On the appointed day, at the appointed hour, Mr. Felton, accompanied by his nephew, called on Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge, who received the two gentlemen with no remarkable cordiality. Coquetry was so inseparable from her nature and habits, that she could not forbear from practising a few of her fascinations upon the younger man and she therefore relaxed considerably from the first formality of her demeanour after a while. But George Dallas was the least promising and encouraging of subjects for the peculiar practice of the beautiful widow, and he so resolutely aided his uncle in placing the conversation on a strictly business footing, and keeping it there, as to speedily convince the lady that he was entirely unworthy of her notice. She was not destitute of a certain good nature which rarely fails to accompany beauty, wealth, and freedom, and she settled the matter with herself by reflecting that the young man was probably in love with some pretty girl, to whom he wrote his verses, and considered it proper to be indifferent to the attractions of all female charmers beside. She did not resent his inaccessibility; she merely thought of it as an odd coincidence that Mr. Felton's nephew should be as little disposed to succumb to love as Mr. Felton himself, and felt inclined to terminate the interview as soon as possible. Consequently, she made her replies to Mr. Felton's questions shorter and colder as they succeeded one another, so that he felt some difficulty in putting that particular query on which George had laid restricted stress. He did not perceive how deep and serious his nephew's misgivings had become, and George grasped at every excuse that presented itself for deferring the awakening of fears which, once aroused, must become poignant and terrible. He had learnt from Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge some of the facts which she had communicated to Routh: young Felton's intention of visiting Homburg at about the period of the year which they had then reached; his departure from Paris, and the unbroken silence since maintained towards her as towards Mr. Felton himself. The information she had to give was in itself so satisfactory, so tranquillizing, that Mr. Felton, who had no reason to expect obedience from his son, felt all his fears--very dim and vague in comparison with those which had assailed George's mind--assuaged. It was only when his nephew had given him some very expressive looks, and he had seen the fine dark eyes of Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge directed unequivocally towards the allegorical timepiece which constituted one of the chief glories of the Schwarzchild mansion, that he said:
"My nephew has never seen his cousin, Mrs. Bembridge, and I have no likeness of him with me. I know you are a collector of photographs; perhaps you have one of Arthur?"
"I had one, Mr. Felton," replied Mrs. Bembridge, graciously, "and would have shown it to Mr. Dallas with pleasure yesterday, but, unfortunately, I have lost it in some unaccountable way."
"Indeed," said Mr. Felton; "that is very unfortunate. Was it not in your book, then?"
"I wore it in a locket," said the lady, with a very slight accession to the rich colour in her cheek--"a valuable gold locket, too. I am going to have it cried."
"Allow me to have that done for you," said Mr. Felton. "If you will describe the locket, and can say where you were yesterday, and at what time, I will take the necessary steps at once; these may not succeed, you know; we can but try."
So Mrs. Bembridge described the lost trinket accurately, and the visit came to a conclusion. As the two gentlemen were leaving the house, they met Mr. Carruthers, who accosted Mr. Felton with stately kindliness, and, entering at once into conversation with him, prevented the interchange of any comment upon the interview which had just taken place between the uncle and nephew. George left the elder gentlemen together, and turned his steps towards Harriet's lodgings. In a few minutes he met her and joined her in her walk, as Routh had seen from the window.
He stood there, long after George and Harriet had passed out of sight, thinking, with sullen desperate rage, of all she had said. He felt like an animal in a trap. All his care and cunning, all his caution and success, had come to this. It was strange, perhaps--if the probability or the strangeness of anything in such a condition of mind as his can be defined--that he seldom thought of the dead man. No curiosity about him had troubled the triumph of Routh's schemes. He had met so many men in the course of his life who were mere waifs and strays in the world of pleasure and swindling; who had no ties and no history; about whom nobody cared; for whom, on their disappearance from the haunts in which their presence had been familiar, nobody inquired; that one more such instance, however emphasized by his own sinister connection with him, made little impression on Stewart Routh. Looking back now in the light of this revelation, he could not discover that any intimation had ever been afforded to, or had ever been overlooked by him. The dead man had never dropped a hint by which his identity might have been discovered, nor had he, on the other hand, ever betrayed the slightest wish or purpose of concealment, which probably would have aroused Routh's curiosity, and set his investigative faculties to work. He had never speculated, even at times when all his callousness and cynicism did not avail to make him entirely oblivious of the past, on the possibility of his learning anything of the history of Philip Deane; he had been content to accept it, as well as its termination, as among the number of the wonderful mysteries of this wonderful life, and had, so far as in him lay, dismissed the matter from his mind. Nothing that had ever happened in his life before had given him such a shock as the discovery he had made yesterday. The first effect on him has been seen; the second, ensuing on his conversation with his wife, was a blind and desperate rage, of a sort to which he had rarely yielded, and of whose danger he was dimly conscious even at its height. He was like a man walking on a rope at a giddy elevation, to whom the first faint symptoms of vertigo were making themselves felt, who was invaded by the death-bringing temptation to look down and around him. The solemn and emphatic warning of his wife had had its effect upon his intellect, though he had hardened his heart against it. It was wholly impossible that her invariable judgment, perception, and reasonableness--the qualities to which he had owed so much in all their former life--could become immediately valueless to a man of Routh's keenness; he had not yet been turned into a fool by his sudden passion for the beautiful American; he still retained sufficient sense to wonder and scoff at himself for having been made its victim so readily; and he raged and rebelled against the conviction that Harriet was right, but raged and rebelled in vain.
In the whirl of his thoughts there was fierce torture, which he strove unavailingly to subdue: the impossibility of evading the discovery which must soon be made; the additional crime by which alone he could hope to escape suspicion; a sudden unborn fear that Harriet would fail him in this need--a fear which simply signified despair--a horrid, baffled, furious helplessness; and a tormenting, overmastering passion for a woman who treated him with all the calculated cruelty of coquetry--these were the conflicting elements which strove in the man's dark, bad heart, and rent it between them, as he stood idly by the window where his wife had been accustomed to sit and undergo her own form of torture.
By degrees one fear got the mastery over the others, and Routh faced it boldly. It was the fear of Harriet. Suppose the worst, came to the worst, he thought, and there was no other way of escape, would she suffer him to sacrifice George?Hecould do it; the desperate resource which he had never hinted to her was within his reach. They had talked over all possibilities in the beginning, and had agreed upon a plan and direction of flight in certain contingencies, but he had always entertained the idea of denouncing George, and now, by the aid of Jim Swain, he saw his way to doing so easily and successfully. Harriet had always been a difficulty, and now the obstacle assumed portentous proportions. He had no longer his old power over her. He knew that; she made him feel this in many ways; and now he had aroused her jealousy. He felt instinctively that such an awakening was full of terrible danger; of blind, undiscoverable peril. He did not indeed know by experience what Harriet's jealousy might be, but he knew what her love was, and the ungrateful villain trembled in his inmost soul as he remembered its strength, its fearlessness, its devotion, its passion, and its unscrupulousness, and thought of the possibility of all these being arrayed against him. Not one touch of pity for her, not one thought of the agony of such love betrayed and slighted, of her utter loneliness, of her complete abandonment of all her life to him, intruded upon the tumult of his angry mind. He could have cursed the love which had so served him, now that it threatened opposition to his schemes of passion and of crime. He did curse it, and her, deeply, bitterly, as one shade after another of fierce evil expression crossed his face.
There was truth in what she had said, apart from the maudlin sentiment from which not even the strongest-minded woman, he supposed, could wholly free herself--there was truth, a stern, hard truth. He could indeed escape now, taking with him just enough money to enable them to live in decent comfort, or to make a fresh start in a distant land, where only the hard and honest industries throve and came to good. How he loathed the thought! How his soul sickened at the tame, miserable prospect! He would have loathed it always, even when Harriet and he were friends and lovers; and now, when he feared her, when he was tired of her, when he hated her, to contemplate such a lifenow, was worse--well, not worse than death, that is always the worst of all things to a bad man, but something too bad to be thought of. There was truth in what she had said, and the knowledge of what was in his own thoughts, the knowledge she did not share, made it all the more true. Supposing he determined to denounce George, and supposing Harriet refused to aid him, what then? Then he must only set her at defiance. If such a wild impossibility as her betraying him could become real, it would be useless. She was his wife; she could not bear witness against him; in that lay his strength and security, even should the very worst, the most inconceivably unlikely of human events, come to pass. And he would set her at defiance! He kept up no reticence with himself now. Within a few days a change had come upon him, which would have been terrible even to him, had he studied it. He hated her. He hated her, not only because he had fallen madly in love with another woman and was day by day becoming more enslaved by this new passion; not chiefly even because of this, but because she was a living link between him and the past. That this should have happened now! That she should have right and reason, common sense, and all the force of probability on her side, in urging him to fly, now--now when he was prospering, when the success of a new speculation in which he had just engaged would, with almost absolute certainty, bring him fortune,--this exasperated him almost to the point of frenzy.
Then there arose before his tossed and tormented mind the vision of a blissful possibility. This other beautiful, fascinating woman, who had conquered him by a glance of her imperial eyes, who had beckoned him to her feet by a wave of her imperial hand--could he not make her love him well enough to sacrifice herself for him also? Might he not escape from the toils which were closing around him into a new, a glorious liberty, into a life of wealth, and pleasure, and love? She had yielded so immediately to the first influence he had tried to exert over her; she had admitted him so readily to an intimacy to whose impropriety, according to the strict rules of society, she had unhesitatingly avowed herself aware and indifferent; she had evinced such undisguised pleasure in his society, and had accepted his unscrupulous homage so unscrupulously, that he had as much reason as a coarse-minded man need have desired for building up a fabric of the most presumptuous hope.
As these thoughts swept over him, Routh turned from the window, and began again to stride up and down the room. His dark face cleared up, the hot blood spread itself over his sallow cheek, and his deep-set eyes sparkled with a sinister light. The desperate expedient to which he had resorted on the previous day had gained him time, and time was everything in the game he designed to play. The discovery would not be made for some time by George Dallas. When it should be made, his triumph might be secured, he might be beyond the reach of harm from such a cause, safe in an elysium, with no haunting danger to disturb. The others concerned might be left to their fate--left to get out of any difficulty that might arise, as best they could. The time was short, but that would but inspire him with more courage and confidence; the daring of desperation was a mood which suited Stewart Routh well.
Hours told in such cases. The fire and earnestness with which he had spoken to the beautiful widow had evidently surprised and, he thought, touched her. If the demonstration had not been made in his own favour, but in that of another, no one would have more readily understood than Stewart Routh how much beauty of form and feature counts for in the interpretation of emotion, how little real meaning there may be in the beam of a dark bright eye, how little genuine emotion in the flush of a rose-tinted cheek. But it was his own case, and precisely because it was, Stewart Routh interpreted every sign which his captor had made according to his wishes rather than by the light of his experience. Indeed, he had little experience of a kind to avail him in the present instance; his experience had been of stronger, even more dangerous, types of womanhood than that which Mrs. Bembridge represented, or of the infinitely meaner and lower. As he mused and brooded over the vision which had flashed upon him, not merely as a possibility to be entertained, as a hope to be cherished, but as something certain and definite to be done, his spirits, his courage, his audacity rose, and the dark cloud of dread and foreboding fell from him. He had so long known himself for a villain, that there was not even a momentary recoil in his mind from the exceeding baseness of the proceeding which he contemplated.
"I can count upon a fortnight," he said to himself while completing a careful toilet, "and by that time I shall either be away from all this with her, or I shall be obliged to put George Dallas in jeopardy. If I fail withher--but I won't think of failure; I cannot fail." He left a message with Harriet, to the effect that he should not dine at home that day (but without any explanation of his further movements), and went out.
"I do not see the force of your reasons for objecting to my introducing you to my mother," said George Dallas to Harriet. Mrs. Carruthers had passed them in an open carriage during their walk, and George had urged Harriet to make his mother's acquaintance.
"Don't you?" she replied, with a smile in which weariness and sadness mingled. "I think you would, if you thought over them a little. They include the necessity for avoiding anything like an unpleasant or distressing impression on her mind, and you know, George," she said, anticipating and silencing deprecation by a gesture, "if she remembers your mention of me at all, she can remember it only to be distressed by it; and the almost equally important consideration of not incurring your stepfather's anger in any way."
"As for that, I assure you he is everything that is kind to me now," said George.
"I am happy to hear it; but do not, therefore, fall into an error which would come very easy to your sanguine and facile temperament. Be sure he is not changed in his nature, however modified he may be in his manners. Be quite sure he would object to your former associates just as strongly as ever; and remember, he would be right in doing so. Will you take my advice once more, George? You have done it before--" she stopped, and something like a shudder passed over her; "let bygones be completely bygones. Never try to associate the life and the home that will be yours for the future with anything in the past--least, oh least of all, with us."
"What do you mean, Mrs. Routh?" George asked her eagerly. "Do you mean that you want to give me up? I know Routh does--he has not spoken to me a dozen times of his own accord since he has been here---but you, doyouwant to get rid of me?"
She paused for a moment before she answered him. Should she say Yes, and be done with it? Should she let things drift on to the inevitable end, yielding to the lassitude of mind and body which was stealing over her? Should she gain another argument to use in a renewed appeal to her husband for the flight in which she saw the sole prospect of safety, by providing herself with the power of telling him a rupture had taken place between herself and Dallas, and her power of guiding him was gone? The temptation was strong, but caution, habitual to her, instinctive in her, restrained her. Not yet, she thought; this may be my next move. George repeated his question:
"Do you mean thatyouwant to get rid of me?"
"No," she answered, "I do not, George. I was only led into overstating what I do want, that you should conform to your stepfather's reasonable wishes. He has been generous to you, be you just towards him."
"I will," said George warmly. "I wonder how far he will carry his newly-found good will. I wonder--" he paused; the name of Clare Carruthers was on his lips; in another moment he would have spoken of her to Harriet. He would have told her of the self-reproach, mingled, however, with hope, which daily grew and throve in the congenial soil of his sanguine nature; he would have pierced Harriet's heart with a new sorrow, a fresh remorse, by telling her of another life, young, innocent, and beautiful, involved in the storm about to burst, whose threatenings were already sounding in the air. But it was not to be--the name of Clare Carruthers was never to be spoken by George to Harriet. Apparently she had not heard his last words: her attention had strayed; she was very weary.
"I must go home," she said abruptly. "We are close to your mother's house. You had better go to her now; she has returned from her drive."
"Let me see you home," said George; "pray don't dismiss me in this way."
"No, no," she said, hurriedly; "let me have my own way, please. You will come to me to-morrow, and let me know your plans."
She stood still, and put out her hand so decidedly in the attitude of farewell, that he had no choice but to take leave of her. They parted on the shaded road, close to the garden gate of Mr. Carruthers's house. As Harriet walked away with her usual rapid step, George looked after her very sadly.
"She is fearfully changed," he said; "I never saw anything like it. Since I went to Amsterdam she might have lived twenty years and been less altered. Can it be that my uncle is right, that Routh ill-treats her? I wonder if there's any truth in what those fellows said last night about him and Mrs. Ireton P.? If there is, it's an infernal shame--an infernal shame." And George Dallas opened the little gate in the wall, and walked up the garden with a moody countenance, on which, however, a smile showed itself as he lifted his hat gaily to his mother, who nodded to him from the window above. His spirits rose unaccountably. The positive information which Mrs. Bembridge had afforded Mr. Felton relative to his son's expected arrival had immensely relieved George's mind. He was satisfied with the progress of his novel; day by day his mother's health was improving. His prospects were bright. The distressing recollection of Deane, and the unhappy consequences of the tragedy, were becoming light and easy to him; sometimes he forgot all about it. If he could but win his stepfather's confidence and regard sufficiently to induce him to pardon his clandestine acquaintance with Clare, he would be altogether happy. How serene and beautiful the weather was! He stood in the verandah, which extended into the garden, bare-headed, and inhaled the sweet air with keen pleasure. His impressionable nature readily threw off care and caught at enjoyment.
"It's such a glorious afternoon, mother," he said, as he entered Mrs. Carruthers's sitting-room; "I'm sure you must have enjoyed your drive."
"I did, very much," his mother replied. "The air seems rather closer, I think, since I came in. I fancy we shall have a storm."
"O, no," said George carelessly. Then he said: "Shall I read you my last chapter? I want to post it this evening. It's a funny chapter, mother. I bring in the queer old bookseller I told you about, who persisted in being his own banker."
"I remember, George. What are you looking at?" He had taken up a letter from the table beside her, and was scrutinizing the address closely. "Are you admiring the handwriting? That is a letter from Clare Carruthers."
"O," said George. And he laid down the letter, and went to fetch his manuscript. So it was she who had forwarded Mr. Felton's letters to him! Ellen must have asked her to do so--must, therefore, have talked of him--have mentioned him in some way. But had she done so in a manner to arouse any suspicion in Clare's mind of his identity? Did Clare remember him? Did she think of him? Would she forgive him when she should know all? These and scores of cognate questions did George Dallas put vainly to himself while he read to his mother a chapter of his novel, which certainly did not gain in effect by his abstraction. It pleased the listener, however, and she knew nothing of his preoccupation; and as he made the packet up for post he came to a resolution that on the following day he would tell Harriet "all about it," and act on her advice.
With nightfall the wind arose, and a storm blew and raged over the little town, over the dark range of the Taunus, over the lighted gardens deserted by their usual frequenters, and, all unheeded, over the brilliant rooms where the play, and the dancing, and the music, the harmless amusement and the harmful devilment, went on just as usual. It blew over the house where Harriet lived, and raged against the windows of the room in which she sat in silence and darkness, except for the frequent glimmer which was thrown into the apartment from the street light, which shuddered and flickered in the rain and wind. Hour after hour she had sat there throughout the quiet evening during the lull, and when the darkness fell and the storm rose she laid her pale cheek against the window-pane and sat there still.
The shaded roads were deeply strewn with fallen leaves next day, and the sun-rays streamed far more freely through the branches, and glittered on pools of water in the hollows, and revealed much devastation among the flower-beds. Rain and wind had made a wide-spread excursion that night; had crossed the Channel, and rifled the gardens and the woods of Poynings, and swept away a heavy tribute from the grand avenue of beeches and the stately clump of sycamores which Clare Carruthers loved.
George had finished a drawing very carefully from the sketch which he had made of the avenue of beeches, and, thinking over his approaching communication to Harriet, he had taken the drawing from its place of concealment in his desk, and was looking at it, wondering whether the storm of the past night had done mischief at the Sycamores, when a servant knocked at the door of his room. He put the drawing out of sight, and bade the man come in. He handed George a note from Harriet, which he read with no small surprise.
It told him that Routh had been summoned to London, on important business, by a telegram--"from that mysterious Flinders, no doubt," thought George, as he looked ruefully at the note--and that they were on the point of starting from Homburg. "Seven o'clock" was written at the top of the sheet. They were gone then; had been gone for hours. It was very provoking. How dreary the place looked after the storm! How chilly the air had become! How much he wished Arthur would "turn up," and that they might all get away!
The storm which had swept unheeded over the heads bent over the gaming-tables at the Kursaal that wild autumn night, was hardly wilder and fiercer than the tempest in Stewart Routh's soul, as he, making one of the number of the gamblers, played with a quite unaccustomed recklessness, and won with surprising sequence. This was earlier in the night, when the powers of the air were only marshalling their forces, and the elemental war had not extended beyond the skirmishing stage. Many times he looked impatiently round, even while the ball was rolling, as if expecting to see some one, who still did not appear; then he would turn again to the green board, again stake and win, and resume his watch. At length a touch on his elbow caused him to look round in a contrary direction, where he saw a man standing, who immediately handed him a note and went away. Then Routh smiled, read the words the note contained, smiled again, swept up the money which lay before him, and left the room. The battle had fairly begun as he stepped out from the shelter of the portico, and, buttoning his coat tightly across his chest, and pulling his hat down to his eyebrows, set himself, with bent head, against the storm. His way led him past his own lodgings, and as he took it on the opposite side of the street, he saw, indistinctly, Harriet's figure, as she sat close beside the window, her head against the panes. Something dreary and forsaken in the aspect of the window, with its flimsy curtains wide apart, the indistinct form close against the glass, no light within the room, made Routh shiver impatiently as he looked at it; and just then the light in the street flickered and swerved violently under the influence of a sudden blast, which drove a sharp cascade of rain rattling against the window.
"Moping there in the dark," said Routh, with an oath, "and making things a hundred times worse, with her cursed whining and temper."
The Schwarzchild mansion was near, and he was soon removed as far from all associations with discomfort and dreariness as brilliant light, a blazing fire of odorous wood burning in a room too large to be overheated by it, luxurious surroundings, and pleasant expectation could remove him from such discordant realities. Presently Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge made her appearance. The room was a long one, and she entered by a door which faced the chimney where he was standing. Much as he had admired her, irresistibly as her beauty had captivated him with its ordinary charm, of recklessness and lustre, with its rare, far-between moments of softness and grace, he had never really understood until now how beautiful she was. For there was a mingling of both moods upon her as she came towards him, her amber silk dress, with the accustomed drapery of superb black lace falling round her, and sweeping the ground in folds such as surely no other mere gown, made by mundane milliner, had ever accomplished. Rich purple amethysts were on her neck and on her wrists, and gleamed on the comb which held the coils of her hair. Wax-lights in profusion shed their softened light upon her, upon the cream and rose tints of her brow and cheeks, upon the scarlet of her lips, upon the marvellous darkness of her eyes; and the capricious blaze from the burning logs shot quivering streaks of light among the folds of her dress, glancing over the jewels she wore, and playing redly on the hand which she held out, while yet some steps divided her from Routh, gazing at her in absorbed, almost amazed admiration.
"How tired and pale you look!" she said, as he took the proffered hand, and she allowed him to hold it. The words were slowly spoken, in the tone of solicitude for him, which is one of the most potent weapons in a beautiful woman's armoury. "Sit there," she went on, drawing her hand gently from his hold and indicating a seat, while she settled herself into the recesses of a huge German sofa. "How could you imagine I would go to the Kursaal to-night? Just listen!" She held her hand up; a cloud of filmy lace fell back from the beautiful round white arm. Then she dropped the hand slowly, and waited for him to speak. He spoke with strange difficulty; the spell of the power of her beauty was upon him. This was not what he had intended. He had meant to conquer, not to be conquered; to sway, not to be ruled.
"I thought," he said, in a low tone, "you would have come, because--I--I did not know you would allow me the happiness of coming here."
"Did you not? I think you don't understand me yet. I wished to see you, you know, and I did not wish to go out this evening. It is quite simple, is it not?"
"It is indeed, for such a woman as you."
She laughed.
"Is not that rather an awkward speech--rather an equivocal compliment? Howposedyou look!"
She laughed again, Routh felt unspeakably embarrassed; he had a sense of being at a disadvantage, which was unpleasant. She saw it, and said:
"What a temper you have! You'd be rather hard to please, I fancy, if one were in any sense bound to try."
"Don't jest with me," said Routh, suddenly and sternly, and he rolled his chair deliberately near her as he spoke. "You did not allow me, you did not invite me to come here to-night; you did not do this, which seems so 'simple' to you, because you are as much braver than every other woman as you are more beautiful,"--he looked into her dark eyes, and their lids did not droop,--"only to jest with me, only to trifle with me, as you trifle with others. You are a wonderfully puzzling woman, I acknowledge; no woman ever so puzzled me before. Each time I see you, there is something different, something new in your manner, and each time it is as though I had to begin all over again; as if I had not told you that I love you, as if you had not listened and confessed that you know it. Why have you sent for me? You dismissed me yesterday with something which you tried to make look and sound like anger--ineffectually, for you were not angry. And I was prepared for the same line of tactics to-day. Well, you send for me. I am here. You come to me a thousand times more beautiful"--he dropped his voice to a whisper, and she grew pale under the fixed fire of his eyes,--"infinitely more beautiful than I have ever seen you; and in your eyes and in your smile there is what I have never seen in them; and yet you meet me with mere jesting words. Now, this you do not mean; what is it that youdomean?"
He rose, and leaned against the mantelpiece, looking down upon her bent head, with the light shining on the jewels in her hair. She did not speak.
"What is that youdomean?" he repeated. She had laid one arm along the cushioned side of the sofa, the side near him. He clasped it, above the wrist, impressively, not caressingly, and at the touch, the words he had spoken to her before, "Would you not be afraid of a man who loved you with all the passion of his heart?" recurred to her, and she felt that so this man loved her, and that she was afraid of him.
"I dare say many others have loved you, and told you so," he continued, "and I don't ask you how you received their professions. I know the world too well, and what it brings to men and women, for any such folly. That is of the past. The present is ours. I ask you why you have brought me here? A woman who resents such words as those I have spoken to you before now, does not give a man the chance of repeating them. You have not sent for me to tell me that you are insulted and outraged, to talk the cant of a hypocritical society to me. I should not love you, beautiful as you are, if you were such a fool."
He saw that his audacity was not without its charm for her; her head was raised now, and her dark eyes, looking up, met his looking down, as she listened, with parted lips and deep-drawn breath.
"Be sure of this," he said, "no man has ever loved you as I love you, or been willing to stake so much upon your love." The sinister truth which lurked in these words lent the sinister expression to his face again for a moment which she had sometimes seen in it. "How much I stake upon it you will never know. So be it. I am ready, I am willing. You see I am giving you time. I am not hurrying you into rash speech. I dare say you were not at all prepared for this when you and I met, and you took the initiative in what you intended to be an ordinary watering-place flirtation--while you were waiting for Arthur Felton, perhaps?" he said, savagely, for, as he went on, the savage nature of the man was rising within him, and for all that his grasp was on her soft white arm, and his gaze was searching the depths of her dark eyes, he was speaking rather to himself than to her; rather to the unchained devil within, than to the beautiful fatality before him.
"It is possible you had some such notion," he said. "I don't ask you to acknowledge it, for if so, you have abandoned it." He stooped lower, his eyes looked closer into hers. She shrank back, and covered her face with her disengaged hand. "Yes," he went on, in a gentle tone, "I know you soon discovered that I am not made for make-believes; and now--now that you have sent for me, and I am here, what is it that you mean? Youcannotmake me the pastime of an hour; youcannotshake off the hold which such love as mine lays upon your life--would still lay upon it were you a feebler woman than you are. What then? Are you going to take the wine of life, or are you going to content yourself with the vapid draughts you have hitherto drank? You must tell me, and tell me to-night, what it is you mean; for a crisis in my life is come, and I must know, without paltering or delay, how it is to be dealt with."
He lifted his hand from her arm, and standing directly before her, bade her look up and speak to him. She did not move. Then he sat down on a velvet footstool before her sofa, and drew her hands away from before her face. There were signs of agitation on it, and he read them, not quite correctly perhaps, but to his own satisfaction.
"Listen to me," he said, in the gentlest tones within the compass of his voice. "I have a right--have I not?--to ask you, to know what is your meaning towards me? What did you bring me here for? Remember the words I have spoken to you, not once only, or twice; remember the story I told you on the balcony yonder; remember the tone you have occasionally adopted in all your levity, and then do not attempt to deny my right to speak as I am speaking, and to demand your answer."
"You--you found me alone here--in my own house--and--"
"Absurd!" he cried. "You are talking nonsense, and you know it. Did you not intend me to understand that I should find you alone? Did your note, your summons (I tore it up, but you remember the words as well as I do), mean anything else? Do you not know this is all folly? There is no need to play withme. I am a sure prize or victim, which you please; you know that well enough, and I must know which youdoplease, for this is, as I said before, a crisis for me. Which is it?" he said, and he held her hands more tightly, and looked at her with a pale face. "Which is it? Mere coquetry--a dangerous game with a man like me I warn you--a game you won't find it possible to play; or--or the deep, deep love of a lifetime--the devotion which will never swerve or falter--the passion which will blot out from your knowledge or your fears everything beyond itself."
Weak, imaginative, without principle, easily ruled by strength, though a despot to weakness, the woman he addressed listened to him like one in a dream. Not until afterwards did a sense of being tricked and trapped come to her. Had her demeanour towards Routh really implied all this! Had she yielded to the rapacity for admiration, to the thirst for conquest, which had always dominated in her nature, once too often, and far too completely? This was precisely what she had done, and she had fallen into the hands of a stronger being than herself. In a blind, vague, groping kind of way she felt this, and felt that she could not help or deliver herself, and felt it with something like fear, even while her imagination and her vanity were intoxicated by the mingling of defiance and pleading in his words, in his tones, and in his looks.
"You and I," he went on, "would say to others, would say to each other in some of our moods, or would have said when first we met, that no such thing as this all-sufficing love exists, but each of us knows well that it does, and may andshallbe ours! This is whatImean. Again I ask you, what isyourmeaning in all this?"
"I don't know," she replied, releasing her hands, and rising. He allowed her to pass him, and to walk to the fireplace. She stood there, her radiant figure glittering in the lustre of the fire and the wax-lights. She stood there, her head bent, her hands before her, the fingers interlaced. After a minute, Routh followed her, and stood before her.
"Then you will not answer me--you will not tell me what your meaning was in sending for me to-night?"
There was tenderness in his tone now, and the slight inflection of a sense of injury which rarely fails with a woman.
"Yes," she said, looking up full at him, "I will tell you. I wanted to let you know that I think of going away."
"Going away!" cried Routh, in unbounded amazement--"Going away! What do you mean?"
"Just what I say," she replied, recovering herself, and resuming her usual tone and manner as soon as he released her from the spell of his earnestness and passion--"I am going away. I don't treat you quite so badly as you try to make out, you see, or I should not tell you about it, or consult you, or anything, but just go--go right away, you know, and make an end of it."
Routh's stern face flushed, and then darkened with a look which Harriet had learned to know, but which Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge had never seen. She did not see it now, and continued:
"I sent for you to tell you this. I don't like the place; I'm tired of it. It's too small, and yet every one comes here, and I'm talked of. Ah, you sneer! Well, I know. I remember all I have said about that, but it is one thing to be talked of in London or Paris, and quite another to be the object of the daily curiosity and the malice--"
"You mean the envy, don't you?"
"No, I don't, I mean the malice; well the envy, or the malice, or only the observation, if you like, of always the same people, whom I meet in always the same places. This is a part of my reason, but only a part. I don't like Mr. Felton, I don't like Mr. Dallas; less than any people in the world I choose to have them to spy and overlook me; and--and--I don't want to be here when that man comes."
Routh stood before her quite silent.
"You know--you remember," she said with a smile, "Arthur Felton. By-the-by, you need not make faces about my wearing his photograph any more, for I've lost it--lost it before I got home yesterday. In fact, I suspect he is in some trouble--perhaps in some disgrace--and I have no fancy for being here when he arrives, to have him quarrelling with me if I avoid him, and his father regarding me with horror if I don't; so--" and here she knelt on the white rug and stretched out her hands to the fire, which shone reflected in her upraised eyes--"so I am going to--" She paused, tantalizing him.
"To--?" he repeated after her, almost in a whisper.
"To London," she said; and laughed and looked at him, and rose. "Now sit down, and let us talk it over, and be reasonable."
Still quite silent, Routh obeyed her. His manner, his look was changed. He was thoughtful; but an air of relief had come upon him, as if unexpected help had reached him from an unforeseen quarter.
There was no light in the window, as Routh passed it by, returning to his lodgings. But there was a lamp in the hall, at which he lighted a candle, and went into the sitting-room.
Harriet was still sitting by the window; she did not raise or turn her head, and Routh thought she was sleeping. He went up close to her, and then she languidly opened her eyes and rose.
"Have you fallen asleep here, in the dark, Harriet?" said Routh, "and without a fire! How imprudent and unnecessary!"
"I am not cold," she said; but she shivered slightly as she spoke. Routh took up a shawl which lay upon a chair and wrapped it round her. She looked at him, quietly but sharply.
"Don't be afraid; I am all right to-night, Harry," he said. "I've won a lot of money at the tables, and I've been thinking over what we were saying this morning--" He paused a moment, and then went on with some constraint in his voice: "I think you are right so far, that the sooner we get away from this the better. I will consider the rest of the matter when we get to London."
Harriet looked at him still, closely and sharply, but she said nothing.
"You are too tired to talk about anything to-night, Harry, I see," said Routh, with good humour which did not sit on him very naturally, "so we will not talk. But would it be possible for you to be ready to start in the morning?"
"Yes," said Harriet, quietly, and without showing the least surprise by voice or countenance, "I will have everything ready."
Homburg von der Höhe was graced for only a few days longer by the beautiful American. Her pony-carriage and the gray ponies, the French groom, the luxurious wrappings, the splendid vision of satin, and lace, and jewels, all disappeared, and the Schwarzchild mansion was for a while desolate, until again occupied by the numerous progeny of a rich and rusty Queen's counsel.
It was understood that Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge had returned to Paris. "Every season is the right season for Paris with those Americans," said a contemptuous Briton, who secretly held himself aggrieved by the abrupt departure of the handsome widow, who had never appeared more than conscious of his existence, certainly not interested in the fact; "it draws them like a loadstone."
"She has evidently heard nothing of Arthur," said Mr. Felton to his nephew, "or she would have sent us word."
He spoke timidly, and glanced at George with anxious eyes. George looked undisguisedly serious and troubled.
"I wish your letters had arrived, uncle," he replied. "I begin to fear we shall not see Arthur here; and--and to be sorry that so much time has been lost."
A week later George Dallas wrote to Harriet Routh from Paris as follows:
"Hôtel du Louvre, Paris, October.
"My Dear Mrs. Routh,--I am here with my uncle. My mother and Mr. Carruthers are travelling more slowly. We are all to meet in London. Meantime a circumstance has occurred which may prove of great, and must be of some, importance to Mr. Felton and to myself. I am compelled to ask your assistance, which I know you will give me with all your accustomed readiness and kindness.
"Accompanied by my uncle, I went this morning to a jeweller's shop in the Rue de la Paix to order the bracelet you know of to be re-made for my mother. I had not previously undone the packet containing the gold band and the turquoises, which you sealed up and kept in your desk for me, since the day you gave it to me at Homburg. The things were wrapped up in letter-paper, you will remember. I opened the packet on the counter of the jeweller's shop, shook the turquoises into a box he handed me for the purpose, and was holding up the gold band for him to examine, when my uncle, who was looking at the paper I had laid down, suddenly called to me, and pointing to some writing on it--mere memoranda, apparently, of articles to be purchased (I enclose a correct copy)--exclaimed, 'That is Arthur's writing!' I saw at once that it was his writing, and determined to apply to you in the first place for information on the matter. It is now clear that my cousin has passed under another name than his own, and that Routh and perhaps you have known him. There is a date, too, upon the paper--10th of April of this year. You took the paper out of the lower division of your desk. You may be able to tell us all that we have so long been anxious to know, at once. Pray answer this without delay. I think it best not to write to Routh, because my uncle and he are almost strangers, and also, dear Mrs. Routh, because it comes naturally to me to address myself to you. How strange that all this time you and Routh should have known Arthur, and I, living in intimacy with you both, should have been in a manner seeking him! You will, no doubt, be able to tell us everything without an hour's delay; but, in any case, we shall be in London in a week, and shall have Arthur's portrait to show you. I am sure this letter is very ill expressed, but I am still bewildered at the strangeness of the occurrence. Write at once. My room is No. 80.
"Always yours affectionately,
"George Dallas.
"P. S. The jeweller of the Rue de la Paix is a jewel among his tribe. He undertakes to replace the diamonds, and, as far as I can judge--to be sure it's only a little way--with stones just as fine as those I sold at A--, for a third less than the money his Hebrew Dutchconfrèregave me. I had a mind to tell him the value of the original diamonds, but I didn't--the honestest of the jewellers is only human, and it might tempt him to raise the price and not the value. But I think he recognized a master-mind in my uncle."