The Guinea Stamp Part 39

I have so often wished to see you here. Come away, come away!'

The accepted lover, at that moment being whirled back by express train to Glasgow, would not have approved of those warm words, nor of the light s.h.i.+ning all over the girl's sweet face as she uttered them. But he would have been compelled to admit that in Gladys's old companion of the slums he had no mean rival. The St. Vincent Street tailor had done his duty by his eccentric customer, and not only given him value for his money, but converted him, so far as outward appearance goes, into a new man. Philosophers and cynics have from time to time had their fling at the tyranny of clothes, but it still remains an undisputed fact that a well-dressed man is always much more comfortable and self-respecting than an ill-dressed one. When Walter Hepburn beheld the new man the tailor had turned out, a strange change came over him, and he saw in himself possibilities. .h.i.therto undreamed of. He realised for the first time that he looked fitter than most men to win a woman's approval, and I am quite safe in saying that Gladys owed this totally unlooked-for visit entirely to the St. Vincent Street tailor.

'So very glad to see you,' she repeated, and she thought it no treachery to her absent lover to keep hold of the hand she had taken in greeting.

'And looking so nice and so handsome! Oh, Walter, now I am no longer unhappy about you, for I see you have awakened at last to a sense of what you ought to be.'

It was a tribute to clothes, but it sank with unalloyed sweetness into the young man's heart.

'You are very kind to me, Gladys, and I do not deserve any such welcome.

I was afraid, indeed, that you might refuse to see me, as you would be perfectly justified in doing.'

'Oh, Walter,' she said reproachfully, 'how dare you say such a thing?

Refuse to see you, indeed! Do sit down and tell me everything. Do you know, it is just my dinner hour, and you shall dine with me; and how delightful that will be. I thought of sending down to say I didn't wish any dinner, it is so lonely eating alone.'

'Where is the lady who lives with you? You had a lady, hadn't you?'

'Yes--Miss Peck. She has gone back to Lincoln to see her aunt who is dying, and I am quite alone, though to-morrow I expect one of Mr.

Fordyce's daughters. And now, tell me, have you heard anything of Liz?'

The voice sank to a grave whisper, and her eyes grew luminous with anxiety and sympathetic concern.

'Nothing,' Walter answered, with a shake of his head, 'and I have been inquiring all round, too. My father and mother have never seen or heard anything of her. I think you must have made a mistake that night in Berkeley Street.'

'If it was not Liz, it was her ghost,' said Gladys quite gravely. 'I cannot understand it. But, come, let us go down-stairs. You ought to offer me your arm, Walter. I cannot help laughing when I think of Mrs.

Fordyce, she would be so horrified were she to see me now. She tries so hard to make me quite conventional, and she isn't able to do it.'

'She may be right, though,' said Walter, and though he would have given worlds for the privilege, he dared not presume to take Gladys at her word and offer her his arm. But they went into the dining-room side by side; and at the table, Gladys, though watching keenly, detected very little of the old awkwardness, none at all of that blunt rudeness of speech and manner which had often vexed her sensitive soul. For the first time for many many months Walter permitted himself to be at ease and perfectly natural in his manner, and the result was entirely satisfactory; self-consciousness is fatal to comfort always. Gladys wore a black gown of some s.h.i.+mmering soft material, with a quaint frill of old lace falling over the low collar, a bunch of spring snowdrops at her belt, and her lovely hair bound with the black velvet band which none could wear just in the same way--a very simple, unostentatious home toilet, but she looked, Walter thought, like a queen. Possessed of a wonderful tact, Gladys managed, while the meal progressed, to confine the conversation to commonplace topics, so that the servant who attended should not be furnished with food for remark. Both were glad, however, to return to the drawing-room, where their talk could be quite unrestrained.

'And now you are going to tell me everything about this wonderful metamorphosis,' she said merrily,--'every solitary thing. When did it dawn upon you that even a handsome man is utterly dependent on his tailor?'

There was at once rebuke and approval conveyed in this whimsical speech, which made Walter's face slightly flush.

'It dawned upon me one day, looking in at a shop window where I could see myself, that I was a most disreputable-looking object, quite eligible to be apprehended as an able-bodied vagrant.'

'How delightful! I hope the shock was very bad, because you deserved it.

Now that you have come back clothed and in your right mind, I am not going to spare you, Walter, and I will say that after my last visit to Colquhoun Street I quite lost hope. It is always the darkest hour before the dawn, somebody has said.'

'If I'd thought you cared'--Walter began, but stopped suddenly; for Gladys turned from the table, where she was giving her attention to some drooping flowers, and her look was one of the keenest wonder and reproach.

'Now you are weak, Walter, trying to bring your delinquencies home to me,' she said, with the first touch of sharpness he had ever seen in her. 'It has been your own fault entirely all along, and I have never had a solitary bit of sympathy for you, and I don't know, either, what you meant by going on in any such manner.'

'I didn't understand it myself then; I seemed goaded on always to be a perfect brute when you came. But I believe I understand it now, and perhaps it would be better if I did not.'

He spoke with considerable agitation, which Gladys affected not to notice, while her white fingers touched the drooping blossoms tenderly, as if sympathising with them that their little day was over.

'Suppose you enlighten me, then?' she said, gaily still; then suddenly seeing his face, her own became very white.

'I don't dare,' he said hoa.r.s.ely, 'it is too much presumption; but it will perhaps make you understand and feel for me more than you seem to do. Don't you see, Gladys, that it is my misery to care for you as happier men care for the woman they ask to marry them?'

There was a moment's strained silence, then Gladys spoke in a low, sobbing voice,--

'It is, as I said, Walter, too late, too late! I have promised to marry another man.'

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.

All the eagerness died out of Walter's face, and he turned away immediately as if to leave the room. But Gladys prevented him; her face still red with the hot flush his pa.s.sionate words had called up, she stood before him, and laid her hand upon his arm.

'You will not go away now, Walter, just when I hope we are beginning to understand each other. Do sit down for a little. There is a great deal left to us,--we can still be friends,--yes, a great deal.'

'It will be better for me to go away,' he said, not bitterly nor resentfully, but with a quiet manliness which made the heart of Gladys glow with pride in him, though it was sore with another feeling she did not quite understand.

'By and by, but not yet,' she said coaxingly. 'Besides, you cannot get a train just now, even if you were at the station this moment. You shall be driven into Mauchline in time for the nine-fifteen, and that is an hour hence. I cannot let you go now, Walter, for I do not know when I shall see you again.'

She spoke with all the frank, child-like simplicity of the old time, and he turned back meekly and took his seat again, though it seemed for the moment as if all brightness and energy had gone out of him. Her hands trembled very much as they resumed their delicate task among the flowers, and her sweet mouth quivered too, though she tried to speak bravely and brightly as before.

'Do tell me, Walter, what you are thinking of doing now that your business has become so prosperous. Don't you think you have lived quite long enough in that dingy Colquhoun Street?'

'Perhaps so. I had thoughts of leaving it, but it is a great thing for a man to be on the premises. Your uncle would not have approved of my leaving the place so soon. Colquhoun Street was good enough for him all his days,' said Walter, striving to speak naturally, and only partially succeeding.

'Ah, yes, poor man; but just think how much he denied himself to give me all this,' she said, with a glance round the beautiful room. 'How much happier he and I would have been with something a little lower than this, and a little higher than Colquhoun Street. It often makes me sad to think of the poverty of his life and the luxury of mine.'

'But you were made for luxurious living,' was Walter's quick reply. 'You never looked at home in the old place. This suits you down to the ground.'

'Do you think so?' Gladys gave a little melancholy smile. 'Yet so contradictory are we, that sometimes I am not at all happy nor contented here, Walter.'

'You ought to be very happy,' he replied a trifle sharply. 'You have everything a woman needs to make her happy.'

'Perhaps so, and yet'--

She paused, and hummed a little sc.r.a.p of song which Walter did not catch.

'I am becoming quite an accomplished violinist, Walter,' she said presently. 'I have two lessons every week; once Herr Doller comes down, and once I go up. Would you like to hear me play, or shall we talk?'

'I don't know. It would really be better for me to go away. I can walk to the station; the walk will do me good.'

'I will not allow you to walk nor go away, Walter, even if you are as cross as two sticks; and I must say I feel rather cross myself.'

They were playing with edged tools, and Gladys was keenly conscious of it. Her pulses were throbbing, her heart beating as it had never beat in the presence of the man to whom she had plighted her troth that very day. A very little more, and she must have given way to hysterical sobbing, she felt so overwrought; and yet all the while she kept on her lips that gay little smile, and spoke as if it were the most natural thing in the world that they should be together. But when Walter remained silent, she came forward to the hearth quickly, and, forgetting that what was fitting in the old days was not permissible in the new, she slipped on one knee on the rug, and suddenly, laying her head down on his knee, began to cry.

'Gladys, get up! For G.o.d's sake, get up, or I can't hold my tongue. This is fearful!'