CHAPTER VI.
PAUL’S GALLING SHACKLES.
“You are surprised to see me here to-night, Mimi,” Paul Desfrayne said, using an old childish pet-name that always disarmed his mother. “I came here with a friend to see Lady Quaintree”—he hesitated painfully—“on—on business.”
Mrs. Desfrayne opened her big blue eyes, and looked him straight in the face. A spasm of pique passed through her heart.
“You did not know thatIwas acquainted with Lady Quaintree?” she remarked, half-sarcastically, opening and shutting her fan with a movement which he knew well of old as indicating vexation. She was angry that he had come hither with some friend unknown to her, instead of asking her for an introduction, and telling her of his business.
“My dear mother, I did not know until this very afternoon that I was to come here. I remembered, when I heard the name, that you had spoken of her. It was she who lent you the opera-box last night, was it not?”
“Well—well, it does not signify. I must not be inquisitive,” said Mrs. Desfrayne, confident that she must learn all sooner or later. “Have you heard or seen anything of the young lady you spoke of yesterday evening?”
“I have.”
“You have?” cried Mrs. Desfrayne, drawing a step or two nearer to him. “What is she like? Where does she live? Is she pretty? What is she?”
Captain Desfrayne paused for an instant, as if perplexed at such a volley of questions.
“Her name is Lois Turquand, and she is the companion of Lady Quaintree,” he then very quietly replied.
Mrs. Desfrayne retreated several steps, as if confounded.
“You are jesting!” she angrily exclaimed, unable to credit that she had heard aright.
“I presume you have seen the young lady?”
“Miss Turquand!” Mrs. Desfrayne slowly repeated—“Lois Turquand! Oh, it is impossible!”
The information did not seem to afford her much pleasure, and there was a visible expression of blank disappointment upon her face.
The truth—or part of the truth—was that Mrs. Desfrayne had no great liking for Lois Turquand. By nature aristocratic, proud as a duchess of Norman descent, she cared not for persons beneath her in station, while winning and all that was gracious to those in her own rank or above her.
To Lady Quaintree, wife of the world-famed lawyer, she had ever paid eager court; but Miss Turquand, the daughter of an embroideress, a penniless nobody, she had always politely ignored. When her son had told her of the strange will which had placed him in such an unexpectedly advantageous position, she had built, with feminine imaginative rapidity and skill, sparkling castles in the traitorous air. All her life she had yearned to mix freely in society—she longed to be a leader of fashion, a star in the hemisphere of the beau monde; but her income was limited. Her husband, a colonel in the army, had died almost a poor man, leaving her some six hundred a year, and to her son an equal pittance—for such she considered it, measured by her desires and wants. She was still young and most beautiful when left a widow, and might have married again advantageously, but her overweening ambition had induced her to reject more than one excellent offer, and now it was too late to retrieve these errors of judgment—though she still had her secret plans and schemes.
Under a fair and smiling mask she hid many little feminine piques and spites, and one of her pet “aversions” happened to be Miss Turquand. She could hardly pardon the girl her roseate youth, her fresh, piquant loveliness, her grace, spontaneous as that of a wood-nymph. For some reason, unexplainable even to herself, she always experienced a horribly galling sense of being old,and world-worn, and artificial, in presence of Lois Turquand, and it created a small vindictive sense of envy and spite that augured ill for any future attempt at conciliation. Her short-lived dream of taking the young person left in her son’s charge in hand, and shining in society by means of a reflected light, was at an end.
She could have better endured to hear that the legatee was a plain young woman, in a vastly inferior station. It was as if her son had held a draft of gall and wormwood to her lips, and asked her to swallow it.
“It is incredible!” she said, after a brief pause, during which she kept her eyes fixed upon her son’s face.
“You have certainly surprised me,” she added, slightly shrugging her shoulders. “Though why I should feel surprise, I cannot tell. It is absurd, I have no doubt. So Miss Turquand has become a young woman of property. I long ago was determined not to be astonished at anything, and I take a fresh resolution from to-night. Was the person who left her this money a relative?”
“No.”
“Not a relative! May I ask what——Am I indiscreet in asking for any particulars?”
Paul Desfrayne knew that sooner or later his mother must become acquainted with everything that the will contained. It was better to take things with a good grace, and let her hear now, than to shrink and keep silence, or grant half-confidences, and make bad worse, by appearing to make a mystery of what was apparently a simple matter.
“The old gentleman of whom I was speaking to you last night—Mr. Vere Gardiner—has left Miss Turquand one hundred and thirty thousand pounds unconditionally. He has left me ten thousand in the same way, but——”
With an effort he rapidly told her the general contents of the will.
“You marry Miss Turquand!” almost angrily cried Mrs. Desfrayne, flirting her fan backward and forward with a nervous movement. She had seated herself, in her agitation, while Paul remained standing a few steps from her.
“Such are the terms of the will. If she dies before thethree years have expired, I am to receive—I forget how many thousands.”
“Have you seen her?”
“I have.”
“How do you like her?”
“Not at all, as far as I can judge.”
A smile, almost of gratification, rippled over the fair, smooth face of his mother at this admission. She was on the point of exclaiming: “I am glad of it!” but checked herself, and remarked instead:
“How is it that I find you here alone?”
These words recalled Captain Desfrayne to his exact position. He felt as if he could have given worlds to speak with the old freedom to the woman who loved him so fondly—could he but explain to her what weighed upon his life like a constant nightmare. But it was impossible. He was a coward, and dared not face her inevitable anger.
“I was going away just as I saw you,” he replied, with apparent tranquillity, though his heart for a moment had beat wildly at the thought of making his confession. “The rooms were frightfully hot up-stairs, and this place seemed so cool and inviting, I lingered.”
“You will take me up-stairs, however. Does Lady Quaintree know you are my son?”
Captain Desfrayne had not thought of it.
“I have such an intolerable headache!” he pleaded, anxious to escape; and his temples throbbed to agony. “I really cannot stay.”
“That is very unusual with you, having a headache,” said his mother. “What is the cause of it?”
The young man shrugged his shoulders without replying in words.
His mother urged him, only half-believing in his excuse, to escort her up-stairs. She had many reasons for desiring his company. Although it was a little vexatious, perhaps, for so young-looking a woman to be attended by a son who seemed nearly as old as she did herself, she always wished for his escort. He was so handsome, so dignified, so chivalrous, gallant, devoted, in his behavior—there was the mother’s pride and glory to atonein a measure for the beauty’s mortified vanity. At this moment she wished to see him with Miss Turquand, to judge how far affairs were likely to go; she wanted to hear Lady Quaintree’s opinion, and see how Miss Turquand carried herself beneath the golden blaze of her new prosperity. But it was in vain she urged him, and she was piqued by this odd refusal. He was determined to go at once.
“Well, you must call to-morrow, Paul. I am dying with curiosity to hear all the rest, and your opinion, and so on.”
Captain Desfrayne escaped. The balmy air cooled his fevered pulses, and he walked rapidly away into the darkness of the summer’s night.
“Good heavens, what an escape!” he muttered. “I don’t know what earthly inducement could have impelled me to go up-stairs. My poor mother! What an ungrateful villain I feel in deceiving her! It was an accursed day when that brilliant butterfly crossed my path, and led me away as easily as ever schoolboy was lured into a mad chase on an idle afternoon, or peasant lout drawn into pursuit of a gleaming Jack-o’-lantern. There is no peace, no happiness for me henceforth. I sometimes wish my mother knew all. It would be an infinite weight lifted off my mind; and yet I dare not—I dare not tell her.”
The desire to be rid of this painful secret rose so strongly within his breast, that when he had traversed several streets, he abruptly paused to reflect on the advisability of going to the house in Porchester Square, where his mother was staying, and awaiting her return, with the object of telling her precisely how he was situated.
“No,” he at length decided. “Icannotdo so to-night. To-morrow, perhaps, I shall be more courageous. If this unlucky piece of ‘good fortune,’ as I suppose some folks would style it, had not occurred, I might have borne my secret some few years longer—maybe forever—safe locked within my breast, there to gnaw away my life at its ease. But this misguided old man’s absurd whim has been the fatal means of letting in a flood of misery now and in the future upon my most unhappy head. It iswell that the girl is cold and seemingly impassive. It is also providential that she has powerful friends, who will render my duties merely nominal.”
The sleepy quiet of the aristocratic street through which he was passing with slow, undecided steps was broken by swift-rolling wheels.
The gleaming lamps of a dashing brougham threw long gleams of light through the semiobscurity of the somber thoroughfare, and the champ of the horses’ feet, the jingle of the silver harness, evidenced that the vehicle belonged to some one of wealth, if not of position.
Paul Desfrayne’s glance was mechanically attracted to this handsome equipage, unconsciously to himself.
As it passed him, the face of a woman appeared at the window—the face of Madam Guiscardini thus coming before him like an apparition for the second time this night.
Her face looked like some beautiful pictured head painted on a dark background. She did not see him, but spoke to the coachman, apparently giving him some new direction. Glancing forth like a vision, she as rapidly vanished again, and in a moment the brougham had swept off down one of the side streets.
Paul Desfrayne struck his hands together with a gesture of despair.
“She seems to haunt me to-night like some evil spirit,” he muttered. “I did not know she was in London. Her face fills me with affright and a sense of coming danger. Can it be true that I once fancied I loved this woman, and that I let her crush my life forevermore with her cold, pitiless hand? Can it be that I am her bond-slave—no longer free to do more than move in the one dull round day by day, with these galling shackles about me, forced to relinquish all the bright hopes of love and happiness that bring sunshine about other men? Oh! fool, fool, fool that I have been!” he cried, aloud.
Then he once more quickened his steps, as if to escape from himself.