By Wit of Woman Part 53

"Hadn't we better speak together alone first?"

"Yes, if you wish."

We went out together into another room.

"You have played me an ugly trick," he began.

"It is rather that you sought to play me one and failed. You came here to steal Gareth from my care."

"Where is she?"

"In this house here."

"My G.o.d!" There was no mistaking the intensity of his feelings. He threw himself into a chair and stared down at the carpet, his face wrinkled in lines of thought, perplexity, and fear. "Does Colonel Katona know?" he asked after a long, tense pause.

"Not yet."

"You mean to tell him?"

"I have brought him here for that purpose.

"He mustn't be told."

I raised my eyebrows and shrugged my shoulders, and left him to interpret the gesture as he pleased.

"You don't know what you are doing. My G.o.d, you don't; or you'd never dare. What are your terms now?"

"No more than they were before--and no less."

He took a paper from his pocket. "Here's the first of them--over my father's signature."

"Is this what you were to have brought to the General's house?"

"Yes," he nodded.

"It is not your doing, then, that part?"

"What else do you want?"

"You know quite well--that you make Gareth your wife."

"You're not so clever as you think you are," he jeered. This cheap sneer at me appeared to afford him some relief.

"Have you no thought for her?

"I don't wish to hear about her from you."

"Then her father and yours had better speak of her. The Duke knows the story by now; and the matter has to be settled somehow."

"You are brewing an awful mess and making any settlement impossible.

But then you're a woman, and can be trusted to do that."

"Shall I send for Colonel Katona to come to us here?"

"No," he cried quickly, and then gave a desperate sigh.

"Yet you love Gareth," I said.

"I tell you I won't hear of her from you."

"And she has given you all her innocent heart, trusting you, believing in you, loving you, as only such a sweet pure girl as she could."

"I will not hear you," he cried again fiercely.

"If you will not, there is only one alternative." He was silent, so I continued. "I do not plead for her--don't think that. Her cause needs no pleading at my hands; because there are those who will not see injustice done to her. You know that--selfish, reckless, wicked and daring as you are. Her father is equally daring, and knows how to revenge a wrong done to her."

"What do you want to say, then? Can you see any way?"

"When you spoke to me that afternoon at Madame d'Artelle's house about her, I saw that you loved her; and what I would appeal to now is that love of yours for her."

"Go on," he said sullenly.

"You would be neither sullen nor indifferent if you could have seen her when to-day she knew you were coming. You know little of a woman's heart; but I know it--and all Gareth's was in her glad eyes at the thought of being once again with you. She is not well, moreover worried and hara.s.sed by suspense; ill with the fever of unrest. She has no strength for the part you have made her play, and the pa.s.sionate desire to have this tangle straightened and peace made with her father is wearing her life away."

Whether he was touched by this, I cannot say. He gave no sign.

"You wish for a chance to checkmate me," I continued; "and here you can find one. I promised her happiness--you can give that promise the lie; you can break her heart and blight her life, and probably kill her. I have acted in the belief that you cared for her: you can sneer that belief out of existence, and win at least that one success over me.

You would have a victory of a sort; but I would not envy your feelings in the hour of triumph."

He took this in silence also. I did not think he had even cared to listen.

"Have you anything more to say?" he asked after a pause.

"If your heart is dead to her, no words are needed--none can do any good. But it will not be well for you."

"Threats now?"

"I leave them for Gareth's father. You know what he can do?"

Something in the words touched him. He looked up with a new, sudden suspicion. "You know that, too?" he asked, sharply. "Is that why you've trapped me here like this?"

"That is not my part of it," I replied, ambiguously, leaving him to make of the answer what he would.

"Can I see Gareth?"

"Yes, when her father knows, and with his consent."

He shrugged his shoulders and sneered again. "You take me for a villain, of course. You said so once."