against the fence. "And take this address. I shall be here every evening at the same hour. And if you don't come--well, you had better come, that's all! I am not in a very patient humour."
She made her way out of the Park at his side, dazed, trembling. When at last he consented to leave her, and hailing a hansom, she clambered in, she leant back, and for a few minutes was barely conscious. She came to herself with a sob.
"Will God have mercy on me?" she wailed. "I was so--so--very young!"
CHAPTER VI
Joan made her way home--how, she hardly knew. In the confusion of thought succeeding that terrible interview which had successfully shown her she was in the power of a merciless tyrant, instinct guided her. After Victor Mercier had put her into a cab, and she had alighted from it in a thoroughfare near her uncle's house, she let herself in with the latchkey she had playfully annexed, little dreaming how she would need to use it--and meeting no one as she made her way up to her room, locked herself in to face her misery alone.
As she tossed and writhed through the long, miserable night she almost despaired. Perhaps she would have utterly and entirely lost heart, had not a thought flashed upon her mind--an idea she welcomed as an inspiration.
"There is only one way to escape the grip of that savage tiger--flight!" she told herself. Although the sole tie between them was the hasty ceremony in a Registrar's office he had cajoled her into years ago--although she had met him but once afterwards before he absconded and disappeared, and that was in the very spot where their interview a few hours before had taken place, she believed, indeed she knew, that for her to try to undo that knot would entail publicity--disgrace--even shame--that if she endured the ordeal, she would emerge unfit to be Vansittart's wife. Ifheforgave her, even her uncle--society could and would never overlook the smirch upon her fair girlhood. She would bear a brand.
"Victor gave me the idea, himself," she told herself, with a bitter smile at the irony of the fact. "He--the man who is legally my husband until he chooses to renounce me"--in her ignorance of the law she fancied that Victor Mercier might divorce her quietly in some way, if he pleased--"proposed that we should disappear together, and frighten my uncle into a concession. What if I disappeared alone--and only allowed one person to find me--Vansittart?"
That Vansittart loved her passionately, with all the fervour and intensity of a strong, virile nature, she knew. Whether the love was mad enough to fall in with any wildly romantic proceeding, she had yet to discover.
"He will seek me as soon as he can!" she correctly thought. As she was crossing the hall after breakfasting with her uncle, who--in his hopes that his only niece and adopted daughter and heiress was thinking better of her aloofness to mankind, and melting in regard to his favourite among her many admirers, Lord Vansittart--had been unwontedly urbane and affectionate, a telegram was brought to her.
"If I may see you at twelve, noon, do not reply.--Vansittart."
At noon her uncle would be at his club, and her aunt had, she knew, an appointment with her dressmaker in Bond Street. She went to her room and spent some little time in deciding upon her toilette. How did she look best, or, rather, how should she be attired to appeal most strongly to Vansittart's imagination and senses?
Most women are born with subtle instincts in regard to the weakness of manhood, especially the manhood already to a certain extent in their power. Joan hardly knew why she felt that a certain dishabille--a suggestion of delicacy and fragile helplessness in her appearance, would place Vansittart more entirely at her mercy; but it was with this conviction that she attired herself in a white, soft, silken and lace-adorned tea-gown, with lace ruffles about her smooth, rounded throat and wrists--a robe that fell away from a pink silk underdress which, fitting tightly about her waist, showed the rich, yet girlish curves of her beautiful form to the fullest advantage.
Her hair had been wound somewhat carelessly but classically about her small head by Julie, who was rather excited at having received an offer of marriage. Joan had listened sympathetically--she had encouraged the girl in her love affair, more, perhaps, because it would serve her own interests, being one which was to remain a secret from "his parents in France" until they had seen Julie, and therefore subject to mysterious "evenings-out" and holidays taken, with other explanations to the housekeeper. Altogether there was a certain softness about her whole appearance, Joan considered, as she anxiously gazed at her reflection in the many mirrors she passed proceeding to her boudoir, which was on the same floor as the drawing-rooms, and opened upon a small balcony full of flowers, with a peep of the enclosure and the Park beyond, just under the red and white awning.
It was eleven when she entered her room and set herself to write a whole host of letters. She had barely finished three before a brougham dashed up to the hall door. She started up, her heart beating, her cheeks aflame.
"It cannot be--why, it is hardly a quarter to twelve," she thought, glancing at the Dresden china clock. But even as she spoke she heard his voice--those musical, resonant, manly tones she loved--and in another moment the groom of the chambers announced, "Lord Vansittart," with an assurance which seemed strange to Joan, unaware of the freemasonry below stairs which enlightened the domestic staff as to the wishes and opinions of the master of the house.
As he came in, tall, his fair, wavy hair flung back from his broad brow; his large, frank eyes alight, his cheeks aglow with passion; some suggestion of a conqueror in his mien--his very fervour and exultation were infectious--she could have fallen into his arms and abandoned herself to his embraces as if there were no obstacle to their mutual love.
As it was she merely gave one limp, chill hand into his eager clasp, and cast down her eyes as he said: "I am early--I could not help it--Joan, Joan, what is it? You are not glad to see me"--his voice faltered.
"Sit down--won't you?" she said, and she sank into a low chair and motioned him to one out in the cold--but he would not understand--he drew a light low chair quite near to hers, and fixed her with an intent, anxious gaze.
"Last night you behaved--as if--you cared a little for me," he began, almost reproachfully.
"Last night--I was a fool!" she bitterly said. "I let you see too much."
"Why too much?" he drew eagerly nearer. "Joan, my beloved--the only one in the whole world I care for--for, indeed, you have all my love, all--I am yours, body and soul!--what can come between us if you love me? And you do! I know you do! I feel you don't want to--and I don't wonder, I am not good enough, no one can be--but if you love me, I and no other man, ought to be your husband!"
"Understand--I beg, pray, implore you to understand," she began, slowly, painfully--this holding her wild instincts in check was the most terribly hard battle she had ever fought--"I have sworn to myself never to marry. Years ago my uncle was hard, cruel to my parents: they literally died, half-starved, because he would not help them. When he adopted me I did not know this. I had some work to accept his kindness after I did know. But never, never will I accept a dowry, a trousseau, from him--yet I will not explain why--nor will I go to any man a pauper. Now perhaps you can see why--I feel--I can only do justice to myself, and show mercy to him--by remaining as I am!"
"You mean to allow this folly about your uncle to come between you and me?" he cried imperiously. His compelling grasp closed upon her wrists. "Joan, Joan, do not throw away my life and yours by such an absurdity--such a whim!"
He gazed into her eyes with his so brimful of intensity of passion that they seemed to draw her towards him. She struggled against yielding to the appeal, the yearning in his face--and he, he watched the struggle--and as she gave a little sob, which was virtually a cry for mercy, he drew her to him--he took her in his arms--she was on her knees, in his embrace, her heart beating against his, their lips clinging to each other.
Long--so it seemed to Joan--was she enwrapped in that delirium of bliss she might have imagined, weakly, but had never felt in all its fierce, oblivious ecstacy. Then she held him from her.
"Oh, what shall I do?" she wailed--and clasping his knee she leant her face upon her cold trembling hands.
"You dear, innocent child! Do, indeed!" he almost merrily exclaimed, stooping and kissing her fair wreaths of shining hair. "Why exactly as you like! I don't care a fig for your uncle--at least, as regards what he can give you--I have enough for you and a family of brothers and sisters, too, if you had one. All I want isyou, do you understand, you! You have only to dictate terms--I surrender unconditionally!"
CHAPTER VII
"You have only to dictate terms--I surrender unconditionally!"
Could she have heard aright? Joan lifted her pale, miserable face--miserable with the woe of reality after the delirious joy of being clasped to her lover's heart--and slowly shook her head.
"I have no terms to dictate," she slowly, dismally said. "I cannot go through a secret engagement! It would be impossible to keep it secret, either. Uncle will guess! Why, I have hardly been decently civil to any man who seemed as if he had ideas of marriage--he will know at once--and then--every one else would know--oh, I could not bear it! It would drive me mad!"
She spoke vehemently--and there was a wild, dangerous gleam in her eyes which he did not like. Perhaps the mental trouble it must have been to the sensitive orphan to accept bounty from the cold-blooded man who had let her father, his brother, die unsuccoured, had brought about hysteria. He had read and heard of such cases. It behoved him to come to his darling's rescue--to cherish and care for her--ward off every danger from one so beautiful, so helpless, so alone. As he gazed at her, an extraordinary idea flashed upon him--like lightning it illumined the darkness--the way he must go seemed to stand out plain before him.
"My dearest, there is a way out of our difficulty so simple, so obvious, that it seems to me a waste of time to discuss anything else!" he said, tenderly, gravely. "You are of age--you are entitled to act for yourself! Let us be married as soon as possible and start in my yacht for a tour round the world! I can manage everything secretly: you will only have to walk out of the house one fine morning and be married to me, and we will take the next train to wherever the yacht will be waiting for us, and be off and away before your absence has been remarked and wondered at! I will leave explanations to be sent to your uncle at the right moment, acknowledging ourselves eccentric, romantic, blameable, perhaps, but not unforgivable--saying that we knew so long a honeymoon would be unpalatable, so we took French leave--why do you shiver dearest?" He bent anxiously over her. "Joan! Won't you trust me?"
"Trust you!" she gazed up at him with that startling expression of mingled love and woe into his face--a look he had seen in a great picture of souls suffering in Hades--an expression too full of agony to be easily forgotten. "Only it seems too much to expect! It cannot possibly happen--those good things don't, in this miserable life!"
"You are morbid, dearest, if I may dare to say it," he tenderly said, drawing her into the arms with which he vowed to shelter and defend her from all and every adverse circumstance which might ever threaten her peace and content. And he set himself to comfort, hearten, encourage her drooping spirits, as he painted the joys of their future life in the most glowing terms at his command, during the rest of what was to him their glorious hour together. To a certain extent he thought he had succeeded. At least, Joan had smiled--had even laughed--although the tragic look in those beautiful eyes--absent, hunted, terror-stricken, desperate--was it only one of those things, or all?--had not been superseded by the expression of calm satisfaction it would be such relief and joy to him to see there.
"Something is wrong--but what?" he asked himself, after he had stayed luncheon, and at last succeeded in tearing himself away. "Is it only that fact--a miserable one to so tender yet passionate a nature--that while she is loaded with luxuries by her uncle, her parents died almost in want because he withheld the helping hand? It may be! Well--anyhow--the best thing for her is absolute change--as soon as possible--and that she shall have!"
* * * * *
Victor Mercier--it was his real name, his father, a meretricious French adventurer, had married his mother for a small capital, which he had got rid of some time before he ran away and left his wife and infant son to starve--had left Joan the eventful night of their meeting after long years--in a towering rage.
His was a nature saturated with vanity and self-love. From childhood upwards he had believed himself entitled to possess whatever he coveted--the law ofmeum and tuumwas non-existent in his scheme for getting as much out of life as it was possible to get. Naturally sharp, and with good looks of the kind that some women admire, he had not only made a willing slave of his mother, but when, some years after, the news of his father's death came to her, she married again, a widower with a charming little daughter, step-father and pseudo-sister also worshipped at his shrine.
Then he ingratiated himself with an employer so that he was entrusted with the sole management of the branch business at C----. Here, he "splurged"; spent money freely, and--when he heard that the pretty schoolgirl he had succeeded in establishing a flirtation with was the only surviving member of the weakly family represented by the wealthy Sir Thomas Thorne--he grew more and more reckless in the expenditure of his master's money and in his falsifying of the accounts. Like many others of his kind, he overreached his mark. When he paid a flying visit to London to marry Joan before she was adopted by her uncle--her mother had just died--it occurred to the head of his firm to "run over" to C---- and audit the books. The day of Mercier's secret marriage he heard that "the game was up," and his only means of escape, instant flight and lasting absence.
It was quite true that his firm failed a couple of years later. But he had then just established himself as partner in a drinking-bar in the unsavoury neighbourhood of a gold mine in South Africa. The lady of the establishment had fallen in love with him, and there was, in fact, money to be made all round about by one who was not too particular in his morals and opinions. Suddenly, the neighbourhood grew too hot for him, and he found it convenient to remember that the rich Miss Joan Thorne must now be twenty-one and ready to be claimed as his wife.
So he returned with money enough to make a show, later on, of being rich, at least for a month or two. The first thing was to find Joan: the next to meet her.
An acquaintance made in his comparatively innocent boyhood happened to be now confidential valet to the Duke of Arran. He sought him out, flattered, and--without confiding his real story to him--made him his creature by using a certain power of fascination which had helped on his unworthy career from its beginning.
Paul Naz got him engagements as "extra hand" on state occasions in noblemen's houses; he had fulfilled three of these before he attained his end and encountered Joan at the Duke's--Paul consented to pay court to Julie le Roux, Miss Thorne's maid, so as to keep his old playfellow informed as to the doings of the family, who, he told him, owed his late father a considerable sum of money, which he wished to recover privately to save scandal. That very night Paul was taking Julie to see Mercier's so-called half-sister act in a transpontine theatre. "Vera Anerley," as she had stage-named herself, had been on tour with a popular piece--was absent at the time of Victor's return--and had appealed to his vanity by her wild emotion when they met. He was to see her on the stage, and to have a word with Naz, who had had to probe Julie in a certain direction, after he left his "wife" in the Regent's Park.
When he had watched Joan's hansom speed away in the darkness, Victor Mercier walked along, then--hailing a passing cab, was driven to the theatre. As he went he anathematized Joan in the strongest of mining oaths.
"Like all the rest," he bitterly thought. "Always another man--they must have a man hanging about them!"
Alighting at the theatre, he met Naz, a fair, innocent-looking Frenchman, coming out. He joined him, saying "Come and have a drink."
"You have lost much by being late, your half-sister is adorable!" said Naz, as they stood together at the bar of a neighbouring public-house.
"No doubt!" said Mercier carelessly. "So is your Julie, eh? By the way, how is Julie's mistress? Any news?"
"As I said," returned Naz, in an undertone. "The beautiful creature is trapped at last, by a lover who has been out of the country to try and forget her, shooting big game! They ride--meet--he was with her when I posted you in the corridor that night. They passed me, you must have seen him."
"Him--who?" muttered Mercier. There was a gleam in his eyes.
"Lord Vansittart," replied Naz. "The Duchess has been heard to say it was a settled thing!"
CHAPTER VIII
The Duke's valet prattled on until the second and third liqueurs had solaced his being. Then Victor glanced darkly at the clock.
"Let us go," he roughly said.
The softspoken Naz only thought that the delightful fluid which warmed and comforted his gentle self had had a reverse effect upon his old friend, so--following him gently as Mercier stalked gloomily into the theatre and up to the dress circle, which was well-packed with honest citizens and their wives in their ordinary habit as they lived--he returned to his seat by Julie, and left him to his own devices.
The third act was over. In the fourth Mercier's so-called "sister" had plenty to do. She was a peccant wife, revisiting home in disguise, and seeking her husband's pardon. It was a pathetic scene, when she sought her husband and discovered herself. Throwing off her disguise--she was got up as an old woman--she emerged sweet, fascinating, in a white dress, with her black hair in Magdalen-like confusion, and sinking at his feet, alternately implored and adored with such passion and intensity that tears rolled down the feminine auditors' cheeks, and the house literally rose to her.
"And all that passion is mine, to take or leave as I please," was Victor's saturnine comment, as he leant back in his seat with folded arms and frowned darkly at the stage. He well knew that his amorous dalliance with his step-father's daughter, when he had had nothing more to his taste to dally with, had succeeded in inspiring her with so violent a devotion to him that, if he had not pitied, he might have come to loathe her. When she was a mere pretty, stupid schoolgirl, going to and fro to her middle-class girls' school, satchel in hand, he had had but little patience with her absorption in him and his career. But now that he saw her on the stage, beautiful with an undeniable beauty, full of grace and spontaneity, and possessed of that power which passion gives, he thrilled with mingled desire and satisfaction.
Strange ideas rose up in his mind--ideas of a subtle revenge upon Joan--of intense and vivid gratification to himself.
"Joan will be my wife--my bondslave, to be dealt with how I please, and when I please; and as long as I kiss and caress her no one dare interfere, if I choose that she shall spend almost her life in my arms with my lips on hers," he grimly told himself. "But--Vera loves me--and if I am Vera's lover while I am Joan's uxorious husband, Joan's pride will not allow her to accuse me, even if she suspects! And how her proud, snobbish soul will hate my giving her half my love--as an Eastern potentate gives it to his appointed spouse, while his real devotion is his favourites'!"
The idea gave him a peculiar and indescribable pleasure. It seemed, indeed, to restore his equilibrium. As the curtain fell, he left the auditorium and made his way round to the stage door, as he had promised Vera to do.
"I wish to see Miss Anerley--which is her dressing-room?" he asked, when, after cautiously traversing a dark, unsavoury alley, he had pushed open the swing door, had entered a dimly-lit corridor where a sickly gas flame was flaring in the draught in its wire cage, and met a man coming towards him.
"You are her brother? Come this way, please." The good-natured acting-manager of the touring company, an eager little man in shabby evening dress, escorted Victor along a passage to a door on which "Miss Vera Anerley" was pasted, and knocked.
"It's your brother, Miss Anerley," he called out.
"Thanks! Wait one moment, Victor, will you?" cried a pretty, girlish voice.
"All right." Victor paced the narrow, damp-smelling corridor, hearing the thumps and shouts from the stage, intermingled with a murmur of melodramatic music now and then from the orchestra--making way occasionally for a stage carpenter in shirt-sleeves, or an actor hurrying from his dressing room--until Vera looked out. "I am so sorry to have kept you--come in," she said caressingly, and she pulled him gently in and closed the door.
"Tell me, how do you like me?" she eagerly cried, clasping his hand with both hers. There was no reserve between these two--if, indeed, propinquity had not established complete freedom from what Victor termedgênelong ago--and she gazed up into his face with eyes transparent, shining, darkly blue as sapphires, eyes so brilliant that in admiring them he hardly noticed the coarse red and white grease paint which thickly coated her delicate skin, or the bistre rings around those beautiful orbs. "Victor! Speak! If you are not satisfied, I shall chuck the profession--dearly as I love my work, I couldn't stand it!"
"Silly child!" He patted her hand, and looked round for a seat. There were two broken chairs in the large, bare, cellar-like "dressing-room," with its high window shrouded by a torn and dirty red curtain and its dresser-like table with looking-glasses the worse for wear under the flaring gas jets. But he shook his head at them. "I'll sit here," he said, perching himself on one of the big dress-baskets under the pegs hung with feminine garments. "By George! what a room for a future Lady Macbeth to dress in, to be sure! My dear, don't gasp! That's your style, tragedy, melodrama, bloodcurdling! You're a damned passionate little witch, that's what you are--and I expected as much."
She gave him a rapturous glance as she drew a deep sigh of relief and satisfaction, and sank in a graceful, unstudied attitude upon one of the crippled Windsor chairs; and he dryly lighted a cigarette, and gazed critically at her. She was very fair! Small, with an oval face under glossy masses of dark silken hair; slight and graceful, with a child's hands and feet, and a tiny waist; yet the shoulders rising from her blue ball-dress with its gaudy wreaths of pink flowers were softly rounded--and the contour of neck and bust he considered "simply perfect." He ground his teeth and spat viciously on the blackened boards--there were only pieces of old carpeting here and there--as he remembered his wife--and her supposed lover, "Lord Vansittart." "What a cursed shame!" he thought. "They wallow in wealth--and I and this child--bah! there is something to be said for anarchy, after all!"
"You look--well, I feel I should like to kiss you," he grimly said.
She blushed under her paint. Since her woman's love had waxed so strong, all the former boy-and-girl intimacy went for nothing--she was shy of him.
"If you did you would spoil my 'make-up' and would get a dab or two of paint on your nose," she said, with slight embarrassment. It was just that coy fear of him in the abandonment of her passionate love which fired Victor Mercier when he was near her. Fierce though his mingled desire of, and hatred for, Joan had been, and still was, she had never thrilled him, stirred his whole nature, as this girl, the companion of his youth, had the power to do.
"You mean to say that is greasepaint on your shoulders?" he said, rising. He crossed the room, and, although she laughingly expostulated, he bent and kissed them--then lifted her chin and kissed her throat.
"Are you angry?" he said mockingly, gazing down into her eyes with an intent, triumphant expression.
"You know--very well--I could not be angry--withyou!" she murmured, lifting them, dewy with tenderness, with fervour, to his.
Victor started, and stepped suddenly away. The door was flung open, and a young woman dressed in nurse's costume rushed in.
"Vera, what are you about? You'll keep the stage waiting! I beg your pardon, I'm sure," she exclaimed.
Vera sprang up, and with a glance in a glass and a wild pat of her hair, ran off. The young woman turned to him.
"It was a near go that time; but I think she's saved it," she said, somewhat dryly. "You're her brother-in-law, or step-brother, or whatever it is, ain't you? She's been all on wires to-night because you were in front! She's a good sort, is Vera! We all cottoned to her when she got the post. But the stage-manager's got a grudge against her, and that's why I ran off to get her on in time. He'd have fined her as soon as look at her! You see he's taken a fancy to her, and she won't have anything to say to him. I tell her she's a fool for her pains--he's a young fellow with plenty of brains, and his people have loads of money. But there! She won't hear of it! I hope you're pleased with us, Mr., Mr.--a'Court? You are? That's a good job!"
Victor Mercier left Vera's colleague a few minutes later with the understanding that he would wait for his "sister" at the stage door. When Vera came out into the dark alley he met her, drew her hand under his arm, and marching her out into the thoroughfare hailed the first hansom he met.
"Get in!" he commanded. Then he gave the address to the driver.
CHAPTER IX
The hansom drove swiftly along through the muddy streets. Victor sat silently by his companion. His nature was strung up to its fullest tension. First had come the exasperating blow--the discovery that his jealous surmise had been right--the wife he called wife because of those few words spoken in a registrar's office, alone, loved another man--perhaps was even secretly his. Then had come the surprise of Vera's beauty--grace--talent--and the conviction of her great passion for himself.
"I will secure her," he grimly told himself. "I must tell her--something! To know there is 'another woman' will make her irrevocably my own." It was thus he correctly or incorrectly judged womankind.
Vera leant back in the corner of the cab, and gazed--rapt, if anxious--at his dark, handsome profile, visible now and again in the moonlight which flashed white radiance upon the puddles and silvered the wet slates of the roofs. Did he love her? Could he care for her? She was ready to follow him like a little dog through the world--if necessary, through disgrace unto death. For, as her sex will do, while she had worshipped him as her hero, she had acknowledged that he could err. When he had been "wanted" by the police she knew that he was "in trouble," if through folly rather than ill-doing; and while he had left his broken-down mother without a hint as to his fate, owing her the money she had borrowed that he might not starve while in hiding, it was Vera who had kept a roof over her widowed step-mother's head--who had toiled and slaved for the lodgers all day, and danced and "walked on" at the theatre all night. Yes--unconsciously she avowed that her idol had feet of clay. But as she sat at his side, the blood raced madly through her veins--her heart beat so strongly against her chest that she could hardly breathe--she had to clench her hands so that they should not clasp his arm--bite her lips lest they should play her false in furtive kisses of the shoulder so tantalizingly near hers.
"I am a fool perhaps," she bitterly mused: "But--he is so splendid--so delightful!" She gave an involuntary sob--it was so terribly, cruelly convincing that her passion was unreciprocated, that while she was trembling and palpitating with emotion he should sit gloomily gazing out into the darkness with arms folded like Napoleon at St. Helena.
He heard it.
"You little darling, what is the matter?" he suddenly said--then his arms closed about her, she was clasped to his breast, her cold lips were warmed into life by a long, close kiss; and there she lay, in an earthly heaven, until they crossed a bridge over the Thames, now a fairy river like quivering, molten silver in the moonlight, flowing between mystic palaces whose windows glowed red in the shadowy façades, and the cab halted at the end of the street.
On his sudden and unexpected return, he had occupied the rooms vacated by a lodger called away to his mother's deathbed in Wales, in the house which was really Vera's, for she paid the rent, but which his mother literally lived by. All the rooms except a parlour and attic she let to students of the huge hospital in the neighbouring thoroughfare.
The windows of the little house all glittered white save one--that of the "front parlour."
"Mother is still up," said Vera disappointedly--to cool down and behave as a sister after that kiss was a terrible prospect! But let into the silent house by Victor's latch-key, they found the little parlour silent also, and empty, although one burner of the gasalier above the little dining table neatly laid for supper was alight.
On the table was a slip of paper: "Excuse me, I am so tired--Mother," was written on it.
Vera trembled a little. "Come, Victor, you must have some supper," she said coaxingly.
"Presently," he said, looking her over with a proprietary glance. "Take off that cloak! Wait, I will do it for you."
He went to her. As he unfastened the clasp of the old evening cloak she felt his touch upon her throat--it seemed to make her weak, almost faint. Then he flung it aside--it fell on the floor--and seating himself on the horsehair sofa he drew her down upon his knee.
"You are all mine! Do you understand?" he imperiously said; and his dark eyes had a sinister, commanding expression as they gazed into hers which frightened her a little, in spite of her unbounded faith and adoration. "All mine! I could take you--or leave you--as I please! You acknowledge it?"
She nodded. To know he cared enough to make love to her overcame any poor scraps of pride that fluttered idly in the wild gale of her passion for him.
"Yes," she murmured humbly.
"Kiss me, then--let me feel there is one woman in the world worth the taking!" he said, with scathing irony. At that moment he told himself scornfully that they might all be everlastingly banished to Sheol except this one, and he would not turn a hair. He could look coolly over the edge of space and watch their torments with less compunction than he had felt gazing at the disembowelled horses in a Spanish bull-fight.
She threw her arms about his neck, and gazed adoringly into his eyes, before she fell yieldingly into his embrace and allowed him to kiss her again and again.
"Oh, I love you, I love you!" she murmured in her ecstasy. Unlike poor Joan, she had no burdened conscience dragging her back from the reciprocation of her lover's passion.
"You do, do you?" he asked suddenly, with one of his swift changes of mood, loosing her, and rising to his feet, taking out his cigarette case. "Suppose I were to test you, eh? Frankly, I don't believe in one of your sex!" He gave a sneering laugh, as he struck a match, and, lighting a cigarette stuck it between his lips. "Little wonder, considering that the old gentleman below sent one of his hags to work my downfall! Surely you--a woman--guessed that a woman was at the bottom of all--my--trouble?"
During that silent drive in the cab he had resolved what complexion he would put upon "that wretched business," as he termed his defalcations and consequent flight: in other words, what lies he would tell this trusting, devoted girl.
"W--What?" she stammered--turning deadly white and gazing at him as if in those words she had heard her death-sentence.
"The old game! A woman pursuing a man," he said, with scornful irony. Why would these women be so terribly tragic? It spoilt sport so abominably! "Don't be jealous! I called her a hag--and she was one! I won't tell you who she was--it wouldn't be fair. But she made a dead set at me--and I kept her at bay until my good nature let me into one of those beastly traps good-natured fellows fall into. I backed a bill for a chum, and he played me false, and left me to pay up. I borrowed money from the business, and then the governor suddenly came down upon me for it. I had to take her money and her with it. Nothing would do but I must marry her! Well, I did, and before I had had time to replace the sum I had borrowed, the governor stole a march on me, and found it out! I begged her to settle matters, but she refused! So there was nothing to do but to bolt--and remain away--live with the old cat I would not! What is the matter? She is less than nothing to me--more, I hate, loathe, and despise her!"
She had sunk back with a groan and covered her face with her hands. He seated himself and drew her passionately to him.
"Come, come, there is no harm done! I mean to have you, d'ye hear? And soon! And as my wife! What else do you think? I heard to-night there is a man in the case. I mean to be free, with a capital to make merry on for the rest of our lives! I've only to play my cards properly, and you've only to keepmum. Can you, do you think? Can you keep everything I do and say to yourself, and help me a bit now and then? If you can, you'll be my wife! If you can't, you won't. That's flat."
"You know what I think of you!" she moaned, gazing piteously at him. "You know you are the whole world to me--that I would be tortured and killed rather than betray you!"
"What is there to groan about, then?" he cried impatiently, springing up. "Upon my word, you are enough to rile a man into chucking you, that you are!"
"What is there to groan about?" she repeated bitterly. "What a question to ask--when you tell me--you are married--when there is a woman alive who has the right to call--you--husband!"
"Not for long, make your mind easy about that!" he grimly remarked. He had made an unalterable resolve that in some way or another this girl should atone to him for Joan's shortcomings--yet should herself benefit to Joan's loss: and he set himself to such a lengthened course of cajolery and fascination of his admirer then and there, that the veils of night were shifting and lifting, furtive nightbirds crept from their lairs and fled along the streets as if scared by the dawn--and the light still glowed in that window of Number Twelve, Haythorn Street.