by Grant Allen
A faint ray of light broke across Douglas’s brain. Linda, with her frank and unmercenary nature, had evidently never even suspected the fact that any man could want to marry her for her money alone, or even largely for her money. She thought merely ‘he was very much taken with her.’
And so he well might be, Douglas thought to himself as he gazed at her. For if the Duke wanted to marry money, where, on this planet, could he find money combined with so much ability, and freshness, and character, and queenly beauty, as in that incomparable Linda?
‘And you accepted him?’ he repeated slowly twice over to himself. ‘But why, Linda, why did you accept him? Did you love him?’
Linda glanced back at him, frank and fearless as ever.
‘I really don’t know whether I ought to discuss that question with any man except my husband, Mr. Harrison,’ she answered simply; ‘at any rate, I wouldn’t discuss it with any other man on earth but you. I ought, perhaps, to tell you that’s my own affair. But you’ve always been so kind to me — like a brother, in fact — and you know so much about that other matter, that I’d rather tell you the plain truth outright. You were always my father confessor, weren’t you? Well, at first, perhaps, I hardly exactly loved Bertie. I told him so myself. I told him I had once loved another man so much that I never could love anyone else in this world equally. And then he said to me that was no matter; he had love enough for the two. And he pressed me so hard, and was so very attentive and anxious I should take him, that I couldn’t bear to disappoint him. I thought to myself, “Why should I sacrifice my life and all my chances of usefulness in the world to a mere sentiment, for a man whom, though I loved him too much, I now know to have been utterly unworthy of me? Why should I go on nursing a foolish grief for years, as some weak women do, instead of holding up my head in the world, and daring to live it down, and making the best of what is left in life to me?” It had been a cruel blow, as you know, and the marks of it I shall carry about with me as long as I live. I’m not one of those who forget easily. But all the more reason, then, that I should throw it off as much as possible, and do my best to live my life and make myself and others happy. Cecil quite agreed with me, and thought if I married the Duke my time might be of more use and worth to humanity. And, besides, I liked him very much; he was so kind and attentive.... And now I’m married to him, you know, I’m extremely fond of him.’
She spoke with charming candour. In a moment Douglas saw, as if by instinct, exactly how it had happened. After all, there was really no mystery. The Duke, on the look-out for money, had lighted suddenly and unexpectedly on beauty, grace, and character as well. In an unguarded moment he had fallen in love with Linda. He had been specially attentive to her, even in the midst of all that wealthy Duke-worshipping Fifth Avenue society; and Linda herself, being human after all, must have been susceptible to the flattery of being so selected from so many beautiful and attractive girls by the man whom every one of them would gladly have married. He had shown her he loved her, and love and admiration go a very long way with even the best of women. Linda, on her part, had frankly told her suitor the whole truth; and the fact that that truth made no difference to his ardour must have impressed her favourably. At last, half out of pure goodness of heart, half out of growing inclination, she had yielded the point; she had consented to give him her hand, if not her heart; and she had done it, not because he was a Duke at all, but because she believed he loved her and longed for her. She had known what unrequited love meant herself; she would do her best to make up for it to that handsome, fascinating, high-born Englishman. For, indeed, to do the Montgomeries justice, they were all handsome, and all, when they chose, exceedingly fascinating. They might have won a harder heart than Linda’s by judicious pleading. And the Duke had pleaded very hard, no doubt, for, at the moment he married her, he was really in love with her, and he fully appreciated the obvious advantages of combining so admirably a marriage for love with a marriage for money.
And now that she was married, then, she was ‘extremely fond of him’!
CHAPTER XXX.
UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM.
Late that same night the Duke returned in a rather perturbed humour to his temporary home in Onslow Gardens.
The moment he entered Linda saw at once something was the matter. Her husband’s eyes had a queer look about them she had never before noticed. It seemed as though a film had gathered over them externally, through which the man himself gazed out, as it were, with dim and uncertain ken, upon the outer universe. His cheek was pale, and his mouth shut hard, like one who means to keep his own counsel. The whole expression of his face shocked and alarmed her.
‘Why, where have you been, Bertie?’ she asked with some anxiety, as he entered the drawing-room, and flung himself down like a log upon the sofa.
‘At the club,’ her husband answered curtly, shutting his lips hard once more, and with the glaze in his eyes growing deeper and more inscrutable.
‘At what club?’ Linda asked, for she had learned already to discriminate between those houses of entertainment.
‘My club,’ the Duke replied, in the settled voice of one who closes a discussion. And then Linda knew, with a little tremor of her heart, he had been to the Die and Hazard.
‘Bertie, you’ve played!’
‘I didn’t say I hadn’t.’
‘Have you lost much?’
‘I didn’t say I’d lost anything.’
Linda came over to him with a gesture of wifely horror.
‘And you promised me you wouldn’t play again!’ she cried, in a disappointed tone.
‘I promised you I wouldn’t play high,’ the Duke retorted, fumbling uneasily at his watch-chain. ‘Not to play at all, for a man in my position, would be simply impossible. Everybody plays when he goes to the club. And I didn’t mean to play high ... at first, at any rate. It was only after the stakes got up bit by bit that the fellows there drew me seriously into it.’
Linda gazed at him in horror.
‘How much have you lost, dear?’ she asked, bewildered.
The Duke replied by a still blanker stare. He fixed his eyes on her long, like one astonished at a piece of incredible impertinence. Then he rose and rang the bell.
‘I want a brandy and soda,’ he answered coldly.
If she was going to keep a check upon his spending in this way — there was no other course possible — she must be promptly demolished.
That moment a blank horror seemed to seize upon Linda’s soul. It came across her in a flash. After all, had she thrown herself away, out of pure good nature, on a commonplace, gambling, fast English gentleman?
Tears rose slowly, one by one, to her eyes, but she said never a word. She was unaccustomed to such treatment, and knew not how to meet it. She merely threw herself down on the other end of the sofa, and waited till his brandy and soda was brought up by the servant.
The Duke drank it off at a single long pull. It was a stiff glass, and Linda shuddered to see it. Then he leaned back in his place, stuck his hands deep in his pockets, and pushed his legs apart in a despondent attitude.
‘Where did you go this morning?’ he asked aggressively. ‘I happened to inquire of Blake where he’d driven you to-day — purely by accident — and he said her grace had made a long call at a small house in a back street in Bloomsbury. What the dickens did he mean? He grinned when he said it; and I gave the fellow a look that’ll cure him of grinning in future, I fancy. But I’d like to know, all the same, what there was in the house for that confounded image to snigger and grin at.’
Linda paused a second. Guileless and frank as she was, she yet felt that it was an unfortunate moment for him to put such a question. Then she answered quietly, ‘I drove to Clandon Street, where Cecil and I used to live together before we went to America. I wanted to call upon some dear old friends of mine there.’
The Duke turned round to her with an insolent look. He had been hard hit that night at baccarat — very hard hit — and, besides bei
ng angry for his loss, and feeling foolish at having gambled away what was, after all, Linda’s money, he wanted to find some fair excuse which might cover his ill-humour. ‘Look here, Linda,’ he said in a somewhat irritable voice, ‘I don’t want to interfere between you and your friends in any way, of course; but, still, I should imagine the less you see of people who live in back streets in Bloomsbury, the better — eh! don’t you think so?’
‘No, I don’t, Bertie,’ Linda answered quietly, but with some internal trembling. ‘I can never give up my dear old friends whom I knew long ago, whatever may happen. I should be ashamed of myself if I were ashamed of them. And besides, in this case, there’s nothing on earth for anyone to be ashamed of.’
‘Oh! who was your friend then?’ the Duke asked pointedly, with just the faintest suspicion of a suppressed sneer.
‘Mr. Douglas Harrison,’ Linda responded, unabashed. ‘You must remember having met him at the Hurst Croft theatricals. He’s brother of Mr. Harrison who’s just been elected member of Parliament for South Hampstead, and who’s going to marry Sabine Venables.’
The Duke started and stared at her; his manner altered. ‘Oh, a gentleman!’ he replied with a certain frigid surprise. ‘That’s quite another matter. I imagined you’d been to see some of your women acquaintances — some amiable old lady of the tabby cat order. But it seems I was mistaken. We men are so innocent! And you say this man Harrison lives in the house in Bloomsbury where you and your brother used to live formerly. Mysterious, to be sure! I ... I don’t quite understand it.’
‘He has lived there for years,’ Linda answered, flushing up. ‘He was our tenant, you know. I thought you knew about it, Bertie; I told you so in New York. I told you we used to let part of our house, didn’t I?’
An unexpected light burst in upon the Duke. He could hardly frame the proposition in words, so much did it disturb his fluttered equanimity; but he was almost forced to do so by a devouring curiosity. ‘You don’t mean to imply, Linda,’ he cried, ‘that you — eh — excuse my saying it, but that you actually let lodgings?’
‘Why, certainly I did,’ Linda answered, not in the least disconcerted, being unable for her part to see anything to be ashamed of in so honest an occupation. ‘I fancied you understood as much when I spoke to you at New York about the matter.’
The Duke leaned back again, stuck his legs out still straighter, and shut his eyes for a moment. This discovery had stunned him — it was too much for a Montgomery to take in at a single hearing. He hardly knew how to comport himself under such novel, such astounding circumstances. Beer he knew, and banking he knew, but how about lodgings? Electric motors, and oil wells, and founders’ shares, and ranches, he could swallow easily enough — they were part of the established routine of business as revealed to his experience — but furnished apartments for gentlemen were a problem in life he had never before been called upon to grapple with.
‘It’s very disconcerting,’ he said at last, after a long pause. ‘I don’t quite take it in. Were there many of these lodgers? Is one liable to have them sprung upon one by instalments at every street corner in London, so to speak?’
Linda laughed in spite of herself. ‘Oh dear no!’ she answered, with some amusement. ‘People who came to our lodgings once always stayed for ever. We had only three sets, all told, in my time; the first two sets stopped on till they died — they were both old ladies — and the third set was Mr. Harrison.’
‘The member and his brother?’
Linda hesitated a moment. ‘The brother, not the member,’ she answered a little nervously, after a short pause.
‘But you implied there were at least two,’ the Duke went on, looking hard in her face. ‘A set means several.’
Linda winced. It was hateful to her to be so cross-questioned, especially on such a subject; but to decline to answer her husband altogether would be equivalent to giving up her own secret. ‘Yes, there were two,’ she said, in a low voice, at last; ‘Mr. Douglas Harrison and Mr. Basil Maclaine, of the Board of Trade, whom we met at Lady Simpson’s that night, you remember.’
‘I remember,’ the Duke repeated, less pleased than ever. ‘I knew him before. A conceited snob! And you went to Bloomsbury, then, to see these two men, Linda?’
His face was black now, and he was getting very angry.
Linda hesitated once more. ‘Not two,’ she said, after a second short pause. ‘One only, Mr. Harrison.’
The Duke looked her through and through with a piercing glance. The glaze seemed to have disappeared from his eyes by this time, and a strange light gleamed in its place from his pupils. ‘Then it was this man Harrison,’ he said in a slow emphatic way, like one who reads another’s mind at sight, ‘you were once so fond of.’
‘No, it was not,’ Linda answered promptly. ‘If it had been, I would never have gone. I’d have stopped away. I don’t desire to see that man again. It was not Mr. Harrison.’
She rose as if to go; but her husband, springing up, seized her wrist in his hand, with no unnecessary violence, and seated her once more, gently though firmly, in her place on the sofa. ‘Not yet,’ he said with calm decision. ‘I want to get to the bottom of this Bloomsbury business now we’ve once started it. You went to see Harrison, then. Now, why did you want to see him?’
‘Because he’s a very dear old friend of mine,’ Linda answered, with a round red spot burning bright in the middle of her cheek; ‘and when all that happened that I told you about, he was very, very kind to me.’
‘So he knew about all that?’ her husband asked again, standing over her watchfully.
‘Yes, he knew about all that,’ Linda assented, with a pang, feeling she had given him one clue too many; for, if possible, she would still have wished to guard her own secret.
‘And it was the other one you were in love with?’ her husband went on, with a touch of scorn in his voice. ‘That confounded cur! Linda, if you hadn’t as good as acknowledged it yourself, I could hardly have believed it. A woman like you in love with that Brummagem Maclaine fellow!’
The spot in Linda’s cheek burned brighter than ever. She felt in her own heart that Bertie was right. Basil Maclaine had never been a fit mate for her. And yet it made her vexed to hear Bertie speak so of him. She felt, in some dim unacknowledged way, it was constructively contemptuous to herself and her order; and that was a sort of insult Linda could never have brooked, even from her husband.
‘I took my affections in my own hand,’ she answered gravely, with some old-fashioned stateliness of manner. ‘I asked nobody else’s approval. He sufficed for me then, and that was all I cared about. I found out afterwards how unworthy he was of me.’
The Duke rose, and moved half angrily towards the door.
‘Well, I know who it was now, anyhow, and I can govern myself accordingly,’ he said with warmth, a deep undercurrent of the hereditary Montgomery jealousy giving some rasping hoarseness to the tones of his voice. ‘I shall remember with whom I have to deal in future in this matter. I should have thought you would have consulted better your own dignity as a woman, and your own position as my wife, if you had avoided altogether your friends at the lodging-house. You appear to have felt otherwise. I suppose by this time this disgraceful story of the way you became acquainted with Maclaine and Harrison, and the way you fell in love with the man who refused to marry you, is all over every club in London. Everybody but myself has, no doubt, heard of it. If you’d told me all this earlier, we might have avoided complications. As it is, you’ve dragged the pride of the Montgomeries in the mud by going back as a Duchess to the rooms where you used once to rub your hands as a landlady. This is intolerable — intolerable! I should have given you credit for better taste and more common-sense. It seems I was mistaken. Good-evening, Duchess.’
Linda started up in an agony of horror.
‘Bertie, Bertie!’ she cried, running after him, all the woman within her aroused at last. ‘What do you mean by this? Are you going to your room without even kissing
me?’
‘No,’ the Duke answered, turning round to her with a stern and deadly white face. ‘I’m going back to finish up the evening at the Die and Hazard.’
CHAPTER XXXI.
FRICTION.
From that evening forth things ran less smoothly in the hired house in Onslow Gardens. There was obviously something wrong with the works. The Duke went down oftener and oftener by night to the Die and Hazard, and, though he never said so at first to Linda, lost more and more heavily with continuous ill chance to his fellow-clubmen. Luck went against him. Baccarat or lansquenet, roulette or blind poker, it was all one: losses, losses, losses. Not that he had much cash of his own to play with; Cecil had taken care that Linda’s money should be strictly settled upon herself; and though he had allowed a large lump sum down to extricate the Duke from his current difficulties, he had firmly set his face, like a sensible business man that he was, against permitting Linda’s husband to squander away at will her future income. So the Duke had to play for the most part on imaginary hundreds; and ‘Powysland paper’ began to be as familiar an object of quotation in the smoking-room of the Die as Bertie Montgomery’s had been at an earlier stage of his existence in the same exalted chamber. The more he played, the more deeply involved the Duke became. The bad luck of the Montgomeries seemed to pursue him throughout. He floundered at last in a perfect slough of complicated embarrassments, and was at once too proud and too nervous to ask his wife’s assistance in disentangling him once for all from his intricate engagements.
The Montgomery jealousy, too, was aroused every whit as much as the Montgomery love of high play. Linda grew gradually and shamefully aware of the disgraceful fact that her husband was watching her. His first outburst of affection was cooling down now, and he was reaching the second stage of married life with men of his type — the stage in which hatred and fear of a rival begin to usurp the place of actual love for the woman they have chosen. This new cancerous growth seemed to spread apace, like some huge shapeless fungus, through the Duke’s brain. Though he spoke of it to no one, it entered into the very marrow of his bones, and filled the larger part of his waking thoughts from morning to night. He escaped from it for awhile to play — to play and lose; and then returned again to lie awake in his bed all night and think of it. Even before, this hateful feeling had begun to rise in his breast; it was characteristic of the Montgomeries that, as soon as their passion for a woman was once gratified and their point carried, a reaction set in, and jealousy alone remained of what had once been desire and worship. But since the Duke had learned the true facts about Basil Maclaine and Douglas Harrison, his fiery emotion knew no bounds. He was devoured and consumed by the eternal flame. He ate his own heart out with suspicious watchfulness.
