The Wicked Marquis Part 19

"A touch of gout," he said, "come to remind me, I suppose, that however much we set our faces against it, change does exist. You are the only person, Marcia, who seems to defy it."

She laughed at him, but not with entire naturalness. He found himself studying her, during the next few moments. Just as he was a celebrated connoisseur of _objets d'arts_, a valued visitor to Christie's, although his purchases were small, so he was, in his way, an excellent judge of the beautiful in living things. He realised, as he studied her, that Marcia had only more fully developed the charm which had first attracted him. Her figure was a little rounder but it had lost none of its perfections. Her neck and throat were just as beautiful, and the success of her work, and her greater knowledge of life, had brought with them an a.s.sured and dignified bearing. There was not a vestige of grey in her soft brown hair, not a line in her face, nor any sign of the dentist's handiwork in her strong, white teeth. Only--was it his fancy, he wondered, or was there something missing from the way she looked at him?--a half shy, half baffled appeal for affection which had so often shone out upon him during these evenings, a wholly personal, wholly human note, the unspoken message of a woman to her lover. He asked himself whether that had gone, and, if it had, whether the companionship which remained sufficed.

"So the journey down to Mandeleys has not materialised yet?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"To tell you the truth," she told him, "I rather shrank from it. I could not seem to bring it into perspective--you know what I mean. How am I to go to him? I don't suppose he has changed. He is still splendidly faithful to the ideas of his earlier days. I do not suppose he has moved a step out of his groove. He is looking at the same things in the same way. Am I to go to him as a Magdalen, as a penitent? Honestly, Reginald, I couldn't play the part."

Their eyes met, and they both smiled.

"It is very difficult," he admitted, "to discuss or to hold in common a matter of importance with a person of another world. Why do you go?"

"Because," she replied, "he is, after all, my father; because I know that the pain and rage which he felt when he left England are there to-day, and I would like so much to make him see that they have all been wasted. I want him to realise that my life has been made, not spoilt."

"I should find out indirectly, if I were you, how he is feeling," the Marquis advised. "I rather agree with you that you will find him unchanged. His fierce opposition to my reasonable legal movements against him give one that impression."

"I shall probably be sorry I went," she admitted, "but it seems to me that it is one of those things which must be done. Let us talk of something else. Tell me how you have spent the week?"

"For one thing, I have improved my acquaintance with the American, David Thain, of whom I have already spoken to you," he told her.

"And your great financial scheme?"

"It promises well. Of course, if it is entirely successful, it will be like starting life all over again."

"There is a certain amount of risk, I suppose?" she asked, a little anxiously.

The Marquis waved his hand.

"In this affair quite negligible," he declared.

"It would make you very happy, of course, to free the estates," she ruminated.

The Marquis for a moment revealed a side of himself which always made Marcia feel almost maternal towards him.

"It would give me very great pleasure, also," he confessed, "to point out to my solicitors--to Mr. Wadham, Junior, especially--that the task which they have left unaccomplished for some twenty-five years I have myself undertaken successfully."

"This Mr. Thain must be rather interesting," Marcia said musingly.

"Could you describe him?"

It was at that precise moment that the Marquis raised his head and discovered that David Thain was being shown by an obsequious _matre d'htel_ to the table adjoining their own.

In the case of almost any other of his acquaintances, the Marquis's course of action would have been entirely simple. David, however, complicated things. With the nave courtesy of his American bringing up, he no sooner recognised the Marquis than he approached the table and offered his hand.

"Good evening, Marquis," he said.

The Marquis shook hands. Some ba.n.a.lities pa.s.sed between the two men.

Then, as though for the first time, David was suddenly and vividly aware of Marcia's presence. Some instinct told him who she was, and for a moment he forgot himself. He looked at her steadily, curiously, striving to remember, and Marcia returned his gaze with a strange absorption which at first she failed to understand. This slim, nervous-looking man, with the earnest eyes and the slight stoop of the head, was bringing back to her some memory. From the first stage of the struggle her common sense was worsted. She was looking back down the avenues of her memory. Surely somewhere in that shadowland she had known some one with eyes like these!--there must be something to explain this queer sense of excitement. And then the Marquis, who had been deliberating, spoke the words which brought her to herself.

"Marcia, let me present to you Mr. David Thain, of whom we were speaking a few minutes ago. Mr. Thain, this is Miss Marcia Hannaway, whose very clever novel you may have read."

David's eyes were still eagerly fixed upon her face, but the introduction had brought Marcia back to the earth. There could be no connection between those half-formed memories and the American millionaire whose name was almost a household word!

"I am very pleased to meet you, Miss Hannaway," David said. "I was just telling the Marquis that I was surprised to find any one here whom I knew. I asked a friend to tell me of a restaurant near my rooms where I should meet no one, and he sent me here."

"Why such misanthropy?" she asked.

"It is my own bad manners," he explained. "I accepted an invitation for this evening, and found at the last moment so much work that I was obliged to send an excuse."

"You carry your work about with you, then?"

"Not always, I hope," he replied, "only I am just now clearing out a great many of my interests in America, and that alone is sufficient to keep one busy."

He pa.s.sed on with a little bow, and took his place at the table which the _matre d'htel_ had indicated. The Marquis, to whom his coming had been without any real significance, continued his conversation with Marcia until he found to his surprise that she was giving him less than her whole attention.

"What do you think of our hero of finance?" he enquired, a little coldly.

"He seems very much as you described him," Marcia answered. "To tell you the truth, his sudden appearance just as we were talking about him rather took my breath away."

"It was a coincidence, without doubt," the Marquis acknowledged.

Her eyes wandered towards the man who had given his brief order for dinner, and whose whole attention now seemed absorbed by the newspaper which he was reading.

"It is Mr. Thain, is it not, who introduced to you this wonderful speculation?" she asked, a little abruptly.

"That is so," the Marquis admitted. "I have always myself, however, been favourably disposed towards oil."

Marcia suddenly withdrew her glance, laughed softly to herself and sipped her wine.

"I was indulging in a ridiculous train of thought," she confessed.

"Mr. Thain looks very clever, even if he is not exactly one's idea of an American financier. I expect the poor man does get hunted about. A millionaire, especially from foreign parts, has become a sort of Monte Cristo, nowadays."

The subject of David Thain dropped. The Marquis, as their coffee was brought, began to wonder dimly whether it was possible that the thread of their conversation was a little more difficult to hold together than in the past; whether that bridge between their interests and daily life became a little more difficult to traverse as the years pa.s.sed. He fell into a momentary fit of silence. Marcia leaned towards him.

"Reginald," she said, "do you know, there was something I wanted to ask you this evening. Shall I ask it now?"

"If you will, dear."

She paused for a moment. The matter had seemed so easy and reasonable when she had revolved it in her mind, yet at this moment of broaching it, she realised, not for the first time, how different he was from other men; how difficult a nameless something about his environment made certain discussions. Nevertheless, she commenced her task.

"Reginald," she began, "do you realise that during the whole of my life I have never dined alone with any other man but you?"

"Nor I, since you came, with any other woman," he rejoined calmly.

"You have some proposition to make?"

She was surprised to find that he had penetrated her thoughts.

"Don't you think, perhaps," she continued, "that we are a little too self-enclosing? Thanks to you, as I always remember, dear, the world has grown a larger place for me, year by year. At first I really tried to avoid friendships. I was perfectly satisfied. I did not need them.

But my work, somehow, has made things different. It has brought me amongst a cla.s.s of people who look upon freedom of intercourse between the s.e.xes as a part of their everyday life. I found a grey hair in my head only the night before last, and do you know how it came? Just by refusing invitations from perfectly harmless people."