The Wicked Marquis Part 42

"Don't," she begged. "You must leave it to me. I will find somewhere.

And now let us be serious, Reginald. Here we are come to rather a late crisis in our lives. Tell me, how much do I really mean to you? Am I just a habit, or have you really in the background memories and thoughts about me which you seldom express?"

He leaned across the table.

"I will confess," he said, "that I have been surprised, during the last few days, to discover how much you do mean to me, Marcia. Your quicker apprehension, perhaps, finds fault with me, rebels against the too great pa.s.sivity of my appreciation. You have been the refuge of my life. Perhaps I have accepted too much and given too little. That is what may reasonably happen when there is a disparity in years and vitality as great as exists between us. What seemed to you to be habit, Marcia, is really peace. I have forgotten what I should always have remembered--that you are still young."

Her eyes glistened as she looked at him. A ray of suns.h.i.+ne which found its way through an overhead window was momentarily unkind. The lines under his eyes, the wrinkles in his face, the thinning of his hair, were all a little more apparent. Marcia was conscious of an unworthy, a hateful feeling, a sensation of which she was hideously ashamed. And yet, though her voice shook, there was still self-pity in her heart.

"I am so glad that you came," she said. "I am so glad that you have spoken to me like this. You need have no fear. Those other things were born of just a temperamental fancy. They will pa.s.s. Be to me just what you have been. I shall be satisfied."

A cloud pa.s.sed over the sun. His face was once more in the shadow, and curiously enough her fancy saw him through strangely different eyes.

Age seemed to pa.s.s, although something of the helpless wistfulness remained. It was the pleading of a boy, the eager hope of a child, of which she suddenly seemed conscious.

"Do you think that you can be happy--as things are, Marcia?" he asked.

"Your friend, Mr. Borden, doesn't think so. He came down--he was just a little melodramatic, I think--hoping to incite me to a great sacrifice. I was to play the part of the self-denying hero. I was to give away the thing I loved, for its own sake. I had no fancy for the rle, Marcia."

"And I should hate you in it, dear," she a.s.sured him.

"Mr. James Borden will always be a dear friend, but he must learn what every one else in the world has had to learn--a lesson of self-denial.

He will find some one else."

"I am not jealous of the man," the Marquis said. "I am jealous of just one thought that his coming may have brought into your brain--one instinct."

"Don't be," she begged. "It will go just as it came. It is part of a woman's nature, I suppose. Every now and then it tortures."

Luncheon was served excellently but without undue haste. They fell to discussing lighter topics.

"You will be interested to hear," he told her, "that my daughter Let.i.tia is engaged to be married to Charles Grantham. I am quite expecting that by Christmas I shall be alone. I find Let.i.tia a charming and dutiful companion," he went on, "but I must confess that I look forward to her marriage with some satisfaction. It has occurred to me that if it suited your work, we might travel for a time, or rather settle down--in Italy, if you prefer it. There is so much there to keep one always occupied. In Florence, for instance, one commences a new education every spring."

"I should love it," she answered, with an enthusiasm which still lacked something.

"A villa somewhere on the slopes of Fiesole," he continued, "with a garden, a real Italian garden, with fountains and statuary, and straight paths, and little strips of deep lawn, and a few cypress trees. And there must be a view of Florence. I think that you would work well there, Marcia. If things go as I expect, I thought that we might leave England about Christmas-time, and loiter a little on the Riviera till the season for the cold winds has pa.s.sed. Browning wrote of the delights of an English spring, but he lived in Florence."

"There is so much there that I am longing to see again," she murmured.

"You shall see it all," he promised. "If you wish, you shall live with it. I do not know whether there is anything strange about me," he went on, after a moment's hesitation, "but I must confess that I find myself a little out of touch with modern English life. The atmosphere of my sister's house, for instance, invariably repels me. The last generation was amused by the efforts of those without just claims to penetrate into the circles of their social superiors. To-day the reverse seems to be the case. The men, and the women especially, of my order, seem to be perpetually struggling to imitate the manners and weaknesses of a very interesting but irresponsible world of Bohemia. I find myself with few friends, nowadays. The freedom and yet the isolation of foreign life, therefore, perhaps appeals to me all the more.

"But you would not care to leave Mandeleys, surely?"

"My dear Marcia," he said, "I am possessed, perhaps, of a peculiar temperament, but I can a.s.sure you that Mandeleys is spoiled for me so long as that--that ridiculous old man--you will forgive me--your father, sits at the end of his garden, invoking curses upon my head.

To every one except myself, the humour of the situation is obvious. To me there is something else which I cannot explain. Whether it is a presentiment, a fear, an offence to my dignity, I cannot tell. I have spent all the spare money I have in the world trying to get that Vont cottage back again into the family estates, but I have failed. Really, your father might just as well have Mandeleys itself."

"You know that I went to see him?" she asked.

"I remember your telling me that you were going," he replied.

"My mission was a dismal failure," she confessed. "I felt as though I were talking to a stranger, and he looked as though he were speaking to a Jezebel. We stood in different worlds, and called to one another over the gulf in different languages."

"Perhaps," the Marquis sighed, "it is as well that he is your father.

The other morning I pa.s.sed down the fencing gallery and examined my father's collection of rifles. There was one there with a range of six hundred yards, which was supposed in those days to be marvellous, and some cartridges which fitted it. The window was open. You think, Marcia, that I am too placid for impulses, yet I can a.s.sure you that I slipped a cartridge into the magazine of that rifle, closed it, and knelt down before the open window. I held your father covered by the sight until I could have shrieked. Then I turned away and fired at a log of wood in the park. I found the bullet afterwards, half a foot deep in the centre of it."

She s.h.i.+vered a little.

"For heaven's sake, don't go near that fencing gallery again!" she begged.--"You see the time?"

He rose to his feet, and they pa.s.sed down the restaurant together.

Outside, the car was waiting.

"Will you think me very discourteous," he asked, "if I send you back in a taxicab? I shall be hard pushed, as it is, to reach home before my guests."

"Of course," she a.s.sented.

He stood for a moment after she had taken her place in the vehicle, with her hand in his.

"My visit," he whispered, "has made me very happy."

She looked at him through a mist of unexpected tears.

"Come to me soon," she begged a little abruptly. "I shall want you."

"Early next month," he promised, "or, if you send for me, before."

She seemed restless, indisposed to let him go. "I wish you weren't going away at all," she declared with unusual fervour. "I wish--Come back with me now, won't you? Do!"

For a moment he hesitated. He felt an extraordinary impulse to throw everything on one side and accept her invitation. The crisis pa.s.sed, however, before he could yield. Marcia, with a little laugh, became her normal self.

"What an idiot I am!" she exclaimed good-humouredly. "Of course, you must get down to Mandeleys as quickly as you can. Good-by!"

She threw herself back in the corner of the taxicab and waved her farewells. The Marquis stood for a moment bareheaded upon the pavement. He watched the vehicle until it became lost in the stream of traffic. The impulse of a few moments ago was stronger than ever, linked now, too, with an intolerable sense of depression. It was with an extraordinary effort of will that he took his place in his own car and motioned the chauffeur to proceed.

CHAPTER XXIX

The d.u.c.h.ess walked with Let.i.tia in the high-walled garden at Mandeleys, on the morning after her arrival. She appeared to be in a remarkably good temper.

"I have not the least intention of boring myself, my dear Let.i.tia," she said, in reply to some conventional remark of her niece's. "So long as I get plenty of fresh air during the day, good plain food, and my bridge between tea and dinner, I am always contented. Let me see," she went on, coming to a standstill and pointing with her stick to the little belt of tall elm trees and the fir plantation behind, "Broomleys is that way, isn't it? Yes, I can see the house."

Let.i.tia nodded, but only glanced in the direction her aunt indicated.

"And Mr. Thain? Do you find him a pleasant neighbour?"

Let.i.tia looked deliberately the other way. It was just as well that her aunt should not see the flash in her eyes.

"We do not see much of him," she replied. "He gallops round the park every day like a lunatic, and he spends a great deal of time, I think, in his car."

"My dear," the d.u.c.h.ess said impressively, "David Thain may have his peculiarities, but he is really a most simple and sincere person. I was attracted to him upon the steamer simply because of his shyness, and a good thing for you, dear, that I was. It must make quite a difference to have Broomleys properly let to a man who can pay a good rent for it."