The Man and the Moment Part 5

"Better not chance eight--as you say it is quite light then and they might see you. Slip out of the hotel at nine. The park gate is, as you know, right across the road. I will wait for you inside, and we can walk here in a few minutes--and come up these balcony steps--and the chapel is down that pa.s.sage--through this door. See."

He went and opened the door, and she followed him--talking as she walked.

"Nine! Oh! that is late--I have never been out so late before--but it can't matter--just this once--can it? And here in the north it is so funny; it is light at nine, too! Perhaps it would be safest." Then, peering down the vaulted pa.s.sage and drawing back, "It is a gloomy hole to get married in!"

"You won't say so when you see the chapel itself," he rea.s.sured her. "It is rather a beautiful place. Whenever any of my ancestors committed a particularly atrocious raid, and wanted to be absolved for their sins, they put in a window or a painting or carving. The family was Catholic until my grandfather's time, and then High Church, so the glories have remained untouched."

Sabine kept close to him as they walked, as a child afraid of the dark would have done. It seemed to her too like her recent experience of the secret pa.s.sage, and then she exclaimed in a voice of frank awe and admiration, when he opened the nail-studded, iron-bound door at the end:

"Oh! how divine!"

And it was indeed. A gem of the finest period of early Gothic architecture, adorned with all trophies which love, fear and contrition could compel from the art of the ages. Glorious colored lights swept down in shafts from matchless stained gla.s.s, and the high altar was a blaze of richness, while beautiful paintings and tapestries covered the walls.

It was gorgeous and sumptuous, and unlike anything else in England or Scotland. It might have been the private chapel of a proud, voluptuous Cardinal in Rome's great days.

"Why is that one little window plain?" Sabine asked.

Then Michael answered with a cynical note in his voice:

"It is left for me--I, who am the last of them, to put up some expiatory offering, I expect. Rapine and violence are in the blood," and then he laughed lightly, and led her back through the gloom to his sitting-room.

There was a strange, fierce light in his bright blue eyes, which the child-woman did not see, and which, if she had perceived, she would not have understood any more than he understood it himself--for no concrete thought had yet come to him about the future. Only, there underneath was that mighty force, relentless, inexorable, of heredity, causing the instinct which had dominated the Arranstouns for eleven hundred years.

He did not seek to detain his guest and promised bride--but, with great courtesy, he showed her the way down the stairs of the lawn, and so through the postern into the park, and he watched her slender form trip off towards the gate which was opposite the Inn, her last words ringing in his ears in answer to his final question.

"No, I shall not fail--I will leave the Crown at nine o'clock exactly on Thursday."

Then turning, he retraced his steps to his sitting-room, and there found Henry Fordyce returned.

CHAPTER III

"Well, old boy!" Mr. Fordyce greeted him with. "You should have been with me and had a good round of golf--but perhaps, though, you have made up your mind!"

Michael flung himself into his great chair.

"Yes--I have--and I have got a fiancee."

Mr. Fordyce was not disturbed; he did not even answer this absurd remark, he just puffed his cigar--cigarettes were beneath his notice.

"You don't seem very interested," his host e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, rather aggrievedly.

"Tommyrot!"

"I tell you, it is true. I have got a fiancee."

"My dear fellow, you are mad!"

"No, I a.s.sure you I am quite sane--I have found a way out of the difficulty--an angel has dropped from the clouds to save me from Violet Hatfield."

Henry Fordyce was actually startled. Michael looked as though he were talking seriously.

"But where did she come from? What the--Oh! I have no patience with you, you old fool! You are playing some comedy upon me!"

"Henry, I give you my word, I'm not--I am going to marry a most presentable young person at nine o'clock on Thursday night in the chapel here--and you are going to stay and be best man." Then his excitement began to rise again, and he got up from his chair and paced up and down restlessly. "It is the very thing. She wants her money and I want my freedom. She gets hers by marriage, and I get mine. I don't care a rush for domestic bliss, it has never appealed to me; and the fellow in Australia who'll come after me has got a boy who will do all right, no doubt, for the old place by and by. I shall have a perfectly free time and no responsibilities--and, thank the Lord! no more women for me for the future. I have done with the snakes. I shall be happy and free for the first time for a whole year!"

Mr. Fordyce actually let his cigar go out. This incredible story was beginning to have an effect upon him.

"But where did she come from?" he asked blandly, as one speaks to a harmless imbecile. "I leave you here in an abject state of despair, ready almost to decide upon marrying old Bessie, and I return in an hour and you inform me everything is settled, and you are the fiance of another lady! You know, you surprise me, Michael--'Pon my word, you do!"

Michael laughed, it was really a huge joke.

"Yes, it is quite true. Well, just as I was going to ring and send James for Bessie to talk it over with her, there was no end of a smash--as you see--and a girl--a tourist--fell through the secret door.

I haven't opened it for five years. She was running away from a horrid fellow she was engaged to, it seems, and fled into the pa.s.sage, and the door shut after her and she could not get out, so she pushed on in here."

"It adds dramatic color to the story, the girl being engaged to someone else--pray go on."

Mr. Fordyce had now picked up his cigar again. This preposterous tale no longer interested him. He thought it even rather bad taste on the part of his friend.

"All right!" Michael explained. "You need not believe me if you don't like. I don't care, since I have done what I wanted to. Bar chaff, Henry, I am telling you the truth. The girl appears to be a young woman of decision. She explained at once her circ.u.mstances, and it struck us both that to go through the ceremony of marriage would smooth all our difficulties. We can easily get the bond annulled later on."

Henry Fordyce put down his cigar again.

"I am off to town to-night. You won't mind, will you?" Michael went on.

"Just to see if everything is all right, and to get her guardian's consent and a special license, and I shall be back by the six o'clock train on Thursday in time to get the ceremony over that night; and then, by the early morning express, if you'll wait till then, we'll go South together, and so for Paris and freedom!"

Henry actually rose from his chair.

"And the bride?" he asked.

Michael laughed. "Oh, she may go to the moon, for all I care; she leaves directly after the ceremony with her certificate of marriage, which she means to brandish in the face of her relations, who are staying at the Inn, and so exit out of my life! It is only an affair of expediency."

"It is the affair of a madman."

Michael frowned, and his firm chin looked aggressive.

"It is nothing of the kind. You told me yourself that you would rather marry old Bessie--a woman of eighty-four--than Violet Hatfield; and now, when I have found a much more suitable person--a pretty little lady--you begin to talk. My mind is made up, and there is an end of it."

Mr. Fordyce interrupted.

"Bessie would have been much more suitable--a plain pretext; but you have no idea what complications you may be storing up for yourself by marrying a young girl--What is the sense in it?" he continued, a little excited now. "The younger and prettier she is makes her all the more unsuitable to be used merely as a tool in your game. Confound it, Michael!"

"And her game, too," his host reminded him. His eyes were flas.h.i.+ng now, and that expression, which all his underlings knew meant he intended to have his own will at any cost, grew upon his face.

"You forget that in Scotland divorce is not an impossibility and--_I am going to do it, Henry_. Now, I had better write to old Fergusson, my chaplain, and tell him to be in readiness, and I suppose I ought to see my lawyers in Edinburgh, although, as there are no settlements and it is just between ourselves, perhaps it does not matter about them."

"How old is the girl?" Mr. Fordyce felt it prudent to ask. "It is a pretty serious thing you contemplate, you know."