Mr. Incoul's Misadventure. Saltus Edgar
of life. It was the post tenebras, lux. And what a light! The incandescence of unexpected hope. A cataract of gold pieces could not have been more dazzling; it was blinding after the shadows in which she had groped. The color came to her cheeks, her hand grew moist. “Yes, yes,” she cried, urging the girl’s narrative with a motion of the head like to that of a jockey speeding to the post; “yes, yes,” she repeated, and her restless eyes flamed with the heat of fever.
“Wasn’t it odd?” Maida concluded abruptly.
“But you accepted him?” the mother asked hoarsely, almost fiercely.
“Accepted him? No, of course not—he—why, mother, what is the matter?”
Engrossed in the telling of her story, the girl had not noticed her mother’s agitation, but at her last words, at the answer to the question, her wrist had been caught as in a vise, and eyes that she no longer recognized—eyes dilated with anger, desperation and revulsion of feeling—were staring into her own. Instinctively she drew back—“Oh, mother, what is it?” And the mother bending forward, even as the daughter retreated, hissed, “You shall accept him—I say you shall!”
“Mother, mother,” the girl moaned, helplessly.
“You shall accept him, do you hear me?”
“But, mother, how can I?” The tears were rolling down her cheeks, she was frightened—the acute, agonizing fright of a child pursued. She tried to free herself, but the hands on her wrist only tightened, and her mother’s face, livid now, was close to her own.
“You shall accept him,” she repeated with the insistence of a monomaniac. And the girl, with bended head, through the paroxysms of her sobs, could only murmur in piteous, beseeching tones, “Mother! mother!”
But to the plaint the woman was as deaf as her heart was dumb. She indeed loosened her hold and the girl fell back on the lounge from which they had both arisen, but it was only to summon from the reservoirs of her being some new strength wherewith to vanquish. For a moment she stood motionless, watching the girl quiver in her emotion, and as the sobbing subsided, she stretched forth her hand again, and caught her by the shoulder.
“Look up at me,” she said, and the girl, obedient, rose from her seat and gazed imploringly in her mother’s face. No Neapolitan fish-wife was ever more eager to barter her daughter than was this lady of acknowledged piety and refinement, and the face into which her daughter looked and shrank from bore no trace of pity or compassion. “Tell me if you dare,” she continued, “tell me why it is that you refuse? What more do you want? Are you a princess of the blood? Perhaps you will say you don’t love him! And what if you don’t? I loved your father and look at me now! Beside, you have had enough of that—there, don’t stare at me in that way. I know, and so do you. Now take your choice—accept this offer or get to your lover—and this very night. As for me, I disown you, I—”
But the flood of words was interrupted—the girl had fainted. The simulachre of death had extended its kindly arms, and into them she had fallen as into a grateful release.
By the morrow her spirit was broken. Two days later Mr. Incoul called with what success the reader has been already informed, and on that same evening in obedience to the note, came Lenox Leigh.
CHAPTER IV.
AN EVENING CALL.
When Leigh entered the drawing-room he found Miss Barhyte already there. “It is good of you to come,” she said, by way of greeting.
The young man advanced to where she stood, and in a tender, proprietary manner, took her hand in his; he would have kissed her, but she turned her face aside.
“What is it?” he asked; “you are pale as Ophelia.”
“And you, my prince, as inquisitive as Hamlet.”
She led him to a seat and found one for herself. Her eyes rested in his own, and for a moment both were silent.
“Lenox,” she asked at last, “do you know Mr. Incoul?”
“Yes, of course; every one does.”
“I mean do you know him well?”
“I never said ten words to him, nor he to me.”
“So much the better. What do you suppose he did the other evening after you went away?”
“Really, I have no idea, but if you wish me to draw on my imagination, I suppose he went away too.”
“He offered himself.”
“For what?”
“To me.”
“Maida, that mummy! You are joking.”
“No, I am not joking, nor was he.”
“Well, what then?”
“Then, as you say, he went away.”
“And what did you do?”
“I went away too.”
“Be serious; tell me about it.”
“He came here this afternoon, and I—well—I am to be Mrs. Incoul.”
Lenox bit his lip. Into his face there came an expression of angered resentment. He stood up from his seat; the girl put out her hand as though to stay him: “Lenox, I had to,” she cried. But he paid no attention to her words and crossed the room.
On the mantel before him was a clock that ticked with a low, dolent moan, and for some time he stood looking at it as were it an object of peculiar interest which he had never before enjoyed the leisure to examine. But the clock might have swooned from internal pain, he neither saw nor heard it; his thoughts circled through episodes of the winter back to the forest and the fringes of the summer sea. And slowly the anger gave way to wonder, and presently the wonder faded and in its place there came a sentiment like that of sorrow, a doubled sorrow in whose component parts there was both pity and distress.
It is said that the rich are without appreciation of their wealth until it is lost or endangered, and it was not until that evening that Lenox Leigh appreciated at its worth the loveliness that was slipping from him. He knew then that he might tread the highroads and faubourgs of two worlds with the insistence of the Wandering Jew, and yet find no one so delicious as she. And in the first flood of his anger he felt as were he being robbed, as though the one thing that had lifted him out of the brutal commonplaces of the every day was being caught up and carried beyond the limits of vision. And into this resentment there came the suspicion that he was not alone being robbed, that he was being cheated to boot, that the love which he had thought to receive as he had seemed to give love before, was an illusory representation, a phantom constructed of phrases.
But this suspicion faded; he knew untold that the girl’s whole heart was his, had been his, was yet his and probably would be his for all of time, till the grave opened and closed again. And then the wonder came. He knew, none better, the purity of her heart, and knowing, too, her gentleness, the sweetness of her nature, her abnegation of self, he began to understand that some tragedy had been enacted which he had not been called upon to witness. Of her circumstances he had been necessarily informed. But in the sensitiveness of her refinement the girl had shrunk from unveiling to a lover’s eyes the increasing miseries of her position, and of the poignancy of those miseries he had now, uninformed, an inkling. If she sold herself, surely it was because the sale was imperative. The white impassible face of the girl’s mother rose before him and then, at once, he understood her cry, “Lenox, I had to.”
As he moved from her, Maida had seen the anger, and knowing the anger to be as just as justice ever is, she shook her head in helpless grief, yet her eyes were tearless as had she no tears left to shed. She had seen the anger, but ignorant of the phases of thought by which it had been transfigured she stole up to where he stood and