A House-Party Part 22

When he is fairly at rare intervals goaded into speech, he utters paradoxes, and suggests views so startling that the wife of the Lord-Lieutenant is scandalized, and thinks the lunacy laws are defective if they cannot include and incarcerate him. She feels sure that the rumor about the Hindoo women at St. Hubert's Lea is entirely true.

After dinner he is free to approach the lady of his thoughts, but he endeavors in vain to tell from her face what answer he will receive, what time and meditation may have done or undone for him. She avoids the interrogation of his eyes, and is surrounded by other men as usual.

The evening seems to him intolerably long and intolerably tedious. It is, however, for others very gay. There is an improvised dance, ending in an impromptu cotillion, and following on an act of a comic opera given with admirable spirit by Lady Dawlish, Mrs. Curzon, and some of the younger men. Every one is amused, but the hours seem very slow to him: Gervase scarcely leaves her side at all, and Brandolin, with all his chivalrous refusal and unchanging resolution to allow no shadow of doubt to steal over him, feels the odious whispers he has heard and the outspoken words of Litroff recur to his memory and weigh on him like the incubus of a nightmare. With a sensation of dread, he realizes that it is possible, do what he may, that they may haunt him so all his life. A man may be always master of his acts, but scarcely always of his thoughts.

"But I will never ask her one syllable," he thinks, "and I will marry her to-morrow if she chooses."

But will she choose?

He is far from sure. He pleases her intelligence; he possesses her friendship; but whether he has the slightest power to touch her heart he does not know. If he loved her less than he does he would be more confident.

As the interminable hours wear away, and the noise and absurdities of the cotillion are at their height, she, who never dances anywhere, drops her fan, and he is before the others in restoring it to her. As she takes it, she says, in a low voice, "Be in the small library at eleven to-morrow."

Soon after she leaves the ball-room altogether, and goes to her bedchamber.

Brandolin goes to his before the cotillion is over, but he sleeps very little. He longs for the morrow, and yet he dreads it. "_Quand meme_,"

he murmurs, as from his bed he sees the white dawn over the dark ma.s.ses of the Surrenden woods. Tell him what she may, he thinks, he will give her his life if she will take it. He is madly in love, no doubt; but there is something n.o.bler and purer than the madness of love, than the mere violent instincts of pa.s.sion, in his loyalty to her. Before anything he cherishes the honor of his name and race, and he is willing, blindfold, to trust her with it.

That morning it seems to him as if the hours would never pa.s.s, though they are few until the clocks strike eleven. The house is still, almost every one is asleep, for the cotillion, successful as only unpremeditated things ever are, had lasted till the sun was high and the dew on the gra.s.s of the garden was dry.

With a thickly-beating heart, nervous and eager as though he were a boy of sixteen seeking his first love-tryst, he enters the small library far before the hour, and waits for her there, pacing to and fro the floor.

The room is full of memories of her: here they have talked on rainy days and have strolled out on to the lawns on fine ones; there is the chair which she likes best, and there the volume she had taken down yesterday; could it be only ten days since standing here he had seen her first in the distance with the children? Only ten days! It seems to him ten years, ten centuries.

The morning is very still, a fine soft rain is falling, wet jessamine-flowers tap against the panes of the closed windows, a great apprehension seems to make his very heart stand still.

As the clock points to the hour she enters the room.

She is very pale, and wears a morning gown of white plush, which trails behind her in a silver shadow. He kisses her hands pa.s.sionately, but she draws them away.

"Wait a little," she says, gently. "Wait till you know--whatever there is to know."

"I want to know but one thing."

She smiles a little sadly.

"Oh, you think so now because you are in love with me. But in time to come, when that is pa.s.sed, you will not be so easily content. If"--she hesitates a moment--"if there is to be any community between our lives, you must be quite satisfied as to my past. It is your right to be so satisfied; and were you not so, some time or other we should both be wretched."

His eyes flash with joy.

"Then----" he begins breathlessly.

"Oh! how like a man that is!" she says, sadly. "To think but of the one thing, of the one present moment, and to be ready to give all the future in p.a.w.n for it! Wait to hear everything. And first of all I must tell you that Lord Gervase also last night asked me to marry him."

"And you!"

"I shall not marry Lord Gervase. But I will not disguise from you that once I would have done so gladly, had I been free to do it."

Brandolin is silent: he changes color.

"I bade him come here for my answer," she continues. "He will be here in a few minutes. I wish you to remain in the large library, so that you may hear all that I say to him."

"I cannot do that. I cannot play the part of eavesdropper."

"You will play that part, or any other that I ask you, if you love me,"

she says, with a touch of imperiousness.

"Do you not see," she goes on, with more gentleness, "that if our lives are to be pa.s.sed near each other (I do not say that they are, but you seem to wish it), you must first of all be convinced of the truth of all I tell you? If one doubt, one suspicion, remain, you will, in time, become unable to banish it. It would grow and grow until you were mastered by it. You believe in what I tell you now; but how long would you believe after marriage?"

"I want no proof: I only want your word. Nay, I do not even want that. I will ask you nothing. I swear that I will never ask you anything."

"That is very beautiful; and I am sure that you mean it now. But it could not last. You are a very proud man; you are _gentilhomme de race_.

It would in time become intolerable to you if you believed that any one living man had any t.i.tle to point a finger of scorn at you. You have a right to know what my relations were with Lord Gervase: it is necessary for all the peace of our future that you should know everything,--know that there is nothing more left for you to know. You can only be convinced of that if you yourself hear what I say to him. Go; and wait there."

Brandolin hesitates. To listen unseen is a part which seems very cowardly to him, and yet she is right, no doubt; all the peace of the future may depend on it. He is ready to pledge himself blindly in the dark in all ways, but he knows that she, in forbidding him to do so, speaks the word of wisdom, of foresight, and of truth.

"Go," she repeats. "Men have a thousand ways of proving the truth of whatever they say; we have none, or next to none. If you refuse me this, the sole poor evidence that I can produce, I will never be to you anything that you now wish. Never; that I swear to you."

He hesitates, and looks at her with a long inquiring regard. Then he bows, and goes.

After all, she is within her rights. She has no other means to show him with any proof what this man whose name is so odiously entangled with her own has, or has not, been to her.

The house is still quite silent, and no one is likely to come into those rooms until much later. Every syllable said in the small library can be heard in any part of the larger one. He stands in the embrasure of one of the windows, the velvet curtains making a screen behind him. He seems to wait for hours; in reality only five minutes have pa.s.sed when he hears the door of the great library open, and Gervase pa.s.ses quickly through the apartment without seeing him, and goes on into the one where she awaits his coming.

"Are you really risen so early?" she says, with a sarcastic coldness in her voice. "I remembered afterwards that it was too cruel to name to you any hour before noon."

"You are unkind," he answers. "To hear what I hope to hear, you may be sure that I would have gone through much greater trials than even rising with the lark, had you commanded it."

His words are light, but his accent is tender and appealing.

"What do you hope to hear?" she asks, abruptly. The question embarra.s.ses him and sounds cold.

"I hope to hear that you pardon me the past and will deign to crown my future."

"I pardon you the past, certainly. With neither your present nor your future have I anything to do."

"You say that very cruelly,--so cruelly that it makes your forgiveness more unkind than your hatred would be."

"I intend no unkindness. I merely wish to express indifference. Perhaps I am even mistaken in saying that I entirely forgive you. When I remember that you once possessed any influence over me, I scarcely do forgive you, for I am forced to despise myself."

"Those are very hard words! Perhaps in the past I was unworthy of having known and loved you; but if you will believe in my regret, and allow me occasion to atone, you shall never repent of your indulgence. Pray hear me out, Xenia----"

"You cannot call me by that name. It is for my friends: you are not numbered among them."

"I would be much more than your friend. If you will be my wife."

"It is too late," she replies, and her voice is as cold as ice.

"Why too late? We have all the best of our lives unspent before us."