The Wicked Marquis Part 31

"Uncle," he begged, "let me know the worst now?"

"You'll know in good time and not before," was the almost fierce reply.

"Don't weary me to-night, lad," Vent continued, his voice breaking a little. "The day has been full of trials for me. 'Twas no light matter to have a strange woman here--the strange woman, David, that was once my daughter."

David frowned a little.

"Uncle," he said, "I don't wish to pain you, but I am sorry about Marcia."

"You don't need to be, lad. She isn't sorry for herself. She is puffed up with the vanity of her brain. She came here in fine clothes and with gentle manners, and a new sort of voice. She has made herself--a lady! Poor la.s.s, her day of suffering is to come! Maybe I was hard on her, but I couldn't bear the sight of her, and that's the truth. She talked to me like one filled with wisdom. It was me whom she thought the ignorant one. Put Marcia out of your mind, David. We will talk of other things."

David leaned forward in his chair. His eyes were bright, his tone eager.

"Let us have this out, uncle," he begged. "I've been thinking of it--perhaps as much as you lately. They may have been wrong, those two; they may be sinners, but, after all, the world isn't a place for holy people only. The Bible tells you that. For nearly twenty years he has stood by her and cared for her. There has been no meanness, no backing out on his part. He is as much to her to-day as ever he was."

"Ay," his listener interposed scornfully, "she talked that way. Do you reckon that a man and woman who sinned a score of years ago are any the better because they are going on sinning to-day? Faithfulness to good is part of the Word of G.o.d. Faithfulness in sin is of the Devil's handing out."

David shook his head.

"I am sorry, uncle," he said earnestly, "I have come to look on these things a little differently. Many years ago, in America, I used to wonder what it was that kept you apart from every one else, kept the smile from your lips, made you accept good fortune or ill without any sign of feeling. I was too young to understand then, but I realise everything now. I know how you denied yourself to send me to school and college. I know how you left yourself almost a beggar when you gave me the chance of my life and trusted me with all your savings.

These things I shall never forget."

"One word, lad," Vont interrupted. "It's the truth you say. I trusted you with well-nigh all I had that stood between me and starvation, but I trusted you with it on one condition. Do you mind that condition?

We sat outside the little shanty I'd built with my own hands, up in the Adirondacks there, and before us were the mountains and the woods and the silence. We were close to G.o.d up there, David. You remember?"

"I remember."

"You'd come hot-foot from the city, and you told me your story. I sat and listened, and then I told you mine. I told you of the shame that had driven me from England, and I told you of the thoughts that were simmering in my mind. As we sat there your wrath was as mine, and the oath which I had sworn, you swore, too. I lent you the money over that oath, boy. Look back, if you will. You remember the night? There was a hot wind--cool before it reached us, though--rus.h.i.+ng up from the earth, rus.h.i.+ng through the pine trees till they shook and bowed around us; and a moon, with the black clouds being driven across it, looking down; and the smell of the pines. You remember?"

"I remember," David repeated.

"We stood there hand in hand, and there was no one to hear us except those voices that come from G.o.d only knows where, and you swore on your soul that you would help me as soon as the time came to punish the man who had blasted my life. In my way you promised--not yours. There should be no will but mine. For this one thing I was master and you were slave, and you swore."

"I swore. I am not denying it," David acknowledged. "Haven't I made a start? Haven't I deceived the man at whose table I sat and laid a plot to ruin him? And I have ruined him! Do you want more than this?"

"Yes!" was the unshaken reply.

"Then what, in heaven's name, is it?" David demanded. "Out with it, for G.o.d's sake! I carry this whole thing about with me, like a weight upon my soul. Granted that you are master and I am slave. Well, I've done much. What is there left?"

"That you will be told in due season."

"And meantime," David continued pa.s.sionately, "I am to live in a sort of prison!"

"You've no need to find it such," the old man declared doggedly.

David sprang to his feet. The time had come for his appeal. The words seemed to rush to his lips. He was full of confidence and hope.

"Uncle," he began, "you must never let a single word that I may say seem to you ungrateful, but I beseech you to listen to me. Life is like a great city in which there are many thoroughfares. It is an immense, insoluble problem which no one can understand. You never open another book except your Bible. You have never willingly exchanged speech with any human being since you left here. In America you shunned all company, you lived in the gloomiest of solitudes. This little corner of the earth is all you know of. Perhaps there is more in life even than that Book can teach you."

"Marcia talked like this," Richard Vont said quietly. "She spoke of another world, a world for cleverer folk than I. Are you going to try and break my purpose, too?"

"I would if I could," David declared fervently. "This man is what his ancestors and his education have made him. He has led a simple, ignorant, and yet in some respects a decent life. He is too narrow to understand any one's point of view except his own. When he took Marcia away, she was the village girl and he the great n.o.bleman. To-day Marcia holds his future in her hands. She is the strong woman, and he is the weak man. She has achieved fame and made friends. She has lived a happy life, she is at the present moment perfectly content.

Every promise he made her he has kept. Well, why not let it go at that?"

"So you are another poor child who knows all about this wonderful world of which I am so ignorant," Richard Vont said bitterly. "Yet, my lad, I tell you that there's one great truth that none of you can get over, and that is that sin lives, and there is nothing in this world, save atonement, can wash it out."

"There's a newer doctrine than that, uncle," David insisted. "You talk with the voice of the black-frocked minister who dangles h.e.l.l in front of his congregation. There is something else can clear away sin, and the Book over which you pore, day by day, will teach it you, if you know where to look for it. There's love."

"Was it love, then, that brought him down through the darkness to dishonour my daughter?" Vont demanded, with blazing eyes.

"It didn't seem like it, but love must have been there," David answered. "Nothing but love could have kept these two people together all this time, each filling a great place in the other's life. I haven't thought of these things much, uncle, but I tell you frankly, I've read the Bible as well as you, and I don't believe in this black ogre of unforgivable sin. If these two started in wrong fas.h.i.+on, they've purified themselves. I hold that it's your duty now to leave them alone. I say that this vengeance you still hanker after is the eye for an eye and limb for a limb of the Old Testament. There has been a greater light in the world since then."

"Have you done?" Vont asked, without the slightest change in his tone or expression.

"I suppose so," David replied wearily. "I wish you'd think over it all, uncle. I know I'm right. I know there is justice in my point of view."

"I'll not argue with you, lad," his uncle declared. "I'll ask you no'but this one question, and before you answer it just go back in your mind to the night we stood outside my shack, when the wind was blowing up from the valleys. Are you going to stand by your pledged word or are you going to play me false?"

The great clock ticked drearily on. From outside came the clatter of teacups. David walked to the latticed window and came back again.

Richard Vont was seated in his high-backed chair, his hands grasping its sides. His mouth was as hard and tightly drawn as one of his own vermin traps, but his eyes, steadfastly fixed upon his nephew, were filled with an inscrutable pathos. David remembered that pa.s.sionate outburst of feeling on a far-distant night, when the tears had rolled down this man's cheeks and his voice was choked with sobs. And he remembered--

"I shall keep my word in every way," he promised solemnly.

Vont rose slowly to his feet. His knees were trembling. He seemed to be looking into a mist. His hands shook as he laid them on David's shoulders.

"Thank G.o.d!" he muttered. "David, boy, remember. This light talk is like an April shower on the warm earth. Goodness and sin are the same now as a thousand years ago, and they will be the same in a thousand years to come. We may pipe a new tune, but it's only the Devil's children that dance to it--sin must be punished. There's no getting over that! Forgiveness later maybe--but first comes punishment."

CHAPTER XXII

A queer atmosphere of depression seemed about this time to have affected the two inhabitants of Number 94 Grosvenor Square. The Marquis had suddenly become aware of an aimlessness in life which not even his new financial hopes enabled him to combat. The night of his weekly dinner at Trewly's he spent in the entertainment of three ancient whist companions, and it was not until they had gone and he was left alone in the silent house that he realised how empty and profitless the evening had been. Day by day, after lunch, he sent out the same message to his chauffeur--five o'clock for the club instead of three o'clock for Battersea, and on each occasion the words seemed to leave his lips with more reluctance. He walked each morning in the Park, as carefully dressed and as upright as ever, but one or two of his acquaintances noticed a certain difference. There was an increased pallor, a listlessness of gait, which seemed to bespeak an absent or a preoccupied mind. He even welcomed the coming, one morning just as he was starting for his promenade, of Mr. Wadham, Junior. Here at least was diversion.

Mr. Wadham, Junior, had been rehearsing his interview and his prospective deportment towards the Marquis on the way up, and he started the enterprise to his own entire satisfaction. He entered the library with an exceedingly serious air, and he took great pains to be sure that the door was closed after the retreating butler before he did more than respond to his distinguished client's greeting.

"Anything fresh, Wadham?" the latter enquired.

"I have ventured to see your lords.h.i.+p once more," Mr. Wadham began, "with reference to the scrip which we deposited at the bank to meet certain liabilities on your behalf."

"Well, what about it?" the Marquis asked good-humouredly. "You lawyers know nothing of the Stock Exchange."

Mr. Wadham a.s.sumed an expression of great gravity.

"Would your lords.h.i.+p," he begged, "for the satisfaction of my firm, the members of which I think you will admit have always been devoted to your lords.h.i.+p's interests, ring up the stockbroking firm of--say--Messrs. Youngs, Fielden and Company, or any other you like, with reference to the value of those shares?"

"I am, unfortunately," the Marquis replied, "not in a position to do so. The shares were sold me by a personal friend. I am content to believe that if they had not been of their face value, the transaction would not have been suggested to me."

"That," Mr. Wadham declared seriously, "is not business."