The Wicked Marquis Part 53

"He has just told me," she admitted.

"I was the first to find your father dead," he went on. "When I received your letter, Marcia, I took it to him. I went to offer him the sacrifice of my desolation. That, I thought, would end his enmity.

And I read your letter to dead ears. He was seated there, believing that all the evil he wished me had come. I suppose the belief brought him peace. He was a stubborn old man."

Marcia would have spoken, but there was a lump in her throat. She opened her lips only to close them again.

"I wished to see you, Marcia," he continued, "because I wanted you to understand that I have only one feeling in my heart towards you, and that is a feeling of wonderful grat.i.tude. For many years you have been the most sympathetic companion a somewhat dull person could have had.

The memory of these years is imperishable. And I want to tell you something else. In my heart I approve of what you have done."

"Oh, but that is impossible!" she replied. "I cannot keep the bitter thoughts from my own heart. I am ashamed when I think of your kindness, of your fidelity, of all that you have given and done for me throughout these years. And now I have the feeling that I am leaving you when you need me most."

He smiled at her.

"Your knowledge of life," he said gently, "should teach you better.

The years that lay between us when you first gave me all that there was worth having of love in the world were nothing. To-day they are an impa.s.sable gulf. I have reached just those few years which become the aftermath of actual living, and you are young still, young in mind and body. We part so naturally. There is something still alive in you which is dead in me."

"But you are so lonely," she faltered.

"I should be lonelier still," he answered, "or at least more unhappy, if I dragged you with me through the cheerless years. Life is a matter of cycles. You are commencing a new one, and so am I, only the things that are necessary to you are not now necessary to me. So it is natural and best that we should part."

She pointed to the cottage, now only a few yards away. Its doors and windows were wide open, there was smoke coming from the chimney, a wealth of flowers in the garden.

"The cottage is mine," she said. "Sometimes I believe that it was left to me in the hope that I might come back with my heart, too, full of bitterness, and that I might take his place. It is yours whenever you choose to take it. I shall send the deeds to Mr. Merridrew."

He looked at it thoughtfully. For a moment the shadow pa.s.sed from his face. He stood a little more upright, his eyes seemed to grow larger.

Perhaps he thought of those days when he had stolen down from the house with beating heart, drawn nearer and nearer to the cottage, felt all the glow and fervour of his great love. There was a breath of perfume from the garden, full of torturing memories--a little wind in the trees.

"One of the desires of my life gratified," he declared. "Mr. Merridrew shall draw up a deed of sale. Look," he added, pointing to the drive, "there is some one waiting for you in the car there. Isn't it your husband?"

She glanced in the direction he indicated.

"Yes," she murmured.

"I will not stay and see him now," the Marquis continued. "You will forgive me, I know. Present to him, if you will," he went on, with some faint touch of his old manner, "my heartiest good wishes. And to you, Marcia," he added, raising the fingers of her ungloved hand to his lips, "well, may you find all that there is left in the world of happiness. And remember, too, that every drop of happiness that comes into your life means greater peace for me.--We talk too seriously for such a brilliant morning," he concluded, his voice measured, though kindly, his att.i.tude suddenly reminiscent of that long, pictured line of gallant ancestors. "Take my advice and use some of this beautiful afternoon for your ride to London. There will be a moon to-night and you may enter it as the heroine in your last story--a fairy city."

He left her quite easily, but when she tried to start to meet her husband, her knees gave way. She clung to the paling and watched him cross the bridge and stroll up the little strip of turf, still erect, contemplating the great pile in front of him with the beneficent satisfaction of inherited proprietorship. She watched him pa.s.s through the front door and disappear. Then she turned around and drew her husband into the cottage.

"James," she cried, sobbing in his arms, "take me away--please take me away!"

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

During those few hours of strenuous, almost fierce work into which David threw himself after the funeral, he found in a collection of belated cablegrams which his secretary handed him an explanation of Let.i.tia's half apology, an explanation, he told himself bitterly, of her altered demeanour towards him. The old proverb stood justified.

Even this, the wildest of his speculations, had become miraculously successful. Pluto Oil shares, unsalable at a dollar a few weeks ago, now stood at eight. Oil had been discovered in extraordinary and unprecedented quant.i.ties. Oil was spurting another great fortune for him out of the sandy earth. He paused to make a calculation. The Marquis's forty thousand pounds' worth were worth, at a rough estimate, three hundred thousand.

"Extraordinary news, this, Jackson," he remarked to the quiet, sad-faced young man, who had been his right hand since the time of his first railway deal.

"Most extraordinary," was the quiet reply. "I congratulate you, Mr.

Thain. You do seem to have the knack of turning everything you touch into gold."

"Do I?" Thain murmured listlessly.

"I took the liberty of investing in a small parcel of shares myself, just to lock away," the young man continued. "I gave seventy cents for them."

"Not enough to make you a millionaire, I hope?" Thain asked, with some bitterness.

"Enough, with my savings, to give me a very comfortable feeling of independence, sir," Jackson replied. "I have never aspired any further than that."

Thain returned to his desk. He gave letter after letter, and more than once his secretary, who had received no previous intimation of his master's intended departure, glanced at him in mild surprise.

"I presume, as you are returning to the States, sir," he suggested, "that we must try to cancel the contracts which we have already concluded for the restoration of this place?"

Thain shook his head.

"Let them go on," he said. "It makes very little difference. I have a seven years' lease. I may come back again. The letters which I gave you with a cross you had better take into your own study and type. I shall be here to sign them when you have finished."

The young man bowed and departed. David listened to the closing of the door and turned his head a little wearily towards the night. The French windows stood open. Through the still fir trees, whose perfume reached him every now and then in little wafts, he could see one or two of the earlier lights shining from the great house. Once more his thoughts travelled back to the ever-present subject. Could he have done differently? Was there any way in which he could have spared himself the ignominy, the terrible humiliation of those few minutes?

There was something wrong about it all, something almost suicidal--his blind obedience to the old man's prejudiced hatred, his own frenzied tearing to pieces of what might at least have remained a wonderful dream. One half of his efforts, too, had fallen pitifully flat. The Marquis had only to keep the shares to which he was justly ent.i.tled, to free for the first time for generations his far-spreading estates, to take his place once more as the greatest n.o.bleman and landowner in the county. If only it had been the other scheme which had miscarried!

His avenue of elms was sheltering now an orchestra of singing birds.

With the slightly moving breeze which had sprung up since sunset, the perfume of his roses became alluringly manifest. Through the trees he heard the chiming of the great stable clock from Mandeleys, and the sound seemed somehow to torture him. His head drooped for a moment upon his arms.

The room seemed suddenly to become darker. He raised his head and remained staring, like a man who looks upon some impossible vision.

Lady Let.i.tia, bare-headed, a little paler than usual, a little, it seemed to him, more human, was standing there, looking in upon him. He managed to rise to his feet, but he had no words.

"I am not a ghost," she said. "Please come out into the garden. I want to talk to you."

He followed her without a word. It was significant that his first impulse had been to shrink away from her as one dreading to receive a hurt. She seemed to notice it and smiled.

"Let us try and be reasonable for a short time," she continued. "We seem to have been living in some perfectly absurd nightmare for the last few hours. I have come to you to try and regain my poise. Yes, we will sit down--here, please."

They sat in the same chairs which they had occupied on her previous visit. David had been through many crises in his life, but this one left him with no command of coherent speech--left him curiously, idiotically tongue-tied.

"I have thought over this ridiculous affair," she went on. "I must talk about it to some one, and there is only you left."

"Your guests," he faltered.

"Gone!" she told him a little melodramatically. "Didn't you know that we had been alone ever since the morning afterwards? First of all, my almost fianc, Charlie Grantham, drove off at dawn. He left behind him a little note. He had every confidence in me, but--he went. Then my aunt. She was the most peevish person I ever knew. She seemed to imagine that I had in some way interfered with her plans for your subjugation, and although she knew quite well that no woman of the Mandeleys family could ever stoop to any unworthy or undignified action, she decided to hurry her departure. She left at midday."

"But Miss Sylvia?"

"Sylvia was most ingenuous," Let.i.tia continued, her voice regaining a little of its natural quality. "Sylvia came to me quite timidly and asked me to walk with her in the garden. She wondered--was it really settled between me and Lord Charles? If it was, she was quite willing to go into a nunnery or something equivalent,--Chiswick, I believe it was, with a maiden aunt. But if not, she believed--he had whispered a few things to her--he was hoping to see her that week in town. It was most extraordinary---she couldn't understand it--but it seemed that their old flirtations--you knew, of course, that they had met often before--had left a void in his heart which only she could fill. He had discovered his mistake in time. She threw herself upon my mercy. She left by the three-thirty."

"My G.o.d!" he groaned. "And this was all my doing!"

"All your doing," she a.s.sented equably. "They were all of them perfectly content to accept your story. There is not one of them who disputes it for a single moment. But you were there, with the secret door closed behind you, and, as my aunt said, there is really no accounting for what people will do, nowadays. And now," she concluded, "I gather that you are leaving, too."