The Fate of Fenella. Various Authors
nodded, mischief simply brimming over in her suddenly transformed little face.
"If I get into a scrape, you've got to get me out. It's a duel, you see, between four of us, with you and Lord Castleton for seconds, and I come of a fighting family," her feet breaking under her into a few steps of war dance. "Oh, look there!"
Her shriek rang far and shrill through the Knaresborough rocks, as, stiffened suddenly to stone, she stood with outstretched arms, her straining eyes gazing up at the cliff. A small object had hurtled through some brushwood overhead, and, rolling downward, was now stopped half-way. It was a little boy, clinging desperately to a bush at which he had caught.
Before the last sounds had left her parted lips, Jacynth bounded forward and was clambering, springing as best he could, up from foothold to ledge. Many holidays of mountain-climbing stood him in good stead. Higher still—ah! there! The bush is giving way slowly at the roots. A little shower of earth falls down on Fenella's upturned face; she has somehow tottered with quaking knees onward.
Safe—safe! Just as the terrified child feels his hold giving way, a strong arm catches him round the waist.
"Thank God!" exclaims a well-known man's voice. Fenella feels a little group about her, summoned by her echoing shriek, but her filming vision sees nothing till Ronny is placed, pale but plucky, in her arms. Presently, with the boy hugging her neck, and her own tight grasp proving he has no bones broken, she turns to find Frank, looking strangely excited, holding out a hand to Jacynth.
"Let me thank you. That was splendidly done. You saved the boy's life, and I am—I——" he stammered and stopped, reddening.
"No thanks are needed. I could not tell but that it was my own little scamp of a nephew. Where is Grandison?" Jacynth frigidly answered, looking round. He had driven Fenella and the two boys out here, because she wished to avoid meeting her husband and his probable companion. And, lo! tricksome fate had drawn these two hither as by some irresistible attraction.
Lucille was meanwhile looking on with intense apprehension. The child—the child was the sole remaining link between this man and wife, but that one how strong! She must interfere rapidly.
Next moment she had dropped on her knees beside Ronny, who now stood leaning against his mother, and had tenderly lifted his hand.
"Poor infant—chéri! He is bleeding, see!"
And she softly wiped some trickling drops from a graze on the chubby, childish fist.
"How dare you? Leave my child alone!" blazed out Fenella, withdrawing as if from the touch of a reptile.
Lucille rose with an air of dignified humility, and looked full at Onslow, with surely a sudden moisture in her beautiful dark eyes.
"I have made a mistake, it is true. But I am a woman, and only remembered that a child was hurt—your child!" The last words were murmured only for his ear.
"Come away," said Onslow briefly, but consolingly.
•••••
A very thunder-cloud, charged with electricity, overhung the end of one of the long dinner tables in the Prospect Hotel that evening.
Lord Castleton presided at the foot, the post of honor. On his right hand, seated thus low, as befitted new guests, were Lord Francis Onslow, and, "by Jove! Mme. de Vigny herself." To his left Jacynth, faithful to his place beside Fenella, who had asked the head-waiter some days ago not to move her seat higher, in usual hotel progression, opposite a sour-faced set of ladies, with side-ringlets and warming-pan brooches, who whispered inuendoes about herself that palled as a diversion. She had then innocently preferred new arrivals. So Castleton looked at four freezingly expressionless faces, four pairs of eyes bottling up lightnings.
"In for a storm!" he chuckled to himself, rubbing his plump hands under the table. "But who is my lady keeping that empty place for on her other side?"
Just then a slight young man, with blond curls clustering thickly on his head, well-waxed mustaches, and a slightly foreign military air about the cut of his clothes and the stiffness of his shoulders, came down the long room with a buoyant step, Fenella's eyes gleamed as she held out her hand in greeting, which the newcomer pressed with that mingled homage and effusion betraying a stranger to English customs.
Onslow's dark face grew suddenly livid with passion. He made a movement as if about to rise, but was restrained by an imploring touch on his arm, and a murmured entreaty from his companion to be calm.
"You see! I obeyed your message on the instant," said the newcomer to Fenella, in an undertone, audible in the fell silence around. "Last week you said don't come—it is stupeed. Now you say, come!"
"Ah, but we have had some new visitors since then, and it is much more amusing."
After which really impudent remark, Fenella leant back, and with a look of infantile innocence on her piquante face, indicated Jacynth.
"I want to make you two acquainted. I like my friends to like each other. Mr, Jacynth—Count de Mürger."
The two men's eyes met. Clitheroe's gaze gravely observant, De Mürger momentarily taken aback, then bowing with gay readiness, as who should say, "A rival? Come on! measure swords."
Next he looked across and started.
It was only a slight start, yet Castleton's cheeks at once puffed with suppressed mirth. Lucille gave the faintest inclination of her handsome dark head. But Onslow, laying his arms on the table with a cool superiority that in a less well-bred man might be offensive, stared at his enemy full, not stirring a muscle.
The cut was direct, cutting De Mürger short in an instinctively begun bow of politely cold recognition. A brilliant smile instantly lightened the young Austrian's face. He had suspected a trap, but now he knew his ground.
An awkward silence ensued. Then Castleton demanded, in nervous accents:
"What fish is this, waiter—eh?"
"Tom Dory, milord," answered the recently imported Teuton with suave readiness.
A little buzz of talk began at once; the spell was loosed. Under cover of this Castleton bent forward, irresistibly thirsting to confide in Jacynth.
"I say, what a game! Would you think De Mürger is one of the greatest gamblers going, and a tremendous duelist?"
"That boy! He looks as if dancing was his strong point."
"So it is. He is a favorite leader of cotillons—invented that figure for Lady Birmingham's ball of shooting with Cupid's bows and arrows—you know."
"No, I don't. I am too old for much ball-going," answered the barrister curtly.
Meanwhile, though Fenella never once looked his way, she felt that her husband's eyes were stabbing her with glances like daggers. It hurt; but she had the sweet revenge of knowing she was wounding his pride in return, though the false Circe by his side might try to pour in balm. So, looking a picture of girlish sweetness in her delicious white gown, so simple seemingly, so costly—a white bud of a little creature in contradistinction to the darker, maturer charms of her handsome rival, she listened with apparent eagerness to De Mürger.
"Yes, I should regret not going to Vienna this summer, if I were not here. You do not know it. Ah, how I should like to show you our Prater. And the life, the gayety. How you would enjoy it!"
"Do you know Vienna?" asked Mme. de Vigny of Onslow in clear tones, as if her neighbors were dummies. "It is—how do you say it in English?—la ville la plus dévergondée in Europe."
At the inference that this abandoned capital will suit herself, in madame's evident opinion, Fenella's pale small cheeks take a sudden rosy tint, her tawny eyes gleam with quite a tigerish flash. She throws up her head, challenging Onslow mutely to dare countenance the insult. But Frank's French is that of Eton, and he