by Grant Allen
For her own part, Psyche had never the courage to hear from Linnell’s own lips the true story of that terrible ride for life across the burning desert, and the catastrophe which had wrought them both so much untold misery. But Haviland Dumaresq and Cyrus Vanrenen heard it all the very next day, in the garden at the Orangers, while Psyche sat happy in the tennis-ground below, with Sirena’s hand twined in hers gratefully. They heard how Linnell, in his last extremity, escaping from the camp with his cousin Sir Austen, had been intercepted on the open by a strong body of robber Touaregs, not far from Hassiou, the very spot where, a few years earlier, Colonel Flatters and his French expedition had all been massacred in cold blood. Sir Austen, whose camel was less fleet than Linnell’s, seeing the outlaws approach, had urged his cousin to fly at all speed and leave him to his fate; but the painter, incapable of deserting his tried companion after so many dangers faced and escaped together, had turned to his aid, and in his fluent Arabic endeavoured to parley with their savage assailants. The Touaregs, however, cared but little for either Christian or Moslem. They fired upon Sir Austen, who fell from his seat; and they left him dead in the night on the open sand. Then, hacking down Linnell himself with their short swords, they went off with the camels, so that the artist found himself alone in the desert, without food or money, to die of hunger and loss of blood, or be devoured, half dead, by the clanging vultures.
Haviland Dumaresq shuddered as he heard the tale. ‘Never tell Psyche,’ he cried, with his hands clasped tight. ‘She’s suffered enough, and more than enough, already. To know how you, too, suffered would wring her poor heart. But what did you do then? How did you finally get across to Ouargla?’
‘I was left on the sands alone,’ Linnell answered briefly, ‘with my cousin’s body lying dead before me. A horrible terror seized me lest the caravan we had just left should come up and overtake us, in which case our sheikh would of course have finished killing what little was left of me. I was faint from my wounds and loss of blood. But there was only myself to do all that need be done. With my own hands, there in the open plain, I scooped a hole in the hot, hot sand, and covered his body over with it decently. After that, I set out all alone to walk northward. The loss of blood had left me very faint: so, crawling and straggling, I hardly know how, failing at times, and dying of thirst, but enduring still — because I wanted to get back at last, for Psyche’s sake — I made my way towards Algeria. After two days’ floundering alone through the bare sand, dazed and stunned, and half dead with fever, I lay down to die. Just then, a caravan belonging to the Khalifa of Ouargla, who is a French dependent, came by within sight. I signalled with my handkerchief. They picked me up. I promised them money if they took me with them; and they brought me on to their own oasis, where the White Brothers, as you know, generously took charge of me and tended me carefully. But don’t ask me any more at present. I can’t bear to talk of it: I can’t bear to think of it. The picture of that poor fellow lying bleeding and dead in the midst of the desert, with the lonely silent sand spreading wide all around, and the blazing sun hanging all day long in the hot gray sky overhead, haunts me still, and will haunt me for ever, till the day I die, with its horrible presence.’
When he finished his story, Cyrus drew a deep sigh of regret. He was glad Miss Dumaresq should have her lover back again; but he did wish events at Cincinnati had permitted him to stop and see her made into a real live baroness. For Cyrus’s views on the intricacies of British nomenclature in the matter of titles were as vague as those generally current in the newspaper press of his benighted fatherland.
CHAPTER XLIV.
‘ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.’
Next day, at the Orangers, Cyrus Vanrenen, with a little stifled sigh of regret, announced his intention of proceeding to Marseilles within forty-eight hours, en route for Amurrica, taking Sirena and Corona, in his own words, ‘along with him’ on his journey.
Psyche looked up as he spoke, with an astonished air. She liked Cyrus, and was grieved to think her happiness, as she imagined, should have brought about so sudden a determination on the young American’s part. ‘Why so soon, Mr. Vanrenen?’ she asked in surprise. ‘You surely meant to stop here the rest of the season, didn’t you?’
Cyrus hesitated for a few seconds. ‘Well, when a man’s ruined, you see,’ he said, after a short pause, ‘I guess it’s about pretty nearly time for him to be moving off home to look about his business. In Amurrica, Miss Dumaresq, when an operator loses one fortune on a throw — why, he begins to think seriously in his own mind about piling up another.’
‘Ruined!’ Psyche exclaimed in the utmost dismay. ‘Lost a fortune! Oh, Mr. Vanrenen, you never told us!’
‘Well, there!’ Sirena put in, with a little deprecating wave of forgetfulness. ‘I do declare! what a giddy girl I am! Why, Psyche, we’ve had such a lot to think about, last few days, if it hasn’t completely slipped my memory to speak about Cyrus having dropped his fortune! He’s had losses in business, home, you know — very serious losses. He’ll have to go back to start things afresh; and Corona and I must go, too, to help poor momma.’
Corona heaved a gentle sigh regretfully. ‘It’s come at a most awkward moment, too,’ she said. ‘It would have been real nice, now, if Sirena and I could only have been bridesmaids — wouldn’t it, Reeney?’
Psyche blushed crimson. As a matter of fact, so far as she had yet been officially informed, there was nobody’s wedding just then in contemplation. But Sirena, paying no attention to her obvious embarrassment, continued placidly to debate that subject of perennial interest to women. ‘So it would,’ she echoed; ‘and Corona and I’d have been real glad to be able to give you a proper sort of present. But that’s all past now, unfortunately, till Cyrus can scrape up another little pile again. Corona and I had all our own money staked, of course, on Cyrus’s operations. It’s just downright annoying, that’s what I call it, at such a moment. I should have liked folks in Cincinnati to see in the Observer I’d been acting bridesmaid at a regular aristocratic British wedding.’
‘Couldn’t you arrange it pretty soon, Sir Austen, so as Sirena and I might stop for the ceremony?’ Corona continued, looking across the table candidly at Linnell, whose awkwardness almost equalled Psyche’s own. ‘You’ll be married here before the Consul, of course; and Sirena and I would just love to assist at it. It’d be something to talk about when we got back to Amurrica.’
‘Oh, don’t, dear, please!’ Psyche whispered in an agony of shame, squeezing Corona’s arm hard with an expressive pressure. ‘But it isn’t really so serious as all that, Mr. Vanrenen, is it? You’ve not had any very bad reverses, have you?’
‘Well, not more serious than being left in the world with the cash I have in hand and the clothes I stand up in,’ Cyrus answered good-humouredly. ‘The trouble is, I don’t see now how we’re to get back at all, if we don’t get back right off, as we are, before we’ve spent the last dollar in our pockets. Much as I should like to risk my end cent in seeing Miss Dumaresq comfortably married, Sir Austen, I kind of feel there ain’t the same chance for a man like me of making another pile here in Algiers that there is home in Cincinnati. Africa don’t offer the same scope for an operator’s enterprise as Amurrica, anyhow.’
That same afternoon Geraldine Maitland came over to see them. It was not without regret that Cyrus led that very high-toned young lady to a secluded seat at the far end of the garden, for a last interview. Now that the moment had actually come for parting for ever, Cyrus was conscious in his own mind how great a strain that wrench would cost him. ‘Miss Maitland,’ he said, blurting it out like a schoolboy, ‘I wanted to see you alone a bit before I went. I’m off by to-morrow’s boat to Marseilles on my way to America.’ He said America, and not Amurrica. Before Geraldine’s face, he had schooled himself now with great difficulty to the slenderer and thinner Britannic pronunciation.
Geraldine started, and her eyes fell. ‘To America!’ she echoed, with obvious regret. ‘Is it so serious as th
at, then? And we won’t see you this side any more, Mr. Vanrenen?’
‘Well,’ Cyrus answered candidly, ‘not till I’ve made another pile, any way. Things look bad, I don’t deny. We’re dead broke, my partner and I — that’s where it is, Miss Maitland.’ He drew a long breath. ‘But I confess, though I don’t so much mind the worry, I’m sorry to go just now,’ he continued more earnestly. ‘You see, the girls ‘ud have dearly liked to stop a bit over here for Miss Dumaresq’s wedding.’
Geraldine’s eyes were fixed on the path, and her parasol described aimless arcs among the small gravel. ‘I’m sorry too, Mr. Vanrenen,’ she said at last frankly.
‘You are?’ Cyrus cried, brightening up at her sympathy.
‘Very,’ Geraldine replied, drawing a larger and completer circle than any yet, and then dividing it into four quarters with a painful display of minute accuracy.
Cyrus gazed at her with undisguised admiration. ‘Why, that’s real kind of you,’ he said gratefully. ‘You’ve been good to me most always, I’m sure, Miss Maitland, and you’re good to me now, to the last, much more than I expected.’
‘When wasn’t I good to you?’ Geraldine asked, turning round upon him half fiercely with flashing eyes. Cyrus was too afraid to look her straight in the face, or he might have seen that small beads of dew glistened with a tremulous moisture upon the lashes.
‘Well, as I said before, it ain’t any use crying for the moon,’ he replied evasively, twirling his stick; ‘but I did think once — —’ He broke off suddenly. ‘Say, Miss Maitland,’ he went on again, after a catch in his breath, on a new tack this time: ‘do you know what I’ll be sorriest to leave behind, when I go to-morrow, of all the people and things I’ve seen in Europe — or rather in Africa?’
‘Yes,’, Geraldine answered, with unexpected boldness; ‘I know exactly.’
‘Well, it’ll cost me a wrench,’ Cyrus said with manful resolution.
‘Why make the wrench at all?’ Geraldine murmured low; and then blushed bright red at her own audacity.
Cyrus glanced back at her, half puzzled, half overjoyed. She was making the running for him now, and no mistake.
‘Well, it can’t be helped,’ he mused on slowly. ‘There’s no way out of it. I’ve got to go. I’ve got to leave it, cost me what it will. I can’t earn my living, don’t you see, anywhere but in America.’
‘I meant,’ Geraldine said, uprooting a pebble with the parasol end, and egging it hard out of its nest sideways, ‘why not take it, whatever it may be — along with you — to America?’
Cyrus glanced sharply round at her in almost speechless surprise.
‘Well, I do admire at you, Miss Maitland!’ he ejaculated, with a sudden burst of joy. ‘But there must be some mistake somewhere. I haven’t a cent now to keep a wife upon.’
Geraldine took his hand in hers spontaneously. Her genuine emotion excused the action.
‘Mr. Vanrenen,’ she said softly, ‘I don’t care a pin for that. I like you dearly. I always liked you. I was always fond of you. I was always proud of the way you thought of me. But I wouldn’t accept you — because of your money. I didn’t want anybody to have it to say — as all the world would have said — that I’d set my cap at a rich American. So, in spite of mamma, I wouldn’t take you. But that day, you remember, when the telegram came from your partner in America, and you behaved so beautifully and so heroically and all that — never thinking of yourself, but only of Psyche, and forgetting your own trouble so bravely in hers, and doing your best for Sirena and Corona — why, that day, I’m not ashamed to say it, I loved you, Cyrus. And I said to myself, “If Cyrus asks me” — for I always call you “Cyrus” in my own heart — —’
The young man looked back into her face with shy delight.
‘Miss Maitland — —’ he began.
But she checked him with a little imperious gesture.
‘Geraldine, you mean,’ she corrected pettishly.
‘Well, then, Geraldine — if I may dare,’ the young man repeated, all aglow with joy. ‘I don’t know how to take this honour upon me; and I don’t know how to say I can’t marry you. You make my heart go too hard to think. But it wants thinking out. A week or two ago I’d have given thousands to hear it. But now I haven’t got thousands to give: I know I can’t keep you as you’re used: I can’t keep you anyhow, if it comes to that. Whatever I’ve got is all my creditors’. But never mind! I’m the proudest and happiest man alive in all Africa this minute, if you really mean to tell me you’d let me marry you. And if you’ll stick to it, Geraldine — there, I don’t feel I’ve got any right to call you so, you’re always so high-toned — I’ll go back home to America right away, and I’ll work like a slave, day and night, till I’ve heaped another pile as big as the first to come again to Europe and offer you.’
Geraldine was holding his hand convulsively now.
‘No, Cyrus,’ she said shortly. ‘That won’t do, either. I don’t want that. I want to go with you.’
‘You can’t!’ Cyrus cried in a burst of despair. ‘I’d cut off my right hand to make it possible, if I could; but there’s no way out. Why, Geraldine, I’m almost ashamed to say it even to you, but I shouldn’t have the funds in hand to pay your passage across the water.’
Geraldine clung to him with a half-timid boldness.
‘But I can’t let you go,’ she said, holding his hand tight. ‘Cyrus, I love you. I’d never have married you then, when you were rich. I’ll work my fingers to the bone for you now you’re poor. I’ll live on anything we two can make. I’ll starve, if you like. But I can’t let you go alone. I must go with you.’
Cyrus soothed her hand between his own caressingly, and raised it with true Western chivalry to his lips.
‘You shall,’ he answered, making a bold, wild shot. ‘Geraldine, we’ll manage it, if we have to go steerage. I never felt so proud in all my life before. I don’t know where I’m standing when you tell me you love me.’
What further might have happened at that precise and critical moment, history trembles to say: had it not been that just as Cyrus dropped Geraldine’s hand, and leant forward with some apparent intention of sealing his compact by more vigorous measures (which the present chronicler declines to mention), Sirena rushed up, all hot and breathless, and threw an envelope into his lap with a penitent air of sudden recollection.
‘Say, Cy,’ she cried, in a somewhat panting voice, ‘I’m so sorry I forgot it! It’s all my fault. I meant to have mailed it to meet you at Constantine; and I put it into an envelope for you just like you see it; but it came that day, you know, when Psyche was so ill, so I stuck it right there into my pocket without thinking; and from that moment to this I utterly forgot all about it. Just now on the tennis-court I pulled out my handkerchief; and there the envelope dropped out, sure enough, after lying all that time in my pocket still, for I haven’t worn this dress before since the morning it came: and I’m real sorry, but I hope the telegram ain’t a very important one.’
Cyrus unfolded it and glanced at its contents in profound astonishment. As he read, he whistled.
‘It’s from the old man, Sirena,’ he murmured, amazed. ‘Just look what he says! One can hardly believe it!’
Sirena took the paper and read it aloud:
‘First wire premature. Jay Gould taken over affairs. The squeeze has burst. Ring operations liquidated at par. Fifth National Bank set up square on its legs again. Panic allayed. Business easy. The old house as solid and firm as ever. Hooray!
‘Eselstein.’
‘Why, what does it all mean?’ Geraldine asked feebly, failing to take in the strange Occidentalisms of the telegram all at once.
‘It means, my dear, Cy’s as rich a man as ever he was a month back,’ Sirena answered, delighted, grasping at the full sense with Western quickness. ‘And, say, Corona,’ as her sister and Psyche came up unexpectedly, ‘ain’t it just fine? We can stay, after all, to see Psyche married.’
Geraldine’s face grew sudd
enly flushed.
‘And so you’re really rich again — Mr. Vanrenen?’ she murmured.
‘Well, that don’t tell against me, anyhow, does it?’ Cyrus asked, crestfallen, with a somewhat anxious and half-regretful look.
‘Not now,’ Geraldine answered, a little faintly, though not without a tinge of disappointment in her voice. ‘Only — I’d rather, you know, if it could have been managed, it had been the other way.’
Psyche looked across at her friend with a puzzled look. But Corona took in the true state of affairs at once with prompter womanly instinct.
‘I guess, Sirena,’ she observed philosophically, glancing quickly from one blushing girl to the other, ‘we two’ll be bridesmaids at both these weddings.’
The Duchess of Powysland
The Duchess of Powysland first appeared as a serialisation in People in 1891 and demonstrates Allen’s ability to write in yet another genre — this time a high-society story with a complicated, yet unlikely plot. The narrative involves the shrewd and beautiful Linda Figgins, a lodging-house landlady, whose brother Cecil is a talented engineer. Together, they make a fortune in America from Cecil’s inventions and so Linda becomes a Duchess by marrying the dissolute, crazed Bertie Montgomery, Duke of Powysland. The Duke, depressed by gambling debts and suspecting his wife, kills himself with morphine, laying the blame on her… A courtroom drama soon follows.
The first edition’s title page
CONTENTS
VOLUME I.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
