CHAPTER XAt first Joan had been almost fearful in her new-born hope. The prospect of flight with her lover, the idea of marrying him secretly, and starting for a tour round the world, about which no one would know anything definite, seemed too splendid a prospect to be true! Then, as the days passed, and after writing an enigmatical letter to Victor at 12, Haythorn Street, the address given her by him--a letter promising to meet him in a week's time "with all prepared according to his wishes"--she had no tormenting reply, she took heart. Vansittart, in their constant, but seemingly accidental, meetings--riding, driving, at parties, and at the opera--encouraged her by promising that in one fortnight from the day they had "settled matters" their plan should be carried out. All seemed to promise to her the dawn of emancipation from the consequences of her past folly; when, awakening somewhat suddenly from sleep one morning, a terrible idea flashed upon her--she was unexpectedly confronted with a truth she had overlooked in her unreasoning passion for deliverance from Victor Mercier and freedom to belong to Vansittart.Her marriage with Vansittart would be a bigamous one."Oh! Surely that was not a real marriage--that short ceremony at the registrar's," she told herself in anguish. "At all events, my uncle will make it worth Victor's while to undo it--never to take any steps to assert that he has any claim upon us. Uncle will manage it. He will have had his will--I shall be Lady Vansittart--he will be ready to do anything, proud man that he is, to prevent a family disgrace!"It was a mean way of emancipating herself--to run away with Vansittart, deceiving him as to the reason of her strange desire for what was practically an elopement--to leave Sir Thomas Thorne recipient of her confession that Victor Mercier was legally her husband, and must be bribed to ignore the fact!"But--if I cannot extricate myself in one way, I am driven to use whatever means remain," she sadly told herself. "I wish I had not got to tell lies all round! But if I must, I must!"Every day she proposed to herself some plan of "managing" Victor Mercier, so as to keep him quiet. She hardly liked that silence of his. Although she had no idea that he had instituted inquiries, and was enlightened as to her intimacy with Vansittart, she felt as if that cessation of hostilities on his part was the calm before the storm.Her brief encouragement was past and gone. She spent hours of silent anguish, pacing her room, cold drops upon her brow, her nervous hands wringing her gossamer handkerchiefs to shreds. Julie, finding them in wisps when she sorted the linen, wondered.Then came the day before the date upon which she was to meet Victor, "with all prepared according to his wishes." There was an afternoon fête at the riverside residence of the Marchioness of C----. Sir Thomas was to drive her down, together with Lady Thorne and some friends. Joan had expected that her uncle would propose that Vansittart should make one of the party. She knew nothing of a brief but crucial interview which had taken place between her uncle and her lover, almost immediately after their mutual understanding.Lord Vansittart's honour demanded that, while respecting the confidence of his future wife, and acceding with entire self-abandonment to her wishes in regard to their matrimonial affairs, he should at least defer in some way to her guardianin loco parentis. So he sought atête-à-têtewith his future uncle-in-law--he contrived to put himself in his way at the club.It was the ordinary luncheon hour, and, after beguiling him into the empty reading-room, he began without much preface."I think you know--at least, I mean, I know you are aware, that I love your niece," he said. "You also know she rejected me--more than once.""Yes, my boy--and I think you know I was deuced disappointed that she was such a silly little idiot!" warmly returned Sir Thomas."Well, I have some reason to flatter myself that if every one will only let everything alone, and will not interfere, I have a very good chance of making her Lady Vansittart!" He looked boldly at Joan's uncle."My dear boy, no one has the slightest wish to interfere! What do you mean?" asked Sir Thomas briskly.Vansittart sighed, and shrugged his shoulders. "My dear Sir Thomas, your niece is a very extraordinary girl," he slowly said. "Once married, she will, I believe, settle down to be more like other people in her ideas, which at present are extravagance itself! But I will tell you this much--the man who refuses to fall in with them will never call her wife! Now, what am I to do? Am I to appear to outrage you by not deferring to your opinions and feelings in regard to our engagement and consequent marriage, or am I not? Dearly, passionately as I love her, I would rather give her up than behave dishonourably to you and Lady Thorne!""Good Lord, what nonsense!" cried Sir Thomas with a short laugh. "D'ye think I don't know that Joan is so soaked in romantic folly that she isn't capable of one single, reasonable, common-sense idea? Go on and prosper, old boy! You have my blessing upon whatever method of courtship you think best to adopt, even if it is to roll her in the mud and kick her, or climb up to her window in the middle of the night and carry her off down a rope-ladder! Upon my word, I am jolly glad that I am not the fool that every one thinks me, when I stick to it that Joan has read that Shelley and Swinburne rot until she can't tell black from white! Make her your wife your own way, Vansittart, and it shan't make any difference in her dowry, here's my hand on it!"After such trust on the part of the man who had the giving of his beautiful niece, Vansittart continued his arrangements for the fulfilment of Joan's wishes, feeling as if treading on air.The day of Lady C----'s garden party was showery at first. But at noon out had come a brilliant June sun, and the rain had only succeeded in freshening the rich foliage and luxuriant flowers of Wrottesley Lodge, on the Thames--a somewhat older house than the usual run of riverside dwellings can lay claim to be.The party on the top of the coach were extremely lively. But Joan sat silent. The beauty of the day was not for her. The summer breeze stirred the chestnut blossoms and diffused their perfume until the air was honeyed with it--the suburban gardens were gay with their beds of summer bloom. As they drove into the road where the gables of Wrottesley Lodge peeped up among the sombre pines and firs which screened the house from the vulgar gaze, the Thames came in sight, its wavelets dancing in the sunlight. All seemed careless happiness--even a boy with a white apron and basket on his arm stood whistling gaily as he watched the four-in-hand tool into the drive. Only Joan's heart seemed like a stone in her breast, and all around was to her a ghastly mockery--with that wretched hopelessness flooding her young soul.Vansittart had arrived early, been welcomed, fussed with, and introduced to specially charming girls by his amiable hostess. But their society talk was to him like the chatter of the apes he had seen in the jungles--he gazed at their pretty patrician features and wondered where the beauty was which, with other things, had gone to make them successes of the season. When he caught sight of Sir Thomas' well-known team of roans, he muttered an excuse to the girl he was talking to, and hurried off to help his beloved to alight.There was a bustle--Joan was almost the last to descend the ladder. How exquisite was that high-bred little foot, he thought, in the white shoe and delicate silk-lace stocking--already he was giving lavish secret orders for a whole trousseau to be on board the yacht for her use--there must be still more costly stockings and slippers to clad those dear, pretty feet! How lovely she looked altogether--her slight, beautifully curved form draped in a thin muslin robe dotted with purple heartsease, with silken sheen showing beneath--a big black hat with feathers and pansies crowning her proud little golden head! But when he met the startled, awe-stricken, "lost" look of those great eyes, it was as if some one had given him an ugly blow on the chest.She smiled, as he welcomed her with a passionate ecstatic gaze in his kind, devoted eyes--but the smile was a miserable imitation--and he felt it."Come away--from the crowd--I have something important to tell you," he whispered. She gave him a glance of horror, and turned pale. "What?" she stammered.CHAPTER XIThat terror-stricken gaze of Joan's chilled Vansittart with a vague new dread--a fear impalpable, indefinite--still deadly in its effect upon him.He laughed as he said, encouragingly, "I can assure you you need not trouble yourself that I have bad news--everything is going most swimmingly!" But as they threaded their way through the groups of brightly dressed girls and young men in all kinds of costumes, from whites to the severest frock-coat permissible at suchal frescogatherings, he gave a name to his misgivings in his own mind."I do not believe it is her brain--she is keeping something from me--she has a secret," he thought, as he talked gaily to her, the current small talk of the hour, while they traversed the rich, smooth green turf to reach the path which ran along a terrace by the river and led to the pleasance--"Lady Betty's pleasance" it had been called since the days when a Lady Betty walked there in hoops and pannier, a little King Charles spaniel waddling in her rear. "I must get it out of her! However much we may deceive our fellow creatures, we must not deceive each other.""Where am I taking you?" he repeated brightly, in answer to her inquiry, although to him it seemed as if a sudden darkness had chased all summer brilliance from the day. "Oh, to a favourite spot of mine--a bench overlooking the river under some tree--a hawthorn, I fancy! We can talk there without any fear of being overheard. My darling--are you quite well? Are you sure you are?"As they left the open, and were under the trees--a belt of well-grown shrubbery divided the spreading lawns from the pleasance--he stopped, and placing his hands lightly on her shoulders, gazed with such honest worship into her eyes, that she flinched and glanced away. Her lips paled and trembled."May I kiss you, dearest?" he almost pathetically asked--his voice faltered. In return she flung herself into his arms, and lifted her lips to his. It was a great moment to him, that abandonment of passion in his beloved--but even as their lips met, and he felt her heart beat against his own, a horrible sensation of despair mingled with the relief her spontaneous outburst had been to him.She still clung to him after the embrace--her cheek against his shoulder--and he heard her groan."My love, this won't do!" he cheerily exclaimed. "You make me feel as if I had injured you somehow--that I must be a tyrant--a monster--if you repent of your bargain there is time yet, you know! Although I have the licence, and we could be married to-morrow if you chose, you can draw back. If you repent of your promise to marry me--I do not hold you to it! And remember, no one knows----"She stirred--and rose. "No one knows?" she feverishly asked. "You managed it all--without--tellinganybody?""Except the people I was obliged to tell to procure the special licence," he answered lightly, as he walked along at her side. "And they--well, one would as soon suspect one's lawyer, or doctor, or banker, of betraying one's confidence as the Doctor's Commons fellows! It would be absurd."The bench he remembered was there, under the hawthorn, which was still a mass of bloom. Below a stone balustrade the river ran, wide, flowing, hastening seaward. They seated themselves. He took her hand, drew off her glove, and kissed the pink, soft palm of her delightful, delicately slender hand."How soft it is, dear little hand!" he said tenderly. "Do you know what the supposed experts say of a soft palm, or skin? That the possessor is morbidly sensitive and sympathetic! I have thought that of you, darling! I have wondered, sometimes, whether you are not indulging in melancholy retrospect--thoughts of your dead parents' troubles, or something! If so, nothing could be more foolish and useless! Can we recall the past? No! it is dead--there is nothing in this world so dead! Are we not taught that our great Creator Himself will not meddle with it? Darling, you make me cruelly anxious, and that is a fact, by your gloom! Do you think I do not know--feel--share your secret suffering? While I cannot guess what it is, I can hardly endure your evident unhappiness--I could bear it, if I only knew! Joan, Joan--I am almost your husband; as we are to be married so soon, you might confide in me! Child! My dearest--my almost wife--tell me! I can help you, I must be able to help you, and I will! Don't you, won't you, believe me?"His words--his passion--pattered harmlessly upon her preoccupied being. She had an idea--by a subterfuge to place her awful position before him, and hear what he would say to it."Of course I believe you!" she dreamily said. "I know you would help me if you could! But how can you? It is a foolish and stupid, rather than a wrong, action of mine, in the past! You yourself say that God Himself does not meddle with the past! No! He does not! We have to suffer the consequences.""But--one may deal with the consequences, darling," he tenderly said. "Tell me--all--exactly as it is! Won't you? I knew there was something rankling in your mind. I can assure you we shall both be the happier for trusting each other. Come, out with it!""How can I put it to you without betraying--her?" she mournfully began, her strained eyes fixed on a beautiful clump of lilies, which seemed to mock her with their modest stateliness, their spotless purity--she, in her own idea, irrevocably defiled by her tie to Victor Mercier--her body smirched by his embrace, her poor cold lips fouled by his detested kiss. "It was--a dear, intimate friend, at school. I loved her so, that I believed in her feelings. I helped her in a secret love affair--with--a young man.""Well, that was quite natural--there was no great harm in that, I am sure!" he exclaimed, heartily, beginning to be half ashamed of his secret doubts, and telling himself he ought to have remembered with what difficulty a girl brought up in a boarding-school learns life and its meaning, how a school-girl is handicapped when she starts real existence in the world."There was harm in it, although I did not think so at the time!" she went on, bitterly. "For she married him secretly--and no sooner had she done so, than he was taken up by the police for something or another--and ran away. She never heard anything of him until the other day, when he turned up. Oh, poor, unhappy girl! What is to be done for her? Cannot you understand that I, who helped to her undoing, am miserable?""My dearest child, we cannot go about the world bearing the consequences of other people's folly. It is not common sense, we have plenty of troubles of our own!" he said, almost chidingly. He felt just a little hurt that his love had not been strong enough to balance her vicarious suffering. The terrible truth that she was speaking of herself never once occurred to him. "Your friend married this man, not you! She must suffer for it. She had better make the best of her bad bargain--and really must not worry you! It is positively inhuman to do so!" He spoke with slight indignation. She shuddered."But surely--there must be some way to rid her of him?" she asked, striving with all her might to still her inward anguish, and speak collectedly."Oh yes, if she does not shrink from a public scandal," he said, somewhat dryly. "The young lady can apply for a divorce. How long since his desertion? Four years?" He shrugged his shoulders. "She had better employ detectives to find out his doings during those years. But she ought to consult lawyers!--What? She would not do that? Why not?""She will kill herself rather than do that--and her death will be on my--soul!" said Joan, solemnly. She looked her lover full in the face. Why was it that at that moment in imagination he seemed to hear a bell tolling and to see a churchyard with a yawning grave--towards which a funeral procession was making its way? He gave a short laugh, which was more a sob. What a grip this girl had upon his emotions!"What power you have over me, you girlie!" he said, chokingly. "You seemed to make me see all sorts of things ... Darling, if money is of any good to your friend--I should only feel too thankful to be of any help----What? It is of no use?""It is of no use!" cried she, in a helpless tone. "None! ... And you mean to tell me--that that few minutes in a registrar's office--can only be undone--publicly--in the divorce court?""There is only one other thing that can free her, my dear child--death!" he said, seriously. "People seem to forget that when they rush into matrimony. But--my darling--" he looked anxiously into her half-averted face--"do you mean to say that this entanglement of your friend's is all you have on your mind--all? Joan"--he grasped her hands--"trust me--your husband--almost your husband--anything you may tell me--will be sacred!"CHAPTER XIIJoan shuddered. To hear that fiat of her lover's--that only death or the divorce court could free a girl in her position from that slight yet deadly tie--and to hear it uttered with such seemingly heartless barbarity--was almost too ghastly to be borne.She hardly understood his last impassioned appeal to her to confide in him--all--all that was troubling her. She stared miserably out upon the river. A steam launch went puffing up stream. Some one on deck was singing an apparently comic song to the strumming of a banjo; for shrill feminine laughter, mingled with ironic "bravos" was borne upon the breeze as the verse came to an end. Then the band engaged for the afternoon struck up a bright little march on the lawn the other side of the shrubbery. The mockery of the careless gaiety of ordinary life jarred her beyond endurance."Let us go away from here," she exclaimed, starting up, and glancing wildly at Vansittart.His heart misgave him. This meant--he felt--that she was concealing something from him. Well! he must have patience, and bide his time."Presently," he said, in tender, but authoritative tones--and he drew her gently, but firmly, back on the seat by his side. "You must recover yourself first, darling--telling me of this wretched affair of your friend's has upset you! And really a girl who would be so reckless and foolish as to damn her whole life in advance by linking it legally with that of the first adventurer who came across her, is hardly worth your sympathy, by the way! Come, cheer up, or people may, will think--well, they will make a shrewd guess that there is something going on between us, and you don't want that, do you?""Just now, I don't seem to care!" she replied--and her glance was one of slight defiance. "You are too hard upon my poor friend--she was a dupe rather than--what was it? 'reckless, foolish'!""I am afraid I must plead guilty to having scant sympathy with dupes," he said, somewhat slightingly. Her manner had hurt him unconscionably."I suppose that is why you fell in with my idea of making dupes of my aunt and uncle!" She gave a shrill laugh, so unlike her ordinary sweet, pleasant laugh--the laugh that had haunted him those lonely nights and days in strange foreign lands, when he had striven to forget her--that his temporary annoyance gave way to concern."That is hardly kind!" he exclaimed, reproachfully. "Remember, it was not I who wished for this extraordinary secrecy! However, let that pass. One of the things I brought you here to tell you, dearest, is that I have hinted broadly to your uncle that I mean to make a dead set at you, and conquer all your various objections to marriage--and that I have his entire concurrence and sympathy! Is not that comforting?""It may be, to you," she said. "Honestly--dear"--she suddenly softened, and gave him a pathetic, beseeching glance--"I am good for nothing to-day--the past seems to have its clutch upon me, and I cannot feel with the present, or believe in a future! You must have patience with me----""You shall believe in a future, my angel!" he said emphatically--that look had swept away the cobwebs of doubt and vague suspicion, and he was once again the lover alone, as he drew her towards him and seemed to devour her with his eyes. "Listen, dearest--you have only to fix any day after a week is at an end, for our marriage, and the yacht will be ready. It is looking delightful--and I have already stocked it with a lot of things I think you will like. All I want now is one of your old frocks--to have some made by the pattern--and just one little shoe and glove"--he spoke hurriedly, somehow he shrank from such husband-like allusions as irreverent until she was actually and irrevocably Lady Vansittart--"may I, can I, have them, do you think? You see, I want you to be thoroughly, completely comfortable! And I do not mean the yacht to touch any port until we are absolutely compelled to--and then I shall choose some little station where one could not get ladies' dresses and things.""How long shall we be able to wander without people knowing anything about us?" she asked eagerly. He was pleased--reassured--to see how the idea of a lengthy, secret honeymoon revivified her. She must love him! How else should she wish to sail the oceans of the globe with him, alone, as her companion?"Dearest, that will be for you to say," he fondly returned, gazing rapturously at the exquisite profile, waxen and delicate against the drooping black feathers of her picture hat. If only the lines under those beautiful eyes were less sharply defined, and the droop in those soft, sweet lips less ominous of secret sorrow!But, as he himself termed it, at that juncture in theirtête-à-têteJoan seemed to "take a favourable turn." First, seemingly roused from her melancholy mood by talk of their approaching flight and consequent life on the high seas, she became steadily brighter as the afternoon progressed. Returning to the augmented crowd of Lady C----'s fashionable guests, they mingled with the rest, Lord Vansittart behaving with a decorous respect, and comporting himself admirably as a rejected suitor returned to the fray. Only when, by Sir Thomas' special invitation, he made one of the party on the coach, and throughout the home-going sat as close into Joan's pocket as he dared, did he permit himself to drop the carefully-assumed manner it had cost him such pains to maintain.But, later, he was rewarded. After dining with Joan and a few guests of Sir Thomas', he spent a delightful half-hour with her on the balcony, among the flowers under the awning. No one could see them from below--opposite, the trees in the enclosure were dusky masses in the starlight. The summer night seemed charged with love-murmurs--the glittering heavens to twinkle joyously of the great emotion which brought forth the Universe."Only a few days--and you will belong to me for ever!" he said, rapturously. Almost as alone in their sought-for seclusion as if they were already riding the waves of the southern seas in the ship that was to see their first matrimonial bliss, he held her in his arms, and tenderly, reverently--with almost the passionate devotion of an anchorite kissing cherished relics--kissed her pale cheeks, her sweet mouth, her beautiful, thoughtful brows. "Darling--I will make you forget all your troubles--your self-reproach--everything that can possibly detract from your happiness! I promise you I will! Do, do say that you believe that I am capable of doing it!""If any one is, you are!" she murmured, clinging to him. "Somehow, to-night, I feel happier than usual--as if life had something in it, after all! And it is you who have made me cheer up--a few hours with you has given me a certain confidence--or rather, I should say, a hope--that perhaps the day may come when I shall be able to forget--everything--but my life with you!""God grant it!" he piously exclaimed; and for that night at least his prayer seemed answered--for after he and the other guests had departed, Joan retired to her room and seeking her couch, slept more tranquilly and dreamlessly than she had done since those evil days when Victor Mercier cajoled her into marrying him--and when almost on the morrow, she had learnt that her husband was an absconding criminal.She awoke, too, with a new sense of safety--and of the very present refuge in her trouble--Vansittart."Even if he got to know--he would not turn against me, I am sure he would not!" she told herself, as she lay and thought of him, smiling. For once she looked at peace and happy. "I feel it! How strange it would be if it turned out that he would have to fight my battles with uncle? But such things do happen--in real life as well as in fiction."She lay and mused happily on the delightful subject--Vansittart, and the coming days when they would be all in all to each other--until Julie came with the hot water and the letters.Then--it was as if death itself laid a cold hand on her heart--for there was one in the detested writing of Victor Mercier. He had dared--risked--writing to her openly in her own home, under her uncle's roof!What did it mean?CHAPTER XIIIThe latent sense of being arbiter of a beautiful young woman's fate--which had been perhaps Victor Mercier's only sentiment in Joan's regard during their separation--developed, on that evening they met in the Regent's Park, into a certain passionate exultation in possessing her for his own, evidently against her wish. But when he felt convinced, from Paul Naz' innocent betrayal of society talk, that the girl who was legally his wife had a lover, and that already their names were coupled together, the smouldering resentment that her girlish passion for him was dead, burst into a fierce flame of absolute hatred.He had enjoyed abandoning himself to the enjoyment of Vera's love with a double zest--because it was a secret revenge upon Joan. He had gone about after he had received Joan's letter postponing their next meeting, making subtle and refined plans for the long-drawn-out punishment of his "faithless wife," as he termed her. He told himself he was glad of a week's interlude. If he had seen her then, he might have betrayed his wrath and desire for revenge. His tactics were quite the opposite of that."First, I must compromise her," he decided. "I must have her actions now, at the actual moment, in my power--she must have been alone with me in such a way as to turn this noble lord who wants her against her, should he know of it! Yes--if she had refused to see me, she might have gone in for a divorce! But if I have her condonation for the past on my side, she will have no case--even if she would not have entirely damned herself with this cur of a lover!"This accomplished--something tangible in the present to hold over her head--he would take her away and make constant and passionate love to her. He told himself grimly that there would be a fantastic delight in this uxorious enjoyment of a wife whose heart was given to another man, which fell to the lot of few. The secret ecstasy would be the knowledge that he had left the loving arms of a devoted girl who was ready to die for him, and could return to them at any moment--for he well knew that Vera's infatuation for him included wholesale acceptance of any lie he chose to invent to account for his absence, or any detail of his life."Then--I can play upon them all in turn, as upon a set of musical instruments," he promised himself. "The uncle will do what I ask--snob as he is, parvenu, beggar on horseback!--to hide what he will think disgrace! The lover--well, he shall be neatly disposed of by-and-bye. He shall see me with her in my arms, somehow, somewhere, somewhen! Upon my word, that will be almost as much torture to them both as the old-fashioned, out-of-date revenges. It is a poor revenge upon people to kill them! Let them live--and thwart them, make them writhe in their impotence to do what they want!"And during this week Vera must be plunged more hopelessly and abjectly in love, so that she would become such a mere echo of himself that she would do, or not do, whatever he suggested, without so much as a second thought.So he devoted himself to her, and spent his money freely in the process. He bought her pretty trinkets, and some ready-made costumes and becoming hats--and almost every day took her some excursion. They had a day at Brighton, one at Windsor, one in Richmond Park, one up river. That was the day before the one in which the crucial interview with Joan was to occur; and he chose to assume a portentous gravity, and to tell her that he must go away for a time."My sweetest pet, this being with you is pretty well driving me mad with impatience to get rid of that cat of a woman who keeps us apart," he told her, as, after they had had a littlefête champêtreof cold chicken and champagne, he lounged at her side in a boat drawn up under the willows of a little creek. "So I have made up my mind to set about it at once! What do you say?""Dearest!" was all she could reply. Her beautiful blue eyes gazed at him through a mist of emotion. How deliriously dainty she looked--flickering shadows cast by the willow branches on herpetite, white-clad figure--the heat of a mid-summer noon bringing a rich rose glow to her rounded cheeks, so much more delicately pretty without war-paint."It will necessitate my being absent for a little while, but that you must not mind," he went on, judicially, resting his head on her shoulder and thinking what a wonderful provision of Nature it was--this unbounded credulity of enamoured women. Did they really believe in their men, he wondered, a little contemptuously--or did their frantic desire for their love to be returned swallow up everything that stood in its way? "When one wants a good thing, one must be content to make a little sacrifice for it, eh, darling? I don't think you are as selfish as most of your sex, I will say that for you!"She glanced at him gratefully. One word of praise from his lips recompensed her for all the drudgery, hard work, and mental suffering of the past years--when, not knowing where he was or what had become of him--whether he was dead or in prison, or fallen among thieves in some unreachable country--she had slaved and toiled nearly the four-and-twenty hours through to keep a home together in which, some day, to welcome back the wanderer, or even the total wreck of him."And now you must help me in something," he went on, sliding his arm about her slender waist and looking up into her face with those sinister, penetrating black eyes, which were, perhaps, the deterrent when dogs growled and snarled at, and children fled from, him. "I am not one of those silly men who talk about their business--who chatter, prate, prattle, and do nothing!--I say little--but act! (The secret of successful life, my dear!) I have not been idle since I returned with the hope of winning you for my wife. Already I have found out much of the woman who was my ruin for a time with her unscrupulous devilry, which will help me immensely to free myself from that obnoxious tie. But I have still to see a very important witness against her, and I can only see the man at my leisure at home. Do you think that if I appoint to-morrow night, you can persuade mother to go to the theatre with you?""Don't you know? She is going to the entertainment given for the patients at the Hospital," returned Vera, eagerly. "That will be the very thing for you! You will have the house to yourself. Mr. Dobson is going, of course!" (Mr. Dobson was a student lodger)."Everything smiles upon us, my love," he said, tenderly, grimly congratulating himself on his good luck. And he gave himself up to love-making for the remainder of the summer afternoon--returning earlier than he had intended, though, to write that letter to Joan: the letter which Julie brought among others to her bedside, and which she read with blanched cheeks and sinking heart:--"You must not go to the old place, but come to me here, to-morrow night, Wednesday, at nine. If you fail, I intend to call upon you without demur, and at all risk. Take a cab to the corner of Westminster Bridge, the other side of the river, and then inquire for Haythorn Street.a'COURT."CHAPTER XIVThe tone of the missive seemed to half paralyse poor Joan. For a little while she lay prone on her bed, unable to think, answering Julie mechanically as she hovered about, pulling up the blinds, getting the bath ready, placing the dainty garments ready to hand.Then, with the first returning pang of despair--for that letter told her that she need not imagine she was in the least secure--a sword of Damocles hung over her unhappy head--she cast about what she must do.Go, of course! that was certain. And make terms--or, rather, accedein tototo anything he might propose for that flight of theirs which was never to take place."I had better take money with me," she told herself. "And--to a certain extent I must take Julie into my confidence." "Julie, I have no money by me, do you know," she said, irrelevantly, as Julie was dressing her golden hair, and wondering why her young mistress' beautiful face was so pale andtriste. Julie usually cashed her young lady's cheques drawn to "Self" for pocket-money."Shall I go for madamoiselle--after breakfast?" asked Julie, sweetly, as she vigorously combed the glistening hairs from the jewelled hair brush, one of Sir Thomas' frequent gifts to his niece. She had always liked her beautiful young mistress, but since Joan had sympathized with her love affair with Paul Naz, she had been ready and willing to fly to the ends of the earth to do her bidding, if need be."No. I am going shopping in the carriage, and you shall come with me. I don't like your taking much money into omnibuses, Julie, so I think I shall draw a large sum at once. It is perfectly safe locked up in this room."Julie readily acquiesced--and during the morning drove with Joan to several shops, and to the Bank, where she cashed a cheque for a hundred and fifty pounds in rouleaux of gold, which she carried in a bag to the carriage. As they were driving home Joan told her she wanted her to help her in an errand of charity that very evening."Mais certainement, mademoiselle!" the girl readily exclaimed. "To-night? I can easily go out another evening.""I don't want you to do that," returned Joan. "What I want is this. My uncle knows nothing of this poor person I am helping, and I do not want him to know. I thought that I might take a sudden fancy to go--say, to Madame Tussauds', which I have not seen for years--that we might start together in a cab--my uncle and aunt are going out to dinner, and have the landau--and then I will drop you at a certain spot, and meet you there again when you are returning home."Julie acquiesced with acclamation--and flushed with pleasure at being admitted to share a secret with the sweet, proud girl who would, she was certain, very soon be a great lady. If she had her doubts about the "poor person," and imagined, from what she knew by experience of Joan's eccentricity--as she considered her mistress' coldness hitherto in regard to the opposite sex--that the nocturnal escapade meant an assignation with the charming milord who intended to make a great lady of Miss Thorne--she kept it to herself.Mistress and maid carried out their plan without hindrance. Sir Thomas teased his niece a little slily about the sudden fancy for waxworks--he had, like Julie, somearrière-penséenot unconnected with Vansittart--but he made no objection to the expedition. Nor did Lady Thorne, to whom, after his talk with Vansittart, he had said, after giving her some broad hints--"my dear, understand this once and for all--if we give Joan her head, and don't interfere in the least, she will be the Viscountess Vansittart before we know where we are!" Shortly after Joan had had a solitary tea-dinner in her sitting-room upstairs--a meal she affected when she preferred not to accompany Sir Thomas and Lady Thorne to a long, dreary, dinner-party of old fogies--mistress and maid started off in a four-wheeled cab to which a man-servant pompously gave the address--"Madame Tussord's."Julie had admired, with a French girl's admiration, her young lady'ssavoir faire, when she had suggested that they should actually make a tour of the exhibition and take an opportunity of slipping quietly out when others likely to absorb the door-keeper's attention were coming in, and had readily acquiesced in the idea.They alighted at the entrance, paid their money, walked leisurely in, strolled about, apparently examining the effigies with interest then steering unostentatiously towards the door by which they had entered; they waited until a number of lively children were flocking obstreperously upstairs and had to be held in check at the turnstile, when they issued forth, and walked along the Marylebone Road.When they came to a church, Joan stopped. "Will you remember this place?" she asked. "You are sure? Then I will leave you here, and meet you again at the exact spot at eleven o'clock. If you are here first, wait until I come. On no account are you to go home alone--without me! Do you understand?"Julie's protestations that she understood were sincere and hearty. Joan said no more, but took the bag from her--Julie had mentally commented upon its weight, and wondered who was the lucky person to be benefited by its contents--and with an easy "au revoir, then," was gone.She sped along the street as much in the shadow as she could, lest a glance of recognition might by any possibility be cast upon her from any of the carriages which drove by almost in numbers, for it was the climax of an unusually gay London season. Then, when she began to meet crawling cabs and hansoms, she hailed one, gave the order, "Westminster Bridge--the Southwark end," and sank back in the corner a little spent and exhausted by the first part of her escapade."So far, so good," she told herself, drawing a long breath of mingled anxiety and disgust. Although she had steadily pulled herself together, willed resolutely to go through the tragic farce with Victor Mercier, as her only alternative--her loathing of the part she had to play was so intense that at times she felt tempted to take a leap into the black waters of the great river instead of submitting to his endearments. As the cab drove briskly towards Westminster, and her eyes rested miserably on the familiar landmarks of the great city, so beautiful in its nightly robe of the mingled light and darkness which is so typical of its very soul--she said to herself in a wild moment--"death or Vansittart--which?" and the memory of her beloved one's fine frank face, glorified into absolute beauty by the strong tenderness of his deep love--won."Even Victor's touch--his kiss," she grimly told herself, "are not too much to pay for a lifetime withhim!"A clock informed her that it was considerably past nine o'clock. So much the better! The shorter that hatedtête-à-têtewith Mercier would be, the more thankful she would feel.The air blowing freshly down stream as they crossed the bridge, revived her. She alighted, paid the cabman, and taking her bag tightly in her hand, passed some roughs who were shouting noisily as they came along, by stepping into the road; then seeing the helmet and tunic of a policeman silhouetted against the sky--still dully red after the sunset--she went across the road to him."Can you direct me to Haythorn Street?" she asked."Haythorn Street? Yes, miss. Straight along that road, and first to the left."Evidently the street where her bugbear at present lived was an ordinary one, and respectable. The policeman's tone of voice suggested that! She went along the road, which was rather dark, until she came to a neat-looking street of small, uniformly built houses. Yes, this was Haythorn Street--she read the name by the light of the gas lamp close by. Now to find the number! The corner was number one, so she went on at once, and then her heart gave a dull, leaden thud against her chest. She saw a dark figure on a little balcony a few houses up, which disappeared as she advanced. When she came up to number twelve, the street door stood open--Victor came out, took her hand, and led her in."Welcome, my dearest wife!" he exclaimed, embracing her. Then he closed the door. She saw an odious, triumphant smile on his sharp, handsome features, and in his bright dark eyes. He was carefully dressed. Although only half a Frenchman, he had the southern taste for fantasy in costume. A diamond stud shone in his embroidered shirt-front, a button-hole of some white, strongly-scented blossom was in his coat."You are frightened, my own!" he caressingly said, with a suggestion of proprietorship which made her inwardly shudder."Don't be! We are quite alone in the house, you and I! And I will take precautions to keep us so," he added, returning to the door and putting up the chain.
CHAPTER X
At first Joan had been almost fearful in her new-born hope. The prospect of flight with her lover, the idea of marrying him secretly, and starting for a tour round the world, about which no one would know anything definite, seemed too splendid a prospect to be true! Then, as the days passed, and after writing an enigmatical letter to Victor at 12, Haythorn Street, the address given her by him--a letter promising to meet him in a week's time "with all prepared according to his wishes"--she had no tormenting reply, she took heart. Vansittart, in their constant, but seemingly accidental, meetings--riding, driving, at parties, and at the opera--encouraged her by promising that in one fortnight from the day they had "settled matters" their plan should be carried out. All seemed to promise to her the dawn of emancipation from the consequences of her past folly; when, awakening somewhat suddenly from sleep one morning, a terrible idea flashed upon her--she was unexpectedly confronted with a truth she had overlooked in her unreasoning passion for deliverance from Victor Mercier and freedom to belong to Vansittart.
Her marriage with Vansittart would be a bigamous one.
"Oh! Surely that was not a real marriage--that short ceremony at the registrar's," she told herself in anguish. "At all events, my uncle will make it worth Victor's while to undo it--never to take any steps to assert that he has any claim upon us. Uncle will manage it. He will have had his will--I shall be Lady Vansittart--he will be ready to do anything, proud man that he is, to prevent a family disgrace!"
It was a mean way of emancipating herself--to run away with Vansittart, deceiving him as to the reason of her strange desire for what was practically an elopement--to leave Sir Thomas Thorne recipient of her confession that Victor Mercier was legally her husband, and must be bribed to ignore the fact!
"But--if I cannot extricate myself in one way, I am driven to use whatever means remain," she sadly told herself. "I wish I had not got to tell lies all round! But if I must, I must!"
Every day she proposed to herself some plan of "managing" Victor Mercier, so as to keep him quiet. She hardly liked that silence of his. Although she had no idea that he had instituted inquiries, and was enlightened as to her intimacy with Vansittart, she felt as if that cessation of hostilities on his part was the calm before the storm.
Her brief encouragement was past and gone. She spent hours of silent anguish, pacing her room, cold drops upon her brow, her nervous hands wringing her gossamer handkerchiefs to shreds. Julie, finding them in wisps when she sorted the linen, wondered.
Then came the day before the date upon which she was to meet Victor, "with all prepared according to his wishes." There was an afternoon fête at the riverside residence of the Marchioness of C----. Sir Thomas was to drive her down, together with Lady Thorne and some friends. Joan had expected that her uncle would propose that Vansittart should make one of the party. She knew nothing of a brief but crucial interview which had taken place between her uncle and her lover, almost immediately after their mutual understanding.
Lord Vansittart's honour demanded that, while respecting the confidence of his future wife, and acceding with entire self-abandonment to her wishes in regard to their matrimonial affairs, he should at least defer in some way to her guardianin loco parentis. So he sought atête-à-têtewith his future uncle-in-law--he contrived to put himself in his way at the club.
It was the ordinary luncheon hour, and, after beguiling him into the empty reading-room, he began without much preface.
"I think you know--at least, I mean, I know you are aware, that I love your niece," he said. "You also know she rejected me--more than once."
"Yes, my boy--and I think you know I was deuced disappointed that she was such a silly little idiot!" warmly returned Sir Thomas.
"Well, I have some reason to flatter myself that if every one will only let everything alone, and will not interfere, I have a very good chance of making her Lady Vansittart!" He looked boldly at Joan's uncle.
"My dear boy, no one has the slightest wish to interfere! What do you mean?" asked Sir Thomas briskly.
Vansittart sighed, and shrugged his shoulders. "My dear Sir Thomas, your niece is a very extraordinary girl," he slowly said. "Once married, she will, I believe, settle down to be more like other people in her ideas, which at present are extravagance itself! But I will tell you this much--the man who refuses to fall in with them will never call her wife! Now, what am I to do? Am I to appear to outrage you by not deferring to your opinions and feelings in regard to our engagement and consequent marriage, or am I not? Dearly, passionately as I love her, I would rather give her up than behave dishonourably to you and Lady Thorne!"
"Good Lord, what nonsense!" cried Sir Thomas with a short laugh. "D'ye think I don't know that Joan is so soaked in romantic folly that she isn't capable of one single, reasonable, common-sense idea? Go on and prosper, old boy! You have my blessing upon whatever method of courtship you think best to adopt, even if it is to roll her in the mud and kick her, or climb up to her window in the middle of the night and carry her off down a rope-ladder! Upon my word, I am jolly glad that I am not the fool that every one thinks me, when I stick to it that Joan has read that Shelley and Swinburne rot until she can't tell black from white! Make her your wife your own way, Vansittart, and it shan't make any difference in her dowry, here's my hand on it!"
After such trust on the part of the man who had the giving of his beautiful niece, Vansittart continued his arrangements for the fulfilment of Joan's wishes, feeling as if treading on air.
The day of Lady C----'s garden party was showery at first. But at noon out had come a brilliant June sun, and the rain had only succeeded in freshening the rich foliage and luxuriant flowers of Wrottesley Lodge, on the Thames--a somewhat older house than the usual run of riverside dwellings can lay claim to be.
The party on the top of the coach were extremely lively. But Joan sat silent. The beauty of the day was not for her. The summer breeze stirred the chestnut blossoms and diffused their perfume until the air was honeyed with it--the suburban gardens were gay with their beds of summer bloom. As they drove into the road where the gables of Wrottesley Lodge peeped up among the sombre pines and firs which screened the house from the vulgar gaze, the Thames came in sight, its wavelets dancing in the sunlight. All seemed careless happiness--even a boy with a white apron and basket on his arm stood whistling gaily as he watched the four-in-hand tool into the drive. Only Joan's heart seemed like a stone in her breast, and all around was to her a ghastly mockery--with that wretched hopelessness flooding her young soul.
Vansittart had arrived early, been welcomed, fussed with, and introduced to specially charming girls by his amiable hostess. But their society talk was to him like the chatter of the apes he had seen in the jungles--he gazed at their pretty patrician features and wondered where the beauty was which, with other things, had gone to make them successes of the season. When he caught sight of Sir Thomas' well-known team of roans, he muttered an excuse to the girl he was talking to, and hurried off to help his beloved to alight.
There was a bustle--Joan was almost the last to descend the ladder. How exquisite was that high-bred little foot, he thought, in the white shoe and delicate silk-lace stocking--already he was giving lavish secret orders for a whole trousseau to be on board the yacht for her use--there must be still more costly stockings and slippers to clad those dear, pretty feet! How lovely she looked altogether--her slight, beautifully curved form draped in a thin muslin robe dotted with purple heartsease, with silken sheen showing beneath--a big black hat with feathers and pansies crowning her proud little golden head! But when he met the startled, awe-stricken, "lost" look of those great eyes, it was as if some one had given him an ugly blow on the chest.
She smiled, as he welcomed her with a passionate ecstatic gaze in his kind, devoted eyes--but the smile was a miserable imitation--and he felt it.
"Come away--from the crowd--I have something important to tell you," he whispered. She gave him a glance of horror, and turned pale. "What?" she stammered.
CHAPTER XI
That terror-stricken gaze of Joan's chilled Vansittart with a vague new dread--a fear impalpable, indefinite--still deadly in its effect upon him.
He laughed as he said, encouragingly, "I can assure you you need not trouble yourself that I have bad news--everything is going most swimmingly!" But as they threaded their way through the groups of brightly dressed girls and young men in all kinds of costumes, from whites to the severest frock-coat permissible at suchal frescogatherings, he gave a name to his misgivings in his own mind.
"I do not believe it is her brain--she is keeping something from me--she has a secret," he thought, as he talked gaily to her, the current small talk of the hour, while they traversed the rich, smooth green turf to reach the path which ran along a terrace by the river and led to the pleasance--"Lady Betty's pleasance" it had been called since the days when a Lady Betty walked there in hoops and pannier, a little King Charles spaniel waddling in her rear. "I must get it out of her! However much we may deceive our fellow creatures, we must not deceive each other."
"Where am I taking you?" he repeated brightly, in answer to her inquiry, although to him it seemed as if a sudden darkness had chased all summer brilliance from the day. "Oh, to a favourite spot of mine--a bench overlooking the river under some tree--a hawthorn, I fancy! We can talk there without any fear of being overheard. My darling--are you quite well? Are you sure you are?"
As they left the open, and were under the trees--a belt of well-grown shrubbery divided the spreading lawns from the pleasance--he stopped, and placing his hands lightly on her shoulders, gazed with such honest worship into her eyes, that she flinched and glanced away. Her lips paled and trembled.
"May I kiss you, dearest?" he almost pathetically asked--his voice faltered. In return she flung herself into his arms, and lifted her lips to his. It was a great moment to him, that abandonment of passion in his beloved--but even as their lips met, and he felt her heart beat against his own, a horrible sensation of despair mingled with the relief her spontaneous outburst had been to him.
She still clung to him after the embrace--her cheek against his shoulder--and he heard her groan.
"My love, this won't do!" he cheerily exclaimed. "You make me feel as if I had injured you somehow--that I must be a tyrant--a monster--if you repent of your bargain there is time yet, you know! Although I have the licence, and we could be married to-morrow if you chose, you can draw back. If you repent of your promise to marry me--I do not hold you to it! And remember, no one knows----"
She stirred--and rose. "No one knows?" she feverishly asked. "You managed it all--without--tellinganybody?"
"Except the people I was obliged to tell to procure the special licence," he answered lightly, as he walked along at her side. "And they--well, one would as soon suspect one's lawyer, or doctor, or banker, of betraying one's confidence as the Doctor's Commons fellows! It would be absurd."
The bench he remembered was there, under the hawthorn, which was still a mass of bloom. Below a stone balustrade the river ran, wide, flowing, hastening seaward. They seated themselves. He took her hand, drew off her glove, and kissed the pink, soft palm of her delightful, delicately slender hand.
"How soft it is, dear little hand!" he said tenderly. "Do you know what the supposed experts say of a soft palm, or skin? That the possessor is morbidly sensitive and sympathetic! I have thought that of you, darling! I have wondered, sometimes, whether you are not indulging in melancholy retrospect--thoughts of your dead parents' troubles, or something! If so, nothing could be more foolish and useless! Can we recall the past? No! it is dead--there is nothing in this world so dead! Are we not taught that our great Creator Himself will not meddle with it? Darling, you make me cruelly anxious, and that is a fact, by your gloom! Do you think I do not know--feel--share your secret suffering? While I cannot guess what it is, I can hardly endure your evident unhappiness--I could bear it, if I only knew! Joan, Joan--I am almost your husband; as we are to be married so soon, you might confide in me! Child! My dearest--my almost wife--tell me! I can help you, I must be able to help you, and I will! Don't you, won't you, believe me?"
His words--his passion--pattered harmlessly upon her preoccupied being. She had an idea--by a subterfuge to place her awful position before him, and hear what he would say to it.
"Of course I believe you!" she dreamily said. "I know you would help me if you could! But how can you? It is a foolish and stupid, rather than a wrong, action of mine, in the past! You yourself say that God Himself does not meddle with the past! No! He does not! We have to suffer the consequences."
"But--one may deal with the consequences, darling," he tenderly said. "Tell me--all--exactly as it is! Won't you? I knew there was something rankling in your mind. I can assure you we shall both be the happier for trusting each other. Come, out with it!"
"How can I put it to you without betraying--her?" she mournfully began, her strained eyes fixed on a beautiful clump of lilies, which seemed to mock her with their modest stateliness, their spotless purity--she, in her own idea, irrevocably defiled by her tie to Victor Mercier--her body smirched by his embrace, her poor cold lips fouled by his detested kiss. "It was--a dear, intimate friend, at school. I loved her so, that I believed in her feelings. I helped her in a secret love affair--with--a young man."
"Well, that was quite natural--there was no great harm in that, I am sure!" he exclaimed, heartily, beginning to be half ashamed of his secret doubts, and telling himself he ought to have remembered with what difficulty a girl brought up in a boarding-school learns life and its meaning, how a school-girl is handicapped when she starts real existence in the world.
"There was harm in it, although I did not think so at the time!" she went on, bitterly. "For she married him secretly--and no sooner had she done so, than he was taken up by the police for something or another--and ran away. She never heard anything of him until the other day, when he turned up. Oh, poor, unhappy girl! What is to be done for her? Cannot you understand that I, who helped to her undoing, am miserable?"
"My dearest child, we cannot go about the world bearing the consequences of other people's folly. It is not common sense, we have plenty of troubles of our own!" he said, almost chidingly. He felt just a little hurt that his love had not been strong enough to balance her vicarious suffering. The terrible truth that she was speaking of herself never once occurred to him. "Your friend married this man, not you! She must suffer for it. She had better make the best of her bad bargain--and really must not worry you! It is positively inhuman to do so!" He spoke with slight indignation. She shuddered.
"But surely--there must be some way to rid her of him?" she asked, striving with all her might to still her inward anguish, and speak collectedly.
"Oh yes, if she does not shrink from a public scandal," he said, somewhat dryly. "The young lady can apply for a divorce. How long since his desertion? Four years?" He shrugged his shoulders. "She had better employ detectives to find out his doings during those years. But she ought to consult lawyers!--What? She would not do that? Why not?"
"She will kill herself rather than do that--and her death will be on my--soul!" said Joan, solemnly. She looked her lover full in the face. Why was it that at that moment in imagination he seemed to hear a bell tolling and to see a churchyard with a yawning grave--towards which a funeral procession was making its way? He gave a short laugh, which was more a sob. What a grip this girl had upon his emotions!
"What power you have over me, you girlie!" he said, chokingly. "You seemed to make me see all sorts of things ... Darling, if money is of any good to your friend--I should only feel too thankful to be of any help----What? It is of no use?"
"It is of no use!" cried she, in a helpless tone. "None! ... And you mean to tell me--that that few minutes in a registrar's office--can only be undone--publicly--in the divorce court?"
"There is only one other thing that can free her, my dear child--death!" he said, seriously. "People seem to forget that when they rush into matrimony. But--my darling--" he looked anxiously into her half-averted face--"do you mean to say that this entanglement of your friend's is all you have on your mind--all? Joan"--he grasped her hands--"trust me--your husband--almost your husband--anything you may tell me--will be sacred!"
CHAPTER XII
Joan shuddered. To hear that fiat of her lover's--that only death or the divorce court could free a girl in her position from that slight yet deadly tie--and to hear it uttered with such seemingly heartless barbarity--was almost too ghastly to be borne.
She hardly understood his last impassioned appeal to her to confide in him--all--all that was troubling her. She stared miserably out upon the river. A steam launch went puffing up stream. Some one on deck was singing an apparently comic song to the strumming of a banjo; for shrill feminine laughter, mingled with ironic "bravos" was borne upon the breeze as the verse came to an end. Then the band engaged for the afternoon struck up a bright little march on the lawn the other side of the shrubbery. The mockery of the careless gaiety of ordinary life jarred her beyond endurance.
"Let us go away from here," she exclaimed, starting up, and glancing wildly at Vansittart.
His heart misgave him. This meant--he felt--that she was concealing something from him. Well! he must have patience, and bide his time.
"Presently," he said, in tender, but authoritative tones--and he drew her gently, but firmly, back on the seat by his side. "You must recover yourself first, darling--telling me of this wretched affair of your friend's has upset you! And really a girl who would be so reckless and foolish as to damn her whole life in advance by linking it legally with that of the first adventurer who came across her, is hardly worth your sympathy, by the way! Come, cheer up, or people may, will think--well, they will make a shrewd guess that there is something going on between us, and you don't want that, do you?"
"Just now, I don't seem to care!" she replied--and her glance was one of slight defiance. "You are too hard upon my poor friend--she was a dupe rather than--what was it? 'reckless, foolish'!"
"I am afraid I must plead guilty to having scant sympathy with dupes," he said, somewhat slightingly. Her manner had hurt him unconscionably.
"I suppose that is why you fell in with my idea of making dupes of my aunt and uncle!" She gave a shrill laugh, so unlike her ordinary sweet, pleasant laugh--the laugh that had haunted him those lonely nights and days in strange foreign lands, when he had striven to forget her--that his temporary annoyance gave way to concern.
"That is hardly kind!" he exclaimed, reproachfully. "Remember, it was not I who wished for this extraordinary secrecy! However, let that pass. One of the things I brought you here to tell you, dearest, is that I have hinted broadly to your uncle that I mean to make a dead set at you, and conquer all your various objections to marriage--and that I have his entire concurrence and sympathy! Is not that comforting?"
"It may be, to you," she said. "Honestly--dear"--she suddenly softened, and gave him a pathetic, beseeching glance--"I am good for nothing to-day--the past seems to have its clutch upon me, and I cannot feel with the present, or believe in a future! You must have patience with me----"
"You shall believe in a future, my angel!" he said emphatically--that look had swept away the cobwebs of doubt and vague suspicion, and he was once again the lover alone, as he drew her towards him and seemed to devour her with his eyes. "Listen, dearest--you have only to fix any day after a week is at an end, for our marriage, and the yacht will be ready. It is looking delightful--and I have already stocked it with a lot of things I think you will like. All I want now is one of your old frocks--to have some made by the pattern--and just one little shoe and glove"--he spoke hurriedly, somehow he shrank from such husband-like allusions as irreverent until she was actually and irrevocably Lady Vansittart--"may I, can I, have them, do you think? You see, I want you to be thoroughly, completely comfortable! And I do not mean the yacht to touch any port until we are absolutely compelled to--and then I shall choose some little station where one could not get ladies' dresses and things."
"How long shall we be able to wander without people knowing anything about us?" she asked eagerly. He was pleased--reassured--to see how the idea of a lengthy, secret honeymoon revivified her. She must love him! How else should she wish to sail the oceans of the globe with him, alone, as her companion?
"Dearest, that will be for you to say," he fondly returned, gazing rapturously at the exquisite profile, waxen and delicate against the drooping black feathers of her picture hat. If only the lines under those beautiful eyes were less sharply defined, and the droop in those soft, sweet lips less ominous of secret sorrow!
But, as he himself termed it, at that juncture in theirtête-à-têteJoan seemed to "take a favourable turn." First, seemingly roused from her melancholy mood by talk of their approaching flight and consequent life on the high seas, she became steadily brighter as the afternoon progressed. Returning to the augmented crowd of Lady C----'s fashionable guests, they mingled with the rest, Lord Vansittart behaving with a decorous respect, and comporting himself admirably as a rejected suitor returned to the fray. Only when, by Sir Thomas' special invitation, he made one of the party on the coach, and throughout the home-going sat as close into Joan's pocket as he dared, did he permit himself to drop the carefully-assumed manner it had cost him such pains to maintain.
But, later, he was rewarded. After dining with Joan and a few guests of Sir Thomas', he spent a delightful half-hour with her on the balcony, among the flowers under the awning. No one could see them from below--opposite, the trees in the enclosure were dusky masses in the starlight. The summer night seemed charged with love-murmurs--the glittering heavens to twinkle joyously of the great emotion which brought forth the Universe.
"Only a few days--and you will belong to me for ever!" he said, rapturously. Almost as alone in their sought-for seclusion as if they were already riding the waves of the southern seas in the ship that was to see their first matrimonial bliss, he held her in his arms, and tenderly, reverently--with almost the passionate devotion of an anchorite kissing cherished relics--kissed her pale cheeks, her sweet mouth, her beautiful, thoughtful brows. "Darling--I will make you forget all your troubles--your self-reproach--everything that can possibly detract from your happiness! I promise you I will! Do, do say that you believe that I am capable of doing it!"
"If any one is, you are!" she murmured, clinging to him. "Somehow, to-night, I feel happier than usual--as if life had something in it, after all! And it is you who have made me cheer up--a few hours with you has given me a certain confidence--or rather, I should say, a hope--that perhaps the day may come when I shall be able to forget--everything--but my life with you!"
"God grant it!" he piously exclaimed; and for that night at least his prayer seemed answered--for after he and the other guests had departed, Joan retired to her room and seeking her couch, slept more tranquilly and dreamlessly than she had done since those evil days when Victor Mercier cajoled her into marrying him--and when almost on the morrow, she had learnt that her husband was an absconding criminal.
She awoke, too, with a new sense of safety--and of the very present refuge in her trouble--Vansittart.
"Even if he got to know--he would not turn against me, I am sure he would not!" she told herself, as she lay and thought of him, smiling. For once she looked at peace and happy. "I feel it! How strange it would be if it turned out that he would have to fight my battles with uncle? But such things do happen--in real life as well as in fiction."
She lay and mused happily on the delightful subject--Vansittart, and the coming days when they would be all in all to each other--until Julie came with the hot water and the letters.
Then--it was as if death itself laid a cold hand on her heart--for there was one in the detested writing of Victor Mercier. He had dared--risked--writing to her openly in her own home, under her uncle's roof!
What did it mean?
CHAPTER XIII
The latent sense of being arbiter of a beautiful young woman's fate--which had been perhaps Victor Mercier's only sentiment in Joan's regard during their separation--developed, on that evening they met in the Regent's Park, into a certain passionate exultation in possessing her for his own, evidently against her wish. But when he felt convinced, from Paul Naz' innocent betrayal of society talk, that the girl who was legally his wife had a lover, and that already their names were coupled together, the smouldering resentment that her girlish passion for him was dead, burst into a fierce flame of absolute hatred.
He had enjoyed abandoning himself to the enjoyment of Vera's love with a double zest--because it was a secret revenge upon Joan. He had gone about after he had received Joan's letter postponing their next meeting, making subtle and refined plans for the long-drawn-out punishment of his "faithless wife," as he termed her. He told himself he was glad of a week's interlude. If he had seen her then, he might have betrayed his wrath and desire for revenge. His tactics were quite the opposite of that.
"First, I must compromise her," he decided. "I must have her actions now, at the actual moment, in my power--she must have been alone with me in such a way as to turn this noble lord who wants her against her, should he know of it! Yes--if she had refused to see me, she might have gone in for a divorce! But if I have her condonation for the past on my side, she will have no case--even if she would not have entirely damned herself with this cur of a lover!"
This accomplished--something tangible in the present to hold over her head--he would take her away and make constant and passionate love to her. He told himself grimly that there would be a fantastic delight in this uxorious enjoyment of a wife whose heart was given to another man, which fell to the lot of few. The secret ecstasy would be the knowledge that he had left the loving arms of a devoted girl who was ready to die for him, and could return to them at any moment--for he well knew that Vera's infatuation for him included wholesale acceptance of any lie he chose to invent to account for his absence, or any detail of his life.
"Then--I can play upon them all in turn, as upon a set of musical instruments," he promised himself. "The uncle will do what I ask--snob as he is, parvenu, beggar on horseback!--to hide what he will think disgrace! The lover--well, he shall be neatly disposed of by-and-bye. He shall see me with her in my arms, somehow, somewhere, somewhen! Upon my word, that will be almost as much torture to them both as the old-fashioned, out-of-date revenges. It is a poor revenge upon people to kill them! Let them live--and thwart them, make them writhe in their impotence to do what they want!"
And during this week Vera must be plunged more hopelessly and abjectly in love, so that she would become such a mere echo of himself that she would do, or not do, whatever he suggested, without so much as a second thought.
So he devoted himself to her, and spent his money freely in the process. He bought her pretty trinkets, and some ready-made costumes and becoming hats--and almost every day took her some excursion. They had a day at Brighton, one at Windsor, one in Richmond Park, one up river. That was the day before the one in which the crucial interview with Joan was to occur; and he chose to assume a portentous gravity, and to tell her that he must go away for a time.
"My sweetest pet, this being with you is pretty well driving me mad with impatience to get rid of that cat of a woman who keeps us apart," he told her, as, after they had had a littlefête champêtreof cold chicken and champagne, he lounged at her side in a boat drawn up under the willows of a little creek. "So I have made up my mind to set about it at once! What do you say?"
"Dearest!" was all she could reply. Her beautiful blue eyes gazed at him through a mist of emotion. How deliriously dainty she looked--flickering shadows cast by the willow branches on herpetite, white-clad figure--the heat of a mid-summer noon bringing a rich rose glow to her rounded cheeks, so much more delicately pretty without war-paint.
"It will necessitate my being absent for a little while, but that you must not mind," he went on, judicially, resting his head on her shoulder and thinking what a wonderful provision of Nature it was--this unbounded credulity of enamoured women. Did they really believe in their men, he wondered, a little contemptuously--or did their frantic desire for their love to be returned swallow up everything that stood in its way? "When one wants a good thing, one must be content to make a little sacrifice for it, eh, darling? I don't think you are as selfish as most of your sex, I will say that for you!"
She glanced at him gratefully. One word of praise from his lips recompensed her for all the drudgery, hard work, and mental suffering of the past years--when, not knowing where he was or what had become of him--whether he was dead or in prison, or fallen among thieves in some unreachable country--she had slaved and toiled nearly the four-and-twenty hours through to keep a home together in which, some day, to welcome back the wanderer, or even the total wreck of him.
"And now you must help me in something," he went on, sliding his arm about her slender waist and looking up into her face with those sinister, penetrating black eyes, which were, perhaps, the deterrent when dogs growled and snarled at, and children fled from, him. "I am not one of those silly men who talk about their business--who chatter, prate, prattle, and do nothing!--I say little--but act! (The secret of successful life, my dear!) I have not been idle since I returned with the hope of winning you for my wife. Already I have found out much of the woman who was my ruin for a time with her unscrupulous devilry, which will help me immensely to free myself from that obnoxious tie. But I have still to see a very important witness against her, and I can only see the man at my leisure at home. Do you think that if I appoint to-morrow night, you can persuade mother to go to the theatre with you?"
"Don't you know? She is going to the entertainment given for the patients at the Hospital," returned Vera, eagerly. "That will be the very thing for you! You will have the house to yourself. Mr. Dobson is going, of course!" (Mr. Dobson was a student lodger).
"Everything smiles upon us, my love," he said, tenderly, grimly congratulating himself on his good luck. And he gave himself up to love-making for the remainder of the summer afternoon--returning earlier than he had intended, though, to write that letter to Joan: the letter which Julie brought among others to her bedside, and which she read with blanched cheeks and sinking heart:--
"You must not go to the old place, but come to me here, to-morrow night, Wednesday, at nine. If you fail, I intend to call upon you without demur, and at all risk. Take a cab to the corner of Westminster Bridge, the other side of the river, and then inquire for Haythorn Street.
a'COURT."
CHAPTER XIV
The tone of the missive seemed to half paralyse poor Joan. For a little while she lay prone on her bed, unable to think, answering Julie mechanically as she hovered about, pulling up the blinds, getting the bath ready, placing the dainty garments ready to hand.
Then, with the first returning pang of despair--for that letter told her that she need not imagine she was in the least secure--a sword of Damocles hung over her unhappy head--she cast about what she must do.
Go, of course! that was certain. And make terms--or, rather, accedein tototo anything he might propose for that flight of theirs which was never to take place.
"I had better take money with me," she told herself. "And--to a certain extent I must take Julie into my confidence." "Julie, I have no money by me, do you know," she said, irrelevantly, as Julie was dressing her golden hair, and wondering why her young mistress' beautiful face was so pale andtriste. Julie usually cashed her young lady's cheques drawn to "Self" for pocket-money.
"Shall I go for madamoiselle--after breakfast?" asked Julie, sweetly, as she vigorously combed the glistening hairs from the jewelled hair brush, one of Sir Thomas' frequent gifts to his niece. She had always liked her beautiful young mistress, but since Joan had sympathized with her love affair with Paul Naz, she had been ready and willing to fly to the ends of the earth to do her bidding, if need be.
"No. I am going shopping in the carriage, and you shall come with me. I don't like your taking much money into omnibuses, Julie, so I think I shall draw a large sum at once. It is perfectly safe locked up in this room."
Julie readily acquiesced--and during the morning drove with Joan to several shops, and to the Bank, where she cashed a cheque for a hundred and fifty pounds in rouleaux of gold, which she carried in a bag to the carriage. As they were driving home Joan told her she wanted her to help her in an errand of charity that very evening.
"Mais certainement, mademoiselle!" the girl readily exclaimed. "To-night? I can easily go out another evening."
"I don't want you to do that," returned Joan. "What I want is this. My uncle knows nothing of this poor person I am helping, and I do not want him to know. I thought that I might take a sudden fancy to go--say, to Madame Tussauds', which I have not seen for years--that we might start together in a cab--my uncle and aunt are going out to dinner, and have the landau--and then I will drop you at a certain spot, and meet you there again when you are returning home."
Julie acquiesced with acclamation--and flushed with pleasure at being admitted to share a secret with the sweet, proud girl who would, she was certain, very soon be a great lady. If she had her doubts about the "poor person," and imagined, from what she knew by experience of Joan's eccentricity--as she considered her mistress' coldness hitherto in regard to the opposite sex--that the nocturnal escapade meant an assignation with the charming milord who intended to make a great lady of Miss Thorne--she kept it to herself.
Mistress and maid carried out their plan without hindrance. Sir Thomas teased his niece a little slily about the sudden fancy for waxworks--he had, like Julie, somearrière-penséenot unconnected with Vansittart--but he made no objection to the expedition. Nor did Lady Thorne, to whom, after his talk with Vansittart, he had said, after giving her some broad hints--"my dear, understand this once and for all--if we give Joan her head, and don't interfere in the least, she will be the Viscountess Vansittart before we know where we are!" Shortly after Joan had had a solitary tea-dinner in her sitting-room upstairs--a meal she affected when she preferred not to accompany Sir Thomas and Lady Thorne to a long, dreary, dinner-party of old fogies--mistress and maid started off in a four-wheeled cab to which a man-servant pompously gave the address--"Madame Tussord's."
Julie had admired, with a French girl's admiration, her young lady'ssavoir faire, when she had suggested that they should actually make a tour of the exhibition and take an opportunity of slipping quietly out when others likely to absorb the door-keeper's attention were coming in, and had readily acquiesced in the idea.
They alighted at the entrance, paid their money, walked leisurely in, strolled about, apparently examining the effigies with interest then steering unostentatiously towards the door by which they had entered; they waited until a number of lively children were flocking obstreperously upstairs and had to be held in check at the turnstile, when they issued forth, and walked along the Marylebone Road.
When they came to a church, Joan stopped. "Will you remember this place?" she asked. "You are sure? Then I will leave you here, and meet you again at the exact spot at eleven o'clock. If you are here first, wait until I come. On no account are you to go home alone--without me! Do you understand?"
Julie's protestations that she understood were sincere and hearty. Joan said no more, but took the bag from her--Julie had mentally commented upon its weight, and wondered who was the lucky person to be benefited by its contents--and with an easy "au revoir, then," was gone.
She sped along the street as much in the shadow as she could, lest a glance of recognition might by any possibility be cast upon her from any of the carriages which drove by almost in numbers, for it was the climax of an unusually gay London season. Then, when she began to meet crawling cabs and hansoms, she hailed one, gave the order, "Westminster Bridge--the Southwark end," and sank back in the corner a little spent and exhausted by the first part of her escapade.
"So far, so good," she told herself, drawing a long breath of mingled anxiety and disgust. Although she had steadily pulled herself together, willed resolutely to go through the tragic farce with Victor Mercier, as her only alternative--her loathing of the part she had to play was so intense that at times she felt tempted to take a leap into the black waters of the great river instead of submitting to his endearments. As the cab drove briskly towards Westminster, and her eyes rested miserably on the familiar landmarks of the great city, so beautiful in its nightly robe of the mingled light and darkness which is so typical of its very soul--she said to herself in a wild moment--"death or Vansittart--which?" and the memory of her beloved one's fine frank face, glorified into absolute beauty by the strong tenderness of his deep love--won.
"Even Victor's touch--his kiss," she grimly told herself, "are not too much to pay for a lifetime withhim!"
A clock informed her that it was considerably past nine o'clock. So much the better! The shorter that hatedtête-à-têtewith Mercier would be, the more thankful she would feel.
The air blowing freshly down stream as they crossed the bridge, revived her. She alighted, paid the cabman, and taking her bag tightly in her hand, passed some roughs who were shouting noisily as they came along, by stepping into the road; then seeing the helmet and tunic of a policeman silhouetted against the sky--still dully red after the sunset--she went across the road to him.
"Can you direct me to Haythorn Street?" she asked.
"Haythorn Street? Yes, miss. Straight along that road, and first to the left."
Evidently the street where her bugbear at present lived was an ordinary one, and respectable. The policeman's tone of voice suggested that! She went along the road, which was rather dark, until she came to a neat-looking street of small, uniformly built houses. Yes, this was Haythorn Street--she read the name by the light of the gas lamp close by. Now to find the number! The corner was number one, so she went on at once, and then her heart gave a dull, leaden thud against her chest. She saw a dark figure on a little balcony a few houses up, which disappeared as she advanced. When she came up to number twelve, the street door stood open--Victor came out, took her hand, and led her in.
"Welcome, my dearest wife!" he exclaimed, embracing her. Then he closed the door. She saw an odious, triumphant smile on his sharp, handsome features, and in his bright dark eyes. He was carefully dressed. Although only half a Frenchman, he had the southern taste for fantasy in costume. A diamond stud shone in his embroidered shirt-front, a button-hole of some white, strongly-scented blossom was in his coat.
"You are frightened, my own!" he caressingly said, with a suggestion of proprietorship which made her inwardly shudder.
"Don't be! We are quite alone in the house, you and I! And I will take precautions to keep us so," he added, returning to the door and putting up the chain.