The Wicked Marquis Part 10

CHAPTER VII

Marcia Hannaway called upon her publisher during the course of the following day. She found the ready entre of a privileged client--with scarcely a moment's delay she was ushered into the presence of James Borden, the person who for some years now had occupied the second place in her thoughts and life.

"Anything happened, Marcia?" he enquired, after their quiet but familiar greeting. "You look as though you were bringing Fate with you."

She made herself comfortable in the easy-chair which he had drawn up to the fire. Outside, an unexpectedly cold wind made the sense of warmth doubly pleasant. She unfastened her simple furs and smiled at him a little dolefully.

"Just this," she replied, handing him a letter.

He spread it out, adjusted his eyegla.s.ses and read it deliberately:

94, GROSVENOR SQUARE, Thursday.

_My dear Marcia:_

I have made enquiries with reference to the non-payment of your allowance for the last two quarters, and now enclose cheque for the amount, drawn by my agent in Norfolk and payable to yourself. I think I can promise you that no further irregularities shall occur.

I look forward to seeing you to-morrow afternoon, and I must tell you of a financial operation I am now conducting, which, if successful, may enable me to pay off the mortgages which render the Norfolk estates so unremunerative.

I trust that you are well, dear. I have ordered Carlton White's to send in a few flowers, which I hope will arrive safely.

Yours, REGINALD.

James Borden read the letter carefully, glanced at the small coronet at the top of the paper, and folded it up.

"I'm sorry, Marcia," he said simply.

She made a little grimace.

"My dear man," she confessed, "so am I. After all, though, I am not sure that the money makes all the difference. You see, if he really were too poor--or rather if his lawyers couldn't raise the money to send to me--I fancy that I should feel just the same."

The publisher turned his chair round towards the fire. He was a man of barely middle age, although his black hair was besprinkled with grey and growing a little thin at the temples. His features were good, but his face was a little thin, and his clothes were scarcely as tidy, or the appointments of his office so comfortable as his name and position in the publishing world might have warranted. Marcia, who had been looking at him while he read, leaned forward and brushed the cigarette ash from his coat sleeve.

"Such an untidy man!" she declared, straightening his tie. "I am not at all sure that you deserve to have lady clients calling upon you.

Were you late last night?"

"A little," he confessed.

"That means about one or two, I suppose," she went on reprovingly.

"I dined at the club and stayed on," he told her. "There was nothing else to do except work, and I was a little tired of that."

"Any fresh stuff in--interesting stuff, I mean?"

He shook his head.

"Three more Russian novels," he replied, "all in French and want translating, of course. The only one I have read is terribly grim and sordid. I dare say it would sell. I am going to read the other two before I decide anything. Then perhaps you'll help me."

"Of course I will," she promised. "I do wish, though, James, you wouldn't stay at the club so late. How many whiskies and sodas?"

"I didn't count," he confessed.

She sighed.

"I know what that means! James, why aren't you a little more human?

You get heaps of invitations to nice houses. Much better go out and make some women friends. You ought to marry, you know."

"I am quite ready to when you will marry me," he retorted.

"But, my dear man, I am bespoke," she reminded him. "You know that quite well. I couldn't possibly think of marrying anybody."

"What are you going to do with that money?" he demanded.

"I think I shall keep it," she decided. "Not to do so would hurt him terribly."

"And keeping it hurts me d.a.m.nably!" he muttered.

She shook her head at him.

"We've had this over so often, haven't we? I cannot leave Reginald as long as he wants me, relies upon me as much as he does now."

"Why not?" was the almost rough demand. "He has had the best of your life."

"And he has given me a great deal of his," she retorted. "For nineteen years I have been his very dear friend. During all that time he has never broken a promise to me, never told a falsehood, never said a single word which could grate or hurt. If he has sometimes seemed a little aloof, it is because he really believes himself to be a great person. He believes in himself immensely, you know, James--in the privileges and sanct.i.ty of his descent. It seems so strange in this world, where we others see other things. If I only dared, I would write a novel about it."

"But you don't care for him any more?"

"Care for him?" she repeated. "How could I ever stop caring for him!

He was my first lover, and has been my only one."

"Let me ask you a question," James Borden demanded suddenly. "Don't you ever feel any grudge against him? He took you away from a very respectable position in life. He ruined all sorts of possibilities.

He was fifteen or twenty years older than you were, and he knew the world. You pleased him, and he deliberately entrapped your affections.

Be honest, now. Don't you sometimes hate him for it?"

"Never," she answered without hesitation. "I was, as you say, most respectably placed--a teacher at a village school--and I might have married a young farmer, or bailiff's son, or, with great luck, a struggling young doctor, and lived a remarkably rural life, but, as you have observed, in great respectability. My dear James, I should have hated it. I was, I think, nineteen years old when Reginald, in a most courtly fashion, suggested that I should come to London with him, and I have exactly the same feelings to-day about my acceptance of his proposal as I had then."

"You are a puzzle," he declared. "You wouldn't be, of course, only you're such a--such a good woman."

"Of course I am, James," she laughed. "I am good, inasmuch as I am faithful to any tie I may make. I am kind, or try to be, to all my fellow creatures, and I should hate to do a mean thing. The only difference between me and other women is that I prefer to choose what tie I should consider sacred. I claimed the liberty to do that, and I exercised it. As to my right to do so, I have never had the faintest possible shadow of hesitation."

"Oh, it all sounds all right when you talk about it," he admitted, "but let's come to the crux of this thing now we are about it, Marcia. I am eating my heart out for you. I should have thought that one of the great privileges of your manner of life was your freedom to change, if you desired to do so. Change, I mean--nothing to do with infidelity.

You may have the nicest feelings in the world towards your Marquis, but I don't believe you love him any more. I don't believe you care for him as much as you do for me."

"In one sense you are perfectly right," she acknowledged. "In another you are altogether wrong."

"And yet," he continued, almost roughly, "you have never allowed me to touch your fingers, much more your lips."