The Wicked Marquis Part 30

"Get away quickly, please," she implored him. "Don't talk to me, James. Outside the gates as quickly as you can go!"

He started his engine, and they drove off, through the lodge gates into the country lane, where the hedges were beautiful with fresh green foliage and fragrant with early honeysuckle.

"To London," she begged. "Don't stop--anywhere yet."

He nodded and drove a little faster, his eyes always upon the road. It was not until they had reached the heath country and the great open s.p.a.ces around Newmarket that a little colour came back into her cheeks.

"It wasn't a success, James," she said quietly.

"I was afraid it mightn't be," he admitted.

"Nothing but a Drury Lane heroine would have moved him," she went on, with an uneasy little laugh. "If I could have gone back in rags, in a snowstorm, with a child in my arms, he'd have forgiven me. As I am now, I am an offence to all that he holds right, and his ideas are like steel cables--you can't twist or bend them."

Borden nodded. He relaxed his speed a little and glanced towards his companion.

"You know what our friend said in that Russian ma.n.u.script I lent you,"

he reminded her: "'The primitive laws are for the primitive world.'"

"But what do we learn, Jim?" she asked him tremulously. "What is its value? Is it sophistry or knowledge? I lived in that little cottage once. I have smiled at the memory of those days so often. I did homely tasks and dreamed of books and learning. To me it seems, although my fingers are bleeding, that I have climbed. And to him--and he looked just like something out of the Bible, Jim--I am nothing more--"

"Don't," he interrupted. "He is of his world and you of yours. You can't work out the sum you are trying to solve, there isn't any common denominator."

"I don't know," she answered, a little pitifully. "There was a single second, as I saw him sitting there with his Bible on his knee and remembered that he was a clean, well-living, honest man, when my heart began to shake. I remembered that he was my father. It seems to me that it is all wrong that there should be any difference between us. I suddenly felt that a brain really didn't count for anything, after all, that all the culture in the world wasn't so beautiful as a single right feeling."

He slackened again the speed of the car. As far as they could see was a great open s.p.a.ce of moorland, with flaming bushes of yellow gorse, little clumps of early heather, and, in the distance, a streak of blue from the undergrowth of a long belt of firs. She looked about her for a moment and closed her eyes.

"There," he said, "is one of the simplest phases of beauty, the world has ever given us--flowers and trees, an open s.p.a.ce and a west wind.

There isn't any one who can look at these things and be happy who isn't somewhere near the right path, Marcia."

She leaned back, her eyes fixed dreamily upon the blue distance.

"Just drive on, please, Jim," she begged.

CHAPTER XXI

David ate his three cutlets and, both as regards appet.i.te and in other ways, was a great success at the little luncheon party. Afterwards, they finished the bottle of Marsala under a cedar tree, and whilst the Colonel indulged in reminiscences, Sylvia's eyes rested more than once upon the automobile drawn up before the door. It was quite an adventure in her rather humdrum life, and, after all, there was no reason why a fairy prince shouldn't be an American millionaire and come in a Rolls-Royce.

"I am sure I hope you'll like Broomleys, Mr. Thain," the Colonel said, as David rose to make his adieux. "I am delighted to leave the place in the hands of such a good tenant. It makes one almost sorry to go away when one realises what one is missing in the shape of neighbours, eh, Sylvia?"

Sylvia was unaccountably shy, but she raised her eyes to David's for a moment.

"It is most disappointing," she agreed. "Mr. Thain is such a sympathetic shopper."

David drove off a little gloomily.

"Why the devil couldn't I fall in love with a nice girl like that," he muttered to himself, "instead of--"

He pulled up short, set his heel upon that other vision, and braced himself for the immediate task before him. He drove around the park, drew up outside the cottage, and, descending from the car, approached the low hedge. At the further end of the garden he could hear his uncle's sonorous voice. He was seated in a high-backed chair, the Bible upon his knee, reading to himself slowly and with great distinctness the Ten Commandments. On the ground by his side were the remnants of another chair. As David came up the little path, his uncle concluded his reading and laid down the Bible.

"Bring out a chair and sit with me, David," he invited.

David pointed to the ground.

"Your furniture seems--"

"Don't jest," his uncle interrupted. "That chair I have broken to pieces with my own hands because of the woman who sat upon it not many hours since."

David frowned.

"You mean Marcia?"

"I mean Marcia--the woman who was my daughter," was the stern reply, "the woman of whose visit you warned me."

"Come into the house with me," David begged, turning his back upon Mandeleys. "You sit and look at that great drear building and brood overmuch. I want to talk with you."

Richard Vont rose obediently to his feet and followed his visitor into the little parlour. David looked around him curiously.

"This place seems to have the flavour of many years ago," he said.

"Sometimes I can scarcely realise that I have ever eaten my meals off that oak table. Sometimes it seems like yesterday."

"Time pa.s.ses, but time don't count for much," the old man sighed.

"Mary Wells will be up from the village soon, and she'll make us a cup of tea. Sit opposite me, lad. Is there any more news?"

"None!"

"Them shares, for instance?"

"There will be no change in them," David replied. "In two months' time he will know it."

"And he'll have forty thousand pounds to find, eh?--forty thousand pounds which he will never be able to raise!" Richard Vont muttered, his eyes curiously bright. "There isn't an acre of land here that isn't mortgaged over and over again."

"You'll make him a bankrupt, I suppose," David said thoughtfully.

"Ay, a bankrupt!" his uncle repeated, lingering over the word with a fierce joy. "But there's something more as'll fall to your lot, David," he went on,--"something more--and the time's none so far off."

David moved in his chair uneasily.

"Something more?"

"Ay, ay!" the old man a.s.sented. "You'll find it hard, my boy, but you'll keep your word. You've got that much of the Vonts in your blood. Your word's a bond with you."

"Tell me," David begged, "about that something more?"

"The time's not yet," his uncle replied. "You shall know, lad, in good season."

David was silent for a moment, filled with nameless and displeasing apprehensions. He was brave enough, prepared to meet any ordinary emergency, but somehow or other the vagueness of the task which lay before him seemed appalling. Outside was Mandeleys, a grim and silent remembrance. Inside the cottage everything seemed to speak of changeless times. The pendulum of the tall clock swung drowsily, as it had swung thirty years ago. The pictures on the wall were the same, the china, the furniture, even its arrangement. And the man who sat in his easy-chair was the same, only that his whiskers and hair were white where once they had been black.