April's Lady Part 40

"You said it was too late," replies he. "And I--agreed with you."

"That was not it!" says she feverishly. "There was more--much more! Tell me"--pa.s.sionately--"what you meant. Why would you not touch me? What am I to understand----"

"That from henceforth you are free from the persecution of my love,"

says Dysart deliberately. "I was mad ever to hope that you could care for me--still--I did hope. That has been my undoing. But now----"

"Well?" demands she faintly. Her whole being seems stunned. Something of all this she had antic.i.p.ated, but the reality is far worse than any antic.i.p.ation had been. She had seen him in her thoughts, angry, indignant, miserable, but that he should thus coldly set her aside--bid her an everlasting adieu--be able to make up his mind deliberately to forget her--this--had never occurred to her as being even probable.

"Now you are to understand that the idiotic farce played between us two the day before yesterday is at an end? The curtain is down. It is over.

It was a failure--neither you, nor I, nor the public will ever hear of it again."

"Is this--because I did not come home last evening in the rain and storm?" Some small spark of courage has come back to her now. She lifts her head and looks at him.

"Oh! be honest with me here, in our last hour together," cries he vehemently. "You have cheated me all through--be true to yourself for once. Why pretend it is my fault that we part? Yesterday I implored you not to go for that drive with him, and yet--you went. What was I--or my love for you in comparison with a few hours' drive with that lying scoundrel?"

"It was only the drive I thought of," says she piteously. "I--there was nothing else, indeed. And you; if"--raising her hand to her throat as if suffocating--"if you had not spoken so roughly--so----"

"Pshaw!" says Dysart, turning from her as if disgusted. To him, in his present furious mood, her grief, her fear, her shrinkings, are all so many movements in the game of coquette, at which she is a past mistress.

"Will you think me a fool to the end?" says he. "See here," turning his angry eyes to hers. "I don't care what you say, I know you now. Too late, indeed--but still I know you! To the very core of your heart you are one ma.s.s of deceit."

A little spasm crosses her face. She leans back heavily against the table behind her. "Oh, no, no," she says in a voice so low as to be almost unheard.

"You will deny, of course," says he mercilessly. "You would even have me believe that you regret the past--but you, and such as you never regret.

Man is your prey! So many scalps to your belt is all you think about.

Why," with an accent of pa.s.sion, "what am I to you? Just the filling up of so many hours' amus.e.m.e.nt--no more! Do you think all my eloquence would have any chance against one of his cursed words? I might kneel at your feet from morning until night, and still I should be to you a thing of naught in comparison with him."

She holds out her hands to him in a little dumb fas.h.i.+on. Her tongue seems frozen. But he repulses this last attempt at reconciliation.

"It is no good. None! I have no belief in you left, so you can no longer cajole me. I know that I am nothing to you. Nothing! If," drawing a deep breath through his closed teeth, "if a thousand years were to go by I should still be nothing to you if he were near. I give it up. The battle was too strong for me. I am defeated, lost, ruined."

"You have so arranged it," says she in a low tone, singularly clear. The violence of his agitation had subdued hers, and rendered her comparatively calm.

"You must permit me to contradict you. The arrangement is all your own."

"Was it so great a crime to stay last night at Falling?" "There is no crime anywhere. That you should have made a decision between two men is not a crime."

"No! I acknowledge I made a decision--but----"

"When did you make it?"

"Last evening--and though you----"

"Oh! no excuses," says he with a frown. "Do you think I desire them?"

He hesitates for a minute or so, and now turns to her abruptly. "Are you engaged to him finally?"

"No."

"No!" In accents suggestive of surprise so intense as to almost enlarge into disbelief. "You refused him then?"

"No," says she again. Her heart seems to die within her. Oh, the sense of shame that overpowers her. A sudden wild, terrible hatred of Beauclerk takes her into possession. Why, why, had he not given her the choice of saying yes, instead of no, to that last searching question?

"You mean--that he----" He stops dead short as if not knowing how to proceed. Then, suddenly, his wrath breaks forth. "And for that scoundrel, that fellow without a heart, you have sacrificed the best of you--your own heart! For him, whose word is as light as his oath, you have flung behind you a love that would have surrounded you to your dying day. Good heavens! What are women made of? But----" He sobers himself at once, as if smitten by some sharp remembrance, and, pale with shame and remorse, looks at her. "Of course," says he, "it is only one heartbroken, as I am, who would have dared thus to address you. And it is plain to me now that there are reasons why he should not have spoken before this. For one thing, you were alone with him; for another, you are tired, exhausted. No doubt to-morrow he----"

"How dare you?" says she in a voice that startles him, a very low voice, but vibrating with outraged pride. "How dare you thus insult me? You seem to think--to think--that because--last night--he and I were kept from our home by the storm----" She pauses; that old, first odd sensation of choking now again oppresses her. She lays her hand upon the back of a chair near her, and presses heavily upon it. "You think I have disgraced myself," says she, the words coming in a little gasp from her parched lips. "That is why you speak of things being at an end between us. Oh----"

"You wrong me there," says the young man, who has grown ghastly.

"Whatever I may have said, I----"

"You meant it!" says she. She draws herself up to the full height of her young, slender figure, and, turning abruptly, moves toward the door. As she reaches it, she looks back at him. "You are a coward!" she says, in a low, distinct tone alive with scorn. "A coward!"

CHAPTER XXVIII.

"I have seen the desire of mine eyes, The beginning of love, The season of kisses and sighs, And the end thereof."

Miss Kavanagh put in no appearance at dinner. "A chill," whispered Lady Baltimore to everybody, in her kindly, sympathetic way, caught during that miserable drive yesterday. She hoped it would be nothing, but thought it better to induce Joyce to remain quiet in her own room for the rest of the evening, safe from draughts and the dangers attendant on the baring of her neck and arms. She told her small story beautifully, but omitted to add that Joyce had refused to come downstairs, and that she had seemed so wretchedly low-spirited that at last her hostess had ceased to urge her.

She had, however, spent a good deal of time arguing with her on another subject--the girl's fixed determination to go home--"to go back to Barbara"--next day. Lady Baltimore had striven very diligently to turn her from this purpose, but all to no avail. She had even gone so far as to point out to Joyce that the fact of her thus leaving the Court before the expiration of her visit might suggest itself to some people in a very unpleasant light. They might say she had come to the end of her welcome there--been given her conge, in fact--on account of that luckless adventure with her hostess' brother.

Joyce was deaf to all such open hints. She remained obstinately determined not to stay a moment longer there than could be helped. Was it because of Norman she was going? No; she shook her head with such a look of contemptuous indifference that Lady Baltimore found it impossible to doubt her, and felt her heart thereby lightened. Was it Felix?

Miss Kavanagh had evidently resented that question at first, but finally had broken into a pa.s.sionate fit of tears, and when Lady Baltimore placed her arms round her had not repulsed her.

"But, dear Joyce, he himself is leaving to-morrow."

"Oh, let me go home. Do not ask me to stay. I am more unhappy than I can tell you," said the girl brokenly.

"You have had a quarrel with him?"

Joyce bowed her head in a little quick, impatient way.

"It is Felix then, Joyce; not Norman? Let me say I am glad--for your sake; though that is a hard thing for a sister to say of her brother.

But Norman is selfish. It is his worst fault, perhaps, but a bad one. As for this little misunderstanding with Felix, it will not last. He loves you, dearest, most honestly. You will make up this tiny----"

"Never!" said Joyce, interrupting her and releasing herself from her embrace. Her young face looked hard and unforgiving, and Lady Baltimore, with a sigh, decided on saying no more just then. So she went downstairs and told her little tale about Joyce's indisposition, and was believed by n.o.body. They all said they were sorry, as in duty bound, and perhaps they were, taking their own view of her absence; but dinner went off extremely well, nevertheless, and was considered quite a success.

Dysart was present, and was apparently in very high spirits; so high, indeed, that at odd moments his hostess, knowing a good deal, stared at him. He, who was usually so silent a member, to-night outshone even the versatile Beauclerk in the lightness and persistency of his conversation.

This sudden burst of animation lasted him throughout the evening, carrying him triumphantly across the hour and a half of drawing-room small talk, and even lasting till the more careless hours in the smoking-room have come to an end, and one by one the men have yawned themselves off to bed.

Then it died. So entirely, so forlornly as to prove it had been only a mere pa.s.sing and enforced exhilaration after all. They were all gone: there was no need now to keep up the miserable farce--to seek to prevent their coupling her name with his, and therefore discovering the secret of her sad seclusion.

As Dysart found himself almost the last man in the room, he too rose, reluctantly, as though unwilling to give himself up to the solitary musings that he knew lay before him; the self-upbraidings, the vague remorse, the terrible dread lest he had been too severe, that he knows will be his all through the silent darkness. For what have sleep and he to do with each other to-night?