The Ghost Girl Part 30

Phyl had done more than slap his face. She had slapped his pride, his a.s.surance of himself, and his desire for her all at the same time.

Silas rarely bothered about girls, yet he knew that he had the power to fascinate any woman once he put his mind to the work. He had not tried his powers of fascination on Phyl. It was the other way about. Phyl absolutely unconsciously had used her fascination upon him.

Something in her, recognised by him on their first meeting in the stable yard, had put away the barrier of s.e.x. He had talked to her as if she had been a boy. Sitting on the seat beside her whilst the Colonel had been prosing over politics and tobacco, the prompting came to Silas to pinch her finger just for fun; when he had put his hands over her eyes that night it was in obedience to the same prompting, but at the moment of parting from her, a desire quite new had overmastered him.

He had kissed a good many girls, but never in his life had he kissed a girl as he kissed Phyl.

Something cynical in his feelings for the other s.e.x had always left him somewhat cold, but Phyl was different from the others, she had in some way struck straight at his real being.

When he left her that night at Grangersons he was almost as disturbed as she.

He scarcely slept. He was out at dawn and on his return after she had left he sat down and wrote the letter which Phyl received next morning.

Silas was in love for the first time in his life, but love with Silas was a thing apart from the love of ordinary men.

There was no worship of the object; the something that crystallises out in the form of love-letters, verses, bouquets, and candy was not there. He wanted Phyl.

He had no more idea of marriage than the great G.o.d Pan. If she had consented he would have taken her off on that yawl of his imagination round the world or down to Florida, without thought of the morrow or the _convenances_, or Society; but please do not imagine this rather primitive gentleman a chartered libertine. He would have married her as soon as not, but he had neither the genius nor the inclination for the courtship that leads by slow degrees up to the question, "Will you marry me?"

He wanted her at once.

As he walked along now with the devil awake in his heart, he felt no anger towards Phyl; all his rage was against Pinckney; he had never liked Pinckney, he more than suspected that Phyl cared for him and he wanted some one to hate badly.

He had walked himself into a reasonable state of mind when he found himself outside the Queen City Club. He went in and one of the first men he met was Pinckney.

So well did he hold himself in hand that Pinckney suspected nothing of his feelings. Silas was far too good a sportsman to shout at the edge of the wood, too much of a gentleman to desire a brawl in public. He was going to knife Pinckney, he was also going to capture Phyl, but the knifing of Pinckney was the main objective and that required time and thought. He did not desire the blood of the gentleman; he wanted his pride and _amour propre_. He wanted to hit him on the raw, but he did not know yet where, exactly, the raw was nor how to hit it. Time would tell him.

He was specially civil to his intended victim, and he went off home that evening plotting all the way, but arriving at nothing. He was trying to make bricks without straw. Pinckney did not drink, nor did he gamble, and he was far too good a business man to be had in that way. However, all things come to him who waits, and next morning's post brought him a ray of light in the midst of his darkness.

It brought him an invitation to the Rhetts' dance on the following Wednesday; nearly a week to wait, but, still, something to wait for.

"What are you thinking about, Silas?" asked old Seth Grangerson as they sat at breakfast.

"I'm thinking of a new rabbit trap, suh," responded the son.

The rabbit trap seemed to give him a good deal of food for thought during the week that followed; food that made him hilarious and gloomy by turns, restless also.

Had he known it, Phyl away at Charleston, was equally restless. She no longer thought of Silas. She had dismissed him from her mind, she no longer feared him as a possible source of danger to the man she loved.

Love had her entirely in his possession to torture as he pleased. She knew only one danger, the danger that Richard Pinckney did not care in the least for her, and as day followed day that danger grew more defined and concrete. Richard had taken to avoiding her, she became aware of that.

She fancied that she displeased him.

If she had only known!

CHAPTER X

Silas Grangerson came to town on the Wednesday, driving in and reaching the Charleston Hotel about five o'clock in the afternoon.

The Grangersons scarcely ever used the railway. Silas, often as he had been in Charleston, had never put foot in a street car; even a hired conveyance was against the prejudices of these gentlemen.

This antagonism towards public means of locomotion was not in the least the outcome of sn.o.bbishness or pride; they had come from a race of people accustomed to move in a small orbit in their own particular way, an exclusive people, breeders and lovers of horses, a people to whom locomotion had always meant pride in the means and the method; to take a seat in a stuffy railway car at so much a mile, to grab a ticket and squeeze into a tram car, to drive in a cab drawn by an indifferent horse would have been hateful to these people; it was scarcely less so to their descendants.

So Silas came to Charleston driving a pair of absolutely matched chestnuts, a coloured manservant in the Grangerson livery in attendance.

After dinner he strolled into the bar of the hotel, met some friends, made some bets on the forthcoming races and at eight o'clock retired upstairs to dress.

He was one of the first of the guests to arrive.

The Rhetts' house in Legare Street was about the same size as Vernons and equally old, but it had not the same charm, the garden was much larger than that at Vernons, but it had not the same touch of the past. Houses, like people, have personalities and the house of the Rhetts had a telephone without resenting the intruder, electric everythings, even to an elevator, modern cookers, modern stoves, everything in a modern way to save labour and make life easy, and all so cunningly and craftily done that the air of antiquity was supposed not to be disturbed.

Illusion! Nothing is gained without some sacrifice; you cannot hold the past and the present in the same hand, the concealed elevator spoke in all the rooms once its presence was betrayed, the telephone talked--everywhere was evident the use of yesterday as a veneer of to-day.

However that may be, the old house was gay enough to-night with flowers and lights, and Silas, looking better perhaps than he had ever looked in his life, found himself talking to Frances Rhett with an animation that surprised himself.

Frances had never had a chance of leading Silas behind her chariot; to fool with her would have meant an expenditure of time and energy in journeys to Charleston quite beyond his inclination. This aloofness coupled with his good looks had set him apart from others.

But to-night he was quite a different being; to-night, in some mysterious way, he managed to convey the impression, pleasing enough, that he had come to see her and her alone.

As they stood together for a moment, he led the talk into Charleston channels, asking about this person and that till the folk at Vernons came on the _tapis_.

"Is it true what I hear, that Richard Pinckney has become engaged to the girl who is staying there?" asked Silas.

Frances smiled.

"I don't think so," she replied. "Who told you?"

"Upon my word I forget," said he, "but I judged mostly by my own eyes--they seemed like an engaged couple when I saw them last."

New guests were arriving and she had to go forward to help in receiving them. Silas moved towards her, but in the next moment they had for a s.n.a.t.c.h of conversation, she did not refer to the subject, nor did he.

The Vernons people were late, so late that when they arrived they were the last of the guests; dancing was in progress and, on entering the ballroom, Richard Pinckney was treated to the pleasing sight of his _fiancee_ whirling in the arms of Silas Grangerson.

Phyl, looking lovely in the simple, rather old-fashioned dress evolved for her by the combined geniuses of Maria Pinckney and Madame Organdie, produced that sensation which can only be evoked by newness, her effect was instantaneous and profound, it touched not only every one of these strangers but also Maria Pinckney and Richard. They had come with her, but it was only in the ballroom that they recognised with whom they had come.

So with a book, a picture, a play, the producer and his friends only recognise its merits fully when it is staged and condemned or praised by the public.

A _debutante_ fails or succeeds at first glance, and the instantaneous success of Phyl was a record in successes.

And Frances Rhett had to watch it and dance. The Inquisition had its torments; Society has improved on them, for her victims cannot cry out and the torments of Frances Rhett were acute. Not that she was troubling much about Richard Pinckney and what the poisonous Silas had said; she was not in love with Richard Pinckney, but she was pa.s.sionately in love with herself. She was the belle of Charleston; had been for the last year; and one of her chief incentives to marriage was an intuitive knowledge that prestige fades, that the position of princ.i.p.al girl in any society is like the position of the billiard ball the juggler balances on the end of a cue--precarious. She wanted to get married and ring down the curtain on an unspoiled success, and now in a moment she saw herself dethroned.

In a moment. For no jeweller of Amsterdam ever had an eye for the quality of diamonds surer than the eye of Frances Rhett for the quality of other women's beauty. At the first glance to-night, she saw what others saw, though more clearly than they, that it was the touch of the past that gave Phyl her _cachet_, a something indefinable from yesterday, the lack of which made the other girls, by contrast, seem cheap.

Never could she have imagined that the "red-headed girl at Vernons" could gain so much from setting, a setting due to the instinct as well as the taste of "that old Maria Pinckney."

She had always laughed at Maria, as young people sometimes will at the old.