The Gambler Part 70

"Unlucky at cards, lucky in love! He won't complain, Clodagh."

Deerehurst smiled calmly.

"Is it well to aver that?" he said. "Look at your own score!"

She laughed again--a laugh of complete satisfaction.

"Ah, but I owe that to my partner's play, not to luck! Shall we lower the points, Clodagh? You are a horrible loser."

Clodagh's hot cheeks flushed a deeper red.

"Lower the points! I would rather raise them. But aren't we losing time? Deal, Mr. Mansfeldt, please!" Her excitement was obvious. Her lips were obstinately set; and her fingers tapped the table in nervous impatience.

A third rubber was begun and finished; then a fourth, and a fifth; and very gradually, as the play continued, the sounds throughout the house became fainter and fewer. At first, the tones of Lady Diana's voice had floated up from the music-room, and the usual hum of applause had succeeded, to be followed in its own turn by more music. Song after song had been sung; then had come the sound of talk and laughter, as the party from the music-room had adjourned to the garden. But slowly these sounds had lessened. The laughter had ceased; and the entertainment out-of-doors had died down to the murmuring of two men's voices and the slow pacing of a couple of pairs of feet up and down the terrace beneath the card-room window. At last even this had ended with the heavy shutting of a door; and, save for the occasional distant sound of a closing window, silence reigned in the house.

The sixth rubber was drawing to its close, when the door of the card-room opened quietly and Lady Diana entered, looking slightly tired and pale.

She came forward to the table and stood looking at the players.

"Don't stir!" she said. "I only came to see that you are all right. Who has been lucky?"

Mrs. Bathurst looked up self-confidently.

"We have--enormously," she said. "Mrs. Milbanke was most daring, and doubled our ordinary stakes. The results have been wonderful--for us."

"Indeed!" Lady Diana's voice sounded unusually cold; and Clodagh was conscious that her observant eyes had turned upon her.

But she played on, without looking up.

At last the final trick was won, the score reckoned up, and the players rose.

Deerehurst pushed back his chair, and looked about him speculatively.

"It feels late!" he said. "What is the time, Lady Diana? My conscience begins to trouble me!"

Lady Diana smiled a little conventionally.

"I think it is about half-past two," she answered.

"Oh, Lady Diana, how wicked of us!" Mrs. Bathurst affected a charming penitence.

Mansfeldt looked genuinely uncomfortable and distressed.

"We owe you an apology!" he said. "We have kept you from your rest."

But Lady Diana graciously waived all apologies aside.

"It is nothing!--nothing!" she a.s.sured them. "We are not so rustic as all that. Lord Deerehurst, you and Mr. Mansfeldt will find George in the smoking-room." She gave the suggestion with her usual hospitable warmth; but the smile that accompanied the words was not the smile she had given to Clodagh the evening before--or that morning at breakfast.

And Clodagh, keenly sensitive to this altered bearing, stood silent, offering no apology. At last, as though the tension of the position compelled her to action, she held out her hand in a half-diffident, half-defiant gesture.

"Good-night, Lady Diana! Good-night, Rose! Good-night, Mr. Mansfeldt.

Good-night!" Last of all, her fingers touched Deerehurst's, and as his cold hand closed over hers, he bent his head deferentially.

"Good-night, partner! Sleep well! We will be more fortunate in the future."

But Clodagh gave no sign that she had even heard. Almost ungraciously, she freed her hand; and, without glancing at any of the occupants of the room, moved quickly to the door, and pa.s.sed out into the corridor.

Her brain seemed to burn, as she mounted the long flight of shallow stairs that led to the bedrooms; her head ached; her senses felt confused. She had lost money to a far greater extent than she could possibly afford; she had alienated the friend she had so ardently desired to make; she had acted wilfully--absurdly--wrongly.

She opened the door of her bedroom with hasty, unsteady fingers. The lamp on the writing-table was lighted, but the rest of the room was dim; through the open windows came a slight breeze that stirred the chintz curtains; in a chair by the dressing-table sat Simonetta in an att.i.tude of weariness.

The sight of the woman's tired figure jarred on Clodagh's over-strained nerves.

"You can go, Simonetta!" she said sharply. "I'll put myself to bed."

Simonetta started up remorsefully.

"Pardon, signora----" she exclaimed.

But Clodagh cut her short.

"You can go!" she said. "Good-night!"

The woman looked at her for a moment in doubt and reluctance; then, instinctively realising that argument was useless, moved softly to the door.

"Good-night, signora!" she ventured; but as Clodagh made no response, she departed, silently closing the door.

Left alone, Clodagh moved aimlessly to the centre of the room, and stood there as if seeking some object which might distract her mind.

Her glance pa.s.sed vaguely over the dressing-table, laden with familiar personal objects; then strayed to a couch, on which lay an open book that she had made a fruitless attempt to read during the hot hours of the afternoon; at last, attracted by the light of the lamp, it turned to the writing-table, on which was placed the heavy leather writing-case that had belonged to her mother, and that had remained with her through all her wanderings since the time of her marriage. It lay unlocked, as she had left it the evening before, the contents protruding untidily from under the thick leather flap. Something intimate and friendly in the shabby object appealed to and attracted her. Without considering the action, she went slowly forward and laid her fingers hesitatingly upon it. All the small records that const.i.tuted memory lay side by side in this worn leather case: her cheque-books--her letters--the few souvenirs her life had provided.

She raised the flap lingeringly and lifted out the topmost papers.

First to her hand, came a bundle of Laurence a.s.shlin's monthly reports from Orristown--boyish, spirited records of trivial doings, ill-constructed from a literary point of view, shrewdly humorous in their own peculiar way. These she tossed aside, as things of small account, and turned almost hurriedly to the papers that lay immediately beneath. They proved to be her sister's letters, dating from the time of their parting in London, when Nance had been sent to school. For a s.p.a.ce she held them in her hand, while a curious expression, half antagonistic, half tender, touched her face; then, with a little sigh, she laid them down again, without having turned a page.

The next object that she drew forth was the faded telegram that, years ago, at the time of Denis a.s.shlin's accident, had brought the longed-for news that Milbanke was on his way to Orristown. She opened it, read it, then folded it and replaced it with something of uneasy haste; and again burying her hand in the recesses of the case, brought to light another link with the past--a large envelope into which were crushed a number of things, amongst them the first invitation from Lady Frances Hope in Venice; a ribbon that had tied a bouquet of flowers on the dinner-table at the "Abbati" Restaurant; a Venetian theatre programme; a couple of dry roses that she had worn on the night when Gore had taken her home from the Palazzo Ugochini. Very slowly she drew these trophies forth. Each breathed the romance of things gone by; yet each possessed the poison of present regret. As she lifted up the roses, her expression became suddenly pained and resentful, and with a fierce impulse she crushed the dry, brown leaves between her fingers, flung them from her across the room, and hurriedly lifted the next object from the writing-case. This last was a large bundle of papers, tied together with a black ribbon.

Lifting it into the light, she looked at it for a long time, without attempting to untie the string. It was the collection of her father's scanty correspondence and ill-a.s.sorted business letters, which she had bound together the night before her marriage--and had never since opened.

A curious feeling a.s.sailed her now, as she looked at these yellowing papers, eloquent of dead days; and at the mourning ribbon, significant of emotions keen and bitter in the living, but buried now under the weight of newer things. How strange, how distant and impersonal, the pages seemed! And yet the time had been when every written line had played its part in some human, personal endeavour! Each doc.u.ment had represented loss or gain to some individual; each letter had conveyed its fragment of earthly sentiment. Moved suddenly by the suggestions of the moment, she untied the string.

A faint, dry odour rose from the loosened papers--the intangible scent that indicates the past. It seemed that some world, distant and forgotten, had suddenly put forth a shadowy hand, pointing she knew not whither. Over her brain, fevered from the night's excitement, fell a stillness--an arresting calm; across her thoughts, distorted by mistaken struggles, glided a memory--a picture. She saw herself as she had been before her marriage, in the far-off isolated days when life had been a simple thing, when the world outside Orristown had been a golden realm lying beyond the sunset.

How young she had been then! How extraordinarily, indescribably young!

How untrammelled in her actions and sweeping in her judgments! As the old existence pressed about her in a cloud of images, she opened the first letter. But so unsteadily, so agitatedly, that, in the opening, five or six of the pages slipped from the packet and fluttered to the writing-table, bringing with them a small unframed ivory miniature that had been wrapped within the sheets.

The thin, fragile picture dropped with a faint tinkling sound; Clodagh bent forward to recover it; then paused, leaning over the table in an att.i.tude of attention. The miniature lay face upwards; and, in the strong light of the lamp, its outline and colours shone forth distinctly. It represented the head and shoulders of a man in a scarlet coat and hunting-stock--a man of thirty, with a handsome, defiant face, fine eyes, and an obstinate, unreliable mouth.

It lay, looking up into her face, while she stared back at it, as though a ghost had risen from the faded letters. On the night before her marriage she had come upon this miniature of Denis a.s.shlin; and in a frenzy of renewed grief had thrust it out of sight amongst the papers she had collected. Then, the picture had seemed pitifully sad in its presentment of the dead man in the days of his strength; now, as she looked upon it in the light of subsequent knowledge, it seemed a thing instinct with portent and dread.