"Do sit down," she urged. "There! I'd rather you wouldn't come nearer."
Still he didn't speak. But he sat down as she bade him with the light full on his face, and she saw he was Gerald Andrews.
It was quite a minute before she could speak. Then, "You—of all the persons in the world!" she breathed barely above a whisper.
"It is odd that we should meet again here under such circumstances," he agreed, pleasantly amused over her astonishment. "And yet not so singular, either. It's a tight little island, this, and any two persons on it are more or less likely to run across each other in time."
"But I thought you were still in India," she said.
"It's three years since I came home. The governor died suddenly, and—well, there were things to be looked after."
Nina smiled, thinking of what Dr. Pottow had told her.
"Where's little boy blue that looks after the sheep?" she quoted. "Was that it?"
"Yes," he answered, "the sheep were part of it. But the quarry is the biggest job."
She wondered how she could be so rude to him after all he had done. Somehow it didn't just seem to her a gentleman's work. But he wasn't ashamed of it, evidently. And she was glad of that.
"I read in the newspapers about your misfortune," he told her. "I'm glad you came to Pottow. He's the best man on scars in all England."
"Scars," she repeated, remembering. But it would be ruder still to ask him about his. She wondered whether he really did think of her every time he shaved.
"He took an old scar out for me—a very delicate bit of work, too."
"How vain you must be!" she exclaimed.
"No; it was hardly vanity. I was ashamed of it, not for what it was, but for what it meant. It symbolized cowardice, and I was ashamed of that."
"I remember," she said; "but I'll forget it, if you'd rather."
"I would rather."
"You're stronger now, aren't you? I'm so glad."
Then for the first time came something of that old boyish lilt in his voice that recalled the Simla days—days prior to the night of the season's last dance at Viceregal Lodge, which wasn't the end of everything, after all.
"Are you glad, really?" he asked, delighted. "Do you care just that little bit?"
"Indeed I am," she told him. "I care a great deal—for your happiness. I want you to be happy."
"I'm hardly that," he confessed. "That is, I haven't been. But I'm very nearly so this evening."
She must have experienced some little emotion, for she forgot her fan for an instant and left her chin unmasked. But she lifted it again almost instantly.
"How good you have been to me!" she murmured. "I didn't deserve such sacrifice."
"It wasn't a sacrifice. It was a delight. Besides, it was the least I could do to make good for being a cad when you were in trouble."
Even in the shadow he could see that she didn't understand. Her eyes showed him that.
"I lost my head," he confessed. "I wasn't only weak; I was half wild. It was I that told Dinghal all you'd ever said to me. It was I, really, who started the horrid stories that got about. I feel I can never do enough to wipe that out."
To his surprise she showed no resentment. "I dare say that all you said wasn't half the truth. I did kill poor Darling, you know."
His brow contracted to a frown.
"You didn't," he protested. "You couldn't—you couldn't have meant to. If you had any part in it, it was accidental."
She didn't insist. All she said was: "I don't see why you should think so well of me, Gerald. I was perfectly horrid to you."
"Were you?" he asked, dreaming. "You were very good to me, too. I can't forget that. I don't want to. It's that and that only I care to remember."
"Would you think it good of me if I should let you come every day to see me?" she asked suddenly, with fresh impulse. "It's a privilege I've allowed no one."
"Oh, will you?" he cried, delighted. "Iwouldbe glad."
"I've seen no one but Dr. Pottow, you know; not even my oldest, dearest friends. Not my own people."
His smile was rapturous.
"I know it," he said. "Have you heard what you are called here? No? Well, you are 'the mysterious widow of Bath.'"
"Isn't that funny?" she laughed. "Fancy how dull I have been! You will come and amuse me, won't you, Gerald?"
"Every day. And if ever I bore you, or you'd rather not see me, say so. You'll do that?"
"I'll do that. And"—she hesitated just an instant—"and you mustn't neglect your sheep or your freestone, you know. If you don't come I'll know a lamb has strayed from the fold and you're out on the hill looking for it. Do you carry a crook?"
"My shepherds do," he said solemnly.
"Send me some south-down mutton, Gerald. I'm so fond of chops." And at that he laughed.
"I'm not going to be teased," he said and stood up. But Nina made him sit down again. She was enjoying his call so much. She made him stay another hour.
He came every day after that, as she bade him. She usually set the hour herself, and he arrived on the minute.
He sent her the magnificent skin of a tiger he had shot in India, and sometimes it pleased her to crouch on this, sensuously delighted by the contact, while remembering with a curious mingling of emotions how Kneedrock had declared her to be the reincarnation of just such another creature of the jungle, cruel, remorseless, blood-lusting—a tigress in the guise of a woman.
But she could never bear to look on that skin again after events that were soon to come.
Kneedrock himself never saw the rug.
As he was leaving one afternoon Andrews heard voices in the vestibule. The housemaid was sending away an insistent caller.
"Mrs. Darling doesn't see any one," he heard her say.
"But I'm sure she'll see me," the persistent male voice continued. "You just take her my card."
"She forbids me to fetch cards," rejoined the housemaid. "I'm sorry, sir."
He heard the jingle of silver coin. The caller was about to resort to bribery. As a privileged one, out of compassion for Nina, he would lend his aid. He might pretend he was the attending surgeon or physician, and that it was by his orders that the patient was denied visitors.
He drew the door, which was slightly ajar, wider. He made a third in the vestibule. And then he recognized the caller. It was Lord Kneedrock.
Nibbetts recognized him, too. He shrugged his hulking shoulders and thrust his handful of coins back into his pocket. Then he turned to the housemaid again.
"I understand," he said in his penetrating undertone. "I quite understand. Mrs. Darling sees no one."
Then he reopened the outer door and stalked lumberingly away.
There was a house-party at Puddlewood, and all the kinsfolk and friends who haunted Bellingdown were there.
"Who's seen Nina?" asked the duchess.
"No one," answered Waltheof laconically.
"Too bad, when she's so entertaining," said the duke. "I always say there's no one like Nina. I say, Doody, don't I say there's nobody like Nina?"
"Everybody knows what you think of Mrs. Darling," affirmed the duchess calmly. "But I do wonder what she looks like!"
Charlotte Grey had been to Bath, but had not succeeded in seeing the recluse. She got as far as Delphine, and that was all.
"Madame ne reçoit personne," said the French maid.
"Nibbetts has been, too," said Kitty Bellingdown. "And he was equally unsuccessful."
"I thought she'd have seen you," ventured the duchess.
"I thought so, too; but it appears not," returned Kneedrock gloomily.
Meanwhile the Carleigh split-up had occurred, but the fact had not yet reached this bureau of family and friendly counsel.
Strolling ruminantly on the promenade at Nice, Caryll's heart turned thirstily toward the giver of oblivion.
"I don't care what she looks like, I must see her," he said, and he left by that night's Parisrapide.
On the journey to Bath he did a great deal of thinking. He hadn't been happy for weeks—not since the night Mrs. Veynol came so suddenly into his paradise in Madeira.
It is idle for a man to hope to keep his perfect balance in a desperate flirtation with his own mother-in-law. One might as well contemplate tight-rope feats on a newly thrown and, consequently, not firm rope.
Carleigh realized that he hadn't made any manner of success of the task. And the worst of it was that his wife didn't in the least care.
When Sibylla had killed her daughter's betrothal, the daughter had rebelled slightly. She had been pale—but she appeared happy.
Now, however, when the marriage had gone under, she exhibited neither reluctance nor grief. She did not resent losing her husband in the least. She only yawned and said: "Why don't you bolt with mama?" and then read further.
It was all very distressing—exceedingly distressing. But now he was nearing Bath and Nina. And that meant consolation.
Nina, receiving his card, experienced a rush of vivid anticipation. Is there any situation so piquant as that of meeting the man one did not marry after he has "hashed it" with another woman?
Her embargo had been lifted that morning, and the precious new skin—partly Gerald's, partly her own—which the specialist had worked so hard to foster into beauty was at last firm enough to stand the gaze of the most critical of all judges—the man that one might have married.
Carleigh, waiting in the drawing-room, was far more nervous than she was. He had been told that she was horribly disfigured, and he expected to find her so.
Now he could hear her step in the passage. She was outside there in the chill hall. Then the latch clicked, the portière swung, and—he was rising to touch Nina Darling's hand again.
After all these months! The bedroom and the bandages rushed back upon his memory, and he was prepared to need self-control when he should look up. But when he did look up he saw, with a curious jump in his heart, that she was not scarred.
Then in the same instant that he realized she was unchanged he knew himself to be greatly changed—branded on brow as well as in soul. And he felt that through and through.
He took her hand—both hands—in his and gazed thirstily into her eyes—a serene violet-blue.
"I've blundered, too," he said as a greeting. "I've made an unhappy marriage, too, now. I have more sympathy for you than I had. Butshenever plays with guns, unfortunately."
He laughed, really quite gaily, for he was awfully glad to feel her hand in his again. And she laughed as well.
"It's funny how people talk, isn't it?" she said. "Of course I never had anything to do with it; but people like to talk—after all these years, too. It was just an accident."
And it was just the other day that she had insisted the reverse. But that was to another man—a different type of man.
He laughed and put his arm about her. "Kiss me, dear," he said. "I'm so very unhappy."
If she had averted her head he would have been her slave afresh; but she didn't avert her head. Instead she kissed him placidly—so placidly that he almost started.
"You see you're married now," she told him and drew her hand out of his and went and sat down.
He felt stunned and sick. It was as if there was no bottom anywhere for a little. But then he remembered.
"Nina," he said, calling her again that which in all the fervor of his nomenclature during the passionate, passed-by period he had so often voiced. "Nina, I've come to ask a great kindness at your hands—two, in fact."
She sat quiet, staring at him with those lash-veiled eyes that had driven him and so many, many others not quite mad; and, had the lesson he had spent months conning in such a hell as may exist amid our earthly surroundings been a bit less bitter and thorough, he must have felt that near-madness course in his veins again. But he was seared so that no near-madness was for him any more.
"How you've changed!" she observed, not seeming to notice his speech, and speaking herself in a certain tone of absolute childlike wonder, which was not the least of the weapons in her arsenal of personal persuasion. "Why, you've lines across your forehead—at your age, too! Lines that I can see even from here."
"Never mind," he said; and then some impulse led him to go over and kneel beside her, conscious only of an acute wonder as to what would come next. "Never mind, dear girl, listen to me."
She put her hand upon his head. "And white hairs," she pursued, tracing them with an astonished finger. "At your age, too. One—five. Why, I can count eight."
"Never mind," he repeated, pulling down the impertinent finger and wondering as he did so that its fresh imprisonment left him so pitifully, piteously unthrilled. "Never mind—I don't care what I look like any more.
"It's all so futile—life is so empty—things seem to me so very, very trivial. What are wrinkles beside things—untellable things—that stone one's immortality and make one wish that on the Judgment Day God Himself wouldn't know!"
Even as he spoke he caught himself questioning whether she believed him—whether his words stirred any feeling in her.
She dropped her eyes and pulled her hand free.
"I know what you mean," she said in a toneless voice. "I had such secrets, too. But they're not what people fancy them to be. People think I killed my husband; but I didn't. I did what you've done—what we all do. I killed myself."
He looked at her. It was such a pitiless, relentless glare—that into which her words thrust his consciousness.
"I can't believe that yours were like mine," he said miserably. "No one can ever have done what I have done. Yes, you're right—and it has killed me."
She didn't seem greatly interested.
"But I didn't come to talk of that," he exclaimed quickly. "I came to ask of you two things. Will you grant them?"
She turned her head, leaving only her profile showing. "Certainly not," she said. "I will grant you nothing."
"You mustn't say that. You don't know what I'm asking."
"You're married," she told him, "and I won't have a thing to do with you. I hate the love-making of married men. It's dangerous, too, for they always talk."
That dull, heavy red that had been crimson before he took on chains stole over his face.
"I'll tell you without asking, then," he said. "It may not be the great and tremendous thing to you that it is to me. I think, perhaps, that you may even laugh."
"Very likely," she assented.
He rose and went to the chimney-piece and stood there, striving for greater quietude. It was a long moment—minutes long.
Then, finally, he threw over his shoulder, "Nina, you must hear me. I'm going away. I'm going to cut it all. Suetonius was pretty bad, but you can be tracked by a mother-in-law until life becomes hideous. I—"
"But everybody knew why your betrothal was called off," she said with simple finality; "and then you deliberately married the girl even after that."
"I know—I know—I know," he cried in irritation; "but those things must be written in the Book of Fate. Some curses must be launched beyond recall. At any rate, it's done. We both know that."
"Yes, we know that," she agreed simply.
"And now I am going away, and I'm not sure that I shall ever return. But I want an object in going, and I would rather have it something in connection with you than anything else on earth. I've thought what I want to do, and I wish you'd give me permission to do it.
"Of course there was a man you loved, and of course you love him yet. Equally of course he accounts for everything, and of course he's still alive or you'd be a better woman. If he was dead he'd have a hold over you that would keep you straight."
"How funny for you to know all that!" she exclaimed, opening her eyes very wide. "You certainly have been learning." Then she broke forth into laughter. "And if it were the duke now!"
"Don't laugh," he cried angrily. "I tell you I'm in earnest. I know that there's a man, and that he's somewhere. Well, then, I want to go where he is, and to see him face to face, and to try to right whatever separates you. I've got to get away—and far away—and I'll be able to build some sort of respect for myself if I know that I've a good purpose and a clean mission."
She wasn't laughing now. He was very much in earnest, and she had caught some of his seriousness. It was contagious.
"I understand what persons like you and me can suffer, and how much they need help, and how the mock of love unfulfilled can drive them into hideous rocks and sink them in a seething whirlpool of temptations. I can read your life like a book now—can read it by the lurid light of my own burning wreck. And so I know that whatever might happen you would be forgivable. And it's what I know—what I have learned—that I want to tell him. And whatever is wrong—if he believes it—if I can make him believe—However, it—" And there he stopped—broke off abruptly.
Nina was staring at him hard.
He had spoken so fast and in such a passion of pleading that he appeared to be for the moment breathless. She sat there before him in the low chair she had chosen, and her eyes were fixed on him.
He had poured forth the last phrases with his head bowed and his hands gripping the edge of the velvet-draped shelf behind him.
It was she who spoke next.
"There is no one for you to go to," she said—"no one in all the wide world. As to my husband, it was a kind of accident. But really I didn't care if it hadn't been. All my crimes are against myself. I've injured no one else. Do you understand?"
He nodded dumbly, feeling rather blank.
"There is no 'man' in my life," she went on. "I never have 'loved' as women are supposed to love. I've just liked men—liked them as such—that was all."
She paused briefly, looking at him, expecting some word; but he was silent.
"I've never been really bad," she continued. "I've never wanted to be bad. But I like to be kissed, and I've been so unhappy through just sheer loneliness that I could only remember a few of the commandments, and the marriage service not at all."
Sir Caryll Carleigh stood very still there, trying to read her meaning in her face, but failing.
"Pretty nearly every one thinks I was in love with Kneedrock," she pursued presently. "You may ask him about that if you like. And they think that we made way with poor Darling between us. But they are wrong."
She paused again, in doubt whether or not to say more—whether or not to tell the truth—the whole truth—as she had never told it before. Carleigh neither urged nor encouraged, but of her own free will she decided. It was due him in a way, and frank confession might probably be the best thing for her. She had carried the burden alone now for five years, always growing heavier, and the temptation to share it was too much for her.
"He was cleaning his gun, you see"—that was how she began it; just that simply—"and a cartridge shell stuck in the barrel. He tried to get it out, and then he held it—the gun, I mean—and asked me to try—with a sharp thing, you know. He thought that it was an empty shell and so did I. But it wasn't. That was all."
Carleigh shivered ever so slightly. "You cannot say that you didn't kill him, then," he declared.
She pursed her lips a bit thoughtfully. Already she felt better. She had not misjudged the effect—shewasrelieved.
"No; because of course I did. But, on the other hand, of course I didn't. Anyhow, it mattered very little. I was so mad over life and living that his death seemed a very small event to me. I couldn't remember a thing at first.
"The shot seemed to have stunned my memory. But it all came back later—horridly. The scene, I mean. Yet the event—the fact that poor Darling was gone—appeared of so little importance. And I foolishly expected the world to see it as I did."
"But the world didn't?"
"No"—she shook her head quite seriously—"the world chose to talk, and has talked ever since. So very stupidly, too."
Carleigh felt dazed. Nina's viewpoint was very puzzling at times.
"And yet I understand," he said, seizing on the most obvious end of the tangle. "I don't suppose I'd—you see I have been so close to desperation myself—I don't suppose I'd care, either, if—" But he got no further.
Nina hooked her fingers together tightly behind her head.
"I wouldn't think such thoughts if I were you," she said quite gravely. "You know if you do, the chance comes, and then you do something—and God—only God—will ever measure you by what you really did mean."
Then she looked at him very intently and went on with great impressiveness both of tone and emphasis: "I did give a most awful jab with that sharp thing, and the cartridge exploded and killed my husband, and—I was glad. So, of course, Iama murderess at heart. Don't you see?"
"Yes, I see," said Carleigh somberly.
"And that was my crime," she continued—"that I wanted to do it. And the results haven't mattered so much. What matters is thatI wanted to do it. That's all that matters. All that can ever matter."
"I understand," said the man, his voice so low that the words were barely articulate.
There was a long, grim silence which grew oppressive.
"It's years ago, is it not?" he asked then.
"Five years," she answered. "It's not a pretty story, is it? How the duchess enjoys telling it! What she knows and what she thinks. And she's my great-aunt. Fancy what fun it has afforded the rest of the world!"
"That is unworthy of you," Carleigh rebuked under his breath—"to rail about the horror that has blighted your life. I can't laugh over horrors. They turn me cold in the night."
"Ah, but I've grown used to mine," she returned lightly. "And besides, it wasn't so bad as what followed—as the realizing that I could never be clean again. I wonder if all those who've sinned as I have sinned are trying to fill an empty life as I've been trying!"
He moved to a seat, sank down and clutched his head between his hands. "But love wasn't killed in you—you find pleasure in men. It has been in me."
She whirled in her seat so suddenly that he started.
"Good Heavens!" she cried, "you don't fancy that I get any real joy out of flirting, do you? Why, it's only to pass the time. I never forget for one second. I—I couldn't."
There was another silence—briefer, this time—and then Carleigh rose, a bit heavily.
"You're horribly human, you know," he said. "I don't know what to say or what to do. I know only that I long more than ever for you. You—you couldn't care for me again, I suppose?"
She began to laugh. "Oh, you very manlike man!" she cried. "As if I didn't know that was what you came for. No; I couldn't ever care for you. No; not possibly."
There was a tap on the door and the housemaid entered with a card for Nina, who knew whose name it bore before she glanced at it.
"Certainly, Wilson," she said; "show Mr. Andrews in at once."
Lord Kneedrock lived, when he was in town, in a small suite in St. James's Square.
Here Carleigh came on a bright morning, three days later, to find Kneedrock in the little sitting-room reading before a fire, three windows open and two dogs asleep at his feet.
They talked for half an hour before the visitor reached his point.
"She told me all," he said, then. "I suppose it's fairest to say outright that she told me all."
Kneedrock didn't look at him. He was smoking his pipe, and his gaze fixed itself on the curling clouds of smoke that eddied in the cross-currents of air from the open windows.
"I suppose that she told you she was to blame, eh?" he drawled after a moment.
"She said that she hadn't cared what happened."
"It isn't a pretty story, no matter how you look at it," the viscount observed, putting his reflections into words. "Two desperate persons who didn't care what happened. Poor Darling! He didn't care what happened, either, don't you know. I've often wondered if he didn't load the thing and call her to manage the discharge."
Carleigh's eyes were fascinatedly fixed on the flames in the grate—little blue, dancing devils of light whose heat was overpowered by the chill from outside.
"I thought of that, too," he said, grimly.
"Poor Darling!" Kneedrock went on musingly. "I saw him before any one else. The smoke hadn't cleared away. His face was quite gone, you know. It was awful."
"Good God!"
There was a little pause, and then the older man said:
"What horrible things go on in the world, anyhow!"
"Yes," the other said simply.
"I saw him after that, though," pursued Kneedrock, "in his coffin, tricked out in his dress uniform, a handkerchief spread where his face used to be, and his head on a silk pillow. He looked very peaceful. Glad it was all over, I dare say."
Carleigh only nodded, still looking at the fire. And then there was another pause, which Kneedrock broke eventually with: "We're awfully primitive.... Still Nina's story wasn't strictly primitive. It was all warped and twisted by civilization.
"In the stone age things would have been different. The troglodyte would have clubbed Darling, and later, if the lady played tricks, he would have ended her in the same way. That's how to manage women."
He stretched out his iron hand and wrist and looked at them—his right hand and wrist, not the scarred ones. "I hate civilization," he said then suddenly. "I hate honor, andnoblesse oblige, and all such tommyrot. It's the ruin of the race."
He spoke slowly now, but with a frightful bitterness.
"Yes," said Carleigh, sympathy swelling quick, "we've gone a long way from the truth of existence."
"It isn't any use going on a wild-goose chase after happiness in these times," Kneedrock went on. "You can't cure your ills, nowadays. I tried to help myself once, and made the worst kind of a mess of it. Go back to your wife, or go off with your mother-in-law, but don't imagine that either course is going to help you to happiness. Because it isn't."
Carleigh was looking Nibbetts straight in the eyes now.
"And yet," he said frankly, "I think that I could be happy—quite happy—with Mrs. Darling."
"No, you couldn't," returned the viscount sharply—gruffly, in fact. "You couldn't. She's too shallow."
"Shallow?"
"Yes, shallow. She has no depths—of feeling, or anything else. Her whole life shows that. She was too pretty when she was young. She led her husband a devil of a dance, and she'll never reform.
"You must go after some other trail or grail, or whatever you choose to call it. You can never either help Nina or get her. Take my word for that."
Carleigh, who wasn't in any sense a strong character, felt depressed at the words. Kneedrock, who was a very strong character, relit his pipe and waited. After a little the other said:
"Do you, by any chance, know a man named Andrews?"
"I know one Andrews," answered Kneedrock, and this time he held out his left hand and wrist. "It was he who gave me that," he added, indicating the healed wound, "the night before poor Darling was shot."
"In India?"
"In India."
"What sort of a chap?"
"Tallish, rather good-looking, brown eyes and hair, young. Was in the civil service."
Carleigh looked puzzled. "I wonder if it could have been the same?" he asked, half to himself. "I met him at Mrs. Darling's the day I called."
"Oh, I dare say," said Kneedrock, non-committally. "He's followed her after five years. Once one gets the virus in one's blood, it's likely to break out any time. So Andrews is at Bath!"
"He seemed to be quite at home."
"Doubtless he is. Nina can make one feel that way. He was very much at home in the Darling bungalow at Umballa. Just before he fired at me he and Nina seemed to be sharing a single chair. You see, I was there on a spying expedition."
"You mean—" queried Carleigh. He couldn't just reconcile Kneedrock and the word.
"I'd heard that Darling was cruel to her and I traveled all the way from Tuamota to the Punjab to find out."
Sir Caryll held his peace, and Kneedrock added: "Of course I found it was the most unwarranted slander. Darling was a saint."
He got up and closed the three windows. Then he poked the coals, and took a place on the hearth-rug with his back to the grate. The dogs still slept.
"So she's amusing herself with Andrews again, eh!" he chuckled. "Recalling those halcyon days of bloodshed, I suppose."
"Perhaps," said Carleigh thoughtfully, "now, after all these years, she'll marry him."
"Oh, no, she won't," flashed from Kneedrock, who was smiling. "She can't, you know."
"I don't see why not," the other rejoined. "She's her own mistress. She's of age, and a widow, and of sound mind."
The viscount maintained a rather disconcerting silence for the space of several seconds, puffing at his pipe and following the smoke with his eyes. Then he patted the head of the nearest dog with the toe of his boot.
When, finally, he spoke, it was to ask: "Did you ever hear me spoken of as her lover?"
"Yes," answered Carleigh, surprised beyond words.
Kneedrock raised his head and his eyes as they rested for a moment upon Sir Caryll's were curiously devoid of expression.
"I was," he said with a sort of dry grimness. "I'm more than that—I'm herhusband."
As he realized the full meaning of Lord Kneedrock's amazing statement, the young and unhappy baronet started. His eyes opened very wide and his jaw dropped, leaving his mouth open, too, though not so wide.
"Yes, we're married," Kneedrock continued. "We've been married a long time."
The only thing that could have drowned the sound of the proverbial dropping pin was the low snoring of one of the sleeping dogs.
"It was one of those useful businesses that are managed sometimes," the speaker amplified without any feeling apparently. "Nobody knew. Nobody knows. I went to South Africa, was supposed to have been killed in battle, and Darling came along.
"She married him at the end of a year, and went to India with him. It was about then that I got my memory back. My head was pretty badly knocked about, you see, and for months I didn't know my own name. Of course I heard about it, but I kept my mouth shut and hid myself away in the South Pacific."
Carleigh just stared. It was altogether too much for him to grasp fully. So he had no questions. But Kneedrock kept on:
"So she wasn't exactly the débutante that Darling thought. Naturally, it's all a mess. Everything's a mess. You take my advice and go off with your mother-in-law."
Carleigh was shaking now as if with the ague.
"They call the whole business love," Nibbetts said. "Well, I thank Heaven I had it young! I'm the one man that Nina can't fool. She knows it. I know it. And you know it, too, now.
"Of course she hasn't any claim on me, and I haven't on her. But we shall neither of us ever marry. That's understood. We can't very well. Don't talk about this. Going? Well, then, good-by, old chap! Better go off with Mrs. Veynol. Good-by!"
Carleigh got out somehow. He was faint and giddy. He went to one of his many clubs, and sat there for a long while. Life looked to him a very low, sordid business.
Outside there was fog and mud, slime and filth. And in his heart there was little that was cleaner.
Nina went down to Puddlewood the next week and surprised everybody.
They weren't expecting her in the least. They hadn't heard a word from her or of her, and they didn't know a thing about the skin-grafting and the wonderful success that Pottow, aided by the Andrews cuticle, had made of it.
They were all gathered in the great hall for tea when she arrived, and her entrance was rather dramatic. She insisted that she should not be announced, but permitted to find her way in alone.
The black staghound, Tara, was with her, and at her command he preceded her, bounding into the group with Nina's umbrella gripped in his lean jaws.
Every woman screamed, and every man who was not already standing sprang to his feet.
"God bless my soul!" cried the duke. "How did that beast get here? It's Nina Darling's. There isn't another such in all England."
Lord Waltheof reached for the umbrella, which Tara gave up without protest, and turned with expectant gaze toward the door.
"It's Mrs. Darling's umbrella," said Wally, examining the initials on the silver-gilt handle. "She must be here."
The duchess rose at that, and her gaze joined that of the hound. She and every one else had the same question in mind: "How will she look?" But there was a very trying delay before it was answered.
Nina came running in an instant later; but, to the dismay of the curious, she was thickly and closely veiled.
From this, of course, they drew their own conclusions, just as she wished them to. Every last one of them believed that her face was not fit to be seen.
Every man, without exception, was sorry—deeply sorry; and every woman, without exception, wasn't. Nina's beauty had always been a hard thing to combat.
For the duchess's kiss she lifted her veil the least bit and presented the extreme point of her chin. The duchess, observing closely, noted that it was unmarred, and concluded that it was the only portion of her great-niece's face that was.
"I have been perfectly brutal to all of you," Nina admitted gaily, "but when you hear my story I'm sure you'll all forgive me."
It is hard for most women to forgive a pretty woman, but to forgive a pretty woman who has suddenly become ugly is not so difficult.
They—the women, that is—were disposed to overlook the poor creature's rudeness. The men were always her slaves, so they didn't count. It was the women she had appealed to, anyhow.
"Nina never is brutal," declared the duke. "I say, Doody, haven't I always said—"
But no one was listening, not even the duchess, who rarely failed to confirm him.
"I've had the most awful time with my burns," Nina was hurrying on; "and I hadn't the heart to write letters, talk, or even see any one. I denied myself to everybody."
"Until you were quite all right again, I suppose?" ventured Lady Bellingdown in an effort to draw her.
"Until I got so desperately lonely—so hungry for the faces and voices of my own people—that I should have come to you even without any face at all."
It was an unfortunate choice of phrasing. Every one noticed it and thought of poor Darling. Every one, that is, except Nina herself, to whom the comparison never occurred. She was too occupied in thinking of how Charlotte Grey would look when she saw her without her veil.
"You needn't mind us, of course," said Charlotte just at that minute.
"Oh, I don't!" Nina came back. "I know you'll overlook any blemishes."
"Indeed we will," agreed the duke; "we're all so devilish glad to see you!" He put a hand under her elbow and whispered close to her ear. "Come sit by me. There's some very excellent seed-cake."
Then, laughing, Nina sat down with the duke on her right and Sir George Grey on the other side of her. The three ladies faced her directly. So did Lord Waltheof, who had his customary place behind Kitty Bellingdown's chair.
A footman came in with the tea-things, and Nina glanced around inquiringly. "Isn't Nibbetts here?" she asked, striving to make the question appear casual.
Everybody seemed to look at everybody else, and no one was in any haste to answer. Already the duchess was busy with the cups and saucers.
"Nibbetts has gone to Scotland," Shucks finally told her.
"Is it possible he's still running after his marmalade lass?" she laughed. "You men do have odd tastes."
"Something wrong with Nibbetts—that's a fact," declared his grace bluntly. "Does most unheard-of things."
"I don't understand," she said, turning to him with sudden seriousness. "What unheard-of things, for example?"
But here the duchess intervened. "Do be still, Pucketts. You're very hard on Nibbetts. You always were. He's never been anything but eccentric. Why magnify a phase of it into something extraordinary?"
"Because it is extraordinary," the duke defended. "Fancy a man haunting the tiger-house at the Zoölogical Gardens day after day, and for hours at a stretch! It's not sane, you know."
Nina bent her veiled face closer to him. "Does Hal Kneedrock do that?" she asked.
"He did," was the answer. "I saw him there myself. Others saw him. I say, Doody, didn't I see Nibbetts in the tiger-house?"
"I dare say you did," his wife confirmed. "But what of it?"
"It's very odd, I say. Very odd. It looks like second childhood. The kiddies like to go to the tiger-house."
No one else said a word. But they all seemed most interested, in Nina especially.
"But now he's gone to Scotland, you say?" she asked.
"Yes, to Scotland. Are there any zoölogical gardens in Scotland, I wonder? Doody, are there any zoölogical gardens in Scotland?"
"Nibbetts has gone to Dundee," the duchess returned, pouring tea. "I don't fancy he'll be able to find any tigers there."
"There's a girl there," said Nina. "He told me so. A girl and a parrot. Can you imagine Nibbetts and a romance?" Her laugh rippled through her veil.
Sir George handed her her tea, and she lifted her veil to a point between her nose and her upper lip. The women stared, and so did the men. But there wasn't a scar in sight.
"Do try the seed-cake," urged the duke. "I can recommend it. I can, really."
Nina tried it. A minute later her veil went to the bridge of her nose, which she brushed with a filmy speck of handkerchief.
They all gazed over their cups, and their eyes testified to their astonishment. Her cheeks were of rose-leaf texture, unmarred.
Then, quite casually, she put down her cup and saucer, lifted her arms, got busy with her hands, and—presto!—her hat and veil were off and her whole face bare to where her golden hair swept across her brow.
Charlotte Grey gasped. The duchess and Lady Bellingdown were dumb.
"By gad!" exclaimed Waltheof in a fervor of astonished admiration. "You're more beautiful than ever, Mrs. Darling."
"We fancied you were horribly marked," cried the duke. "We did, really. All purple blotches and that sort of thing. Didn't we, Doody?"
"Speak for yourself, Pucketts," said Doody. "I could never imagine Nina anything but lovely."
Kitty Bellingdown had turned to frown at her cavalier. She regarded his outburst as quite unnecessary and very ill-timed.
Charlotte Grey gasped a second time. Then she said: "I'd be willing to be burned to get a complexion like yours, dear."
"But, you see, I had the foundation to begin on; and I had a friend who was willing to sacrifice something for me," replied Nina sweetly. So sweetly that Charlotte Grey fairly gritted her teeth.
Lady Bellingdown grasped the situation and rushed to the rescue with a change of subject.
"Nina," she said, "did you know that Caryll had returned to his wife?"
Then it was really Mrs. Darling's turn to gasp. "Really!" she exclaimed.
"Yes. He was in England for a week, but never came near us. It seems they had a quarrel over some trifle and he ran away to give her a lesson. Unfortunately it got into the papers."
"I saw it," Nina white-lied valiantly.
"But did you see about Mrs. Veynol?"
"You mean—"
"About her marriage."
"Her marriage? Surely—"
"Yes. She's married for the third time. Now it's a journalist, a sub-editor on one of the cheap and nasty society weeklies. Fancy!"
"Ah, that cleared the way, then. Caryll would never have gone back otherwise."
"You think that?"
"I know it. He told me as much."
"You mean you saw him—saw him the week he was here?"
Nina colored faintly. She had not meant to tell.
"Yes," she answered. "He came to me at Bath. He wanted me to save him. He couldn't quite decide between the pair of them, so he wished to compromise on me."
Lady Bellingdown nearly boiled over.
"He's a most ungrateful boy," she cried. "He must have known how anxious we all were about you, and he never sent me a line. Only a wire that he had returned to Nice and Rosamond."
"If he—" Nina began, and finished with: "He might have said Rosamond and Nice. Don't you think so? It's straws, you know—"
After dinner that evening Nina got the duke alone in a corner.
"Tell me more about Hal Kneedrock," she begged, taking the clawlike ducal hand in both her own. "Is there anything really wrong, do you think?"
His grace, out of ear-shot of the duchess, didn't mince matters. "Mad as a hatter," he said earnestly. "Brain gone all to pieces over something. No doubt about it. Poor old Nibbetts!"
"But how? What has he done except haunt the tiger-house?"
"Nothing. But the way he haunts it. There all day, you know, from opening to close, every day of the week."
"That's an odd mania. Can't anything be done? Has any one talked with him?"
"Yes," answered the duke. "His man. Bellingdown and I saw his man and told him what was up. We asked him to keep his master in sight and see that no harm came to him. Just that. But the beggar exceeded his instructions. He let Kneedrock see him and then he tried to argue him out of his habit."
"And what did Hal say?"
"He didn't say; he acted. He beat the poor fellow up most fearfully. Went into a towering rage, in fact."
"And now nobody'll speak to him about it, I suppose," cried Nina indignantly. "You men are such cowards."
"No, no, no," the duke protested. "It isn't that, my child. It isn't really. But, you see, it's a most delicate matter. He probably has some reason for going there that in his own mind seems perfectly right and proper."
"Then, after all, why interfere?"
"Because he's attracting attention. Or was. Of course, he's not now. He's in Dundee, you know."
"Yes. I've heard that. When he comes back perhaps he won't go to the tiger-house any more."
His grace adjusted his monocle and carefully examined his three massive rings of yellow gold, handsomely set with jewels.
"If he does there'll be trouble," he said quietly.
"But if he's not creating a disturbance?"
"Ah, but he is. That's just it. He collects a crowd."
"How?"
The duke hesitated. "I suppose it's this that Kitty was afraid I'd tell you. You've been through a lot of nervous strain, with the fire and things, and she wanted to save you. I can see it."
Nina naturally was doubly interested. "You've gone too far now to turn back," she said. "You must tell me the rest. I have a right to know all."
"Well, it's this way"—the duke dropped his glass and turned to her, his voice very low—"it's just one cage that he's apenchantfor. He stands before it, or paces up and down before it continuously." Then he paused.
Nina was growing annoyed. "What of it?" she asked.
"You know that story he's always telling you—that you're a reincarnated tigress. Well, this is the cage of a tigress."
"I think you are all very silly," she declared. "Fancy connecting the two facts! He's probably doing it on a wager—or been doing it." But she was disturbed, nevertheless.
"The tigress is a very handsome beast," continued the duke, "and—you may as well have the worst of it—he talks to her. He mumbles under his breath. Sometimes it's a tone that is most adoring, and again he berates her scandalously. And, Nina, you'd never imagine it, but it's quite true—the creature seems to understand."
Then she laughed nervously. "No," she said. "I won't believe that. It's too silly for words. I'm surprised at you, Pucketts, taking such a thing seriously. Nibbetts has been playing a joke on you. And your imagination has done the rest. I never heard such ridiculous folderol in all my life."
She stood up and started to move away, but the duke was by her side.
"There's one thing he says that is quite plain," he continued. "I heard it and Bellingdown heard it. We were there beside him, and he didn't so much as see us. He was blind to everything except that great, lithe, purring she-cat."
Nina turned to him. In spite of her little speech of repudiation she was all a-quiver from head to feet. "What was it?" she asked.
"He was calling the beast Nina."
After three nervously anxious days Nina Darling journeyed back to London and reopened her flat at Mayfair—a very different Nina indeed from the frolicsome Nina who went to Puddlewood to display her restored beauty.
The duke's story concerning Kneedrock had distressed her woefully. As a girl, in spite of her high-spirited independence and honey-bee proclivity of sipping sweets where she found them, she had loved him deeply, and since his return from self-banishment—since the one great tragedy of her life at Umballa—she had found in him her sole rock of dependence. Stubborn—cruel often at times as he was—she nevertheless felt and knew that while he reprobated and deplored her seeming lightness of character, yet deep in his soul he still held her very dear.
From what she had learned—but which she still hoped to prove grossly exaggerated—she was now more than ever convinced that this was true.
How profoundly he had been stirred and hurt by her wilful follies this awful climax—oh, it couldn't, it must not be true—demonstrated as nothing else, either word or action, could possibly have done.
Selfishly, for her own passing pleasure, she had driven men to intemperance, to exile, to self-destruction even; and now, as a fitting culmination inlex talionis—the one strong man of all, the king, the god she worshiped, had succumbed, they told her, in more awful plight than any of the others.
In her extremity Nina wired to Bath, bidding Gerald Andrews come to her at once. Then she sat down and waited.
He came by the first train, yet the intervening time seemed endless. And he found her pale and haggard, with purple crescents beneath dull, tired eyes; for in twenty-four hours she had neither eaten nor slept. It was nine o'clock at night, and the rain, driven by an east wind, was beating against the windows like an avalanche.
"Gerald," she greeted, giving him the tips of cold fingers, "you are so good. I need you terribly."
"You are ill," he said at once. "What have you been doing?"
She told him briefly what she had heard.
"It is the uncertainty," she added. "It's killing me. If I could only be sure—one way or the other—I—" Her voice quavered.
"Have you dined?" he interrupted.
"No; I'm not hungry. I haven't thought of eating."
"But you must," he urged. "You must keep up your strength. Unless you do I shall refuse to help you."
"I've no appetite," she said. "I hunger only for facts—for the truth."
"Then you must prepare for it. It may be too strong for an empty stomach."
But this only alarmed her. "You know?" she cried hysterically. "You know something already?"
"Nothing," he answered—"nothing at all. Only—well, the fact is, I haven't dined, either. I came straight here from the station. Could you—"
"You poor boy!" she broke in. "Of course. Please touch the bell. There; behind you."
"Won't you come out with me?"
"No; I couldn't; besides, listen to the rain, and—and I'm not dressed, you see."
"You don't want me to go alone?"
"Oh, no, no, no," she protested. "I have so much to say—"
"Very well. I'll stop, and I'll eat; but on one condition. You must eat, too."
"I can't," she insisted. "I can't, really. I'd choke."
"Try it," he insisted, in turn. "If you choke I'll let you off."
There was consommé, and there were chops—done to a turn—and a cobwebbed bottle of Pommard. Of the wine Andrews forced her to sip the better part of a glass, and was rewarded by a faint show of color in her lips and cheeks.
It stimulated her appetite, too, and she managed to swallow a few spoonfuls of the soup and a little lean, red meat of a chop. After which he called her a brave girl and assured her that there was nothing he wouldn't do for her in return.
"I want you, the very first thing in the morning, to go to Regent's Park," she said. "I want you to go where the tigers are, and to ask questions of the guards. They can can tell you whether it is true that a gentleman has been there recently, acting strangely."
"I'll be there when the gates open," returned Gerald. "What else?"
"If you find it is true—which I hope to Heaven you don't—I want you to go to Lord Kneedrock's solicitor and learn what he knows about it. You may tell him you came from me, and that I desire some steps taken."
He looked at her questioningly. He couldn't understand her right to make such a demand, but he said nothing, except:
"Who is Lord Kneedrock's solicitor?"
"A combined mummy and sphinx," she answered. "His name is Widdicombe, and he has chambers in the Inner Temple. Your real task will be to get him to open his mouth. He's a living storehouse of secrets."
"Won't your name open it?"
"The name of his majesty wouldn't open it unless he felt it to be for his client's interest. I'm afraid you'll find him a very hard nut to crack, Gerald."
"If I fail, it won't be for lack of effort," he declared determinedly.
Then she smiled at him in the old way for the first time since he came.
"How are the sheep and the ewe lambs?" she asked, with a faint sign of mischief.
He smiled in return, pleased to note the change in her, even if it were but momentary.
"Safe in fold to-night, I hope," he answered, as a gust of wind blew the rain in vicious volleys against the panes.
"Tell me," she said presently. "How did Lord Kneedrock look the day you saw him at Bath?"
"Vexed," he answered. "Beastly angry, in fact."
"I'm sure he did. It was unkind of me not to see him, and to make an exception of you."
"That's altogether a matter of viewpoint. I think it was most kind."
"Of course you do. Men are all selfish animals."
"I thinkthatis unkind," he said reprovingly. "I'm not selfish where your happiness is concerned. I'd go to the ends of the earth to serve you, Nina."
"With another man left behind?"
"Yes. Even with another man left behind."
"That's what Kneedrock did," she told him. "And—and I can never forget it."
"And he can never forgive it," Andrews added.
Then he went away, and Nina passed another sleepless night.
But he was back the next day by noon, to find her sitting in the same chair, with Tara lying at her feet, and the rain still beating its dismal tattoo on the window-panes. The room was in dusk.
She saw in his face that what she had feared, yet hoped against, he had brought her. She needed no word to confirm the dire thing told her by the duke. Poor Andrews seemed weighed down by the burden of his tidings. His expression was as grim and dour as the day.
"But do they know who he is?" It was her first question, and it relieved him of the bald announcement he had dreaded.
"They don't," he answered quickly, glad to get the first plunge over. "They haven't the faintest notion, apparently. I asked particularly."
"Poor Nibbetts," Nina sighed. "He doesn't look the typical nobleman. Yet when he was a young man there wasn't a smarter in all London."
"That South Sea life took it out of him, I suppose."
"And the butchering the Boers gave him."
"I wonder if his present fix can't be traced back to that?" suggested her friend, leaning down and patting the staghound's head. "There's such a thing as traumatic insanity, you know."
She seemed to seize on this alternative possibility with eagerness.
"He has never been the same since he came back," she said. "That is certain. He was quite, quite different before he went to South Africa."
Then a question occurred to her, and she asked: "Has he shown any violence?"
"Not at the gardens. But they had heard of an assault he made outside the gates."
"Yes, I know. He attacked his valet for following him and daring to interfere."
"He has been very quiet in the tiger-house—except for that mumbling talk of his to the tigress. But that attracts attention—collects a crowd, you know—and they have to ask him to move on."
"And does he?"
"Oh, yes! Very peaceably. But he's back again in a little while, and then the same thing has to be repeated."
"Poor Hal!" sighed Nina, her locked hands tightly gripped.
"They hope he has gone away to stay, one of the guards told me. Ever since the row outside, they fear he may indulge in some outbreak in the grounds. There is talk of refusing him admission."
"If they only would," she said. And then, abruptly: "But you haven't told me of Mr. Widdicombe. Did you see him?"
Gerald smiled. "Yes, oh yes," he answered. "I saw him. But you were right. He wouldn't talk. He wouldn't open his mouth."
"He just sat dumb?"
"He turned to his desk and touched a bell. A clerk came and—that was all."
"You told him thatIwished to know?" There was something imperious in her emphasis.
"I did—yes." And again he questioned why that should bear any weight. Although he did not voice it, she read it in his look.
"I'm his near kin, you know," she explained. "We are cousins."
"I understand," he told her, but he thought the explanation far short of adequate.
She got up and crossed the room, and from a drawer in an escritoire took out a small photograph, which she passed to Andrews.
"That was taken in 1900," she said.
It was easy to recognize her in the slender, tallish girl, with masses of fair hair, and clad in the simplest of white frocks. But he would never have known the slim young man with the waxed mustache for Lord Kneedrock, had she not told him. He wore outing flannels and a blazer of wide stripes, and his arm was about her youthful shoulders.
"It was taken at Henley," she said, "just for a lark. Look at the back."
He turned it over and found written there in pencil: "'Arry and his 'Arriet," in a man's hand.
"Hal used always to call me Harriet," she explained, and in spite of her, her voice shook.
He looked at her sharply as he handed it back, remembering just then a certain night in Simla when she told him that she had met her match and her mate in one.
"Does Widdicombe know about this?" he asked.
"I very much doubt that there is anything in Lord Kneedrock's life which Mr. Widdicombe doesn't know," was her answer.
She returned to her chair, but Gerald Andrews remained standing. "Is there anything else I can do?" he inquired. "If not, I'll—"
"You can stay for luncheon," she interrupted.
He thanked her, but declined.
"I've a little business to look after while I'm up," he added, "and I should be back in Bath to-night."
"You've been so good," she said, giving him her hand. "I shall miss you awfully. You'll be up again soon, won't you, Gerald?"
The door-bell echoed, and at the same instant Tara lifted his head and growled. Neither seemed to notice.
The man drew her closer and placed his disengaged hand on her shoulder.
"I'd give the world, Nina," he said, "to make this thing lighter for you. If I could only help in some real way!"
"You do; you do," she assured him. "Your sympathy is everything to me."
There was a step in the passage, but neither heard it. For it was at that moment that he caught her almost roughly in his arms and crushed her close to him.
And then the door opened, and Kneedrock was gazing at them from the threshold.