Robert Elsmere Part 78

Langham turned away from her towards the blaze, holding out his hands to it mechanically.

'The poor child,' he said, after a pause, in a lower voice, 'wandered about for some hours. It was a frightful night--the great capital was quite strange to her. She was insulted--fled this way and that--grew benumbed with cold and terror, and was found unconscious in the early morning under the archway of a house some two miles from her sister's lodgings.'

There was a dead silence. Then Rose drew a long quivering breath.

'I do not believe it!' she said pa.s.sionately. 'I cannot believe it!'

'It was amply proved at the time,' said Langham drily, 'though of course Madame Desforets tried to put her own colour on it. But I told you I had private information. On one of the floors of the house where Elise Romey was picked up, lived a young university professor. He is editing an important Greek text, and has lately had business at the Museum. I made friends with him there. He walked home with me this afternoon, saw the announcement of Madame Desforets's coming, and poured out the story. He and his wife nursed the unfortunate girl with devotion. She lived just a week, and died of inflammation of the lungs. I never in my life heard anything so pitiful as his description of her delirium, her terror, her appeals, her s.h.i.+vering misery of cold.'

There was a pause.

'She is not a woman,' he said presently, between his teeth. 'She is a wild beast.'

Still there was silence, and still he held out his hand to the flame which Rose too was staring at. At last he turned round.

'I have told you a shocking story,' he said hurriedly. 'Perhaps I ought not to have done it. But, as you sat there talking so lightly, so gaily, it suddenly became to me utterly intolerable that that woman should ever sit here in this room--talk to you--call you by your name--laugh with you--touch your hand! Not even your wilfulness shall carry you so far--you _shall_ not do it!'

He hardly knew what he said. He was driven on by a pa.s.sionate sense of physical repulsion to the notion of any contact between her pure fair youth and something malodorous and corrupt. And there was besides a wild unique excitement in claiming for once to stay--to control her.

Rose lifted her head slowly. The fire was bright. He saw the tears in her eyes, tears of intolerable pity for another girl's awful story. But through the tears something gleamed--a kind of exultation--the exultation which the magician feels when he has called spirits from the vasty deep, and after long doubt and difficult invocation they rise at last before his eyes.

'I will never see her again,' she said in a low wavering voice, but she too was hardly conscious of her own words. Their looks were on each other; the ruddy capricious light touched her glowing cheeks, her straight-lined grace, her white hand. Suddenly from the gulf of another's misery into which they had both been looking there had sprung up, by the strange contrariety of human things, a heat and intoxication of feeling, wrapping them round, blotting out the rest of the world from them like a golden mist. 'Be always thus!' her parted lips, her liquid eyes were saying to him. His breath seemed to fail him; he was lost in bewilderment.

There were sounds outside--Catherine's voice. He roused himself with a supreme effort.

'To-night--at Lady Charlotte's?'

'To-night,' she said, and held out her hand.

A sudden madness seized him--he stooped--his lips touched it--it was hastily drawn away, and the door opened.

CHAPTER x.x.xV

'In the first place, my dear aunt,' said Mr. Flaxman, throwing himself back in his chair in front of Lady Charlotte's drawing-room fire, 'you may spare your admonitions, because it is becoming more and more clear to me that, whatever my sentiments may be, Miss Leyburn never gives a serious thought to me.'

He turned to look at his companion over his shoulder. His tone and manner were perfectly gay, and Lady Charlotte was puzzled by him.

'Stuff and nonsense!' replied the lady with her usual emphasis; 'I never flatter you, Hugh, and I don't mean to begin now, but it would be mere folly not to recognise that you have advantages which must tell on the mind of any girl in Miss Leyburns position.'

Hugh Flaxman rose, and, standing before the fire with his hands in his pockets, made what seemed to be a close inspection of his irreproachable trouser-knees.

'I am sorry for your theory, Aunt Charlotte,' he said, still stooping, 'but Miss Leyburn doesn't care twopence about my advantages.'

'Very proper of you to say so,' returned Lady Charlotte sharply; 'the remark, however, my good sir, does more credit to your heart than your head.'

'In the next place,' he went on undisturbed, 'why you should have done your best this whole winter to throw Miss Leyburn and me together, if you meant in the end to oppose my marrying her, I don't quite see.'

He looked up smiling. Lady Charlotte reddened ever so slightly.

'You know my weaknesses,' she said presently, with an effrontery which delighted her nephew. 'She is my latest novelty, she excites me, I can't do without her. As to you, I can't remember that you wanted much encouragement, but, I acknowledge, after all these years of resistance--resistance to my most legitimate efforts to dispose of you--there was a certain piquancy in seeing you caught at last!'

'Upon my word!' he said, throwing back his head with a not very cordial laugh, in which, however, his aunt joined. She was sitting opposite to him, her powerful loosely-gloved hands crossed over the rich velvet of her dress, her fair large face and grayish hair surmounted by a mighty cap, as vigorous, shrewd, and individual a type of English middle age as could be found. The room behind her and the second and third drawing-rooms were brilliantly lighted. Mr. Wynnstay was enjoying a cigar in peace in the smoking-room, while his wife and nephew were awaiting the arrival of the evening's guests upstairs.

Lady Charlotte's mind had been evidently much perturbed by the conversation with her nephew of which we are merely describing the latter half. She was labouring under an uncomfortable sense of being hoist with her own petard--an uncomfortable memory of a certain warning of her husband's, delivered at Murewell.

'And now,' said Mr. Flaxman, 'having confessed in so many words that you have done your best to bring me up to the fence, will you kindly recapitulate the arguments why in your opinion I should not jump it?'

'Society, amus.e.m.e.nt, flirtation, are one thing,' she replied with judicial imperativeness, 'marriage is another. In these democratic days we must know everybody; we should only marry our equals.'

The instant, however, the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. Mr. Flaxman's expression changed.

'I do not agree with you,' he said calmly, 'and you know I do not. You could not, I imagine, have relied much upon _that_ argument.'

'Good gracious, Hugh!' cried Lady Charlotte crossly; 'you talk as if I were really the old campaigner some people suppose me to be. I have been amusing myself--I have liked to see you amused. And it is only the last few weeks since you have begun to devote yourself so tremendously, that I have come to take the thing seriously at all. I confess, if you like, that I have got you into the sc.r.a.pe--now I want to get you out of it! I am not thin-skinned, but I hate family unpleasantnesses--and you know what the duke will say.'

'The duke be--translated!' said Flaxman coolly. 'Nothing of what you have said or could say on this point, my dear aunt, has the smallest weight with me. But Providence has been kinder to you and the duke than you deserve. Miss Leyburn does not care for me, and she does care--or I am very much mistaken--for somebody else.'

He p.r.o.nounced the words deliberately, watching their effect upon her.

'What, that Oxford nonent.i.ty, Mr. Langham, the Elsmeres' friend?

Ridiculous! What attraction could a man of that type have for a girl of hers?'

'I am not bound to supply an answer to that question,' replied her nephew. 'However, he is not a nonent.i.ty. Far from it! Ten years ago, when I was leaving Cambridge, he was certainly one of the most distinguished of the young Oxford tutors.

'Another instance of what university reputation is worth!' said Lady Charlotte scornfully. It was clear that even in the case of a beauty whom she thought it beneath him to marry, she was not pleased to see her nephew ousted by the _force majeure_ of a rival--and that a rival whom she regarded as an utter n.o.body, having neither marketable eccentricity, nor family, nor social brilliance to recommend him.

Flaxman understood her perplexity and watched her with critical amused eyes.

'I should like to know,' he said presently, with a curious slowness and suavity, 'I should greatly like to know why you asked him here to-night?'

'You know perfectly well that I should ask anybody--a convict, a crossing-sweeper--if I happened to be half an hour in the same room with him!'

Flaxman laughed.

'Well, it may be convenient to-night,' he said reflectively. 'What are we to do--some thought-reading?'

'Yes. It isn't a crush. I have only asked about thirty or forty people.

Mr. Denman is to manage it.'

She mentioned an amateur thought-reader greatly in request at the moment.

Flaxman cogitated for a while and then propounded a little plan to his aunt, to which she, after some demur, agreed.

'I want to make a few notes,' he said drily, when it was arranged; 'I should be glad to satisfy myself.'