Christina Part 2

"Well, sir, I should gather they were all for you," Courtfield answered respectfully, whilst his master gathered the packet of envelopes into his two hands. "I thought myself at first that there must be some mistake, seeing that they are only addressed in initials. But the number is correct, sir."

"By Jove!" Mernside exclaimed, gazing with stupefied eyes at the unprecedented batch of correspondence, and observing that every letter bore the initials only, "R.M.," and had been forwarded to him from a newspaper office.

Courtfield noiselessly left the room, but his master's coffee remained in the pot, and his breakfast untasted, whilst he sat and stared with a petrified stare at the pile of unopened letters, with their extraordinarily unfamiliar address. A dusky flush mounted to his forehead, and he turned over one of the letters distastefully, as though its very touch were odious to him.

"I am not in the habit of being addressed by initials only," he muttered, "nor of corresponding through newspapers; the wretched things are probably not meant for me at all--unless it's some confounded hoax," he added, after a pause, at the same moment tearing open the top letter of the pile, one addressed in an untidy, uneducated handwriting.

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed, pus.h.i.+ng back his chair, and staring down at the letter he unfolded, with the disgusted stare of one who sees something unexpectedly horrible, "is the woman mad? or am I mad?--or--what does it mean?"

His eyes travelled quickly down the written page, the large, sprawling writing imprinting itself upon his brain.

"DEAR SIR" (so the epistle ran),--

"Having seen your advertis.e.m.e.nt in yesterday's _Sunday Recorder_, I beg to say that I should be pleased to enter into correspondence with you--with a view to meeting, etc. Am twenty-one, tall, and said to be elegant. Some call me pretty. Have large blue eyes, fair hair, and a good complexion. Am domesticated and sweet-tempered. Would send photograph if desired.

"Yours truly, ROSALIE."

"PS.--Should be pleased to cheer your loneliness."

Mernside read this effusion to the end; then one word only, and that a forcible one, broke from his lips, and with grimly-set mouth, and eyes grown suddenly steely, he began to open and read one after another of the other letters, his expression becoming sterner and more grim as he laid each one down in turn.

"My opinion of women is not enhanced by my morning's correspondence,"

he reflected cynically, during the course of his reading; "could one have believed there were so many silly women in the world--or so many plain ones?" and with a short laugh he picked up two photographs, and looked with scornful scrutiny at the wholly unattractive features of the ladies of uncertain age, and quite certain lack of beauty. Before he had waded half through the packet of letters, his table was strewn with his correspondence, and the look on his face was one, which, as his best friends would have known, indicated no amiable frame of mind.

"Domesticated." "Would make a lonely man intensely happy." "Only long for a quiet home such as you suggest."

"Such as I suggest--_I_!" Mernside looked wildly round him. "Do I appear to be in search of a quiet home?" he exclaimed, apostrophising the pictures on the walls; "do I want a domesticated female? 'Am considered pretty'--oh, are you, my good young woman? You can't write a civilised letter, that's certain. 'I have a slender income of my own--amply sufficient for my modest wants--but I gather you do not require a fortune with the lady--only a companion for your loneliness.'

"A fortune with the lady? I don't require the lady, thank you," Rupert soliloquised, picking, out sentences from the letters as he read them, and flung them one by one upon the pile. "'I have been lonely for so _long_ myself, that I can _fully_ understand what a lonely man feels.

I am no longer in my first youth, but I have a heart _overflowing_ with tenderness. Your happiness would be my first, my only care, etc., etc.'

"Pshaw--what tommy rot!

"'All my friends say I am cheerful. I have often been called a little ray of suns.h.i.+ne'"--Rupert lay back in his chair, and shouted with sudden laughter. "'I would make your home a heaven of bliss.'"

"Oh! Good lord! Good lord!" quoth the unhappy reader, "who in heaven's name has played this confounded practical joke upon me? And what am I to do with these abominable letters and photographs? I should like to burn the lot!--but oh! hang it all, the silly women have taken some rotten hoax for earnest, and"--he paused, as though struck by a sudden recollection, then bounced out of his chair with a good round expletive.

"That young a.s.s, Jack Layton! I'll take my oath he was at the bottom of this tomfoolery. Wasn't he reading some matrimonial humbug out of--wait!--by Jove! it was the _Sunday Recorder_," and without more ado, Mernside strode across the room and rang the bell.

"Get me a copy of the _Sunday Recorder_ of the day before yesterday, at once," he said curtly, when Courtfield appeared. As soon as the man had vanished, he returned to the table, gathered up the letters he had read, and thrust them into the bureau near the fireplace; and by the time Courtfield came back with the paper in his hand, his master was decorously eating a poached egg, and deliberately opening the nineteenth or twentieth letter of his morning mail.

There was little deliberation in his movements when, alone once more, he feverishly turned the pages of the _Sunday Recorder_, until his eyes fell on the words, "Matrimonial Bureau." Yes--there it was. The wretched thing seemed to leap into sight as though it were alive, and to his disordered vision the lines appeared to be twice the size of the ordinary print.

"Quiet and cultivated gentleman of means, who is very lonely, is anxious to meet a young lady of good birth who needs a home. No fortune is necessary, but marriage may be agreed upon, if both parties are mutually satisfied."

"Oh! may it indeed?" Mernside said scathingly, flinging the paper upon the floor. "A young lady of good birth!" His thoughts went back to the letters he had just been perusing, most of them ill-written, many mis-spelt, some genteel, some sentimental--but all bearing the unmistakable stamp of having been penned by the underbred and the vulgar.

"A young lady of good birth." Again he reflected grimly, continuing to eat his breakfast, and to open letter after letter mechanically, expending over their contents a force of language which would greatly have surprised the writers, could they have heard it. "Not one of these good women has the most elementary conception what the word 'lady' means. No lady would be likely to answer such an advertis.e.m.e.nt," his thoughts continued contemptuously, as he picked up the last letter of the pile, and glanced idly at the writing of the address. That writing held his attention; it was different from the others; yes, it was certainly different. It did not sprawl; it was not exaggerated or affected; it was merely a round, simple, girlish hand, with unmistakable character in the well-formed letters and clean strokes. And when he had drawn out the contents of the envelope, and read them slowly, some of the grim lines about his mouth faded away, a softer look came into his eyes.

"This is different," he said, "very different," and for the second time he read the terse phrases.

"c/o Mrs. Cole, Newsagent, "100, Cartney Street, S.W.

"DEAR SIR,--

"I should not have answered your advertis.e.m.e.nt, but that I cannot find work. I need a home very much. If I could make things better for somebody else who is lonely, I should be very pleased. I am not at all pretty or clever, but I can cook a little, and I can sew.

"Yours truly, C.M.

"I am twenty."

"Poor little girl," Rupert murmured, "if this is genuine, I am sorry for C.M. She is the only one of the lot who writes like a lady, and the only one who does not suggest a meeting, or actually appoint a meeting place. Those are points in her favour. But, had I ever any intention of marrying, I should not make my matrimonial arrangements through the medium of a newspaper!"

Each writer of the letters which had so disturbed Mernside at breakfast time, received a few hours later a short note, and the wording of all the notes was identical.

"DEAR MADAM,--

"I regret that both you and I should have been the victims of a hoax.

The advertis.e.m.e.nt in the _Sunday Recorder_ was inserted without my knowledge or consent. Regretting any annoyance this may cause you.

"Yours faithfully, R.M."

But when, having laboured through the ma.s.s of "Rosalies," "Violets,"

"Lilians," and "Hildas," he finally reached the little note signed "C.M.," Mernside paused.

"I--don't think I can let this little girl know she has been the victim of a hoax," he mused, a pitiful tenderness creeping about his heart as he thought of the girl who was without work or home; "the others are fairly tough-skinned, I am ready to swear. This one"--he looked again at the round, characteristic handwriting, the simple phrases--"this one--did not make up her mind to write such a letter, excepting under stress of circ.u.mstances, I am sure of that. This one--is different.

And if that incorrigible young a.s.s, Jack Layton, hadn't started on a yachting cruise last week, I--should jolly well like to give him a thras.h.i.+ng."

Feeling the need, as he himself expressed it, of a balloon full of fresh air after his distasteful occupation of the morning, Rupert went out at about eleven o'clock, taking with him the pile of letters he had to post.

"Can't leave them for Courtfield's inquisitive eyes," he muttered.

"Good chap as he is, Courtfield would think I had gone raving mad, if he saw all these things addressed to Christian names and initials.

I'll get rid of the horrors, and then see if Margaret can take the taste of them away from me."

The letters posted, he made his way briskly along Piccadilly, and across the Park, to a quiet road in Bayswater, where he stopped before a small detached house, standing a little back from the pavement, in its own garden. His ring at the bell brought to the door a middle-aged servant, whose plain but kindly face expanded into a smile when she saw him. He was evidently a frequent and welcome visitor, for to his cheery "Well, Elizabeth, how are things this morning?" she answered with another smile--

"We've had a bad two days, sir, but Mrs. Stanforth is better now. She is downstairs, sir," and, opening a door on the right of the tiny hall, she ushered Rupert into a long narrow room, whose windows at either end gave it an unusual look of brightness and suns.h.i.+ne. A piano took up a large share of one wall, and over the piano hung some fine photographs of Old Masters, chiefly of the Italian school. The fireplace was flanked by bookshelves, and drawn close to one of these was a couch, on which lay a woman of such rare and startling beauty, that Mernside, familiar as her face was to him, caught his breath as he entered, and for a moment stood still, looking silently down at her.

Her cheeks were very white, but it was the whiteness of a pure white rose, and gave one no sense of ill-health, although there was about her a certain air of fragility. Her hair, soft and dark, waved back from her forehead in dusky ma.s.ses, that made just the right background for her exquisitely chiselled features, and for the eyes, that seemed to concentrate in themselves all the loveliness of her face. They were wonderful eyes--dark, deep, unfathomable--with a mystery in their depths that enhanced their strange fascination. Those dark eyes with their sweeping lashes, and the crimson line of her beautiful mouth, were the only points of colour in her face, and as she turned her head to greet the visitor, the gleam of light that shot into those eyes, might well have turned a stronger head than Rupert's. Meeting her glance, his pulses quickened, and his own eyes grew bright; but his voice was very quiet, very self-contained, as he said--