She tossed up her fan and caught it deftly, and looked to him for admiration. Then, ‘It depends,’ she said. ‘Is it a large claim?’
‘It is a claim — for all I have,’ he answered slowly. It was the first time he had confessed that to any one, except to himself in the night watches.
If he thought to touch her, he succeeded. If he had fancied her unfeeling before, he did so no longer. She was red one minute and pale the next, and the tears came into her eyes. ‘Oh,’ she cried, her breast heaving, ‘you should not have told me! Oh, why did you tell me?’ And she rose hurriedly as if to leave him; and then sat down again, the fan quivering in her hand.
‘But you said you would advise me!’ he answered in surprise.
‘I! Oh, no! no!’ she cried.
‘But you must!’ he persisted, more deeply moved than he would show. ‘I want your advice. I want to know how the case looks to another. It is a simple question. Shall I fight, Julia, or shall I yield to the claim?’
‘Fight or yield?’ she said, her voice broken by agitation. ‘Shall you fight or yield? You ask me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then fight! Fight!’ she answered, with surprising emotion: and she rose again to her feet. And again sat down. ‘Fight them to the last, Sir George!’ she cried breathlessly. ‘Let the creatures have nothing! Not a penny! Not an acre!’
‘But — if it is a righteous claim?’ he said, amazed at her excitement.
‘Righteous?’ she answered passionately. ‘How can a claim be righteous that takes all that a man has?’
He nodded, and studied the road awhile, thinking less of her advice than of the strange fervour with which she had given it. At the end of a minute he was surprised to hear her laugh. He felt hurt, and looked up to learn the reason; and was astounded to find her smiling at him as lightly and gaily as if nothing had occurred to interrupt her most whimsical mood; as if the question he had put to her had not been put, or were a farce, a jest, a mere pastime!
‘Sho, Sir George,’ she said, ‘how silly you must think me to proffer you advice; and with an air as if the sky were falling? Do you forgive me?’
‘I forgive you that,’ Sir George answered. But, poor fellow, he winced under her sudden change of tone.
‘That is well,’ she said confidently. ‘And there again, do you know you are changed; you would not have said that a week ago. I have most certainly improved your manners.’
Sir George made an effort to answer her in the same strain. ‘Well, I should improve,’ he said. ‘I come very regularly to school. Do you know how many days we have sat here, ma belle?’
A faint colour tinged her cheek. ‘If I do not, that dreadful Mr. Thomasson does,’ she answered. ‘I believe he never lets me go out of his sight. And for what you say about days — what are days, or even weeks, when it is a question of reforming a rake, Sir George? Who was it you named to me yesterday,’ she continued archly, but with her eyes on the toe of her shoe which projected from her dress, ‘who carried the gentleman into the country when he had lost I don’t know how many thousand pounds? And kept him there out of harm’s way?’
‘It was Lady Carlisle,’ Sir George answered drily; ‘and the gentleman was her husband.’
It was Julia’s turn to draw figures in the dust of the roadway, which she did very industriously; and the two were silent for quite a long time, while some one’s heart bumped as if it would choke her. At length— ‘He was not quite ruined, was he?’ she said, with elaborate carelessness; her voice was a little thick — perhaps by reason of the bumping.
‘Lord, no!’ said Sir George. ‘And I am, you see.’
‘While I am not your wife!’ she answered; and flashed her eyes on him in sudden petulance; and then, ‘Well, perhaps if my lady had her choice — to be wife to a rake can be no bed of roses, Sir George! While to be wife to a ruined rake — perhaps to be wife to a man who, if he were not ruined, would treat you as the dirt beneath his feet, beneath his notice, beneath—’
She did not seem to be able to finish the sentence, but rose choking, her face scarlet. He rose more slowly. ‘Lord!’ he said humbly, looking at her in astonishment, ‘what has come to you suddenly? What has made you angry with me, child?’
‘Child?’ she exclaimed. ‘Am I a child? You play with me as if I were!’
‘Play with you?’ Sir George said, dumfounded; he was quite taken aback by her sudden vehemence. ‘My dear girl, I cannot understand you. I am not playing with you. If any one is playing, it is you. Sometimes — I wonder whether you hate me or love me. Sometimes I am happy enough to think the one; sometimes — I think the other—’
‘It has never struck you,’ she said, speaking with her head high, and in her harshest and most scornful tone, ‘that I may do neither the one nor the other, but be pleased to kill my time with you — since I must stay here until my lawyer has done his business?’
‘Oh!’ said Soane, staring helplessly at the angry beauty, ‘if that be all—’
‘That is all!’ she cried. ‘Do you understand? That is all.’
He bowed gravely. ‘Then I am glad that I have been of use to you. That at least,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ she said drily. ‘I am going into the house now. I need not trouble you farther.’
And sweeping him a curtsey that might have done honour to a duchess, she turned and sailed away, the picture of disdain. But when her face was safe from his gaze and he could no longer see them, her eyes filled with tears of shame and vexation; she had to bite her trembling lip to keep them back. Presently she slackened her speed and almost stopped — then hurried on, when she thought that she heard him following. But he did not overtake her, and Julia’s step grew slow again, and slower until she reached the portico.
Between love and pride, hope and shame, she had a hard fight; happily a coach was unloading, and she could stand and feign interest in the passengers. Two young fellows fresh from Bath took fire at her eyes; but one who stared too markedly she withered with a look, and, if the truth be told, her fingers tingled for his ears. Her own ears were on the alert, directed backwards like a hare’s. Would he never come? Was he really so simple, so abominably stupid, so little versed in woman’s ways? Or was he playing with her? Perhaps, he had gone into the town? Or trudged up the Salisbury road; if so, and if she did not see him now, she might not meet him until the next morning; and who could say what might happen in the interval? True, he had promised that he would not leave Marlborough without seeing her; but things had altered between them since then.
At last — at last, when she felt that her pride would allow her to stay no longer, and she was on the point of going in, the sound of his step cut short her misery. She waited, her heart beating quickly, to hear his voice at her elbow. Presently she heard it, but he was speaking to another; to a coarse rough man, half servant half loafer, who had joined him, and was in the act of giving him a note. Julia, outwardly cool, inwardly on tenterhooks, saw so much out of the corner of her eye, and that the two, while they spoke, were looking at her. Then the man fell back, and Sir George, purposely averting his gaze and walking like a man heavy in thought, went by her; he passed through the little crowd about the coach, and was on the point of disappearing through the entrance, when she hurried after him and called his name.
He turned, between the pillars, and saw her. ‘A word with you, if you please,’ she said. Her tone was icy, her manner freezing.
Sir George bowed. ‘This way, if you please,’ she continued imperiously; and preceded him across the hall and through the opposite door and down the steps to the gardens, that had once been Lady Hertford’s delight. Nor did she pause or look at him until they were halfway across the lawn; then she turned, and with a perfect change of face and manner, smiling divinely in the sunlight,
‘Easy her motion seemed, serene her air,’
she held out her hand.
‘You have come — to beg my pardon, I hope?’ she said.
The smile she bestowed o
n him was an April smile, the brighter for the tears that lurked behind it; but Soane did not know that, nor, had he known it, would it have availed him. He was utterly dazzled, conquered, subjugated by her beauty. ‘Willingly,’ he said. ‘But for what?’
‘Oh, for — everything!’ she answered with supreme assurance.
‘I ask your divinity’s pardon for everything,’ he said obediently.
‘It is granted,’ she answered. ‘And — I shall see you to-morrow, Sir George?’
‘To-morrow?’ he said. ‘Alas, no; I shall be away to-morrow.’
He had eyes; and the startling fashion in which the light died out of her face, and left it grey and colourless, was not lost on him. But her voice remained steady, almost indifferent. ‘Oh!’ she said, ‘you are going?’ And she raised her eyebrows.
‘Yes,’ he answered; ‘I have to go to Estcombe.’
She tried to force a laugh, but failed. ‘And you do not return? We shall not see you again?’ she said.
‘It lies with you,’ he answered slowly. ‘I am returning to-morrow evening by the Bath road. Will you come and meet me, Julia — say, as far as the Manton turning? It’s on your favourite road. I know you stroll there every evening. I shall be there a little after five. If you come to-morrow, I shall know that, notwithstanding your hard words, you will take in hand the reforming of a rake — and a ruined rake, Julia. If you do not come—’
He hesitated. She had to turn away her head that he might not see the light that had returned to her eyes. ‘Well, what then?’ she said softly.
‘I do not know.’
‘But Lady Carlisle was his wife,’ she whispered, with a swift sidelong shot from eyes instantly averted. ‘And — you remember what you said to me — at Oxford? That if I were a lady, you would make me your wife. I am not a lady, Sir George.’
‘I did not say that,’ Sir George answered quickly.
‘No! What then?’
‘You know very well,’ he retorted with malice.
All of her cheek and neck that he could see turned scarlet. ‘Well, at any rate,’ she said, ‘let us be sure now that you are talking not to Clarissa but to Pamela?’
‘I am talking to neither,’ he answered manfully. And he stood erect, his hat in his hand; they were almost of a height. ‘I am talking to the most beautiful woman in the world,’ he said, ‘whom I also believe to be the most virtuous — and whom I hope to make my wife. Shall it be so, Julia?’
She was trembling excessively; she used her fan that he might not see how her hand shook. ‘I — I will tell you to-morrow,’ she murmured breathlessly. ‘At Manton Corner.’
‘Now! Now!’ he said.
But she cried ‘No, to-morrow,’ and fled from him into the house, deaf, as she passed through the hall, to the clatter of dishes and the cries of the waiters and the rattle of orders; for she had the singing of larks in her ears, and her heart rose on the throb of the song, rose until she felt that she must either cry or die — of very happiness.
CHAPTER XVI
THE BLACK FAN
I believe that Sir George, riding soberly to Estcombe in the morning, was not guiltless of looking back in spirit. Probably there are few men who, when the binding word has been said and the final step taken, do not feel a revulsion of mind, and for a moment question the wisdom of their choice. A more beautiful wife he could not wish; she was fair of face and faultless in shape, as beautiful as a Churchill or a Gunning. And in all honesty, and in spite of the undoubted advances she had made to him, he believed her to be good and virtuous. But her birth, her quality, or rather her lack of quality, her connections, these were things to cry him pause, to bid him reflect; until the thought — mean and unworthy, but not unnatural — that he was ruined, and what did it matter whom he wedded? came to him, and he touched his horse with the spur and cantered on by upland, down and clump, by Avebury, and Yatesbury, and Compton Bassett, until he came to his home.
Returning in the afternoon, sad at starting, but less sad with every added mile that separated him from the house to which he had bidden farewell in his heart — and which, much as he prized it now, he had not visited twice a year while it was his — it was another matter. He thought little of the future; of the past not at all. The present was sufficient for him. In an hour, in half an hour, in ten minutes, he would see her, would hold her hands in his, would hear her say that she loved him, would look unreproved into the depths of her proud eyes, would see them sink before his. Not a regret now for White’s! Or the gaming table! Or Mrs. Cornelys’ and Betty’s! Gone the blasé insouciance of St. James’s. The whole man was set on his mistress. Ruined, he had naught but her to look forward to, and he hungered for her. He cantered through Avebury, six miles short of Marlborough, and saw not one house. Through West Kennet, where his shadow went long and thin before him; through Fyfield, where he well-nigh ran into a post-chaise, which seemed to be in as great a hurry to go west as he was to go east; under the Devil’s Den, and by Clatford cross-lanes, nor drew rein until — as the sun sank finally behind him, leaving the downs cold and grey — he came in sight of Manton Corner.
Then, that no look of shy happiness, no downward quiver of the maiden eyelids might be lost — for the morsel, now it was within his grasp, was one to linger over and dwell on — Sir George, his own eyes shining with eagerness, walked his horse forward, his gaze greedily seeking the flutter of her kerchief or the welcome of her hand. Would she be at the meeting of the roads — shrinking aside behind the bend, her eyes laughing to greet him? No, he saw as he drew nearer that she was not there. Then he knew where she would be; she would be waiting for him on the foot-bridge in the lane, fifty yards from the high-road, yet within sight of it. She would have her lover come so far — to win her. The subtlety was like her, and pleased him.
But she was not there, nor was she to be seen elsewhere in the lane; for this descended a gentle slope until it plunged, still under his eyes, among the thatched roofs and quaint cottages of the village, whence the smoke of the evening meal rose blue among the trees. Soane’s eyes returned to the main road; he expected to hear her laugh, and see her emerge at his elbow. But the length of the highway lay empty before, and empty behind; and all was silent. He began to look blank. A solitary house, which had been an inn, but was now unoccupied, stood in the angle formed by Manton Lane and the road; he scrutinised it. The big doors leading to the stable-yard were ajar; but he looked in and she was not there, though he noted that horses had stood there lately. For the rest, the house was closed and shuttered, as he had seen it that morning, and every day for days past.
Was it possible that she had changed her mind? That she had played or was playing him false? His heart said no. Nevertheless he felt a chill and a degree of disillusion as he rode down the lane to the foot-bridge; and over it, and on as far as the first house of the village. Still he saw nothing of her; and he turned. Riding back his search was rewarded with a discovery. Beside the ditch, at the corner where the road and lane met, and lying in such a position that it was not visible from the highway, but only from the lower ground of the lane, lay a plain black fan.
Sir George sprang down, picked it up, and saw that it was Julia’s; and still possessed by the idea that she was playing him a trick he kissed it, and looked sharply round, hoping to detect her laughing face. Without result; then at last he began to feel misgiving. The road under the downs was growing dim and shadowy; the ten minutes he had lingered had stolen away the warmth and colour of the day. The camps and tree-clumps stood black on the hills, the blacker for the creeping mist that stole beside the river where he stood. In another ten minutes night would fall in the valley. Sir George, his heart sinking under those vague and apparently foolish alarms which are among the penalties of affection, mounted his horse, stood in his stirrups, and called her name— ‘Julia! Julia!’ — not loudly, but so that if she were within fifty yards of him she must hear.
He listened. His ear caught a confused babel of voices in the direction of Marlb
orough; but only the empty house, echoing ‘Julia!’ answered him. Not that he waited long for an answer; something in the dreary aspect of the evening struck cold to his heart, and touching his horse with the spur, he dashed off at a hand-gallop. Meeting the Bristol night-wagon beyond the bend of the road he was by it in a second. Nevertheless, the bells ringing at the horses’ necks, the cracking whips, the tilt lurching white through the dusk somewhat reassured him. Reducing his pace, and a little ashamed of his fears, he entered the inn grounds by the stable entrance, threw his reins to a man — who seemed to have something to say, but did not say it — and walked off to the porch. He had been a fool to entertain such fears; in a minute he would see Julia.
Even as he thought these thoughts, he might have seen — had he looked that way — half a dozen men on foot and horseback, bustling out with lanterns through the great gates. Their voices reached him mellowed by distance; but immersed in thinking where he should find Julia, and what he should say to her, he crossed the roadway without heeding a commotion which in such a place was not unusual. On the contrary, the long lighted front of the house, the hum of life that rose from it, the sharp voices of a knot of men who stood a little on one side, arguing eagerly and all at once, went far to dissipate such of his fears as the pace of his horse had left. Beyond doubt Julia, finding herself in solitude, had grown alarmed and had returned, fancying him late; perhaps pouting because he had not forestalled the time!
But the moment he passed through the doorway his ear caught that buzz of excited voices, raised in all parts and in every key, that betokens disaster. And with a sudden chill at his heart, as of a cold hand gripping it, he stood, and looked down the hall. It was well perhaps that he had that moment of preparation, those few seconds in which to steady himself, before the full sense of what had happened struck him.
The lighted hall was thronged and in an uproar. A busy place, of much coming and going it ever was. Now the floor was crowded in every part with two or three score persons, all speaking, gesticulating, advising at once. Here a dozen men were proving something; there another group were controverting it; while twice as many listened, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, or in their turn dashed into the babel. That something very serious had happened Sir George could not doubt. Once he caught the name of Lord Chatham, and the statement that he was worse, and he fancied that that was it. But the next moment the speaker added loudly, ‘Oh, he cannot be told! He is not to be told! The doctor has gone to him! I tell you, he is worse to-day!’ And this, giving the lie to that idea, revived his fears. His eyes passing quickly over the crowd, looked everywhere for Julia; he found her nowhere. He touched the nearest man on the arm, and asked him what had happened.
Complete Works of Stanley J Weyman Page 307
