Wild Margaret. Garvice Charles
were intended to signify that such an offer would not meet with a refusal. It was a mistake! I had forgotten that I was poor, and that you were rich. You recalled me to my senses by a laugh, which I hear still – "
"What is the use – " she tried to break in with, but he went on.
"Most men, I believe, placed in a like position, that of a rejected suitor, implore the lady who refuses them her love to grant them her friendship. I did so. But while most men mean nothing by it, I meant a great deal. If I could not have you for myself, I was ready to serve you as a grand vizier serves his sultan, or a slave its master. You accepted my offer. It was not I you wanted, but another man; that man was Blair Leyton."
"You – you put it plainly," she murmured, biting her lip.
He looked over her head.
"Yes. Truth is natural, always," he said. "I undertook to help you to gain him, asking for no definite reward, but trusting to your generosity."
"You shall ask for what you like. I will grant it," she said, "you know that."
"Yes," he said, "I know that," but his response was uttered with a significance which she did not appreciate. "You and he were engaged, the engagement is broken off; it is my task to see that it is renewed. I am engaged in that task now. Between us, it is understood there should be no concealment. Concealments would be fatal. You ask me to tell you all concerning this visit of Blair to the Court. I intend doing so. There is not much difficulty, for I have just left Blair, who has found out his heart after his fashion."
"His heart! About what?" she demanded, taking up her tea cup.
"About a girl he met there," he said, quietly and coldly.
The fragile and priceless piece of porcelain fell crushed by her fingers.
He rose courteously and picked up the fragments.
"It will spoil the set," he remarked, coolly.
"Girl – girl! What girl?" she demanded.
She was white to the lips, and her gray eyes seemed to have grown dark, almost black.
"A girl whom he found staying in the house," he rejoined, with a cool ease that maddened her. "I can describe her, for Blair was minute to weariness. She is tall, graceful, has auburn hair, large and expressive eyes, a small mouth, a clear, musical voice, an angelic smile – "
She put up her hand.
"Are – are you saying all this to – to play with me?" she said, and her voice was almost hoarse.
He raised his brows and looked above her head with an air of surprise.
"No. They are his own words," he said.
"And – and you think he is in" – she paused; something seemed to stop her utterance for a moment – "he is in love with this girl?"
He sat silent for a moment.
"If he is to be believed, he is most certainly," he responded, coldly; "very much in love – head over heels! He raved about her for nearly an hour by the clock; I timed him."
She sprung to her feet and moved to and fro, her tiny hand clutching the riding-whip until the nails ran into her soft, pink palm. Then she stopped suddenly and looked at him.
"And this – this girl?" she said. "Who is she?"
"The daughter – no, to be exact, the granddaughter of the earl's housekeeper," he said slowly, as if he enjoyed it.
She panted and drew her breath heavily.
"A servant!" she exclaimed, and she laughed, a cruel unwomanly laugh.
"By no means," he said. "She is, according to Blair, and he is a fair judge, a lady. She is an artist, and is copying the pictures in the Court gallery."
Her face grew white and anxious again.
"What – what is her name?" she demanded, and her voice was hard and hoarse.
He took an ivory tablet from his pocket and consulted it.
"Her name is Margaret – a pretty name; reminds one of Faust, doesn't it? Margaret Hale."
"Margaret Hale," she repeated slowly; then she came and stood in front of him, her gray eyes as hard as steel, her lips drawn across her white, even teeth. "And he – you say – he is in love with her?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"He says so," he said coldly.
"And – and he speaks of marrying her?"
"Apparently it is the one and absorbing desire of his life," he responded in exactly the same manner.
She opened her lips as if about to speak again, then sank on to a couch in silence.
He rose.
"I'll go," he said.
"Wait!" she said, and she stretched out her hand with the whip in it. "Austin, this – this, must be stopped, prevented – " she spoke with a panting breathlessness. "You – you understand. It must be prevented, at all costs, at any risks! You will do it! Promise me! Remember our bargain! Ask what you please, I will grant it. Half – every penny I possess – anything! You will prevent it!"
He stood looking at her without an atom of expression on his clean-cut face, which might have been a marble mask.
"I understand," he said, after the pause. "At any cost? You will not upbraid, reproach me in the future, whatever may happen?"
"No. I shall not! At any cost!" she repeated, meeting his cold glance.
He stood regarding the wall above her head for a moment, then, without a word, went out and left her.
Slowly, impassively, he paced down the stairs, his eyes fixed on the open doorway and the street beyond, but reaching the hall, which happened to be empty, he paused, and with his foot on the doorstep, he turned round and smiled.
It was a peculiar smile and difficult to analyze, but supposing a man had caught a wild animal in a trap and had left it hard and fast, to be killed at his leisure, that man might smile as Austin Ambrose smiled as he looked round the hall of Violet Graham's house in Park Lane.
CHAPTER VIII
Margaret had never been in love. If any one had asked her why not, she would have said that she was too busy, and hadn't time. Young men had admired her, and some few, the artists whom she met now and again, had fallen in love with her, but no one had ever spoken of the great mystery to her, for there was something about Margaret, with all her wildness, an indescribable maiden dignity which kept men silent.
Lord Blair had been the first to speak to her in tones hinting at passion, and it is little wonder that his words clung to her, and utterly refused to be dismissed from her mind, though she tried hard and honestly to forget them; even endeavored to laugh at them, as the wild words of a wild young man, who would probably forget that he had ever spoken them, and forget her, too, an hour or two after he had got to London.
But she could not. She said not a word of what had occurred to old Mrs. Hale, for she felt that she could not have borne the flow of talk, and comment, and rebuke which the old lady would pour out. It would have been better if she had spoken and told her all; a thing divided becomes halved, a thing dwelt upon grows and gets magnified.
Margaret brooded over the wild words Lord Blair had said until every sentence was engraved on her mind; even the expression of his face as he stood before her, defiant as a Greek god, got impressed upon her memory so that she could call it up whenever she pleased, and, indeed, it rose before her when she did not even wish it.
"This is absurd and – and nonsensical!" she exclaimed on the second day after his departure, when she suddenly awoke to the fact that she had been sitting, brush in hand, staring before her and recalling Lord Blair's handsome, dare-devil eyes, as they had looked into hers. "I am behaving like a foolish, sentimental idiot!" she told herself, dabbing some color on her canvas with angry self-reproach. "What on earth can it matter to me what such a person as Viscount Leyton said to me? I shall never see him again, and he has probably forgotten, by this time, that such a person as myself