God's Good Man Part 55

"Oh lover of ladies, told and free, Why did you lose yowr life for me?"

The song ceased with a clash of chords. It was followed by a subdued clapping of hands,--a pause of silence--and then a renewed murmur of conversation. Walden looked up as if suddenly startled from a reverie, and resumed his quick pace across the courtyard,--and Maryllia, seeing him go, advanced a little more into the gleaming moonlight to follow him with her eyes till he should quite disappear.

"Upon my word, a very quaint little comedy!" said a coldly mocking voice behind her--"A modern Juliet gazing pathetically after the retiring form of a somewhat elderly clerical Romeo! Let me congratulate you, Miss Maryllia, on your newest and most brilliant achievement,--the conquest of a country parson! It is quite worthy of you!"

And turning, she confronted Lord Roxmouth.

XXIV

For a moment they looked at each other. The smile on Roxmouth's face widened.

"Come, come, Maryllia!" he said, easily--"Don't be foolish! The airs of a tragedy queen do not suit you. I a.s.sure you I haven't the least objection to your amusing yourself with a parson, if you like! The conversation in the picture-gallery just now was quite idyllic--all about a cigarette and Psyche! Really it was most absurd!--and the little sermon of the enamoured clergyman to his pretty penitent was as unique as it was priggish. I'm sure you must have been vastly entertained! And the final allusion he made to his age--THAT was a masterstroke of pathos!--or bathos? Which? Du sublime au ridicule il n'y'a qu'un pas, Madame!"

Her eyes were fixed unswervingly upon him.

"So you listened!" she said.

"Naturally! One always listens to a comedy if it is played well.

I've been listening all the evening. I've listened to your waif and stray, Cicely Bourne, and am perfectly willing to admit that she is worth the training you are giving her. It's the first time I've heard her sing to advantage. I've listened to Eva Beaulyon's involved explanation of a perfectly unworkable scheme for the education of country yokels (who never do anything with education when they get it), on which she is going to extract twenty thousand pounds for herself from the pockets of her newest millionaire- victim. I've listened to the Bludlip Courtenay woman's enthusiastic description of a new specific for the eradication of wrinkles and crowsfeet. I've listened to that old bore Sir Morton Pippitt, and to the afflicting county gossip of the lady in green,--Miss Ittlethwaite is her name, I believe. And, getting tired of these things, I strolled towards the picture-gallery, and hearing your delightful voice, listened there. I confess I heard more than I expected!"

Without a word in response, she turned from him and began to move away. He stretched out a hand and caught her sleeve.

"Maryllia, wait! I must speak to you--and I may as well say what I have to say now and get it over."

She paused. Lifting her eyes she glanced at him with a look of utter scorn and contempt. He laughed.

"Come out into the moonlight!"--he said--"Come and walk with me in this romantic old courtyard. It suits you, and you suit it. You are very pretty, Maryllia! May I--notwithstanding the parson--smoke?"

She said nothing. Drawing a leather case from his pocket, he took a cigar out and lit it.

"Silence gives consent,"--he went on--"Besides I'm sure you don't mind. You know plenty of men who can never talk comfortably without puffing smoke in between whiles. I'm one of that sort. Don't look at me like Cleopatra deprived of Marc Antony. Be reasonable! I only want to say a few plain matter-of-fact words to you---"

"Say them then as quickly as possible, please,"--she replied--"I am NOT a good listener!"

"No? Now I should have thought you were, judging by the patience with which you endured the parson's general discursiveness. What a superb night!" He stepped from the portal out on the old flagstones of the courtyard. "Take just one turn with me, Maryllia!"

Quietly, and with an air of cold composure she came to him, and walked slowly at his side. He looked at her covertly, yet critically.

"I won't make love to you,"--he said presently, with a smile-- "because you tell me you don't like it. I will merely put a case before you and ask for your opinion! Have I your permission?"

She bent her head slightly. Her throat was dry,--her heart was beating painfully,--she knew Roxmouth's crafty and treacherous nature, and her whole soul sickened as she realised that now he could, if he chose, drag the name of John Walden through a mire of social mud, and hold it up to ridicule among his own particular 'set,' who would certainly lose no time in blackening it with their ever-ready tar-brush. And it was all through her--all through her!

How would she ever forgive herself if his austere and honourable reputation were touched in ever so slight a degree by a breath of scandal? Unconsciously, she clasped her little hands and wrung them hard--Roxmouth saw the action, and quickly fathomed the inward suffering it indicated.

"You know my dearest ambition,"--he went on,--"and I need not emphasise it. It is to call you my wife. If you consent to marry me, you take at once a high position in the society to which you naturally belong. But you tell me I am detestable to you--and that you would rather die than accept me as a husband. I confess I do not understand your att.i.tude,--and, if you will allow me to say so, I hardly think you understand it yourself. You are in a state of uncertainty--most women live always in that state;--and your vacillating soul like a bewildered b.u.t.terfly--you see I am copying the clerical example by dropping into poetry!--and a b.u.t.terfly, NOT a cigarette, is I believe the correct emblem of Psyche,--" here he took a whiff at his cigar, and smiled pleasantly--"your soul, I repeat, like a bewildered b.u.t.terfly, has lighted by chance on a full-flowering parson. The flight--the pause on that maturely-grown blossom of piety, is pardonable,--but I cannot contemplate with pleasure the idea of your compromising your name with that of this sentimental middle-aged individual who, though he may be an excellent Churchman, would make rather a grotesque lover!"

She remained silent. Glancing sideways at her, he wondered whether it was the moonlight that made her look so set and pale.

"But I said I would put a case before you,"--he continued, "and I will. Here are you,--of an age to be married. Here am I,--anxious to marry you. We are neither of us growing younger--and delay seems foolish. I offer you all I am worth in the world--myself, my name and my position. You have refused me a score of times, and I am not discouraged--you refuse me still, and I am not baffled. But I ask why? I am not deformed or idiotic. I would try to make you happy. A woman is best when she has entirely her own way,--I would let you have yours. You would be free to follow your own whims and caprices.

Provided you gave me lawful heirs, I should ask no more of you. No reasonable man ought to ask more of any reasonable woman. Life could be made very enjoyable to us both, with a little tact and sense on either side. I should amuse myself in the world, and so I hope, would you. We understand modern life and appreciate its conveniences. The freedom of the matrimonial state is one of those conveniences, of which I am sure we should equally take advantage."

He puffed at his cigar for a few minutes complacently.

"You profess to hate me,"--he went on--"Again I ask, why? You tell your aunt that you want to be 'loved.' You consider love the only lasting good of life. Well, you have your desire. _I_ love you!"

She raised her eyes,--and then suddenly laughed.

"You!" she said--"You 'love' me? It must be a very piecemeal sort of love, then, for I know at least five women to whom you have said the same thing!"

He was in nowise disconcerted.

"Only five!" he murmured lazily--"Why not ten--or twenty? The more the merrier! Women delight in bragging of conquests they have never made, as why should they not? Lying comes so naturally to them! But I do not profess to be a saint,--I daresay I have said 'I love you'

to a hundred women in a certain fashion,--but not as I say it to you. When I say it to you, I mean it."

"Mean what?" she asked.

"Love."

She stopped in her walk and faced him.

"When a man loves a woman--really loves her,"--she said, "Does he persecute her? Does he compromise her in society? Does he try to scandalise her among her friends? Does he whisper her name away on a false rumour, and accuse her of running after him for his t.i.tle, while all the time he knows it is he himself that is running after her money? Does he make her life a misery to her, and leave her no peace anywhere, not even in her own house? Does he spy upon her, and set others to do the same?--does he listen at doors and interrogate servants as to her movements--and does he altogether play the dastardly traitor to prove his 'love'?"

Her voice shook--her eyes were ablaze with indignation. Roxmouth flicked a little ash off his cigar.

"Why, of course not!" he replied--"But who does these dreadful things? Are they done at all except in your imagination?"

"YOU do them!" said Maryllia, pa.s.sionately--"And you have always done them! When I tell you once and for all that I have given up every chance I ever had of being my aunt's heiress--that I shall never be a rich woman,--and that I would far rather die a beggar than be your wife, will you not understand me?--will you not leave me alone?"

He looked at her with quizzical amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Do you really want to be left alone?" he asked--"Or in a 'solitude a deux'--with the parson?"

She was silent, though her silence cost her an effort. But she knew that the least word she might say concerning Walden would be wilfully misconstrued. She knew that Roxmouth was waiting for her to burst out with some indignant denial of his suggestions--something that he might twist and turn in his own fashion and repeat afterwards to all his and her acquaintances. She cared nothing for herself, but she was full of dread lest Walden's name should be bandied up and down on the scurrilous tongues of that 'upper cla.s.s'

throng, who, because they spend their lives in nothing n.o.bler than political intrigue and sensual indulgence, are politely set aside as froth and sc.u.m by the saner, cleaner world, and cla.s.sified as the 'Smart Set.' Roxmouth watched her furtively. His clear-cut face, white skin and sandy hair shone all together with an oily l.u.s.tre in the moonlight;--there was a hard cold gleam in his eyes.

"It would be a pretty little story for the society press," he said, after a pause--"How the bewitching Maryllia Vancourt resigned the brilliancy of her social life for a dream of love with an elderly country clergyman! By Heaven! No one would believe it! But,"--and he waited a minute, then continued--"It's a story that shall never be told so far as I am concerned--if--" He broke off, and looked meditatively at the end of his cigar. "There is always an 'if'-- unfortunately!"

Maryllia smiled coldly.

"That is a threat,"--she said--"But it does not affect me! Nothing that you can do or say will make me consent to marry you. You have slandered me already--you can slander me again for all I care. But I will never be your wife."

"You have said so before,"--he observed, placidly--"And I have put the question many times--why?"

She looked at him steadily.